The Zymposium is Over, But It Has Just Begun!

awesome! thanks for sharing this good news. props to you Julian for kicking this off and to all those who participated. as for me, i wasn't able to jump into the discussion because we're sooo busy here on Zaadz in the background. so for this round, i was a lurker :)

keep it flowing… this is a great start!

~C

Hey Julian great work on setting this off. Been to busy to absord all the info
but I will be going through all the stuff slowly. About the video camera problems
, I’m not sure about that particular model of camera but you should be
able to “work around” the issue. What your going to have to do is change the
output on the camera to “downconvert” to mini dv then you should be able
to use it as a regular mini-dv camera and edit your things in idvd, unfortunately
this will be in standard def. If you have any other video questions drop me a line.

Julian,

The symposium turned out much better than I thought. While there was substantial agreement between the participators there was also some clear disagreement that spawned some interesting debate.

As I wrote in the comments section of Balder's post, I will be hosting an event called “I-I Blogopalooza” starting a week from now. A group of podsters from the I-I pod, as well as blogger Joe Perez, will each write an essay that will be published both in their blogs and under ”Chapel Perspicacious” in the I-I pod.

I'm giving everyone this week off, then the debate starts again!


peace and love
pelle

C4 was invited to the blogopalooza but felt he was to busy to participate.

BTW, I'm pretty sure we'll get some perspectives on Integral Christianity so that debate will be revived in a week.

peace
pelle

Brilliant forum Julian. I'm looking forward to the next one but I'll be away for that week so I probably participate less.

I like to express how I view an integrated spiritual life. Having been brought up in Sweden where state and church now are separate and where private schools are far and few between, and where the school has mainly emphasized a broad non-secular curriculum, I and my generation has not been indoctrinated with a strong faith-based culture. This, more than anything else I believe, has helped me to seek for truth anywhere. Christianity is by far the biggest religious influence in Sweden and there is a healthy dialogue that continues to influence and broaden its own understanding as it moves into the 21'st centery. This is good news, and while there is a lot of unquestioned dogmas that many people will stand by blindly, there is room for integration among leaders and believer alike as we pursue to understand our faith in our times.

For anyone today who would dare to proffess faith in anything lies the challenge to be able to clarify, explain, and show its bearing on ones life. Blind adherence will not stand to reason any longer in our new brave world. Christians today will have to be able to explain the reasons for their faith or convictions, they have to be able to reveal what scripture means, what the creeds and symbols stand for, how it relates to a modern life.

As we all know, there will be plenty of people proffesing all kinds of beliefs with but a shallow understanding, including integral students.

To come to an integrated understanding of oneself, in relationship to our situation, to live this understanding through our choices, and yet to be able to understand where we all come from, where our cultures stem from, where our religions originate from, and how it all plays a part of the evolution of our society, for better and for worse.

There was a big part of me that said fine, I don't need history, to live my own inherent freedom. But since then I have come to appreciate history and all that has come before. I even made much effort to shift through the mass of doctrine to unearth and understand why and how some men stood out from the crowd, like Jesus and the Buddha. What was it with them that made the impact on the world so huge? It's too easy and too simplistic to group them in with other spiritual lights. We need to be able to distinguish between teachers. Often the fruit, the effect, reveals something extraordinary. Why did this take off and that died? Why does truth survive and falsehood fall away?

All religions has done terrible things but that goes with any field of human endavor. We need to look at the core in order to experience and understand the true and timeless messages these religions carry forth. Then we will begin to understand how spiritual teachings filters into society and our striving for an integrated approach may very well be a result of society growing and maturing under the fostering umbrella of Jesus teachings as well as of other philosophies.

I then think we owe it to Jesus to give him the correct interpretation for our day. Taking in all of its history but lifting its understanding to a higher level. Mind you, people are already doing this. There are Christians with a healthy and deep understanding of integral life.

But Integral can never be exhausted as any new encounter will show; we still can learn so much by meeting people and wanting to understand their situation. This can be easily accomodated as long as we ourselves has walked that extra mile and found a peace within that settles our fears of particulars and of points of views.

To integrate to me doesn't mean we join hands and summarize all things into one all-encompassing Truth, but we endavor to understand any faith, any creed, that we feel are a part of the life that we lead. But that is much to ask for because it is not the easiest thing to unravel as you all well know. The society we live in is so much part and parcel of religion in one way or another, so in order to clarify, to educate, and not let the fools and fanatics get away with claiming “God” to be their own. We need to be able to bring out what Jesus and the Buddha really taught and how it can be understood today, without necessarily dismissing the symbolism as outdated or as metaphors for children, because it is not. It is fully alive if but taken seriously.

Truth is the truth, then and today. I am interested in the truth, and as such I know for one Jesus stands tall. Do we need him? That's not really the question. We can't ignore him. That's the point. The same goes with the Buddha and many other creeds.

There is also a point of understanding a complete teaching. A teaching that is complete doesn't mean it exhausts other teachings, but in itself it will serve as a complete internal map for a integrated life lived in the spirit. This is where so many fall. “The teaching is real” they realize and therefore conclude wrongly that all other teachings are false. We can find a waterproof, complete teaching, that has the capacity and potential to bring us all the way into a liberated relationship to life (with the little help of our friends). And because the task is so great to come to an absolute understanding of any given faith it more often than not put people off trying to integrate it with other religions. There is no need to integrate them at all as that would do more harm to the teachings of each separate school of thought, but we can learn, widen our perspective, with other views, other angles, that most likely will only enrich our understanding.

Standing free, outside of or beside existing religions, we can easily share alike in the treasures they do offer, help or be helped in the process.

And we combat falsehood, limited views,  wherever we find opportunity to.

Sorry for all this rambling

Dear friends,

I greatly enjoyed the Symposium - yet you will not find a comment on it on my blog… rather I posted a piece that unwraps why I feel that ”We are the next Buddha” which brings you up to date on where I'm coming from in all the comments I've made in these last 10 most inspiring days.

As you see I'm expanding on those areas that I've mentioned as missing several times in the symposium.

Enjoy… if you like.

Hey Julian, thank you so much for organizing, hosting, facilitating, and participating in this symposium! I very much appreciated it and I look forward to more. There was a lot to read (for me), but I enjoyed getting a sense of where different people are coming from, and I also want to thank the 7 main participants who posted essays.

On another subject, you, Ken Wilber, me, and many others agree that there is a tendency for some people in New Age and spiritual circles to be on ambivalent terms with reason (I will quote Wilber and Morris Berman on this below). I would love to at some point see a symposium or some type of discussion here at zaadz that focuses on the application of critical thinking to the kinds of issues that arise in integral theory (which of course includes integral psychology and integral spirituality, etc.). I mention this because here at your blog you have been stressing the importance of critical thinking.

Here are the quotes:

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Ken Wilber says:

The higher developments do indeed lie beyond reason, but never, never, beneath it.

In his foreword to The Common Heart: An Experience of Inter-Religious Dialogue (edited by Netanel Miles-Yepez, 2005), Wilber writes:

Without pigeonholing anybody or any tradition—because people and traditions can span the entire spectrum—there is a world of difference between those who are acting in egocentric, preconventional, and pre-rational ways, and those acting in postconventional, worldcentric, and trans-rational ways. The latter, having developed and befriended rationality, now transcend and include it; whereas the former are not acting beyond reason, but beneath it.

In an article titled “Mind and the Heart of Emptiness: Reflections on the Intellect and the Spiritual Path” in The Quest (Winter, 1995), Wilber says that:

people in new age and spiritual circles tend to be on ambivalent terms with the intellect, especially with rationality. 

And:

in our haste to get outside the confines of the rational, we too often end up uncritically embracing anything that is non-rational, including many things that are, frankly, pre-rational, regressive, infantile, and narcissistic.

He also says:

To use the mind to beat the mind, my writing always has two parts: a strong criticism of the merely pre-rational, in an attempt to get people up to rationality, and then an equally intense attack on rationality, in an attempt to get people up to the trans-rational. And thus, in these guises, I am always playing good cop and bad cop…

In The Twilight of American Culture (Norton, 2000), Morris Berman says:

the rise of a huge New Age industry, immensely successful financially, is based on the premise that your rational mind is your worst enemy.

In Integral Spirituality, Wilber criticizes “new age infantilism” while stressing the necessity of cognitive development. He says that to some people:

“That’s too cognitive” means “that is not spiritual.” In reality, it’s almost exactly the opposite… … (This is why, as we saw, developmentalists repeatedly have found that the cognitive line is necessary but not sufficient for ALL of the other developmental lines…exactly the opposite of what you would expect if the anti-intellectualist and anti-cognitive stance were right.)

Berman notes (in The Twilight of American Culture) that Deepak Chopra “publishes books with titles such as Escaping the Prison of the Intellect,” and then he says:

On one level he has a point, in that we can get caught up in cognitive categories, to the detriment of reality. All well and good. The problem is that Chopra seems to be addressing an audience that for the most part hasn't managed to find its way into the “prison of the intellect” in the first place. It is one thing to see the limits of the Enlightenment tradition after you have studied it for a few decades. It's another to reject it before you have ever been exposed to it.

Jim

Hi Julian, I followed the “Z-bate” that you and ~C4Chaos did back when you did it, and I appreciated both the format and the content from each of you.

Julian, I found a thread you started a few months ago in the I-I “pod” with a post titled “Second Tier? Get Over Yourself. A Brief Righteous Vent….” I’m guessing that it’s part of the discussion you’re referring to that “did not go well.”

If so, I would say that one reason you received some negative feedback is that despite your disclaimers that “this is not directed at anyone in particular, nor do i mean it as a statement on integral in general or the members of this pod and the totality of what they say” and “none of this is intended as a direct challenge, attack, or stereotyping of anyone here,” some of what you say in your post sounds and feels as if you are indeed pointing the finger, however indirectly, at some of the very people you are addressing.