Simply Put #1

Simply put, exquisite! Keep it up…

Hokai

So…what, then, is your opinion of Wilber's recent interview with Neale Donald Walsh?  :-D  Wilber describes Neale's message as partly God's message – saying that God is trying to give a new message to us, and is actively communicating it through Neale…  That's got to set off a few alarms for you!  *chuckle* 

Turning more to the point of your blog, I agree with Hokai that you've done a nice job laying out some very valuable points.  Two things that “stuck out” to me were the claim that cause and effect are indisputable – I think that needs to be qualified to a degree.  It has been challenged, philosophically, in a very rigorous way, by both Western and Eastern thinkers.  This doesn't mean that it isn't a relatively useful term that conforms with experience, but I think we need to be cautious about taking conventional-level understanding of this concept as “indisputable truth,” as if it is the ultimate perspective.  And the second thing that stuck out was your use of “reality.”  I agree that religious traditions often peddle ego toys and assurances which allow the self-construct to remain unchallenged and untransformed.  I'm not sure if you're taking the full scope of integral post-metaphysics into account in your use of that term. 

Best wishes,

Balder

This is nice. I de-lurked to say that.

As I strip the religion out of myself layer by layer, I'm noticing something sort of trite. That it's really about control. The compulsion to believe that a god or a causal law is running the universe: this is what I strain to believe after I'm hit with realization #1: that I am not control. At least not in the way that I would like.

Just on an emotional level, embracing that the meaning of life is what I make of it–that this is the awesome but also mundane extent of my control–is difficult. And sweet.

I have not heard Wilber's interview with Walsch, but what Balder says about it sets off a few alarms for me!

I saw Walsch on Larry King Live in 2000, when Walsch suggested that God may have sent Hitler to earth to teach humans a “lesson.” (The transcript is online.) To me, the thinking Walsch demonstrated was on a par with Shirley MacLaine's “New Age” thinking when in the 1980's she suggested that the people who died in the Holocaust “chose” their births because their souls needed the lesson of dying in the Holocaust. (What Walsch said was a classic “feel-good metaphysical reason behind what we don't like about reality,” to borrow a phrase from Julian's post.)

It was in the 1980's that Wilber lambasted some of MacLaine's moronic “New Age” thinking (I believe Wilber comments about her in Grace & Grit). If he is today saying that Neale Donald Walsch is in some sense a messenger for God, to me this is Wilber behaving like a politician during a campaign, e.g., one who is rabidly pro-gun control when addressing New Yorkers but who makes it a point to be photographed holding a gun at the shooting range alongside some “good old boys” when campaigning in the South.

As for Julian's short essay, hi Julian, I love it and agree with what you say in it, Julian.

I would bite my tongue about all this stuff but for one thing that I have always agreed with Wilber on (from since before he was first published), and that is that in order to really develop and individuate and transform in the directions he points to, you've got to engage existential developmental tasks (what he referes to as the “existential level” and has referred to in the past as the “centaur level”).

Existential development (and Wilber's sources in his books and bibliographies agree) necessarily entails disillusionment and disenchantment. Existential development necessarily entails confrontation with aspects of reality that we don't like. We can speak of this in terms of the First Noble Truth of Buddhism and the cross of Christianity, or in many other ways, but there's no getting around it.

In Eye of Spirit, Wilber says that when speaking of the “spiritual line of development” he uses theologian Paul Tillich's definition of “spiritual” as “ultimate concern.” One of Wilber's sources in writing about the existential level is Irvin Yalom (specifically his book Existential Psychotherapy). Yalom borrows from Tillich's term “ultimate concern” to speak of what Yalom calls four ultimate existential concerns, which are mortality, groundlessness, existential isolation, and meaninglessness. One cannot develop existentially until one confronts the ultimate existential concerns.

It is at times painfully obvious that a lot of people who are drawn to Wilber's work and to spirituality just don't get the whole concept of existential development. A lot of people seem to be quite certain that meaning is a given in the universe, which would of course mean that there is no meaninglessness to confront, and that human beings are in reality immaterial souls that transmigrate from one gross physical body to the next, and if one believes that, one has diluted the reality of mortality considerably. Buddhist emptiness and groundlessness as Yalom et al understand groundlessness are not in conflict (e.g., see The Emptiness of Emptiness by C.W. Huntington and Geshe Namgyal Wangchen; Huntington's understanding of emptiness has a robust existential flavor), but it seems that many people who are drawn to Wilber's work and to spirituality in general prefer some kind of ontological substratum to emptiness, and if you have an ontological substratum that is loving and caring and who does things like send souls to earth for various reasons and who violates quantum and physical laws via miracles, you don't have to confront existential groundlessness (or realize Buddhist emptiness, including the emptiness of self).

When my dad died a few years ago, I consoled my mom by talking about my dad being with God, and when she would tell me that she heard him speaking to her I would support her. But my mom doesn't read books with bibliographies like Wilber's bibliography, and she has no interest in integral theory, transpersonal theory, and philosophy. It surprises me that so many Wilber fans also seem to have no interest in philosophy (except in some sense that no learning institutions where Western and Eastern philosophy are taught would recognize), no interest in understanding the bibliographic roots of some of Wilber's ideas, and no interest in seeking small “t” truth no matter where it leads. (E.g., let's say that it's a small “t” truth that when someone is brain dead, that person no longer exists as a person or as a soul, and that person's memories are gone – not hanging out in some “Akashic Field” – and that person no longer has the capacity for perception, cognition, thinking, deciding, choosing, imagining, and communicating with others. That's painful, or at least it's not consoling in the way it is consoling to think that even though someone is brain dead they continue to exist as a person who cares for us. I would NEVER tell the loved ones of someone who was brain dead that this is what I believe if it was obvious that they needed to believe that their loved one continued to exist as a person or soul, but if someone wants to discuss the philosophical questions around all this, then I will speak the truth about what I think.)

Disillusionment and disenchantment aren't fun. For some, disillusionment and disenchantment can be damaging if they come too fast and they are unprepared. Gotama chose to leave the insularity of the palace after he come face to face with the realities of aging, sickness and death. It would not have worked had someone pushed him out of the palace before he was ready, saying, “Get out there and face the truth of suffering!” But he wouldn't have become the Buddha, i.e., awake, if he never left the palace.

But for far too long – since the late sixties in fact – I have seen far too many seekers demanding “nirvana” while ignoring the truth of suffering; the truth of grasping, aversion, and confusion; and the truth that there is a path that isn't a “get it now” Happy Meal type of thing, but which involves real work, real effort, pain, difficulty, perseverance in the face of great resistance, and time. Trungpa talked about the demand for spiritual Happy Meals in terms of “spiritual materialism.” No one who criticizes this demand is going to win any popularity contests, but someone has to say something about it.

Thanks, Julian, for saying as much as you say about it.

- Jim

PS: I think I'd better add something to what I just said. I fully appreciate the need to support myself and others in going deep and high into the psyche, and I fully appreciate that in order to do that, it is necessary to willingly suspend disbelief and/or to take the kind of approach that William James indicates when he talks about the “will to believe.” I fully appreciate the value of myth. I in no way think we should live or even can live without enriched psyches that are populated with meaningful stories and narratives, whether those narratives have a religious or spiritual or secular flavor. I am “integral” around all this, but I am also “integral” in thinking that there must be some times and places when we can put all of that aside and just focus on some of the philosophical questions, especially the ones that, if we think about them deeply enough, might end up leading us to profound disillusionment and disenchantment (i.e., waking up to the First Noble Truth or the truth of the cross). This can get confusing, because obviously there are people who have never gotten to disillusionment and disenchantment and just as obviously there are people who have and who have gone beyond all that to the reenchantment of the world. But I can't think of any reasons why anyone, no matter where they are at developmentally, can't address the philosophical issues, if they are interested in doing so.

(Buddhist scholar/practitioner Robert Thurman once said something about Buddhism consisting of two main phases. The first phase entails disenchantment, and the second phase entails reenchantment. My concern is about the tendency to want to skip over the first phase.)

Nice one Julian.  I like the road a “Simply Put” series could take. 

Thanks for the great response Jim.  And, of course, Balder.

Simplicity is a wonderful thing.

I'm with Julian on the main thrust of his points, e.g.” Look behind the belief in divine causation and you'll find the denial of chaos, suffering and meaninglessness.”

I'm with Balder when he says “the claim that cause and effect are indisputable – I think that needs to be qualified to a degree.” 

And I think this guy may be with Balder too in his video “Newtonian Physics is non-deterministic” - Hmm! 

And maybe this guy would also agree, given that he carried out one of the most successful experiments in photon entanglement, thereby raising big questions about what is normally understood as “cause and effect”.

Even considering the content of the links, however, I still also come back to Julians' point : “There being reasons for things happening is not the same as everything happening for a reason.” Must be one of your best killer quotes!

Cheers me dears,

James

It's me again, unable to resist.
Julian, you have a gift of being able to draw into dialogue the most erudite of minds.
The reading of such disussion challenges my personal mantra of KISS, 'keep it simple stupid'.
For instance in a discussion wherein cause and effect, truth, and many other ism's are related to that which we call God, I wonder which God are we talking about, the god that is within earshot of all of us within the confines of time and space, or the One that remains beyond Time and Space and remains unapproachable while we are entrapped in our temporal construct which are so fearful to abandon?

I console myself with the thought that at the point of Ultimate Self Realization I do not care about the intellect as a tool of logic. Now I can begin to remain with myself.

Nobody on earth or in (Time and space bound) heaven is going to save me.

I have finally arrived at a time and place where I can simply and sinlessly “trust that eternal, internal flow”.

Nothing original here I know, but the effort to negate the complication of 'complete chaos' is best approached from a state of pure simplicity, which is love, compassion and understanding.

I liked and enjoyed the simplicity of this blog.

Just one little glitch, I feel, that I'd like to point out; you say:
“In meditation, noticing the activity of the mind that tries to spin elaborate belief systems and metaphysical concepts to pretend this is not so, we can stop and direct compassionate attention underneath that activity - toward our own fear.”

In meditation, noticing the mind spinning elaborate stories - sometimes belief systems and metaphysical concepts - I do not find that it is doing this to avoid chaos, or pretending  that this (chaos, disorder, suffering, meaninglessness etc.) is not so. It is not trying to avoid this generally (although sometimes it does); nor is the mind spinning stories or intricate webs of understanding and knowledge something 'negative' or against anything at all.
I find that the mind weaving a web of stories, beliefs and understandings is doing what it does by its very nature…

Believing that the mind is trying to do anything to avoid non-existence, chaos, meaninglessness or even the concept that the mind is trying to escape stillness seems an unnecessary pattern…

We can direct compassionate attention at anything and everything, even if we are in need of a 'underneath' to the busy mind spinning stories…

Actually, directing compassionate attention is much helped by the acceptance of its basic 'meaninglessness'… now it can be done whatever the case may be.

Eric Wilson's In Praise of Melancholy is making the rounds in the blogosphere, and reminds me of what Julian has written here:

The “wakeful anguish” of sharp melancholia can lead to a shuddering experience… This vital moment grows from an insight into the nature of things: Life grows from death; death gives rise to life. This insight animates melancholy, makes it vibrant. But it also intensifies the pain, for it emphasizes this: Everything, no matter how beautiful, must die. Rather than flee from this difficult position, the melancholic appreciates things all the more because they die. In enjoying the beauty of the world, the melancholic himself wants to create beauty, to commemorate his resplendent experience of earth's transient gorgeousness. Melancholia, far from a mere disease or weakness of will, is an almost miraculous invitation to transcend the banal status quo and imagine the untapped possibilities for existence.

…

Melancholia pushes against the easy “either/or” of the status quo. It thrives in unexplored middle ground between oppositions, in the “both/and.” It fosters fresh insights into relationships between oppositions, especially that great polarity life and death. It encourages new ways of conceiving and naming the mysterious connections between antinomies. It returns us to innocence, to the ability to play in the potential without being constrained to the actual. Such respites from causality refresh our relationship to the world, grant us beautiful vistas, energize our hearts and our minds.

…

Suffering the gloom, inevitable as breath, we must further accept this fact that the world hates: We are forever incomplete, fragments of some ungraspable whole. Our unfinished natures — we are never pure actualities but always vague potentials — make life a constant struggle, a bout with the persistent unknown. But this extension into the abyss is also our salvation. To be only a fragment is always to strive for something beyond ourselves, something transcendent. That striving is always an act of freedom, of choosing one road instead of another. Though this labor is arduous — it requires constant attention to our mysterious and shifting interiors — it is also ecstatic, an almost infinite sounding of the exquisite riddles of Being.

To be against happiness is to embrace ecstasy. Incompleteness is a call to life. Fragmentation is freedom. The exhilaration of never knowing anything fully is that you can perpetually imagine sublimities beyond reason. On the margins of the known is the agile edge of existence. This is the rapture, burning slow, of finishing a book that can never be completed, a flawed and conflicted text, vexed as twilight.

Hi Julian,

I just happened to watch the Matrix Reloaded this weekend and remembered you had written a blog about that… then here is your latest blog and somehow the two find a connection (for me)

You say:

Cause and effect is indisputable, yet completely compatible with chaos

Look behind the belief in divine causation and you'll find the denial of chaos, suffering and meaninglessness.

Yet without accepting the reality of chaos, suffering and meaninglessness, the truly organized, compassionate and meaningful cannot be fully perceived.

The denial of suffering makes compassion appear less essential

Merovingian:  … You are here because you were sent here, you were told to come here and you obeyed. [Laughs] It is, of course, the way of all things. You see, there is only one constant, one universal, it is the only real truth: causality. Action. Reaction. Cause and effect.

Morpheus: Everything begins with choice.

Merovingian: No. Wrong. Choice is an illusion, created between those with power, and those without.

So is choice an illusion?
and does cause and effect then rule the cosmos?

I agree with  The denial of suffering makes compassion appear less essential
AND
the denial of bliss makes suffering more important

Gina,

I also recently rewatched the matrix series. I borrowed the Ultimate Matrix collection from a friend, which has Wilber's commentary on it, and in that part you quote, he points out that the Merovingian's obsession with power is kind of a denial of causality, because he believes that if he can understand causality, he can have power over it, and so be free of it. Neo also has power over causality – the ability to control the matrix – but the only true emancipatory move made in the story is in his final battle with smith where he transcends choice and choicelessness. The naive reading of that event is that it looks like surrender, or Julian's acceptance of meaninglessness, but in fact, there's something much more profound at work that is necessary for authentic liberation to occur.

~Mike

Hey, Julian. I like the new style, though I like the old one too. You sound like Lao Tsu in the beginning.

Okay, so I agree with the general thrust of the blog, which I take to be an arguement against feel-good metaphysics like God has everything under control or the Self will take care of everything and the like. They certainly miss the evolutionary nature of this Self, which I think would solve some of your objections to it. And of course they miss a lot if they don't think their participation in the process has any bearing on the future.

Anyway, you seem to imply that chaos is the reality of our existence and that human beings have somehow lifted themselves out of that chaos, created order out of that chaos. That's a valid perspective, but how were those amazing human beings created? How did they come about? If the universe began in light, then matter, etc. etc. to organisms, all the way to humans, how did that evolution occur? How is that evolution has been characterized by increasing complexity?

Also, I'm wondering what people here would like to do with the cool ideas of dark matter and dark energy. What relevance do you think they might have for spiritual questions? Maybe all the forces in the universe aren't visible to us yet.

~David
 

Hi

Julian said: ”suffice it to say for now that i dont think that either of those things make any substantial difference to the existential and awareness-practice implications of what i have said above at all.”

I agree. My comment was simply a suggested qualification to your opening statement “Cause and effect is indisputable”. In the realm of hard science - physics - apparently it is.

(I'm not going to labour this point though, because as Julian has pointed out it's going slightly off topic / out of context.)

Great discussion,

James

Julian,

I very much agree with ”metaphysical-explaining-away, which i am saying is a defense against the underlying existential anxiety that can actually wake us up to clearer seeing once we begin to tolerate it compassionately.”

I know from experience that this existential anxiety is very real indeed. My take is, though, that it is something our psyche produces as it leaves behind safe mythological, logical and other meaning-making havens, discovering/understanding them to be “arteficial” artifacts of past cultures (or some such).
So I don't think it is underlying anything; but maybe this is just a matter of not being that well versed in English language. In my understanding it would suppose that the existential fear/anxiety is there all the time (somewhere in a so called sub- or un-consciousness).

But maybe thats the challenge of saying things simple - they can be understood so different than they may have been meant…

You still seem to believe in an “existential reality as it is.”
Bless your heart, my friend! I personally think that is one big mothafucka of an idea; what existential fears there are to let that one go! And please don't get off on the distinction between reality and existential reality, they are different ideas - nevertheless it is one 'story' we actually can do without :-)
We are much more creative than you seem to think (and I don't mean solipsism or the awful “the Secret” ideologies). As far as I have come to see by letting these concepts go, “We are making 'as it is' up as we go.” And there is many different levels of “making it up as we go”, I'm sure - there is a whole development there - but there never was nor will there ever be (nor is there) existential reality as it is.
From my usual vantage point that is most of all a power-claim (I know what is and what isn't); a way to avoid the heart-renting immediacy of uncontrollable becoming (which is being produced on certain stages of development).

So when you say, ”…kalshed's distinction, …between “fantasying” which disconnects us from reality and “imagination” which is relates us more deeply to it,” I certainly dissagree, and agree in another way. Making it simple I would say, “Fantasysing disempowers us and imagining empowers us ;” empowers us to stand naked in the face of a mystery that is both meaningless and meaningful, both chaotic and full of order, escaping us as we grasp it - and we cannot separate us out of this situation once we let go of “metaphysical reality”.

beautiful post, julian…

chaos…order…life…death…choice(less)…meaning(less)…mystery…the continuum…

yum.

thanks for keepin' it simple.

much love…S.

Julian, you do a beautiful job at avoiding the issue - admirably so.

What you call facts is a strange mixture of statements some of which are processes - like being born or dying (life and death are concepts - just ask a biologist what she thinks life is, and what of stones: Are they dead?) - some are opinions (life is neither fair nor unfair; what is fair and what not depends very much on the culture you ask them in; getting arrested for having fun with young boys would have been regarded extremely unfair in Socrates' Greece)… need I go on?

What you do by that is avoid the issue that I put you before: The existential fear that comes up when you realise that there is no such thing (“isness”) as 'existential reality as it is'.
So you keep hanging on to your concept of “reality as it is” that can be seen/perceived/experienced/understood or stated in simplistic statements like the one's you use to avoid the issue.

And by the way, by leaving behind these concepts/ideas (or what you deem 'facts'), I do not leave behind the feeling and experiencing of real suffering (a good friend of mine lives in Nairobi, Kenya - don't put me in a bag with those softy New Ade Whimsies!!!); the one doesn't lead to the other.
There is different gradations of relativity; but that doesn't lead to the necessity of an “existential reality as it is”.

You still subscribe to what is a fallacy in my eyes; that we can know of an independent reality (we cannot), and that to relate our views and worldviews to situations we perceive on whatever level therefore means that there is an “existential reality as it is” anywhere.

You rightly in your post point at what can be diagnosed as a disease or avoidance in so called spiritual circles - avoiding meaninglessness, chaos etc. Yet you come with a medicine and ideas which are nice and comforting to those who “heroically face these situations”. You do not wish to face the possibility, apparently, that there actually is no “existential reality as it is” and no metaphysical absolute.
Living from that realization (that this universe really doesn't make any sense - we do; that we come from nowhere and go nowhere; feelingly and intelectually and spiritually accepting chaos, unconsciousness, suffering, unfairness etc. to be an integral part of living in this body on this planet) has been quite a natural happening for me for almost a decade now. At times I tried to do away with that deep understanding/realisation, especially when I had the need to hold onto something. So I sympathise with your avoidance…

Nevertheless, even if I find your response to be nice and simple, it doesn't confuse the issues for me.

Hi Julian

“does anyone who is attempting to challenge the terms “reality” or “existential reality” on some kind of philsophical grounds disagree with these facts:

First of all, I don't feel I'm “challenging” anything, just that your strong statements about “what reality is” can be more accurately described as “reality as Julian sees it”.  Also agree with Mushin that what you're calling facts are not necessarily so - some are processes, some are points of view.

But since your question was about  disagreeing or agreeing, here's my tuppence worth…

“we are born and we die.” Agree

“there is much we have no control over. Agree

“as much as we wish it were so, life is not fair.”  Absolutely

“accidents, traumas, vitimization, exploitation, war, famine, disease, poverty are real.”  Agree

“much of our metaphysical belief-making as it appears in religion and spirituality is an attempt to deny, candy coat, silver-line, or explain away these aspects of reality (ie our existential situation) and pretend they are something else, illusory, part of a grand plan, the result of past lives, designed to teach us so we awaken etc etc…”  Yes

“the above facts of life are a reality everywhere for everyone regardless of one's worldview.”  I think it's your use of the word “reality” that makes me stop here -  if all you're saying here is that “these shitty things do actually happen to people” then yes I of course agree.

“people may percieve them differently but this does not change reality.”  Again it's that huge word “reality”. I guess I'd rephrase it slightly as “… however people perceive them, this does not change the fact that these negative aspects of life do actually happen”

“there is a difference between what is relative and what is not.”  Do you mean like, the earth is spherical rather than flat? Well yeah, that can be proven. But if you mean negative personal experiences, e.g. you observe someone being victimised and you say  “you were just victimised” and the person says “no I wasn't” then how do you prove to that person that they were victimised? What's relative and non- relative? Both seem valid here.

the above facts are simply not relative. Poverty is not relative? My parents thought they were rich when they moved our family of 5 into a 2 bedroom flat with an outside toilet in 1966. According to current UK govt criteria this falls well below current poverty levels. According to a recently viewed documentary, a homeless, elderly farmer in Kenya who had a one-room brick shack built for him by an NGO said he felt like a king - the smile on his face was priceless. But according to other indicators he is still in deep poverty.

“one's worldview either relates honestly with these facts about our existential situation (reality) or does not - of course this does exist somewhat along a continuum”.   While I agree with the heart of your “argument”,  I challenge the idea that these “facts about our existential situation” alone make up all of our “reality”. So, for me, maybe it all comes down to your use of the word “reality”.

these statements are within a very specific context and refer to very specific conflicts and how we deal with them and what powerful implications this has.. This statement is too vague / wide ranging to have any meaning for me. I'm not sure what you are referring to.

“ok - so does anyone seriously disagree with that ?”  See above.

I do disagree with your tendency in this and other blogs to claim that you know what reality is.

However, I certainly don't disagree with the main thrust of your blogs, beautifully put here: ”
as we perform that act (holding both chaos and meaning) inevitably the fear and pain  that lies underneath the denial of chaos, helplessness, death etc will come to the surface and that is where the practice of compassionate presence comes in…. together the discernment and compassion provide an opportunity for deepening authenticity and liberation.

as you might guess what i think makes this possible is:

1) critical thinking/cognitive development
2) inquiry-based spiritual practice
3) shadow work”

Great stuff,
James

Thanks Mike for comment about the box set and what Wilber had to say.  It really connected the points of why I posted them here together.

Julian,
Recently I said this in a discussion:

I wonder if bliss is a spiritual by-pass.

Knowing pain, leads to compassion
Avoiding pain leads to more pain
Where does non-stop bliss play into it all?

Reality is subjective maybe why folks are pushing back is you are speaking to a crowd that already knows the 'reality' of getting hit by a truck.

AND can't help but wonder if all the harsh 'reality' leaves little balance for the bliss.  Fantastic, glorious love that comes from deep connection might be minimalized if one is always focused on the reality of ….

Julian,

Although I feel like an intruder here I hope that you will all accept a totally different point of view which may or may not be relevant to the discussion.

There is an element of this hugely intellectual discussion that touches upon evolution. It seems to me personally, that evolution must be separated for discussion purposes into the material, temporary aspect of life as it exists within the confines of time and space, and the spiritual, which is simply the psychological aspect of life, born of the thought of man and also subject to the confines of time and space.

The first, material aspect of evolution is obviously limited to these confines and whether chaotic or not, seemingly has no specific goal in mind since every advance must be subject to the temporal or transitory nature of our universe.

For the second aspect to be truly Spiritual, there must be evidence that it has the hallmarks at least of an advance which takes the existing earthly species, of which humankind is at the forefront, outside and beyond the realm of time and space.

If this is not the case then any evolution is simply a product of the intellect and has no more permanence or power to it than any other construct to date.

It is an indisputable fact that everything that comes into being within our universe rises, shines, fades and passes away. There are no exceptions whatsoever to this fact.

The only question for me therefore relates to the prospect of genuine evolution.

I do not see it in the methodology of any aspect of the collective, either in the material process that we term evolution nor in the so called spiritual aspect. Nor do I see it possible in the methodology of the collective but only as a possibility for the individual as an internal process involving soul participation.

Julian,

What would you have me reply to ”mushin, there is no metaphysics in what i am saying. you are walking a perplexing zig zag  line between nonsensical extreme relativism and pragmatic common sense.”?

That my form of relating things, situations and expressions is not nonsensical? Maybe even prove it? Or at least demonstrate it? Sorry, I'm not going to do that.

Being, I think, a friendly and open person ;-) I take it that you are indeed perplexed by my way.

You state: “i am not avoiding anything here - merely pointing out the difference between what has meaning and what does not - between what is a reflection of our inner life/spiritual being and what is not…”.

I hear your statement - I don't see you facing the issue I placed before you. And you do it paradoxically with the claim that you know what has meaning and what hasn't. So where is the bold Julian willing to face the meaninglessness and perplexion that he has when reading what I have to say - I admit, my arguments are never very linear… :-)

With most of the other things you say you are preaching to the congregation of believers, my dear. I'm all with you when you say, ”most religion and spirituality does - and in so doing creates a series of metaphysical distortions whose aim is to try and manage our existential anxiety.”

So after having said all these things that are so obvious and clear to many of us, your readers and partners in discussion here, things i have not contested at all, you ask, ”what am i avoiding?”

But I already pointed that out!  Even in bold print: The existential fear that comes up when you realise that there is no such thing (“isness”) as 'existential reality as it is'. (Underline is fresh, though ;-)

So beyond the fear that you love to take potshots at (the fear that needs 'metaphysical distortions' as in the quote above), there is the fear that is produced by the existential doubt: the possible fact and at some point  the very real understanding that all metaphysics is essentially pointless and unnecessary.

You can try to calm that fear by proposing some kind of (usually captal A) absolute that is beyond every kind of relativity or relatedness, and that's usually ok with me, I don't say a word to the contrary… yet, it is your strong statements that I rendered above that makes me itch to point out that existential challenge and say that you are obviously (in my eyes) avoiding it, and keep on doing buy shooting at straw men that you put up yourself.

I also say, and know from my own life and other anecdotal evidence, that this existential fear is produced by a certain spiritual development (maybe the end of one level?), and that it can be 'transcended' by whole-heartedly accepting the intrinsic meaninglessnes and chaos of our human existence. Once that has happened you have no more need for any kind of metaphysics or (A)bsolute. This does not - as the theory goes - make you be a total relativist, like you and others seem to think. Not at all. And it is not the end of spiritual development neither. It has been the beginning of unfathomed beauties and understandings, a revelation of the good, true, compasdsionate and beautiful that is in no need of absolutes, non-duals and all the other inventions of meaning-making in the conventionally spiritual sense.

So in the spirit of the teaching that you espouse, if you would have some spiritual practise in dealing with the situations you happen to become conscious within, and having gone through what I would call “the grand disillusionment” and actually living from the understanding that more basic than all “isness” is relation and relatedness… and if you would apply the shadow work to the immense fear of thorough non-control, non-knowing and non-meaning… then you might not be so perplexed anymore and actually be able to preceive and face the issue that I said you are avoiding.

So there…
Love,
Mushin

Hogwash, simply put, no?

I'm not  entirely caught up in this thread, but I wanted to respond to these:

 

We are born and we die.

That's the materialist view. I don't see what's scientific about deciding that once and for all, concluding that there is no transmigration. Given the evidence that we have, I frankly say that it seems quite possible that there is transmigration–all the reports of OBE, NDE, etc. Given all that, it seems rather close minded to conclude that there is no transmigration. It seems like scientism rather than science, which is open ended. In science there are theories, which, as Ken once put it, are ways of looking at things until we find a better way. In the meantime before we find the new theory, the old theory looks increasingly doubtful.

   

As much as we wish it were so, life is not fair.

This could be taken two ways: it could be taken the authentic, evolutionary way, which has us fighting and working for things to be more fair, or it could be taken in the egocentric way, which will always take a victim position towards life.
 

Much of our metaphysical belief-making as it appears in religion and spirituality is an attempt to deny, candy coat, silver-line, or explain away these aspects of reality (ie our existential situation) and pretend they are something else, illusory, part of a grand plan, the result of past lives, designed to teach us so we awaken etc etc…

Yes, this is the motivation behind much of the metaphysical belief, but that doesn't mean we see everything that is going on. There are lot of forces at work that aren't recognized. Today we call them Gods; tomorrow we call them a part of ourselves and have a new idea about what God is–God is those parts of ourselves that we haven't realized, haven't become aware of, that are impacting us without are knowing about it, without our being conscious of it, without our knowing how to work with it. Once we have enough awareness of something, it becomes a part of ourselves; then we have a little awareness of something new that is Other … 

 

The above facts of life are a reality everywhere for everyone regardless of one's worldview.

I disagree with this. You have given one perspective, one worldview, and claimed that it's component beliefs are all “facts” and are valid for everyone. 

 

People may perceive them differently but this does not change reality.

You're absolutizing one worldview. There is a hierarchy of worldviews, of course, but one aspect of the higher ones is that they remain open about things, inquiring into new possibilities, ready to change if new evidence comes in–if we take too strong a stand in some belief, we won't be able to change even if new evidence begins to come in, as it has in the case of transmigration, for example. Not conclusive evidence, but enough for many rational and post rational people to begin to doubt the materialist view of life and death.

 

Question for all: Do we consider KW's Integral postmetaphysics entirely without metaphysics, or does the second-face-of-God idea imply some degree of metaphysics? If it is entirely without, please explain the second face of God that is entirely without metaphysics and where one would begin to drift into unhelpful metaphysics. I know how one drifts into gross metaphysics–believing in structures that are pre-existing, in radical predeterminism, in a nonevolutionary God, etc.–but I would like to know the more subtle points about it, if there are any.

David, any answer to this would take a 3rd person perspective on God, or express a 1st person experience of such awareness. Since your inquiring the 2nd person perspective to God, why don't you ask God face-to-face, so to speak?

I will do that, Hokai, but in the meantime, how about a 3rd-person perspective on the 2nd-person perspective? What's wrong with that? In your view, what is the second face of God, and what is the proper relationship to it?

Okay, I'll ask God:

God: Any relationship to Me that is not taking entire responsbility for your condition is too metaphysical for Me. That said, anything you do and that I do not do is egoic, plain and simple.

There you have it, the word of God.

Julian, I don't have the time to respond at length now, to all your points that is, but reread my comments about the victim. I may not have been clear enough, but I said that there is such a thing as victimhood and that we need to work to make things more fair, that things need to evolve–and also that the ego will always take the victim's position.

But the latter part is generally only for very evolved people like yourself. That is, even when we are victimized, we would do well not to take the victim position–which doesn't mean not standing up for ourselves, doing something about it, fighting for our rights, etc. It just means going about it in a certain way. A pragmatic way. Sure, maybe there's a time for crying and going into hysterics, but it's not going to help in the end really, and it's not an expression of the part of us that's already free.

Julian: actually i have not given a worldview - i have stated facts that transcend worldviews.

Ken's view is that there is the nondual, and then there is the world of perspectives. You gave one perspective, and you are trying to absolutize it.

Of course there is a heirarchy of perspectives–some have more of the truth than others.

Also, there are some “facts” that we can be pretty sure of. But what you've done is assemble of bunch of facts and and half facts and perspectives and called them all facts.

Julia,

I guess you're right about language barrier, and linear versus non-linear barrier. And we do have an disagreement.

“the disagreement seems to be that perhaps you dont think it is ever valid to point out anything about reality as being an isness or existential situation. this sounds like relativist obscurantism to me and i don't agree.”

No, it is quite alright to point out things about reality etc. It is not alright, and that is the disagreement, to build up a strawman ”anything about reality…” It is the generalizing that you have been doing, the conclusions that you then draw about what you construct to be my point of view that then you severly criticise.

But since you feel personally attacked - and moreover by something that lacks in substance I don't feel it makes any sense to write more.

Take care,
Mushin

Hi Julian

Just to repeat that I am 100% in agreement with this:
“it is a reality that poverty, suffering, trauma, unfairness, chaos etc exist and are not controled by any metaphysical principles that make them somehow not so bad.”


But I still feel obliged to get back you on some “tangential” points.

- “still there continues to be absolutely nothing in quantum theory that makes any difference to cause and effect in it's practical application.” 
Well, given that quantum theory resulted in the invention of the transistor and hence micro-chip technology and hence this cyber-conversation, then to say it has no practical application is not accurate. But yes, as far as I am aware, there is no practical application which seems to turn our normal understanding of cause and effect on it's head… yet.