All Discussions Tagged 'civilization' - Integral Post-Metaphysical Spirituality2024-03-28T21:37:23Zhttp://integralpostmetaphysics.ning.com/forum/topic/listForTag?tag=civilization&feed=yes&xn_auth=noUprising ~ Eric Towletag:integralpostmetaphysics.ning.com,2015-07-31:5301756:Topic:618642015-07-31T14:03:58.307ZNeelesh Marikhttp://integralpostmetaphysics.ning.com/profile/NeeleshMarik
<p>Towle brings to our attention the dynamic interplay of <b>two forces</b> which concomitantly shape our destiny: the organic, bottom-up evolution of consciousness, and the inorganic, top-down machinery to scuttle or derail that evolution. While the former has been explored and studied in social-scientific, philosophical and spiritual ‘enterprises’ (including the Integral Movement), the latter is much less acknowledged, researched and understood as of today. This, I dare say, is a testament to…</p>
<p>Towle brings to our attention the dynamic interplay of <b>two forces</b> which concomitantly shape our destiny: the organic, bottom-up evolution of consciousness, and the inorganic, top-down machinery to scuttle or derail that evolution. While the former has been explored and studied in social-scientific, philosophical and spiritual ‘enterprises’ (including the Integral Movement), the latter is much less acknowledged, researched and understood as of today. This, I dare say, is a testament to the success (albeit waning, hopefully) of that latter machinery!</p>
<p>It is encouraging to note recent stirrings in the integral community, both evident in online forums such as these, and in the recently concluded ITC, representative examples being:</p>
<ul>
<li>The broaching of Justice as a fourth potential inclusion in the Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness</li>
<li>The Democracy 3D debate on Capitalism in ITC (prefaced by Zak Stein’s article)</li>
<li>The surfacing of the subject of contemporary politics and economics in the Integral discourse mix</li>
<li>Some articles in Integral World which scream out for inclusion on some of these critical aspects and are beginning to be seen for their constructive merit rather than just blatant criticism</li>
</ul>
<p>However, I think it is very important that this discourse moves beyond ‘Neo-Liberalism as a current malaise’ type orientation to a much broader and more <b>panoramic historical review of power structures around material and non-material resources</b> across civilizations, as Towle alludes to in his paper, and am sure has covered in his book (which I haven’t read, yet).</p>
<p>Keith Chandler, in his seminal <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Civilization-civilization-achievements-differences/dp/059520550X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1438311547&sr=8-1&keywords=keith+chandler+beyond+civilization">work</a>, traces back the dynamics of power that led mankind move from a primitive social mode to a civilizational mode and outlines at least eight key attributes of that transition: (verbatim quote)</p>
<ol>
<li>A hierarchical social organization dominated by a power elite which is not accountable to the powerless majority and for whose actions there is little or no redress</li>
<li>Concentration of power and wealth in fortified urban centres</li>
<li>Written language, the understanding and use of which are monopolized by the elite and its functionaries</li>
<li>An economic system which vests title to the wealth produced by the society in the elite and controls that wealth by a strictly measured allocation of all industrial, agricultural, forestry and mining resources within the control of the central power</li>
<li>Skills training and labour organization designed to serve the goals of the power elite</li>
<li>Extensive slavery and serfdom</li>
<li>A grand mythology portraying society as originating from and continuing to be influenced by superhuman powers with the elite as the conduit of that influence</li>
<li>A military establishment which is utilized not only for internal control and repression of the dispossessed majority</li>
</ol>
<p>Chandler accordingly proceeds to offer a new definition of the term civilization, which is quite different from the likes of Toynbee and Durant:</p>
<p><i>Civilization is a type of social organization in which a relatively small power elite, in pursuit of its own goals, exercises authority over and pre-empts the production of a large, powerless majority through the monopolization of information, the sanctification of myth, the centralization of key institutions, and the utilization of regimented armed force.</i></p>
<p>Holding this definition, we need view historical data across the millennia and investigate its empirical veracity and validity, including but not limited to the Roman appropriation of Christian ecclesiastical authority, the history of heresy, the Dark Ages, Crusades, the rise of ‘underground’ traditions such as the Gnostic and Hermetic, the French and American and various revolutions etc. to begin to make sense of the data. This is a tricky task demanding high perspicacity and edge/ fringe awareness, bearing in mind that even history as it was recorded (or allowed to have been recorded) is subject to the top-down influence of power centres who sponsor and authorize its very writing. To dive back to our own generation for a moment and take an illustrative dipstick, let us read this <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/apr/24/usa.comment">work</a> by Naomi Wolf with that backdrop ( Naomi fleshes out a lot of detail on the latter two of three ‘events’ cited by Towle on page 7 of his paper. For the first on finance, I recommend Mike Maloney’s video series, especially <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFDe5kUUyT0">Video 4</a>).</p>
<p>Juxtaposed on the historical timeline, if we then begin to study Gebser, Graves and other memetic hypotheses through a Wilberian tetra-dynamic lens, we may conclude that consciousness evolves not just <i>because</i>, but <i>despite</i>. (At a deeper level, both <em>because</em> and <em>despite</em> kind of converge, but that is another philosophical matter). Towle refers to this phenomenon as ‘civilization side-effects’ (p 3). Understanding both these forces offers us a fair idea of the <b>other</b> kind of evolution happening in parallel to the Gebserian, that of what Towle calls the ‘robber barons’ – how schemes of manipulation of the <b>Empire</b> are keeping pace (and perhaps outpacing) with sophistication, complexity and insidiousness. What earlier was slavery and serfdom, colonial maraud and open theft, is today media-led engineering of choice and consent, dumbing down of/ indoctrination in education systems, global deployment of a debt-based monetary system with fractional reserve banking, corporatization of every public service, interference in food and pharma inputs, widespread geo-political chicanery, staged false flag events at strategic times. The list goes on – the purely physical operations of yesteryears are now complemented by an entire spectrum of psychological operations, shortened as Psy-Ops. The forces of Empire know that consciousness moves towards healthy individuation and autonomy with a deeper awareness of connectedness and urge for cooperative co-creation – and hence their physical and psychological machinations are geared to strip the tribal mind from its nature connections, keep the ego-centric mind from maturing into the socialized mind, and the socialized mind from developing the self-authoring mind (using Kegan’s terms illustratively). To understand that, we ‘have to dive beneath the “perception management” layer and contact the ground of history’ (p 20)</p>
<p>I have often wondered why spiritual practice and shadow work, even in their more advanced and discerning injunctions, have not yet fully caught on to this two-force dynamic. I have a few hypotheses which I enumerate below:</p>
<ol>
<li>A subtle, ever-persistent bias towards ‘positive thinking’ that usually characterize typical New Age movements, and a general disinclination to face the Dark and the messily complex and seemingly inscrutable.</li>
<li>Even if facing the Dark has been embraced, in has only been in the province of the <i>individual</i> shadow work focusing on individual pathologies, constructs, identifications and psycho-emotional biases. Both the inclination and methodological apparatus of collective shadow work and meta-systemic analysis hasn’t matured enough, yet, to deal with the demonic reach and workings of the second force, the ‘war on consciousness’ perpetrated by the top-down power brokers.</li>
<li>Even the Jungian archetype recognition has focussed only on the biopsychic roots of collective pathology, and perhaps not taken into account the Marxian impact of socio-economic systems and power equations (especially in their twisted and corrupted avatars) on culture and consciousness</li>
<li>Pathology, then, both individual and collective, is then ascribed only to the unconscious. The underlying premise is that we are entirely responsible for our own pathology and need to deal with it ourselves. All therapy and spiritual counselling today derive their raison d’etre from this premise. When we begin to consider that pathology owes its origin NOT just to an <i>organic and spontaneous</i> movements of consciousness, but ALSO to an <i>orchestrated, cold bloodedly deliberate</i> process employed by the Empire machinery, our vista of investigation could suddenly widen.</li>
<li>There is a fair of research work that happens on this ‘second force’ of Empire and its multifarious workings and manifestations, and with the coming of the internet a lot of that information is now publicly available. Unfortunately much of that is generated from a place of fear, anxiety and even panic, as can be expected when individual spiritual grounding of presence has not been cultivated. Because of this, even the thin sliver of original, pragmatic, insightful work goes unnoticed and /or dismissed by the post-modern and even post-pomo mainstream, including Integralists. (I mean the ‘mainstream’ of the edge, not the ‘mainstream’ mainstream).</li>
</ol>
<p> </p>
<p>Resonating in Towle’s eloquence from page 7:</p>
<p> </p>
<p>‘In a bid to oust the Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan in the 1970’s and 1980’s the CIA and their Saudi partners encouraged an extremist form of Islam through contributions to radical clerics all over the Middle East and then funneled the jihadist fighters they recruited through Saudi Arabia into Afghanistan to harass the Soviets. When the Soviets left the extremists took over and the Sufis went into hiding or converted. This was the rise of the Taliban. All this was fine by the U.S. state department as long as they were cooperative to U.S. interests in the rejoin. When they refused to allow the Unocal pipeline project to the Arabian Sea to go through, then they had to be gotten rid of too. When the American forces invaded the pipeline building equipment went in on the first day of operations (Johnson, 2004). <i>To suggest that Islamic people haven’t climbed the color scale high enough to get along with Westerners without understanding the effects of having your family blown to bits by a drone attack or be rendered homeless by Israeli bulldozers represents the classic arrogance of empire.</i> Why is all this lost to the popular Integral analysis? The deeper forces at work in the world are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-a6jzU0YgQ">not hidden</a>; they’re simply not well publicized.’ (Italics mine. Hyperlink in last sentence mine, pointing to yet another illustrative data point)</p>
<p>Where does that leave the world at large? To quote Towle: ‘The pathology of our time rests in the co-opting of all domains by the mental/rational structure’ and the consequent ‘essentially “instrumental,” utilization of a person, that is the depersonalization of humanity within the “machine mind” that typifies the deficient mental/rational stage of evolution.’ As integralists we understand this and seek to transcend (and hopefully not include!) it. What we do not understand very well and need to wake up to is that by refusing to acknowledge the second force in its pervasive ubiquity and investigating it, we are also complicit it its perpetuation. Towle says ‘The evolution of consciousness is moving toward a new society but cannot get there as long as people are unconsciously supporting the failing system that emerges from their own choices and behavior’ (pp 3,4). Till then, ‘We are also the Empire and we live the dream that sustains it toxic effects’ (p 5).</p>
<p>In summary then, as integral minds, we have to expose ourselves to wide and divergent information, without flinching at potential discomfort or dissonance, and learn to separate the wheat from the chaff. We have to allow ourselves to be appalled, incinerated even, at the extent of manipulation and debauchery of power, and understand its nefarious workings and how that ‘evolves’ over time. Just like we try to do with our ego identity. We have to move on from viewing suffering as a matter of unfortunate chance or personal darkness only, but also (and perhaps largely) a consequence of social engineering, mass manipulation, and the orchestrated <b>Matrix</b>. Only then, IMHO, we stand a chance to build an integral response.</p>
<p>There is some truth to the reformulation of the Divinity Prayer by Angela Davis, applicable today perhaps more than ever before!</p>
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