New Integral Review on spirituality and religion

[Edward theurj Berge]

Check it out. There's an article on interreligous dialogue as well as wesoterica, body practices, activism and an interview with Jorge Ferrer.

[Balder]

Excellent; thanks for posting that here, Edward.  I had just seen Bonnitta talking about it, and was thinking about where I was going to bookmark it, when I saw this here.  Of course!  IPS is where it belongs.  :-)

On a side note, I was talking with Jorge Ferrer this weekend (a good exchange), and he made a comment to me that made me think of you.  He commented that in "Kingdom Come," I presented my ideas as if they were the existing Wilberian Integral views instead of an alternative or a new development in (or out of) Integral, and he felt that weakened my argument.  I recalled you had said something very similar to me, and told him so.

[Mary W.]

Thanks Edward!

[Edward theurj Berge]

A few points in Ferrer's interview. He notes that in the Zen school he was with it was mixed with Taoism and shamanism, and magic was included in the study. Taoism is rife with this in itself. I've noted before the heavy mix of shamanistic magic that permeates most Tibetan Buddhism. I still see this as not so much a pluralism of practices, or even an integration a la Gebser of the various worldviews, but as a holdover of pre-modern views that infects and ties it down to (bad) regressive metaphysical views. I'm just how Ferrer sees this, as he admits shamanism is a significant part of his practice. Perhaps you can ask him given your new friendship?

I like that he's talking about creating a sort of unified ethical code from the various traditions. I think this is paramount given the ethical lapses in the integral community, and no code to adjudicate infractions. I called for such a code in my old essay "Giving Guns to Children" but no sure how far this project has gone.

I appreciate how he undermines the notion that the esotericists have some special capacity to get along, citing the Tibetan Buddhists internecine arguments as the the nature of reality (and which I've expounded at length).

And his point that taking nondual consciousness as a goal might in fact be a regressive move! I've argued the same, at least in terms of how we interpret it. I call for integrating and recontextualizing such states so that they are a part of the program, not its goal. I do though question when he says that "we might be able to access such foundation of existence," which I strongly criticize as exactly the kind of metaphysical view of states that must go.

I found it humorous his report on how the spiritually inclined at Spirit Rock would devote hundreds of hours to meditation yet could not spare an hour to help the homeless. While his brother, an avowed atheist, was quite active in such social work. It seems a typical American malady in the 'spiritual' movement.

[Balder]

There's a new issue of Integral Review available, with several essays that are relevant to this forum.

Bonnitta Roy has an essay comparing and critiquing the soteriological models of Integra....

Zach Stein has a suprisingly positive (for me) review of Marc Gaftni's recent books (which he differentiates from most popular spiritual self-help books).

 

[Edward theurj Berge]

Just looking over the table of contents and reading a few abstracts, I have a hard time generating interest in this stuff anymore. It's so dominated by dessicated academic jargon that little passion or life seems left. It's like Gebser's deficient mental structure or Lakoff's false reason, which I find in much of these so-called developmental models: just abstraction upon super- or meta-abstraction, now and forever more. Even Bonnie's paper sounds this way to me. Academics has its place, but not at the head of the developmental pyramid.

[Balder]

Here's my recent response to Bonnitta about her paper:

 

I enjoyed this paper - and I think a comparison of the soteriological visions of IT and mR is needed and fruitful -- but I found myself a bit confused by your description of Bhaskar's strata of being.  This confusion may be entirely due to my own misinterpretation of Bhaskar's model, but I did read quite a bit of it, and about it, while working on my most recent papers, and based on that, your description of the "actual" is out of step with my own understanding of it.  Your identification of the actual with the known (and mostly false) world appears, to me, to reduce the world of the actual to the domain of the empirical.  My understanding of Bhaskar's reasoning for positing the "actual" as a distinct domain is to counter empiricist or positivist views of causality (as a constant conjunction of empirical events).  Bhaskar argues that constant conjunctions of events are the exception rather than the rule, usually only manifesting in specially controlled, closed systems (such as experimental settings).  Bhaskar distinguishes three domains, in my understanding, because he believes that in open systems, generative mechanisms (as the deepest strata of the real) may either be inactive or obscured, and thus both out of phase with actual events -- i.e., whatever happens to be eventuating at any time -- and non-apparent in experience ... and that something like this must be posited to make sense of experimental activity.  In my view, Bhaskar's "actual" is not just the "known (if false) world" but the domain of manifest events, which may be known, unknown, or even unknowable (for a given sentient being).  As such, there is not a coincidence here of the actual, in my understanding, with "enculturated, indoctrinated and karmically inherited conditions of unfreedom" or with representation or "the known."  Am I missing something?

[Balder]

Bonnitta commented, after our discussion, that she is going to update her paper, not to suggest a conflation of the actual and the empirical.

[Balder]

Here's another post I wrote to Bonnitta in response to her article:

Bonnitta, I like your suggestion that the soteriological visions of both IT and mR can play complementary roles in a more integrated understanding.  While Wilber frequently appeals to the Eye of Spirit, he seems (in my recollection) more often to talk about it in terms of what kinds of objects it discloses, rather than what alternate modes or forms of knowing it might entail (which is something Bhaskar tends to focus on: i.e., 'everyday nonduality,' knowing as identity or co-present participation, etc).  So, yes, there is an important 'gnostic' sensibility that a focus on perspectives (and types of objects enacted) might tend to obscure.  On the other hand, I find Bhaskar's notion of realization as a stripping away of ego, thought, etc, to arrive at an already-perfect condition -- while supported by some venerable mystical traditions -- to be rather unsatisfactory and even naively Romantic.  I think the 'shedding' process is important, but I would prefer to view this process in the terms Levin outlines, for instance: a hermeneutic-phenomenological retrieval of an 'always already' primal mode of participation and perception that also 'never yet was'.  Also, regarding 'perspective,' I agree that it can be useful to see this as related to our abstract projects of 'looking for' -- but I do not limit 'perspective' to this level.  It seems to me that, if we conceive of knowing as also embodied, even a more immediate, participatory knowing has a constructive/perspectival character: how *this* body-process uniquely participates with, and bodies forth, other beings.  What do you think?