JP, Stop the Self-Loathing and Give Yourself Credit for Being a Good Critic
Today I stumbled across a video in my social media feed on Higher Education from spiritual comic JP Sears. I don’t have much to say about the topic of whether higher education is a waste of time, although I must say that this video’s starting assumption — that education is about making money, so the fact that one has to go into debt to get one ought to invalidate the premise of getting a college degree — is a bit insipid and insulting to intelligent people. Moreso than I think he intended!
We should all be grateful to JP Sears for his witty, biting commentary to criticize the New Age movement in a manner that has caused many people to say “so true”. As he once put it…
Ultra Spiritual is the practice of looking spiritual and getting other people to notice how spiritual you look.
He’s a prophetic voice decrying hypocrisy and encouraging honest self-reflection, and there’s always a place for that in our society. He’s setting out to show the shadow side of spirituality and delivering the unpleasant truths with just enough humor and lightness to make people willing to get the medicine down. Let’s honor his work so far for what he has genuinely achieved.
By this time — what is this? Episode #2,382? — I’ve enjoyed quite a few of JP Sears’s videos. Thank you, JP Sears, if you ever stumble upon this post, for many laughs. But now, let me say to JP: you’re getting a bit like an annoying party guest that I wish would just go talk to somebody else. You’re basically a comedian who’s still using the same old routine long after its novelty wore off, and let me tell you, Mr. New Age Stephen Colbert, you’d do all your fans a major service if you shook up your spiritual teachings with a fresh approach.
JP Sears apparently thinks he’s VERY FUNNY, and a ton of people agree. His videos on YouTube have scored “well over 100 million views, and his following is both massive and faithful” … but I suspect that some of the fans may be moving on. Perhaps people have started to catch on to the fact that he’s feeding them a diet virtually 100% in sarcasm, satire, and parody. But that’s a starvation diet for the spirit.
Trust isn’t built on endless, repetitive, unremitting sarcasm. For one thing, it’s untruth after untruth after untruth designed to make you feel very intelligent for being “in on the joke” and “reading between the lines”. But after a while, there’s a bitter aftertaste. Not to mention the fact that JP now seems to have started to do spiritual teaching of a more conventional variety, and it remains to be seen whether “don’t take yourself too seriously” is a great brand for embracing the fullness of life as opposed to escaping from it or bypassing darkness into superficial lightness.
For another thing, sarcasm and parody have a short shelf-life. They’re disposable tweaks best when used sparingly by the powerless against the powerful as a way of achieving a measurable outcome. They’ve been used in the past brilliantly by social critics from Mark Twain to Oscar Wilde.
But JP Sears’s videos routinely get tens of millions of viewers. Some of his videos get half a billion hits and counting. By now, JP Sears is (by all appearances) another successful, famous, rich, white guy using a vast social media empire and legions of adoring fans to put down (other) people who are genuinely trying to turn their lives around and embrace anti-materialistic, spiritual truths. It doesn’t quite ring authentically prophetic in the way he hopes it would.
For another thing, parody functions through a subtle cruelty. It may distort people’s actual beliefs with exaggeration in order to attack them. Because it is delivered through the persona or false self rather than authentic self, it deprives the audience of a depth of feeling and connection and love that are necessary for healing the pain generated through the parody.
TV parodies like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show” are frequently funny — especially if you already agree with their political agenda — but they are vehicles for exacerbating polarization, defensiveness, self-righteousness, and cynicism. It would be a very strange thing to say about SNL’s “Weekend Update” that it feeds both our better angels and coarser angels equally or that it’s spiritually enlightening. We tend to set our standards pretty darn low for anything on a TV comedy show. But a spiritualized version of “Weekend Update” becomes susceptible to this sort of criticism. We ought to ask: how long can this purportedly spiritually enriching show go on?
What I see also is a talented and smart comic artist whose work has started to grow stagnant. His criticisms, once poignant and novel, seem a bit shallow and banal these days (as in the flat, unfunny parts of the Higher Education video). So here are five constructive suggestions for JP Sears to revitalize his shtick.
Start challenging your audience with more actual ideas, not just parody. My favorite living philosopher, Ken Wilber, is also known as a fierce critic of the New Age movement. But consider their differences. One big difference between Sears and Wilber is that after slamming the intellectual paucity of New Age dogma the latter will give you the intellectual tools for replacing your fallacies with philosophy and your “cheesy junk food” worldview with something nourishing and One Tasty. JP Sears doesn’t really go there, but he’s got amazing hair. Wilber can’t compete there one bit.
Speak more from a standpoint of sincerity rather than merely mockery of others. Take a cue from the journey of Stephen Colbert who gave up his invented persona in favor of showing up in the world without the fake facade. Not only would you doubtlessly reveal to us your serious side and passions — as you do on some of the videos on your Awaken With JP site — you would probably find a funny side as well that uses humor more subtly rather than always going “low” with mockery and parody.
Own your inner critic. As your video on critics makes clear, you don’t like critics. You think they’re hiding out from life by staying safely in the bleachers. But not all critics are like your YouTube viewer who just types, “Your a jerk”. Good criticism is nothing to be afraid of. Good critics help us to get real; they help us to own shadow; they help us to … wait, I’m lecturing a master critic. You do criticism better than 99% of the New Age spiritual figures out there … so stop self-loathing and give yourself some credit for it.
Try honoring the truth and partial values of the beliefs you are making fun of. I know this is a difficult piece of advice considering that you’ve chosen parody as your favorite vehicle for delivering a message (see points 1 and 2, above). But maybe you can find a way that gives a more balanced and nuanced point of view alongside your own. Rather than spell this out, I’ll just let you think about it. It can be done and possibly even without losing your brand as a humorist.
Make fun of Ken Wilber and Evolutionary / Integral Spirituality. There’s a lot to work with there, so go for it. We are the elite of the spiritual elite. We had a whole great big Theory of Everything while you were still reading The Aquarian Conspiracy. We need Meta-Ultra Spiritual, the more evolved, integrated, and AQALly-informed version of Ultra Spiritual.
From one JP to another, that’s what I wanted to say about (and sometimes to) JP Sears. He’s one of the funniest spiritual humorists working today, and I hope that he keeps reinventing himself and staying fresh for many years to come, all the while challenging others to grow alongside him.
Dylan Newcomb Brings Integral Theory to Embodied Arts
(Above: Dylan Newcomb)
If you’re an Integralist, you ought to be aware of the UZAZU embodiment practice. Developed by Dylan Newcomb, it’s basically a new, integrated bodymind practice (like yoga or tai chi) informed by Integral theory.
Dylan, Mind-body Master Coach and Trainer and graduate of the renowned The Juilliard School, created the practice more than a decade ago in the arts and dance scene. At first, he called it The 16 Ways (I’m guessing this is based on the numerology of the I Ching’s core symbols, one of the sources of inspiration for the practice’s pattern-making).
He taught more than 100 workshops across the global and continued his research into all aspects of embodiment methodology. He even received research grants from Dutch cultural institutes.
Although he built up a solid base of practitioners, for the last four years or so, Dylan slowed down. He attended to his roles as a husband and father and expanded his repertoire to include a private coaching practice.
In “The UZAZU Story”, Dylan describes how he didn’t stop working on UZAZU during this slow period; rather, he took an “inward turn”…
Working one-on-one with private clients over longer periods of time gave Dylan the opportunity to deepen UZAZU’s effectiveness with a wide range of topics, from life-purpose to re-patterning limiting beliefs, to working with family systems and marital dynamics to integrating early-childhood trauma.
In tandem to this period of intensive 1-1 applied research, Dylan immersed himself in intensive additional study in the UZAZU-related fields of Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience, Polyvagal Theory, Phonology, Dynamical Systems Theory, Personality Theory, and Developmental Ego Psychology.
This ‘inward turn’ for the modality turned out to be surprisingly healthy for the further maturation of both UZAZU’s underlying theoretical clarity and the depth and effectiveness of it’s embodied techniques & practices—leading to the birth of what Dylan informally refers to as ‘UZAZU 2.0’.
Newcomb is now getting ready to launch the first complete online course for learning and practicing UAZAZU in 4+ years. This is a prelude to a new series of live workshops and certification trainings.
One of the things I find most fascinating about UZAZU — and I’ve been a fan-at-a-distance of the “old UZAZU” for several years — is that there is no other embodiment practice out there that brings together Integral theory, somatics/embodiment, and vowel phonosemantics.
I’m not yet quite sure what UZAZU 2.0 has to offer, but the old version gave its practitioners a way of experiencing vowels — the most fundamental building blocks of all the Sacred Word traditions — as having subtle energetic relationships with one another that can be felt in the full bodymind. For example, you could pronounce the vowel “O” and embody it through dance movements in a manner which helped you to draw connections to the felt realities of words like Organize and Oversee, and then connect those concepts to coordinates within the “Integral map”.
The spiritual technology was still experimental, but it was definitely promising to be the first of a more sophisticated breed of embodiment methodologies. In short, if the new UZAZU is anything like the old one, it will be something genuinely new and exciting on the spirituality scene that only comes along very rarely.
think of it that way: Wilber’s true word is ‘integral’ — he dreamt it, like Einstein dreamt theory of relativity. It is powerful, and in the case of Wilber, we can assume that is more ‘true’ since any word uttered by any postmodernist … because he included it, so to speak. Maybe he dreamt that word because of his his year long studies and meditation, because he found something deeper within himself … something more profound or ‘authentic’ … that is the level I am talking about. And again: While I think there is a lot of usefulness in Wilber’s word … it is still his word. It has limitations. Adopting it without finding a ‘authentic’ voice or word is ‘problematic’ …
I stepped into the conversation to add the following remark:
Tom, Re: “Adopting it [integral] without finding a ‘authentic’ voice or word is ‘problematic’ ..”
A decade ago, it seemed several of Wilber’s green critics were simply watering down his philosophy and changing the name – like something with ‘new paradigm’ in the title. THAT’s not genius, it’s piracy. If something truly new comes along — like Critical Realism for instance — it needs a different name to help people to situate themselves properly.
While there’s certainly a lot to be admired when a spiritual genius invents something big and new, I see a problem with attaching originality to the failure to use perfectly acceptable and useful terms when they exist. Movements need powerful symbols such as the word ‘integral’ to latch on to, or they fail.
Tom Amarque replied:
Joe Perez, Yes, actually I was thinking of you. You certainly synthesized something ‘new’, because, I presume, you had an urge to – let me stay in this metaphysical context – utter a word which fitted your soul or cosmic address. I think that goes hand in hand with a deeper understanding of yourself; hence ‘authenticity’ and truth. And I still think you have to … at least to some degree … get rid of your ‘integral copy-self’ to do so ..
Hi Tom, you may be right about that last part. Who knows how my own evolution of the state of Integral Spirituality will unfold in the future. There are too many variables for me to predict 5 or 10 years ahead…
But let me briefly explain, right or wrong, the most important reason why I think it’s important for me and others to explicitly put themselves within the Integral Spirituality movement at this time (even if they use a somewhat different name): Individuals need to take responsibility to help build a healthy global culture that is BOTH centered at 4th-to-5th-person-perspectives AND genuinely open to higher level perspectives (in my Lingua-U model, from 6th–person’s X-Mind up to 9th-person-perspective, the Una-Mind). So people who today are waking up into systemic cognition, meta-systemic cognition, and cross-paradigmatic thinking can find the sort of community of resonance that allows them to develop the Global-Mind so desperately needed in the world today … AND preserve formative insights from (what Wilber and/or Aurobindo calls) para-mind, meta-mind, over-mind, and super-mind. In other words, if 5th-person-perspective is held up as “all there is”, hello, we’ve got a new sort of flatland: a flatland with a little hill.
So far as I know, there is no other game in town that offers the world what it needs other than Ken Wilber’s oeuvre in general and Integral Theory specifically. Not the Gebserian integralists, not the Cultural Creatives or Evolutionaries who aren’t themselves quite “integrated” yet, not the Spiral Dynamics theorists who don’t think there’s anything worth looking at after Turquoise, not the meta-modernists who have shucked Wilber and chucked the third-tier to boost their appeal among street-smart secularists, etc. Any one of these schools of thought could evolve in the future, but that’s how I see them today.
At this time, only the Wilberian tradition carries this full-spectrum Dharma, for lack of a better phrase. As everyone knows, a specific culture emerged has around Wilber’s philosophy that calls itself Integral. Personally, I think it’s a fine word, but I associate it with the 5th-person-perspective, and everything more complex meta-grammatically is what they call Super-Integral. That term is acceptable and useful enough as well.
So why chuck it? Good words are really hard to come by. Wilber’s certainly built a conveyor belt up to the 5th-person-perspective (and higher when you dig into his total oeuvre), and as a community I think we need to maintain what he’s built, correct its flaws, add to it, and so on. If people don’t “get” at least 5th-person-perspective thinking, they aren’t going to “get” a whole library of possible writings that could be coming in the decades to come by many talented people. We need Integral ideas, culture, and community; we’re all enriched by it, at its best.
The irony in my writing this, perhaps, is that Lingua-U doesn’t require AQAL or Integral Theory. As a sort of Kabbalah of the International Phonetic Alphabet, it reconceives AQAL-like “altitudes” as ArcheStations described by subtle energetic symbols linked to 39 vowels and consonants based on the Sacred Word traditions and ordinary speech of the world’s major languages. If Lingua-U turns out to be successful, it will be Indigo or Violet spiritual technology that could be used by any religious, cultural, or linguistic tradition to steer the course of evolution in Sacred Words or ordinary speech without requiring the adoption of any particular philosophical position.
But inventing Lingua-U would not have been possible without Integral Theory, and the connections between the two haven’t even begun to be explored. Plus, I have to add that we don’t really know what the shortcomings, dangers, and misuses of the new technology are. Nobody knows. With Integral Theory, there is a valuable conveyor belt from Turquoise to Indigo to Violet that will help the entire Integral community to make space for the “real magic” of Lingua-U (if it succeeds) or similar future technologies in their worldviews.
Still, it’s worth asking … if Lingua-U turns out to be successful, then when you’ve got “flying carpets” like Lingua-U, do you still need conveyor belts?
A Review of “After the Wrecking Ball” by Lynn Christine Fuentes
As I write this eBook review, tens of thousands of human beings have died so far this year in armed conflicts around the world. Syria is in civil war. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to exact a toll in blood and treasure. The war against narcotic cartels in Mexico and Latin America claims the lives of ever escalating numbers of victims of violence and terror.
Wherever you look in the world, violence is too abundant and peace too elusive. As a single person among 7.6 billion others, it is easy to look upon this madness and adopt an attitude of apathy or resignation. If one summons the courage to do something, it is very common to seek political solutions. Who hasn’t thought: If only the politician that I vote for is elected who has promised to make a difference, then I will have done what I could do.
But there’s a more radical, effective, and satisfying approach to winning world peace. Instead of merely voting for a better Senator, you can become devoted to higher Self. Through spiritual wisdom, it is possible to obtain an inner peacefulness that changes everything about your perceptions and infectiously spreads peace everywhere you go.
If this sounds too unrealistic to be true, then I suggest you read After the Wrecking Ball, an eBook by Lynn C. Fuentes which articulates Ten Principles for Finding Peace Amidst Conflict. Fuentes carries an unusual lineage in integrative spirituality (she says Ken Wilber is her favorite philosopher) as well as a varied career as a lawyer, mediator, journalist and university professor. One of her specialties is conflict management, so her eBook contains wisdom born out of a decades-long quest to obtain equanimity of the self, peaceful family relations, healthy and balanced communities, and a nonviolent world.
I don’t want to make it sound that Lynn is only applying ideas from her higher education or work experience into a spiritual context. In fact, the source of her Ten Principles might astonish you. She writes that in her forties she experienced multiple formidable challenges that made her feel helpless. And then something remarkable happened:
Help came from a direction I didn’t expect and didn’t even see at first. Slowly and almost imperceptibly, beginning in Thanksgiving, 1995, ten guiding principles “dropped” into my mind. They were accompanied by an electric ‘felt’sense (a feeling I have sometimes that heightens my awareness and powers my body in some way) along with a ‘knowing’ that these were absolutely true and very significant to me. Over the years after their appearance, I began to apply them to the issues confronting me and gradually found that my life and the life of others around me was getting better.
She had sought answers to her problems, and she received them in a remarkable spiritual “download” that gradually set her to cook up a spiritual path that would put conflict resolution on the front burner. She says she was unconscious of how it was all taking place because her learning was very gradual, but eventually she came to a new level of understanding of “the energetic movement of thought and feeling that gave rise to, complicated or defused, resolved or didn’t resolve disputes, discord, and painful states of being, both internal and external.”
What sort of a spiritual download did Fuentes receive? She puts each of the Ten Principles in each of ten chapters beginning with “Love Is The Only Transformative Thing” and ending (full circle) with “Be Love”. Her teaching is autobiographical, not preachy or dogmatic. She even explains that as some of these Principles appeared in her own mind, she was skeptical or puzzled. Nevertheless, she attempted to apply them in real life and thereby began to realize their truth and wisdom for herself. She describes some of her frustrations in attempting to put them into practice amidst ongoing difficulties with her marriage, her youngest child’s health, and her career.
In Chapter 7, “I Am The Hands of God”, she synthesizes perspectives from her experience as a caregiver, a reader of spirituality and philosophy books, and her mystical experiences of listening as contact with “the flow of the universe”. She writes:
It’s easy to hold beautiful beliefs, to sit and wait for God to act, to tell ourselves that ‘if it’s right, it will happen,” to think that someone else will do it, when all along, we are the instrument by which those beliefs will manifest, the hands through which God will act, the ones who will make right happen. Whatever it is we feel called to do, or to refrain from doing, is something we can commit to. If it is right for us, we will feel it in our bodies. Acting in this way takes us into flow with the universe. We are not bucking the tide or forcing things; we are not imposing our will. Instead we are giving naturally what is ours to give and allowing others to do the same.
Lynn’s talents as an educator are quite apparent. Although her eBook is only 62 pages long, it manages to distill some of the “greatest hits” of a spiritual perspective infused with common sense, a compassionate soul, and a mind capable of a genuine Integral embrace. There is refreshingly little jargon that might get in the way of comprehension and yet there is real depth to the wisdom. It is a book an Integralist could easily buy for a parent or coworker or friend without fearing that it will be too difficult to comprehend.
Perhaps the Ten Principles are most challenging when they confront readers with teachings that demand a radical inner peacefulness. Anyone convinced that they must change the world through controlling others is told that every truth contains its opposite. Anyone sure that they are right is told that peacefulness is obtained through both/and thinking, not either/or thinking. And warriors are given the firm counsel to “Be Defenseless” (But Not A Doormat).
My only real criticism of After the Wrecking Ball is that as a memoir it may have erred by abbreviating too much of Lynn’s personal story of crisis and redemption. She gives us the Cliff’s Notes version of her story only, leaving some hanging threads. As well, one may want to hear more about how she applied the Ten Principles in her work in conflict mediation (there’s only one chapter on “Living the Principles”).
Reading After the Wrecking Ball is a crash course in how to obtain greater inner peace after life’s disruptions. If you’re ready for it, herein is everything you need to become a force of inner and outer reconciliation that is so much needed in the world today.
After the Wrecking Ball: Ten Principles for Finding Peace Amidst Conflict is available from Amazon and BookBaby.
Why I No Longer Support Dr. Gafni’s Leadership in the Integral Community
Here are three of my most significant blog posts about Dr. Marc Gafni. They reflect my views at the time I wrote them, and are not a perfect representation of my views as they have somewhat evolved to this day. I have added a note at the top which is up-to-date.
A Note on 12/10/2021
TL;DR: Even if I were to grant Dr. Marc Gafni the benefit of the doubt on all the things that he claims are true about the accusations against him (which I certainly do not), I would STILL have to conclude that he is not a morally fit leader for our community. Based merely on what he has already admitted to doing and based on the undisputed consequences of his actions. However, I feel that if others disagree with me — choosing to support the man or feeling that he be absolutely canceled and shunned — then I can still respect their opinions despite our disagreement.
More than a decade ago, I had a small but memorable role in facilitating a public discussion on my blog and Facebook posts of controversies regarding Marc Gafni, who for a time was a spiritual leader in the Integral community and who remains active in the Center for Integral Wisdom). Subsequent to my blogging about the controversy, I worked for a year with Marc, mainly helping him to launch the Your Unique Self book and UniqueSelf.com website. At different times, I was a nuanced Gafni defender and at other times I was a nuanced critic of Gafni; consequently, Gafni’s friends liked me or hated me and eventually Gafni’s enemies like me or hated me, and I didn’t make anyone happy all the time.
To this day, I acknowledge that I made mistakes in forming opinions about the scandal in the Integral/Sounds True community. However, I also believe that I did the best I could under the circumstances while working with the information I had at the time. Gafni’s enemies were angered by my early defense of him, but sometimes they seem to forget that in forming my defense of him I was (a) deliberately misled by one of the two women in the community, and (b) was informed by the other woman that her relationship with him (however much he acted terribly and immorally towards her) was consensual and not physically abusive. In short, #MeToo was not yet “a thing”, but I believed the women. But I just didn’t think that Marc’s wrongdoing in our community rose to the level of badness that would destroy my trust in him. That’s basically what I said, too.
I also made serious mistakes in judgment about the scandals in Marc Gafni’s career before he joined the Integral scene. The issues involved are complex and even after spending days pouring over Marc’s research files and days in conversations with him and people in his orbit, I was unable for some time to conclude that Dr. Gafni’s behavior was beyond the pale. This statement is shocking to people who have read the online posts by some of the women, including two women who allege abuse while they were 13 and 16 years old, and who have courageously shared their stories of emotional abuse. Marc denies the abuse and has issued detailed rebuttals to most of the points made by the women (and some men) on his “Who is Marc Gafni?” site. I have spent a few hours on this site, too.
Before speaking to the present day, let me just say that I was swayed by Marc’s defense, especially the existence of a private report by Integral Institute which seemed to exonerate him of wrongdoing and concluded that sexual misconduct allegations against him were “entirely fraudulent”. No one in the Integral community saw that report while they were forming their judgments against him (that is, not until I leaked it to the Integral Global group at great risk to my reputation within Integral Institute). I leaked the report in an effort to bring greater consciousness to the motivations held by many Integralists who were aware of this report and were defending Gafni.
As I said at the time, I had grown distrustful of the I-I report and had reason to doubt its accuracy and perhaps even its authenticity. If my fellow Integralists at the Center for Integral Wisdom were putting their reputations on the line because they believed the I-I report, they might have been doing so because of a fraud. I felt that there was no way to ensure the veracity about the report and even its authenticity except by leaking it publicly so that people within I-I and outside I-I could critique it together (and, after Rob Smith acknowledged the report’s authenticity, this happened in Integral Global discussions).
Despite a degree of ambiguity about these statements regarding Marc Gafni, I was swayed several years ago to join with his critics in many of their criticisms and some of their conclusions about the question of how people in the community should relate to Marc today. Regarding the question of whether Gafni committed grievous emotional harm to girls and women, I believe that he did. I disbelieve most, if not all, of his denials of the accusations against him, on account of my lack of trust in his honesty with himself and others.
If there are any readers who are angry that I won’t say that I disbelieve ALL the denials, it is simply because I have read the files, heard the conversations, seen the reports, talked to a few of the women and emailed with others, and it seems pretty clear that some of the women didn’t tell the total truth some of the time about some of the shit that went down. It’s well documented, I think, and I believe that some things happened some of the time in the manner that Gafni described it, in a way which paints him in a more favorable light than the monster he is often caricatured as. In the Integral world, we have a saying: no one is so wrong that they are wrong 100% of the time, and this is the case with Dr. Gafni, who is wrong a lot of the time regarding the controversies that he brought on himself, but not all of the time.
Despite all the disagreements and conflicting evidence, I have concluded that Marc Gafni despite all his other talents is manifestly unfit to serve as a spiritual leader in the Integral community. This is partly because when Gafni and his accusers disagreed, the accusers were probably right much more often than wrong, at least insofar as I can tell as an outsider to these events with limited information. And this is also because there is an awful lot that the accusers and Dr. Gafni totally agree on: they agree that he lied a lot, that he pressured people to lie, that he actively covered up multiple affairs, that he broached the trust of his business partners (Sounds True, Integral Institute, etc.), that he has left a string of a considerable number of women in his wake who feel so abused by him that they keep coming after him year after year in an effort to get him to stop abusing other women, that he has left a trail of people who are convinced to this day that he plagiarized or manipulated them, and so on. None of this is normal. None of this is acceptable. Whether or not other people involved in the dramas hold a share of responsibility for what happened, none of this speaks well to Gafni’s maturity or skillfulness. Especially now where #MeToo has brought important consciousness around sexual harassments issues, we can part ways.
There is also the issue of whether “we” should invite Gafni to speak to our conferences, dialogue in our podcasts, hire him as a Kabbalah instructor, link to his think tank, and contribute papers to our think tanks. Let me just say that I am both (a) a fan of free speech and free association, and (b) a fan of accountability for betrayals of trust.
Regarding one of Gafni’s controversies, I once defended him like this: “Where there is smoke, there is not always fire. Sometimes there is smoke that is intentionally and maliciously planted there and sometimes there is only the illusion of smoke.” After painful determinations over several years, I would have to revise this. I would say, “Where there is smoke but not fire, sometimes you have been unduly influenced to not see the fire that’s really there. And sometimes there is so much smoke over so long a time that you stop caring whether the arsonist was 100% responsible all the time, you just get away from the arsonist, and you stop breathing smoke.”
Naturally, I would leave it up to the specific Integral person or organization to discern the wisest choice for them in the situation. If someone feels differently on this subject than I do — say, if they support Gafni and want him fully reembraced by the Integral community, or if they feel that Gafni and his associates ought to be canceled, run out of town, and totally shunned — that’s their business and not mine.
In the tiny matter of whether to link to the Center for Integral Wisdom on my link list, I am choosing to do so as a small goodwill gesture towards Dr. Gafni and other members of the CIW. The passage of time has a way of giving greater perspective on things and there may yet be opportunities for forgiveness, reconciliation, and accountability in the future.
An Apology To Tami Simon (Statement on 3/19/2017)
On October 3, 2011, I wrote an open letter to Tami Simon concerning remarks she made to another blogger. In her remarks, she explained her reasons for cancelling the book publishing deal of one of Sounds True’s contracted authors, Marc Gafni. She explained that “[N]ew and incontrovertible information came to light that made me aware that Marc was involved in a sexual relationship with a student and that the relationship was shrouded in secrecy…” and that the other woman “often … witnessed Marc telling lies to cover his tracks.”
At the time, I was just getting to know Dr. Marc Gafni, the former Jewish Orthodox rabbi and one-time Israeli public celebrity turned Oxford University scholar with revolutionary ideas about Kabbalah’s “nondual humanism” among other things. At the time, circa 2011, many people felt that despite a history involving personal controversies, Gafni was one of the Integral scene’s brightest stars and most promising leaders.
Given Tami Simon’s impeccable reputation for integrity, her letter to the blogger seemed likely to end Gafni’s career. It left many reasonable people wondering if she needed to say anything at all. It left many reasonable people wondering if she was handling Gafni’s controversies with even-handedness or if he was being singled out for past misdeeds unfairly. I had heard she was in fact pressured and threated with a boycott and character assassination by individuals who Gafni and his associates claimed were part of a “dishonest smear campaign” to discredit him based on “trial by Internet”.
What the heck was going on between Sounds True and Tami’s decision to cancel Dr. Marc Gafni’s book deal? As a blogger in the Integral community, I tried to get to the bottom of it. But only Marc Gafni and people close to him would speak to me. Tami declined to speak to me, but I did speak to the two women Gafni was involved with simultaneously while being in a relationship with his child’s mother. One woman spoke of atrocious behavior by Marc that made me sick to hear of it including outright lies, infidelity, and telephone stalking. But it seemed to me that there was no smoking gun of physical abuse and the relationship was consensual. The other woman spoke to me and said her relationship with Marc was healthy. Years later, in the spring of 2016, she revealed to me that she secretly felt threatened and psychologically terrorized by Marc and could not speak openly to me of her actual experience with him which was emotionally and spiritually traumatic on many levels. I didn’t know any of this at the time, and I believed her public story that she thought well of Marc.
So in October 2011, I looked for a smoking gun, some evidence to tell me to stay clear from Marc and avoid getting involved with him, despite the brilliance and usefulness and humaneness of his spiritual writings. Tami’s public letter was a warning sign, but Marc had convinced me that there were many misunderstandings between him and Tami that she was unwilling to get past. So I wrote a blog post challenging Tami where I said things like, “Since you don’t mention any specific lies it’s hard for me to determine if there’s any truth to this comment, you know. There’s nothing to investigate, nothing that Marc can say in his defense.” and “How can there be a healing of these fresh wounds between you and Marc? I have heard him say that he loves you and hopes that you will forgive him for mistakes he’s made and that he hopes you can accept his friendship. I know that he is reluctant to make a public apology so long as the stink of the recent toxic blog posts lingers in the air, but he wants healing so very much for everyone. Is there any chance you will forgive him?”
Between 2011 and most of 2015, Marc Gafni and I had a positive relationship and spent over a year in public collaboration. I was on the lookout for signs of duplicity, deception, and potential abuse of myself or any associates. I did not find anything that set off alarm bells, though as I have said before Marc has a strong and domineering personality, a charismatic presence, circles of trust among his associates, and sometimes he isn’t aware of the impact that he has on other people. He is not perfect, but I never saw him as the monster or demon that his opponents put on him.
In the final days of 2015, the New York Times wrote a story on Marc Gafni as a rising political figure within the Integral community who was plagued by scandal. It brought many new developments to the forefront even though Marc was accused of no new misdeeds. At the time, I was not on the board or really very active in the organization he founded, the Center for Integral Wisdom. Nevertheless, it happened that the Board Chair of the CIW back-forwarded me a document which purported to exonerate Marc Gafni of his misdeeds. It seemed likely to me that she was sending this document, with Marc’s permission, to the Board of Directors of the CIW to influence them to stay loyal to Marc in the face of brutal public attacks on him. The author of the exonerating document has since gone on in 2017 to create a blog focused on defending Gafni against his attackers.
When I read the document, called the Integral Institute Report Summary, I soon learned that there was an entire section concerning Marc’s dismissal from Sounds True. Every single sentence of the paragraphs in this section contained falsehoods, lies, and distortions. I knew this because I had spoken not only to Marc but to the two women involved in the Sounds True controversy. I didn’t want to accept the truth that I had learned about my friend Marc. He seemed to be doing his best to prove his enemies correct who say that he is a pathological liar. While the document was not apparently written by Marc, it bore his fingerprints as a ghost writer or single source. He lied to the document’s author about key details, denying for instance that he had been involved with one of his students, even though the fact that she was his student was not in denial at the time. In fact, he made a very public defense of spiritual teachers having relationships with students to the Integrales Forum. Nevertheless, what he previously admitted, he now lied about. Wouldn’t he know he would get caught? Not necessarily, if we think through the mind of a pathological liar. He could make Kate demand that everyone who received the document keep it secret so that the lies within it could not be scrutinized by his attackers. He was perpetrating a brilliant, risky fraud, with the reputations of every one of the Board of Directors of CIW at stake. I couldn’t stand for it. First, I leaked the document to the Internet so that it could not be re-written to cover up the lies. Then I wrote what I knew to Ken Wilber and Kate Maloney and Marc Gafni. (Marc wrote me back the next day, explaining that there were “errors” in the report that would be “corrected” and republished.) Finally, at the behest of a commenter on a Facebook forum, I published my letter to Marc disclosing everything (which was soon republished by Robb Smith in the Integral Global forum).
After the incident with the leaked report, I remained distant from Marc and his organization. A few months later, I penned “An Apology as A Former Marc Gafni Defender” for my blog. I met with one of the two women from the Sounds True controversy and apologized personally for having not seen Marc more clearly and defending him for too long. But I never apologized to the other woman, who I deeply regret not having perceived her pain and validated it earlier than today. I am truly sorry. And I never apologized to Tami Simon personally.
She saw Marc Gafni more clearly than I did much sooner than I did, and I cast doubt on her testimony. She said she didn’t trust Marc, and I dismissed her concerns with a trust in him which was built on sand. She exercised sound judgment about Marc’s honesty when I did not, and I (relying on Marc’s account combined with Tami’s refusal to speak with me) insinuated that perhaps she was being less than fully honest. I regret that insinuation very much, though at the time I spoke those words I was in a difficult position. One of the brightest stars and most talented leaders the Integral community had known was being publicly assailed based on evidence outside the public view, and the controversy threatened to derail the publication of an entire body of literature which the world had a right to see. I did what I could in the situation, but I erred in judgment in key respects. I hope all three women I have apologized to will forgive me for failing as I did, and I wish them well.
An Apology as A Former Marc Gafni Defender (Statement on 4/28/2016)
In 2011, I became friends with Dr. Marc Gafni, currently the head of the Center for Integral Wisdom. I visited him and listened to him extensively discuss the allegations of various parties (mostly women alleging emotional or sexual abuse), and learned that he had an archive of private materials in his defense. I perused the private materials and, after some deliberation, came to see matters much as he did, as a misplaced and unsubstantiated vendetta.
In all of my deliberations, I relied mainly upon public information and his private archives, except for one scandal. It was the scandal that brought Marc and I together, actually. Tami Simon, the head of Sounds True, cancelled Marc’s book deal, alleging that Marc had been inappropriately involved with two persons, one a student. Marc expressed regret about some of his behavior, such as asking for privacy/secrecy from the women, but not all of his behavior. I interviewed the two women and attempted to interview Tami. When Tami refused an interview, I posted a blog post with my interview questions for her. I really didn’t feel I had enough information to judge Tami, but I did feel that Marc’s behavior while problematic was not an obstacle to his continued involvement in the Integral community.
In 2012 and 2013, I collaborated with Marc on a variety of projects, the most important being my work to help ensure that the website for Your Unique Self got off the ground. For about a year I was an independent contractor for the Center for World Spirituality (which would later be renamed CIW).
Last year, new information came to light — as I have written publicly and which I and Robb S. published in a Facebook forum — and I withdrew my support for Marc’s role with the CIW. For one thing, there was the secret I-I Report which Marc had long touted as a vindication. I read the Summary and it was deeply flawed and did not address some of the most serious allegations against him. It contained a paragraph full of falsehoods about the Sounds True story: every single sentence contained a falsehood or half-truth! I can think of no other explanation for the lies in the I-I Report Summary than that Marc lied to the report’s author, knowingly spreading a falsehood that in turn was being used to bolster Marc’s credibility with Board members and supporters. It reeked of cover up, not exoneration, and I told Ken Wilber and the CIW Board Chair so. I even leaked the I-I Report Summary on Facebook so the truth would get out there, even if it meant creating a rift.
Once I saw conclusive evidence that Marc committed a serious lie, I became resistant to Marc’s explanations regarding the older information which had been publicly available on the Internet regarding Marc’s misdeeds. I don’t know what to think of all these past allegations, but I certainly don’t dismiss them as I had for years earlier, believing Marc’s narrative instead. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to see through the smoke sooner, but I had been earlier won over to Marc’s self-defense, and it took my personally uncovering something indisputable (the lies regarding the Sounds True scandal) before I could be more open to the perspectives offered by the earlier victims.
Once I began to see Marc in a more ambiguous light, his halo was gone from my sight. I no longer wished to have any role defending him publicly from any charges, especially ones about which I did not have first-hand information. I believe I have made it clear that I am no longer a “Gafni defender” or “Gafni collaborator”. I regret the role I played in the past which without my intent may have made things worse for other people, women and men in Gafni’s past and current associates. I am sorry deeply that I did not see the light so that I could have disavowed Gafni publicly earlier, and I would advise others to not collaborate with him. I wish I could have seen reason to disavow him earlier, but my judgment was clouded and I was unwilling to look deeper into the stories of his victims to find facts that I might have overlooked. It was a moral failing, not just a logical error, which I regret.
If I have not made a bigger fuss over this apology, it is because I do not agree with those individuals who have gone on a vendetta to ever prevent the man (Gafni) from earning a living as a scholar and book author. From what I have read, Gafni’s books have wonderful, brilliant, incredibly useful ideas (as I see it). People who want to read his writings or learn from him, buyer be warned, ought to be able to do so. He has been found guilty of no crime. To the extent possible, I would prefer we could just agree to leave him in peace to continue his intellectual contributions or live his life as he wishes. If others cannot just leave him be, but insist on policing community standards of behavior, then I think we will continue as an integral community to be haunted by this shadow for many years to come. I will not persecute the man, but as I have said I do not think he is suitable to lead CIW.
My conclusions on the Marc Gafni blogosphere controversy in the Integral community (Statement on 12/26/2011)
Recently statements from Ken Wilber and the Special Committee of the Board of Directors for the Center for World Spirituality (CWS) have appeared online regarding Marc Gafni. They have made up their minds. They have chosen to continue to work with Marc Gafni in his vision for evolving a world-centric spirituality based on Integral principles. They appear to have seen through the misinformation and distortions which have appeared in the blogosphere since September.
In his new statement, Ken Wilber says that Marc is a very gifted spiritual teacher who has the capacity to be a “good spiritual leader” of the CWS. He affirms that Marc is serious about doing his inner work, despite not being dysfunctional. In a 2008 statement with Sally Kempton, Wilber wrote:
Marc, more than almost anyone we know, lives from a profound sense of being responsible to love. In practice, that means that when he loves someone—and he has the gift for genuinely loving many people– he is willing to offer whatever he has. This willingness to love and give himself—sometime against his own best interests—is one of Marc’s remarkable qualities. One aspect of this gift for loving is that people who spend time with him will often experience a natural opening of the heart, which gets played out in their own relationships and work life. Marc’s open heartedness is unusual, and has often been misunderstood, just as his spontaneous, playful and experimental nature has been misunderstood…
I also have high regard for Marc’s spiritual gifts, brilliant and original teachings, and have experienced his opening to Eros which expresses itself in unusual warmth and open heartedness. I applaud the decision by Wilber and the Board of CWS and am glad to be holding a similar vision of a spirituality that advocates careful ethical discernment and which calls us to listen to many different voices and become informed with many different perspectives before exercising judgment. While not everyone will make the same decision, I’d like to share a few of the observations that have led me to support Marc Gafni’s leadership role in the Integral spiritual world.
As you may know, I’ve been tracking the controversy since late September, when I first started to pay attention to the so-called “sex scandal” manufactured by Bill Harryman’s Integral Options Café blog. Although I’d never spoken to Marc up to that period of time, I have since then met him personally, spoken to several persons with close knowledge of the events, and familiarized myself with many of the relevant aspects of the controversy.
After having spent dozens of hours in conversation, interviews, and reading relevant archival material, I can find no basis for rejecting Marc Gafni’s teachings and indicting his ethics in any way that he has not already publicly acknowledged, as when he says that he is sorry that the privacy he asked of the two women he dated was psychologically painful to one of them (the one who was not a student).
While I’m not done with my research into the entire history of the controversy, I feel it’s important in the interim to let my readers know about my findings so far. I’m coming to the conclusion that this may all be much ado about nothing. Where there is smoke, there is not always fire. Sometimes there is smoke that is intentionally and maliciously planted there and sometimes there is only the illusion of smoke.
Unfortunately several persons closest to the controversy are not willing to go “on the record” at this time with the sort of details which would help the public form an educated opinion. This puts me in the difficult position of passing along anonymously sourced claims which are subject to possible errors or withholding the story and simply passing along my judgments without explaining their basis. I hope that a more complete story can be told in the future; meanwhile, here are a few general remarks that could help to bring more light into our discussion.
Much ado about nothing?
Basically, Marc and his partner (to whom he was not married and had supported in having a child) had stepped out, by mutual agreement, from a monogamous domestic relationship. He then dated two women at the same time. Both women knew he was not monogamous before dating him and both knew of each other for most of the two or so months they went out. The parties all agreed mutually to hold the relationships private for a while, and eventually one woman came to feel the deception required by the privacy was too much for her to handle, especially their joint decision not to inform Tami Simon, CEO of Sounds True, with whom she was closely associated in professional contexts. She did not intend to stop seeing Marc, but decided that the best course of action was to inform Tami that she was dating Marc.
Subsequently, Tami and the second woman had a series of conversations the results of which, from what I can tell, resulted in the woman who was dating Marc at the time coming to believe that she had been “emotionally damaged” (according to Simon’s public statement). Tami is in a position of power over this second woman. Tami has declined to answer the question as to whether she had any role in influencing the woman to feel “emotionally damaged.” About six weeks later, Tami issued a statement critical of Marc to a blog known to regularly traffic in malicious attacks on spiritual teachers who the blogger regards as “abusive gurus.” This blog post had substantial ripple effects through the blogosphere, setting off hundreds of comments on blogs many of which brought out savage character attacks by anonymous commenters from outside the Integral community.
In my opinion, Marc’s judgment was problematic in a few practical respects but he did not deserve Tami Simon’s moralizing rebuke. Simon refused to comment as to whether there is an ethics policy for Sounds True authors or if she held Marc to a special higher standard to which other authors are not held accountable. In rebuking Marc publicly, she appears to have been motivated by factors outside of public view, which when taken into account cast doubt on her characterization of Marc.
Tami did not tell people that she was in close contact with a third woman, one who has been centrally involved in false statements about Marc, and who has been actively and even obsessively working against him for many years. Tami also did not share that this person represented a group that had been pressuring Tami to withdraw the chapter on false complaints in Mariana Caplan’s book, which at the time had just been published by Sounds True. Tami also did not share that she put the second woman —- her friend, who had just told her she was dating Marc —- in touch with this purveyor of vitriolic attacks on Marc. This person’s intense agenda of vilification, which she downloaded to Tami and the second woman, could not have been without substantial influence. These are just a few of the related facts that she chose not to share in her public statement. I don’t think she intended to deceive anyone, but her words have nevertheless done truth a disservice.
Unanswered questions
Tami Simon, as I have noted, declined my repeated requests to interview with her. Effectively, she did a “hit and run” piece on one of the most gifted scholars, organizational leaders, and spiritual teachers in the Integral / Evolutionary Spirituality world. She offered no factual evidence to back up her specific charges against Marc and her central moral claim — that Marc’s private relationship with his student was wrong — is steeped in some sort of unacknowledged Oppression Theory-based ideology which is inadequate to explain the complexities of this particular situation. She also believes that Marc should have violated his commitment to privacy and shared the relationship with her (Tami). Marc has denied making the promise to her which she alleged he did, and she has refused to back up her assertion. Marc says that he promised Tami not to create a scandal; it is arguable that Tami and not Marc turned a private matter into a public spectacle. None of this however by itself warrants the kind of actions that Tami took in response which were obviously motivated by much more then these issues.
Since she used first-person language (i.e., “I statements”) to express her criticisms of Marc Gafni, she can probably make a case for evading responsibility for technically defaming him, but the question of moral culpability remains open. My expectation and hope is that the claims in her blog-delivered attack will be questioned by readers with careful discernment or that she will come forward with facts that will show her behavior in a more comprehensive light.
Marc’s public statements — which Simon probably knew about (and if she didn’t, as his publisher she ought to have known) — made it clear that he has articulated a sophisticated approach to teacher / student relationships in post-conventional contexts. From what I have been able to ascertain, Marc behaved in accordance with his public teachings. Simon did not speak to the student of Marc’s to learn her point of view nor did she make an effort to get Marc’s point of view or clarify highly disputed claims prior to making her public assault on his character.
Instead, she probably based her statement against Marc primarily on conversations she had with another woman Marc dated and with one or more of Marc’s ex-lovers who have a documented history of making grotesquely false accusations and reprehensible legal complaints against him. It is quite likely, from what I have been able to learn, that Simon did not even review the very extensive and compelling documentary evidence vindicating Marc of the baseless charges against him by the woman with whom she was in close communication in the days prior to her statement.
Simon listened to women providing a very selective and distorted picture of events but didn’t get Marc’s point of view, an apparent neglect of her responsibility to get the facts right before throwing stones. Why she would lapse in her diligence I cannot be certain, and perhaps she will address a few unanswered questions in the future.
My best guess is that she bought into the poisonous “hermeneutic of hate” spread as gospel by the anti-Gafni cohort. Perhaps she also reacted out of anger and a self-protective fear that Sounds True would be attacked as “guilty by association” if the anti-Gafni cohort chose to turn their guns on her next as an “enabler” of a bad man who abuses women. Was she mad that he dated the specific woman he did because of her relationship with that woman? Was she afraid of possible harm to her professional reputation, and therefore she went public with an unusual critical statement? It seems possible.
Notably Marc during this whole story, who is arguably the injured party, has refused as far as I can tell, to attack or demonize any of the parties. If you know Gafni at all, you know that he is genuinely committed to repair and healing. Marc has offered to do a facilitated public or private dialogue with the parties to this issue but there have been no takers.
A “vast first-tier conspiracy”?
If Tami Simon were the only person to ever criticize Marc Gafni for his behavior in his love life, her statement would have been greeted with a much different reaction. Unfortunately, she selected as the target for her statement a particularly vulnerable man: a spiritual teacher with a long history of controversy and a small group of highly vocal attackers who have pursued an Internet vendetta against him for years under the disguise of “protecting” vulnerable people from a “dangerous” man.
The whole affair is the most complicated spiritual scandal/controversy that I’ve ever read about … and I’m not even nearly done researching the archive of documents on the case, or speaking with all the most important players. Some of the most helpful backdrop of the story is told by Mariana Caplan in “An Unexpected Twist: False Complaints Against Teachers” and a detailed article “Trial by Internet: an archetypal spiritual drama” in Catalyst Magazine. The picture that emerges is that of a spiritual teacher — Marc Gafni — who has been repeatedly demonized by a vocal group of people as an “abusive guru,” despite a paucity of evidence and the testimony of many smart, sane people who insist that he is nothing of the sort.
It isn’t necessary to think that the women who have come out against Marc over the years are all delusional or mentally unstable, although at least one prominent attacker has a bizarre history of unstable statements (claiming on Oprah in the 1980s to have been the victim of a Jewish satanic cult which forced her to murder babies and refuses to recant her story). This is weird stuff. Nor is it necessary to claim that there’s a “vast first-tier conspiracy” against Marc (to adapt a term once used by Hillary Clinton), though evidence is overwhelming that the online vendetta against him is perpetuated largely by a handful of folks who are all connected to each other although they do not disclose that fact and who are apparently obsessed with ruining his reputation by spreading a mix of truth, distortions, and lies by posting anonymously or under multiple pseudonyms on comment boxes (sometimes purporting to speak as the moral conscience of the “entire Jewish community” as they do so). Very strange, indeed.
What’s most important, as I see it, is that when you look at the evidence with an open mind with careful attention to separate facts from interpretations of fact, you find that a picture emerges of Marc Gafni dramatically at odds with what you read in the seediest corners of the Internet. Instead of viewing Marc’s evolution through stages of consciousness — from ethnocentric to worldcentric, for example — and instead of viewing his evolving teachings on Eros and spirituality in a life affirming manner, they choose to make Marc out to be a monster.
It is significant that almost all of the group was directly involved in supporting what Mariana Caplan termed “the false complaints” against Marc almost six years ago. It may well be that after being culpable of making or supporting the promulgation of false complaints — truly heinous acts from any ethical perspective — the only choice that remains to them is to try to ruin Marc Gafni. To feel good about themselves, they must continue to view Gafni as bad. Therefore, they conclude, anyone today who believes Gafni must be delusional and duped, seduced by his charm and charisma. Accordingly, they feel justified in ignoring everything they say which challenges their own beliefs.
Marc’s detractors post with missives reeking of self-righteousness and an unwillingness to own any shadow or responsibility for unethical, demonstrably distorted or false communications. They do not acknowledge when they have passed along falsehoods or correct the record. They usually hide behind anonymity. They inaccurately paint Marc’s defenders as holding to a “situational ethics.” They have to a person, so far as I can tell, all refused to engage Marc in direct dialogue aimed at healing.
It’s time for closure
Marc has never claimed to be perfect or to have always lived up to his high ethical ideals, and he’s accepted his share of responsibility for the controversies as best he sees it. But for the small group of vigilante crusaders fueling the fires in the blogosphere, this isn’t enough. They will not rest until Marc apologizes for “abuses” that did not in fact occur, except in the minds of “victims” steeped in an Oppression Theory ideology and a poisonous hermeneutic which does not permit them to accept any responsibility for their role in the messiness of their relationships with Marc or their role in bearing false witness.
I have compassion for anyone who claims suffering, but I can’t accept their ideological distortions which divide people into victims and perpetrators and which has constructed a bizarre, demonizing narrative around Marc Gafni that is not reality-based. I am also reminded of Mariana Caplan’s point that much malice hides behind the fig leaf of “I was hurt.” Claims of victimization are not always to be assumed valid, especially when they don’t pass the smell test. Sometimes people exaggerate the hurt in relationships in order to inflict undeserved damage on the other side.
Of course, from a perfectly ordinary point of view, there are genuine victims and perpetrators of terrible acts of exploitation. No credible evidence exists that I have seen that over the past 30 or so years Marc Gafni has been involved in any terrible acts of exploiting others; however, some of his intimate, consensual, adult relationships have involved hurt feelings by persons who later blamed him for causing their own emotional pain.
When he was very young, Marc was accused of impropriety by two young women, whose version of events he denied vehemently; a lie detector test by a highly regarded expert later backed Marc’s version of events. In any case, no complaints were ever brought against him. Both of these stories were spread and encouraged by an Orthodox rabbi who disliked Gafni, and whom Gafni had been in a personal conflict. This man has continued to encourage and support various attacks on him for some thirty years. This same rabbi was a key supporter of the disreputable sexual abuse advocate mentioned above (the one who appeared on Oprah claiming to have murdered babies as part of a satanic cult). It was this same person who sowed the ground, for over twenty years, for the hermeneutic of hatred that others later picked up on.
Gafni has a strong presence with a penetrating and challenging transmission. It is understandable that he would elicit negative reaction from some percentage of his audiences over the years, especially as he may have outgrown theologically the level of consciousness of the communities in which he resided. Gafni can catalyze people’s confrontation with their own shadow. He calls people out in a deep way. At the same time, most people who hear Gafni find him compelling and profound. I sense his love and goodness and know many others do as well. But given the existence of the negative prism of Internet attack, any negative response to Gafni can potentially be filtered through the demonizing prism, and then linked together on the web by those invested in keeping the demonization alive.
Furthermore, in my experience Gafni’s most vocal detractors generally engage in a sort of group-think which perpetuates a myth that only those people who dislike Marc Gafni know the real man and everyone who likes him needs to be constantly reminded that he is disreputable. The fact that others think the same way they do seems evidence enough to persist in their beliefs even after they are presented with counter-factual evidence. In this way, they remind me of birthers who deny that Barack Obama was born in America or the Clinton Derangement Syndrome sufferers who believe Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster. Many millions of people hold these false beliefs sincerely and the mere prevalence of an idea does not make it better.
I hope Marc’s attackers will look within and not simply lash out with projections of malice and patronizing attacks on more reality-based thinkers as “Gafni’s puppets” as they have sometimes done. I hope they will own that they have situated their beliefs about him in the dubious context of an intellectual rubric of Oppression Theory, especially a sort of victim-feminism which disempowers women and ignores the voices of the many women who have found in Marc an ethical, gifted, and brilliant teacher and friend. We will see.
I’m glad that the Tami Simon/Bill Harryman-manufactured controversy is now coming to a close. The statements by Ken Wilber, Marc Gafni, Warren Farrell, and the Special Committee of the Board of the Center for World Spirituality sound true to me, and I am proud to be part of a spiritual movement in which many leaders are capable of looking at even the most complex ethical quagmires with a multi-perspectival, all quadrant, all levels lens. The world desperately needs more integral, evolutionary visions … and we cannot afford to be distracted with faux scandals perpetuated largely by First-Tier ideologies in action and Integralists who haven’t exercised very careful discernment and owned their own shadows.
Marc is facing the controversy with courage and determination to emerge stronger and more conscious than ever before as evidenced in his statement of closure. Now I look forward to moving on to the important business of helping to co-create the framework and foundation for a cosmo-centric spirituality which is capable of bringing about breakthroughs in healing the world and feeding souls hungry for a more radically expansive love and life more whole, passionate, and ethical.
or: Kalen’s Speech to Surya Upon the Start of Her Quest for the Golden Egg
(Photo Credit: PetarPaunchev/BigStock.com)
Remember these, the first words spoken by Kalen O’Tolan, Slayer of Capricorn, when returned from the underworld after falling in his famed battle with the Old Zodiac which had grown too greedy, self-satisfied, cruel, and corrupt.
Kalen emerged as a newborn person in New Zealand, innocent in New Flesh. Like a chick hatched from a golden egg on the Day of Embodiment, held in the arms of his daughter Surya and her husband Benedict In a Māori occupation at the site of present-day Dundein, in 1227 CE, shortly after the death of Genghis Khan, the Great Khan.
He spoke to her when he learned to talk at the age of two, speaking in Tolang so as to reveal the secret location of the Golden Egg, highest treasure at the Throne of Treasuring in the Kalendar’s most spectacular Month.
Surya, I see the swirling path you have gone through a Grass-Green wood since I left you. You sojourned from one continent to another, searching for evidence to lift your spirit, seeking for a new significance from within your self-citta, seeing more than you could reason through science and schemes for success. The priests offered you absolution from sin, and you refused. Everything old you stopped; a new world started in your svelte arms. I watched you running to stay one step ahead of danger, never far from samsara and suffering, needing new, personal ethics. Nothing did you prize more than the solace of your soul, your new integrity, until you had to sacrifice even such self-certainty to a new sort of servitude.
I watched you, semi-immortal daughter, standing upon the Gold Coast at 1111 CE, looking as youthful as a girl of merely nine years, her hair twisted tikitiki in the Māori fashion. Your once pristine self-root became misshapen with shame. It was not your fault; it was the collective shame that your soul took to glue to itself out of its goodness. Your way was once shining, and you shone. Your way was once chivalrous, and you were kind to animals and old people. Your way was once shimmering and chicanery, until you made a living for yourself in the wild and on the pirate ships. I looked the other way at times, daughter. Economics and reforming the social ethos were your passions. Fighting against evil you became the twin of that which you opposed. I remember how you nearly sold an Artifact of Orr to feed your firstborn son. The gods and goddesses took it from you then, but it will return one day, its retrieval to become the task of your heirs. You shouldn’t have tried it. Shriveled in misery, shady as a shifty showman, you stunk of shit and stain. Your gold-haired beau fell in love with you, young lovers shacking up in a shantytown, sharing a bed out of wedlock. Do you see where the Grass-Green road left you? You become nothing but walking, talking, living shadow! Bankrupt. Corrupt. Your soul had to shout before Allah would listen, asking for mercy upon you and help for your family. In response, God showered you with shunyataa: nothing.
Listen to me, Surya, your beloved father reborn as your adopted toddler. I have a message for you: the Grass-Green Gate is shut to you forever. A Sea-Green Gate with Teal undertones shining under a Yellow sky beckons now. Grieve what you once won on the Gate’s other side: nothing. And now, nothing accumulates. You have even lost the nothingness. Your mind grew quiet and peaceful. Your education was your illumination. Your ways grew smooth as the skin-lotion you pour on your epidermis. Embodiment is the Way now. Let your body lead you on the road ahead. Empathy is the Way now. Let your feelings lead you on the road ahead. Enfoldment is the yang, Enclusion is the yin, and Enactment is the yung. Let these three principles energize you to ever greater degrees of Enlightenment. Be an emissary of Shikaina as you know her, and Allah will show you the way which is the yung to the yang of Science and Evolution and the yin of Essence and Should, which is the yung to the yang of Self and Soul and the yin of Shiva and Shakti, and there — Ʒblokohɛt: It Becomes Unblocked! The Golden Egg is within your reach now, tucked inside the Green Forest.
I have consulted the Atlas of Uvoha, and I will now tell you the secret spot where the Greatest Treasure is hidden for you, Surya. The Omphalos of Delphi says you must leave behind the world you know in Australia. Head North to Anadyr, the easternmost point in Russia. In the town center, you will see the Trinity. Be well. You will leave me in the care of a peasant woman and return to me, my beloved daughter, only when you have the Golden Egg in your possession. Thereafter, we will seek the Goose who laid it at the Throne of Gunas.
Adyashanti, Mariana Caplan, Jeff Foster, Ken Wilber, Shinzen Young, Hanzi Freinacht, Jordan B. Peterson, and More
Today we will look at some of the ideas put forward on the topic of enlightenment by 12 thinkers and artists informed by Integral, metamodernism, Advaita nondualism, or other philosophical perspectives. (They are presented in alphabetical order.)
Adyashanti, Teacher at Open Gate Sangha
Adyashanti, author of multiple books including The Way of Liberation, is an American-born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings. His teachings are an open invitation to stop, inquire, and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of all existence.
In speaking regularly with spiritual seekers, it dawned on me one day how addicted so many of them are to the power of charisma. They swap stories about how powerful this or that teacher is and compare experiences. They get a charge from it, many mistaking charisma for enlightenment. Charisma attracts at all levels: political, sexual, spiritual, etc., and it feeds the ego’s desire to feel special. The ego loves getting hits of power—it’s like a form of spiritual candy. The candy may be sweet but can you live on it? Does it make you free?
Freedom is not necessarily exciting; it’s just free. Very peaceful and quiet, so very quiet. Of course, it is also filled with joy and wonder, but it is not what you imagine. It is much, much less. Many mistake the intoxicating power of otherworldly charisma for enlightenment. More often than not it is simply otherworldly, and not necessarily free or enlightened. In order to be truly free, you must desire to know the truth more than you want to feel good. Because if feeling good is your goal, then as soon as you feel better you will lose interest in what is true. This does not mean that feeling good or experiencing love and bliss is a bad thing. Given the choice, anyone would choose to feel bliss rather than sorrow. It simply means that if this desire to feel good is stronger than the yearning to see, know, and experience Truth, then this desire will always be distorting the perception of what is Real, while corrupting one’s deepest integrity.
In my experience, everyone will say they want to discover the Truth, right up until they realize that the Truth will rob them of their deepest held ideas, beliefs, hopes, and dreams. The freedom of enlightenment means much more than the experience of love and peace. It means discovering a Truth that will turn your view of self and life upside-down. For one who is truly ready, this will be unimaginably liberating. But for one who is still clinging in any way, this will be extremely challenging indeed. How does one know if they are ready? One is ready when they are willing to be absolutely consumed, when they are willing to be fuel for a fire without end.
If you start playing the game of being an “enlightened somebody,” the true teacher is going to call you on it. He or she is going to expose you, and that exposure is going to hurt. Because the ego will be there, standing in the light of Truth, exposed and humiliated. Of course, the ego will cry “foul!” It will claim that the teacher made a mistake and begin to justify itself in an effort to put its protective clothing back on. It will begin to spin justifications with incredible subtlety and deceptiveness. This is where real spiritual sadhana (practice) begins. This is where it all becomes very real and the student discovers whether he or she truly wants to be free, or merely wants to remain as a false, separate, and self-justifying ego. This crossroad inevitably comes and is always challenging. It separates the true seeker from the false one. The true seeker will be willing to bare the grace of humility, whereas the false seeker will run from it. Thus begins the true path to enlightenment, granted only to those willing to be nobody. Discovering your “nobodyness” opens the door to awakening as beingness, and beyond that to the Source of all beingness.
Do not think that enlightenment is going to make you special—it’s not. If you feel special in any way, then enlightenment has not occurred. I meet a lot of people who think they are enlightened and awake simply because they have had a very moving spiritual experience. They wear their enlightenment on their sleeve like a badge of honor. They sit among friends and talk about how awake they are while sipping coffee at a cafe.
The funny thing about enlightenment is that when it is authentic, there is no one to claim it. Enlightenment is very ordinary; it is nothing special. Rather than making you more special, it is going to make you less special. It plants you right in the center of a wonderful humility and innocence. Everyone else may or may not call you enlightened, but when you are enlightened the whole notion of enlightenment and someone who is enlightened is a big joke. I use the word enlightenment all the time—not to point you toward it but to point you beyond it. Do not get stuck in enlightenment.
The concept of the inner guru is one of the most deceptive of all the popular truisms. Though the term ‘inner guru’ refers to something ultimately real, of the many who believe themselves to be following their inner guru only a rare few are actually doing so effectively. A high degree of human and spiritual maturity is required in order to consistently and clearly hear and follow the demanding guidance of the inner guru, a maturity that is earned through years of spiritual practice and not from reading a spiritual book or from hearing a New Age freedom fighter proclaim the message.
The main reason that people turn to the inner guru is because they are lazy and essentially uninterested in genuine transformation. The outer guru – the genuine spiritual master – will undermine one’s ego and confront one’s falsity in a way that the inner guru never will. The inner life of the human being consists of a grand multitude of voices – many of them highly neurotic – and the ego is only too happy to give one of those voices monk’s robes and a soothing tone and call it the inner guru. Such inner gurus, also known as the ‘inner self’, the ‘wise elder within’, or the ‘deep self’, have been known to guide people to do whatever it is their ego desires (extravagant vacations for example, a new Ferrari, manipulating others for a ‘higher good’ etc.), always in the name of spiritual life. It is much easier to excuse our mistakes if we have been ‘guided’, thus dismissing personal responsibility for the outcome. If positive results come from the guidance, we become a hero for hearing and following the voice; if things don’t work out, we are simply a victim of the inner voice’s desires. Either way, we do not consider ourselves to be accountable.
A close relative to the inner voice is the notion of following one’s heart. It is true that one must ultimately follow one’s heart, and that the true heart doesn’t lie, but how does one know when one is hearing this heart? Most individuals have no idea what their heart is, and have neither felt it nor heard it speak. The majority of messages they attribute to their heart are, in fact, coming from their mind, though it may well speak lovingly, tenderly, and even ‘heartfully’.
When people are unaware of the quantity of ‘inner voices’ that exist within them (including the voice of one’s ‘heart’), and are uneducated regarding the ego’s tendency to corrupt any aspect of the personality it can in order to sabotage spiritual growth, they easily fall prey to the seductions of the inner guru. Ultimately, they cheat themselves out of the growth and transformation they once came to this life looking for.
Still another of the dangerous truisms rampant among contemporary aspirants is the catch-phrase, ‘It’s all an illusion’, and all of its derivatives. From the logic of the mind rooted in duality, if everything is an illusion, it doesn’t matter if we harm others or if we destroy our bodies with drugs and alcohol because our bodies aren’t real anyway. If life is but a dream, why not take everything we can get regardless of how many toes we step on to get it and how many others will have less because of our selfishness? If all is one, there is no good and evil, right and wrong, so why not cheat, lie, and steal?
Those who indiscriminately use these ideas taken from the ‘absolute reality’ fail to understand that the absolute reality in no way negates the relative reality. Nonduality does not cancel out duality. Those who truly understand (as opposed to having had profound but fleeting insight into) the esoteric principles of ‘the inner guru’, ‘all is one’, and ‘the teacher is everywhere’, never boast such truths in reaction to any challenge to their psyche or psychology. They are instead humbled by the majesty of the reality they have glimpsed, to the extent that it propels them toward greater service to, and participation in, the very real world that we all live in. As another Zen master said: ‘You can’t live in God’s world for very long; there’s no restaurants and no toilets.’
No future ‘event’ – no ‘energetic shift’ event, ‘collapse into boundlessness’ event, ‘popping’ event, or ‘final falling-away of the me’ event – is required to make seeking disappear and freedom appear. Because freedom never went away. If it did, it wasn’t freedom.
Some Advaita teachers say “well okay, it’s not a personal event for somebody, it’s a non-event for nobody“.
I see their point. But you have to be very careful here. Because however you word it, this statement seems to promote the idea that something has to happen before there can be freedom. And apparently, after this ‘happening/non-happening’, you’ll be liberated. Or ‘there will be liberation’. For ‘no-one’.
But however you reword, rephrase, and repackage it, it’s the promise of something in the future. It’s the old enlightenment myth updated and repackaged for a modern audience.
In the same breath, of course, these teachers will say ‘There is no future. I am not promising you anything. There is nothing on offer here. Already there is only Oneness.”
Of course, in the end, it doesn’t matter what these teachers say. Ultimately, it’s what you hear. …
And so, in the end, I could easily tell the story that I have undergone some sort of transformation. That I have awakened to my true nature, that an energetic shift has happened here, that I’ve ‘popped’ and the ‘me’ has fallen away.
I could tell all of those stories.
But who would tell those stories? And for what purpose? To be a ‘teacher’? To be an ‘authority’ on nonduality? To be a ‘special, enlightened being’. No, I have no interest in that anymore.
Undeniably, something has changed here. Something is different. These days, life is light. Simple. Without the seeking, there is nothing missing. There is only fascination, intimacy, love. Gratitude. Only life happening, in its richness and wonder. But I’m not talking about Jeff. I’m talking about life.
Years ago, like those Advaita teachers, yes, I probably would have said things like ‘an energetic shift has happened here but it hasn’t happened there’, or ‘liberation has happened for no-one’, or ‘there is nobody here but I sense there is still somebody there’.
I just can’t say these things anymore. The assumption at the foundation of these statements was seen through, and the statements shattered into millions of tiny little pieces.
In the end, you can’t even know that you’re nobody. Even that story, however beautiful, has to go.
Perhaps that’s the true ‘energetic shift’: when the illusion of the ‘energetic shift’ is seen through. But my goodness, how much longer will it take to see it? Isn’t now long enough?
Another way of saying it: the shift has already happened, so there’s nothing to wait for. Life is already complete, as it is, and everything is already included. Do you see?
Hanzi Freinacht, Metamoderna
Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian and sociologist, author of The Listening Society, and the upcoming books Nordic Ideology and The 6 Hidden Patterns of World History. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps.
With sloppy variables, no reliable measurements and no stringent definitions (even if the researchers do attempt to be stringent), the field is wide open for people to have just about anything in mind when they talk about “wisdom”. And people always seem to assume that they themselves possess wisdom, and that people who they don’t like don’t. The wisdom movement goes: “Yeah man! You like wisdom too? Me too! Let’s do it, y’all!”
Think about it. The concept of wisdom becomes a projection screen, upon which we can project pretty, wishful images. We can paint anything that feels good onto this “super-duper-variable”. The problem is that it would break down into a giant slugfest of disappointment and conflict if operationalized in society: people would have to start arguing about who is wise, really, and why, and what that means. And a lot of people would force a lot of low quality “wisdom” down other people’s throats. Or sell it to them by means of expensive consulting and motivational speeches. Wisdom, after all, is most often just taken to mean: “you folks should be more like me”. This way, wisdom is simply the speaker’s received wisdom.
So here’s my take on a narrower, stricter, definition. Wisdom is great depth, plain and simple. Nothing more, nothing less. So, the way I use the term, wisdom has to do with things like spirituality and transcendence but not really with being smart or “proficient at living a good life”. With this definition the answer is: yes, Eckhart Tolle is wise. To a highly complex but low-depth thinker like Richard Dawkins, Eckhart Tolle simply appears to be a fraud; to his enthused followership, he appears to be a sage. The truth is, quite simply, he has high state, great depth and relatively low complexity.
The first example person, Nelly (great depth, low state, low complexity), is also wise, even if she lives in a darker subjective world than Eckhart Tolle. They are both wise, but perhaps not very clever. What can I say?
With this stricter definition, the rural Mongol shaman, for instance, can be viewed as wiser than an average modern person. The same goes for the Tibetan nun. With the definition I propose, they can be called “wiser” simply by virtue of having greater depth. We are being specific about what we mean. And a psychologically healthy, complex thinker, who is of old age and at peace with herself is not wise, unless she also has great depth – even if the clichés hold that she “should” be wise.
All this lets wisdom be specific, measurable, and just one piece in the puzzle (rather than being a universal fix-it-all). What we might lose by making the term more narrow, we regain manifold by clarifying what we are actually talking about.
We might try another definition if you like, a more inclusive one: wisdom is the combination of mental health, high complexity and great depth. This might let Ashoka qualify as wise (assuming that he, as a successful ruler, was also a complex thinker). With this definition, people can be “wise” regardless of which symbolic code they have (so you can have a wise person in ancient India, even if he’s hardly progressive by modern standards). With this definition it becomes more difficult to answer the question of who is wise, but strictly speaking neither Nelly nor Eckart Tolle would be categorized as such. Ashoka might.
The devil isn’t just in the details. He’s in the definitions. And, most of all, he’s in the analytical distinctions: in the ability to tell one thing apart from another. To not mix things up. So before you preach the gospel of wisdom, please consult the devil. It would be wise.
Craig Hamilton, Integral Enlightenment Teacher
Craig Hamilton is a pioneer in the emerging field of evolutionary spirituality and a leading voice in the movement for conscious evolution. As the guiding force behind Integral Enlightenment, Craig offers spiritual guidance and teachings to a growing international community spanning 50 countries around the world.
What I’m saying is that it’s possible to be truly free.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I’m speaking about a completely different kind of human life than most of us have ever encountered.
This is not simply about “being in the now” or “loving and accepting what is in every moment.”
It is not about simply learning to connect with and trust in a “higher power” to guide us through life’s challenges.
Nor is it about simply accessing a more expansive state of awareness or being able to stand back and abide as the “witness” of all that arises.
All of these are good experiences to have and important capacities to cultivate. But I’m speaking about something more.
I’m pointing to authentic spiritual awakening in which the ego has been radically overridden by the Ultimate principle, by the creative force of the cosmos, by what the Buddha called “the roar of the timeless beyond.”
It’s a life in which our endless quest for self-fulfillment has been replaced by a passion to give our heart and soul to the awakening and upliftment of all of life, to bringing the Sacred into manifestation in this world.
In this ultimate submission to and alignment with the Absolute, the human being becomes a living, breathing force for higher evolution.
And this changes our relationship to being alive in unimaginable ways.
Experientially, we find ourselves in a state of profound receptivity and openness. A deep and abiding simplicity pervades our life, and an ongoing sense of flow permeates every moment.
We have let go of identification with the mind, abandoned any attachment to the self, enabling us to live as a transparent, vibrant vessel for the Infinite.
Amidst this profound openness, there is remarkable mental clarity at times, but there is no clinging on to that clarity. Insights come and go, but there is the knowledge that “I can’t hold onto any of this,” and so there is no grasping on to certainty.
But in moments when clarity is needed, it miraculously appears, integrating all of our knowledge and lived experience in a flash of intuitive knowing.
Spiritual experiences come and go, too, but there is no longer any clinging to ecstasy, bliss or love. We have discovered the source of all these things, and so feel no compulsion to cling to them.
More importantly, and contrary to popular belief, we awaken to a profound awareness of what we might call the heart of the cosmos. We feel, in a sense, for the Whole of Life.
We feel the pain of the whole and the joy of the whole as our own pain and our own joy. We become a seeing, sensing, feeling organ of the whole.
And at the center of our being is a burning passion for evolution and transformation, a calling to transform the world into an expression of the divinity we have discovered.
All of this may sound very big and beyond reach, but I want to make it clear that this is not a pipe dream drawn from ancient books. This is what it’s really like. This is really what’s possible for a human life—for your life—to become.
Now, just because it’s possible to awaken to this radically different kind of life does not mean that it’s easy. Indeed, what I’m describing is without question the most challenging endeavor a human being can undertake.
Andrew Harvey and Karuna Erickson
Andrew Harvey is a British author, religious scholar and teacher of mystic traditions, known primarily for his popular nonfiction books on spiritual or mystical themes, beginning with his 1983 A Journey in Ladakh. He is the author of over 30 books including The Hope and A Guide to Sacred Activism.
Karuna Erickson is a devoted yoga teacher as well as a psychotherapist, practicing in both fields since 1970. The focus of her work is the integration of body, mind, heart, and spirit. She is the director of the Heart Yoga Center, a registered yoga teacher training school with the Yoga Alliance. She has trained yoga teachers for over 20 years.
All authentic mystical traditions proclaim with one strong voice: the aim of spiritual awakening is not merely to realize one’s own divine identity, but to serve all beings with compassion and a commitment to justice. The enlightened life is one that balances ecstatic inwardness with dedicated action; profound inner surrender with unceasing service to others.
A great Indian saint, Anandamayi Ma, once said, “Just as God is both utterly peaceful and utterly dynamic, so the being who realizes God is at once sunk in a calm that nothing can disturb and active with a love that nothing can defeat. It is so simple;” she added, “through sacred practice you breathe in divine inspiration, divine strength, divine peace, and divine passion. Then you breathe them out in acts of wise compassion. This is the real life all of us are called to.”
In these chaotic and difficult times, the union of grounded passion and peaceful joy in the body and heart that everyone needs to keep strong, creative, and inspired by love can be awakened by a spiritual practice such as yoga. A heart-centered approach to yoga unites an awakening into the luminous body with a meditative peace of mind. From this sacred marriage of body and mind, your heart will burn with the holy desire to see all beings safe, protected, and happy.
To stay connected to this natural desire of your heart, begin your practice by sitting quietly and noticing how you are feeling. By listening to your body and mind, you can choose whether you need a heating, awakening practice or a cooling, restorative practice.
When you sense that you need grounding or extra vitality, or if you’re feeling distracted, unfocused, or not present, an active, heating practice can help you return to the strength of your body and restore your energy, intention, and clarity. Strengthening yoga postures develop courage and stamina for the practical healing, creative, and transformative service you do in the world.
When you’re busy and not attending to the messages of your body, heart and mind, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, ineffectual, stressed, or burned out. Reconnect directly with your own source of inspiration with a relaxing, restorative yoga practice, bringing you to the place where the desire to serve others naturally arises.
Those who come to know and trust in the sacred heart, and act from its passion of compassion are Sacred Activists. Sacred Activists unite peace, strength, and courage with the holy desire of the heart to see justice established everywhere. They work passionately to see the poor housed and fed, the environment cherished and protected, and all sentient beings revered as divine, and so in turn experience the joy of service.
With bodies infused with the inspiration of the transcendent, and with mystical awareness grounded in the present moment, those of us who are responding to the call to serve the creation of a new humanity will be able to devote ourselves to service whole-heartedly without growing exhausted. Through our ever-deepening experience of the power of spiritual practice, we will find the strength and wisdom to serve all beings, and to live in deep peace and joy.
Daniel Ingram, Unusually Hardcore Buddhist Teacher
Daniel Ingram is author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and a leading proponent of Buddhism as a practical path to enlightenment in this lifetime. Dr. Ingram also has an MD, a Master’s degree in Public Health, and a bachelor’s degree in English literature.
The last and perhaps most misunderstood of the Three Characteristics is no-self, also rendered as egolessness or emptiness. Emptiness, for all its mysterious sounding connotations, just means that reality is empty of a permanent, separate self. The emphasis here absolutely must be on the words “permanent” and “separate.” It doesn’t mean that reality is not there, or that all of this is illusion! Solidity is an illusion, permanence is an illusion, that the watcher is a separate thing is an illusion, but all of this isn’t an illusion.
Sure, all experience is utterly transient and ephemeral, but that is not quite the same as everything being an illusion. There is a habit of reading just a bit too much into things and coming out with the false conclusion that all of this means that there is some separate, permanent us. Reality is actually fine just as it is and always has been, but there is a deeper understanding of it that is called for.
Let’s talk a little bit about this concept and how the illusion of a self is created in the first place before we talk about how to use this powerful and profound concept of no-self in simple ways in practice. Some theory really can be useful to the practice, as all of it can be understood directly once one has some stability of mind and a bit of insight into what is mind and what is body, and when each is and isn’t there.
We have this notion that there is really a permanent “I.” We might say, “Hello, I am…” and be quite convinced that we are talking about a permanent, separate thing that can be found. However, if we are just a bit more sophisticated we might ask, “What is this ‘I’ which we are sure is us?” We have grown so accustomed to the fact of the definition changing all the time that we hardly notice it, but the point of insight practice is to notice it, and to see just what it is that we are calling “I” in each moment.
We may begin with the obvious assumption: we are our body. This sounds nice until we say something like “my body.” Well, if it is “my body,” that seems to imply that, at that moment, whatever it is that owns the body wasn’t the body. Suppose someone points to our toenails.
They surely seem to be “me,” until we clip them, and then they are “not me.” Is this really the same body as when we were born? It isn’t even made of the same cells, and yet it seems to be a permanent thing. Look more closely, at the sensate level, and you will see that moment to moment it isn’t. At the level of actual experience, all that is found is flickering stuff. So impermanence is closely related to no-self, but there is more to no-self than that.
Perhaps thoughts are the “I.” They may seem more like the “true I” than the body does. But they come and go to, don’t they? Can we really control these thoughts? Are they something solid enough to assume that they are an “I”? Look closely and you will see that they are not. But again, no-self is more profound than this.
There also seems to be something that is frequently called “the watcher,” that which seems to be observing all this, and perhaps this is really the “I” in question. Strangely, the watcher cannot be found, can it? It seems to sometimes be our eyes, but sometimes not, sometimes it seems to be images in our head and sometimes something that is separate from them and yet watching the images in our head.
Sometimes it seems to be our body, but sometimes it seems to be watching our body. Isn’t it strange how we are so used to this constant redefinition of ourselves that we never stop to question it? Question it!
This odd sense of an unfindable watcher to which all of this is happening yet which is seemingly separate from all that is happening, which sometimes seems in control of “us” and yet which sometimes seems at the mercy of reality: what is it really? What is going on here?
One of my teachers once wisely said, “If you are observing it, then it isn’t you by definition!” Notice that the whole of reality seems to be observed. The hints don’t get any better than this.
Mooji, Satsang Teacher in the Advaita Tradition
Mooji (born Anthony Paul Moo-Young in 1954) is a spiritual teacher originally from Jamaica. Mooji is a disciple of Papaji, a devotee of the advaita and non-dual master Ramana Maharshi. He shares self-inquiry, directing his students to the non-dual Self by encouraging them to question who or what they are at the deepest level.
In truth it is not possible to become enlightened as you put it because no one is there as such to become enlightened in the first place. The firm recognition or realisation that there isn’t a ‘somebody’ in reality to gain enlightenment, and that there can never be an entity at any time, either now or in the future, to gain any such state, is what amounts to enlightenment. This direct realisation occur and become revealed, confirmed and convincing truth through the process of self enquiring. ‘Self-enquiry’, also called atma-vichara, is one effective means of exposing the unreality of the ‘I-concept’, or ego, ordinarily felt to be the fact of oneself, leaving the pure immutable Self as the single an perfect reality. This is the ultimate truth.
You ask: ‘Is there anyone who through attending Satsang has become awake’. This has already been addressed in my previous statement but I will further add here that there has been and continues to be the constant recognition of this fact that the ego identity is a myth, a fictitious character. That individuality as such is an expression of pure consciousness/beingness and not the fact or definition of that Beingness. That oneself remains behind as the witness or the noticing of the phenomena arising spontaneously in consciousness. That ones true self is formless and nameless presence only which arises or shines as peace, joy and happiness felt as loving contentment. When this recognition occurs within each individual point or expression of consciousness known as a person, that state is called ‘awakening’ or ‘enlightenment’.
You ask that I point out if there is such a person present here? In common language I will say a number of persons here have arrived at this point of clear seeing/being beyond mere intellectual or academic understanding or acceptance. However, the mental tendencies and identification aren’t instantly or completely destroyed and the ego-sense, posing as the seat of reality, though expose through enquiry as mere illusion, continues to appear; this is natural. The duty and challenge here is to repeatedly bring this I-individuality sense back into the heart/source whenever it arises and by training the attention to stay in the source, which is your true self, it gradually merges in the source and become the source itself. Finally, who could the ‘I’ be who will claim ‘I’ve got it’ or ‘I am a realised person’. Who or what can be the possessor of enlightenment? Isn’t it the same ego ? Do you see my point?
However, some masters have indeed declared and affirmed themselves as the one pure, qualityless reality and have spoken so from pure, direct ego-less knowledge/conviction. This is also correct in my view and is most refreshing, authoritative and natural, so that we may know it is not possible to frame or limit the pure self by any human standard or logic.
Joe Perez, Worldview Artist
Joe Perez is a Worldview Artist, Integral Visionary, Creator of Lingua-U, Translineage Mystic, Poet, Blogger, and the Author of Soulfully Gay and other books.
I’ve walked a meandering path without the benefit of a rock solid community with which to check my self-understanding against the nuanced terminology of a specific lineage. I’ve been on a path of spontaneity and worldview artistry and metalinguistic map-making and prophetic calendary and mythopoesis and even a wild sort of world shamanism at times … and while I have been influenced by Buddhist writers and have an important place for Buddhist spiritual warrior teachings in my worldview, my traditions are Abrahamic and indigenous as well as the esoteric Confucianism of Yang Hsiung and aspects of Wilberian and Jungian psychological theory; they have not usually conceptualized the human endeavor in terms of “enlightenment”, but in terms of “salvation” and “courage” and “nobility/virtue” and “hero’s journey”, as well as the sense that art and religion and philosophy are deeply intertwined and inseparable.
Since I haven’t had the benefit of a lineage teacher to tell me “yes” or “no” in my spiritual education, I’ve done a lot of work in the Integral Spirituality space where meta-maps of consciousness and formal assessments of level of ego-maturity by folks with doctorates and decades of professional experience have given me the “reality checks” that I’ve required.
So we’re having this conversation today about “enlightenment”, but it would be different if we were talking about whether my soul is saved, whether I am a hero of my own story, or if I feel myself in unity with my art. Those questions are no less poignant, though they are a bit easier perhaps because the question doesn’t presuppose a classical Buddhist or nonduality framework which can get problematic.
I meant to say, they’re problematic for me, and I’m not sure what to think about their usefulness for anybody else. I have difficulties fitting them completely into a Big Picture that fully resonates with me as truthful and a great way to talk about my life and worldview. I can’t rule out the possibility that “non-dual” refers to something outside my personal experience or to something I know by a different name — such as ternary consciousness. However, I think it may also turn out to be the case that these philosophies are flawed and will need to be evolved to continue to be relevant.
For some of the spiritual gurus who are working these days, it comes down to the fact that their teachings presuppose worldview-making maps that “spiritually bypass” huge swaths of the subtle realm. This leads them to offer various erroneous teachings, including the fallacy that language is a hindrance, or at best a pointer, to ultimate reality, which they say is empty or a void. But in truth, the Logos or Word is a constitutive element of reality and is never really banished from awareness. Not in duration, in any event. Language can become so subtle that it is no longer intelligible to the mind at ordinary or even superb functioning, but the mind can still enter into communicative union with the Sacred Words.
The more one listens to these teachers of enlightenment, the more one wonders if we aren’t in need of another Wittgenstein to untangle the ways that perhaps language has befuddled them. Some of them think there is “no self” or that they are “a nobody”, but the ones that make the most sense to me speak of enlightenment as “more than personal” or “true self + personal perspective (i.e., unique Self)”. Unfortunately, language has made it virtually impossible to speak of these post-egoic realities in a way that feels natural and is easy to understand.
That’s why I think we need a revolution in language, starting with a new spiritually-informed metalanguage that includes definitions for new parts of speech (articles, affixes, pronouns, etc.) on many different stations of life from pre-personal to personal to integral to super-integral all the way up. I’ve reserved metawords in Lingua-U that could serve this purpose, based on my cross-cultural research into the Sacred Words of the Great Traditions as well as ordinary speech, and if we ever built them into our worldviews, many of the philosophical problems that gave rise to “no self” and “non-duality” might just disappear.
There’s two elements to it. One is that you’re truly working to make things better. You can start with your own presumption of what better would be. I mean better.
Part of that would be that you are trying to decrease unnecessary suffering. That’s not all there is to it, but if you need an anchor point, that’s a good one. You should try to decrease unnecessary suffering.
You should tell the truth. Those are the two fundamental elements, I think. You’re oriented towards the good. And you continue to improve that orientation because you understand that your definition of good is insufficient and so it has to transform. But at the same time you try to speak the truth.
The truth issue is an interesting one. This is the proper way to understand faith. Faith doesn’t mean believing a bunch of things you know not to be true. That’s stupidity, that’s not faith. Here’s how to imagine it.
Imagine that when you’re talking to someone, you want something from them. You want their recognition. You want to dominate the conversation. You want to stand out. There’s a goal. You’re using it as a tool to obtain some end. Maybe you do that with your speech all the time; you’re always using it as a tool to achieve some end.
You see some extreme of this in the pick-up artist community. Their whole scheme is how to craft their words in a manipulative manner. It’s all acting, right? How to present yourself as a dominant male so you can attract sexual partners. It isn’t how to be a good man so you can attract women. It’s how you can present yourself falsely. I’m satirizing it to some degree because the community is useful insofar insofar as it gets men to stop being afraid of women, but forget about that for a minute.
That’s the use of speech instrumentally.
But here’s another way of using speech. You try to say what you think as clearly as you can. Period. And you let whatever happens happen.
The faith idea is whatever happens if you tell the truth is the best thing that could possibly happen. It’s a presumption. You have to make presumptions to move forward in life.
If being is good, then a truthful relationship with it is the proper relationship. And you might say, how do you know if the outcome is going to be good?
You never know, you never know if the outcome is going to be good, so you have to assume. There is a deep idea. I think it’s a core religious idea. It’s certainly extraordinarily well developed in Christianity. There is a fundamental moral obligation is to tell the truth. Period.
Well, people say, what about truths that hurt people’s feelings? You’re not supposed to be stupid when you tell the truth. You’re supposed to be wise.
This is a funny little anecdote to illustrate the point. You’re out clothing shopping with your girlfriend or your wife. She says does this dress make me look fat. What’s the answer. Well, no. Maybe that’s a white lie. Maybe it isn’t, maybe it is.
You say, I don’t answer questions like that. That’s the truth in a situation like that. A white lie…
There are levels of seriousness to being deceitful. Sometimes you tell a white lie because you can’t come up with a truth that isn’t more harmful. It’s still not right. It’s not optimal. There’s a truth there you could tell if you get it right. You just don’t bang out your stupid observations casually just because they happen to be accurate in that microcosmic moment. You have to be sophisticated when you tell the truth.
You have to be oriented towards the good in a fundamental way. You have to shake off your resentment of being in order to be oriented towards the good. That’s very hard because being makes people suffer, and so everyone’s angry about that. And if you’re angry you can’t be oriented towards the good because you’re out for destruction.
Ken Wilber, Integral Theorist
Ken Wilber is one of the most widely read and influential American philosophers of our time. His recent books include Integral Buddhism, The Religion of Tomorrow, Integral Meditation, Wicked and Wiseand Grace and Grit.
Precisely because the ego, the soul and the Self can all be present simultaneously, we can better understand the real meaning of egolessness, a notion that has caused an inordinate amount of confusion. But egolessness does not mean the absence of a functional self (that’s a psychotic, not a sage); it means that one is no longer exclusively identified with that self.
One of the many reasons we have trouble with the notion of egoless is that people want their egoless sages to fulfill all their fantasies of saintly or spiritual, which usually means dead from the neck down, without fleshy wants or desires, gently smiling all the time. All of the things that people typically have trouble with money, food, sex, relationships, desire they want their saints to be without. Egoless sages who are above all that is what people want. Talking heads is what they want. Religion, they believe, will simply get rid of all baser instincts, drives and relationships, and hence they look to religion, not for advice on how to live life with enthusiasm, but on how to avoid it, repress it, deny it, escape it.
In other words, the typical person wants the spiritual sage to be less than a person, somehow devoid of all the messy, juicy, complex, pulsating, desiring, urging forces that drive most human beings. We expect our sages to be an absence of all that drives us! All the things that frighten us, confuse us, torment us, confound us: we want our sages to be untouched by them altogether. And that absence, that vacancy, that less than personal, is what we often mean by egoless.
But egoless does not mean less than personal, it means more than personal. Not personal minus, but personal plus all the normal personal qualities, plus some transpersonal ones. Think of the great yogis, saints and sages from Moses to Christ to Padmasambhava. They were not feeble-mannered milquetoasts, but fierce movers and shakers from bullwhips in the Temple to subduing entire countries. They rattled the world on its own terms, not in some pie-in-the-sky piety; many of them instigated massive social revolutions that have continued for thousands of years.
And they did so not because they avoided the physical, emotional and mental dimensions of humanness and the ego that is their vehicle, but because they engaged them with a drive and intensity that shook the world to its very foundations. No doubt, they were also plugged into the soul (deeper psychic) and spirit (formless Self) the ultimate source of their power but they expressed that power, and gave it concrete results, precisely because they dramatically engaged the lower dimensions through which that power could speak in terms that could be heard by all.
These great movers and shakers were not small egos; they were, in the very best sense of the term, big egos, precisely because the ego (the functional vehicle of the gross realm) can and does exist alongside the soul (the vehicle of the subtle) and the Self (vehicle of the causal). To the extent these great teachers moved the gross realm, they did so with their egos, because the ego is the functional vehicle of that realm. They were not, however, identified merely with their egos (that’s a narcissist), they simply found their egos plugged into a radiant Kosmic source. The great yogis, saints and sages accomplished so much precisely because they were not timid little toadies but great big egos, plugged into the dynamic Ground and Goal of the Kosmos itself, plugged into their own higher Self, alive to the pure atman (the pure I–I) that is one with Brahman; they opened their mouths and the world trembled, fell to its knees, and confronted its radiant God.
Shinzen Young
Shinzen Young is an American mindfulness teacher and neuroscience research consultant. His systematic approach to categorizing, adapting and teaching meditation, known as Unified Mindfulness, has resulted in collaborations with Harvard Medical School, Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Vermont in the bourgeoning field of contemplative neuroscience.
I’m one of those teachers who’s comfortable with the “E-word”—perhaps because my very first teacher Okamura Keishin talked about kenshō and satori as realistic goals. I take the Zen notion of kenshō to be roughly equivalent to sotāpatti or stream entry. I tend to use the phrase “enlightenment with a small e” to refer to the depth of a person’s kenshō, i.e., the extent to which they have broken the identification with the mind-body process.
Of course many teachers avoid using the E-word. There are numerous and quite legitimate reasons for that taboo—not the least of which is that the general public tends to associate the word enlightenment with an extremely advanced stage of practice wherein one has deeply integrated kenshō with refinement of one’s humanity in terms of behaviors and relationships. I tend to refer to this latter attainment as “Enlightenment with a big E.”
Enlightenment with a small e comes about as a kind of paradigm shift involving the notion of self. That shift can occur rapidly or come on gradually. (I have talked about this a lot; see the resource list below.) According to Buddhism, the centerpiece of this paradigm shift is the shedding of sakkāya-diṭṭhi, the perception that there is a thing inside one called self. Historians of philosophy point out that a Buddhist-like notion that self is an illusory bundle of perceptions also arose in the West, specifically in the Scottish thinker David Hume, who is considered to be one of the founders of the European Age of Enlightenment.
Recently an article appeared in the Atlantic by Alison Gopnik conjecturing a direct historical link between Buddhist bundle theory and Humean bundle theory. The connection involves an amazing Italian Jesuit named Ippolito Desideri—perhaps the first Westerner to attain a thorough education in Buddhist scholastic theory (in the early 1700s!). So possibly there’s an interesting synchronicity between enlightenment in the Buddhist sense of that term and The Enlightenment in the historical sense of that term.
After reading Joe Perez’s article here, I wanted to re-read Be Scofield’s essay on “Integral Abuse: Andrew Cohen & The Culture of Evolutionary Enlightenment”. I am glad I did because I liked it even more after a close reading. I don’t see Be Scofield’s writing as “anti-Integral” nor do I view it as “muckraking.” To the contrary, I found the essay to be spot-on in pointing out the dangers of cult leaders such as Andrew Cohen and why it is important to point out their ethical transgressions. I commend Be Scofield and would argue that Integral Theory needs such voices. I especially don’t view it as “adversarial journalism” but rather as good, incisive critical reporting. We need more voices such as Be Scofield. We certainly don’t need more Andrew Cohen like cultic antics. I don’t buy the argument that if “we let the Dharma die a death from a thousand attack-blog-bites or suffocate the Holy Spirit under a pillow stuffed with festering doubt.”
Rather, deep skepticism is precisely what is needed when individuals make extraordinary claims. As Laplace and later Carl Sagan pointed out, “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.” Let these cult leaders, these gurus, these self-proclaimed mystics, be open to severe criticism. Why? Because if what they say is true it will easily withstand whatever questions or doubts or scrutiny we place upon them. As that famous quip goes, “little faith, little doubt; great faith, great doubt.” To which I would add, “infinite faith, infinite doubt.” The sun doesn’t disappear if we throw water at it from the earth, likewise the great wisdom of mystics shouldn’t disappear because we ask hard questions of them.
We need more investigations, not less, from Be Scofield and others who are willing to shed a clearer light on the shadow side of spirituality. We all derive a benefit from such illuminations.
My reply…
Hi David,
Nice to meet you. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to clarify the aim of my article a little bit by responding to your comment.
I don’t think the terms “muckraking” or “adversarial journalism” are pejorative; they are accurate descriptions of Be’s work even as she described it herself in her comments in the Integralists forum. You prefer the term “critical reporting”, but that’s not one that has an accepted definition and therefore its use gets us nothing in terms of greater understanding.
I notice that you really elided, not engaged, with the substance of my critiques of Be’s article. Nowhere did I say it was wrong for her to point out flaws in spiritual teachers. Nowhere did I say that voices like hers should be silenced. What I said was basically twofold: (1) that as an adversarial journalist, she engaged in the use of extreme bias and out-of-context sourcing that made her work unreliable, though it could be incorporated with caution into a more nuanced synthesis; (2) that her work didn’t rise to an “Integral” level as I would want it to, unfortunately, which is particularly fair and appropriate to note because she said she is “a fan of integral theory”. To make this case I located the Kosmic Address of her argument at “mean green meme (just kidding!)” or simply Green and contrasted it to the approach of a Teal or Turquoise thinker who would recognize the partiality of her values in her approach and situate their critique in a wider context: e.g., (a) when a guru encourages ascetic behavior is it merely “psychological abuse” or could it be an act of developing in trans-psychological (post-egoic) ways as well?; (b) how does criticizing a Western teacher for “abuse” square with her silence in not speaking out to criticize Indian or Chinese or African or indigenous gurus and shamans and mystics for practices that Westerners would say are even worse; (c) how does tarring the entire “Integral” community as enablers to abuse harm the evolution of consciousness itself at a critical time in the world’s transition into Second-Tier forms?; etc. (I could go on; these are points in the spirit of my original article, not a transcription of it.)
To the authentic Integralist, there is not much to praise as “Integral” in Be’s article. It’s all Green flatland, explicitly lacking the transcendent or awakening dimensions, tied to neo-Maxist reductionist social theory. That doesn’t mean that it’s bad work from the standpoint of Green consciousness though. When the early systemic-mind sees only flat systems it devalues the need to find workable ways to fit systems from different paradigms together; it is not yet mature enough to “enfold, enclude, and enact” in the form of a thinker genuinely wrestling with the concerns appropriate to an Integral thinker.
I agree with you on the value of deep skepticism, though I would add that to extol the virtues of skepticism or deconstruction alone outside of a wider context of critical appreciation is to see totality only in the subtle forms of Green thought which find a surprising but warmly welcome synthesis in what I call the yin-yang-yung face of, yes, “enfolding, encluding, and enacting”.
To reiterate: my article was not a commentary on whether or not people should be critical of any particular spiritual or religious figure. It was a comment about how those of us who comment on such things (i.e., journalists) may be blinded by wearing too narrow a vision for our worldview, puffing up ourselves in an explosion of self-righteous virtue signaling, and then turn away from or fail to notice the damage left in our wake.
Sifu Shi Yan Ming, the Shaolin master, suffered ascetic disciplines growing up in the care of monks at China’s Shaolin Temple that many Westerners would simply consider torture: stress positions, sleep deprivation, 50-pound weights strapped to his testicles, etc. They also taught him lessons in life as an awakened master for which he is enormously grateful. There isn’t an ounce of hatred, resentment, or bitter nastiness coming from him regarding his childhood experiences. Later, many of these Shaolin Buddhist monks were murdered by a left-wing totalitarian regime that had a vision of a more socially just order, and Ming escaped persecution and defected to America. He doesn’t speak of the communists with hatred either. He says that treatment like he endured is common in China, but not in America, and so he treats his students differently, adapting ancient ways to the appropriate cultural context.
One reason I’m talking about Ming: regarding Social Justice Warriors with no awakening, no transcendent spirit, we’ve seen what happens historically when these sorts of people get power. They murder the monks and mystics. This is no exaggeration, you know. Be Scofield admits her idea of social justice has no place for awakening. Green SJWs should transform themselves into Teal Shaolin warriors on route to a comprehensive awakening in order to transform real shadows, using a balance of inner and outer disciplines and practices, instead of preening on soapboxes or poking sticks at people who rise to leadership in order to rip them down.
Spiritual warriorship takes real courage and could truly help bring about an enlightened world; however, the mean green SJWship that you have praised is its quasi-fascistic, socially stagnant, self-corrupting and anti-evolutionary cousin. There’s no doubt about which path I would prefer to see Integralists take.
There are many fascinating ethical questions that one can pose about guru cultures in cross-cultural perspective; none of these are posed by Scofield, nor does she seem to even be aware of them. She writes to injure or assassinate with ink by playing a zero-sum game, not to illuminate with complexity and nuance and thereby expand the game. Praise it if you like for its own merits, but I’m not buying that it’s “Integral” one bit.
So yes, bring on looks at the shadow side of spirituality and make them as tough as they need to be to curtail any wrongdoing or mistreatment or exploitation of anyone. But then if you point your stick at Integral Spirituality so broadly that it jabs everyone inhabiting the environment, be prepared to have that stick broken with karate or jiu jitsu!
Or: Mean Green* Scofield, There She Goes Again (Just Kidding!)
(Photo: Be Scofield)
Today I clicked on a Google Ad for Be Scofield’s article, “Integral Abuse: Andrew Cohen & The Culture of Evolutionary Enlightenment”, which she has published on Medium and Frank Visser’s website. According to her bio, Be is a queer/trans writer and digital strategist who founded the magazine Decolonizing Yoga. As part of her work, she has even gone undercover in the communities of some spiritual gurus that she wants to tear down by digging up evidence that will paint them in a negative light.
Be’s article is one of several pieces of adversarial journalism that have criticized aspects of the Integral movement from the standpoint that it hasn’t done enough to curb “abuses” by the spiritual teachers Andrew Cohen and Marc Gafni, or because it received inspiration from another guru accused of moral impropriety, Adi Da. Other integralists come under scrutiny because they haven’t done enough to protest “abuses” loudly enough, or because they are “enablers” (Scofield names Ken Wilber, Craig Hamilton, and Terry Patten specifically).
Furthermore, the fact that some Integral online courses and educational programs are funded through memberships, subscriptions, or tuition payments is evidence that the whole movement is some sort of scam, merely “a very large money making machine” as Be puts it. Be doesn’t ask whether these programs are actually profitable or whether their fees are excessive relative to other sorts of psychological or educational programs; the mere fact that money is being charged is apparently grounds for her anti-Integral moralizing and muckraking.
And make no mistake, it is “anti-Integral” rhetoric. She puts “Integral Abuse” in a headline and blasts it across the internet through advertising in much the same way that Islamophobes talk about “Islamic Terror” or anti-Semites talk about “Jewish Abuse” or racists talk about “Mexican Rapists”. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that the Integral movement is a diverse group of people who don’t deserve to see the word associated with their identity linked unfairly and uncharitably to “Abuse” as she does. There’s no such thing as “Integral Abuse”; that’s just a cheap smear. Nobody’s writing “Mean Green* Scofield, There She Goes Again” in a headline or sub-headline, are they? (Oops.)
And Scofield is concerned to indict not only the prominent figures on the Integral scene, either, but anyone who doesn’t follow her example of shunning and speaking out against Cohen and Gafni, loudly denouncing their alleged “abuse, manipulation, and cultish behaviors”. Unless you signal your virtue or parade your Opression Theory-based credentials in a manner like Be does, you are part of the problem. Comparing Integralists to participants in the horrific Jonestown massacre and the shocking pedophilia of Roman Catholic abusers, she says that unless they speak out as she does, then they are spiritually unfit to instruct anyone about how to confront the shadow or give any sort of credible advice.
I don’t know Be personally, but she and I exchanged a few comments back and forth once on the Integralists forum. I had read an article she wrote to expose the Sedona-based guru Bentinho Massaro and while I applauded its commitment to justice and agreed with some of the major points she made about the guru, I also noticed its overall poor quality. I agreed with others who said that it was a little bit nasty and vicious (she used pictures of the spiritual teacher dressed up in a Halloween costume to undermine him). It was also heavily biased, using out-of-context quotations in a manner that made it impossible to know what to take seriously and what to take with a grain of salt.
But these weren’t the most important criticisms I had of her article. From an Integral standpoint, it seemed to me that Be was incapable of distinguishing any of the spiritual teacher’s potential gifts or positive qualities or true aspects of his teachings from the allegedly questionable or abusive ones. I noticed that whenever she heard someone talk of “spiritual realization” or “psychic experiences”, she derided it as narcissism and loopiness. She threw her critical net so broadly that it would capture anyone of any quality or moral uprightness attempting to galvanize a spiritual movement.
Furthermore, I also noticed that she failed to demonstrate the ability to articulate or apply some critical theoretical distinctions enabled by the Integral theory that she claimed to have familiarity with as a former student at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Ken Wilber’s notion of the pre/trans fallacy is rather important for a lot of integralists because it allows us to distinguish between pre-rational spiritual beliefs (psychotic delusion, mere charisma, silly superstitions, etc.) and trans-rational spiritual beliefs (those based on authentic mystical insight, contemplative practices, mythopoetic analysis, etc.). Whereas a good Integralist would look at a guru’s body of work and attempt to disentangle the puffery from the prajna, the smoke from the samadhi, etc., Be Scofield merely used mockery and sardonic jabs to achieve a sort of rhetorical filicide: throwing away baby and bathwater alike. To her way of thinking, authentic spiritual paths that involve gurus who challenge the ego have no place at all — they are merely excuses for bad people to verbally abuse victims, because they’re bad phonies and cultic boogeymen and that’s just what they live to do.
Well I’m sorry to disappoint some of my readers, but today I’m not going to defend Andrew Cohen or Marc Gafni or any other spiritual teacher that Be has criticized (they or their students can do that for themselves if they choose). I believe every integralist and every journalist has a responsibility to try to hold to a rigorous evidential standard for denouncing cults so that bona fide healthy new and old religious groups and spiritual movements aren’t so easily tainted by association with them. I believe spiritual abuse and exploitation is wrong; I also think that it’s hard to define, that definitions vary from culture to culture and “from within” guru-based spiritual traditions and “from without” guru-based spiritual traditions. I also believe that someone who is accused of abuse by some people may yet have much that is valuable to contribute to the world and its enlightenment.
As an Integralist, I believe the world is at a critical point where we need to be open to evolution in our religions and spiritual traditions and in virtually every aspect of our culture and philosophies. It’s like threading a needle while standing on one foot. It’s like walking through a minefield blindfolded. To get there, we’re going to have to have more complex and nuanced ways of looking at leadership in our movement than are on offer by the adversarial journalists. For one thing, I’d like to see a world where people can be enthusiastic about a spiritual group or set of ideas or teacher and not be cast as a victim of cult mind control the minute they go on a juice fast to do some basic state training that requires an ounce of asceticism or crazy wisdom. Perhaps Scofield doesn’t share this vision because, as she wrote at Integral Agape (a public group):
Yeah, not into any concepts of awakening. And I’m surprised you are given that awakening never has any sort of social justice lens either.
Nevertheless, Scofield wants to grab the word “Integral” for herself — she writes:
I am a fan of integral theory in general—not of the Wilber sort, but the principle behind it.
Somehow we’re supposed to accept that she’s a “fan of integral theory” — just not the kinds that have a place for awakening, i.e., like the Integral Theory of Ken Wilber based on Grow Up, Wake Up, Show Up, Lighten Up. She doesn’t seem to believe that awakening happens. So what she offers instead of enlightenment is consistent with what you would expect to happen at flatland green meme: aversion to growth hierarchies except their own two-level hierarchy which puts anti-hierarchical thinking on top and everyone else on the bottom, disbelief in stages of attainment in quality or excellence, and a tendency to cast the “real bad guys” in society as the folks who don’t believe as they do about these things. And to get you to buy into their myopic worldview, they sometimes use genuine victims as shields, painting themselves as the pure defenders of helpless unfortunates and Integralists as the morally stained enablers of the perpetrators of abuse.
Be Scofield’s lack of discrimination in her style of adversarial journalism makes the task of creating nuanced and healthy dialogue around the topic of enlightenment significantly more difficult than it needs to be. One of the vexing problems we face, I think, is secularization which is removing the religious roots and absolute perspectives — often replacing it with nothing but reductive, resentment-based neo-Marxist materialism or just crass consumerism. Someone without a concept of awakening to the Transcendent settles for idolatrous forms of awakening instead, finding sin in smaller and smaller slights to less and less comprehensive matters, and redemption in louder and shriller denunciations of such. Liberation itself gets cheapened when we let that happen. Liberation of what kind? Liberation for what? If there’s no transcendence of suffering, the devil’s in charge of the world and we’re already living in hell. And don’t think that if our world is hellish already that it can’t get worse. It definitely can, particularly if we let the Dharma die a death from a thousand attack-blog-bites or suffocate the Holy Spirit under a pillow stuffed with festering doubt.
In conclusion, let me repeat something I wrote earlier about Be Scofield’s journalism: I’m glad that she went undercover to infiltrate an allegedly sketchy spiritualist’s den to shine some light. I think she was courageous and that her work can contribute valuable perspectives to a broader Integral synthesis which includes rebuttals from the targets of her attacks as well as mainstream journalists who will apply more stringent standards for evidence. There’s a “partial, but useful” role for muckraking of her sort, whether it’s applied to the New Age community, the Integral scene, or anywhere else.
But it also needs to be scrutinized and relativized as I have done, and we ought to learn a lesson from her mistakes: even the best-intentioned people often do at least as much harm in the world as we do good and we do so over and over again, not because the values we hold are wrong, but because they are held like a blindfold over our own eyes to obscure a more awakened reality.
* mean green meme: A catchy term for pathological pluralistic consciousness.
The Mean Green Meme (MGM) refers to the quasi-fascistic, socially stagnant, self-corrupting and anti-evolutionary forms of postmodernity. It utilizes but degrades the normal cognitive and temperamental complexity of this level of “meta-” intelligence. This not only makes actual Green Consciousness weaker but also inflames (by justifying) the upset of Modern and Traditionalist cultural agents who view Progressive Postmodernity as a surrender of all the holy attainment of human civilization.
Etymology: Used by Ken Wilber to describe the deleterious social effects of the imbalanced “Green” phase of social and cognitive consciousness — truncating the use of “value-memes” in Spiral Dynamics. (Source: Doowikis)
Q&A with Joe on the Topic of “What is Enlightenment?”
A talk with Joe Perez on the topic of “Enlightenment” in a Question and Answer format.
Q: What’s your definition of Enlightenment?
Let me answer you literally just because I’m feeling ornery. Throw me a dictionary. Any definition will do that is in common use, in monasteries or divinity schools, among spiritual teachers or TV infomercials. All of these are ordinary and perfectly fine ways that people are talking about gaining knowledge and insight.
I’m not trying to be evasive or any more complicated than I need to be, but I don’t have personal, idiosyncratic definitions for terms that I then manipulate to manufacture the terms of a debate in my favor. When I write about a term such as “spirituality” and “enlightenment”, I consider my audience at the time, what they are likely to think of those words, and then write in a fashion that a large number of them will find meaningful.
When I don’t know who my audience is, as I often don’t when writing for this blog, I imagine the ways that persons with worldviews at all Nine Stations of Life in my Integral Konstructs are mostly likely, as a whole, to construe what I write. I don’t expect everyone to “get into the groove” with me, but I can usually find some sort of a communicative meeting point for everyone, or fail trying. In this way, it’s not necessary to define words in advance.
I find that practice to be unfortunately very common these days, and I don’t see the point. It can get quite manipulative. When people get to define enlightenment as they please, they very often say reasonable things about it because they have already fixed themselves into one Station of Life and without realizing it they have just announced their Kosmic Address and all but proclaimed that they aren’t going to try to reach anyone else who comes from another location. Anyone can sound reasonable if they get to define all the terms of their argument in a special way so that they always come out on top. These folks tend to imagine human discourse as if the world is made up of 7.6 billion people each with their own private dictionary somewhere “in their heads” that makes them right all the time if only other people would ask them to define the terms that they are using. That’s nonsense. Language doesn’t work like that.
Q: Do you consider yourself “enlightened”?
(Laughter)
You know, I wish that weren’t such a tricky question. The wisest answer is probably to just leave it alone. But there are a few things I can say in response.
I’ve had a series of partial awakenings in my life, each life-changing, each one that set my spiritual sojourn on a new path for a while at least, and they keep coming. I wrote about my early awakenings in Soulfully Gay. I’ve also written an autobiography that sketches my life story from birth to January 2018, but I don’t think I’ll publish it. I’m more inclined to use it as a reference for writing fiction, which would give me the literary satisfaction of telling the story with more dramatic flair.
Sometimes these experiences fundamentally changed my personality or self-concept, and sometimes they changed how my mind processes information or how I perceived spiritual, invisible realities, or how I wanted to show up in the world as a moral being. Self, cognition, perception, aesthetics, morality… there are so many ways that I’ve stepped up, and I’m still growing.
Maybe that’s all anyone ever really has, you know: partial awakenings. I don’t know of anyone who claims anything different these days, especially in the evolutionary or integral spiritual circles where everyone is pretty much aware of development and how tricky it is to make claims outside of particular coordinates — one’s own Kosmic Address.
Now since comparative religion and the psychology of religion are interests of mine, I’ve analyzed my experiences and compared them to the accounts of mystics who have reported “becoming more enlightened” or having “direct experience of God” and so forth, and some of them match really well and some of them don’t. Some of my experiences have been very unusual — I talk about this elsewhere and in my autobiography — and they’re just not mapped out anywhere, though I have found interesting parallels in the first-hand accounts of people who have used psychedelic drugs or who are brujos (like in the Carlos Castaneda novels). And then there’s the life stories of certain Muslim prophets, where I can find even more parallels.
The movement of spirit that I think of as my “exit of para-mind for meta-mind (maturation into the beginning of the Third Tier)” to use some Integral Spirituality jargon, was basically a falling away of psychic narcissism and an attachment to suffering that had subtly infused my “indigo period” (2010 to 2014). When that happened, I lost contact with my sources of spiritual and angelic support that had previously nourished me … eventually, I got some of that support back a couple years down the road, as an occasional assist to lift a heavy weight in my writing of Lingua-U, another unpublished book, but by then I had changed a lot.
Q: What do you mean by “falling away of psychic narcissism”? Is this “no-self” or “shunyataa”?
I don’t think so. Let’s start with “indigo” — the realm that Wilber calls para-mind (what I sometimes call X-Mind). I mean that at this time the organizing structure of my self-regard disintegrated because I had come to overcome much of the materialistic worldview. I saw the chain of cause and effect as involving mysterious and inexplicable phenomena that were steering my life and pursuits. Paranormal events and channeling of spirits and accurate divinations were ordinary, commonplace in my worldview — and they were common because my mental phenomena was no longer something merely “in my head”, but part of a permeable field in which other, unseen entities could (and did!) interact. This is the period when I engaged in certain occult practices to contact spirits … and formed relationships with two entities that I call angels. I didn’t have “no-self”; I had an expanded self. I also lost a certain degree of healthy, normal functioning (and that’s terrible!), but it was for a higher purpose: to grow into a larger field with a paranormal identity stabilized. It was frightening, but I survived the experience all right.
But “indigo” was not the start of a radically different worldview than what had come before in the previous decade or so (“teal”, “turquoise”). it was the payoff, in a manner of speaking. I had loosened the rigidity of my self-concept and worldview to the point where I was drawn, like a magnet, to a new point of synthesis. The yang of emptiness and the yin of creativity opened up into the yung of a cha (叉) opening to subtle energetic availability and so on, but it was all part of the same progression. The “psychological” turn of green opens to the “psychic” of indigo, but the latter is just a more interior and integrated form of the other. There’s still a lot of psychic narcissism.
My “indigo” period was exciting like a second adolescence, but it was also painful and dangerous, too. As I felt myself opened, I was flooded with grief and darkness. There were times when I believed myself to be communicating with a goddess, jinn, devils, demons, angels or with Allah or Jesus, but what I was feeling was a suffering and not-yet-redeemed divinity. I might even truthfully say: a tormented divinity. It was heart wrenching and it destroyed me. And so I had to let it all go. I had to give up everything I had ever done to tap into psychic or subtle energies. I just stopped and it felt like giving up God, giving up my spirituality, my evolution, my integralism, everything. It all had to go away.
And then I fully expected to regress, and perhaps I did in some respects, but life went on and eventually a new life impulse came to me. It was organized around everything that wasn’t me — especially around language and symbol and philosophy. It was no longer psychological or psychic, but these ways of organizing the life force were still present as undertones. The “third tier” began for me like so, a dropping away of the me in my spiritual journey, my relationship with angels/God, my work. It was no longer my work at that point. Apparently, the Mind itself wanted to become more lively and self-aware, and it began to use my hands and my voice and my output as one of its instruments.
Q: How does this relate to the Buddhist view of enlightenment or the nonduality of Advaita?
I think for a spiritual person to talk with a great deal of clarity and precision about their mystical experiences as a particular flavor of enlightenment, they should probably settle their worldview into one or two frameworks of the Great Traditions, so they can use nonduality-talk, or zen-talk, or Christian contemplative-talk, and so on, in a manner that is nuanced. If they do this, then they will also have the benefit of being able to check the accuracy of their self-awareness with a community of practitioners in a lineage who are adequate for the task. It’s obviously something easy to deceive one’s self about if you’re not getting quality feedback.
That said, I’ve walked a meandering path without the benefit of a rock solid community with which to check my self-understanding against the nuanced terminology of a specific lineage. I’ve been on a path of spontaneity and worldview artistry and metalinguistic map-making and prophetic calendary and mythopoesis and even a wild sort of world shamanism at times … and while I have been influenced by Buddhist writers and have an important place for Buddhist spiritual warrior teachings in my worldview, my traditions are Abrahamic and indigenous as well as the esoteric Confucianism of Yang Xiong and aspects of Wilberian and Jungian psychological theory; they have not usually conceptualized the human endeavor in terms of “enlightenment”, but in terms of “salvation” and “courage” and “nobility/virtue” and “hero’s journey”, as well as the sense that art and religion and philosophy are deeply intertwined and inseparable.
Since I haven’t had the benefit of a lineage teacher to tell me “yes” or “no” in my spiritual education, I’ve done a lot of work in the Integral Spirituality space where meta-maps of consciousness and formal assessments of level of ego-maturity by folks with doctorates and decades of professional experience have given me the “reality checks” that I’ve required.
So we’re having this conversation today about “enlightenment”, but it would be different if we were talking about whether my soul is saved, whether I am a hero of my own story, or if I feel myself in unity with my art. Those questions are no less poignant, though they are a bit easier perhaps because the question doesn’t presuppose a classical Buddhist or nonduality framework which can get problematic.
I meant to say, they’re problematic for me, and I’m not sure what to think about their usefulness for anybody else. I have difficulties fitting them completely into a Big Picture that fully resonates with me as truthful and a great way to talk about my life and worldview. For instance, I can’t truthfully say that I feel “One with God” when my most profound experiences have been being the yin to God’s yang and merging imperfectly and temporarily into a yung. So, I can’t rule out the possibility that “non-dual” refers to something outside my personal experience or to something I know by a different name — such as ternary consciousness. However, I think it may also turn out to be the case that these “nondual” philosophies are flawed and will need to be evolved to continue to be relevant.
For some of the spiritual gurus who are working these days, it comes down to the fact that their teachings presuppose worldview-making maps that “spiritually bypass” huge swaths of the subtle realm. This leads them to offer various erroneous teachings, including the fallacy that language is a hindrance, or at best a pointer, to ultimate reality, which they say is empty or a void. But in truth, the Logos or Word is a constitutive element of reality and is never really banished from awareness. Not in duration, in any event. Individual words can be banished, but the subtle structure of language which helps to constitute all of our lived experience can’t be. Language can become so subtle that it is no longer intelligible to the mind at ordinary or even superb functioning, but the mind can still enter into communicative union with the Word (or Sacred Words).
The more one listens to these nondualistic teachers of enlightenment, the more one wonders if we aren’t in need of another Wittgenstein to untangle the ways that perhaps language has befuddled them. Some of them think there is “no self” or that they are “a nobody”, but the ones that make the most sense to me speak of enlightenment as “more than personal” or “true self + personal perspective (i.e., unique Self)”. Unfortunately, language has made it virtually impossible to speak of these post-egoic realities in a way that feels natural and is easy to understand.
That’s why I think we need a revolution in language, starting with a new spiritually-informed metalanguage that includes definitions for new parts of speech (articles, affixes, pronouns, etc.) on many different stations of life from pre-personal to personal to integral to super-integral all the way up. I’ve reserved various metawords in Lingua-U that could serve this purpose, based on my cross-cultural research into the Sacred Words of the Great Traditions as well as ordinary speech, and if we ever built them into our worldviews, many of the philosophical problems that gave rise to “no self” and “non-duality” might just disappear.
