The Integral Spiral

ArchiveMay 2018

An Integralist’s Fable of Three Words: Sangha, Community, and Church

By admin
In Community, Language, Philosophy
8 Min read
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A Response to Aleta S. on Resilience in Communities of Trust

I am one of those Integralists who longs for the arrival of a more substantial integral community, one based on Integral Spirituality and branching out into all aspects of our interconnected lives. I’m convinced that the green rejection of organized religion in favor of spirituality is a temporary phenomenon; that Integral calls us to both/and solutions that will eventually put spirituality and religion back together again.

I’m also slowly becoming convinced that the church walls that enclose the world religions today will eventually become too confining for second-tier individuals as they continue to evolve; that they will increasingly gravitate towards interfaith, interspiritual, and translineage approaches to spirit… and therefore could very well find themselves on the outside of the old faith structures by choice or excommunication. So it’s good to start thinking ahead to what possibilities exist for community when we start to look ahead to what may be coming.

In reply to “Is the ‘Integral movement’ basically about ‘individual attainment’?”, Aleta S. writes:

I collaborated with the late Rev. Tom Thresher at Integral Spiritual Nexus. Tom once said that “faith communities have an essential role to play in helping individuals develop the kind of interior resilience that they’re going to need in this world. This kind of resilience will allow them to participate deeply in communities of trust and caring. From that foundation they can go out and help make the changes in the world that are so essential… faith communities have something no other institution has. We own the great stories that give our lives meaning. We have society’s permission to change people at the level of their soul. And, perhaps most important, we have time to work with people to make the deep changes that are required by our world.”

While I was working to bring various faith communities together to work on the world problems, Tom cautioned me that I was wasting my time until people were able to change the interior individual quadrant. Perhaps we both suffered from a form of quadrant absolutism. Or we may have benefited from a coherent We space.

Does resilience come before communities of trust and caring or with such communities?

Great question. I don’t know the answer, though I’m passionately concerned that the Integral movement find out the answer for itself. As you know, I’ve had an interest in the topic of “Integral spiritual community” for several years now and have hoped that I would see something come into the world. I’m still watching and waiting, and writing and “righting the way” if it’s meant to come to pass.

For what it’s worth, there’s some imagery around the appearance of Sacred Words in The Kalendar that give food for thought to those whose imagination/intuition is ready. (The Kalendar is part of my Worldview Artistry, one which builds upon Lingua-U).

Three such words appear in the Season of Yin — which I associate with the second-tier of consciousness (green, teal, turquoise, and indigo): Sangha, Community, and Church. Let me tell fables about these Sacred Words and see if they resonate with you on some level. (Technically, these fables are called Ngoungong, or “new stories about the elemental energies of thought” or simply “meta-fables”).

Fable One: Sangha. Sangha appears at the start of the Season of Yin, at the very first Seat (the Seat of Basis at the Letter of Self-Sensing). The story told by the word Sangha is mainly that of a base for the self in its quest for enlightenment. The Sangha is at the “root” of the entire Season of Yin, so every aspect of the self’s enlightenment including its work in the world and its development of powers of the siddha are all connected and supported and reinforced from the Sangha.

Sangha is the yung to the yin of the Sacred and the Spirit at the Letter of Self-Sensing, so it is always already with us. As yung, it joins us to the yang of Safety, spiritual safety. It is one with the Svaadhiʃθaanə (self’s root) to six marks of subtlety. It doesn’t have to be established. It already exists.

Fable Two: Community. Community appears at the very middle of the Season of Yin, the Seat of Concern at the Letter of Constructing. Its story is that of the Container in which the Ethos (social soul) is taken up. The Turquoise Earth (turquoise) is the carrier that brings the Goose which lays The Golden Eggs (teal), and the Community is its essence. The Goose who lays the Golden Egg is nowhere in sight during the Month of the Green Forest; it appears in the following month, as the yin to the yung of God/Goddess and the yang of Advaita (Vedantic nonduality). The self is completely faded away in Community, but it is accepted through Agape. The Community is the carrier of the Culture and the hub of Communication at the Season of Yin, but it is also the Keeper of Occult knowledge, so don’t assume that all wisdom is transparent at this point in time.

Although it is common for people today to speak of “the Integral community” it is also common to hear other people deny the existence of any such thing. I think today it may be more accurate to say that the Integral movement has an Ethos (a social soul), but that soul is still rather incorporeal. The Ethos is at the cross-point between Green and Teal, but before a solid Community can emerge, the challenges suggested by several words must be faced and overcome: Shadow, Emptiness, Enlightenment, Enfolding, Upright, Goodness, Government, Advaita (Vedantic nonduality), Attentiveness, Gunas (a ternary model of subtle energy), God, and Guru (or Guardian). Perhaps when enough people come together who have a common understanding of terms such as these, and the emotional and spiritual capacity to bring complex responses to them into the world, we will finally have the preconditions of Community. If we fail to achieve that, well then, it’s (literally) Chaos.

Fable Three: Church. Church appears in the central part of the final chapter of the Season of Yin, at the Seat of Concern in the Letter of Challenge (the middle part of indigo). Its archetypal story is similar to that of King Arthur and the Holy Grail: an exceptional person, a group of committed disciples or acolytes (the Knights of the Round Table), and a quest for the Holy Grail (Chalice). The Church does not form without a need; it must first be presented with a Challenge, an Existential crisis or perhaps even the threat of Extinction for our species. It arises in response to the yang of the Ethos (social soul) and yin of Community as the yung of Church.

It works like a butter churn at a dairy farm: through cranking motions it converts cream into butter. The social soul and community are made thicker, richer, and more potent in their essence. But whereas a churn makes butter that is consumed, a Church makes… the Letter of Challenge itself. Well, in Lingua-U at least. The Church is self-reflexive (the /ch/ sound repeated at front and end). Therefore, the goal of Church is to Challenge those within it and those who are not a part of it. The Holy Grail is always beckoning, never finally confiscated.

Bonus Fable: There’s one more word that I haven’t told a fable about, and that’s Organization. This word waits until the final Throne — 27 out of 27 — in the Season of Yin before it appears. It is literally the yin to the yang of Order in the world at the Seat of Actualization at the Throne of Jazz/Order; it is adorned in the perfume of Jasmine and likes to dance to Jazz and get jacked. It is one with the subtle energy of the Organism to an astonishing 18 marks of subtlety. Its mode of knowing is a yung form of oracular knowing that enfolds both the yang of meta-systemic empiricism and the yin of cross-paradigmatic cognition. Its activity is governed by the yang of the OM/AUM (Shakti) of Yoga, the revelations of Oomoto of Shinto, and the Omphalos of Delphi, mediated through Jesus (who we may think of, for these purposes, with the English pronunciation of /jizəz/, indicative of the spirit of Generosity and Generativity that is yung to the yang of the Jeopardy of Existence, past the yin of Owiazka, the Polish word for Sacrificial Lamb, at the Seat of Structure of the Letter of Generativity. If the Season of Yin began with a repudiation of old forms of organized religion, the Season of Yin will end with the formation of new Organizations that are difficult for us to characterize at this time. Really, no one knows what they will look like.

So, such fables aside, I understand you are contemplating the nature of resilience and whether it comes before or after the arrival of spiritual community. I’m sorry that my answer veered so badly from your original question onto an unexpected detour! I’ve just got metalanguage on the mind this afternoon.

Upon reflection, I think each of these different sorts of things — sanghas, communities, churches, and organizations — nurture us differently and send us on different sorts of journeys, and so it could go either way.

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On The Relationship Between Integral Spirituality and Religion

By admin
In Philosophy, Spirituality
7 Min read
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Integral Spirituality is Not a Religion, But It is Something Like a Religion

Yesterday, I wrote a blog post to critique the usage of the term “sweetness” for Integral Spirituality to describe the ultimate nondual station for love realization, and I got a response from an Integralist disagreeing with my point by saying essentially (a) that’s what Kabbalah says, and (b) Ken Wilber and three other “big names” in the Integral scene all agreed that it was a fine term to use. So on the one hand, the integralist appeals to a traditional authority and with the other appeals to a new sort of authority: the (alleged) opinions of leading Integralists associated with the Integral Spiritual Experience event.

And today, I interacted with another person (integralist or former integralist, not sure what label to use) who said that

For those with eyes to see, “integral” is becoming/has become a religious orthodoxy. A fundamentalism.

Now, I took exception with those comments and wrote replies in context. But it got me thinking about the relationship between Integral Spirituality and religion to the point of wanting to write something on the blog. It’s probably a little too early to do so constructively, but I’ll make it brief.

1) What is the proper focus for religious reform from an Integral perspective? If integralists conclude that Kabbalists have got the terminology for nondualism all wrong, for instance, is it any of our business? Or if we conclude that Jesus of Nazareth was a highly realized being but not The One and Only True God, is it any of our business to tell Christians to change their teachings? And so on.

I would like to put out there the notion that as we develop a robust Integral Spirituality for ourselves and those in our community, that we define our sacred terminology and theological constructs based on the Good, True, and Beautiful — or Spirit or Allah-consciousness or some other formula — as it looks to us. This becomes our trans-religious perspective, the set of beliefs that we will bring into whatever religious practices we choose from one or more traditions with which we individually resonate. And then it is our responsibility to embody these beliefs and practices in our parochial religious contexts, offering critique from within those traditions as we see fit. But it is NOT our responsibility to criticize religions that are not our specialty. We can leave that to others with an Integral Spirituality who walk in those paths to do so.

2) Do the “big names” of the Integral movement, especially those living and teaching, have the standing by authority to dictate or suggest points of belief for Integral Spirituality?

This is an easy one, I think. An author or blogger writing about “Integral spirituality” speaks only for themselves. They have no authority except as individuals; thus, their authority is one of individual influence, but not institutional influence. No one can appeal to “Ken says so” or “Marc says so” or “Diane says so” and expect it to have any sort of power except that earned by the reputations of those individuals to other individuals.

That could change in a flash, however, if an organization or network or institution for Integral Spirituality were to emerge claiming the right to define the terms of Integral Spirituality for its members. No such organization has yet emerged so far as I know, though there are some churches or other non-profit organizations that might find themselves wrestling with questions of a related nature. For instance, they may need to write a mission statement for the organization… and who gets to sign off? What if a member disagrees with it? What if a member acts in a way that seems to violate the ethical norms of the community?

It seems to me that the Integral Spirituality is in a state of disorganization or self-organization with no settled forms of authority to provide a locus of leadership to any sort of collective; only individuals acting as individuals have that authority at this time. Somehow this seems fitting for the Integral movement’s present state of evolution, which seems to be crawling around along the ground floor, flirting with rising up to a higher state for a while only to settle back down into a more inchoate system.

3) Is Integral becoming a religion? Has it already become one?

Integral Spirituality is not a religion, but it contains the raw materials out of which religious or quasi-religious movements are formed. In my mind, it’s pretty much inevitable that something new will happen in this philosophical and spiritual space, a transition difficult to predict and perhaps even something that no one expects. It is very likely to take the form of what we might call a trans-religious movement or even a meta-religion. By use of these terms, I mean to point towards an emerging sensibility that the Good, True, and Beautiful are not found exclusively in any one religion or philosophy, but is scattered; therefore, the proper response is to appropriate what is valuable from each while disappropriating what is not.

I don’t think AQAL, i.e., Ken Wilber’s formulation of Integral Theory, was written for people who are susceptible to religious orthodoxy, but as an integrative Konstruct it — and groups that are attracted to it as such — are bound to bounce off of Amber (mythic-membership, synthetic). The most sophisticated books which contain the essence of AQAL (e.g., Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution) were written (at a higher level than Turquoise, I imagine) by Ken for people capable of Turquoise (meta-systemic, cross-paradigmatic) thinking. Turquoise is the closest thing to higher Amber on the entire second-tier. It is basically the Construct-Aware mind that has matured into Construct-Creating and Construct-Enacting. If someone is looking at Turquoise and only seeing “fundamentalist” Amber, they’re definitely not there yet.

The current situation in the Integral community on social media is not one characterized as being too much Turquoise, that’s for damn sure. But as people enter into the second-tier, especially at the dispiriting orange-to-green transition as the Throne of Zeus segues into the Throne of Evolution in The Kalendar, they may very well lose (or have lost) their religion and until a new one comes along, if ever, they will grasp for a replacement. Spirituality. Science. Socialism. Self-actualization. They will keep trying to make sense of themselves and their society even if it seems to lead them beyond sense. Or they make a fruity sangria. Something to give their psyche a new crutch or their soul a new church.

“Spirit-chew-ality” is a spirit hungry for chewing on (re-)ality.

Even if the novice Integralist has not yet fully internalized the cognitive processes that allow someone to feel AQAL or another Integral Konstruct “from within”, they may nevertheless intuit that it has something to offer. They are on the way to trans-religious conditioning, and there’s no reason to get alarmed if that looks like religiosity.

After all, that’s to be expected. Religion doesn’t live at The Red Jewel, where it first took a faith-filled form. It’s my developed understanding that it dwells in The Silver Stars, at the Ninth and final Month of The Kalendar, where it is linked to post-duality (a.k.a. evolved nonduality) as the yin to the yung of the Atman, the Universal Self.

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Damn It! I Don’t Have An Easy Teaching

By admin
In Language, Philosophy, Spirituality
5 Min read
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or: The Time Has Come for a Rectification of Language with Sacred Truths

(Photo Credit: yhelfman/BigStock.com)

My teaching, if I may be so presumptuous as to call this conversation an exercise in education, is going to take time to unfold. Few are ready to hear; those who are ready don’t see the gestalt yet. I think I’ve got a picture of it.

I wonder if eventually some of the very earliest readers of this blog (like YOU) will look back some day with a deepened rootedness in the “language of the Real” and then re-read these blog posts and see that all along I was guiding you to it, to take in the Real, not through the meaning of what I said but in the life of the words.

Until then, there are moments when I wish I had an easier teaching. Like:

You are a precious snowflake.

God is love.

Just be present.

You are already enlightened.

My spirituality is kindness.

Or:

You are perfect just the way you are.

But there is blood on the snow, darkness in the mystery, cruelties that lead to a greater kindness, and you are perfect if you believe it so… and yet everything must change.

Realization is getting real, and human beings will do almost anything to avoid that, I fear.

If my tone is dark, blame the cosmos. This is the Week of the Swan in The Kalendar, my calendar infused with mythopoetic symbolism of the letter S. These dates are the home of Eve and the snake, evil and sacrifice, sadness amidst mere satisfaction, samsara’s ashes, sackings and snatchings, slavery and slaying, smallness and solitude… perhaps the soul does not confront a greater slog. It is as if evening has come suddenly at exactly 8:40 AM, and the world is engulfed in an uncertain darkness. Do you hear the sound of evil in the air?

In ancient China, the scholars who followed Confucius and read their classics spoke of times like these with uncanny prescience. They noted that periodically in the course of human events the ways that people speak lose touch with reality itself. Language grew overconfident or overbearing and nobody seemed to notice. People spoke like they knew what they were talking about, but their words betrayed the truth on their lips before they were even uttered. Language had become a trap for the soul, one that threatened the stability of the nature of everything. In such times, goodness itself was at risk of being toppled by evil.

What did they do in such perilous times?

The wisest among them called for a “rectification of language”. They wrote poetry and sang songs and composed pithy aphorisms that used language in ways that were more natural, more attuned to the rhythms of the cosmos. And their words sounded mighty peculiar to everyone around them who had grown accustomed to spite-filled, ossified, and putrid speech. They even sounded a little nonsensical because sense had become divorced from the senses. 

We too live in a climate of lame and languishing language so that common speech is laced with the cyanide of cacophony for the spirit, no matter how well-intentioned or supposedly “spiritual” one may aspire to be.

The words are not easy to understand, but we can learn from the poetry of The Canon of Supreme Mystery. Yang Hsiung says:

When yellow is not yellow,
The autumn routine goes back and forth.
The virtue of the center is lost.

What does all this have to do with “Integral” spirituality, you might be wondering?

Simple. As we grow in consciousness, some of us will grow to the point of requiring to change the nature of our relationship to language itself. Those of us who do so may find themselves lost in the wilderness of strange notions, bizarre mysteries, the deeper they look.

Have you really listened to English lately? Here are just a few of its oddities.

Have you ever wondered if there were hidden patterns between the words we use and the symbols of the letters or numbers that represent them to us?

Have you seen a meme like this one in your social media feed and thought: that’s weird.

Good. Keep noticing the strangeness of the dream. These are silly examples, but perhaps they are deceptively silly.

Language can cast a spell on us. Will we be like the hero in The Adventures of Letter Man or will we be like the Letter Man’s archnemesis, the Spell Binder?

There is an alternative to being lost in the wilderness in a world where language has come unmoored from Truth, Beauty, and Goodness (as if we could wave a magic wand over those three words to shake off the sense of unease we feel in these days, but I suspect that they are not the most effective mantras for our problem).

There is another way. Wait until the book Lingua-U comes out.

Lingua-U can moor language in a metalanguage of Sacred Words that brings together the best insights into wisdom, truth, and human relations from all the Great Traditions, be they religious or secular. Taking a cue from Master Yang Xiong himself, we can borrow the symbols of his ancient masterpiece, The Canon of Supreme Mystery, and elevate them into a trans-religious spiritual technology for developing new insights into human nature by attending to the subtle energies of speech. In short, Lingua-U can become part of the “Integral toolbox”, a modality of individual and group practice for re-balancing the soul and social ethos through enhanced awareness of the subtle realm.

Will you choose a conscious relationship to language or simply slip into slumber? Do not go to sleep in the Week of the Swan. In a time such as this, sleep leads to sorrow; the greater the unconsciousness, the greater you will become sorry.

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