or: Is Integral Politics Merely a Privileged Fantasy?
To my friend who thinks Integral Politics is fantasy and privileged… Okay, got it. You think integral politics is privileged and fantasy. Let’s say, hypothetically that you had a green politics. Doesn’t mean that that’s your center of gravity (COG), just that your politics are green. You’ve got plenty of company! Even in Integral groups the political center is green or lower. The forum administrator of Integral Global said a while ago that the COG of that forum was probably “green with an ‘open to experience’ personality type”. And green is hostile to higher levels, no doubt about it, and it shuns them from its awareness whenever possible, sometimes by actual shunning (e.g., blocking on Facebook).
So one thing this means is that if you have judgements about “integral politics”, be sure they’re based on an actual, truly Integral Politics and not stuff you’ve heard about in Facebook forums. You might want to re-read the classic texts and a Wilber video or two (there’s a good one where he says that IP is almost impossible right now and no one is really doing it…). Read the position papers of Steve McIntosh’s organization. Read Simpol by John Bunzl. Terry Patten’s New Republic of the Heart book too. There are a few others I could add… That’s real Integral Politics, not the pseudo-integral stuff you see in social media.
IP isn’t a fantasy, but it’s not for everyone. It’s aspirational. It’s basically a light form of “causal politics” — meaning finding your Self in everyone and everything, and in building bridges of compassion and connection and peacemaking and generating creative solutions. Not because of some practical pose you’re taking, but because THAT’S WHO YOU ARE. You are the left and the right and the center. You are the North and the South, the Red and the Blue. No anarchists or disestablishmentarianismists though (just kidding, sorta).
As the Atman (Universal Self), you have no choice but to be an agent of whatever is called for most in the moment, given your particular self’s unique perspective and situation. Occasionally this means taking a revolutionary or extreme pose, if that’s the only way to protect the health of the Spiral as a whole… but it never has to mean mean-spirited partisan sniping and complaints and whining and resentment-wallowing like one sees in so many social media posts these days.
In a truly causal state, there’s no one left to resent! Not Trump. Not Berniebros. Not even Debbie Wasserman Shultz. It’s all you!
And is IP privileged? It better be! In the true sense of the word “privilege”, which is that it knows its place and how to make the best use of its unique gifts and qualities. Privilege means owning your personal power, wherever that might be. In our culture these days, the power is in Amber and Orange and a little bit of Green, but Teal+ has little political power. So in that sense, I would even say that IP isn’t privileged enough!
Green’s attack on “privilege” is a false idol; it gets greens drunk on the high of self-righteous resentment and then once they get empowered themselves they are attacked and brought down by folks with even greater anger and resentments. I don’t think you realize how the green language of “privilege” is generating such extreme backlash against postmodernism out there in the real world. It’s a flawed model for activism and not suitable beyond use as training wheels for something more serious and nuanced. Sadly many people use it because of peer pressure to do so and the dopamine high that comes from having their peers hold them up in high regard as woke. That gets lost as one gets post-woke. IP is post-woke.
IP needs to welcome people from ALL stations into its fold who are committed to our shared ideals which include egalitarianism. Because all have a place, and that’s how it’s always happened in America in the past and what’s most likely to happen in the future (unless we are to live through an anarchic dystopia). IP needs to work towards a post-scarcity politics and in the meantime there are likely to be some bumps in the road.
I just wish that more people who have a green politics would realize that IP plays a valuable role already and could be much more powerful in the future, if more postmodernists evolved into a higher stage of maturity. So long as people are strictly identified with their gross and subtle self, and not the causal self, they will battle each other in a politics of winners and losers. It’s only by shifting their state towards early causal, at least, that they are drawn out of what they knew to be true before into a higher truth, and then they will have no choice but to change their political tune. As Gandhi put it, they will “be the change”, and it will be effortless.
Lots of People Are Already Swimming in an Integral Sea. Are You One of Them?
When spirituality is based on an “Integral” spirit, it opens the door wide for expanding human potential for rich inner development, cultural progress, artistic creativity, and spiritual renewal. In fact, you might have an “Integral” spiritual sensibility or tendency without even knowing it. Here are the Top 10 signs to look for that will tell you if your temperament and worldview might already be on the way to becoming “Integral”:
10. You don’t find yourself easily offended by slights to your ego, subculture, or group identification; therefore “political correctness” has little appeal to you.
At the same time, you intuitively tend to avoid causing others unnecessary pain through your words or deeds. You don’t try to silence or shout down those who disagree with you. Compassion towards the disadvantaged and marginalized is your priority, not remaining comfortable in your preconceptions about being right. But everyone is marginalized about something! Everyone suffers in some ways and is privileged in other ways.
You understand that freedom of expression is an important value for universities to teach, but colleges ought also be cauldrons of pushing the envelope forward in terms of what is possible for social justice; accordingly, these interests must be balanced through both/and solutions, not either/or thinking.
You realize that there are more ways to work for justice than complaining that people are being insensitive. You also realize that there are many levels of justice that look different depending on your particular perch in life, and ultimately all human efforts at justice will fall short of our ideals.
9. You have come to a compassionate stance with regard to religious fundamentalists and traditionalist zealots because you recognize that their own stage of evolution may be less than your own.
You know that everyone has a part of the truth. You know that many of the worst problems in the world are caused by people who think they have the full truth when they only have a part.
You believe sacred texts such as the Bible are a source of wisdom, even if they contain many teachings which aren’t useful today.
You pick your battles for justice carefully and strategically, not by reacting out of anger or fear.
Belief in spiritual evolution means you run the risk of looking like an elitist to others, but you have to just shrug it off. You don’t pick your beliefs because they are convenient or fit in with the expectations of your social group, but because they seem to best represent the True, Good, and Beautiful. Because fundamentalists and ideological conservatives are trying their best to do the same, you can identify with a part of their own station of life.
Fundamentalists have myths that they take as literal, absolute truths, and you know that this is a path that you’ve outgrown. At the same time, you’ve noticed that hardcore atheists also have a fundamentalist orientation of their own!
Wherever you look, whether it’s in New Age spirituality books or the coffee social of your twelve-step social or the biased headlines on Huffington Post or The Drudge Report you see people spout beliefs about reality naively as if they were merely “a given”. But you realize that reality is constructed of many complex, interlocking systems and paradigms without which we cannot see things clearly.
8. You don’t think spirituality and religion are antithetical.
Whether or not you have found a spiritual community, you know that being fully human is not strictly an individual affair. Everything people know about spirituality comes from religious experience, passed down from generation to generation through lineages dedicated to following practices of spiritual development. Although spirituality can be extracted from religion like chicken broth from the carcass of a chicken, it isn’t necessarily going to be as tasty or nourishing (but you’re definitely less likely to choke!)
You know no person is an island. You may even admire the strong bonds of commitment and devotion shown by the religiously orthodox or traditional, and you long for deeper relations with people in your community and — through virtual communities and/or travel — around the world. When someone asks if you believe in God, before you say yes or no, part of you wonders what they mean by “God” and questions whether you are both talking about the same thing. Perhaps as Integral philosophers say there are various “levels of God”, and you could be talking about the same reality but using different words that fit into adjacent worldviews.
Perhaps once you were allergic to religion, but now you find yourself with a more ambivalent feeling. There are some religious communities you could consider joining, or at least spiritual organization dedicated to common practices for holistic well-being. When you hear religious friends calling “none of the above” people narcissists or fluffy, or you hear spiritual friends calling religious people “nuts” and “fundamentalists”, you cringe at the either/or thinking. You are called to see a larger picture that can bring both things together.
7. You don’t look for “explanations” of religion but seek comprehensive approaches that include individual and collective dimensions of spiritual experience in subjective and objective perspectives.
Religion isn’t merely a subject of interest to biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, social historians, or theologians. It’s not merely an objective thing that you can toss aside. You see it as much more complex: there are the institutions and organizations that collectively transmit historical teachings and lineages of practice; there are communities and cultures that put the teachings into practice through ethical and moral behavior, community service, activism, philanthropy, and so on; there are individual beliefs and behaviors that are the result of religious adherence or spiritual work; and then there’s the whole realm of “inner work”, the spirituality that aligns an individual to stages of maturation in the self and mind, plus many different states of consciousness.
Of course, you believe scientific study of religion in comparative perspective is a valuable angle to take… but you see how it only asks specific questions and doesn’t address any questions other than the ones that it’s asking about. Therefore, it is silent on many of the important dimensions of spirituality and religion that you recognize to exist.
You don’t think science and spirituality are opposed. You don’t want to stay “stuck in your head” all the time; however, at the same time, you want your spirituality to be intellectually solid, not anti-intellectual.
6. You are non-judgmental when appropriate and exercise mature capacities for judgment when appropriate.
Once upon a time, you never judged anyone for anything because you wanted others to like you or because you sought to avoid being judged by others. Perhaps your ego was so sensitive that even the slightest criticism could send you into a tailspin of self-doubt. Back then, you gravitated to spiritual groups where there was no “cross-talk” so nobody could say anything that might be at all shame-inducing or moralistic, and you sought out therapists or counselors who would just listen to you and give you the acceptance you thought you needed.
But now, you realize that you can’t avoid judgement regarding values, ranking of opinions, ascertaining the merit of relative truths, calling foul when you see something amiss, and so on. You realize that judgment is a skill that can be honed and sharpened so that it can be more conscious, useful, and wise. So now you’re getting bored hanging around people with whom you can never say what’s really on your mind.
At the same time, you have come to recognize a piece of your own shadow in everything you judge. Sometimes you find yourself judging others for some truth about yourself that you would rather not look at. It’s not easy to face up to, but you do so courageously and seek to grow from self-awareness.
You don’t think spiritual people have to be nice all the time. You know that anger — even rudeness — can have a healthy place in the spiritual life. You are skeptical when you hear of spiritual people blaming sick people for causing their own illnesses. You want to be free of shame, but still take responsibility for mistakes and shortcomings without blaming every problem on other individuals or classes of people.
5. You reject beliefs that insist on classifying people rigidly into victims and perpetrators.
You know that morality is very often an ambiguous and complex affair with aspects in self, nature, culture, and society at many different levels of understanding. Naturally, when you hear people wielding a rigid ideology that divides the world into two categories, one of which is good and the other of which is evil, you just know it is far too simplistic.
So, when an act of violence or violation is alleged to have occurred, you know that it’s important not to rush to judgment. Instead, you seek to gather a combination of subjective experiences and objective facts that together illuminate what happened and allow you to offer a mature discernment.
Ultimately, Spirit knows no absolute distinctions between “good” and “evil” or “victim” and “perpetrator”; every person has light and dark within themselves, and sometimes “victims” are wolves in sheep’s clothing and sometimes “perpetrators” are acting for a higher purpose you didn’t even know was possible.
You understand that many –isms such as classism, sexism, racism, and so forth, are wrong and need to be addressed; at the same time, you know that these terms are abstractions that obscure as well as reveal truths about a complex world. They are socio-cultural conventions which emerged in the context of a world evolving in greater degrees of Spirit and reflect the concerns of earlier stages in religious and cultural development. You believe strongly in human liberation, but think the ways that most people think of liberation are too limiting.
4. You reject overly simplistic answers to complex questions.
You further realize that our beliefs about ultimate reality should not seek to diminish, sentimentalize, or rationalize the mysterious and awe-inspiring nature of life. Likewise you try to avoid supposedly certain answers for understanding the mystery of death. Whether you believe in heaven and hell, reincarnation, or are agnostic about the afterlife, you know that human life is purposeful and our actions make a difference in this world.
You understand that denial of death is the hallmark of an ego that doesn’t understand its true nature, its higher Self. Perhaps you understand “Self” as your own Higher Power. Perhaps it is a statement about what is really real (i.e., your metaphysics). Or perhaps it is “post-metaphysical”, meaning that it a statement that could be true if enacted within a framework of constructed meaning-making.
Looking back on your life so far, you see many different ways you’ve believed — in the magical spirituality of early childhood, in the rational rebelliousness of your adolescence, in the pluralistic relativism of your college days, and now it’s something different from all of those. It’s inclusive. It’s holistic (or tries to be). It cares deeply about saving the world for future generations, but it is aware of the ways that revolutionary ideals can easily go astray and cause harm. In short, you’re wiser now than you have been in earlier days, but you might be lacking a label to put on your way of being in the world.
3. You are concerned about ecology, justice, and development not only in your community, but for all people around the world.
You are concerned to alleviate the suffering and contribute to the holistic development of all sentient beings. You may have evolved beyond thinking only about people in your community or ethnic group or nation.
You may have discovered a “world-centric worldview”, one which realizes that in the 21st century it isn’t good enough to only think locally but also to think globally. You are deeply concerned by environmental concerns and protecting the natural world for future generations, but you know that technology isn’t the root of all evils; it can sometimes be the solution.
Thinking locally deepens your vision. Thinking globally expands your vision. And thinking in terms of holistic development — growth in consciousness and cultural evolution as well as wealth and ecological sustainability — means that you are bringing depth (vertical) and expansion (horizontal) dimensions together.
Now, you listen to other people talk and you sometimes wonder how it is that they only see one part of the picture and decry the other parts as foul, whereas you are coming to see how all the parts fit together, almost as if they were different parts of the same organism. (And perhaps, you think, they are!)
2. You realize the importance of having maps of human nature and evolutionary potential that are capable of integrating vastly different ideas and methods.
In the past, when you were uncertain and didn’t know where to turn, you looked to the counsel of a trusted adult. You had teachers or parents or coaches you guided you until you were ready to get by on your own. And of course, you had books and school to teach you the guide-posts for living. But these were not enough!
You had to develop an independent streak that questioned everything and everyone. You didn’t want to just receive established wisdom, you demanded to know why it was true and look at the evidence for yourself. In this manner, you began to think for yourself and felt the wisdom of Plotinus to Hamlet: “To thine one self be true!”
Eventually, your independent streak discovered something remarkable about reality: it was far too diverse and complex for any one person to figure out everything for themselves! You were discovering that other people who also had independent streaks had been studying the hidden mysteries, esoteric wisdom, hidden connections, systemic processes, meta-systemic interrelationships, paradigmatic models, and cross-paradigmatic interoperations for some time! These were marvelous thinkers whose ways of thinking were different than anything you had previously encountered. They were thinking at a “higher level” and pulling your mind along with them. The more you studied their maps of human nature and potential, the more you began to sift through all the parts within yourself that were fragmented in order to come closer to a greater whole.
1. You aren’t afraid to see your own divinity married to your own humanity, inside and out, in self, nature, culture, and social perspectives.
You know what “divinity” means even if you can’t fully put it into words. Divinity is the Source and Spirit and their ultimate unity, the Alpha and Omega and their ultimate reconciliation, the Creator and Creation and Redemeer, the Dao. You know what “divinity” means, and you are sure that it includes you — in your uniqueness and in everything you are — but it also is something greater than you, or at least the “you” that you have taken yourself to be.
Once you were a “seeker”, but now you see that That for which you sought is “always already” present, and was never gone. Paradoxically, it is always That Which Is Arising, so you find yourself drawn deeper into mysteries and stories and hidden aspects of reality and evolutionary emergents. Even though you have the answers you once sought, life continues to be interesting. In fact, you’ve never felt yourself more creative and alive.
Now you’re finding ways to celebrate erotic energy as well as spiritual energy because they are ultimately one. This means that you give sex a unique role for encountering beauty, expressing blissful play, exercising ethical behavior, and for giving and receiving love. You aren’t afraid to talk about subtle energies or core principles of reality: perhaps yin and yang and yung or masculine and feminine and transgender (or two-spirit). You know that our gender and sexual roles are biologically, culturally, and sociologically conditioned; at the same time you recognize that there are meaningful cross-cultural patterns and universals that we can benefit from understanding.
You may worry about arrogance sometimes, but you don’t think pride is the worst sin. You know that having self-esteem is important and that it is only genuine when it is based on recognition of your intrinsic worth, gorgeous uniqueness, and inner divinity. You know it’s safe to “come out of the closet” about both your shadows and your light, and doing so is central to your spiritual journey. You strive to overcome all limited conceptions of who you are into a fully authentic sense that accepts everything that arises in an integral embrace as not distinct from your own highest Self.
Now score yourself. Did you get at least 5 out of 10?
Congratulations, if this story about spirituality rings more true than false to you, then you’re on your way to discovering an Integral Spirituality for yourself!
Is evolution evil? Goodness forbid! Forgive me if you just spit a little coffee back into your mug. Are you ready for a sobering thought experiment?
If it were true that evolution were evil, then that would make Evolutionary Spirituality a sort of practice of evil or evil-worship, wouldn’t it, in a manner of speaking? The horror. Let’s spend a moment on this idea.
Why do I even ask such a dreadful question? Simple. The phonosemantic properties of the words suggest that Evolution and Evil are closely connected, and when these properties are placed within the Lingua-U Konstruct these patterns are highlighted. This probably sounds like woo-woo numerology or Kabbalah to most of you, but please bear with me.
Could evolution be evil? First, let’s bear in mind that the discovery of biological evolution by Darwin was considered godless heresy in its days and is still widely disbelieved by folks on religious grounds. If true as the fundamentalists say, then evolution displaces God — considered the ground of Being and/or Goodness by many — who isn’t left with much to do since the world doesn’t need Him, not in the manner that the fundamentalists believe in any event.
Second, consider that evolution is associated with Social Darwinism and the principle of survival of the fittest. In its crude forms, this is basically the idea that might makes right, and it is used to justify ruthless power grabs so long as they further one’s own survival. Crude evolutionary theory suggests that altruism or self-sacrifical love is counter to nature, and by extension some philosophers have argued for aggressive self-interest.
Third, consider that evolution is also associated with the extinction of species for no other reason than that they weren’t strong and powerful enough. The weak die, the strong survive. It doesn’t seen right, fair, or good. The history of species is a graveyard of death and failure. And when one goes looking for a cause, a reason for such horrors, one’s sight must turn to evolution (or Evolution, some sort of personification or philosophized version of the same word).
Fourth, consider the evidence (or “evidence” if you prefer) from word play. E-V-O-L, the first four letters of the word, is L-O-V-E spelled backwards. Like sounds have like significance in subtle ways that tend to reveal themselves upon close empirical study of language, taking statistics, and breaking sounds down to phonetic properties for analogical comparisons. And backwards words, according to many esotericists who know about such things on the basis of methodologies that may be pre-rational or trans-rational, tend to have an undertone or evocative quality of reversing the meaning in some sense. and you get that E-V-O-L is a form of anti-LOVE.
Fifth, consider the evidence from Lingua-U, if you will indulge me by looking at an unpublished methodology. No, never mind. I’ll save that discussion for later (once the book comes out).
There are some concerns raised by this thought experiment that ought to give everyone pause who has attached an overly one-sided view to Evolution by “spiritualizing it” in a way that bypasses the ambivalent truths about natural processes that aren’t pretty. If one’s spirituality is based on purging all negative thoughts, energies, and uncomfortable feelings to a dark closet while reveling in warm-fuzzy thoughts of happiness only, you’re only looking at one half of reality. There is both yang and yin, so to speak, meeting in yin-yang.
I don’t think Evolution is evil. I don’t think any word is evil, and Evolution is just a word. What is refers to is a constructed concept that is constantly being formulated and refined through use and theorizing and construct-making. I do think some of the ways that people have conceived Evolution as a brutal, immoral, death-dealing force leading to annihilation seems pretty dark indeed … and anyone calling themselves an Evolutionary ought to wake themselves up to the darkness within their own chosen framework of meaning-making.
I believe there is an evil potential within our scientific and philosophical concepts of Evolution that ought to be remedied through theorizing that puts the Goodness back into Evolution. We can choose how we conceive of Evolution and adjust our worldview artistically in a manner that gives Goodness a victory over its opposite. What I mean by this is too difficult to explain at this point in the, um, evolution of my own philosophy, but I will say that my wrestling with this very topic has strengthened my Abrahamic faith infused with Eastern cosmological tenets. The symbols that I’ve studied and included in my research point to great spiritual mysteries and invite me to expand my outlook by making conscious decisions about the grounds of knowledge.
The questions I’m asking today don’t have simple answers because they cut to the heart of our appreciation and appraisal of the Goodness of Existence itself. I’ll leave you with a thought from an Episcopalian writer named Larry Gilman. In his blog post “Is Evolution Evil?”, he concludes:
Just bluntly, couldn’t God have found some nicer way to create? And admittedly, any theological acceptance of death as creative tends to clash with Christian views of death-as-enemy that go right back to Paul: “through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin” (Romans 5:12). The creationists build a great deal on that verse, of course, but we might double-dip on Romans and build instead on the statement that the “whole Creation groans in childbirth” (Romans 8:22). The pain of the world is, in that metaphor, the pain of creation.
But maybe even that is just too pat. I do not mean to say that suffering, human and otherwise, can ever be explained away or theologically domesticated. The problem of pain can be lived with, maybe, sometimes, a little, but never nullified. It cuts too deep. Christ despaired on the cross; we, too, will always face the possibility of despair, whether in the semiprivate hospital room or the torture chamber. We humans, like all the other creatures, are vulnerable to the core and no theology or narrative can ever make us otherwise.
Three Ways of Looking at Appreciation and Criticism
(Photo Credit: fizkes/BigStock.com)
Here are three ways of looking at appreciation including my latest understanding of appreciation as “the unifying force of mature integral interiority”. The first comes from the late, great Dick Bolles and the others are both mine, at different points in my writing career.
Dick Bolles: “There’s a Meanness Abroad in the Land”
Richard Nelson Bolles (March 19, 1927 – March 31, 2017) was an Episcopal clergyman and the author of the best-selling job-hunting book, What Color is Your Parachute?
This is a criticism of critics. Just a tiny bit of irony, in that!
I was reading Newsweek today, and found a review of war films, written by Caryn James. She is a well-known movie critic. I don’t want to pick on her, she’s probably a very nice woman, but she does serve up food for thought about all critics. She was reviewing the new series about World War II, by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. And she had nothing good to say about it. She also had little good to say about The Hurt Locker, the film which just cleaned up at the Oscars. She said that Kathryn Bigelow’s dazzling filmmaking “doesn’t pause to let you realize that suspense and bravery are everything here.” I thought the film was about nothing else but. I went to watch it twice, because I was so entranced with her examination of the virtues and defects of such bravery. (“War is a drug.”)
In many of the reviews I read daily, on a whole range of subjects besides filmmaking, I am so struck with the underlying view the critics seem to have about intelligence. Review after review bespeaks the idea of “look how intelligent I am, I can see – more than most – everything that’s wrong with this.” (Whatever the this may be.) I was raised with a very different view of intelligence: it valued “look how intelligent I am, I can see – more than most – all the things there are to appreciate, about this.”
In our day, and perhaps in other days as well, it is a far rarer soul who makes appreciation the defining motif of his or her life, than those who make criticism their defining goal. Criticism is easy; it takes no brains to say what’s wrong with something. Appreciation however, is difficult; you sometimes have to fight to see things to appreciate, digging for example beneath ugly surface impressions, to see some shining beauty underneath. That’s why prejudice flourishes. It takes brains to see what there is to appreciate in every man and woman who was ever born. Which should be the goal of every intelligent man or woman. Civilization never decays or vanishes because of a lack of criticism in a society; it decays or vanishes because of a lack of appreciation in that society. As a direct consequence of this, that society tends to preserve the commonplace, while it casually throws away treasures. And criticism causes more meanness to be abroad, in the land.
Every critic begins with assumptions, usually unexamined, that they use to justify their hammering the thing they are examining. For example, Caryn James’ assumption here, in reviewing historical war films like The Hurt Locker, is that such films must have “a cultural resonance today,” and feel “relevant.” She has no patience with “outdated ideas” that were dear, she says in the past, like “justice is on our side,” or “warfare was about turf,” or “platitudes about heroism.” She criticizes The Hurt Locker for “ignoring the urgent question of whether the war should be fought at all.” In other words, if she had been making that film, she would have been sure it dealt with that question. Fortunately, no such obligation was laid upon Kathryn Bigelow. She was free to make her own film, not Caryn James’es.
In critics’ articles or blogs, there’s always just a little bit of “Ah, if I were king….(or queen) this is what I would have done.” The one notable exception to this is Roger Ebert, whom I read devotedly, just because he looks for things to appreciate in films that other critics dismiss out of hand.
Now, about history: just because the past was different from the present, with different values and assumptions, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be depicted. Our history is what defines people, and nations. Show me only a man’s present circumstances, and I may be bewildered by his actions. But tell me that man’s history and I will understand him much more completely, and find much to appreciate in him. Our past is important, and so are nations’ pasts. We didn’t just come into this world fully-hatched, and fully-born. We came into a context, a family, a community, a country, with traditions and values that were important to them, then; and therefore important to us now. In a word, show us our past, and make us really feel our history vividly, and then we will find much more to appreciate about the present. That is what the producers of The Pacific have done, and that is what Kathryn’s The Hurt Locker has done, magnificently.
There’s no way around it: we need more “appreciators” in our society: men and women who, from the beginning, set out to make their lives all about appreciating others, even if it requires some hard thinking. And who think it takes more brains to appreciate than it does to criticize. We need more men and women to make appreciation the goal of their whole career. These are men and women to admire.
As the great composer of beautiful music, Jean Sibelius, famously said, “No one ever erected a statue to a critic.”
Must we choose between being systematic and original in our thought and deeds?
Joe Perez’s Rising Up (2006)
Here’s a reader’s comment related to my post on defining integral:
Joe, I applaud your independent STEAM streak .. Orienting consciousness maps are a good thing… and – but 🙂 I think following any ‘leaders’ methodology to a ‘t’ restricts one’s own flow of creative juices…
Ah, that’s the rub, isn’t it? In a modern, American culture that places a high premium on having an “independent streak,” and being “leaders (not followers),” and above all not restricting the flow of “one’s own creative juices,” then how the hell do you become a truly systematic thinker? Are we so tied to narcissistic notions of creativity and independence that we are incapable of merging into a more encompassing and ego-shattering whole? Is “that sounds like group think” or “he’s just another Ken Wilber ditto-head” the worst insult we can hurl at something new? Must originality be limited to how we resist something greater than ourselves, and never describe how we surrender?
I think it is possible to be both integral and original, independent and systematic. One way is to latch on to the broad movement called integral and claim that your version of integral is the most correct version, or at least a better version, and point out how other versions leave something important out. If you’re right and persuasive, then perhaps your ideas will have an influence in shaping what counts as truly integral. And then you have demonstrated that you’re both an independent thinker and a systematic thinker. You haven’t erected a new system or demolished the old system; you’ve strengthened the value of the system by correcting its shortcomings.
I imagine that pretty much all good internal criticism of integral would have to look something like that. (By distinguishing between internal and external criticism, I am talking about criticism launched from within a second-tier stage versus criticism launched from a lower stage. An example of second-tier critique is: “This model of reality leaves something important out, obscures valuable distinctions, or fails to incorporate the ideal number of contexts to be truly useful.”) In contrast are criticisms such as “It doesn’t make central to its paradigm the act of listening to marginalized or oppressed minority voices,” or “There’s no rational proof for the supposedly trans-rational benefits of meditation,” which are perfectly valid concerns derived from a first-tier level of analysis. However, even if all first-tier criticisms are granted, a second-tier system remains standing.)
As useful as it is to think about criticism in helping one to develop a sense of distance, originality, and independence of thought, it’s not the only valid approach to life. That would be like saying that the only way to be a creative, integral thinker is to continually search for weaknesses and faults in the foundation of one’s own consciousness. I suspect that such a sentiment is more a holdover from first-tier rationalistic philosophy than truly a second-tier mode of being. Transcending rationalism means finding ways of being appropriately critical in the right time, for the right reasons, and to the right degree, without spending inordinate, unnatural amounts of one’s time and energy in the smashing idols and gods. In other words, as we ascend in stages of consciousness and incorporate more angles in our life-maps, we become more fully rational, not rationalists.
So I think the sentiment that “following any ‘leaders’ methodology to a ‘t’ restricts one’s own flow of creative juices” is a perfectly understandable and ordinary sort of view. And it may be right or it may be wrong, but it’s a recipe for narcissistic abandonment to the self. There’s nothing wrong with a little first-tier “I want what I want and damn anyone who says they’re a leader worth following, this is my life, I’m doing it my way” sort of thinking. I’ve got a healthy “red streak” myself, even as it doesn’t define me. The challenge with STEAM-powered living [a.k.a. AQAL or Integral], as I see it, is to think about the world in a comprehensive and systematic way that defines the proper place and relation of self, other, world, and the Divine, in the context of an evolving world… and to live from that vision as deeply and graciously as possible. If that isn’t being original in this culture and age, then what is?
Appreciation: The Unifying Force of Mature Integral Interiority
Joe Perez’s Experimental Reflections Inspired by the Integral Konstruct of Lingua-U (2018)
Mature Integral consciousness — in technical terms, I’m talking about early Turquoise, a station after the maturation of Second-Tier awareness past Green and Teal called §5.1 in Lingua-U — is the yin of 𝌪 Appreciation to the yang of 𝌒 Philia (Friendship) and the yung of 𝍅 Willing. Whereas Philia (at Formal-Mind) tethers the mind to an object external to itself in order to support or protect the self from frightening realities of “otherness” and “foes” and come to an inner freedom from the vicissitudes of life, Appreciation lifts up an object in order to gain insight in how to Usher it into a more comprehensive worldview and how to Understand it more fully as it is in its own uniqueness and dignity. Furthermore, when Philia and Appreciation are combined, they describe the powerful potentialities available in a community of friends, mutually uplifted in support and appreciation, their individual Wills subsumed into a world-centric Mission.
Furthermore, to fully Appreciate something is to befriend it in a way that enlarges you and it into a larger whole, grounded in a healthy worldview in which all stations of life are given a place of dignity and ordered in a manner that sustains a healthy Gaia (planetary soul). True and good Appreciation does not easily veer off into idolatry or possessiveness, though addiction is a temptation if the appreciation is incorporated too deeply. It is not a stance of taking a good for use or consumption or an idea or dogma for the purpose of making it exclusive and superior to all others. Appreciation requires situating the object into a relatively comprehensive worldview, one that can find a place for something where it can be most useful for the entire realm.
Appreciation is a 𝌮𝌁 Kingly function, psychologically speaking, in consideration of a universal Archetype gendered yin-yin-yin-yin-yung. Speaking intuitively, we may say that the King’s first yin sees its place in the whole order of things; the second yin sees its place relative to other objects in the realm; the third yin sees its place relative to the King himself; the fourth yin perceives what the object is not; and the yung grasps its usefulness. The inner King is able to offer his blessing to the object even when others cannot because he is powerful enough to situate the object, create movement through influence, or even quarantine a potentially harmful object (as a last resort).
If one doesn’t have a healthy and strong relationship to the inner King archetype, one may find it difficult go bless others or offer a full appreciation, mature and wise. Forgive me for the heresy of combining Jung and Wilber, but it is unavoidable! Growing in one’s relationship to the King Archetype is a good thing for development into mature Integral consciousness. (The inner Queen is also essential, though she “comes online” later in the maturity of Integral development when it becomes necessary to Qualify candidates for selection.)
Another way of looking at the role of Appreciation in the emergence of mature Integral consciousness is to note its stabilizing and conservative function in the individual and collective. A psyche in which all the sub-parts or micro-personalities or inner archetypes are appreciated and given a valuable place is a healthier, more integrated inner life. A society of appreciators is much more harmonious than a society of acrimonious critics or rebels. A culture based on the exchange of mutual self-esteem and appreciation is happier and a fuller expression of the Goodness of Existence.
Let me add that within the interiority of the Integral mind there is a three-station dynamic. In the yang or initiatory station, there is noticing “the given” (𝌪⚍). The object is grasped as it is in itself, not as we want it to be, and not as we would expect it to fit into reality based on our preconceived notions and theories. It must be seen in four modalities: its Pitifulness or compassion-inducing partiality, its Figurativeness or way of representing the Image of God, its Distinctiveness including its contribution to diversity, and its Symbolic role. In the yin or responsive station, there is a “giga-sizing” (𝌪⚏) of the object. It must be given an active function relative to every other object in the emerging Global-Mind — thus, maps of human nature, developmental stations, narratives of holonic tenets, and so on, are extremely important now.
Finally, at the yung or unifying station, there is the triple function of “appraisal” (𝌪𝌃) and “appreciation” (𝌪𝌃) and “approval” (𝌪𝌃). Appraisal is the yang-yang move: it looks unflinchingly at how the spaciousness of our own Mind meets resistance in the object. Appreciation is the yin-yin move: it brings the object into the Kitchen of our spirit (which is another way of talking about incorporating it into a mature, healthy, well-functioning ego). Finally, Approval is the yung-yang move. It allows the object to exist within the King’s realm in its own way, circumscribed by its nature and the whole scope of Existence’s requirements. Disapproval does not come easily for early mature Integral consciousness, so this stage of interiority will frequently find itself “collapsing” into earlier modes of reactivity (especially the “polarizing” of objects at Protective-Mind or the “foeing” of objects at Formal-Mind/Amber or the “disapproval/destruction” of objects at Diligent-Mind/Orange or the “shunning” of objects at Systemic-Mind/Green).
The Fight Over Wedding Cakes Is a Political and Spiritual Distraction
Today’s 7-2 decision by the US Supreme Court concerning religious liberty and gay wedding cakes preserves the framework of anti-gay discrimination laws and really doesn’t bother me. I understand the bakers had a nuanced argument (the gay couple also had a nuanced argument too, hence it was not a slam dunk case IMO). And the truth is, religious liberty is a serious issue and we need to tread lightly when it comes to forcing people to do things that violates their spiritual beliefs … especially when it was totally not necessary.
What’s more, I think it’s by and large a distraction from more important things. The LGBT community in countries where basic legal equality has been won — such as my country, the US — are very fortunate. Gays and lesbians are on better footing than ever before. Regarding gay and lesbian rights, we just have some fine tuning to do. Also, we have to support transgender rights. We have to elect Presidents and Senators who will nominate and approve Supreme Court Justices who will uphold LGBT rights, it is true. But we also ought to turn our attention to doing what we can to support LGBT communities throughout the world, turning our attention to global concerns.
It’s also worth reminding ourselves in the LGBT community that the political dimension is only one aspect to our lives. It is a pull towards togetherness and liberation that tugs at deeper, spiritual concerns we have as a community. Although it doesn’t get a lot of ink in the queer press, basically we are all walking down a road of discovering new models for being Love and doing Eros in the world. Thus, done well, our spiritual quests confront the core teachings of the world’s Great Traditions in audacious and disruptive ways simply by being authentically ourselves. As those of us in theistic-based worldviews say, we are all made in the image of God and we are pioneers in unveiling unabashed and unashamed gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender faces of God for the first time in history.
The political dimension of our lives is just one piece of an integral whole. One useful way to picture all the major perspectives on human nature is the Four Quadrants model developed by Ken Wilber. The issue of gay wedding cakes concerns the laws regulating discrimination by private businesses: that’s something with a home in the lower-right quadrant. (Technically, it has aspects in all four quadrants, but let’s keep it simple.)
The lower-left quadrant includes all the ways that we need to shift the culture, philosophy, and worldviews to make more space for the dignity and flourishing of LGBT people. The upper-left quadrant includes all the ways we need to do “inner work” to heal from our psychological wounds, do shadow work, and grow spiritually into wider and more expansive concepts of our relationship to All-That-Is. The upper-right quadrant includes all the ways that we need to keep our bodies healthy and sound and our individual duties to others fulfilled.
When I speak of Integral Spirituality on this blog, what I’m mainly talking about is including all four quadrants of human nature in our priorities. If we are focusing too hard on only one of these angles, we are leaving important things out in other dimensions in our lives, and this can come back to bite. For example, if we devote ourselves passionately to political change but neglect to have compassion for all sentient beings as an enduring feeling in our hearts, something that the gift of meditation can help to further, then we are likely to encounter burnout. Or, if we get totally focused on our physical fitness to an extreme, we may find ourselves disconnected from the pulse of the living community.
As a footnote, since it has come up today in a conversation or two with libertarian-oriented thinkers, my political philosophy (I call it “Integral” by the way) insists on a balance between individualistic and communitarian principles. There are no strong individuals without a strong society, and vice versa. Since government is inevitable (yes, for at least our lifetimes) it ought to be as virtuous, well-functioning, and enlightened as possible. There is nothing “forced” about participating as a citizen when your self-identity is rooted in a higher, more expansive level of self-recognition.
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.
