The television ads say that democracy in the USA is on the ballot on Tuesday. But what they don’t say is that these ads are futile because about 40% of Americans don’t vote based on civil or moral issues. Let’s take a minute to think about the implications.
Four in ten Americans vote based on their wallets: are they richer and more financially confident than they were a few years ago? And they don’t decide the answer to this question based on rational analysis of policy. They vote based merely on tribal allegiance (partisans) or on throwing the out-of-power party out (independents).
These sorry facts now have now walked the USA to the edge of a perilous cliff. Voters are more likely than not to reward the GOP and neuter the President’s agenda. This is a unique, unprecedented problem because the GOP has transformed itself in recent years into an amoral bunch of cowardly leaders who coddle election deniers, embrace conspiracy theories, and are willing to seize power by nearly any means necessary (with a few notable exceptions like Liz Cheney).
If you’re paying attention, you know this already. You also are (hopefully) voting for the Democratic candidate who will strike a blow against this aggression against democracy. If you aren’t voting for a Democrat because they’ve swerved too far to the left, I’ll have a few words for you in a moment.
What I hope you will realize is that–regardless of what the election brings–America is not almost certainly going to veer from the see-saw of a power play of two dominant parties. Until that changes, the only way to save democracy is to ensure that the country has the healthiest, most rational, most culturally intelligent two parties that are possible.
So, since the Democrats are already pretty sane, rational, and enlightened relative to the Republicans, the focus of democracy-lovers may very well need to be on straightening out the party that most needs reformation. Our nation’s cultural intelligence needs to integrate the valid values and true arguments of conservatives in order to progress forward. Healthy, rational, and intelligent voters exist on both side of the aisle, and the future of democracy depends on them finding each other and cooperating for the sake of good governance.
The anger and hostility of blue voter towards the red voter needs to be transmuted into passion and compassion to hear out the voters who feel left behind and who are so desperate they are willing to throw democracy into the ditch. We can’t give up on making a decisive difference. Vote like democracy depends on it.
Perhaps you, like substack conservative Andrew Sullivan, have voted for Democrats in the past, but you’re afraid they’re too far left these days. Sullivan wrote two days ago:
I’m going to vote for the Republican and the most conservative Independent I can find next Tuesday. And I can’t be the only Biden and Clinton and Obama voter who’s feeling something like this, after the past two years.
There was no choice in 2020, given Trump. I understand that. If he runs again, we’ll have no choice one more time. And, more than most, I am aware of the profound threat to democratic legitimacy that the election-denying GOP core now represents. But that’s precisely why we need to send the Dems a message this week, before it really is too late.
I’ve counted on Andrew for years as two scoops of raisins in my cereal bowl (with an occasional rock in the spoonful). So what he says doesn’t surprise me too much, despite the fact that he has been one of the foremost journalists to warn of the dangers of creeping totalitarianism arriving with this bunch of Republican elected officials.
However, I can’t figure out how he doesn’t understand that he’s not only sending the Dems a message by voting in the semi-fascists, he’s sending the Repubs a message, too. He’s telling them to keep getting stupider, more extreme, and bolder in their worshipful obsequiousness to Donald Trump. That is a helluva wrong-headed message.
Perhaps I would vote as he will if I thought, as he seems to, that the progressives have been too successful so far in realizing a far left agenda. In fact, the vast majority of the policies implemented during the Biden agenda have been watered-down, moderate policies (or, in the case of COVID relief, somewhat excessive spending measures which had a bit of bipartisan support). Crime has gone up, but mostly (I say) because of the pandemic and the unaffordability of living, not because the Dems want to lower mandatory sentences for certain crimes or experiment with a few new ideas in addiction treatment.
I could go on about the myriad ways that the Dems aren’t as bad as Sullivan seems to think they are, but I won’t. The truth is, I think his basic premise is correct. The Dems have overreached with the progressivism in many ways. They have sided with the most extreme progressive activists when they should have been paying attention to the center-left politicians who kept warning them that they were losing credibility. They made economic mistakes that made inflation worse.
And, despite what I said a moment ago, they aren’t totally blameless when it comes to the increase in crime and illegal border crossings. They coddled the defund-the-police progressives and allowed neighborhoods like Capitol Hill in Seattle to become autonomous zones by anarchists. They hugged the most left wing voices on immigration when they should have hewed to the center. They let crisis upon crisis pile up and often didn’t look like the competent, good governance, adults-in-the-room politicians we thought we elected.
Whether you vote for the Repubs to send a message of repudiation to the Dems or vote for the Dems to send a message of repudiation to the Reps (as I will do), stop and think. Third party choices, from where I stand, are unelectable and typically abysmal. Let it sink in that the red and the blue choices are the best we can hope for in 2022, which is a terrible state.
Unless we co-create a healthier democratic system and two healthier frontrunning red and blue parties, then the cycle continues. Don’t think mundane purple moderation. Think an up-leveled violet and ultraviolet radiance on the Spiral of Cultural Intelligence. An integral approach to politics, one that respects different voices and finds common ground based on What’s Best for Everyone, might do better.
To paraphrase something the Integral philosopher Steve McIntosh said some years ago: there’s no more important work for an Integralist than building the Integral worldview itself.
But how do we do this when so many of us disagree amongst ourselves?
There are staunch critics among us who hang out in our social media circles. You may hear from them that Integral philosophy is not practical enough, that it’s not relevant enough, or is not popular enough to warrant adherence. Some of these people have wrestled with the philosophy and found it lacking, and others have rejected the best views and taken to promoting weird, sectarian views instead.
I have spent many hours tussling with these folks in social media forums filled with huge disagreements and controversy. Let it not be said that there is not a healthy spectrum of legitimate philosophical leanings within the Integral movement. (And let it not be denied that there’s a bit of lunacy, too.)
Perhaps the biggest rift among Integralists concerns the proper role of spirituality. Opposed to the view of sectarian thinkers who would separate Ken Wilber’s nondual spirituality from his scaffolding of evolutionary metatheory, I would invite others to put such deep spirituality at the center of our purpose, as I try to do.
The Atman project: the attempt to find Spirit in ways that prevent it and force substitute gratifications. And, as you will see in the following pages, the entire structure of the manifest universe is driven by the Atman project, a project that continues until we — until you and I — awaken to the Spirit whose substitutes we seek in the world of space and time and grasping and despair. the nightmare of history is the nightmare of the Atman project, the fruitless search in time for that which is finally timeless, a search that inherently generates terror and torment, a self ravaged by repression, paralyzed by guilt, beset with the frost and fever of wretched alienation — a torture that is only undone in the radiant Heart when the great search itself uncoils, when the self-contraction relaxes its attempt to find God, real or substitute: the movement in time is undone by the great Unborn, the great Uncreate, the great Emptiness in the Heart of the Kosmos itself.
I hear this today as a reminder to the Integral movement — the loosely-defined group of individuals who are inspired by Wilber’s philosophy, his many contemporaries such as Carter Phipps and Lana Wachowski, and predecessors such as Sri Aurobindo and Clare Graves.
We are a community of evolutionaries, persons whose spirit is always under renovation.
As I see it, Ken’s writing is a call to think of the Integral movement not as a force of grasping and despair but of REMEMBRANCE.
Our remembrance ought to begin with Ken’s words — articulated in dozens of books and hundreds, if not thousands, of videos and blog posts — and the words of all his contemporaries who have walked alongside him (or just down the road on an aligned path) in his Integral vision. From there, it ought to stretch out to Teilhard de Chardin, Jean Gebser, and other luminaries who have helped to build the Integral worldview.
Such remembrance is not veneration of these persons or their books or teachings, though we may be passionate; it is appreciation of the distinctive and original ways that they have each invited us to set aside our individual Atman projects in favor of an unqualified Spirit.
It is this remembrance that awakens us to our own realization.
It is this remembrance that embodies the disembodied Integral philosophy into a renaissance tradition of Integralism and a community of Integralists.
It is this remembrance that builds something Integralists desperately need: a healthy amber layer (e.g., tradition, a source of norms, a commons) and a stronger LR quadrant (e.g., a well-formed collective presence).
And remembrance can bring us an awakening that allows us to engage actively in the world of politics, morality, sexuality, art, and so on, freed from narcissistic attachments and nihilistic doom-seeking.
Hence, the Integral movement has a choice before it today:
(A) to become a community of remembrance and awakening to Spirit, or
(B) to become a substitute for such an authentic awakening, offering instead shallow visions, truncated theories, and rejections of nondual spirituality.
Today I am probably a lot like many of you, striving for consciousness and clarity, looking for inspiration from wisdom and holism, and still seeking connection to others who are walking a similar path.
Not everyone shares my enthusiasm for seeing Integralism as essentially a spiritual movement, and that’s okay. Let us agree on what we can agree on, and then move on so that we are better able to serve the world through an Integral vision.
I believe that spirituality should be updated and made more relevant and rigorous, not abandoned. Through The Integralist newsletter, I am hoping to speak to all Integralists, but especially those who are choosing path A.
An earlier version of this article was published on Joe-Perez.com on 9/20/2020.
Joran Slane Oppelt’s Integral Church: A Handbook for New Spiritual Communities is one of the most important books regarding spirituality yet written in the 21st-century. Co-authored with other members of an emergent spiritual community, it is one of the first books to suggest a new coherent social structure for harnessing the power of spiritual evolution.
And timely, too! The old religious traditions are showing their inflexibility in the face of new insights from mystics and other spiritual higher achievers. Even relatively open churches like the Unitarian Universalists have closed their eyes to spiritual development beyond postmodern pluralism. But the integral or evolutionary or metamodern spiritual movements are aiming to meet the needs of our world at this time.
I pray that Integral Church is widely read and that anyone inspired by its vision of evolutionary community ought to receive a calling to integral ministry in our time. There are other handbooks for interfaith ministry that are useful as well, but Oppelt’s book contains unique information that should interest all integrally-informed leaders in emergent religious communities.
As I’m sure Oppelt would be sure to acknowledge, the book has its limitations. Some shortcomings are inevitable in a pioneering work of this kind, limited as it is to the author’s particular tastes and predispositions. Joran is foremost a boots-on-the-ground minister and community organizer, not a scholar of ecclesiology (the discipline of Christian theology devoted to Church).
As a result, it sidesteps many difficult issues and questions regarding the ways in which the structure, symbols, and practice of Integral community enact the transcendent. For example, Catholics and other Christians wanting to know how sacraments function and relate to Christology and Ecclesiology will not find discussions of that depth within the pages of this book.
Given the complexity and severity of the challenges faced by all species in an interconnected globe, the time is short for our civilization to evolve or perish. Don’t let the book’s limitations dissuade you from readingIntegral Church. Along withCohering the Integral We Spaceby multiple authors, it is truly a worthwhile pioneering effort at creating communities of faith and dialogue that can be a part of an emergent Global-Mind.
In the future, I want to write again about the Integral Church model for ecclesiology and propose some possible areas for mutually enriching dialogue to Joran. Meanwhile, I am working to wrestle with some of these issues atan organization of my own inception. Perhaps our organizations will partner or align in the future, but until then, I wish them the best in fulfilling their mission and pushing the envelope forward.
How to Build an Authentic Pride Based on a Spiritual Foundation
How do you reconcile diverse points of view about LGBT Pride found in psychology, religion, and spirituality? What about differences in point-of-view between traditional, modern, postmodern, and metamodern (a.k.a. Integral) philosophies? The following two reflections on Pride come from distinct periods in my own development: the first one, published back in 2007; the second, written today.
Is Gay Pride a Sin? (An Excerpt from 2007’s Soulfully Gay)
Antigay zealots once placed a billboard in downtown Toronto that they intended for marchers in a Gay Pride parade. The billboard was a Bible quote: “This was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, Pride.”
The idea that pride is the worst of all sins is a common notion. Saint Augustine called pride “the beginning of all sin.” Today, the religious right sees the depravity of gays not only in our sexual behavior but also in our “prideful” failure to acknowledge our own sinfulness.
They call us egotists, narcissists and hedonists. However, our response to the religious right does not have to be as categorical and knee-jerk as their attacks. Gays need not reject religion altogether just because a group uses its theology as a weapon against us. Instead, we can take an open-minded look at pride to glean wisdom that we can claim for our own.
Judeo-Christianity is hardly the only tradition to condemn pride. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, and other wisdom traditions also have teachings that condemn egotism and arrogance. The Greeks understood pride as hubris, the exaggerated self-confidence of being foolish enough to ignore the gods.
Unfortunately, the spiritual wisdom about pride is frequently distorted by religion. Religions may go beyond condemning arrogance to actually teaching that human nature is corrupt, wicked, vile, wretched, and fundamentally sinful. In recent decades, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered have suffered some of their greatest humiliations at the hands of religion.
Traditional religion relentlessly condemns pride but seldom condemns low self-esteem with the same conviction. Authentic spirituality teaches that both arrogant pride and low self-esteem are equally important distortions of self-worth.
In Christian ways of thinking, arrogant pride is tantamount to playing God; effectively one is pretending to be one’s own savior. By the same token, Christians can think of low self-esteem as a failure to honor one’s dignity as a creation of God by effectively playing God and damning oneself.
Christianity’s remedy for the dual sins of pride and low self-esteem is right relation with God. In other words, it’s not thinking so highly of oneself that you don’t see your own need for salvation. But it’s also not thinking too lowly of oneself, because your sense of esteem comes from recognizing your sacred worth as a child of God.
In Taking a Chance on God, John J. McNeil discusses the sin of low self-esteem: “In my 20 years as a pastoral counselor and psychotherapist to lesbians and gays, I have found that the chief threat to the psychological and spiritual health of most gay people, especially those who come from a strong Christian background, is guilt with its companions shame and low self-esteem, which can in turn develop into self-hate.”
McNeil points to therapy, coming out of the closet, and developing a healthy spirituality as the three most important steps for gays to take in healing low self-esteem.
Pride isn’t a sin when it’s an expression of healthy self-esteem. Celebrating gay pride is an essential affirmation of our human dignity, whether that takes the form of marching in a parade or being more honest with our friends and family about who we are.
Pride can surely elevate the gay spirit, but what about the gay soul? Feeding the spirit requires that we envision our ideals, put our philosophy of life into action, and have a strong sense that we are a woman or man with dignity and integrity. Positive self-esteem is vital for these endeavors. In contrast, soulfulness does not care about what’s healthy or unhealthy, or whether an experience is joyful or melancholy.
Soulfulness insists on being true to what’s real without pretense or apology. Being soulfully gay means not using false pride as a shield over our pain, shame, and guilt. Authenticity demands that we allow a place for all our feelings, especially the uncomfortable ones that we’d rather cover over with denial, secrecy, and rigid thinking.
For everything in life there is a time under the sun, says the book of Ecclesiastes. There are times for celebrating gay pride and times for acknowledging our doubts and lack of wholeness. For every man and woman marching gleefully in the parade, there are others who aren’t yet ready to celebrate, at least not until they’ve done their soul work.
The point of doing soul work is not to wallow in misery but to enter deeply and courageously into our pain. Soul work requires us to break down the falseness of our sense of gay pride so that we can eventually emerge from the other side into an authentic form of gay pride. But the soul’s first step down can be a rough and tumbling one: humility.
“LGBTQ Pride and Power, Integral Style” (2018)
Pride is an emotion with polarized meanings in psychology and religion. Psychologists speak of pride as a highly developed sense of self-esteem and mastery of the associated feelings with which it is associated. Traditional religionists often speak of pride as the “root of all evil” and more progressive religionists speak of pride as a distorted relationship with the divine. How do we address all of these different senses?
In Integral Spirituality as I see it, the truthful aspects of all of these meanings are interrelated and both healthy self-esteem and appropriate (not hubristic) self-regard are seen as essential aspects to a healthy spiritual life. For some people, it is easy to throw out the old fashioned view of pride as sick or ignorant or intolerant. For other people, it is easy to dismiss the more modern view of pride as fluffy, narcissistic, meaningless psychobabble, or emasculated spirituality. Like so many areas where life is confusing, the truth is in the middle, provided you take a higher and central view.
When I say that the truth about pride is central what I am trying to convey is that an Integral Spirituality does more than say “gay is okay” or “do what’s good for your self-esteem”, it gives you an Integral Map (that is, a post-metaphysical cosmology) in which the universal currents underlying your psychological and spiritual potential can be illustrated. And in this Map, there’s an appropriate place for pride as well as a way of seeing its potential dysfunctions that you can acknowledge from wherever you’re at, regardless of your gender or sexual identity and no matter what your religious preference.
So, I am speaking about taking a balanced view of pride as it fits in your own life seen from the perspective of an Integral Map. It’s central if you’re a religious traditionalist to emphasize the virtue of humility and the vice of hubris; and from this perspective you can say that good LGBT pride is the path of moderation in between extreme humility and extreme hubris.
It’s also central if you’re a psychologically-minded modernist atheist who emphasizes the healthful role of self-esteem in a well-functioning psyche and the unhealthful role of pathological narcissism; and from this perspective you can say that healthy LGBT pride contributes to wellness and good social skills.
It’s also centraland higher between the mindset of a progressive postmodernist who emphasizes that LGBT pride is a form of taking back power from the marginalized by disrupting cultural memes that silence our voices … and the mindset of a conservative assimilationist who emphasizes that one should take pride in universal human attributes only, not divisive and non-integrated cultural differences.
The views of the conservative assimilationist and the progressive postmodernist cannot be reconciled on their own terms. One seems to think that all good things come from celebrating our differences and the other seems to think that that’s a recipe for social disintegration owing to a leveling of value hierarchies. This is important to recognize because some form of this argument lies at the root of many of the cultural conflicts still facing the LGBT community.
In order to reconcile the views of assimilationists with cultural separatists in society, one must begin by reconciling them within one’s own self. To do this, one needs to find all the truth and goodness and beauty in each of the opposing views. Take an intellectual curiosity in the views of your opponents on the other side of the culture war and really listen to them. Read the best and most thoughtful of their worldview’s subscribers, not merely the trolls in Reddit forums or CNN’s comment boxes.
And then own all the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty you can find in the views of the other side and don’t let it go. To do this, it helps if you imagine that these worldviews form a continuum from assimilationist (LGBT pride is divisive and unnecessary, just be human) to separatist (LGBT pride is all-important, disrupt and transgress) to integralist (both/and: celebrate both the diversity of the LGBT community and celebrate our universal humanity, all the good things we share in common with everyone).
Enfold the integral dictum that some truths are more right than others. Exclude the sinful, unhealthy, or wrong aspects of the views about LGBT pride you need to reject.
Enclude the truthful parts of the assimilationist and separatist viewpoints as part of a more cohesive whole truth about LGBT pride.
Enact your expanded and more inclusive view of LGBT pride in everyday life, finding new degrees of wholeness and peace of mind and more tolerant and compassionate ways of relating to people from all different worldviews.
Befriend your inner traditionalist, modernist, and postmodernist alike and walk with them into a new way of being in the world that lets you be fully YOU. You may find yourself empowered into a more authentic sense of pride, one that is built on a more solid and unshakable foundation than ever before.
Why I No Longer Support Dr. Gafni’s Leadership in the Integral Community
Here are three of my most significant blog posts about Dr. Marc Gafni. They reflect my views at the time I wrote them, and are not a perfect representation of my views as they have somewhat evolved to this day. I have added a note at the top which is up-to-date.
A Note on 12/10/2021
TL;DR: Even if I were to grant Dr. Marc Gafni the benefit of the doubt on all the things that he claims are true about the accusations against him (which I certainly do not), I would STILL have to conclude that he is not a morally fit leader for our community. Based merely on what he has already admitted to doing and based on the undisputed consequences of his actions. However, I feel that if others disagree with me — choosing to support the man or feeling that he be absolutely canceled and shunned — then I can still respect their opinions despite our disagreement.
More than a decade ago, I had a small but memorable role in facilitating a public discussion on my blog and Facebook posts of controversies regarding Marc Gafni, who for a time was a spiritual leader in the Integral community and who remains active in the Center for Integral Wisdom). Subsequent to my blogging about the controversy, I worked for a year with Marc, mainly helping him to launch the Your Unique Self book and UniqueSelf.com website. At different times, I was a nuanced Gafni defender and at other times I was a nuanced critic of Gafni; consequently, Gafni’s friends liked me or hated me and eventually Gafni’s enemies like me or hated me, and I didn’t make anyone happy all the time.
To this day, I acknowledge that I made mistakes in forming opinions about the scandal in the Integral/Sounds True community. However, I also believe that I did the best I could under the circumstances while working with the information I had at the time. Gafni’s enemies were angered by my early defense of him, but sometimes they seem to forget that in forming my defense of him I was (a) deliberately misled by one of the two women in the community, and (b) was informed by the other woman that her relationship with him (however much he acted terribly and immorally towards her) was consensual and not physically abusive. In short, #MeToo was not yet “a thing”, but I believed the women. But I just didn’t think that Marc’s wrongdoing in our community rose to the level of badness that would destroy my trust in him. That’s basically what I said, too.
I also made serious mistakes in judgment about the scandals in Marc Gafni’s career before he joined the Integral scene. The issues involved are complex and even after spending days pouring over Marc’s research files and days in conversations with him and people in his orbit, I was unable for some time to conclude that Dr. Gafni’s behavior was beyond the pale. This statement is shocking to people who have read the online posts by some of the women, including two women who allege abuse while they were 13 and 16 years old, and who have courageously shared their stories of emotional abuse. Marc denies the abuse and has issued detailed rebuttals to most of the points made by the women (and some men) on his “Who is Marc Gafni?” site. I have spent a few hours on this site, too.
Before speaking to the present day, let me just say that I was swayed by Marc’s defense, especially the existence of a private report by Integral Institute which seemed to exonerate him of wrongdoing and concluded that sexual misconduct allegations against him were “entirely fraudulent”. No one in the Integral community saw that report while they were forming their judgments against him (that is, not until I leaked it to the Integral Global group at great risk to my reputation within Integral Institute). I leaked the report in an effort to bring greater consciousness to the motivations held by many Integralists who were aware of this report and were defending Gafni.
As I said at the time, I had grown distrustful of the I-I report and had reason to doubt its accuracy and perhaps even its authenticity. If my fellow Integralists at the Center for Integral Wisdom were putting their reputations on the line because they believed the I-I report, they might have been doing so because of a fraud. I felt that there was no way to ensure the veracity about the report and even its authenticity except by leaking it publicly so that people within I-I and outside I-I could critique it together (and, after Rob Smith acknowledged the report’s authenticity, this happened in Integral Global discussions).
Despite a degree of ambiguity about these statements regarding Marc Gafni, I was swayed several years ago to join with his critics in many of their criticisms and some of their conclusions about the question of how people in the community should relate to Marc today. Regarding the question of whether Gafni committed grievous emotional harm to girls and women, I believe that he did. I disbelieve most, if not all, of his denials of the accusations against him, on account of my lack of trust in his honesty with himself and others.
If there are any readers who are angry that I won’t say that I disbelieve ALL the denials, it is simply because I have read the files, heard the conversations, seen the reports, talked to a few of the women and emailed with others, and it seems pretty clear that some of the women didn’t tell the total truth some of the time about some of the shit that went down. It’s well documented, I think, and I believe that some things happened some of the time in the manner that Gafni described it, in a way which paints him in a more favorable light than the monster he is often caricatured as. In the Integral world, we have a saying: no one is so wrong that they are wrong 100% of the time, and this is the case with Dr. Gafni, who is wrong a lot of the time regarding the controversies that he brought on himself, but not all of the time.
Despite all the disagreements and conflicting evidence, I have concluded that Marc Gafni despite all his other talents is manifestly unfit to serve as a spiritual leader in the Integral community. This is partly because when Gafni and his accusers disagreed, the accusers were probably right much more often than wrong, at least insofar as I can tell as an outsider to these events with limited information. And this is also because there is an awful lot that the accusers and Dr. Gafni totally agree on: they agree that he lied a lot, that he pressured people to lie, that he actively covered up multiple affairs, that he broached the trust of his business partners (Sounds True, Integral Institute, etc.), that he has left a string of a considerable number of women in his wake who feel so abused by him that they keep coming after him year after year in an effort to get him to stop abusing other women, that he has left a trail of people who are convinced to this day that he plagiarized or manipulated them, and so on. None of this is normal. None of this is acceptable. Whether or not other people involved in the dramas hold a share of responsibility for what happened, none of this speaks well to Gafni’s maturity or skillfulness. Especially now where #MeToo has brought important consciousness around sexual harassments issues, we can part ways.
There is also the issue of whether “we” should invite Gafni to speak to our conferences, dialogue in our podcasts, hire him as a Kabbalah instructor, link to his think tank, and contribute papers to our think tanks. Let me just say that I am both (a) a fan of free speech and free association, and (b) a fan of accountability for betrayals of trust.
Regarding one of Gafni’s controversies, I once defended him like this: “Where there is smoke, there is not always fire. Sometimes there is smoke that is intentionally and maliciously planted there and sometimes there is only the illusion of smoke.” After painful determinations over several years, I would have to revise this. I would say, “Where there is smoke but not fire, sometimes you have been unduly influenced to not see the fire that’s really there. And sometimes there is so much smoke over so long a time that you stop caring whether the arsonist was 100% responsible all the time, you just get away from the arsonist, and you stop breathing smoke.”
Naturally, I would leave it up to the specific Integral person or organization to discern the wisest choice for them in the situation. If someone feels differently on this subject than I do — say, if they support Gafni and want him fully reembraced by the Integral community, or if they feel that Gafni and his associates ought to be canceled, run out of town, and totally shunned — that’s their business and not mine.
In the tiny matter of whether to link to the Center for Integral Wisdom on my link list, I am choosing to do so as a small goodwill gesture towards Dr. Gafni and other members of the CIW. The passage of time has a way of giving greater perspective on things and there may yet be opportunities for forgiveness, reconciliation, and accountability in the future.
An Apology To Tami Simon (Statement on 3/19/2017)
On October 3, 2011, I wrote an open letter to Tami Simon concerning remarks she made to another blogger. In her remarks, she explained her reasons for cancelling the book publishing deal of one of Sounds True’s contracted authors, Marc Gafni. She explained that “[N]ew and incontrovertible information came to light that made me aware that Marc was involved in a sexual relationship with a student and that the relationship was shrouded in secrecy…” and that the other woman “often … witnessed Marc telling lies to cover his tracks.”
At the time, I was just getting to know Dr. Marc Gafni, the former Jewish Orthodox rabbi and one-time Israeli public celebrity turned Oxford University scholar with revolutionary ideas about Kabbalah’s “nondual humanism” among other things. At the time, circa 2011, many people felt that despite a history involving personal controversies, Gafni was one of the Integral scene’s brightest stars and most promising leaders.
Given Tami Simon’s impeccable reputation for integrity, her letter to the blogger seemed likely to end Gafni’s career. It left many reasonable people wondering if she needed to say anything at all. It left many reasonable people wondering if she was handling Gafni’s controversies with even-handedness or if he was being singled out for past misdeeds unfairly. I had heard she was in fact pressured and threated with a boycott and character assassination by individuals who Gafni and his associates claimed were part of a “dishonest smear campaign” to discredit him based on “trial by Internet”.
What the heck was going on between Sounds True and Tami’s decision to cancel Dr. Marc Gafni’s book deal? As a blogger in the Integral community, I tried to get to the bottom of it. But only Marc Gafni and people close to him would speak to me. Tami declined to speak to me, but I did speak to the two women Gafni was involved with simultaneously while being in a relationship with his child’s mother. One woman spoke of atrocious behavior by Marc that made me sick to hear of it including outright lies, infidelity, and telephone stalking. But it seemed to me that there was no smoking gun of physical abuse and the relationship was consensual. The other woman spoke to me and said her relationship with Marc was healthy. Years later, in the spring of 2016, she revealed to me that she secretly felt threatened and psychologically terrorized by Marc and could not speak openly to me of her actual experience with him which was emotionally and spiritually traumatic on many levels. I didn’t know any of this at the time, and I believed her public story that she thought well of Marc.
So in October 2011, I looked for a smoking gun, some evidence to tell me to stay clear from Marc and avoid getting involved with him, despite the brilliance and usefulness and humaneness of his spiritual writings. Tami’s public letter was a warning sign, but Marc had convinced me that there were many misunderstandings between him and Tami that she was unwilling to get past. So I wrote a blog post challenging Tami where I said things like, “Since you don’t mention any specific lies it’s hard for me to determine if there’s any truth to this comment, you know. There’s nothing to investigate, nothing that Marc can say in his defense.” and “How can there be a healing of these fresh wounds between you and Marc? I have heard him say that he loves you and hopes that you will forgive him for mistakes he’s made and that he hopes you can accept his friendship. I know that he is reluctant to make a public apology so long as the stink of the recent toxic blog posts lingers in the air, but he wants healing so very much for everyone. Is there any chance you will forgive him?”
Between 2011 and most of 2015, Marc Gafni and I had a positive relationship and spent over a year in public collaboration. I was on the lookout for signs of duplicity, deception, and potential abuse of myself or any associates. I did not find anything that set off alarm bells, though as I have said before Marc has a strong and domineering personality, a charismatic presence, circles of trust among his associates, and sometimes he isn’t aware of the impact that he has on other people. He is not perfect, but I never saw him as the monster or demon that his opponents put on him.
In the final days of 2015, the New York Times wrote a story on Marc Gafni as a rising political figure within the Integral community who was plagued by scandal. It brought many new developments to the forefront even though Marc was accused of no new misdeeds. At the time, I was not on the board or really very active in the organization he founded, the Center for Integral Wisdom. Nevertheless, it happened that the Board Chair of the CIW back-forwarded me a document which purported to exonerate Marc Gafni of his misdeeds. It seemed likely to me that she was sending this document, with Marc’s permission, to the Board of Directors of the CIW to influence them to stay loyal to Marc in the face of brutal public attacks on him. The author of the exonerating document has since gone on in 2017 to create a blog focused on defending Gafni against his attackers.
When I read the document, called the Integral Institute Report Summary, I soon learned that there was an entire section concerning Marc’s dismissal from Sounds True. Every single sentence of the paragraphs in this section contained falsehoods, lies, and distortions. I knew this because I had spoken not only to Marc but to the two women involved in the Sounds True controversy. I didn’t want to accept the truth that I had learned about my friend Marc. He seemed to be doing his best to prove his enemies correct who say that he is a pathological liar. While the document was not apparently written by Marc, it bore his fingerprints as a ghost writer or single source. He lied to the document’s author about key details, denying for instance that he had been involved with one of his students, even though the fact that she was his student was not in denial at the time. In fact, he made a very public defense of spiritual teachers having relationships with students to the Integrales Forum. Nevertheless, what he previously admitted, he now lied about. Wouldn’t he know he would get caught? Not necessarily, if we think through the mind of a pathological liar. He could make Kate demand that everyone who received the document keep it secret so that the lies within it could not be scrutinized by his attackers. He was perpetrating a brilliant, risky fraud, with the reputations of every one of the Board of Directors of CIW at stake. I couldn’t stand for it. First, I leaked the document to the Internet so that it could not be re-written to cover up the lies. Then I wrote what I knew to Ken Wilber and Kate Maloney and Marc Gafni. (Marc wrote me back the next day, explaining that there were “errors” in the report that would be “corrected” and republished.) Finally, at the behest of a commenter on a Facebook forum, I published my letter to Marc disclosing everything (which was soon republished by Robb Smith in the Integral Global forum).
After the incident with the leaked report, I remained distant from Marc and his organization. A few months later, I penned “An Apology as A Former Marc Gafni Defender” for my blog. I met with one of the two women from the Sounds True controversy and apologized personally for having not seen Marc more clearly and defending him for too long. But I never apologized to the other woman, who I deeply regret not having perceived her pain and validated it earlier than today. I am truly sorry. And I never apologized to Tami Simon personally.
She saw Marc Gafni more clearly than I did much sooner than I did, and I cast doubt on her testimony. She said she didn’t trust Marc, and I dismissed her concerns with a trust in him which was built on sand. She exercised sound judgment about Marc’s honesty when I did not, and I (relying on Marc’s account combined with Tami’s refusal to speak with me) insinuated that perhaps she was being less than fully honest. I regret that insinuation very much, though at the time I spoke those words I was in a difficult position. One of the brightest stars and most talented leaders the Integral community had known was being publicly assailed based on evidence outside the public view, and the controversy threatened to derail the publication of an entire body of literature which the world had a right to see. I did what I could in the situation, but I erred in judgment in key respects. I hope all three women I have apologized to will forgive me for failing as I did, and I wish them well.
An Apology as A Former Marc Gafni Defender (Statement on 4/28/2016)
In 2011, I became friends with Dr. Marc Gafni, currently the head of the Center for Integral Wisdom. I visited him and listened to him extensively discuss the allegations of various parties (mostly women alleging emotional or sexual abuse), and learned that he had an archive of private materials in his defense. I perused the private materials and, after some deliberation, came to see matters much as he did, as a misplaced and unsubstantiated vendetta.
In all of my deliberations, I relied mainly upon public information and his private archives, except for one scandal. It was the scandal that brought Marc and I together, actually. Tami Simon, the head of Sounds True, cancelled Marc’s book deal, alleging that Marc had been inappropriately involved with two persons, one a student. Marc expressed regret about some of his behavior, such as asking for privacy/secrecy from the women, but not all of his behavior. I interviewed the two women and attempted to interview Tami. When Tami refused an interview, I posted a blog post with my interview questions for her. I really didn’t feel I had enough information to judge Tami, but I did feel that Marc’s behavior while problematic was not an obstacle to his continued involvement in the Integral community.
In 2012 and 2013, I collaborated with Marc on a variety of projects, the most important being my work to help ensure that the website for Your Unique Self got off the ground. For about a year I was an independent contractor for the Center for World Spirituality (which would later be renamed CIW).
Last year, new information came to light — as I have written publicly and which I and Robb S. published in a Facebook forum — and I withdrew my support for Marc’s role with the CIW. For one thing, there was the secret I-I Report which Marc had long touted as a vindication. I read the Summary and it was deeply flawed and did not address some of the most serious allegations against him. It contained a paragraph full of falsehoods about the Sounds True story: every single sentence contained a falsehood or half-truth! I can think of no other explanation for the lies in the I-I Report Summary than that Marc lied to the report’s author, knowingly spreading a falsehood that in turn was being used to bolster Marc’s credibility with Board members and supporters. It reeked of cover up, not exoneration, and I told Ken Wilber and the CIW Board Chair so. I even leaked the I-I Report Summary on Facebook so the truth would get out there, even if it meant creating a rift.
Once I saw conclusive evidence that Marc committed a serious lie, I became resistant to Marc’s explanations regarding the older information which had been publicly available on the Internet regarding Marc’s misdeeds. I don’t know what to think of all these past allegations, but I certainly don’t dismiss them as I had for years earlier, believing Marc’s narrative instead. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to see through the smoke sooner, but I had been earlier won over to Marc’s self-defense, and it took my personally uncovering something indisputable (the lies regarding the Sounds True scandal) before I could be more open to the perspectives offered by the earlier victims.
Once I began to see Marc in a more ambiguous light, his halo was gone from my sight. I no longer wished to have any role defending him publicly from any charges, especially ones about which I did not have first-hand information. I believe I have made it clear that I am no longer a “Gafni defender” or “Gafni collaborator”. I regret the role I played in the past which without my intent may have made things worse for other people, women and men in Gafni’s past and current associates. I am sorry deeply that I did not see the light so that I could have disavowed Gafni publicly earlier, and I would advise others to not collaborate with him. I wish I could have seen reason to disavow him earlier, but my judgment was clouded and I was unwilling to look deeper into the stories of his victims to find facts that I might have overlooked. It was a moral failing, not just a logical error, which I regret.
If I have not made a bigger fuss over this apology, it is because I do not agree with those individuals who have gone on a vendetta to ever prevent the man (Gafni) from earning a living as a scholar and book author. From what I have read, Gafni’s books have wonderful, brilliant, incredibly useful ideas (as I see it). People who want to read his writings or learn from him, buyer be warned, ought to be able to do so. He has been found guilty of no crime. To the extent possible, I would prefer we could just agree to leave him in peace to continue his intellectual contributions or live his life as he wishes. If others cannot just leave him be, but insist on policing community standards of behavior, then I think we will continue as an integral community to be haunted by this shadow for many years to come. I will not persecute the man, but as I have said I do not think he is suitable to lead CIW.
My conclusions on the Marc Gafni blogosphere controversy in the Integral community (Statement on 12/26/2011)
Recently statements from Ken Wilber and the Special Committee of the Board of Directors for the Center for World Spirituality (CWS) have appeared online regarding Marc Gafni. They have made up their minds. They have chosen to continue to work with Marc Gafni in his vision for evolving a world-centric spirituality based on Integral principles. They appear to have seen through the misinformation and distortions which have appeared in the blogosphere since September.
In his new statement, Ken Wilber says that Marc is a very gifted spiritual teacher who has the capacity to be a “good spiritual leader” of the CWS. He affirms that Marc is serious about doing his inner work, despite not being dysfunctional. In a 2008 statement with Sally Kempton, Wilber wrote:
Marc, more than almost anyone we know, lives from a profound sense of being responsible to love. In practice, that means that when he loves someone—and he has the gift for genuinely loving many people– he is willing to offer whatever he has. This willingness to love and give himself—sometime against his own best interests—is one of Marc’s remarkable qualities. One aspect of this gift for loving is that people who spend time with him will often experience a natural opening of the heart, which gets played out in their own relationships and work life. Marc’s open heartedness is unusual, and has often been misunderstood, just as his spontaneous, playful and experimental nature has been misunderstood…
I also have high regard for Marc’s spiritual gifts, brilliant and original teachings, and have experienced his opening to Eros which expresses itself in unusual warmth and open heartedness. I applaud the decision by Wilber and the Board of CWS and am glad to be holding a similar vision of a spirituality that advocates careful ethical discernment and which calls us to listen to many different voices and become informed with many different perspectives before exercising judgment. While not everyone will make the same decision, I’d like to share a few of the observations that have led me to support Marc Gafni’s leadership role in the Integral spiritual world.
As you may know, I’ve been tracking the controversy since late September, when I first started to pay attention to the so-called “sex scandal” manufactured by Bill Harryman’s Integral Options Café blog. Although I’d never spoken to Marc up to that period of time, I have since then met him personally, spoken to several persons with close knowledge of the events, and familiarized myself with many of the relevant aspects of the controversy.
After having spent dozens of hours in conversation, interviews, and reading relevant archival material, I can find no basis for rejecting Marc Gafni’s teachings and indicting his ethics in any way that he has not already publicly acknowledged, as when he says that he is sorry that the privacy he asked of the two women he dated was psychologically painful to one of them (the one who was not a student).
While I’m not done with my research into the entire history of the controversy, I feel it’s important in the interim to let my readers know about my findings so far. I’m coming to the conclusion that this may all be much ado about nothing. Where there is smoke, there is not always fire. Sometimes there is smoke that is intentionally and maliciously planted there and sometimes there is only the illusion of smoke.
Unfortunately several persons closest to the controversy are not willing to go “on the record” at this time with the sort of details which would help the public form an educated opinion. This puts me in the difficult position of passing along anonymously sourced claims which are subject to possible errors or withholding the story and simply passing along my judgments without explaining their basis. I hope that a more complete story can be told in the future; meanwhile, here are a few general remarks that could help to bring more light into our discussion.
Much ado about nothing?
Basically, Marc and his partner (to whom he was not married and had supported in having a child) had stepped out, by mutual agreement, from a monogamous domestic relationship. He then dated two women at the same time. Both women knew he was not monogamous before dating him and both knew of each other for most of the two or so months they went out. The parties all agreed mutually to hold the relationships private for a while, and eventually one woman came to feel the deception required by the privacy was too much for her to handle, especially their joint decision not to inform Tami Simon, CEO of Sounds True, with whom she was closely associated in professional contexts. She did not intend to stop seeing Marc, but decided that the best course of action was to inform Tami that she was dating Marc.
Subsequently, Tami and the second woman had a series of conversations the results of which, from what I can tell, resulted in the woman who was dating Marc at the time coming to believe that she had been “emotionally damaged” (according to Simon’s public statement). Tami is in a position of power over this second woman. Tami has declined to answer the question as to whether she had any role in influencing the woman to feel “emotionally damaged.” About six weeks later, Tami issued a statement critical of Marc to a blog known to regularly traffic in malicious attacks on spiritual teachers who the blogger regards as “abusive gurus.” This blog post had substantial ripple effects through the blogosphere, setting off hundreds of comments on blogs many of which brought out savage character attacks by anonymous commenters from outside the Integral community.
In my opinion, Marc’s judgment was problematic in a few practical respects but he did not deserve Tami Simon’s moralizing rebuke. Simon refused to comment as to whether there is an ethics policy for Sounds True authors or if she held Marc to a special higher standard to which other authors are not held accountable. In rebuking Marc publicly, she appears to have been motivated by factors outside of public view, which when taken into account cast doubt on her characterization of Marc.
Tami did not tell people that she was in close contact with a third woman, one who has been centrally involved in false statements about Marc, and who has been actively and even obsessively working against him for many years. Tami also did not share that this person represented a group that had been pressuring Tami to withdraw the chapter on false complaints in Mariana Caplan’s book, which at the time had just been published by Sounds True. Tami also did not share that she put the second woman —- her friend, who had just told her she was dating Marc —- in touch with this purveyor of vitriolic attacks on Marc. This person’s intense agenda of vilification, which she downloaded to Tami and the second woman, could not have been without substantial influence. These are just a few of the related facts that she chose not to share in her public statement. I don’t think she intended to deceive anyone, but her words have nevertheless done truth a disservice.
Unanswered questions
Tami Simon, as I have noted, declined my repeated requests to interview with her. Effectively, she did a “hit and run” piece on one of the most gifted scholars, organizational leaders, and spiritual teachers in the Integral / Evolutionary Spirituality world. She offered no factual evidence to back up her specific charges against Marc and her central moral claim — that Marc’s private relationship with his student was wrong — is steeped in some sort of unacknowledged Oppression Theory-based ideology which is inadequate to explain the complexities of this particular situation. She also believes that Marc should have violated his commitment to privacy and shared the relationship with her (Tami). Marc has denied making the promise to her which she alleged he did, and she has refused to back up her assertion. Marc says that he promised Tami not to create a scandal; it is arguable that Tami and not Marc turned a private matter into a public spectacle. None of this however by itself warrants the kind of actions that Tami took in response which were obviously motivated by much more then these issues.
Since she used first-person language (i.e., “I statements”) to express her criticisms of Marc Gafni, she can probably make a case for evading responsibility for technically defaming him, but the question of moral culpability remains open. My expectation and hope is that the claims in her blog-delivered attack will be questioned by readers with careful discernment or that she will come forward with facts that will show her behavior in a more comprehensive light.
Marc’s public statements — which Simon probably knew about (and if she didn’t, as his publisher she ought to have known) — made it clear that he has articulated a sophisticated approach to teacher / student relationships in post-conventional contexts. From what I have been able to ascertain, Marc behaved in accordance with his public teachings. Simon did not speak to the student of Marc’s to learn her point of view nor did she make an effort to get Marc’s point of view or clarify highly disputed claims prior to making her public assault on his character.
Instead, she probably based her statement against Marc primarily on conversations she had with another woman Marc dated and with one or more of Marc’s ex-lovers who have a documented history of making grotesquely false accusations and reprehensible legal complaints against him. It is quite likely, from what I have been able to learn, that Simon did not even review the very extensive and compelling documentary evidence vindicating Marc of the baseless charges against him by the woman with whom she was in close communication in the days prior to her statement.
Simon listened to women providing a very selective and distorted picture of events but didn’t get Marc’s point of view, an apparent neglect of her responsibility to get the facts right before throwing stones. Why she would lapse in her diligence I cannot be certain, and perhaps she will address a few unanswered questions in the future.
My best guess is that she bought into the poisonous “hermeneutic of hate” spread as gospel by the anti-Gafni cohort. Perhaps she also reacted out of anger and a self-protective fear that Sounds True would be attacked as “guilty by association” if the anti-Gafni cohort chose to turn their guns on her next as an “enabler” of a bad man who abuses women. Was she mad that he dated the specific woman he did because of her relationship with that woman? Was she afraid of possible harm to her professional reputation, and therefore she went public with an unusual critical statement? It seems possible.
Notably Marc during this whole story, who is arguably the injured party, has refused as far as I can tell, to attack or demonize any of the parties. If you know Gafni at all, you know that he is genuinely committed to repair and healing. Marc has offered to do a facilitated public or private dialogue with the parties to this issue but there have been no takers.
A “vast first-tier conspiracy”?
If Tami Simon were the only person to ever criticize Marc Gafni for his behavior in his love life, her statement would have been greeted with a much different reaction. Unfortunately, she selected as the target for her statement a particularly vulnerable man: a spiritual teacher with a long history of controversy and a small group of highly vocal attackers who have pursued an Internet vendetta against him for years under the disguise of “protecting” vulnerable people from a “dangerous” man.
The whole affair is the most complicated spiritual scandal/controversy that I’ve ever read about … and I’m not even nearly done researching the archive of documents on the case, or speaking with all the most important players. Some of the most helpful backdrop of the story is told by Mariana Caplan in “An Unexpected Twist: False Complaints Against Teachers” and a detailed article “Trial by Internet: an archetypal spiritual drama” in Catalyst Magazine. The picture that emerges is that of a spiritual teacher — Marc Gafni — who has been repeatedly demonized by a vocal group of people as an “abusive guru,” despite a paucity of evidence and the testimony of many smart, sane people who insist that he is nothing of the sort.
It isn’t necessary to think that the women who have come out against Marc over the years are all delusional or mentally unstable, although at least one prominent attacker has a bizarre history of unstable statements (claiming on Oprah in the 1980s to have been the victim of a Jewish satanic cult which forced her to murder babies and refuses to recant her story). This is weird stuff. Nor is it necessary to claim that there’s a “vast first-tier conspiracy” against Marc (to adapt a term once used by Hillary Clinton), though evidence is overwhelming that the online vendetta against him is perpetuated largely by a handful of folks who are all connected to each other although they do not disclose that fact and who are apparently obsessed with ruining his reputation by spreading a mix of truth, distortions, and lies by posting anonymously or under multiple pseudonyms on comment boxes (sometimes purporting to speak as the moral conscience of the “entire Jewish community” as they do so). Very strange, indeed.
What’s most important, as I see it, is that when you look at the evidence with an open mind with careful attention to separate facts from interpretations of fact, you find that a picture emerges of Marc Gafni dramatically at odds with what you read in the seediest corners of the Internet. Instead of viewing Marc’s evolution through stages of consciousness — from ethnocentric to worldcentric, for example — and instead of viewing his evolving teachings on Eros and spirituality in a life affirming manner, they choose to make Marc out to be a monster.
It is significant that almost all of the group was directly involved in supporting what Mariana Caplan termed “the false complaints” against Marc almost six years ago. It may well be that after being culpable of making or supporting the promulgation of false complaints — truly heinous acts from any ethical perspective — the only choice that remains to them is to try to ruin Marc Gafni. To feel good about themselves, they must continue to view Gafni as bad. Therefore, they conclude, anyone today who believes Gafni must be delusional and duped, seduced by his charm and charisma. Accordingly, they feel justified in ignoring everything they say which challenges their own beliefs.
Marc’s detractors post with missives reeking of self-righteousness and an unwillingness to own any shadow or responsibility for unethical, demonstrably distorted or false communications. They do not acknowledge when they have passed along falsehoods or correct the record. They usually hide behind anonymity. They inaccurately paint Marc’s defenders as holding to a “situational ethics.” They have to a person, so far as I can tell, all refused to engage Marc in direct dialogue aimed at healing.
It’s time for closure
Marc has never claimed to be perfect or to have always lived up to his high ethical ideals, and he’s accepted his share of responsibility for the controversies as best he sees it. But for the small group of vigilante crusaders fueling the fires in the blogosphere, this isn’t enough. They will not rest until Marc apologizes for “abuses” that did not in fact occur, except in the minds of “victims” steeped in an Oppression Theory ideology and a poisonous hermeneutic which does not permit them to accept any responsibility for their role in the messiness of their relationships with Marc or their role in bearing false witness.
I have compassion for anyone who claims suffering, but I can’t accept their ideological distortions which divide people into victims and perpetrators and which has constructed a bizarre, demonizing narrative around Marc Gafni that is not reality-based. I am also reminded of Mariana Caplan’s point that much malice hides behind the fig leaf of “I was hurt.” Claims of victimization are not always to be assumed valid, especially when they don’t pass the smell test. Sometimes people exaggerate the hurt in relationships in order to inflict undeserved damage on the other side.
Of course, from a perfectly ordinary point of view, there are genuine victims and perpetrators of terrible acts of exploitation. No credible evidence exists that I have seen that over the past 30 or so years Marc Gafni has been involved in any terrible acts of exploiting others; however, some of his intimate, consensual, adult relationships have involved hurt feelings by persons who later blamed him for causing their own emotional pain.
When he was very young, Marc was accused of impropriety by two young women, whose version of events he denied vehemently; a lie detector test by a highly regarded expert later backed Marc’s version of events. In any case, no complaints were ever brought against him. Both of these stories were spread and encouraged by an Orthodox rabbi who disliked Gafni, and whom Gafni had been in a personal conflict. This man has continued to encourage and support various attacks on him for some thirty years. This same rabbi was a key supporter of the disreputable sexual abuse advocate mentioned above (the one who appeared on Oprah claiming to have murdered babies as part of a satanic cult). It was this same person who sowed the ground, for over twenty years, for the hermeneutic of hatred that others later picked up on.
Gafni has a strong presence with a penetrating and challenging transmission. It is understandable that he would elicit negative reaction from some percentage of his audiences over the years, especially as he may have outgrown theologically the level of consciousness of the communities in which he resided. Gafni can catalyze people’s confrontation with their own shadow. He calls people out in a deep way. At the same time, most people who hear Gafni find him compelling and profound. I sense his love and goodness and know many others do as well. But given the existence of the negative prism of Internet attack, any negative response to Gafni can potentially be filtered through the demonizing prism, and then linked together on the web by those invested in keeping the demonization alive.
Furthermore, in my experience Gafni’s most vocal detractors generally engage in a sort of group-think which perpetuates a myth that only those people who dislike Marc Gafni know the real man and everyone who likes him needs to be constantly reminded that he is disreputable. The fact that others think the same way they do seems evidence enough to persist in their beliefs even after they are presented with counter-factual evidence. In this way, they remind me of birthers who deny that Barack Obama was born in America or the Clinton Derangement Syndrome sufferers who believe Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster. Many millions of people hold these false beliefs sincerely and the mere prevalence of an idea does not make it better.
I hope Marc’s attackers will look within and not simply lash out with projections of malice and patronizing attacks on more reality-based thinkers as “Gafni’s puppets” as they have sometimes done. I hope they will own that they have situated their beliefs about him in the dubious context of an intellectual rubric of Oppression Theory, especially a sort of victim-feminism which disempowers women and ignores the voices of the many women who have found in Marc an ethical, gifted, and brilliant teacher and friend. We will see.
I’m glad that the Tami Simon/Bill Harryman-manufactured controversy is now coming to a close. The statements by Ken Wilber, Marc Gafni, Warren Farrell, and the Special Committee of the Board of the Center for World Spirituality sound true to me, and I am proud to be part of a spiritual movement in which many leaders are capable of looking at even the most complex ethical quagmires with a multi-perspectival, all quadrant, all levels lens. The world desperately needs more integral, evolutionary visions … and we cannot afford to be distracted with faux scandals perpetuated largely by First-Tier ideologies in action and Integralists who haven’t exercised very careful discernment and owned their own shadows.
Marc is facing the controversy with courage and determination to emerge stronger and more conscious than ever before as evidenced in his statement of closure. Now I look forward to moving on to the important business of helping to co-create the framework and foundation for a cosmo-centric spirituality which is capable of bringing about breakthroughs in healing the world and feeding souls hungry for a more radically expansive love and life more whole, passionate, and ethical.
Or: Mean Green* Scofield, There She Goes Again (Just Kidding!)
(Photo: Be Scofield)
Today I clicked on a Google Ad for Be Scofield’s article, “Integral Abuse: Andrew Cohen & The Culture of Evolutionary Enlightenment”, which she has published on Medium and Frank Visser’s website. According to her bio, Be is a queer/trans writer and digital strategist who founded the magazine Decolonizing Yoga. As part of her work, she has even gone undercover in the communities of some spiritual gurus that she wants to tear down by digging up evidence that will paint them in a negative light.
Be’s article is one of several pieces of adversarial journalism that have criticized aspects of the Integral movement from the standpoint that it hasn’t done enough to curb “abuses” by the spiritual teachers Andrew Cohen and Marc Gafni, or because it received inspiration from another guru accused of moral impropriety, Adi Da. Other integralists come under scrutiny because they haven’t done enough to protest “abuses” loudly enough, or because they are “enablers” (Scofield names Ken Wilber, Craig Hamilton, and Terry Patten specifically).
Furthermore, the fact that some Integral online courses and educational programs are funded through memberships, subscriptions, or tuition payments is evidence that the whole movement is some sort of scam, merely “a very large money making machine” as Be puts it. Be doesn’t ask whether these programs are actually profitable or whether their fees are excessive relative to other sorts of psychological or educational programs; the mere fact that money is being charged is apparently grounds for her anti-Integral moralizing and muckraking.
And make no mistake, it is “anti-Integral” rhetoric. She puts “Integral Abuse” in a headline and blasts it across the internet through advertising in much the same way that Islamophobes talk about “Islamic Terror” or anti-Semites talk about “Jewish Abuse” or racists talk about “Mexican Rapists”. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that the Integral movement is a diverse group of people who don’t deserve to see the word associated with their identity linked unfairly and uncharitably to “Abuse” as she does. There’s no such thing as “Integral Abuse”; that’s just a cheap smear. Nobody’s writing “Mean Green* Scofield, There She Goes Again” in a headline or sub-headline, are they? (Oops.)
And Scofield is concerned to indict not only the prominent figures on the Integral scene, either, but anyone who doesn’t follow her example of shunning and speaking out against Cohen and Gafni, loudly denouncing their alleged “abuse, manipulation, and cultish behaviors”. Unless you signal your virtue or parade your Opression Theory-based credentials in a manner like Be does, you are part of the problem. Comparing Integralists to participants in the horrific Jonestown massacre and the shocking pedophilia of Roman Catholic abusers, she says that unless they speak out as she does, then they are spiritually unfit to instruct anyone about how to confront the shadow or give any sort of credible advice.
I don’t know Be personally, but she and I exchanged a few comments back and forth once on the Integralists forum. I had read an article she wrote to expose the Sedona-based guru Bentinho Massaro and while I applauded its commitment to justice and agreed with some of the major points she made about the guru, I also noticed its overall poor quality. I agreed with others who said that it was a little bit nasty and vicious (she used pictures of the spiritual teacher dressed up in a Halloween costume to undermine him). It was also heavily biased, using out-of-context quotations in a manner that made it impossible to know what to take seriously and what to take with a grain of salt.
But these weren’t the most important criticisms I had of her article. From an Integral standpoint, it seemed to me that Be was incapable of distinguishing any of the spiritual teacher’s potential gifts or positive qualities or true aspects of his teachings from the allegedly questionable or abusive ones. I noticed that whenever she heard someone talk of “spiritual realization” or “psychic experiences”, she derided it as narcissism and loopiness. She threw her critical net so broadly that it would capture anyone of any quality or moral uprightness attempting to galvanize a spiritual movement.
Furthermore, I also noticed that she failed to demonstrate the ability to articulate or apply some critical theoretical distinctions enabled by the Integral theory that she claimed to have familiarity with as a former student at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Ken Wilber’s notion of the pre/trans fallacy is rather important for a lot of integralists because it allows us to distinguish between pre-rational spiritual beliefs (psychotic delusion, mere charisma, silly superstitions, etc.) and trans-rational spiritual beliefs (those based on authentic mystical insight, contemplative practices, mythopoetic analysis, etc.). Whereas a good Integralist would look at a guru’s body of work and attempt to disentangle the puffery from the prajna, the smoke from the samadhi, etc., Be Scofield merely used mockery and sardonic jabs to achieve a sort of rhetorical filicide: throwing away baby and bathwater alike. To her way of thinking, authentic spiritual paths that involve gurus who challenge the ego have no place at all — they are merely excuses for bad people to verbally abuse victims, because they’re bad phonies and cultic boogeymen and that’s just what they live to do.
Well I’m sorry to disappoint some of my readers, but today I’m not going to defend Andrew Cohen or Marc Gafni or any other spiritual teacher that Be has criticized (they or their students can do that for themselves if they choose). I believe every integralist and every journalist has a responsibility to try to hold to a rigorous evidential standard for denouncing cults so that bona fide healthy new and old religious groups and spiritual movements aren’t so easily tainted by association with them. I believe spiritual abuse and exploitation is wrong; I also think that it’s hard to define, that definitions vary from culture to culture and “from within” guru-based spiritual traditions and “from without” guru-based spiritual traditions. I also believe that someone who is accused of abuse by some people may yet have much that is valuable to contribute to the world and its enlightenment.
As an Integralist, I believe the world is at a critical point where we need to be open to evolution in our religions and spiritual traditions and in virtually every aspect of our culture and philosophies. It’s like threading a needle while standing on one foot. It’s like walking through a minefield blindfolded. To get there, we’re going to have to have more complex and nuanced ways of looking at leadership in our movement than are on offer by the adversarial journalists. For one thing, I’d like to see a world where people can be enthusiastic about a spiritual group or set of ideas or teacher and not be cast as a victim of cult mind control the minute they go on a juice fast to do some basic state training that requires an ounce of asceticism or crazy wisdom. Perhaps Scofield doesn’t share this vision because, as she wrote at Integral Agape (a public group):
Yeah, not into any concepts of awakening. And I’m surprised you are given that awakening never has any sort of social justice lens either.
Nevertheless, Scofield wants to grab the word “Integral” for herself — she writes:
I am a fan of integral theory in general—not of the Wilber sort, but the principle behind it.
Somehow we’re supposed to accept that she’s a “fan of integral theory” — just not the kinds that have a place for awakening, i.e., like the Integral Theory of Ken Wilber based on Grow Up, Wake Up, Show Up, Lighten Up. She doesn’t seem to believe that awakening happens. So what she offers instead of enlightenment is consistent with what you would expect to happen at flatland green meme: aversion to growth hierarchies except their own two-level hierarchy which puts anti-hierarchical thinking on top and everyone else on the bottom, disbelief in stages of attainment in quality or excellence, and a tendency to cast the “real bad guys” in society as the folks who don’t believe as they do about these things. And to get you to buy into their myopic worldview, they sometimes use genuine victims as shields, painting themselves as the pure defenders of helpless unfortunates and Integralists as the morally stained enablers of the perpetrators of abuse.
Be Scofield’s lack of discrimination in her style of adversarial journalism makes the task of creating nuanced and healthy dialogue around the topic of enlightenment significantly more difficult than it needs to be. One of the vexing problems we face, I think, is secularization which is removing the religious roots and absolute perspectives — often replacing it with nothing but reductive, resentment-based neo-Marxist materialism or just crass consumerism. Someone without a concept of awakening to the Transcendent settles for idolatrous forms of awakening instead, finding sin in smaller and smaller slights to less and less comprehensive matters, and redemption in louder and shriller denunciations of such. Liberation itself gets cheapened when we let that happen. Liberation of what kind? Liberation for what? If there’s no transcendence of suffering, the devil’s in charge of the world and we’re already living in hell. And don’t think that if our world is hellish already that it can’t get worse. It definitely can, particularly if we let the Dharma die a death from a thousand attack-blog-bites or suffocate the Holy Spirit under a pillow stuffed with festering doubt.
In conclusion, let me repeat something I wrote earlier about Be Scofield’s journalism: I’m glad that she went undercover to infiltrate an allegedly sketchy spiritualist’s den to shine some light. I think she was courageous and that her work can contribute valuable perspectives to a broader Integral synthesis which includes rebuttals from the targets of her attacks as well as mainstream journalists who will apply more stringent standards for evidence. There’s a “partial, but useful” role for muckraking of her sort, whether it’s applied to the New Age community, the Integral scene, or anywhere else.
But it also needs to be scrutinized and relativized as I have done, and we ought to learn a lesson from her mistakes: even the best-intentioned people often do at least as much harm in the world as we do good and we do so over and over again, not because the values we hold are wrong, but because they are held like a blindfold over our own eyes to obscure a more awakened reality.
* mean green meme: A catchy term for pathological pluralistic consciousness.
The Mean Green Meme (MGM) refers to the quasi-fascistic, socially stagnant, self-corrupting and anti-evolutionary forms of postmodernity. It utilizes but degrades the normal cognitive and temperamental complexity of this level of “meta-” intelligence. This not only makes actual Green Consciousness weaker but also inflames (by justifying) the upset of Modern and Traditionalist cultural agents who view Progressive Postmodernity as a surrender of all the holy attainment of human civilization.
Etymology: Used by Ken Wilber to describe the deleterious social effects of the imbalanced “Green” phase of social and cognitive consciousness — truncating the use of “value-memes” in Spiral Dynamics. (Source: Doowikis)
A Response to Aleta S. on Resilience in Communities of Trust
I am one of those Integralists who longs for the arrival of a more substantial integral community, one based on Integral Spirituality and branching out into all aspects of our interconnected lives. I’m convinced that the green rejection of organized religion in favor of spirituality is a temporary phenomenon; that Integral calls us to both/and solutions that will eventually put spirituality and religion back together again.
I’m also slowly becoming convinced that the church walls that enclose the world religions today will eventually become too confining for second-tier individuals as they continue to evolve; that they will increasingly gravitate towards interfaith, interspiritual, and translineage approaches to spirit… and therefore could very well find themselves on the outside of the old faith structures by choice or excommunication. So it’s good to start thinking ahead to what possibilities exist for community when we start to look ahead to what may be coming.
In reply to “Is the ‘Integral movement’ basically about ‘individual attainment’?”, Aleta S. writes:
I collaborated with the late Rev. Tom Thresher at Integral Spiritual Nexus. Tom once said that “faith communities have an essential role to play in helping individuals develop the kind of interior resilience that they’re going to need in this world. This kind of resilience will allow them to participate deeply in communities of trust and caring. From that foundation they can go out and help make the changes in the world that are so essential… faith communities have something no other institution has. We own the great stories that give our lives meaning. We have society’s permission to change people at the level of their soul. And, perhaps most important, we have time to work with people to make the deep changes that are required by our world.”
While I was working to bring various faith communities together to work on the world problems, Tom cautioned me that I was wasting my time until people were able to change the interior individual quadrant. Perhaps we both suffered from a form of quadrant absolutism. Or we may have benefited from a coherent We space.
Does resilience come before communities of trust and caring or with such communities?
Great question. I don’t know the answer, though I’m passionately concerned that the Integral movement find out the answer for itself. As you know, I’ve had an interest in the topic of “Integral spiritual community” for several years now and have hoped that I would see something come into the world. I’m still watching and waiting, and writing and “righting the way” if it’s meant to come to pass.
For what it’s worth, there’s some imagery around the appearance of Sacred Words in The Kalendar that give food for thought to those whose imagination/intuition is ready. (The Kalendar is part of my Worldview Artistry, one which builds upon Lingua-U).
Three such words appear in the Season of Yin — which I associate with the second-tier of consciousness (green, teal, turquoise, and indigo): Sangha, Community, and Church. Let me tell fables about these Sacred Words and see if they resonate with you on some level. (Technically, these fables are called Ngoungong, or “new stories about the elemental energies of thought” or simply “meta-fables”).
Fable One: Sangha. Sangha appears at the start of the Season of Yin, at the very first Seat (the Seat of Basis at the Letter of Self-Sensing). The story told by the word Sangha is mainly that of a base for the self in its quest for enlightenment. The Sangha is at the “root” of the entire Season of Yin, so every aspect of the self’s enlightenment including its work in the world and its development of powers of the siddha are all connected and supported and reinforced from the Sangha.
Sangha is the yung to the yin of the Sacred and the Spirit at the Letter of Self-Sensing, so it is always already with us. As yung, it joins us to the yang of Safety, spiritual safety. It is one with the Svaadhiʃθaanə(self’s root) to six marks of subtlety. It doesn’t have to be established. It already exists.
Fable Two: Community. Community appears at the very middle of the Season of Yin, the Seat of Concern at the Letter of Constructing. Its story is that of the Container in which the Ethos (social soul) is taken up. The Turquoise Earth (turquoise) is the carrier that brings the Goose which lays The Golden Eggs (teal), and the Community is its essence. The Goose who lays the Golden Egg is nowhere in sight during the Month of the Green Forest; it appears in the following month, as the yin to the yung of God/Goddess and the yang of Advaita (Vedantic nonduality). The self is completely faded away in Community, but it is accepted through Agape. The Community is the carrier of the Culture and the hub of Communication at the Season of Yin, but it is also the Keeper of Occult knowledge, so don’t assume that all wisdom is transparent at this point in time.
Although it is common for people today to speak of “the Integral community” it is also common to hear other people deny the existence of any such thing. I think today it may be more accurate to say that the Integral movement has an Ethos (a social soul), but that soul is still rather incorporeal. The Ethos is at the cross-point between Green and Teal, but before a solid Community can emerge, the challenges suggested by several words must be faced and overcome: Shadow, Emptiness, Enlightenment, Enfolding, Upright, Goodness, Government, Advaita (Vedantic nonduality), Attentiveness, Gunas (a ternary model of subtle energy), God, and Guru (or Guardian). Perhaps when enough people come together who have a common understanding of terms such as these, and the emotional and spiritual capacity to bring complex responses to them into the world, we will finally have the preconditions of Community. If we fail to achieve that, well then, it’s (literally) Chaos.
Fable Three: Church. Church appears in the central part of the final chapter of the Season of Yin, at the Seat of Concern in the Letter of Challenge (the middle part of indigo). Its archetypal story is similar to that of King Arthur and the Holy Grail: an exceptional person, a group of committed disciples or acolytes (the Knights of the Round Table), and a quest for the Holy Grail (Chalice). The Church does not form without a need; it must first be presented with a Challenge, an Existential crisis or perhaps even the threat of Extinction for our species. It arises in response to the yang of the Ethos (social soul) and yin of Community as the yung of Church.
It works like a butter churn at a dairy farm: through cranking motions it converts cream into butter. The social soul and community are made thicker, richer, and more potent in their essence. But whereas a churn makes butter that is consumed, a Church makes… the Letter of Challenge itself. Well, in Lingua-U at least. The Church is self-reflexive (the /ch/ sound repeated at front and end). Therefore, the goal of Church is to Challenge those within it and those who are not a part of it. The Holy Grail is always beckoning, never finally confiscated.
Bonus Fable: There’s one more word that I haven’t told a fable about, and that’s Organization. This word waits until the final Throne — 27 out of 27 — in the Season of Yin before it appears. It is literally the yin to the yang of Order in the world at the Seat of Actualization at the Throne of Jazz/Order; it is adorned in the perfume of Jasmine and likes to dance to Jazz and get jacked. It is one with the subtle energy of the Organism to an astonishing 18 marks of subtlety. Its mode of knowing is a yung form of oracular knowing that enfolds both the yang of meta-systemic empiricism and the yin of cross-paradigmatic cognition. Its activity is governed by the yang of the OM/AUM (Shakti) of Yoga, the revelations of Oomoto of Shinto, and the Omphalos of Delphi, mediated through Jesus (who we may think of, for these purposes, with the English pronunciation of /jizəz/, indicative of the spirit of Generosity and Generativity that is yung to the yang of the Jeopardy of Existence, past the yin of Owiazka, the Polish word for Sacrificial Lamb, at the Seat of Structure of the Letter of Generativity. If the Season of Yin began with a repudiation of old forms of organized religion, the Season of Yin will end with the formation of new Organizations that are difficult for us to characterize at this time. Really, no one knows what they will look like.
So, such fables aside, I understand you are contemplating the nature of resilience and whether it comes before or after the arrival of spiritual community. I’m sorry that my answer veered so badly from your original question onto an unexpected detour! I’ve just got metalanguage on the mind this afternoon.
Upon reflection, I think each of these different sorts of things — sanghas, communities, churches, and organizations — nurture us differently and send us on different sorts of journeys, and so it could go either way.
I know I’m going to get asked this eventually, so let me address the topic explicitly. What’s a guy who wrote Soulfully Gay, the memoir of his integral spiritual development, doing talking about being bisexual or homoflexible? Gay is not bisexual. Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?
Yes and no. If you read the book and not just the title, you would have heard how I came out of the closet first as bisexual and only later identified as gay. In fact, as a Harvard senior, I had the opportunity to enroll in the world’s first-ever college course devoted to bisexuality (Robin Ochs taught it at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991). If you’ve only been paying attention to the labels I have worn like a garment and not stripped them off, then you’ve only been looking at half of me.
Truthfully, from age 20 to age 23, I identified as bisexual, not gay. But I was open about my preference: I was not a “Kinsey 3”, exactly half-way between homosexual and heterosexual. Few self-identified bisexuals are, in fact. My preference was on the gay side of the street, and anyone who asked about my preference as opposed to my orientation knew this. I didn’t think of my homosexuality as a rigid orientation which I could not shake off so much as it was the side of the sexuality street I was more inclined naturally to be comfortable playing on. Make sense?
I only stopped identifying as bisexual after testing HIV positive (at age 24) and realizing that my life’s choices were probably going to be drawn from a shorter menu than I had previously contemplated. I wanted to find a partner, preferably one who was also HIV+. Basically, I looked at two exigencies: first, by looking for another partner who was also HIV+ there were many more gay men than straight or bi women who were HIV+; second, biphobia among gay men meant that if I refused to also identify as gay I would likely be seen negatively. And who wants to be thought of as a “sexual orientation traitor”? (Yes, someone actually called me that when I came out as bi and didn’t always see the same way as the “politically correct” party line.)
Once I grew comfortable identifying as gay and no longer actively sought out female partners, everything got a little bit easier for me socially as an HIV+ man. I think that’s what postmodern theorists call “monophilic privilege”.
There’s actually at least one term for what I was back then: a gay-identified bisexual. It is more or less what it sounds like. It’s someone who has bisexual feelings and attractions, but calls himself gay for whatever reason. This is not to say that I ever “chose” to be gay, only that given the many different curve balls that life threw at me from prenatal hormones to genes to socio-cultural ideologies, I really had very little choice other than deciding to be myself or live a miserable life of denial, lies, and distortions.
Now many of you are probably saying “who cares”, and I applaud your tolerance. Many people keep such topics private, but as an author I have something of a professional responsibility to deal with the public dimension of the topics that I choose to write about. I won’t labor the point.
What changed that I am now calling myself bisexual? Sometime in 2011, I was separated from my then-boyfriend and started thinking about what it meant to be single again. I realized that I didn’t care anymore about whether my next potential mate was a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and so I started practicing a bit of homoflexibility before I even knew there was a term for it. Shortly after this time, my boyfriend and I got back together and we stuck out a monogamous partnership for another five or six years. So I went back to being gay, which is basically where I landed.
I’m not going to call Shambhala and tell them to change the title of my memoir to Soulfully Bisexual. It’s fine just the way it is. I’ve lived the vast majority of my entire adult life as a gay man and that’s unlikely to change. But times have changed, both in terms of my views and the cultural views. The younger generation is increasingly rejecting rigid sexual orientation labels for themselves, and that’s a bit of cultural evolution at work.
I believe in wearing labels around sexuality lightly; it’s not the social identity that penetrates to the soul or spirit level, it’s the intermixing of homophilia and heterophilia (and homo-Eros and hetero-Eros) in the subtle and spiritual realms (for more, see Soulfully Gay). Nor does having a sexual identity have to be a preoccupation: I’m also okay with not being with anyone else romantically or sexually at the moment. But if I choose to date again, it’s just another aspect of being amorously human.
