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How Integralists Can Participate in Conversations with Believers and Doubters

I saw an article by Carol Kuruvilla, the HuffPo religion reporter, come across my feed today that educates Christians about how they should avoid talking to doubters in various insensitive ways.

The best thing about the article: Its advice that doubters ought to encourage Christians to “learn to step into someone else’s shoes and try to see how your words and actions are being received.” Indeed, it is through an expansion of empathy and up-leveled perspective-taking that many tensions can be diffused or avoided.

The worst thing about the article: Steeped in flatland presuppositions, it refuses to acknowledge that the fact of development is very often the central implicit issue behind the conflicts. It’s not about Christians v. doubters; it’s often about people in a traditionalist mode of life locking horns with people transitioning into a modern mode. In terms of James Fowler’s stages of faith, we are talking about people in Mythic-Literal stages talking to people transitioning to Synthetic-Conventional or Individuative-Reflective stages.

There are many reasons Kuruvilla’s avoidance of the topic of development shortchanges her readers. One of them: she doesn’t allow the doubters to expand their own awareness of the dynamics of the conflict to allow the Christian their own space to hold their own developmentally appropriate worldview without judgment or to frame their disagreements as simply a moment in time which will eventually pass away and which affords everyone an opportunity for learning and awareness of Spirit’s movements through holarchical patterns.

Many times, at a certain stage of development (possibly that Individuative-Reflective stage that Fowler talks about), a former Christian or doubting Christian can get overly preoccupied with a narcissistic occupation with their own feelings, their own hurts, and yes even their own doubts and beliefs. That’s when their sensitive self bristles at any slight to their ego, however minor. Perhaps Kuruvilla is speaking out of the concerns of this stage when she lists 6 offensive phrases that Christians must avoid at all costs to protect the feelings of other people, and then she writes:

Instead of using the offensive phrases like the ones listed above, try this instead.
Recognize that your words and actions may not be helping and that in fact, they can make things even worse.

Yes, indeed. The sad truth is that so far as many integralists have been able to observe, when two people are situated at different stages of faith and they start talking at one another in an effort to help the other person, their words have the opposite effect instead. Talk about a frustrating situation!

But this is true BOTH for the Christian and the ex-Christian, for the traditionalist and the modernist, or the Amber believer and the Orange doubter (to use terms from Integral Theory). When people at a later stage of faith start insisting that people at an earlier stage of faith act in a way that is foreign to their mode of existence, then they are also acting problematically.

And so we are back to encouraging empathy and expanded perspective-taking from all parties. That’s my primary integrally-informed recommendation for all parties concerned in a nutshell, at both levels.

I think that this recommendation can honestly help, but let’s not fool ourselves. Both the typical traditionalist and the typical doubter are probably deeply convinced that they are thinking about the nature of things in a given representation of reality that is not only real-to-them but real-for-everyone.

If both mythic believer and reflective doubter began to take seriously the idea of development then this bedrock presupposition of both their worldviews would begin to collapse; reality might seem to shift underneath their feet. Their conscious and unconscious mind would seek to protect themselves from the disequilibrium.

(Note that I’m not saying that my own perspective isn’t true, only that it is partly a construction situated in myriad contexts and therefore it is only more or less implicitly real-for-everyone, not actually real-for-everyone.)

Unless they are ready to move on to a more expanded level of their own consciousness, wherever they are at, then the Integralist ought not to expect too much change by offering their own well-intended advice. Oftentimes, we must learn to just let it be, not because we approve of people causing each other offense and suffering, but because wisdom itself appears to suggest acting carefully in order to allow Spirit to take the reigns in order to bring about a win-win-win situation that perhaps no one expected or could have planned.

What do I mean by “win-win-win”?

• A win for the Christian: they feel accepted and affirmed in all that is vital about their faith and they have done what they could to help others see what they see.

• A win for the doubter: their ego is strengthened by letting go of attachment to needing a particular response from someone incapable of it. They may also be content with the knowledge that they have planted seeds of doubt in another.

• And a win for the integralist: we may witness the dualistic drama as framing our own internal struggles, two phases of our own past development, and thereby heal a part of ourselves by being a part of the process as a sort of “universal donor” to all parties. And of course, we have helped to heal the conflict between others, thereby helping to create a more harmonious world.

Integralists Must Find Ways to Give the World Something to Say “Yes” To

Stephen Colbert once said,

“Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying “yes” begins things. Saying “yes” is how things grow. Saying “yes” leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say “yes’.”

I’ve been thinking now and then about cynicism and the ways to make it obsolete, or at least unnecessary. I like what Colbert says on the subject, but there’s even more we can say about that Yes.

As I get ready to undertake a new blog, I  paused for a moment to reflect on the ways that my old blogs had disappointed or upset people in the past. It wasn’t an easy thing to consider because I can easily strike a self-righteous pose, convinced that I am doing important work on behalf of global spiritual evolution and most people who don’t appreciate that have a serious problem!

The folks in my online community with whom I have tended to butt antlers have something in common: they are pretty cynical about many things, religion and politics top of the list. Anything “Establishment” is something to be forcefully opposed in their eyes, whether it is a movement leader, a spiritual guru, or a politician who plays by the rules in order to succeed.

These community members are hardly unique. A streak of cynicism and irritation at anyone who seems arrogant or condescending or holier-than-thou runs strong in American culture. At its best, the Integral movement swims upstream against this tendency, insisting that out of fragmentation can come wholeness, out of partiality can come unity, and out of many relative perspectives can come overlapping agreement and increasing degrees of truth.

Over many years of writing blogs related to integral spirituality in some way, some of the other writers and bloggers who I singled out for criticism and their friends took a dislike to me. A few left the Integral community on their own to pursue other interests more in line with their temperament, but a few of them stayed around its online forums to throw tomatoes at Integral spiritual leaders, criticize Integral philosophy and political theory, and attack anyone who utilized developmental terminology as committing an outrageous misdeed.

One guy called me an “arrogant know-it-all”, but I’m not sure their problem was really with me. I think their problem was with the integral philosophy and the movement it has inspired, and they lashed out at me for showing them how far they had differentiated themselves from it.

The mismatch between these folks and our communal values got so bad in the most prominent Integral online forum in 2016, so “unintegral”, so devolved from any semblance of actual Integral theory and practice, that the forum administrator actually temporarily renamed the group. Robb Smith removed “Integral” from its title, proclaiming that the group was not particularly constructive but heavily deconstructive in its orientation.

I tell you this so to make the point that although in this particular subculture that separated themselves from Smith’s group I was not a well-liked personality, it was not merely about my personal relational style. After all, people can just rub each other the wrong way when they are both passionately committed to being part of the same community yet they see the world in starkly different ways.

The integral community seemed at times to be dividing itself among the heterodox and orthodox, in parallel perhaps to the split in the 19th-century among the left Hegelians and the right Hegelians, and I stood with those who wanted to preserve and constructively build upon our valuable intellectual tradition. At the same time, I resented the implication that I was “orthodox” and was simply a “follower of Ken Wilber“, since anyone who read my writings knew that my intellectual stance had nothing to do with assent to an authority figure and everything to do with discovering that my own best insights were similar to those of an entire intellectual movement — the “evolutionaries” as Carter Phipps called them, so why not learn from each other and work together when we can?

The cynics helped me to understand the challenges that Integralists will face in having any sort of public mission. People who can’t “see” a spectrum of consciousness invariably believe that individuals who claim a high level of spiritual realization are “inflated” or “egotistical” or “narcissistic” or just “full of shit”. For this reason it’s important for Integralists to learn to deal with being misunderstood and negatively characterized.

So that’s what I’m writing to share with all of you. I’m a worldview artist with a bold vision about the future of religion, politics, culture, and spirit. I could go without defining myself in a way that could draw suspicious remarks, but that wouldn’t help advance the collective culture of this movement as it cuts new grooves in consciousness. I am willing to draw some friendly fire and let people talk about my successes and failures, if they are drawn to do so.

I hear the cynics, especially when they show up in my own online community, and feel compassion. I want the world to be a place where cynics have no more reasons to be cynical. That’s what a more divinized world looks like to me. But I can’t change the hearts and minds of a diehard cynic on my own; all I can do is try to give them something, however flawed, to say Yes to. As Stephen Colbert might say, it’s up to them to replace self-imposed blindness with true wisdom.

I have a dream that together integralists can unite to make cynicism obsolete or at least unnecessary by giving the world something powerful and beautiful to say Yes to. Pessimism, suspicion, doubt, scorn, disparagement, and skepticism will not disappear entirely, but they do not need to be the leading demeanor, a pernicious default attitude, for so many. Hope, optimism, trust, goodwill, appreciation, and enlightenment can replace them. Are you with me on this vision?