CategorySpirituality

A Look at “Sacred Economics” by Charles Eisenstein

(Photo: Ben White on Unsplash)

An economics based on Integral Theory is distant, says Christian Arnsperger in “Integral Economics: A Manifesto” (2007), neither being resonant with the materialistic dogma of unlimited economic growth nor sounding sufficiently like “science”, which to economists is a thoroughly positivistic and reductionistic affair. If modern economics is stripped of the interiors within individual and cultural whole/parts (holons), the rising of a more Integral economics instead would put humanity back into the economic discipline.

By including such interiority, Arnsperger theorizes, economics would be populated with people who are real subjects with desires, fears, states of consciousness, stages of consciousness, irrational drives, shadows, etc. Economics could include disciplines like psychoanalysis and social history … even existentialism and critical theory. What Christian is envisioning is a science with living subjects and literary modes and meaningful facts in all major perspectives (quadrants) and all levels of consciousness.

To get closer to this ideal, Integral thinkers need to start by taking seriously economic data and interpretations that have been widely overlooked by positivist economists. This includes the realm of spirituality. In this regard, it is worth quoting Arnsperger at length:

Today’s real capitalist agents—as opposed to the abstract, disincarnated homo economicus of evolutionary game theory and of complex-systems modeling—have deep-seated fears, desires, instincts, cultural preconceptions, and so on, which account both for the high performance and for the awful effects of global capitalism. On the normative side, work on a Buddhist economics, on a Christian economics, or on an “Enlightenment” economics would be extremely helpful to delineate paradigmatic ideals of economic organization and economic agency towards which conscious evolution might be geared in a liberation-oriented economy. These would be ‘paradigmatic’ in Wilber’s extended sense, i.e., they would be based on actual evidence that being a Buddhist, Christian or generally enlightened agent is possible, and that building a caring, compassionate economy is feasible, because such things has happened in actual fact and because there are accounts of such individuals and systems throughout human history. It’s about time we reached for such paradigms in order to consciously evolve toward our highest potentials.

Arnsperger’s vision is an example of a more evolved style of economics, one that can pave the way towards an economics of the Global-Mind (turquoise). Global-Mind, i.e., mature Integral consciousness, has the potential to attend to all aspects of life and work for individuals, neighborhoods, nations, and global holons. It would know the human being as having a holistic spiritual intelligence — an understanding of human nature that is truly beyond the selfish egos of modern economics and the tribalistic collectives of postmodern economics.

Reconnecting Money to Spirit and Matter

It is from something very close to Christian’s integral economics manifesto that I think we need to appreciate and critique Charles Eisenstein’s important book Sacred Economics (2011). Eisenstein is an author, speaker, and “de-growth activist” who has written an illuminative, sustained, and thoughtful attempt to apply postmodern (green) wisdom and approaches to baffling and critical problems in the world. Unfortunately, it leaves the Integral reader sometimes frustrated and concerned with regard to its potential use in the real world.

“Postmodernism” in my usage today is basically a worldview which emerged in the late modern era in opposition to many of modernity’s disasters: its crony capitalism, its coarse materialism, its cultural imperialism, its exploitation of the environment, and so on. Eisenstein’s postmodernism includes many of postmodernism’s most prominent dignities: a high level of responsiveness to human needs, an affiliative sensibility based on organizing a new gift economy, and a somewhat relativistic approach to values (situational and pragmatic, not absolutistic).

More problematically, Charles’s philosophy also features an openness to Romantic ideals such as a thoroughly optimistic view of human nature and an unrealistic idealization of indigenous spirituality based on caricatures. By inappropriately idealizing his sources of inspiration, he runs the risk of offering unrealistic solutions in his own right.

Sacred Economics contains a multi-faceted program defined in reflections on not paying debt, a critique of usury, wealth redistribution, economic “de-growth”, plus smart critiques of both socialism and New Age notions of “money as energy”. The task ahead for humankind may be best summed up in Eisenstein’s formula for describing the new money system he wants to create:

Sharing instead of greed, equality instead of polarization, enrichment of the commons instead of its stripping, and sustainability instead of growth. As well, this new kind of money system will embody an even deeper shift that we see happening today, a shift in human identity toward a connected self, bound to all being in the circle of the gift.

From an Integral perspective, Eisenstein is basically describing the evolution of money from a modern (orange) perspective to a postmodern (green) perspective. He pictures a critical mass of the population growing up in consciousness from a modern to postmodern self-sense, replacing the Cartesian-defined self with a “connected self” common at more developed stages.

When Eisenstein’s book was first published (2011), there was more optimism in America for believing in a progress out of materialistic modern capitalism to a gift-based postmodern communitarian vision. Alas, Donald Trump’s presidency brought a devolution or “evolutionary self-correction” (as Wilber puts it). Therefore, we must remember that evolutionary progress is not guaranteed, it is only a possibility to be obtained through striving and destiny.

The Prophet and the Systems Integrator

Normative, spiritual ideas based on postmodern mysticism are not the usual fodder for economics, but there’s a place for them as part of an Integral synthesis. Sacred Economics doesn’t really provide complete answers or even roadmaps for getting to the promised land, but its ideas can help to model experimental, non-totalizing prototypes for revisioning a wide variety of aspects of our economic life, bringing our materialistic desires and spiritual ideals into greater harmony.

However, it is difficult to see many of these ideas actually getting off the page and into real life. One important reason for this is that as a postmodernist, Eisenstein is talking largely to others who share postmodernism’s values and he doesn’t offer a compelling way to persuade readers at other value memes (e.g., traditionalist and modernist) to climb on board the train.

For example, Charles wants to see “equality rather than polarization” in the new order, but is this equality of opportunity or equality of results? Does prioritizing the value of equality mean rejecting ideas of merit or bulldozing value hierarchies? Traditionalists, modernists, and many others would probably have many reasons to balk at the economic program.

The progressive postmodernist’s values are not everybody else’s values. Perhaps there is a way to for thought leaders to harmonize notions of equality enough across value memes so that they could be useful for shared economic programs among traditionalists, modernists, postmodernists, and others, but Charles does not seem interested in that, except to lift the spirituality of premodern religions out of context for appropriation.

Eisenstein is best seen as a prophet of systemic doom of the old economic systems (and the fires are indeed burning!), not as a meta-systemic integrator of new economic and spiritual dimensions. Generally speaking, postmodernists think systemically; Integral thinkers think meta-systemically. Integralists can’t just say “To hell with capitalism!” and demand that all systems in existence need to be shut down, they have to attempt to show how multiple intertwined socio-economic and cultural systems can interoperate and segue.

Like elite I.T. systems integrators, Integralists must concern themselves with the health of many different systems running on many different operating systems, and somehow get them all to talk to each other because the older systems must continue to be viable and operable for many decades to come. All have to be operating in good working order for the whole system to function (at least until finally, much longer than anyone ever anticipated, the legacy mainframes can finally be retired).

Note that because Integralists see the value of preserving a whole tier of co-existing systems, postmodernists often paint them as “conservatives” on this account. Though the greens would say it as a smear against the teals and the turquoises, such conservation is nothing to be ashamed of. All the value memes across the whole spectrum of consciousness have dignities of their own which must be respected and defended.

Conclusion

Even if Eisenstein’s economic program could be tested, I’m afraid that the key ideas would be doomed in execution. Postmodernism fails to understand the depth of the grip of other value memes on human civilization, especially aggressive self-interested economic activity, the sort known as Warrior Culture (red). Its failure stems also from a conception of human nature without sufficient regard for evil or sinfulness.

A question: Wouldn’t an economy based on sharing be defeated militarily by an alternative empire based on Warrior/Pirate values that sought to exploit its peaceful nature? Don’t look to Eisenstein for an answer to this simple question; it doesn’t seem to concern him.

Like others who bring postmodern values to the forefront of economics, he hasn’t fully grappled with the propensity of human beings to value self-interest over communal values until they have already reached a relatively high level of ethical development. What is the beautiful gift economy with its glorious economic commons to do when it is overrun by freeloaders, grifters, trolls, vandals, and unethical hackers? Surrender, apparently.

Postmodern thinkers usually insist on anti-capitalism and some sort of collectivism. This gets some things right and other things wrong. There are elements of postmodern economics that can be lifted up and incorporated into an Integral economics that is methodologically plural, one that allows roles for all sorts of actors (local, national, global) at all levels (orange capitalists, green communitarians, etc.) while we work, sometimes seemingly at cross-purposes, for new systems to emerge beyond the old models (teal/turquoise).

Integral economics not as anti-capitalism or anti-socialism, but as post-capitalism and post-socialism.

At the end of the day, there is no conveyor belt to such a higher-level consciousness contained in Sacred Economics, only a mélange of well-intended ideas that may offer a mirage rather than an exit from our most vexing problems. Latching onto Eisenstein’s new economic ethos of “de-growth” is no complete remedy for our maladies. Not because it is too extreme a measure, but because it may be too weak a response to the complexities of our current situation.

Our most fundamental problem isn’t that there is too much wealth being created through industry; it is the lack of an operational Global-Mind (turquoise) with institutional authority and a market-based and regulation-tempered program for alleviating the quagmires posed by unchecked economic development. Perhaps this is a distant pipe-dream, or perhaps the next great and indispensable step towards its realization is as near as your next act of surrender, acceptance, and synergistic way of being in the world.

We stand in need of a new Integral economics which brings the interiors of individuals and collectives, including sacred matters, into the analysis of social goods. Our hope ought to lie not merely in shifting a Cartesian self into a “connected self” but in the rising up of the Global-Mind, a mature post-postmodern consciousness, one that has learned to apply its evolutionary awareness and holistic spiritual intelligence to the solving of urgent global problems through collective action.

Plenty Integral (That Is, If We’re Not Talking About Stages), and Here’s Why

(Photo: Official 2013 White House photo by David Lienemann)

Joe Biden is not a scholar or a deep philosophical thinker. He is not the son of scientists or doctors or executives. He is a father and grandfather from humble blue-collar roots who has survived tragic losses. He is a professional politician with a natural talent for relationship-building that has served him well doing Senate negotiations, international relations, and retail politics on the street.

He would neither recognize the term “Integralist” nor use it for himself (he is a devout Roman Catholic). But an Integralist might reasonably ask: how do we look at the U.S. president-elect from an Integral level of consciousness? and: How “Integral” is Joe Biden?

By “Integral”, I am speaking of a certain way of looking at and being in the world that is developmentally-aware. And when developmentalists look at the sphere of American politics, they tell us that there are certain undeniable patterns that emerge, worldviews, or basic units of culture that inform our values and political orientations.

In Developmental Politics, Steve McIntosh distinguishes between several different major worldviews in American culture: the traditional worldview with “Heritage Values” such as patriotism and religious faith; the fiscally conservative modern worldview with “Liberty Values” such as individual rights and limited government; the liberal modern worldview with “Fairness Values” such as protecting minority rights and an activist government; and the progressive worldview with “Caring Values” such as protecting the environment, championing multiculturalism, and expanding social justice.

McIntosh explains that conflicts among these four major worldviews are the basis of the “culture wars” that have played such a large role in American politics in recent decades. He also holds that the culture wars are not interminable because they can be resolved by a higher consciousness:

Unlike the standard modernist approach of making tactical compromises to try to get most of what our side wants, developmental [Integral] politics seeks to include the values of each camp into the mix from the beginning because it actually affirms these values and wants to see them forwarded. At the level of conventional political issues we’re often faced with a win-lose proposition. But at the level of bedrock values it becomes possible to discover something closer to a win-win solution, even if such a solution does not completely satisfy all parties. Simply put, a developmental approach to politics seeks to accommodate the concerns of all sides, not just to get its way, but to make authentic progress for all sides by creating new value agreements.

In McIntosh’s conception, which I think is a valid and important approach to an Integral Politics, the work of forging compromises between differing political factions can be an expression of a transformation in values from one level of development to another. This value transformation is key to what we might call an “Integral method” of doing politics, or simply, the creation of “Integral dignities”.

Three Bidenesque Integral Dignities

Even though Joe Biden has probably never studied interdisciplinary metatheory or any similar esoteric intellectual domain, he nevertheless walks in the world in a manner that is rich with Integral dignities. In other words, his basic approach to politics is that of one who reconciles conflicting value systems through the hard work of getting agreement on tough issues, forging a new level of coherence.

I will flesh out this understanding of Biden’s politics in a moment by talking about three specific Integral dignities, but even if I convince you that Biden practices one sort of Integral Politics, it’s important to stress that this isn’t the only valid and important way of walking in the world with an Integral Politics.

There are fluid positions for Integral politicians on the right, center, left, and other stations (but there should be no rigid, ideologically-fixed identities). There are persons with an “Integral consciousness” who may identify predominantly with one or more of McIntosh’s key values: Heritage Values, Liberty Values, Fairness Values, or Caring Values.

And there are Integral people working within every political party and trans-partisan endeavors. As for me, I’m an Integral Democrat (but I would happily vote outside my party if there’s a viable candidate who is a better fit for the role).

The Evolver-in-Chief: The First Integral Dignity

Some of you Integralists reading this are possibly having coughing fits at the notion of Biden as an Integral politician. You might be thinking: how could he be? He has never quoted an Integral thinker or used an evolutionary theoretical framework in his speeches?

I think this is a big confusion when looking at development, the idea that one must trace one’s biography in a philosophically coherent framework for development to be real. The truth is that on at least one hugely important developmental line – emotional intelligence – Biden’s life story has given him a constantly expansive and evolving capacity for worldcentric love and care.

Depth psychologists understand that one of the biggest movers of human consciousness from one level to another is the capacity to overcome grief. Mourning breaks down certainties and symbols of coherence into new capacities for meaning-making. In Biden’s life, he has overcome losses in his personal life without losing his open-heartedness and has expanded that concern to members of his political tribe, to his country, and even to the world.

At a time of a global pandemic with all the suffering it entails, Americans have selected a “healer in chief” as our president-elect partly because we rightly sense that he is the man for the occasion. Biden can be the emotional physician for healing a sick nation—and Integralists understand that this is so because of his advanced emotional intelligence, one that has expanded the scope of its empathy beyond egocentric concerns until it embraced the whole world (and beyond into the spiritual realm).

The Scientific Spiritualist: The Second Integral Dignity

Biden campaigned for president as a spiritual person (notably, by attending Mass on election day) and as a man with reverence for science (notably, by wearing masks to comply with scientific public health recommendations). So, it is worth noting that the ability to do both of these things is one of the hallmarks of the Integral worldview.

McIntosh defines “cultural transcendence”, a key concept of Integral consciousness, as

a new collective higher purpose for American society that finds its truth in the intersection of science and spirituality.

He says that cultural transcendence, or values transformation, is a sort of “technology of agreement”.

So far as Integral “super-powers” go, “cultural transcendence” is basically the ability to depolarize a polarized country. The superhero rescues a nation bitterly divided into warring factions by getting them to see beyond their cultural prejudices, even those in his own party and ideology.

It makes sense that Joe stands a good chance at reconciling the conflicts abounding between the modern scientific worldview and the traditional religious worldview because these worldviews are reconciled in himself. He can draw on his personal journey of self-integration when he works on issues involving human rights, religious freedom, the role of science in government, and so on.

In short, Biden is more likely than other politicians to see ways of reconciling apparent polarities in modern and traditional worldviews because the same opposing forces have become complementary energies within himself like yin and yang.

The Pragmatic Uniter: The Third Integral Dignity

Another Integral dignity relates to the ability to reconcile pragmatism with idealism. Like Barack Obama before him who spoke of “No Red States and Blue States”, and walking in the footsteps of George W. Bush who said he was a “Uniter, Not a Divider”, Joe Biden delivered an acceptance address tonight which was a message of unity. His message was a response to a political climate that is widely acknowledged as extremely polarized and toxic, filled with demonization and hostility.

Now, in certain times and places, a political message of unity would not be appropriate. Some historical conditions call for a radical or revolutionary spirit (i.e., the spirit of Eros) and others call for a radical conservative spirit (i.e., the spirit of Agape). But the wise Integralist understands that political theory needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the moment, conserving what needs to be conserved and reforming what needs to be reformed, or even supporting extreme measures in extreme situations.

Biden’s pragmatic spirit is obvious, but couldn’t this be seen not as a dignity but as a disaster, an unprincipled accommodation to a corrupt political system? Indeed, it could, if the pragmatism becomes divorced from the idealism. Likewise, if idealism becomes unmoored from pragmatism, it becomes a disaster in its own right, or “the perfect becoming the enemy of the good” as we say.

Conclusion

I have suggested that the question of Joe Biden’s “Integral-ness” ought to be framed as a matter of the extent to which he seems to embody characteristic norms of an Integral philosophy of life—namely, an evolutionary orientation, emotional intelligence, scientific spirit, spirituality, idealistic pragmatism, and a unifying orientation. There are many other qualities or norms of an Integral nature that we could talk about.

Obviously, not everyone who has some of these dignities would consider themselves an Integralist. And certainly not all Integralists have these dignities. But most Integralists will recognize these dignities as present in their own value systems. They will welcome these qualities in Biden because they have them in themselves.

You might be thinking: “There’s no way that Joe Biden is Integral. He’s boring!”

But I would say: “Don’t demand that Integral Politics always be exciting! That would be very immature of you. There’s a face of Integral Politics that is integrative rather than revolutionary, empathetic rather than lively, effective rather than astonishing, useful rather than avant garde. Biden’s face is not the only face worn by Integral Politics, but you’ve got to appreciate the authentic Integral dignities that he has or you’re leaving a lot out of the picture.”

In my view, Joe Biden’s election is a new day for America, one made all the more hopeful by virtue of his Integral dignities. These dignities endow him with the potential capacity for “cultural transcendence” necessary for solving our national polarization crisis, and he deserves the support of Integralists in his efforts to do so.

Spirit is Everything, Nothing is Separate from God

(Photo: liyavihola via BigStock.com)

I imagine that most Integralists probably have roughly similar ideas about God, and a valued place in our lives for God or Goddess or Allah or Spirit, by whatever name. One might also say, if one has belief, that God gives us a valued place in God’s world, and God reveals God’s self to us in its essential nature through evolving ways.

The Roman Catholic theologian Teilhard de Chardin, one of the major influencers of the Integral worldview, says in Hymn of the Universe:

So, far from light emerging gradually out of the womb of our darkness, it is the Light, existing before all else was made which, patiently, surely, eliminates our darkness. As for us creatures, of ourselves we are but emptiness and obscurity. But you, my God, are the inmost depths, the stability of that eternal milieu, without duration or space, in which our cosmos emerges gradually into being and grows gradually to its final completeness, as it loses those boundaries which to our eyes seem so immense. Everything is being; everywhere there is being and nothing but being, save in the fragmentation of creatures and the clash of their atoms.

In a similar observation, the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo wrote:

In the spiritual experience, we see God as the supreme Self or Spirit, or as the Being from whom we come and in whom we live and move. We see Nature as his Power or God as Power, Spirit in Power acting in ourselves and the world.

These renowned thinkers are suggesting that God or Self or Spirit is everywhere, from the farthest reaches of the cosmos to the most interior depths of the human heart. Where did Integralists come by this idea?

I would guess that significantly fewer than half of Integralists are regular churchgoers or active members of any formal religious community. Therefore, most of us have derived our understanding of God from a variety of loosely-defined places, including the “canon” of popular Ken Wilber books and Integral community trainings and the “tradition” of evolutionary spiritual thinkers from generations past (e.g., de Chardin and Aurobindo).

Beyond de Chardin and Aurobindo, other Integralists share some roughly similar ideas about the way things are in the grand scheme of things, but they do not use terminology with a religious-sounding origin. Some call themselves atheists or agnostics. They prefer to use terms such as Universe or Kosmos or Nature or All-That-Is or Sprit to speak of how we relate to all things. Also, they prefer to use terms like “I AMness” or Self to refer to the spiritual perception of all things with an emphasis on the inner being.

The Divine Spirit

Spirit, you may have noticed, is a term used by both religious and irreligious Integralists, so it is very useful for speaking to the entire community. I feel that it invokes the Holy Spirit of Christian faith to my ears (which suits me), but it also resonates with a variety of other perspectives from German Idealism to New Age to scientific panpsychism.

Perhaps most people who are comfortable describing their relationship to all things as a walk with Spirit would probably feel comfortable describing themselves as panentheistic. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, panentheism “considers God and the world to be inter-related with the world being in God and God being in the world.”

How these two faces of God are related is a matter of ongoing discussion among Integralists. For one view, the Integral/Metamodern thinker Layman Pascal says:

The God who is in the world (as participation in the dynamic interdependent co-arising) supercedes the God who supercedes the world.

Don’t confuse panentheism, which is belief in a transcendent reality and nature, with pantheism, which believes that all that exists is only nature, and God is nothing but nature. Why is this important? Partly, because a lot of Integralists prefer inclusion to exclusion. While the cosmos and its mysterious forces inspire many sublime feelings, few of us would say that they point to nothing beyond themselves, and we want to include everything (after all, evolution is all about bringing in a transcendent future).

One perspective that is rare among Integralists is that of atheistic scientific materialism, which is widely understood as a reductive philosophy that has no worthy view of science’s limits. Basically, we generally believe that we live in a world that we actively participate in, and the boundaries between the world “out there” and the world “in here” are ultimately illusory.

There are a few folks among us of a strong secular bent who express themselves much like scientific materialists do, but even they are usually forced to reject the materialistic doctrine along with (hopefully) the smug, arrogant stance of many modern scientific writers. Although few Integralists think that Integralism and militant atheism are compatible, many Integralists enjoyed the writings of the New Atheists when they were popular because they enjoy good spirited debates.

And then let’s not forget about the Metamodernists like “Hanzi Freinacht” who believe that the more evolved you become, the more secular you get. You might not be surprised to learn that Hanzi’s Metamodernism seems to be foremost a European phenomenon, which might explain their worship of secularism and their lack of serious interest in religion or spirituality as anything but an obsolete artifact.

If you ask me, it’s simply not true that a person’s evolution in worldview necessarily produces increasing secularization, though I suppose it depends on how terms like “secular” and “spiritual” and “religious” are defined. My opinion is that evolution produces more sophisticated, more inclusive, and more comprehensive consciousness, which may be interpreted in secular or spiritual or religious ways (with the advantage going to spiritualists or religionists with well-formed outlooks, because these views are nearly always less reductionist).

The Six Major Levels of God

One thing just about all Integralists can agree upon is that evolution in one’s view of God is real. There are all sorts of complexities, caveats, and nuances that ought to be spelled out, but today let’s just keep it short and sweet.

Ken Wilber once wrote pointedly in a BeliefNet column:

Put bluntly, there is an archaic God, a magic God, a mythic God, a mental God, and an integral God. Which God do you believe in?

Let us imagine a hypothetical person who has a spiritual journey along 6 major stations similar to the 5 mentioned by Wilber (who is simplifying 100+ different models of human development). I’ll call this person “Joe” or “Joey” because some details come from my own life experience.

IMPORTANT: The following short descriptions suggest just one possible way of passing through these stages. Your mileage will vary, but you can probably recognize some of these stages in your own story.

Level 0: Archaic

Baby Joey’s ability to see God is very different than ours because it is totally dominated by his survival needs. These needs appear as instinctual forces, e.g., drives for food, water, comfort, bonding, and safety. In a manner of speaking, these drives themselves are divinities. When Joey’s hunger demands food or pain demands comfort, these forces dominate his entire world.

The baby sees God in raw impulses and basic emotions. Worship of the archaic God is the satisfaction of drives and relief from fear. Faith is the cry of a needy infant, hoping for survival. Theology is inchoate primordial sensing.

Level 1: Magic

Little Joey, seated on his high-chair throne, sees God in his own ego and its ability to change a world of supernatural beings. He recognizes the divine power of relationships because the trusted bonds of family and ancestors are essential for living. His sense of right and wrong are not yet well developed, so he tends to obey his superiors without thinking about it. Rituals and traditions connect Joey to God because they generate miracles or ask God for intervention.

The magic God is the one where belonging to the tribe or clan is a source of power and magic. This God is known through belief in fairy-tales (e.g., sunshine is God’s smile and the rain is God’s tears). Faith is joining in the rite of passage that bonds people together in a community. Theology is feeling and folklore.

Level 2: Mythic

Joey is now old enough to receive instruction in prayers, listen to stories about Jesus Christ, and even serve as an altar boy in church services. God is a lot like his parents, but visible nowhere on Earth. God is in heaven, the place that people speak of when they look up into the blue sky. And you want very much to go to heaven when you die, because it is the reward for behaving according to God’s rules and moral teachings while you live, and much better than the hell that awaits sinners.

The child sees God mainly through the prism of stories about the divine. These stories give his life purpose, order, and steadiness. The mythic God is known by accepting guidance from a Higher Power other than one’s self, gaining membership in a supportive community, and atoning for the guilt caused by one’s immoral actions. Faith is enacted through communal acts of honoring and sacrifice. Theology is defending the source of ultimate authority for the community.

Level 3: Mental

Now in his college years, Joe has been educated by studying many modern thinkers. His religiosity has been challenged by historicist criticism of the Bible, the history of dogma, scientific theories, and the history of philosophy. God is a figure embattled with modernity, one who is constantly denied, attacked, and demythologized. Although Joe is no longer able to easily affirm the God of his religious upbringing, he nevertheless finds God as the infinite in the finite, the unconditioned in the conditioned, and the ground of being.

The mental God is the object of rational theorizing and philosophical debate, a new role for God that allows Joe to feel greater autonomy and independence. His mental concept of God as a ground of being gives him a way of combining a scientific, materialist understanding of the way the world works with a logical approach to religion. Faith is the optimism that bestows Joe with confidence in the progress of democracy over authority, science over superstition, and technology over backwardness. Theology is a way of thinking about God by thinking about human nature and destiny.

Level 4: Pluralistic

As Joe continues his studies into graduate school, he grows increasingly disenchanted with modernity. Although he maintains the same essential view of religion as problematic, he now begins to look down on rationality itself along with its truth-claims. Just as he once saw the manufactured nature of religious dogma as an impediment to faith, now he sees the history of science as full of arbitrary paradigm shifts, culturally relative claims, and oppressive power grabs. Joe begins to seek out marginalized experiences within his own life experience and that of the pluralistic multitude of suffering beings, and thereby come to a more sensitive, caring, and compassionate relationship to all things.

The pluralistic God is the divine presence in the lived experience and perspectives of the poor, oppressed, and marginalized persons. This praxis of God gives Joe a postmodern philosophy suitable for escaping the narrow worldview of materialistic, capitalistic, nature-raping modernity to find salvation in interdependence, consensus, respect for feelings, and working for the common good. Faith is finding God through the gospel of multiculturalism and wokeness. The cutting edge of thought is neo-Marxist, feminist, and liberation theology.

Level 5: Integral

Amidst a life complete with breathtaking highs and devastating lows, Joe arrives at a new order of meta-awareness, an opening to the wholeness of reality. He usually speaks of this totality as Spirit or Universe or Spiral of Existence, one that is not separate from the world, but the all-pervading force of evolution itself within self, culture, and nature. His temperament is warmly accepting of people from all stations of life and he strives to find ways to serve the ongoing well-being and development of others. He sees Spirit as a transpersonal force that embraces all of his past spiritual outlooks, enjoining the pluralistic God, enfolding the mental God, embracing the mythic God, incorporating the magic God, and adding the archaic God.

The integral God is the one that develops through a whole spectrum, including and transcending a variety of prior processes, but without excluding any of them. As God emerges in this post-postmodern consciousness, God appears as one who can relate flexibly to individuals at all different stations of life, overcoming irreducible pluralism in favor of pluralism-within-unity. Faith is growing in consciousness along with a struggle against unconsciousness. Theology is seeking to understand the ineffable and the manifest co-arising in the Spirit of Evolution.

And the Spiral of Existence continues to unfold…

Encountering All-That-Is in Emptiness

(Photo: Eldar Nurkovic via BigStock.com)

Spirituality is how we relate to all things. It is how we find an Alpha and Omega in all things, being and becoming within a field of uncertainty and expectation. It is how we arrive at a good point-of-view that is useful for living our complex lives, address pain and suffering, and wrestle with the mystery of death.

Most people are confused about these things, sad to say. They go through life focused on making ends meet, thinking fantastically about how everything works, believing in unevidenced stories that have been handed down to them, losing themselves in pursuits of money and status, or absorbing themselves in “spiritualized” political struggles.

All these confusions contain fragments of a spirituality more whole and complete. Within the struggle to survive, there is an encounter with the Root; within magical performances, there Is an encounter with Nature and the birth of the Magus; within storytelling, there is an encounter with the Logos; within the striving for personal excellence, there is an encounter with the God-Person or Divinity; within politics conflated with absolute ideals, there is an encounter with Gaia and the Liberator.

So, thinking about the different common types of spirituality may take us to simpler principles or archetypes that capture their essence. I have just been talking about Root, Nature, Magus, Logos, God-Person, Divinity, Gaia, Liberator; these are just a few of the many names useful for gathering fragments of the Whole into cohesion.

Religions can help us to gather fragments together, each one stressing a unique set of fragments that separately give us specific, irreducibly unique approaches to the Whole. Irreligiousness can also gather fragments together, e.g., by using science to forge a worldview characterized by empirical evidence and rational analysis.

An Integral Approach to Spirit

When we are talking about Integral spirituality, there are many forms to consider. Some Integralists prioritize one religious tradition over others, e.g., articulating an Integral Buddhism or an Integral Christianity. Other Integralists eschew religion for raw training in the lineages of realized and enlightened gurus. Still others call themselves atheists or pantheists, seeking fulfillment of their human longings in nature and secular pursuits.

Perhaps most Integralists walk a translineage or interspiritual path (like Wayne Teasdale’s) to some degree, borrowing ideas and practices that come from two or more of the above approaches. This is my own preference, personally. As I’ve related in my spiritual memoir, I was baptized and raised Roman Catholic but have since expanded my vision over the years. I remain connected to my roots while developing my faith with insights from Islam and Kabbalah, and other insights from indigenous cultures and the East.

How is it that many thousands of Integralists take such divergent approaches to religion and spirituality while still having enough in common to think of themselves as part of the Integral community?

I say that they have usually accepted certain primal distinctions, elemental principles, or orienting generalizations that give them a relatively sure map through the maze of different philosophical or religious heritages. When you understand that there are common developmental pathways (e.g., those spotted by James Fowler’s stages of faith or the color-coded value memes of Spiral Dynamics or the colorized altitudes of Ken Wilber), you gain a sort of common language for walking your path. You also may cease to identify with merely “traditional values” (blue/amber), “modern liberal faith” (orange), or “postmodern progressive spirituality” (green).  You want a useful way to integrate the warring religious systems to find peace within your own past stages of development and present struggles.

Here’s the essence of it, from my perspective. The Integral approach to Spirit is to learn to speak a “common language” so that you have the freedom to choose to relate to various spiritual heritages stemming from magical, mythic, modern, and postmodern origins without losing yourself in their traps and deficits. You can correct for the problems within your religious inheritance (and yes, there are always issues). Basically, you OUTGROW what you need to leave behind (e.g., shame, ethnocentrism, and materialism) and DEEPEN what you need more of (e.g., moral education, community, and mysticism).  

On Emptiness in Integral Thought

If the essence of Integral spirituality is the use of a lingua franca for conceiving and speaking of how we relate to all things, what is the vocabulary and grammar of this language, and how is this language learned?

Often Integral thinkers speak of reality in terms of one or two primordial distinctions: e.g., emptiness and form, Spirit, God and Creation, Ascent and Descent, All-That-Is, Eros and Agape, infinite and finite, fullness and freedom, or Tao. At other times, we speak of three or four important distinctions. These original distinctions are sometimes the building blocks for making more complex distinctions later; for example, the Spiral Dynamics value memes are influenced by the distinction between agency (yang) and communion (yin).

Today, let’s start by briefly learning one of the most important words in Integral thought: Emptiness. There will be time to talk more about other key terms of Integral-speak later.

Integralists who come from a Buddhist heritage (and just about everyone else, too) import the important principle of Emptiness into the Integral lexicon. Ken Wilber writes in A Brief History of Everything:

Q: Emptiness has two meanings?

KW: Yes, which can be very confusing. On the one hand, as we just saw, it is a discrete, identifiable state of awareness—namely, unmanifest absorption or cessation (nirvikalpa samadi, ayn, jnana samadhi, nirodh, classical nirvana). This is the causal state, a discrete state.

The second meaning is that Emptiness is not merely a particular state among others, but rather the reality of suchness or condition of all states. Not a particular state apart from other states, but the reality or condition of all states, high or low, sacred or profane, ordinary or extraordinary.

If I read this passage as merely a set of fancy words on a page, the words remain ghosts. So long as I remain in an ordinary state of consciousness, I find myself as a separate being characterized mainly by bodily sensations, feelings, and thought processes, and many perceptions of sight and sound. But the practice of meditation – perhaps not enough to generate samadhi, but just enough to create cessation of these thoughts and sensations – allows me to encounter emptiness as an action of unfolding a new causal awareness.

You can examine your own experiences with meditation to relate to what I’ve just spoken from my own experience. This is true of many key terms of Integral spirituality: they can be immediately encountered as empirical qualities already present in your awareness if you look for them in the right way. Stillness illuminates, silence sets you on an isle of sense, and muteness negates mutability. In a manner of speaking, Integral-speak is not a foreign tongue but a new way of speaking about things you didn’t realize you already knew.

Back to looking at Emptiness. When I stop meditating and return, say, to writing a book, I am ever so slightly changed. Silence is now not merely an empty sound but an unchanging aspect of my being or identity, and it is not merely my-self but a quality of all things.

Listening to the lingering silence, the world seems different – as Simon and Garfunkel famously sang, I can hear:

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Listening to silence is not inert; it has enormous power to dare and transform. When you have been meditating consistently for a period you may find your ordinary awareness changed. You can think of that change as a slide into what Wilber calls “the reality of suchness or condition of all states”.

This is important. Too many people today have been taught to only look at meditation as a secular relaxation technique. It is that, and more. Integralists know meditation as an injunction which (properly informed by philosophy) is a gateway to an encounter with fundamental realities and truths about yourself, and really, the nature of being human.

Emptiness is a primordial concept in Integral thought, not exactly part of the duality of nothingness and being, but useful for characterizing the quality of All-That-Is or God (conceived panentheistically, which we’ll talk about another day). Not empty of content, but empty of distinctions.

This is not to say that Emptiness and God are the same thing; this is to say that Emptiness and God each point to overlapping aspects of the same, most primordial reality. Both Emptiness and God (or Spirit) provide the basis for valuable perspectives on reality, and therefore they are both essential foundations for Integral spirituality. They help to define how we relate to all things because they point to their suchness.

or: The Integral Tradition Searches for a “Second Simplicity”

At Integralists, Paul writes:

If spirituality requires a Masters degree to understand it’s probably not true. People are complex so ethics, neuroscience and psychology are complex. But spirituality implies universal human accessibility. Buddhism is spiritual. Its basic tenants are accessible to both genius and moron without need for books or scriptures. The complex matrix virtual reality multi-level video game spirituality described in Wilber’s recent book isn’t spirituality, it’s intellectual masturbation. In my opinion. I enjoyed reading it because I enjoy intellectual masturbation. I enjoyed and learned a few things and gave it a few stars in my review. But I certainly did [not] feel more “spiritual” after reading it. Did anybody?

I respond:

It may surprise you to hear this, but I largely agree with what you said, although I do have a different spin on it. And I’m probably one of the persons you may be talking about who’s fascinated by 30-dimensional Rubik’s cubes (but they’re not in the naval, they’re in one of the 729 petals of the Manipura chakra). Maybe there’s even a side of Wilber who would chat for an hour making hundreds of delicate philosophical distinctions and then, during or afterwards, also appreciate the emptiness of all those distinctions and appreciate the simplicity of a child’s smile.

Basically, I think spirituality which is only simple or only complex, to the exclusion of the other, is terrible. It’s a real problem, and probably looking at the world as a whole the bigger problem right now isn’t that people are taking too sophisticated an approach to their spirituality but just the opposite (so simple they’re actually being willfully ignorant, actually dumb-dumbs). A spiritual tradition needs to be able to be teachable to a young child AND have an appeal to the most erudite scholars.

Yes, as you say, Buddhism today can be expressed in a simple form, but there are also much more complex versions of it; without both, the Tradition would be incomplete. Christian doctrine can be expressed in the 920-page Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church or the 180-word pamphlet of a Protestant evangelical street preacher, but you sorta need both to figure out what Christians are trying to pass along.

So I get why reading a complex book of Integral philosophy can be kinda off-putting, but think of it from Wilber’s standpoint (or how I imagine it). He’s one person. He has talents no one else does and knowledge no one else has synthesized. He has a gift to give the world and part of it is being “that guy” who can be the erudite scholar. If we choose to see his work as a touchstone or pillar in a Tradition, then there’s no reason to confuse Wilber’s contribution to that Tradition with the whole of it. If we read Wilber’s 816-page book, The Religion of Tomorrow, we are doing the ‘mind’ part of our Integral Life Practice which feasts on richness and nuance and intellectual agility, not the ‘body’ part that wants nourishment and power or the ‘soul’ part that longs for comfort and homecomings or the ‘spirit’ part that wants to rest in profound simplicity.

One of the main reasons Integral philosophy is so much more difficult to digest than, say, Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, is that Wilber attends to the ‘subtle’ realm and how it expresses itself in concepts and constructs that play out at all lower levels of the holarchy of existence, and less subtle thinkers merely spiritually by-pass all that. Is bypassing a good thing? If 95 out of 100 spiritual teachers and gurus are all bypassing something that’s essential for sustaining life on this world and the well-being of every world, shouldn’t we applaud a thinker for being more comprehensive?

The Integral Tradition ought to be broad enough to include Wilber’s marvelous complexity as well as the moderate complexity of, say, the high-school level world religions course taught at Exeter Academy which includes Integral theory on Self… and simpler expressions still, like the songs and prayers and other educational tools for children described by Joran Oppelt in his book Integral Church.

Has the Integral Tradition done enough to evolve a “second simplicity” or “simplexity” as some call it? Not nearly enough. That’s a huge and vital part of the cutting edge of our work these days, for some of us. And while very, very few of us are in a position to write 20 books of Integral theory like Wilber has, this is a task that everyone is called to participate in. Let’s try to do our best.

L-O-V-E Spelled Backwards is E-V-O-L-ution

Is evolution evil? Goodness forbid! Forgive me if you just spit a little coffee back into your mug. Are you ready for a sobering thought experiment?

If it were true that evolution were evil, then that would make Evolutionary Spirituality a sort of practice of evil or evil-worship, wouldn’t it, in a manner of speaking? The horror. Let’s spend a moment on this idea.

Why do I even ask such a dreadful question? Simple. The phonosemantic properties of the words suggest that Evolution and Evil are closely connected, and when these properties are placed within the Lingua-U Konstruct these patterns are highlighted. This probably sounds like woo-woo numerology or Kabbalah to most of you, but please bear with me.

Could evolution be evil? First, let’s bear in mind that the discovery of biological evolution by Darwin was considered godless heresy in its days and is still widely disbelieved by folks on religious grounds. If true as the fundamentalists say, then evolution displaces God — considered the ground of Being and/or Goodness by many — who isn’t left with much to do since the world doesn’t need Him, not in the manner that the fundamentalists believe in any event.

Second, consider that evolution is associated with Social Darwinism and the principle of survival of the fittest. In its crude forms, this is basically the idea that might makes right, and it is used to justify ruthless power grabs so long as they further one’s own survival. Crude evolutionary theory suggests that altruism or self-sacrifical love is counter to nature, and by extension some philosophers have argued for aggressive self-interest.

Third, consider that evolution is also associated with the extinction of species for no other reason than that they weren’t strong and powerful enough. The weak die, the strong survive. It doesn’t seen right, fair, or good. The history of species is a graveyard of death and failure. And when one goes looking for a cause, a reason for such horrors, one’s sight must turn to evolution (or Evolution, some sort of personification or philosophized version of the same word).

Fourth, consider the evidence (or “evidence” if you prefer) from word play. E-V-O-L, the first four letters of the word, is L-O-V-E spelled backwards. Like sounds have like significance in subtle ways that tend to reveal themselves upon close empirical study of language, taking statistics, and breaking sounds down to phonetic properties for analogical comparisons. And backwards words, according to many esotericists who know about such things on the basis of methodologies that may be pre-rational or trans-rational, tend to have an undertone or evocative quality of reversing the meaning in some sense. and you get that E-V-O-L is a form of anti-LOVE.

Fifth, consider the evidence from Lingua-U, if you will indulge me by looking at an unpublished methodology. No, never mind. I’ll save that discussion for later (once the book comes out).

There are some concerns raised by this thought experiment that ought to give everyone pause who has attached an overly one-sided view to Evolution by “spiritualizing it” in a way that bypasses the ambivalent truths about natural processes that aren’t pretty. If one’s spirituality is based on purging all negative thoughts, energies, and uncomfortable feelings to a dark closet while reveling in warm-fuzzy thoughts of happiness only, you’re only looking at one half of reality. There is both yang and yin, so to speak, meeting in yin-yang.

I don’t think Evolution is evil. I don’t think any word is evil, and Evolution is just a word. What is refers to is a constructed concept that is constantly being formulated and refined through use and theorizing and construct-making. I do think some of the ways that people have conceived Evolution as a brutal, immoral, death-dealing force leading to annihilation seems pretty dark indeed … and anyone calling themselves an Evolutionary ought to wake themselves up to the darkness within their own chosen framework of meaning-making.

I believe there is an evil potential within our scientific and philosophical concepts of Evolution that ought to be remedied through theorizing that puts the Goodness back into Evolution. We can choose how we conceive of Evolution and adjust our worldview artistically in a manner that gives Goodness a victory over its opposite. What I mean by this is too difficult to explain at this point in the, um, evolution of my own philosophy, but I will say that my wrestling with this very topic has strengthened my Abrahamic faith infused with Eastern cosmological tenets. The symbols that I’ve studied and included in my research point to great spiritual mysteries and invite me to expand my outlook by making conscious decisions about the grounds of knowledge.

The questions I’m asking today don’t have simple answers because they cut to the heart of our appreciation and appraisal of the Goodness of Existence itself. I’ll leave you with a thought from an Episcopalian writer named Larry Gilman. In his blog post “Is Evolution Evil?”, he concludes:

Just bluntly, couldn’t God have found some nicer way to create?  And admittedly, any theological acceptance of death as creative tends to clash with Christian views of death-as-enemy that go right back to Paul: “through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin” (Romans 5:12).  The creationists build a great deal on that verse, of course, but we might double-dip on Romans and build instead on the statement that the “whole Creation groans in childbirth” (Romans 8:22).  The pain of the world is, in that metaphor, the pain of creation.

But maybe even that is just too pat.  I do not mean to say that suffering, human and otherwise, can ever be explained away or theologically domesticated.  The problem of pain can be lived with, maybe, sometimes, a little, but never nullified.  It cuts too deep.  Christ despaired on the cross; we, too, will always face the possibility of despair, whether in the semiprivate hospital room or the torture chamber.  We humans, like all the other creatures, are vulnerable to the core and no theology or narrative can ever make us otherwise.