Part II – The Birth

I begin to think of the incredible sequence of events that brought me to this very precarious point in time and space. I remember getting off the phone with Kate, a tall and freckled beauty with closely shaven copper-red hair and a long, slender, graceful body that belied her clumsy mannerisms. A newly un-closeted (and highly enthusiastic) lesbian, she was one of my very closest friends, and I had the terrible misfortune of being completely and hopelessly in love with her.

Exhilarated by our decision to abandon all we had known and move somewhere else, somewhere new, somewhere we had never been. When I got off the phone with Kate, I was anxious to immediately call someone else and share my excitement.  So I called my roommate Allison, a bulimic chef who I happened to be living with at the time in Boston—which itself was ridiculous, since she lived in the room directly next to mine and I could have just walked over or yelled through the wall if I wanted. But I called her anyway, and I told her everything. I told her how we made a drastic life decision to leave school, to do something new. We didn’t know what, and we didn’t know where—but it would really be something, and we were going to do it together! I told her all this, and she expressed her happiness, how wonderful this would be for us, how much we will grow because of this, how….

She suddenly interrupted herself.

“Oh my God! Corey! Come over here, right now!!!”

I had no idea what was going on. I put down the phone and walked to her room. She had this enormously goofy grin, pointing into her closet. “Look!” I peered my head in, and watched to my absolute astonishment as Brandy, the house cat, was giving birth to a litter of kittens.

I felt as though lightning bolts were surging through my fingertips, as though every atom, every molecule, every cell, every bone, organ, and tissue were singing in unison—the music of my organism melting into the music of the universe.

I freaked out; I didn’t know what to do. Was I supposed to boil water or something? And what the hell would I do with it anyway?! I was clearly out of my element. I ran back into my room to call my mother to ask her what I should do. Before I did, I called Kate.

“Hello?”

“Um, hi Kate. I know that we just talked but there’s something I really think you should know…”

“Huh? What’s going on?”

“Well, you know how like just a couple minutes ago we made this huge life decision to pick up and leave?”

“Um, well, yeah of course.”

“To go someplace new….”

“Yeah…?”

“To start fresh….”

“Corey what’s going on?”

“Well, um, I went to tell Allison, and, uh, my cat is giving birth right now.”

Ten endless seconds of silence.

“Oh my fucking God,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“New life!”

“Yeah. Well, you can interpret this however you want, I just thought you should know…”

In the end, Kate did not end up coming with me. She broke my heart. But Aphex, one of the kittens born that precise moment, did.

The full piece is rather long, so i have decided to serialize it into six consecutive installments, which will be published here throughout the week.

Part I – The Climb

“One day I will leave this world and dream myself to Reality…” Crazy Horse, 1874

We are surrounded.  On all sides, a horde of mechanical dinosaurs roar their thunderous roars, ricocheting chaotically off the rubble. The stone wall of the mountain reflects the noise in all directions, flooding our ears with liquid concrete, entombing us in sonic opacity. It is a symphony of white noise that shifts and undulates with each movement of the head. There is no way of telling where the industrial growl is coming from; it sounds like they are everywhere. As our paranoia approaches a boil, so does the intensity of our aspiration—we had come this far; there is no turning back now.

Where am I? I am somewhere in between dreams, surfing the turning page in between chapters. What am I doing? I am fleeing a former me, reaching for a deeper I, struggling to create myself anew, molding my self into something meaningful, something real. In a flash I had seen my own Face, and I yearned to chisel out some vague likeness within myself.

We can’t tell how many of them there are. We can’t tell where they are. We know there is one on the far right base of the mountain, behind a small crop of trees about a thousand feet away, its eyes shifting back and forth against the black of night. So far we’ve climbed on the far side of the rubble heap, safely hidden from view of the mechanical monster on the other side.

I am equal parts exhausted and exhilarated, my breath struggling to keep pace with my heart.  The climb is pretty intense at first, the lower rubble composed mostly of tremendous boulders, some the size of Volkswagen busses, from the earlier and more dramatic days of blasting. These we climb with our entire bodies, searching strategically for stable routes up and through the massive monoliths. The debris becomes finer as we ascended, since the later blasts were much more calculated and refined than the earlier ones. Eventually we reach such an incline that our steps are triggering avalanches of detritus beneath our soles. We are getting pretty high, having climbed the nearly two hundred foot tall pile of rubble that encircles the base of the mountain. But it is as far as we can go. We have been able to conceal ourselves so far, but now we need to scale the far right side of the monument. We have come to the point where the rubble reaches its highest slope and begins to curve around the mountain, leaving us exposed to the only metal beast we know for sure was there, awash in its guttural growl. We have no choice but run, and pray we can somehow traverse the mountain without being detected.

I slowly peer over the ridge of stone and dirt, observing with cautious eyes the movement of the massive Caterpillar. Its path seems predictable, moving back and forth like a video game sentry, taking about forty-five seconds for each trip. We study the situation for about five minutes, assuring the regularity of its motion, and quickly determine our strategy. We would watch it come toward us until it was just about to turn around, and then we would just run for it, as fast as our legs would take us.

This is absurd. None of us know if we will be able to make it before the beast turns back around again. Absurd, yes, but it is about all we can do. So we go with it.

The time had come. The machine makes its turn and is now coming toward us. We brace ourselves, watching the white lights approach behind the trees, until it is about to make another turn.

“Okay,” I say over the ubiquitous rumble of industrial machinery. “This is it—get ready! Five, four, three, two…”

At some decimal point between 2 and 1, the world stops. The air, indescribably thick and heavy with the invisible mass of the bulldozer’s sonic aura, suddenly vanishes. There is now only a sudden stillness, an impossibly massive silence laced with sounds of wind ripping across the mountain face. The engine had suddenly cut off, leaving only the howling emptiness of the South Dakota night. We are paralyzed, petrified with anticipation.

We don’t know what is happening. We don’t know whether the guy had seen us and is coming after us, or if he’s just taking a break to piss. We have no clue whatsoever what’s going on. There is only stillness, paranoia, and panic. In my head I run through a multitude of scenarios, realizing the three of us may have to split up and run off in different directions if indeed they are on their way up to get us.

The air is crisp and clean, once opaque with a barrage of white noise, now massively vacant. The wind carries the subtlest of sounds—we can hear the leaves swaying hundreds of yards away, the footsteps of the bulldozer operator as he dismounts his machine, the pounding of our own hearts. We know that if we can hear him he can certainly hear us, and so we remain as still as we can. My leg begins to fall asleep, but I am far too scared of being heard to shift it. The slightest twitch would send a stone tumbling down the slope, knocking five more loose as it went. I wonder how I would be able to run on a dead leg if we hear someone climbing the rubble trying to come after us. All we can do is wait patiently in these extremely awkward positions, biting through the burning discomfort of our limbs; just waiting to see what happens.

Continue to Part II: The Birth

Previously:

In the 1980′s, the music scene in America was dominated by the glut and theatrics of “glam metal.” For nearly 10 years, most of popular music was defined by sex, drugs, and machismo-in-drag, and an entire generation of youth nearly lost themselves within a cloud of hairspray. There was a void in the cultural heart of the musical mainstream that was dying to be filled—an utter lack of artistic interiority, emotional depth, and authenticity. Untold millions were craving artistic substance, and were only offered artificial decadence.

Then along came grunge, taking the entire world by storm in the early 90′s. From the rain-soaked streets of Seattle emerged a new voice for American youth. In much the same way that punk music arrived just in time to offer salvation for our Disco-era sins, grunge music promised to completely cleanse our cultural palette, placing an aesthetic imperative upon more simplicity, more spontaneity, and more sincerity. And so bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Pearl Jam came into the mainstream, forever changing the landscape of American music. From behind a tsunami of massively distorted guitars, hallowed vocals, and countless acres of flannel, appeared an unmistakable return to introspection and idealism—even while cloaked by themes of angst and despair, the natural result of our collective interiors being ignored for almost a decade.

Few bands of the era embody this move toward introspection and idealism as strongly as Pearl Jam. As the grunge scene continued to explode, it was becoming apparent that the inherent iconoclasm of the scene was ill-suited to handle the immense pressures of fame, and many artists found themselves circling the drain of inevitable self-destruction—for many, Kurt Cobain’s suicide was a morbid reminder of what can happen when artistic ideals are reduced to mere currency for the status-sphere. One by one the originators of grunge began to fall away, and an impossibly huge body of talent was forever lost to suicide and drug addiction.

Few bands survived as the industry began churning out the newest grunge-inspired fads, marketed (ironically) as “alternative rock.” Pearl Jam was one of the few who did make it through this period of intense commodification. Unlike most others from the Seattle era, they were able to prevent themselves from being crushed by the enormous pressure that their celebrity brought to their personal and professional lives. While they did in a sense try to distance themselves from their own fame, they were also simultaneously using their celebrity as a platform for their idealism, soon finding themselves fighting “on all fronts” for initiating real change in the world. From their famed battle with the corruption of the Ticketmaster venue monopoly, to publicly berating the policies of George W. Bush, to expressing pro-choice sentiments in concert, to promoting awareness around Crohn’s disease—Pearl Jam was helping to return rock and roll to its roots, in terms of both the profoundly personal and the deeply political. And they continue to do it to this day, over 18 years since the band first formed.

In this dialogue Stone Gossard leads us through the story of Pearl Jam’s iconic rise, as well as his own experiences in the early grunge scene, long before any of us had ever known what “Teen Spirit” actually smelled like. Stone and Ken also discuss the current state of the music industry, some of the key problems it needs to come to terms with, and the role of record labels in the future of music. Stone’s story is one that is truly aligned with the essence of Integral Art, which attempts to restore Beauty to it’s rightful place within the human condition—emphasizing creativity instead of deconstruction, idealism instead of apathy, depth instead of sensationalism, authenticity instead of irony—and always reflecting the fullest expressions of both artist and audience alike. We hope you can join us in this fascinating exploration of artistic idealism and creative reverie….

To listen to a free interview between Stone Gossard and Ken Wilber, click here.

Originally published on Integral Life: Pearl Jam: Restoring Idealism to Rock and Roll. Part 1: From the Birth of Grunge to the Death of an Industry (w/ Stone Gossard and Ken Wilber)

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Note: I’ve decided to make many of these pieces available for free for the very first time, so that you can feel free to share and circulate them however you wish.

A Tale of Four Americas

Corey W. deVos & Clint Fuhs

A Tale of Four Americas takes a look at the political dynamics and cultural perspectives that influence every part of the Republican and Democratic parties. It explores the ideological divides that exist within each party, and offers a simple map to help make sense of these seemingly conflicting beliefs.

Integral Trans-Partisan Politics

Ken Wilber, written by Corey W. deVos

Ken Wilber discusses the many problems facing the emergence of a genuinely Integral “Third-Way” political party, most notably the issue of developmental elitism, and offers a remarkably simple-but-effective definition of the political Left and Right.

The Deconstruction of the World Trade Center

Ken Wilber

In this fascinating footnote to the book Boomeritis, written in 2002, Ken discussions the many sorts of reactions people had to the tragedy of 9/11, while also presenting a theoretical framework within which a genuinely Integral approach to politics and governance might emerge.

Politics in the 21st Century

Jim Garrison & Ken Wilber, written by Corey W. deVos

In this fascinating 3-part dialogue between Ken Wilber and chairman and president of the State of the World Forum Jim Garrison, the topics range from the increasingly dangerous crises happening around the globe to America’s transition from republic to empire to the ability for Integral consciousness to face the precarious challenges of the 21st century head on.

Is an Integral World Federation Possible?

Ken Wilber

Here Ken discusses the work that is being done by Integral Institute, Integral Life, and Jim Garrison’s State of the World Forum to help move toward a genuine integral “World Federation” government—one capable of meeting the complex and tightly-interconnected nature of our 21st-century problems with the clarity, compassion, and decisiveness they require.

The Integral-Political Imperative

James S. Turner & Ken Wilber, written by Corey W. deVos

In this three-part series, James Turner, a founding pioneer in Integral forms of law, politics, and federal regulation talks with Ken about his days with Ralph Nader, 18th-century American political history, the essential ingredients of an Integral approach to politics, and the meaning of “trans-partisan” politics.

One Person, One Vote—One Catch

Ken Wilber

Here Ken discusses the dangers of “one person, one vote” approaches to democracy. If we consider the fact that people grow through three major stages of development—ego-centric, ethno-centric, and world-centric—and then try to get a sense of where the majority of the people current exists, we find that nearly 70% of the world’s population remains at an ethno-centric stage or lower. Democracy is inherently a world-centric system of governance, and “one person, one vote” an ideal way to enact the democratic process. But if the majority of the voters have not themselves achieved a world-centric level of consciousness, it begins to fall apart pretty quickly, with effects as broad as Kansas banning the teaching of evolution to the democratic election of Hamas in Palestine—even the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (aka the Nazis) came into power through a plurality election in 1933. Although one does not garner a tremendous amount of popularity criticizing the “one person, one vote” ethic, without a sophisticated understanding of how this system of governance actually plays itself out in the real world, and without finding some way to limit the influence of pre-rational beliefs and mob-rule, democracy can actually become the last best hope for fascism in the 21st century.

Spiral Dynamics and the Palestine/Israel Conflict

Don Beck & Jeff Salzman

Here Don offers an intimate glimpse into his own life and career. He discusses the current phase of his work: traveling the world and applying Spiral Dynamics to various geo-political “hotspots” all over the planet. He offers his own ideas about healthy models of society, the crucial distinction between stages of consciousness and the contents of those stages, and the importance of preserving many of the early stages of development that are so often seen as primitive and obsolete. He then goes into considerable depth around the specifics of the Palestine-Israel conflict, describing the needs and problems on both sides of the divide, his hands-on involvement with both nations, and the remarkable receptivity with which his work has been met. At a time when tensions in the Middle East can seem so hopelessly combustible, it is encouraging to see Integral seeds being planted in such surprisingly fertile soil, offering us all a much-needed exhale as we wait to see how evolution will continue playing itself out in this difficult region of the world.

The Middle East: Leveling the Laws of the Land

Ken Wilber

In this video, Ken is asked about one of the most difficult and pressing issues of our time: the violence in the Middle East. How can the West help influence the overall growth of the Middle East, from renegade states to civil societies? Do democratic solutions have any chance of helping a region which, to quote Winston Churchill, “continues to produce more history than it can possibly digest”?

Is the Future Spinning Out of Control?

Ken Wilber

“Is everything spinning out of control?” asked an Associated Press article in Summer 2008. Between rising flood waters in the Midwest, drowning polar bears in the far North, skyrocketing gas prices, plummeting home values, and endless wars on multiple fronts, the future does not seem to be living up to its promise—a promise envisioned since the détente of the Cold War and the proclamation of George H.W. Bush’s “New World Order.” From an Integral altitude, what can we make of the future?

It is not the first revolution the world has ever seen, and it will certainly not be the last. But it is the first that does not insist that everyone adopt a new philosophy, a new worldview, or a new monolithic way of being—even while new philosophies, new worldviews, and new ways of being are constantly laid down as we speak.  It is a revolution that fully embraces us wherever we may be in our own development and allows us to be who we already are—even while it points out all those aspects of our lives where we still need to grow.

Welcome to the Integral Revolution, history’s response to the observation that “problems cannot be solved from the same level of thinking that created them.” We’ve been handed an entirely new set of problems and complexities that would have been unimaginable just fifty years ago, bringing us ever closer to fulfilling our limitless potential as conscious and compassionate human beings, slowly bootstrapping our way to infinity.

When contemplating the possible shapes and sounds of our newly emerging revolution, it is useful to track the similarities and differences it may have with other cultural and spiritual transformations in our past—most notably the postmodern revolution of the 1960’s. The sixties, of course, were the inevitable result of a perfect storm of social and cultural currents.  Our hearts and minds were being expanded in two directions at once: we were growing as a culture vertically into an entirely new stage of consciousness (postmodernism/pluralism), as well as horizontally through states of consciousness (spiritual, altered, etc.).

Vertical development is the natural evolutionary response to the rise of new complexities in our lives, pushing the human species through archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral waves of consciousness, and onward toward a greater and greater sense of human dignity.  In this succession of values and worldviews, the sixties became a staging platform for the newly emerging pluralistic stage of development, as seen in the rise of postmodernism as an intellectual and artistic framework, an explosion of pluralistic values emerging around the world, a rapidly accelerating media industry that seemed to make the world smaller and smaller by the moment, the urgency of civil rights and racial desegregation, a newfound curiosity and empowerment around human sexuality, etc.

At the same time that we were just beginning to explore a whole new vertical stage of consciousness, another major force of transformation began to sweep through culture.  The sixties became a test-tube for experimentation with various spiritual and psychedelic states of consciousness, catalyzed by the sudden appearance of two extremely powerful methods of state-change: a massive influx of Eastern spirituality and mystical thought, as well as the introduction of psychedelic drugs—both of which placed major emphasis upon the importance of raw, direct experience of reality.

The confluence of these two powerful currents of human development made for one of the most fascinating and colorful revolutions in recent history, forever changing how we relate to the world, to our culture, and to ourselves.

It is easy to wax quixotic about the sixties, forgetting that it was a period of time littered with its own tragedies, heartbreaks, and casualties—after all, the hippie movement was itself book-ended by a number of devastating assassinations, and one can only wonder what would have become of the counterculture had it not been so crippled when its greatest leaders were murdered in the prime of their influence.  On the other hand, it can also be easy to dismiss the psychedelic sixties altogether as naïve, excessive, narcissistic, intellectually effete—and ultimately doomed to collapse under the tremendous weight of pragmatic reality.  But regardless of how we relate to the social and cultural zeitgeist of the sixties, entire generations of X’ers and Y’ers have since felt as if they’ve somehow missed the boat entirely.  We feel as though we standing in the glorious, gluttonous Technicolor shadow of our parents, wondering to ourselves if the time for our own revolution will ever actually come.

Well make no mistake about it: the time has come. Though it is no longer merely a revolution of the mind (ours is a revolution of the “body, mind, and spirit in self, culture, and nature”) and though it is still in its very early stages of emergence (with a long way to go before it reaches any sort of “tipping point”), its influence is already beginning to sweep across the world.  It is happening right now at this very second.  The very same currents of growth and development that set the initial stage for the sixties revolution—vertical and horizontal growth through stages and states of consciousness—have begun to flow together once again, creating an upswell of consciousness, care, and creative novelty that has not been seen in decades.  Our revolution approaches; all we can do is hope that our soundtrack will be as cool as theirs was.

During the sixites, we were almost entirely subject to these two mighty currents of evolution, unable to differentiate or even discern the forces that were dramatically shaping our minds and our hearts. But now we have a map—one of the most significant differences between the new revolution and the old—that can actually help make sense of the chaotic territory of human potential.  And not just any map; it’s a map that shows us where exactly we are at any given point in relation to the full totality of the natural and spiritual world.  A map which, for those casualties of addiction who became irrevocably lost in the psychedelic wilderness of their minds, could have been immensely useful fifty years ago.

It might be fair to say that the worldwide transformation promised by the sixties counterculture was largely stillborn, its momentum permanently hamstrung by political assassinations and various forms of cultural fallout. But evolution has continued surging on nonetheless, pumping, pulsing, and pushing humanity into the horizon of tomorrow’s possibilities.

The Integral Revolution is one that is based upon principles of compassion, clarity, and inclusiveness—principles that also defined the sixties revolution in many ways, though they did not have the sophisticated tools and methodologies that we currently have, nor the complexities of today’s world and the capacity for integral thought that arises alongside them.  Although we do not yet know what shape our own revolution will take, when it will hit critical mass, and how exactly it will transform our lives and our world, we do know that it is happening only because of pioneers like you, dedicating your lives toward deepening and enriching our humanity and divinity alike.

A willingness to step beyond our personal and cultural points of view while remaining true to our own unique perspective; to sanctify the common ground between different sciences and different spiritual traditions while fully honoring and celebrating the differences between them; to hold all the contradictions and paradoxes of knowledge gently in one hand while cutting through the confusion and fragmentation with the other—these are precisely the sorts of qualities that define Integral Revolution. Shouting William Stern’s slogan from the mountaintop like a 21st-century battle-cry—Unitas Multiplex!—we find unity within the heart of diversity, forged deep in the furnace of purpose.

The Integral Revolution: the result of an unstoppable force meeting an unmovable subject.

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Posted in Humor Tagged: Deepak Chopra, LOLsage ]]> http://coreywdevos.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/lolsaint-3-deepak-shakur-thug-buddha/feed/ 3 Corey W. deVos http://coreywdevos.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/a-river-outside-of-time/ http://coreywdevos.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/a-river-outside-of-time/#comments Sat, 05 Sep 2009 21:42:59 +0000 Corey W. deVos http://coreywdevos.com/?p=175 ]]> In the world that exists just outside of time, Spirit is a single river, flowing from a single mountain with a million cloud-covered peaks, carving channels deep into the soul and soil of the earth.  It bubbles forth from unseen springs, tenderly gnashing through history with sublime patience and tenacity.   It has been called countless names—some of which endure to this very day, while many others have been forever lost to the whispers of time’s passing.  Spirit is a single river, reminding us all of our own inherent wetness, leading us back to the Source of being.

In the world that exists just outside of time, Spirit is a single river—but we do not live outside of time.  We live within the belly of time, swallowed at birth by a demiurge that separates us from our own eternal providence.  From within time, Spirit is not a single river, but a confusing latticework of streams, brooks, and tributaries—each suggesting a universal Source, but leading to a million different springs atop a million different mountains.  Within the world of time, Spirit has been broken up into a million pieces, a million different moments, and is made to dance with itself for all eternity.

If the single river of Spirit has been split into so many seemingly disconnected streams, decoupled from the single Source, then the information age represents the mighty delta of spiritual consciousness.  It is this fragile moment in history where all these streams may eventually converge once again, where the waters from the East lick the waves of the West, and faint echoes of timeless unity can be heard in the playful spray of ancient liquid.

We are standing in the middle of this convergence, this digitally-defined delta, in which more of the world’s knowledge, culture, and wisdom has flowed together than ever before possible.  The mid-to-late 20th century saw an unprecedented influx of Eastern traditions into the Western mind, most notably through the work of scholars like Alan Watts, D.T. Suzuki, and Aldous Huxley, as well as through influential (and controversial) teachers like Chogyam Trungpa, Krishnamurti, and Adi Da.  While we might regard some of these individuals as being relatively flawed in comparison to the perfection they attempted to embody, we cannot confuse these vehicles for the rivers they skim across, or we run the danger of distrusting the water for fear of a leaky boat.

This inundation of Eastern and Western traditions into the modern and postmodern worlds has yielded a rich pool of perspectives, principles, and practices—a sort of primordial ooze of spiritual consciousness that has become the habitat of an entirely new generation of Integral thinkers and practitioners who are now emerging from the muck of history, and using the tools and technologies of the 21st century to trace the countless streams back to their singular Source.  These new pioneers are beginning to recognize the ripples on the water’s surface as eternal patterns dancing behind the veil of time, and are once again seeing Spirit for what it is: a single river, flowing from a single mountain with a million cloud-covered peaks.

Would you wear this?

*I’ve been informed that LOLsaints has already been taken. Damn my impulsive lust for novelty; i didn’t do my homework first.

NOTE: LOLsages is inspired by LOLcats, and essentially represents a post-post-modern mashup of the incredibly brilliant and the incredibly stupid.  If you are not already familiar with the LOLcats phenomenon, i suggest that you try googling the term.  Or you can simply refer to the cartoon below, which sums it up pretty well.

Note: This piece was originally written to summarize a dialogue between Ken Wilber and Tami Simon (which you can download and listen to for free by clicking here.) But i wanted to share it with the general community, as it is my hope that it can help frame the difficult emotions that inevitably surround people’s disappointment with spiritual teachers. It should be noted that this piece is not intended to help people emotionally process this disappointment, but rather to find some sort of theoretical grounding for their emotions, so that they may better relate to their own emotional intensity in a somewhat energetically hygienic way. This is the only way we can possibly hope to invoke the tremendous clarity, compassion, and resolve that is required to make sense of the impossible heart-ache of our teachers’ failings, and even find a way to use the disappointment as yet another opportunity for growth for student and teacher alike.

By virtue of running a business like Sounds True, which has produced a litany of audio interviews with a staggering amount of today’s heaviest-hitting spiritual teachers, Tami has had plenty of opportunities to get to know many of the world’s most extraordinary teachers in very deep and profound ways. As she mentions in the interview, when there is a business contract sitting on the table between herself and some of these teachers, she is often exposed to a side of them that many of their own students aren’t—a side that occasionally appears to be incongruous with the lofty perceptions that surround them. Rather than being the perfect vehicles of liberation they are often made out to be, Tami has found many of these teachers to be anything but perfect. She has been exposed to their full humanness, and finds that they possess many of the same relative foibles, flaws, and idiosyncrasies that so many of us are subject to. Sometimes this experience can be endearing, but many times it is painfully disappointing—especially when the teachers seem to be so unaware of their limitations, parading their spiritual realization in such a way that tries to mask their own human twistedness.

Here we will explore this notion of states and stages of consciousness by taking a closer look at two of the world’s foremost Christian thinkers, theologian James Fowler and mystical writer Evelyn Underhill, exploring ways to integrate these two pioneers into a more comprehensive view of the Christian experience.

Fully Human: James Fowler’s Stages of Faith

Dr. James W. Fowler III is Professor of Theology and Human Development at Emory University, and was director of both the Center for Research on Faith and Moral Development and the Center for Ethics until he retired in 2005. He is a minister in the United Methodist Church, and is best known for his book Stages of Faith, published in 1981, in which he sought to develop the idea of a developmental process in faith.

“Faith may be characterized as an integral, centering process underlying the formation of beliefs, values and meanings that (1) gives coherence and direction to persons’ lives, (2) links them in shared trusts and loyalties with others, (3) grounds their personal stances and communal loyalties in the sense of relatedness to a larger frame of reference, and (4) enables them to face and deal with the limit conditions of human life, relying upon that which has the quality of ultimacy in their lives . . .The stages aim to describe patterned operations of knowing and valuing that underlie our consciousness.” – James Fowler

Here is a synopsis of Fowler’s stages of faith, in his own words:

• Primal Faith (stage 0): “If we start with infancy-the time from birth to two years-we have what we call undifferentiated faith. It’s a time before language and conceptual thought are possible. The infant is forming a basic sense of trust, of being at home in the world. The infant is also forming what I call pre-images of God or the Holy, and of the kind of world we live in. On this foundation of basic trust or mistrust is built all that comes later in terms of faith. Future religious experience will either have to confirm or reground that basic trust.”

• Intuitive-Projective Faith: “The first stage we call intuitive/projective faith. It characterizes the child of two to six or seven. It’s a changing and growing and dynamic faith. It’s marked by the rise of imagination. The child doesn’t have the kind of logic that makes possible or necessary the questioning of perceptions or fantasies. Therefore the child’s mind is “religiously pregnant,” one might say. It is striking how many times in our interviews we find that experiences and images that occur and take form before the child is six have powerful and long-lasting effects on the life of faith both positive and negative.”

• Mythic-Literal Faith: “The second stage we call mythic/literal faith. Here the child develops a way of dealing with the world and making meaning that now criticizes and evaluates the previous stage of imagination and fantasy. The gift of this stage is narrative. The child now can really form and re-tell powerful stories that grasp his or her experiences of meaning. There is a quality of literalness about this. The child is not yet ready to step outside the stories and reflect upon their meanings. The child takes symbols and myths at pretty much face value, though they may touch or move him or her at a deeper level.”

• Synthetic-Conventional Faith: “There is a third stage we call synthetic/conventional faith which typically has its rise beginning around age 12 or 13. It’s marked by the beginning of what Piaget calls formal operational thinking. That simply means that we now can think about our own thinking. It’s a time when a person is typically concerned about forming an identity, and is deeply concerned about the evaluations and feedback from significant other people in his or her life. We call this a synthetic/conventional stage; synthetic, not in the sense that it’s artificial, but in the sense that it’s a pulling together of one’s valued images and values, the pulling together of a sense of self or identity.

One of the hallmarks of this stage is that it tends to compose its images of God as extensions of interpersonal relationships. God is often experienced as Friend, Companion, and Personal Reality, in relationship to which I’m known deeply and valued. I think the true religious hunger of adolescence is to have a God who knows me and values me deeply, and can be a kind of guarantor of my identity and worth in a world where I’m struggling to find who I can be.

At any of the stages from two on you can find adults who are best described by these stages. Stage Three, thus, can be an adult stage. We do find many persons, in churches and out, who are best described by faith that essentially took form when they were adolescents.”

• Individuative-Reflective Faith: “Stage Four, for those who develop it, is a time in which the person is pushed out of, or steps out of, the circle of interpersonal relationships that have sustained his life to that point. Now comes the burden of reflecting upon the self as separate from the groups and the shared world that defines one’s life. I sometimes quote Santayana who said that we don’t know who discovered water but we know it wasn’t fish. The person in Stage Three is like the fish sustained by the water. To enter Stage Four means to spring out of the fish tank and to begin to reflect upon the water. Many people don’t complete this transition, but get caught between three and four. The transition to Stage Four can begin as early as 17, but it’s usually not completed until the mid-20s, and often doesn’t even begin until around 20. It comes most naturally in young adulthood. Some people, however, don’t make the transition until their late 30s. It becomes a more traumatic thing then, because they have already built an adult life. Their relationships have to be reworked in light of the stage change.

Stage Four is concerned about boundaries: where I stop and you begin; where the group that I can belong to with conviction and authenticity ends and other groups begin. It’s very much concerned about authenticity and a fit between the self I feel myself to be in a group and the ideological commitments that I’m attached to.”

• Conjunctive Faith: “Sometime around 35 or 40 or beyond some people undergo a change to what we call conjunctive faith, which is a kind of midlife way of being in faith. What Stage Four works so hard to get clear and clean in terms of boundaries and identity, Stage Five makes more permeable and more porous. As one moves into Stage Five one begins to recognize that the conscious self is not all there is of me. I have an unconscious. Much of my behavior and response to things is shaped by dimensions of self that I’m not fully aware of. There is a deepened readiness for a relationship to God that includes God’s mystery and unavailability and strangeness as well as God’s closeness and clarity.

Stage Five is a time when a person is also ready to look deeply into the social unconscious—those myths and taboos and standards that we took in with our mother’s milk and that powerfully shape our behavior and responses. We really do examine those, which means we’re ready for a new kind of intimacy with persons and groups that are different from ourselves. We are ready for allegiances beyond our tribal gods and our tribal taboos. Stage Five is a period when one is alive to paradox. One understands that truth has many dimensions which have to be held together in paradoxical tension.”

• Universalizing Faith: “Some few persons we find move into Stage Six, which we call universalizing faith. In a sense I think we can describe this stage as one in which persons begin radically to live as though what Christians and Jews call the “kingdom of God” were already a fact. I don’t want to confine it to Christian and Jewish images of the kingdom. It’s more than that. I’m saying these people experience a shift from the self as the center of experience. Now their center becomes a participation in God or ultimate reality. There’s a reversal of figure and ground. They’re at home with what I call a commonwealth of being. We experience these people on the one hand as being more lucid and simple than we are, and on the other hand as intensely liberating people, sometimes even subversive in their liberating qualities. I think of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the last years of his life. I think of Thomas Merton. I think of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. I think of Dag Hammerskjold and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the last years of his imprisonment. These are persons who in a sense have negated the self for the sake of affirming God. And yet in affirming God they became vibrant and powerful selves in our experience. They have a quality of what I call relevant irrelevance. Their ‘subversiveness’ makes our compromises show up as what they are.”

***

These stages of faith map quite well against the many other models of human development suggested by the great developmental psychologists of the world, including Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, Abraham Maslow, Clare Graves, Jean Gebser, etc.  Each of these models focus upon a particular aspect of intelligence or psychological growth (e.g. cognition, values, drives, emotional and psychosexual development, etc.) and unfold in a strictly sequential fashion—meaning that while an individual can be “higher” in some developmental lines and “lower” in others, he or she needs to progress through one stage before moving on to the next.  In other words, there is no skipping of developmental stages—you cannot, for example, move from Fowler’s stage 2 (Mythic-Literal Faith) to stage 6 (Universalizing faith) without first developing through the three major stages that lie between them—a process that can often take adults years, if not decades, to accomplish.

Taken together, these psychological models offer a comprehensive map of human growth and development in all its multifarious dimensions. Each successive stage of consciousness adds more complexity and more understanding of the world around us, as well as more capacity for love, compassion, and connection.  By ascending the spire of psychological development to higher and higher altitudes of consciousness, humanity becomes increasingly more human with each and every step.

Fully Divine: Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) was an Anglican writer known for her numerous works on religion and spiritual practice, drawing upon hundreds of different sources to formulate her own version of a universal scheme of spiritual experience.  Her groundbreaking book Mysticism (a term defined by Underhill as “the direct intuition or experience of God”) is still held as a classic treatise exploring the individual’s journey to God, second only to Aldous Huxley’s 1946 classic The Perennial Philosophy in terms of its impact and influence upon early 20th-century thinkers.

Underhill characterizes the spiritual path as unfolding through five broad states of consciousness—awakening, purgation/purification, illumination, dark night, and unification:

• Awakening: One begins to have some consciousness of absolute or divine reality for the first time and the spiritual identity begins to emerge.  This experience is often abrupt and fairly dramatic, and is typically preceded by a period of existential crisis or sense of longing.

“That which the Servitor saw had no form neither any manner of being; yet he had of it a joy such as he might have known in the seeing of shapes and substances of all joyful things. His heart was hungry, yet satisfied, his soul was full of contentment and joy: his prayers and his hopes were fulfilled.” – Henry Suso (disciple of Meister Eckhart)

• Purgation: Conscious for the first time of the Divine reality and the immeasurable distance separating it from finite existence, one attempts to bridge the gap with focused discipline and practice—purifying the mortal self to prepare for the emergence of the spiritual Self.

“We must cast all things from us and strip ourselves of them and refrain from claiming anything for our own.” - Theologia Germanica (14th-century mystical treatise, often attributed to Meister Eckhart)

• Illumination: Intimate knowledge of Reality, a certain apprehension of the Absolute—but not a true union with it; awareness of a transcendent order and a vision of a universe infused with the love of God.

“Everything in temporal nature is descended out that which is eternal, and stands as a palpable visible outbirth of it, so when we know how to separate out the grossness, death, and darkness of time from it, we find what it is it in its eternal state…. In Eternal Nature, or the Kingdom of Heaven, materiality stands in life and light; it is the light’s glorious Body, or that garment wherewith light is clothed, and therefore has all the properties of light in it, and only differs from light as it is its brightness and beauty, as the holder and displayer of all its colours, powers, and virtues.” – William Law (English cleric and theologian)

• Dark Night of the Soul: Borrowing the language of John of the Cross, this state is one of final and complete purification and is often marked by confusion, helplessness, stagnation of the will, and a sense of the withdrawal of God’s presence. It is the period of final “unselfing” and the surrender to the hidden purposes of the divine will.

“Lord, since Thou hast taken from me all that I had of Thee, yet of Thy grace leave me the gift which every dog has by nature: that of being true to Thee in my distress, when I am deprived of all consolation. This I desire more fervently than Thy heavenly Kingdom.” Mechthild of Magdeburg (medieval mystic and Cistercian nun)

• Unification: Nondual union with God, the timeless beloved, Absolute Reality—the spiritual Self has been permanently realized, and the finite self liberated for a new purpose. Filled with the Divine Will, it immerses itself in the world of appearances in order to incarnate the eternal within time, becoming the mediator between humanity and eternity.

“When love has carried us above all things into the Divine Dark, there we are transformed by the Eternal Word Who is the image of the Father; and as the air is penetrated by the sun, thus we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us, and penetrating us.” – John of Ruysbroeck (13th-century Flemish mystic)

“Further, these mystics see in the historic life of Christ an epitome—or if you will, an exhibition—of the essentials of all spiritual life. There they see dramatized not only the cosmic process of the Divine Wisdom, but also the inward experience of every soul on her way to union with that Absolute ‘to which the whole Creation moves.’ This is why the expressions which they use to describe the evolution of the mystical consciousness from the birth of the divine in the spark of the soul to its final unification with the Absolute Life are so constantly chosen from the Drama of Faith. In this drama they see described under the veils the necessary adventures of the spirit. Its obscure and humble birth, its education in poverty, its temptation, mortification and solitude, its ‘illuminated life‘ of service and contemplation, the desolation of that ‘dark night of the soul‘ in which it seems abandoned by the Divine: the painful death of the self, its resurrection to the glorified existence of the Unitive Way, its final re-absorption in its Source – all these, they say, were lived once in a supreme degree in the flesh. Moreover, the degree of closeness with which the individual experience adheres to this Pattern is always taken by them as a standard of the healthiness, ardor, and success of its transcendental activities.” -Evelyn Underhill

A remarkable synthesis of almost two thousand years of Christian mysticism, Underhill’s classification of awakened spiritual states can be seen reflected in the esoteric teachings of almost all the world’s religious traditions.  There is an abundance of deep-rooted similarities found in the writings and teachings of history’s most profoundly realized mystics, East and West.  Though the texture, tone, symbolism, and general flavor of these spiritual states vary greatly from culture to culture, when these similarities are taken as a whole, they reveal a remarkable snapshot of the heavenly estate—describing spiritual realities that mirror the broad states of consciousness we experience every single day.  Though we can certainly classify these states with much more granularity than we shall use here, we can group the wide variety of state experiences into a minimum of four categories:

Purgation is largely concerned with the fleshy instincts and compulsions found in gross states of everyday waking consciousness

Illumination reflects the inner light and visions found in subtle states of dreaming consciousness

The Dark Night of the Soul is a silent echo in the empty causal state of deep dreamless sleep

Unification symbolizes the somewhat more elusive—but never eclipsed—nondual state, recognizing emptiness as form, form as emptiness, and the radical “not-two-ness” of all things.

Fully Human, Fully Divine: The Wilber-Combs Lattice

Underhill continues: “The mystic cannot wholly do without symbol and image, inadequate to his vision though they must always be: for his experience must be expressed if it is to be communicated, and its actuality is inexpressible except in some hint or parallel which will stimulate the dormant intuition of the reader.”

It is not enough to have direct and immediate experiences of spiritual realities, powerful and life-changing as they are, as these experiences must then be properly interpreted and internalized before it can be communicated to the rest of the world.  After all, what would Moses’ fabled encounter with the burning bush have amounted to much if he had not returned from the mountaintop with the Ten Commandments, carving the Divine Will into stone, sculpting the interpretive foundation upon which thousands of years of Western history are built?  What good would St. Teresa of Avila’s experiences of the “Interior Castle” have done for the world if she hadn’t translated her transcendent visions into the viscera of language, unveiling the blueprints to the Heavenly Kingdom for all to see?  Would we even be having this discussion if Christ had left his revelations in the desert, lost forever to the scorched sands, without ever coming back to the world to become one of history’s greatest exemplars of divine Love?  Our interior states need to be interpreted and communicated to the rest of the world, burning in our hearts and haunting our dreams until we somehow find a way to express them—and this process of expression and communication is almost entirely determined by one’s vertical stage of consciousness

These vertical stages of development act as containers of consciousness—unseen structures that pattern our knowledge and mold our interpretations of the world around and within us. Horizontal states, on the other hand, are the stuff of experience itself—gross physical and emotional experiences; subtle visions, inspirations, and revelations; causal glimpses of transcendence, clarity, and emptiness; nondual states of radical union, flow, and Atonement.

Although spiritual practice such as meditation or contemplative prayer typically work to transform temporary states into permanent traits by stabilizing gross, subtle, causal, and nondual states in succession, we do not experience these horizontal states in a rigidly sequential way like we do vertical stages of development. States are ever-present, meaning they are accessible to all people at all times—“peak experiences” that punctuate our personal narratives with moments of catharsis, epiphany, clarity, and unity.  This is true regardless of our psychological and spiritual growth—a person can experience a subtle state of divine Illumination early in life at Fowler’s stage 2 (Mythic-Literal), and then again decades later, after developing to stage 6 (Universalizing).  Though the actual phenomenological state may be similar, the interpretations of the experience would differ drastically from different altitudes of consciousness, with an immense chasm of meaning, context, and sense of personal duty separating the two experiences.

Even those who have realized permanent or semi-permanent nondual awareness—the integrative dissolution of self and other, form and emptiness, the temporal and the eternal—even these people need to continue exercising their vertical growth.  To be fully enlightened in today’s world is to be both fully human and fully divine, which means developing vertically through all the developmental stages currently available to us as well as mastering the many horizontal states, and continuing to inch closer and closer to the unreachable horizon of human development—or else we miss out on a substantial part of a world that remains “over our heads,” limiting the amount of reality we can become one with.  While states of consciousness teach us why we should love, stages of consciousness determine who, what, where, when, and how we love, increasing the heart’s capacity for love with every stetp.  Full enlightenment, of course, can never be attained, in much the same way that we could never say that we were “fully educated.”  We are again asked to love beyond our means, to open our hearts as wide as we possibly can, to the point of breaking forever.  We are asked to simply love, and more often than not, we simply say no.  And yet we are always loved exactly as we are, broken, flawed, and perfect.

Only by taking a truly comprehensive approach to psychological and spiritual life can we begin to make sense of the full complexity of the human condition.  Knee-deep in the information age, we are watching every conflicting worldview, interpretation, and experience from every possible coordinate of the Wilber-Combs lattice coming into contact for the very first time—different worlds, realities, and perspectives all struggling to coexist upon the same planet. Friction and dissonance proliferate within the developmental gaps, giving rise to just about every religious conflict we can think of: moral absolutism versus moral relativism; exoteric religion versus esoteric religion; “New Atheism” and the war against religion; culture wars between traditional, modern, and postmodern worldviews; unthinkable violence in the name of God; religious fundamentalism and persecution; terrorism and the desperation of suicide bombings, etc.

It takes this sort of comprehensive approach to appreciate the role religion has played as history’s greatest source of suffering and liberation alike, and to help us to update our spiritual traditions so that they can offer a path beyond religious fundamentalism and ideological zealotry—carrying people vertically through magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral stages of consciousness, as well as horizontally through gross, subtle, causal, and nondual states, and onward into the limitless heart of human potential.

By understanding and embodying these two directions of human growth and spiritual revelation, our mortal and immortal hearts are able to truly become one, following the path Christ laid down for us two thousand years ago, and fulfilling our evolutionary heritage, billions of years in the making—fully human, fully divine, feeling the blissful union of two hearts beating as one.

RELATED:

Panentheism: The One and the Many

Gratitude and God in 2nd-Person

Simply Love

MGM = the “Mean Green Meme”
MSM = Mainstream Media
Faux News = the brutal disembowelment of journalistic integrity

Brent Simpson has written a great followup to his discussion about conspiracy theory over on Integral Life, and i thought i would post my latest response here.

—

Brent, you are doing an exquisite job with this, allowing yourself access to so many perspectives–even those teetering precariously on the fringe–while keeping your own approach as grounded as possible, which can be very difficult to do when dealing with this sort of material.  Keep up the great work; you have obviously hit on a topic that i am rabidly fascinated with.

I think that as long as we can keep just a few parameters in mind, this conversation can go a long way toward identifying some of the major obstacles that stand in the path of implementing any of our visions of an “Integral World Federation”  And i personally agree that there is no greater obstacle to this newly-emerging potential than the power elite.

Just a few things i like to keep in mind:

- One of the greatest weaknesses in conspiracy theory is the temptation to wrap over-simplified mythologies around extremely complex realities, often framing the struggle as one between classic conceptions of good vs. evil, oppressed vs. oppressor, Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader.  Most conspiracy theory does not take into account the full range of human motivation, even among the power elite themselves.

- Conversely, many conspiracy theorists prefer needlessly complex and convoluted narratives over more straight-forward interpretations, in desperate need of an appointment at Occam’s Barber Shop.  (See, for example, the supposed “moon landing hoax” conspiracies. Much simpler to just go there and simply cover up what you found, than it is to hoax the whole damn thing ^_^)

- A great preponderance of conspiracy theory is fueled by green anti-modernist sentiments, which often undermine both their perceptions and conclusions about life in the 21st century.  These are the people who use the internet to protest anti-globalization, or who fancy themselves revolutionaries because they wear Che Guevera t-shirts that were actually made in China.  It’s important for us to find a way to have a conversation about the New World Order set in a worldview that frames our growth toward globalization in a positive light.  Which brings us to….

- Eros, baby.  Not even the power elite can escape its grasp.  Whether they know it or not, they are part of the story of our mutual becoming, just as much as anyone else.  And they are playing their role precisely as they should be, creating exactly the sort of evolutionary tension we need to propel ourselves to the next level of self-organization.

I have a few comments about the examples you cite of conspiracy within military, economic, industrial, and entertainment complexes, which is exactly where you would want to begin when trying to determine the influence of the power elite on American (and, by effect, global) society.  But unfortunately, i don’t have as much time to respond as i would like, so i will just touch on one piece i have been thinking about lately, which is around the corporate-controlled mainstream media and the 24-hour news cycle.

The other night Chuck Todd was on Bill Maher’s show, and he was expressing his own consternation that he has to share the arena of “media” (i think he was specifically referring to “journalism”) with people like Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh, who make a career out of distorting truth, fabricating reality, and espousing traditional values rather than offering an objective view of the facts and allowing the viewer to draw their own conclusions.  A couple decades ago, these people would have never have even been invited to the grown-up table on Thanksgiving.  But now, it seems, you can use something like Fox News to carpet bomb American society with partial truths and propaganda, leaving it to the other networks to clean up the mess, while knowing that the lies will “stick” with enough of the pre-rational fringe to disrupt our most important media cycles.  This is why when you turn on the TV hoping for a reasonable debate about health care, one that presents the facts on both sides of the argument in a cool and rational way, but instead find images of gun-toting protesters, hanging effigies of congressmen, and posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache (which i imagine must be hideously insulting to holocaust survivors and their decendants…).

Many people point the finger at Rupert Murdoch, and consider him a direct conspirator behind the artificially-stoked culture wars that are preventing any real solutions from being surfaced.  But i think he is just playing his role as a capitalist, following the money wherever it takes him.  Our current journalistic malaise is not (solely) due to corporate conspiracy to keep us down by keeping us dumb, but is an inevitable result of liberal media itself, coupled with the exponential growth of information technology.  Having only three network channels to choose from forced us into a sort of journalistic objectivity, and someone like Walter Cronkite was able to report across ideological lines and be heard by multiple values at once.

But as communications technology continued to accelerate, our viewing options continued to increase, and postmodernist criticism of objectivity itself continued to saturate academia,the entire milieu of journalism began to change right before our eyes until we found ourselves exactly where we are–a plurality of news sources, each uniquely customized to various values propositions up and down the spectrum of development, each catering to its own (usually mutually exclusive) audience demographic.  As a result, it is now almost completely impossible to send a single message to all of America–or for a single lie to be debunked for all of America–a reality that many politicians have already begun using to their advantage (I’m looking at you, Palin…).

I don’t actually think all of this unfolded according to some secret Illuminati plan, as the technologies involved (especially the internet) were largely disruptive technologies–meaning they were innovations no one could have really seen coming, with consequences no one could have fully predicted.  But it did create fresh and fertile soil for corporate opportunism, especially as the expansion of news media became more and more dependent upon Neilson ratings and advertising sponsorships.

Of course, news media now has way too much span for way too little depth, and has already begun collapsing under its own weight.  Journalism is beginning to eat itself–anchormen are being replaced by entertainers, journalists replaced by commentators, and investigative reporters replaced by stay-at-home bloggers.  We no longer report facts, we report values.  We no longer search for objective truth, we search for ways to reinforce the things we already believe.  As a result, the power elite now has an entirely new place to hide their skeletons: right in plain sight for all to see (and none to notice).

Anyway, i think it is a delicious twist of irony that the only reason that people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck can find a spotlight in the mainstream media is because of the high-minded pluralistic values that have emerged in the past 50 years, which has simultaneously raised the bar for journalistic sophistication, while almost entirely deconstructing our collective need for journalistic objectivity (or even integrity).

“There is no objective truth, just endless interpretations of truth. And no single interpretation can be any better or any worse than any other interpretation.  Therefore, there is no essential difference between Sean Hannity’s truth and Rachel Maddow’s truth.” -Extreme Postmodern Strawman

“Take your aperspectival nihilism and shove it up your mean green ass.” -Extreme Integral Strawman

PREVIOUSLY:

Here Be Dragons: Conspiracy Theory and the Power Elite

“Over the last few months I have come across Alex Jones. His views to say the least are radical. He is positing that the government (at the highest levels)… is already non-left/right (Something Wilber pushes for & I believe could be wonderfully powerful if just people run the show). Jones’ view is that however, the left/right paradigm is a hoax it is used as a means to rile people into partisan thought. Where in reality the control is really coming from banking elite. Wacky right? I agree… it sounds/is far out. But, the far out-ness of it does not on its own negate its possibility of truth. As truth claims must be empirically looked into right?

Here’s the scary thing… he in my view provides some real suggestive evidence that there may well be some real truths to what he has to say. The stuff is far out no doubt… but it requires personal inquiry to ascertain if such important info is or isn’t true.

Look for yourself: www.infowars.com & www.prisonplanet.com”

Brian Oconnell responded by saying:

“Too much reality might make Integral’s and Ken’s Vision have to be revised. The LR would look much different with the truths your pointing to…. Integral thinks it has a grasp of the LR. But does not understanding banking 101. Integral needs a LR awakening and quick before the Elite blob takes over Integral hopes.”

Here was my response.

As a life-long enthusiast of conspiracy theory, i’ve kept an eye on everything from Alex Jones to the Masons, to the Bilderbergers, and all the way to glass domes on the moon, structures on Mars, ancient astronauts, and various forms of (occasionally illicit) extraterrestrial liaison.  Not only is it wildly entertaining to wrap interesting mythologies around the complexity of modern life, it’s also a great way to remind myself of everything i don’t know—and i personally think that it is extremely important for even our best maps of reality to acknowledge the mind boggling mystery at the periphery of understanding, dark seas of incomprehension scribed with warnings that plainly read: “Here Be Dragons.”

The problem with most conspiracy theory is that, when followed through to the end with a critical eye, any particular theory ends up appearing hopelessly naive.  However, it is equally naive to think that, in a world with as dramatically imbalanced a distribution of wealth as ours, there are no conspiracy theories at all.  American and European history has been decidedly influenced by a plethora of secret societies, each with its own sphere of influence, control, and power.  Let’s be clear—those with the most wealth and power will almost always manipulate the system so they can maintain that power.  And they use tactics that have been in play since at least the Roman Empire—even the Babylonian, if you listen to Alex Jones.  But, outside the world of comic books and caped crusaders (the Guild of Calamitous Intent notwithstanding), it is hard to imagine any single room of people powerful enough (or competent enough with their power) to successfully manipulate and control the thoughts and values of over six billion individual agents around the world.

Conspiracies certainly exist, but no prison is strong enough to confine Eros.

Much of the confusion, i believe, is due to an unnecessary personification of the “nexus-agency” of the lower right quadrant—e.g. Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”—there is a very real “intelligence” to the LR quadrant, a self-organizing force that we have begun to intuit, but have found difficult to account for (at least before Ken Wilber’s four-quadrant map made it explicit)—and while looking for some way to “ground” this LR intelligence in the real world, we naturally project it onto the power elite.  After all, if there anyone who could influence the political, industrial, military, and entertainment worlds, it would certainly be the top .0001% of the wealthiest people in the world.  But to think that any of them would be capable of subverting more than 500 years of individual liberty, enslaving the free-thinkers of the world under some sort of monolithic New World Order aegis of global totalitarianism (as Alex Jones suggests) is hopelessly naive, and radically overestimates our own sway on the forces of evolution in this lonely pocket of the galaxy.

It reminds me of my favorite argument against those who believe the Bush administration was responsible for 9/11*—do you really think that those responsible for the FEMA, Guantanamo Bay, and Iraqi WMD fiascos could really carry out an operation as incomprehensibly complex as a 9/11 coverup?**

As to Brian’s comment that “the LR would look much different with the truths you’re pointing to”—would it really?  Isn’t this thirst for wealth and power pretty much covered by the “Red” stage of development?  And isn’t it made pretty explicit that any level of cognition can be hijacked by ego-centric values, and that these power-hungry values can even be dressed up (double-speak style) with the language of pretty much any other stage of values?  While i agree that the integral treatment of political science has remained highly abstract and conceptual, and its real-world implementation needs to take into account the fact that the power elite and the developmental elite seem to share almost no overlap whatsoever, i don’t think our distribution of wealth and power does anything to “break” the integral model.  I also think it can accommodate the concept of “esoteric” and “exoteric” power dynamics as they exist today and throughout history, which is what most political conspiracy theory concerns itself with.

Again, i think it is foolish to believe any given conspiracy theory, on it’s own merit.  The truth is too big, too complex, and most likely too compartmentalized for even the conspirators themselves to fully understand.  And it is easy to become seduced by the sorts of generalizations people like Alex Jones throw around so easily, such as the idea that distinctions between the American Right and Left are mere Illuminati illusions—one only needs to look at the deeply-embedded culture wars of America to see that, on an ideological level, the Left and the Right represent some very real distinctions of modern political thought.  That is, even if the American political system has been manipulated on a structural level by the power elite, it is still inhabited by a plurality of different perspectives—some red, some amber, some orange, some green, some teal, and some turquoise.  Some valuing individualist libertarianism, some collectivist socialism.  Some emphasizing interior values, some emphasizing exterior conditions.  Some socially liberal, some socially conservative; some fiscally liberal, some fiscally conservative.  Again, although i agree that the integral community still needs to find more pragmatic interpretations of real-world power dynamics, we already have all the conceptual tools we need to do so—we just need to continue unfolding the map and unpacking some of these insights.

Personally, i have noticed that i have grown far less interested in conspiracies of imprisonment, and more interested in conspiracies of jailbreak—that is, if any one of the thousands of possible conspiracies was actually true, it would be extraterrestrial contact that would have the potential of radically reconfiguring our integral maps.  Nothing would stretch our definitions of the word “integral” more than interplanetary contact.  Just a couple weeks ago at Ken’s loft, he said something along the lines of “right now in history, we have the biggest opportunity we will ever have to integrate all the world’s knowledge and to get a real sense of the universal—until we make extraterrestrial contact, when we will have to compare our integrated world-truth with all the other integrated world-truths that are out there.”  But we don’t even need to be so visionary—i think that even finding a single microorganism in the seas of Europa would be enough to galvanize a massive upswell of human consciousness, as we would have a new symbolic “other” by which to contrast a new global sense of “us.”

You can almost smell the pot fumes with this sort of dorm-room philosophizing ^_^

* Which is an entirely different group of people than those who believe the Bush administration wasn’t directly responsible for executing the 9/11 attacks, but knew it was going to happen and allowed it to, precipitated by Cheney’s confession that we “need” a “new Pearl Harbor”—which i find to be a far more believable accusation.

** Just so i don’t come off as a typical liberal Bush-basher (though it can sometimes seem like shooting whales in a barrel) i will say in self-defense that i am horribly disappointed that the media has been ignoring the admirable success of his AIDS work in Africa, as it’s been recently estimated that his actions are responsible for saving the lives of over one million people.  It was a shining diamond in the eight-year rough that should receive far more acknowledgment than it does.  For some reason i doubt very much that Dick Cheney was closely involved in that one.  (Yes, i am a typical liberal Cheney basher.)

Hurricanes, tsunamis, drought, global warming, melting icecaps, eradication of biodiversity—to many of us, these harbingers of our planet’s seemingly imminent environmental meltdown are becoming more and more apparent each year, while the need for effective and enforceable sustainability policies on a global scale are becoming more and more urgent.

Despite considerable tension and even aversion in green communities to the subject, we cannot talk about “going green” without making it a discussion about growth through various hierarchies of human development.  Really, the subject of growth should come as second nature to “green” thinkers and communities—after all, a blade of grass must grow to two inches before it can grow to six; a tree must grow from acorn to sapling before it can someday become a mighty oak.  In much the same way, our consciousness, our values, and our cultures must also move through several distinct stages of growth before we can even begin to even see the problem, let alone care enough to do anything about it.

In other words, “going green” really means “growing green,” and represents the crux of almost all the global issues we presently face: it’s not a problem of human imagination, technological innovation, or even political will—it’s a problem of human growth.

A simple way to explain human growth through stages of developmental unfolding is to say that, with each successive stage, we see an increased capacity for complexity, compassion, consciousness, and the number of perspectives one can take. For example, in consciousness development, one goes from the ability to take only a 1st-person perspective, to also being able to take a 2nd-person perspective, to also being able to take a 3rd-person perspective, and so on. Thus, in this example, you can see that the capacity for love increases (from being able to love only me, to being able to love us, to being able to love all of us, to being able to love all sentient beings….). For convenience, the stages of development follow the natural colors of the rainbow, so you’ll often hear us refer to degree of development or degree of consciousness or degree of capacity to love, etc. by a particular color of the rainbow.

“Green” consciousness actually represents one of the most highly evolved stages of consciousness currently available to humanity, and can only be achieved after moving through a succession of previous stages.  While these stages must be held lightly in our minds, understanding that human beings are far too complex to be easily pigeonholed into these sorts of categories, they nonetheless represent very real measurements of personal and cultural growth.

As it turns out, we must first grow through at least four other major levels of development (described in more detail at the bottom of this page.)

Magic (“Magenta”)

Power (“Red”)

Mythic (“Amber”)

Rational (“Orange”)

…before we can make it to:

Pluralistic (“Green”)

…and then onward to:

Integral (“Teal/Turquoise”)

Which is why, when it comes to things like climate change and the “magic number” of 350 PPM of CO2, we say that “truth is not enough.”  Measurements such as these are products of at least “orange” rational consciousness, and can thus only be apprehended by those segments of the human population who have grown to this developmental stage.  Which may not be as many as you think—by recent estimates, nearly 70% of the world is at an “amber” mythic stage or lower (as reflected in a now-infamous statement made by Republican John Shimkus, Representative of Illinois: “The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth, this earth will not be destroyed by a flood.”)

In the U.S., this can be seen in such polls as Gallup’s recent study into beliefs around evolution vs. creationism: a staggering two thirds of the American population believe that the Earth was created by God within the past 10,000 years.  Obviously, polls like this cannot be used as direct correlates of personal or cultural development, especially as we consider the divergence that often occurs between our cognitive understanding and our innermost beliefs about the world.  However, this data does directly apply to our current discussions around climate change and sustainability—after all, how are you going to convince someone to care about the future of the planet if they believe that we are currently living in the biblical End Days, and that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ will occur in our lifetime?  How do you expect a Wall Street executive to have long-term concerns about eliminating carbon emissions if all he cares about are short-term profits?  How do you convince a hardened gang member of the virtues of recycling when all he is trying to do is live to see tomorrow?

It’s not about imposing facts upon people and expecting them to respond in an eco-conscious way, just by virtue of facts alone.  Again, truth is not enough—without the capacity to think critically about our problems, the world-centric values to inform our behavior, and a rational world-view to make sense of it all, we are incapable of responding to the urgency of our times.  Without these fruits of human growth and development, facts are little more than an affront to faith, an insult to tradition, or an obstacle to self-gratification.

One thing we absolutely cannot do is try to change people’s minds, or to convince them how important this all really is.  Human beings don’t work like that—it can take many years for an adult to move from one stage of consciousness to the next, and we have very little understanding of what makes people grow in the first place.  And really, the logistics of human development are entirely beside the point—even if we did understand the mechanics of transformation, it would be a violation of basic human dignity to try to coerce someone’s growth, or to “make them more” than what they already are.  People have a right to believe whatever they believe, to station themselves wherever they like in the spectrum of growth and development.

It is important to understand the nature of human development so that we can meet people at their own level, without a hint of contempt or condescension, framing the problems in a way people can actually hear and respond to.  As Ken Wilber says in a recent interview with Ode Magazine, climate change is “the first issue that affects everybody everywhere on the planet. [Former U.S. Vice-President] Al Gore is saying that the entire world needs to change its behavior. But he says so in a language that is perhaps understood by 20 percent of the world population. Gore assumes that people will respond from rational self-interest based on sound science, but that’s the least of the motivations of the majority of the population of the planet.”

“Al Gore has to ‘language’ his message in at least four different value structures to get, say, 80 percent of the world behind him,” Wilber says. “Anything less than that will simply not work.”

In order to take a truly comprehensive approach to climate change, it is important to see how all the major systems of human interaction impact each other—energy policies, economic policies, technological infrastructures, food production, transportation systems, political realities, etc. Our world has become far too interwoven for these matters to be dealt with individually, and devising piecemeal solutions without a sophisticated understanding of how these systems interface with each other (and how our actions ripple through the rest of our human systems) can only exacerbate our problems.

It can not be emphasized enough how crucial it is to take this sort of holistic approach to human systems—and yet, even if the full complexity of these systems are taken into account, even if we were to clearly understand how every single variable of human interaction affects the total equation of sustainable living, it is still not enough. This is why, alongside a developmental view of human consciousness, Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrant model is so essential to the climate change discussion. Our techno-economic systems represent only one of four irreducible dimensions of human experience, all of which must be taken into consideration if we are to fulfill our potential as stewards of this little blue-green marble.

The totality of our various systems represents the “Lower-Right” quadrant, or the “exterior of the collective.” The other dimensions are:

- the “Lower-Left” quadrant, or the “interior of the collective”: cultural realities, language, beliefs, world-views, sacred cows and taboos, etc.

- the “Upper-Left” quadrant, or the “interior of the individual”: psychological realities, consciousness, cognition, values, personal beliefs, etc.

- the “Upper-Right” quadrant, or the “exterior of the individual”: observable realities, behaviors, empirical knowledge, etc.

Again, the Four Quadrants help us orient ourselves to a truly comprehensive approach to climate change, contextualizing much of the current debate as an exploration of just one of four crucial dimensions of our interconnected world. By using the Four Quadrants as a guide, we take the full complexity of our 21st century problems into account while developing a roadmap to the next phase of human civilization.

What Are the Four Quadrants?

According to Integral Theory, there are at least 4 primary dimensions or perspectives through which we can experience the world: subjective, intersubjective, objective, and interobjective.

These 4 perspectives, represented graphically, are the upper-left, lower-left, upper-right, and lower-right quadrants.

In the subjective—or upper-left—quadrant, we find the world of our individual, interior experiences: our thoughts, emotions, memories, states of mind, perceptions, and immediate sensations—in other words, our “I” space.

In the intersubjective—or lower-left—quadrant, we find the world of our colletive, interior experiences: our shared values, meanings, language, relationships, and cultural background—in other words, our “we” space.

In the objective—or upper-right—quadrant, we find the world of individual, exterior things: our material body (including brain) and anything that you can see or touch (or observe scientifically) in time and space—in other words, our “it” space.

In the interobjective—or lower-right—quadrant, we find the world of collective, exterior things: systems, networks, technology, government, and the natural environment—in other words, our “its” space.

What’s the point of looking at the world through a 4-quadrant lens?

Simple answer: Anything less is narrow, partial and fragmented! Integral Theory maintains that all 4 quadrants are real—and all are important. So, for example, to the question of what is more real, the brain (with its neural pathways and structures) or the mind (with its thoughts and perceptions), Integral Theory answers: BOTH.

Moreover, we add that the mind and brain are situated in cultural and systemic contexts, which influence both inner experience and brain activity in irreducible ways.

What’s more important in human behavior? The psychology of the mind (upper left), or the cultural conditioning of the individual (lower left)? Integral Theory answers, again: BOTH. What is more critical in social development? The habits, customs, and norms of a culture (lower left), or the products it produces (like gun and steel – lower right). Integral Theory answers: BOTH.

All four quadrants are real, all are important, and all are essential for understanding your world.

While some might like to reduce reality to the mind (upper-left quadrant), and others to the brain (upper-right quadrant), and still others to the influence of cultural context (lower-left quadrant), and yet others to the effect of systems (“it’s the economy, stupid!” i.e., lower-right quadrant), Integral Theory holds that ALL 4 QUADRANTS are indispensable. The more we can consciously include the 4 quadrants in our perspective, the more whole, balanced, healthy, comprehensive, and effective our actions will be.

And it all boils down to just four dimensions. It’s as easy as I, we, it, and its!

An Overview of Stages of Consciousness

Infrared (archaic): Infrared Altitude signifies a degree of development that is in many ways imbedded in nature, body, and the gross realm in general. Infrared Altitude exhibits an archaic worldview, physiological needs (food, water, shelter, etc.), a self-sense that is minimally differentiated from its environment, and is in nearly all ways oriented towards physical survival. Although present in infants, infrared is rarely seen in adults except in cases of famine, natural disasters, or other catastrophic events. Infrared is also used as a kind of catch-all term for all earlier evolutionary stages and drives.

Magenta (egocentric, magic): Magenta Altitude began about 50,000 years ago, and tends to be the home of egocentric drives, a magical worldview, and impulsiveness. It is expressed through magic/animism, kin-spirits, and such. Young children primarily operate with a magenta worldview. Magenta in any line of development is fundamental, or “square one” for any and all new tasks. Magenta emotions and cognition can be seen driving such cultural phenomena as superhero-themed comic books or movies.

Red (ego- to ethnocentric, power): The Red Altitude began about 10,000 years ago, and is the marker of egocentric drives based on power, where “might makes right,” where aggression rules, and where there is a limited capacity to take the role of an “other.” Red impulses are classically seen in grade school and early high school, where bullying, teasing, and the like are the norm. Red motivations can be seen culturally in Ultimate Fighting contests, which have no fixed rules (fixed rules come into being at the next Altitude, Amber), teenage rebellion and the movies that cater to it (The Fast and the Furious), gang dynamics (where the stronger rule the weaker), and the like.

Amber (ethnocentric, mythic): The Amber Altitude began about 5,000 years ago, and indicates a worldview that is traditionalist and mythic in nature—and mythic worldviews are almost always held as absolute (this stage of development is often called absolutistic). Instead of “might makes right,” amber ethics are more oriented to the group, but one that extends only to “my” group. Grade school and high school kids usually exhibit amber motivations to “fit in.” Amber ethics help to control the impulsiveness and narcissism of red. Culturally, amber worldviews can be seen in fundamentalism (my God is right no matter what); extreme patriotism (my country is right no matter what); and ethnocentrism (my people are right no matter what).

Orange (worldcentric, rational): The Orange Altitude began about 500 years ago, during the period known as the European Enlightenment. In an orange worldview, the individual begins to move away from the amber conformity that reifies the views of one’s religion, nation, or tribe. The orange worldview often begins to emerge in late high school, college, or adulthood. Culturally, the orange worldview realizes that “truth is not delivered; it is discovered,” spurring the great advances of science and formal rationality. Orange ethics begin to embrace all people, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal….” Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, the US Bill of Rights, and many of the laws written to protect individual freedom all flow from an orange worldview.

Green (worldcentric, pluralistic): The Green Altitude began roughly 150 years ago, though it came into its fullest expression during the 1960’s. Green worldviews are marked by pluralism, or the ability to see that there are multiple ways of seeing reality. If orange sees universal truths (“All men are created equal”), green sees multiple universal truths—different universals for different cultures. Green ethics continue, and radically broaden, the movement to embrace all people. A green statement might read, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, regardless of race, gender, class….” Green ethics have given birth to the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements, as well as environmentalism.

The green worldview’s multiple perspectives give it room for greater compassion, idealism, and involvement, in its healthy form. Such qualities are seen by organizations such as the Sierra Club, Amnesty International, Union of Concerned Scientists, and Doctors Without Borders. In its unhealthy form green worldviews can lead to extreme relativism, where all beliefs are seen as relative and equally true, which can in turn lead to the nihilism, narcissism, irony, and meaninglessness exhibited by many of today’s intellectuals, academics, and trend-setters… not to mention another “lost” generation of students.

Teal (worldcentric to “kosmocentric,” integral): The Teal Altitude marks the beginning of an integral worldview, where pluralism and relativism are transcended and included into a more systematic whole. The transition from green to teal is also known as the transition from “1st-tier” values to “2nd-tier” values, the most immediate difference being the fact that each “1st-tier” value thinks it is the only truly correct value, while “2nd-tier” values recognize the importance of all preceding stages of development. Thus, the teal worldview honors the insights of the green worldview, but places it into a larger context that allows for healthy hierarchies, and healthy value distinctions.

Perhaps most important, a teal worldview begins to see the process of development itself, acknowledging that each one of the previous stages (magenta through green) has an important role to play in the human experience. Teal consciousness sees that each of the previous stages reveals an important truth, and pulls them all together and integrates them without trying to change them to “be more like me,” and without resorting to extreme cultural relativism (“all are equal”). Teal worldviews do more than just see all points of view (that’s a green worldview)—it can see and honor them, but also critically evaluate them.

Turquoise (“kosmocentric,” integral): Turquoise is a mature integral view, one that sees not only healthy hierarchy but also the various quadrants of human knowledge, expression, and inquiry (at the minimum: I, we, and it). While teal worldviews tend to be secular, turquoise is the first to begin to integrate Spirit as a living force in the world (manifested through any or all of the 3 Faces of God: “I”—e.g. the “No self” or “witness” of Buddhism; “we/thou”—e.g. the “great other” of Christianity, Judaism, Hindusm, Islam, etc.; or “it”—e.g. the “Web of Life” seen in Taoism, Pantheism, etc.).

More Resources:

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In order to get a full grasp of this complex and fairly volatile issue, we must consider two different types of power and powerlessness, one type belonging to men, and the other to women.  Since the very first waves of feminism, women began comparing their public roles to those belonging to men, and began to perceive a very real imbalance of opportunities for women to excel in the workplace.  This, many people claimed, was testament to the outright dis-empowerment of women everywhere.  A man’s success was viewed as the only power that carried any real currency in society, and so a movement was born—or rather multiple movements, each building upon the triumphs and trappings of the last.  Women’s liberation allowed women to suddenly move into the workplace, more than ever before in history, and is now viewed as one of the most remarkable victories of the human spirit.  Together, men and women began to view the public sphere as the arena of power itself—where all the gaps between oppressor and oppressed ultimately dwell, and the only place where they can be resolved.  As a result, the “invisible power” of women was often devalued, if acknowledged at all.

However, once women began moving en masse into positions of social authority, many began to realize that men’s ostensible “success” in the public sphere was not necessarily a product of male power, but rather of male powerlessness—one of few highly disposable roles that society offers to men.  These roles often require a considerable sacrifice of time, energy, and happiness, as well as frequent abandonment of interest in things like music, poetry, dance, and other artistic expressions.  Such material success often requires men to cut themselves off from all the qualities that are commonly associated with female power—namely love, connection, and compassion—and often replace them with the sort of hyper-masculine pathologies perceived as necessary to ensure financial prosperity such as callousness, ruthlessness, and an unhealthy predisposition to avarice.  These traits started to define success for a great many people, traits that were in actuality a portent of how little power men really had.

When trying to weigh the distribution of power between men and women, we might suggest a very interesting metric: life expectancy.  For example, we can point to the significantly lower life expectancies among African Americans when compared to Caucasians as a valid measure of dis-empowerment—it could be surmised that because African Americans tend to have notably less societal power on average than Caucasians, they are subject to more stress and hardship throughout a lifetime, leading to more exhaustion, illness, and thus reduced life-spans.  But the fact that men of all races can expect considerably shorter life-spans than women is not often regarded as symptomatic of this same sort of power imbalance, despite the fact that there appears to be no real biological reason why this should be the case.

Of course it is entirely too simplistic to say that, since women tend to live longer lives, they therefore have more power—but we might be able to infer that, of the power men and women do already have, women’s power may be more healthfully wielded.

Just as we might look to life expectancy as a measure of male vs. female power, we might also consider suicide rates as an indicator of overall powerlessness.  Here too we find a tremendous imbalance between male suicide rates and female suicide rates, which predict that adolescent men are as much as four times more likely to kill themselves as women—and the ratio only becomes greater with age, with elderly men being more than one thousand percent more likely to commit suicide than women of the same age.  Just as a woman’s power can be characterized as being “invisible” and therefore all-too-easy to overlook, men’s powerlessness has become invisible to the majority of society, even while it is being confused for his power.  Again, it would be simplistic as to think that, since men kill themselves more often than women, they are more powerless than women.  But perhaps we can suggest that the lack of recognition of this powerlessness is what causes so many males to prematurely end their own lives.  The case could be made that the expectations for males to conform to the rigidly defined societal pressures of sexuality, success, and service are much greater than they are for females.

Which is certainly not to say that women do not have their own sets of societal pressures bearing down upon them from all angles, often coercing women to adopt identities they are not at all comfortable with—but these pressures tend to carry different sorts of consequence in the public sphere. This brings us to one of the most universal and fundamental misconceptions in virtually all of feminist thought, what we might call “the myth of oppression.”  In order for one group of people to be truly oppressed, at least one of three possibilities is true: they are either dumber, weaker, or fewer in numbers than their oppressors.  It is doubtful that we could find any sane person, male or female, who would suggest that women have ever fallen into any of these categories—and yet the myth of oppression lives on, a grim parody of the real oppression that men and women have both experienced throughout our shared history.

It is crucial to emphasize the following: though we may find it necessary to reframe our popular conceptions of male/female oppression, debunking the myth of women as perennial victim, at no point are we diminishing the very real experiences of oppression women encounter every day, all over the world.  At every moment women are being demoralized.  Her identity is being commodified, packaged, and sold for a quick profit.  Her sexuality is either being forced upon her or ripped away, her soul ravaged by senseless acts of physical, emotional, and spiritual abuse.  There is no denying that oppression exists in this world, that countless instances of exploitation and inequity persist to this very day, and that women are too often the victims of this oppression. It obliterates my heart whenever i open myself to even a fraction of the full severity of women’s suffering, if even for just a moment.  And it is clear that men everywhere need to recognize these genuine instances of violence, find a way to collectively “man up” and take more ownership and responsibility for his gender’s behaviors, and begin to consciously redefine the male identity, just as women have been doing for generations.

But when trying to identify the source of this oppression, we must be careful not to allow ourselves to get swept away by the difficult emotions surrounding male/female oppression, or succumb to the glib oversimplifications presented by so many feminist thinkers: namely, the popular narrative that human history is one giant plot concocted by men to keep women under his thumb.  Make no mistake, men and women are both oppressed, by ourselves, by each other, and by the forces of history.  The dreaded patriarchy and all it is associated with—the sharp divisions between labor, gender roles, sexuality, temperament, etc.—men and women have created this mess together, out of sheer necessity of human survival, and both suffer under its weight.  Thus, a comprehensive approach to feminism would not frame the issue as a woman’s struggle to escape her historical oppression by men, but as both men and women together struggling to escape the oppression of history itself.

The weakness of men is the facade of strength, while the strength of women is the facade of weakness.  The goal, obviously, is to thoroughly understand power and powerlessness as they relate to both men and women, thus enabling both sexes to move beyond the often-constricting roles we have created for ourselves.  Some may consider it odd or disingenuous to have men discussing feminism—it is not unusual in academia to believe that only women should deal with women’s issues, and only men with men’s issues, as neither can speak to the experience of the other.  These rules of engagement have only reinforced the enormous divide between us, and it is only through self-awareness and inter-gender dialogue that we will strengthen our ability to honor and cultivate the brilliance inherent within both genders.  The fact remains that both men and women are in this together—we created the mess together, step-by-stumbling-step, all throughout history—and therefore such identity politics have no place in this conversation.  There can be no real progress for women without men’s own progress taking place right alongside, just as there can be no real progress for men without honoring and deepening the many victories women have created for themselves in recent decades.  We are defined only in relation to each other.  Only together are we whole, completing the most sacred circuit the universe has ever known—a circuit through which life continues to proliferate, consciousness continues to amplify, and history continues to whisper its secrets to future generations.

Originally published on Integral Life: Redefining the Relationships Between Men and Women. Part 3: Power and Powerlessness (w/ Warren Farrell and Ken Wilber)

Previously:

Redefining the Relationships Between Men and Women

“It’s definitely true that men, as a rule today in industrialized societies, are basically where women were in the 1950′s, psychologically and socially. Part of what is keeping men there is being blamed for having power that is really a camouflage for the powerlessness. Real power is control over my own life.” – Warren Farrell

In order to come to any coherent definition of ourselves as sexual beings, we must take as comprehensive a view of sexuality as possible. Ken Wilber has developed a theoretical model known as the “Four Quadrants,” which, when applied to nearly any field of human knowledge, offers a very simple way to ensure that all bases are being covered and that nothing is being left out. The Four Quadrant model accounts for the interior and exterior dimensions of both the individual and the collective, yielding four major realms of consciousness: intentional, cultural, behavioral, and social (or “I”, “we”, “it”, and “its”, respectively, for those interested in tracking pronouns). All four of these dimensions are closely related, with each quadrant having strong correlates in the others—though none of these quadrants can be reduced to each other (despite the entire history of human thought being essentially an attempt to do exactly this.)

When applied to human sexuality, the Four Quadrants allow us to clearly see the respective roles of biological sex (male vs. female), interior sexuality (masculine vs. feminine), and sexual gender (man vs. woman, as defined by cultural beliefs and expectations), while also accounting for the various technological and economic systems all of these are situated in. By differentiating each of these important dimensions of sexuality, we are able to see how each is able to develop along its own trajectory, with its own history, without needing to confuse one’s sexual orientation with one’s sense of “manliness,” one’s secret desires with one’s cultural taboos, or even one’s gender with one’s genitals.

As previously mentioned, each of these major dimensions of human sexuality (sex, sexuality, gender, and sociological factors) grows through several distinct stages of unfolding. Just as the human body grows through stages of physical maturity—from fetal to infancy, to toddler-hood, to adolescence, to reproductive maturity—so do we grow psychologically, culturally, and socially. In fact, it is only toward the higher reaches of psychological growth that these sorts of important differentiations between biology, psychology, culture, and society can be made—and only from within a relatively advanced culture can significant strides be made on behalf of sexual identity, expression, and liberation. Both men and women evolve through ego-centric, ethno-centric, and world-centric stages of development, creating cultures that reflect these ever-deepening and increasingly inclusive values as they go.

A special note should be made in regards to our techno-economic development, which arguably has the most influence upon development in the other quadrants, for a variety of reasons. By looking to the history of economic production, we can find the history of gender roles themselves—in the earliest stages of civilization, men and women were able to produce food fairly equally, as men would hunt and women would gather, and even later when we moved into the horticultural stage and both men and women could use a digging stick to grow crops. Things changed, however, when we moved into agricultural mode of production, requiring the training of large animals to pull heavy plows through the fields. As men possess more upper-body strength than women, and women were much more susceptible to birth complications under this sort of physical labor, men and women both made the mutual decision to each tend to different spheres of life. This is we begin to see our first true divisions of labor, with men becoming responsible for the public sphere, and women for the private sphere. (And as an interesting footnote, most of the cultures from the early foraging and horticultural eras worshiped gods that were predominantly matriarchal or evenly split between male and female deities, as opposed to agrarian societies who typically only worshiped male deities.) In societies still struggling with survivalist needs, women became valued as humanity’s most precious resource, and men became valued for their disposability, and are expected to compete for the opportunity to protect these resources.

For the next several thousand years, men did what they do best: kill, compete, and construct rigid and elaborate patriarchies, in all flavors of tribalism, nationalism, religion, aristocracies, meritocracies, and steel cage matches. And, in these testosterone-driven social hierarchies, a woman’s proper place in the public sphere was all too clear: she had none whatsoever. And though modern and post-modern feminists can (and do) scoff at the unabashed sexual inequities within these patriarchies, the fact that this was an intentional, necessary, and mutually beneficial decision made by both sexes early in history is regrettably forgotten. Most men aren’t the oppressive beasts they are often made out to be, and most women aren’t the helpless victims of men’s oppression that they are often made out to be.

Of course, we are now in a completely different era of history, with modes of technology that have rendered many, if not all, of these prior decisions about labor division obsolete. Much of the physical labor men traditionally had to do has been replaced first by the steam engine, then by combustion, and now by the microchip. This is probably the single most important factor in terms of the rise of women’s liberation, and has brought into relief one of the most frustrating aspects of collective transformation: although the technology can change overnight, the culture is much more slow to adapt, often requiring entire generations to die off before real change can be enacted throughout society. Or, as Ken has bleakly joked elsewhere: “the knowledge quest can only proceed funeral by funeral….”

All in all, it is an amazing time to be alive—to be a man or a woman, male or a female, masculine or feminine, gay or straight. We are bearing witness to an entire new wave of individual and collective values, an Integral wave of development which, when it reaches the tipping point of its emergence, will make just as extraordinary a splash upon history as the European renaissance or the postmodern revolution of the sixties. And while each previous revolution has occurred only to steer the world away from the pathologies and excesses of what came before, the Integral revolution will be markedly different—while creating a space of personal and collective transformation that is radically and unmistakably new, Integral consciousness will also help to bring a tremendous amount of healing, stability, and sanity to the rest of the world, with the crucial understanding that everyone must start at square one before evolving to Integral consciousness. With as comprehensive a view of human sexuality as Integral consciousness provides, it becomes apparent that all of our old and apparently obsolete methods of relating to each other will always exist, and we must therefore allow them to exist on their own terms, while simultaneously liberating ourselves from definitions of sexual maturity that no longer seem to apply to us or our relationships, and finding new ways to relate to each other with more authenticity, more wholeness, and more erotic passion than ever before possible….

Originally published on Integral Life: Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men? (w/ Warren Farrell & Ken Wilber)

Responding to a previous post titled “Deconstructing Niggy: A Brief Exploration of Race and Hip Hop,” a friend asked me: “Why do you like to discuss race?  I’m curious about that more so than the race issues themselves—what’s your own background anyway?”

Here is my response.  Before you read it, you should know that i hereby acknowledge that a) i am white, b) i have been white my entire life, and c) i still carry a LOT of naivete around the subject of racism and oppression. That said, i think there are obviously a tremendous amount of cultural taboos that continue to cloud this subject, and i have always been a fan of trying to look at those spaces between us where most spend a lavish amount of time and energy trying not to see. I have largely grown up in the cultural vacuum of identity politics, in which you are not allowed to say anything about anyone else’s experience, culturally or personally, other than your own—and so i feel like i am sitting on the end of a particularly wobbly branch, completely unsure if the winds will knock me off.  But i guess this is an effort to cut through my own fear of personal expression, and probe a bit deeper into the sensitive wounds that continue to exist beneath our cultural scabs.

Why do i like to discuss race—that is a really difficult question to answer!  A quick response might be to say that i think part of it has to do with my relationship with music and trying to take a “trans-genre” approach to djing.  Music has long been a sort of window into other cultures, perspectives, and ways of being for me.  And as i see it, the “conscious dj” has an enormous amount of responsibility when it comes to not just playing music that sounds good and has a catchy beat, but having a very real, in-depth understanding of the artists and cultures s/he is representing.

Being a good dj is sort of like being a cultural archivist (for good examples, check out Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, among many others). DJ’s are usually looked to for their cultural expertise, as they are typically the ones who are most passionate about music and music culture, and therefore the most knowledgeable. They tend to represent some form of “lower-left quadrant” mastery, and are looked to for this expertise, in much the same way that listeners form kinships with certain music reviewers who are trusted for their meta-perspectives on cultural trends and innovations. In this sense, dj’s are rather like the “Mavens” described in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, acting as trusted cultural experts to help expose people to artists they would never have been exposed to by the mainstream industry-controlled channels—and in order to live up to that responsibility, he or she needs to be exposed to as many different subcultures as possible.  And once you start stepping into subcultures other than your own, you inevitably bump into the often tricky business of race and racism.

For example, i find it fascinating that, in hip hop culture, just about any race can find acceptance as a dj, but it is very very difficult to gain the same level of recognition and acceptance as an mc if you are not black. I think much of this has to do with economic advantage—turntables, mixers, and crates of records are expensive, and it’s no secret that black communities have historically remained on the shit end of the socio-economic stick.  (In fact, hip hop as an artform exploded throughout New York City following a massive two-day blackout in 1977, during which the looting of music stores by impoverished blacks brought new technology to poor neighborhoods and ghettos for the first time ever.)  Because technology is so expensive, yet everyone is born with a voice, it is much easier for the art of rapping to remain anchored in ethnocentric thinking—making it more difficult for non-black mc’s to be accepted by the hip hop community.

So there’s one example of my interest in race and racism, from an artistic perspective.

On a personal level, i guess it comes down to becoming increasingly aware of my own “white privilege”—which is why i find the question fascinating: “Have you had any experiences which forced you to deeply acknowledge, confront, or even simply feel your skin color?”  My guess is that, for most white Americans (at least those who have not traveled beyond the borders of the U.S.) the honest answer would be “never.”  Which is a bit of a luxury, you know what i mean?  Most minorities are made to feel the color of their skin on a daily basis, from subtle cultural biases to flagrant racial profiling.

This is why when people ask me why i moved from Boulder to Denver, i often half-jokingly respond “too many white people.”  Or, if i’m feeling a little more socially lubricated, “too many self-assured white people who think they are above racism, without ever having to interact with people who don’t look like them.” I can be an elitist asshole when i am socially lubricated.

I remember the first time i ever felt the color of my skin.  I was in 9th grade, and though i came from a pretty racist family, my mother and stepfather were very careful to keep me away from such toxic values.  As a result, i was raised to be “color-blind” to questions of race.  It was all very naive, as i was largely unconscious of the struggles minorites were experiencing every day.  I think there is a sort of expectancy for post-amber whites to become “color-blind” to racial differences—especially in the zeitgeist of postmodernism.  But i think that such “color-blindness” is a sort of covert racism—after all, the only people who can afford to be “color-blind” are the ones who never have to even think about the color of their skin.  The ones who aren’t forced to confront their own identity on a daily basis in the same way that minorities are.  “Color-blindness” is just another perk of white privilege, along with mortgages, small classroom sizes, and free access to the country club pool.

Then, the Rodney King trial went down.  Four white cops beat a black man within an inch of his life, with no reasonable threat made to them.  Although a bystander recorded the entire incident, the four white cops were found innocent, the entire city of Los Angeles exploded in mass riots, while many other parts of the country trembled in the aftermath. It was as though decades of repressed anger and rage had exploded through the whole nation, and people were finally given license to say something about it.

A few days after the riots began i was sent to the vice-principal’s office.  I was late to school that day. Clumsy and awkward, i walked across a row of seated students and accidentally stepped on some black kid’s foot. (Again, my identity politics made me hesitate to say “on some black kid’s foot,” because the phrase “some black kid” may sound condescending or lead the reader to believe that skin color is my primary way of relating to him as a human being, and that all my culturally-inherited fears and half-truths around the word “black” color my perception of “black people” in general—thereby making me only able to see their blackness, instead of their full humanness.  But as it turns out, his skin color is about the only thing i knew about him as a human being, other than the fact that he definitely had a foot, and that i had indeed stepped upon that foot. But i couldn’t very well describe him as “some footed kid’s foot;” that’s just redundant.)

Anyway, i accidentally stepped on his foot, and was promptly reminded that i was, in fact, a stupid motherfucker. As if i didn’t already know. I stammered a nervous apology and took my seat at the end of the row.

After detention at the end of the school day, i was walking alone down the sunlit hallway connecting the cafeteria to the classrooms when i saw the kid whose shoe i had earlier accidentally stepped on.  He was with about a half dozen of his friends, all human beings who happened to be black.  He pointed me out, and they all ran at me.

There was a very funny episode of the animated series Boondocks in which one of the characters said: “I’ve said it before, expensive sneakers are like $150 land mines. Step on one and BOOM! A perfectly rational black man can explode.” This whole thing kind of reminds me of that.  (I should mention that i edited out of the quote the part that referred to these shoe-related explosions as an example of “nigger moments,” because that is an identity politic i am particularly sensitive about as a white person, and personally think that is a cultural taboo that whites should continue to respect.  But i included it in this parenthetical because i am edgy like that.)

Next thing i knew, the dude i stepped on punched me in the jaw, and i dropped to the floor like a sack of meat, whereupon they all proceeded to kick the living shit out of me—in the ribs, in the back, and in the head.  Fortunately, just a minute or two into my beating, Taharka—another melanin-abundant guy and the only name i remember from the entire incident—pulled them all off me, and brought me to the nurse’s office.

It was horrifying.  I was just a bit bruised up, no real damage at all, but i was so shocked and confused—i was fourteen years old, i had never hurt anyone, i was just a shy and socially awkward white kid trying to keep his head down and avoid being noticed by anyone.  But on that day, i stood out—i was the enemy, and for a moment was offered a circus-mirror glimpse of how minorities must feel almost every day: singled out for no other reason than the color of my skin.

I cried when my dad came to the school to pick me up.  It was one of the most important days of my life.

***

I believe that the civil rights movement is not over, but is a struggle that must be fought every single day.  By everyone.  It’s not enough for blacks, or asians, or latinos, or any ethnic group to fight the battle alone, which i think has largely been the case since the late sixties/early seventies.  Meanwhile many young whites take the revolutions of the sixties for granted, as if it were our parent’s struggle, and not our own.  As a result, much of the progress from that era is taken completely for granted—and i have the sense that many whites believe that the major victories have already been won, and silently wonder why non-whites aren’t somehow “over it” by now, especially in Obama’s America.

But the civil rights movement is barely half a century old—a tiny sliver of human history—and though the seeds have already been planted and are even now taking root deep in our collective psyche, the fruit of a genuinely post-racial America will only be tasted by unborn generations.

Whites can no longer lean upon the accomplishments of our parents and grandparents as justification for no longer thinking critically about the subject.  In much the same way that a healthy feminism can only flourish alongside a healthy masculism, i believe that questions of race and racism must be as much of a struggle for whites as it is for anyone else.  If civil rights are to continue to flourish in the future, whites need to be just as invested in the discussion as anyone else.  And i just don’t see that happening within mainstream white culture.

And since the Integral movement is currently composed mostly of male white perspectives, it is very important to me personally to emphasize these sorts of civil responsibilities to everyone in the community—especially since Integral consciousness is vastly more capable of understanding and addressing the roots of racial injustice.

Many of us have learned to be accountable to our upper quadrants in relation to race and racism—cultivating certain sense of “Right Thoughts” and “Right Behaviors,” to use Buddhist terms.  But the lower-quadrants—the invisible bedrock of racial biases, socio-economic imbalances, and historical circumstance—has remained fairly untouched in recent decades, especially in white cultures.  Much of this, i believe, stems from the vigorously-enforced identity politics found in academia, which ironically prevents any real perspective-taking from occurring.  I could feel this sort of unseen tension as i was writing this piece—as i pointed out, even using the words “black man” feels like i am betraying the politically-correct superego i was indoctrinated with, as though it were inappropriate to ever use one’s racial heritage as a descriptive qualifier.  But it is exactly this sort of sterilized relationship with language that prevents any genuine conversations around race to move forward in a constructive and meaningful way.

That said, i do think identity politics has it’s place.  As i said, i think it is extremely inappropriate for whites to use the “n-word.”  It will likely take many generations before that radioactive word is able to cool down enough for whites to be able to use it casually and in good taste.  If black communities wish to transmute for themselves the tremendous pain and gravity that word continues to carry (as Saul Williams attempts to do with The Rise and Inevitable Liberation of Niggy Tardust) that is obviously acceptable and their own right to do so.  We can clearly argue that slavery in general is NOT a white vs. black issue, but a developmental issue of both values and technological capacity—but until some of the cultural scars around that word have begun to heal, it should be voluntarily relinquished from the vocabularies of those directly descending from people who have used it as a euphemism for the enslavement and dehumanization of an entire people.

That said, any of you can totally feel free to call me a cracka.  It’s open season for crackas everywhere.  Cracka with an “a” that is—don’t you dare try calling me a “cracker.”  That one is ours.

Related:

Deconstructing Niggy: A Brief Exploration of Race and Hip Hop
Race, Stereotyping, and Socially-Constructed Knowledge by Sean Yang (KenWilber.com)
Beyond Race and Racism with Mark Palmer and Ken Wilber (Integral Naked)

Responding to a previous post titled “Deconstructing Niggy: A Brief Exploration of Race and Hip Hop,” a friend asked me: “Why do you like to discuss race?  I’m curious about that more so than the race issues themselves—what’s your own background anyway?”

Here is my response.  Before you read it, you should know that i hereby acknowledge that a) i am white, b) i have been white my entire life, and c) i still carry a LOT of naivete around the subject of racism and oppression. That said, i think there are obviously a tremendous amount of cultural taboos that continue to cloud this subject, and i have always been a fan of trying to look at those spaces between us where most spend a lavish amount of time and energy trying not to see. I have largely grown up in the cultural vacuum of identity politics, in which you are not allowed to say anything about anyone else’s experience, culturally or personally, other than your own—and so i feel like i am sitting on the end of a particularly wobbly branch, completely unsure if the winds will knock me off.  But i guess this is an effort to cut through my own fear of personal expression, and probe a bit deeper into the sensitive wounds that continue to exist beneath our cultural scabs.

Why do i like to discuss race—that is a really difficult question to answer!  A quick response might be to say that i think part of it has to do with my relationship with music and trying to take a “trans-genre” approach to djing.  Music has long been a sort of window into other cultures, perspectives, and ways of being for me.  And as i see it, the “conscious dj” has an enormous amount of responsibility when it comes to not just playing music that sounds good and has a catchy beat, but having a very real, in-depth understanding of the artists and cultures s/he is representing.

Being a good dj is sort of like being a cultural archivist (for good examples, check out Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, among many others). DJ’s are usually looked to for their cultural expertise, as they are typically the ones who are most passionate about music and music culture, and therefore the most knowledgeable. They tend to represent some form of “lower-left quadrant” mastery, and are looked to for this expertise, in much the same way that listeners form kinships with certain music reviewers who are trusted for their meta-perspectives on cultural trends and innovations. In this sense, dj’s are rather like the “Mavens” described in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, acting as trusted cultural experts to help expose people to artists they would never have been exposed to by the mainstream industry-controlled channels—and in order to live up to that responsibility, he or she needs to be exposed to as many different subcultures as possible.  And once you start stepping into subcultures other than your own, you inevitably bump into the often tricky business of race and racism.

For example, i find it fascinating that, in hip hop culture, just about any race can find acceptance as a dj, but it is very very difficult to gain the same level of recognition and acceptance as an mc if you are not black. I think much of this has to do with economic advantage—turntables, mixers, and crates of records are expensive, and it’s no secret that black communities have historically remained on the shit end of the socio-economic stick.  (In fact, hip hop as an artform exploded throughout New York City following a massive two-day blackout in 1977, during which the looting of music stores by impoverished blacks brought new technology to poor neighborhoods and ghettos for the first time ever.)  Because technology is so expensive, yet everyone is born with a voice, it is much easier for the art of rapping to remain anchored in ethnocentric thinking—making it more difficult for non-black mc’s to be accepted by the hip hop community.

So there’s one example of my interest in race and racism, from an artistic perspective.

On a personal level, i guess it comes down to becoming increasingly aware of my own “white privilege”—which is why i find the question fascinating: “Have you had any experiences which forced you to deeply acknowledge, confront, or even simply feel your skin color?”  My guess is that, for most white Americans (at least those who have not traveled beyond the borders of the U.S.) the honest answer would be “never.”  Which is a bit of a luxury, you know what i mean?  Most minorities are made to feel the color of their skin on a daily basis, from subtle cultural biases to flagrant racial profiling.

This is why when people ask me why i moved from Boulder to Denver, i often half-jokingly respond “too many white people.”  Or, if i’m feeling a little more socially lubricated, “too many self-assured white people who think they are above racism, without ever having to interact with people who don’t look like them.” I can be an elitist asshole when i am socially lubricated.

I remember the first time i ever felt the color of my skin.  I was in 9th grade, and though i came from a pretty racist family, my mother and stepfather were very careful to keep me away from such toxic values.  As a result, i was raised to be “color-blind” to questions of race.  It was all very naive, as i was largely unconscious of the struggles minorites were experiencing every day.  I think there is a sort of expectancy for post-amber whites to become “color-blind” to racial differences—especially in the zeitgeist of postmodernism.  But i think that such “color-blindness” is a sort of covert racism—after all, the only people who can afford to be “color-blind” are the ones who never have to even think about the color of their skin.  The ones who aren’t forced to confront their own identity on a daily basis in the same way that minorities are.  “Color-blindness” is just another perk of white privilege, along with mortgages, small classroom sizes, and free access to the country club pool.

Then, the Rodney King trial went down.  Four white cops beat a black man within an inch of his life, with no reasonable threat made to them.  Although a bystander recorded the entire incident, the four white cops were found innocent, the entire city of Los Angeles exploded in mass riots, while many other parts of the country trembled in the aftermath. It was as though decades of repressed anger and rage had exploded through the whole nation, and people were finally given license to say something about it.

A few days after the riots began i was sent to the vice-principal’s office.  I was late to school that day. Clumsy and awkward, i walked across a row of seated students and accidentally stepped on some black kid’s foot. (Again, my identity politics made me hesitate to say “on some black kid’s foot,” because the phrase “some black kid” may sound condescending or lead the reader to believe that skin color is my primary way of relating to him as a human being, and that all my culturally-inherited fears and half-truths around the word “black” color my perception of “black people” in general—thereby making me only able to see their blackness, instead of their full humanness.  But as it turns out, his skin color is about the only thing i knew about him as a human being, other than the fact that he definitely had a foot, and that i had indeed stepped upon that foot. But i couldn’t very well describe him as “some footed kid’s foot;” that’s just redundant.)

Anyway, i accidentally stepped on his foot, and was promptly reminded that i was, in fact, a stupid motherfucker. As if i didn’t already know. I stammered a nervous apology and took my seat at the end of the row.

After detention at the end of the school day, i was walking alone down the sunlit hallway connecting the cafeteria to the classrooms when i saw the kid whose shoe i had earlier accidentally stepped on.  He was with about a half dozen of his friends, all human beings who happened to be black.  He pointed me out, and they all ran at me.

There was a very funny episode of the animated series Boondocks in which one of the characters said: “I’ve said it before, expensive sneakers are like $150 land mines. Step on one and BOOM! A perfectly rational black man can explode.” This whole thing kind of reminds me of that.  (I should mention that i edited out of the quote the part that referred to these shoe-related explosions as an example of “nigger moments,” because that is an identity politic i am particularly sensitive about as a white person, and personally think that is a cultural taboo that whites should continue to respect.  But i included it in this parenthetical because i am edgy like that.)

Next thing i knew, the dude i stepped on punched me in the jaw, and i dropped to the floor like a sack of meat, whereupon they all proceeded to kick the living shit out of me—in the ribs, in the back, and in the head.  Fortunately, just a minute or two into my beating, Taharka—another melanin-abundant guy and the only name i remember from the entire incident—pulled them all off me, and brought me to the nurse’s office.

It was horrifying.  I was just a bit bruised up, no real damage at all, but i was so shocked and confused—i was fourteen years old, i had never hurt anyone, i was just a shy and socially awkward white kid trying to keep his head down and avoid being noticed by anyone.  But on that day, i stood out—i was the enemy, and for a moment was offered a circus-mirror glimpse of how minorities must feel almost every day: singled out for no other reason than the color of my skin.

I cried when my dad came to the school to pick me up.  It was one of the most important days of my life.

***

I believe that the civil rights movement is not over, but is a struggle that must be fought every single day.  By everyone.  It’s not enough for blacks, or asians, or latinos, or any ethnic group to fight the battle alone, which i think has largely been the case since the late sixties/early seventies.  Meanwhile many young whites take the revolutions of the sixties for granted, as if it were our parent’s struggle, and not our own.  As a result, much of the progress from that era is taken completely for granted—and i have the sense that many whites believe that the major victories have already been won, and silently wonder why non-whites aren’t somehow “over it” by now, especially in Obama’s America.

But the civil rights movement is barely half a century old—a tiny sliver of human history—and though the seeds have already been planted and are even now taking root deep in our collective psyche, the fruit of a genuinely post-racial America will only be tasted by unborn generations.

Whites can no longer lean upon the accomplishments of our parents and grandparents as justification for no longer thinking critically about the subject.  In much the same way that a healthy feminism can only flourish alongside a healthy masculism, i believe that questions of race and racism must be as much of a struggle for whites as it is for anyone else.  If civil rights are to continue to flourish in the future, whites need to be just as invested in the discussion as anyone else.  And i just don’t see that happening within mainstream white culture.

And since the Integral movement is currently composed mostly of male white perspectives, it is very important to me personally to emphasize these sorts of civil responsibilities to everyone in the community—especially since Integral consciousness is vastly more capable of understanding and addressing the roots of racial injustice.

Many of us have learned to be accountable to our upper quadrants in relation to race and racism—cultivating certain sense of “Right Thoughts” and “Right Behaviors,” to use Buddhist terms.  But the lower-quadrants—the invisible bedrock of racial biases, socio-economic imbalances, and historical circumstance—has remained fairly untouched in recent decades, especially in white cultures.  Much of this, i believe, stems from the vigorously-enforced identity politics found in academia, which ironically prevents any real perspective-taking from occurring.  I could feel this sort of unseen tension as i was writing this piece—as i pointed out, even using the words “black man” feels like i am betraying the politically-correct superego i was indoctrinated with, as though it were inappropriate to ever use one’s racial heritage as a descriptive qualifier.  But it is exactly this sort of sterilized relationship with language that prevents any genuine conversations around race to move forward in a constructive and meaningful way.

That said, i do think identity politics has it’s place.  As i said, i think it is extremely inappropriate for whites to use the “n-word.”  It will likely take many generations before that radioactive word is able to cool down enough for whites to be able to use it casually and in good taste.  If black communities wish to transmute for themselves the tremendous pain and gravity that word continues to carry (as Saul Williams attempts to do with The Rise and Inevitable Liberation of Niggy Tardust) that is obviously acceptable and their own right to do so.  We can clearly argue that slavery in general is NOT a white vs. black issue, but a developmental issue of both values and technological capacity—but until some of the cultural scars around that word have begun to heal, it should be voluntarily relinquished from the vocabularies of those directly descending from people who have used it as a euphemism for the enslavement and dehumanization of an entire people.

That said, any of you can totally feel free to call me a cracka.  It’s open season for crackas everywhere.  Cracka with an “a” that is—don’t you dare try calling me a “cracker.”  That one is ours.

Related:

Deconstructing Niggy: A Brief Exploration of Race and Hip Hop
Race, Stereotyping, and Socially-Constructed Knowledge by Sean Yang (KenWilber.com)
Beyond Race and Racism with Mark Palmer and Ken Wilber (Integral Naked)

Since the dawn of civilization, sports have been an intrinsic part of human society. From the militaristic competitions of ancient China, Greece, and Egypt, to the enormous rise of spectator sports in the wake of the industrial revolution, athletics have long served society as a foundation of human triumph, camaraderie, and excellence, as well as a source of personal discipline, achievement, and improvement—not to mention a common language of stories and statistics that men have traditionally used when women aren’t around to fill the often-awkward spaces between them.

In many ways, sports represent the very best of the human spirit. And yet, some may find it odd to suggest a connection between sports and spirituality, as though these are two completely distinct facets of human life with very little in common, if anything at all. Maybe if we are talking about kung fu, tai chi, or some other martial art we can see an overlap, but what does spirituality have to do with modern western sports like football (of either variety), baseball, or basketball? After all, these games are fueled by the decidedly earthly elements of blood, sweat, tears, and testosterone, while spirituality is often charged with the role of dealing with the more abstract and heavenly concerns of our finite human existence. But really, this establishes a sort of false dichotomy, unable to capture the full complexity and richness of either athletics or spirituality. After all, an athlete can find as much virtue, luminosity, and self-transcendence through sports as a monk can find through his or her spiritual practice. And a monk can find as much personal power, potency, and embodiment through spiritual practice as an athlete can potentially find in any type of sport.

As it turns out, there is an extraordinary overlap between sports and spirituality. The Integral model maintains that the human being is composed of many different intelligences, talents, and skills, each of which can grow through multiple stages of depth, complexity, and competency. Examples of these “multiple intelligences” (or “developmental lines”) include: cognitive ability, kinesthetic intelligence, moral development, aesthetic skill and appreciation, etc. Although each of these developmental tracks grows along its own path, each with its own unique stages of unfolding, there is enough symmetry in their overall development to suggest a very general barometer to make sense of all these different trajectories of human growth—a concept known as “altitude,” and demonstrated in the accompanying graphic. “Athleticism” draws upon a combination of these developmental lines, in varying degrees of importance. But what is especially interesting is that, as any of these individual intelligences approach the highest stages of development currently available to us (teal, turquoise, indigo, and beyond, as indicated below) they begin to take on qualities that can only be described as “trans-rational” or, more simply, “spiritual”—which is why, for many, watching Michael Jordan play at the peak of his game can feel like listening to Mozart, looking at the Sistine Chapel, and reading Rumi at the same time.

Click image to enlarge

Developmental altitude not only describes the progress of each of these multiple intelligences, but also influences the overall cultural sense of meaning that surrounds sports, for both the athlete and the spectator. For example, sports allow fans a certain amount of magenta ritual, a healthy outlet for red aggression, a source of amber allegiance to a particular team, city, state, nation, etc. For athletes, sports have historically had an exceptional ability to bring people from red to amber, tempering the rawness of the ego by plugging the often testosterone-driven identity into a higher-order structure of self-sacrifice, discipline, and teamwork, before opening them up to orange principles of accomplishment and excellence. These structures also determine the general values of sportsmanship with which the athlete approaches the game—whereas red is focused upon the glory of victory, amber reminds us that “there is no I in team,” orange tells us that it’s “not if you win or lose, but how you play the game,” while the modern Olympic code reflects the green sentiment that “the most important thing is not winning, but taking part.” These different modes of sportsmanship are especially important in today’s world, which situates sports in an aggressive business market that can seriously reinforce the power-hungry ego. Without properly internalizing the ethical sensibilities of amber-and-above structures, it is all too easy for the ego to be seduced by delusions of self-importance, enabling athletes to remain red megalomaniacs running loose in an orange world of fame, status, and celebrity—which may help explain the apparent moral transgressions of people like Michael Vick, Kobe Bryant, Tonya Harding, and many others.

There is another definition of “spirituality,” which has more to do with the fleeting—but very real—subjective experience of spirituality that athletes frequently tap into, regardless of which developmental altitude they may be coming from. Often described as being “in the zone” or “out of his head,” athletes can often slip into the same exact nondual states of consciousness that have more typically been associated with artists and mystics—states of utter self-transcendence and unobstructed creative or performative flow. These nondual “flow” states (along with gross, subtle, causal, and witness states) form the very core of esoteric and contemplative forms of spiritual practice at the heart of virtually all the world’s religious traditions—and although they have very different names, metaphysical assumptions, and cultural contexts from tradition to tradition, there is an astonishing symmetry in all of these various descriptions, enough to suggest an essential unity underlying every single spiritual experience and expression in the history of mankind.

Click image to enlarge

According to many athletes, these states occur with astounding frequency—especially for those who have evolved to the highest reaches of development in any of their developmental lines, which seems to allow more stable access to these higher states. These nondual “peak-experiences” are rarely acknowledged by the sporting community, largely due to the unavailability of adequate language in sports culture to properly communicate these experiences, or to help take them off of the field/court/ice and into daily life. But whether acknowledged or not, nearly every athlete has had his or her own sense of being “in the zone” at one time or the other—the effortless collapse of player, opponent, audience, and game, until all that remains is the erotic scent of freshly-cut grass, the weight of the warm sun pressing against your skin, and the slow-motion frenzy of a Kosmos-at-play.

All in all, this exceptional dialogue goes a long way to remind us that all those aspects of our lives that seem separate or distinct from our spirituality are, in actuality, anything but. There is nothing Spirit doesn’t touch—from our highest ideals of love, respect, and sportsmanship, to the drunken bloodlust of hearing millions of people cheering you to victory—everything finds its home in the transcendent mind of God, nestled in the immanent heart of the Sacred, where the line between winning and losing becomes the very same line that separates self and other, part and whole, here and eternity.

Originally published on Integral Life: Sports and Spirituality (w/ David Meggyesy and Ken Wilber)