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The Home of Evolutioneers

'The Integral Spirit' Quarterly ezine, Issue #3,

The Integral Spirit
 
INTEGRAL RELIGION
The Great Announcement
by Baha'u'llah, Baha’i founder
HONORED ARTISTS
Artists of the Quarter
CALENDAR OF EVENTS
Upcoming Integral Events
EDITORIALS
- From the Editor
Byron

Genuine Religion Must Stand Apart

‘Tis true, friends, religion is always embedded in culture. But a potent, life-changing religion is not reducible to culture, much less to the politics, philosophy, or art of its day. Genuine religion has its own energetics; we might say that it enjoys direct encircuitment in the infinite energy of the divine spirit itself. Ultimately, it is truth-powered by the Absolute, and love-sourced from the universal Father/Mother. In this vein, we are honored to feature in this e-zine a guest editorial from Chandra Alexandre, who evokes this sensibility in her description of the Divine Feminine. Chandra points out how Goddess powerfully functions above and apart from the religio-cultural vehicles in which She may appear—especially in our time. Similary, Ken Wilber argues in his latest book Integral Spirituality—reviewed in this issue—that integralized religion, as he calls it, is no longer the captive of a particular stage of consciousness or culture. In fact, integral religion of any kind would by definition be especially equipped to inspire cultural evolution. For additional inspiration along these lines, our own Integral Religion section of the e-zine provides a stirring excerpt from one of the great proclamations of the world’s first post-modern prophet, Baha'u'llah—founder of the Baha’i faith. And to further honor the evolutionary potentials of the Islamic tradition at a time of troubled relations between Muslims and the West, we conclude the e-zine with Stephen Dinan’s thoughtful essay about “Honoring the Sacred Core of Islam” in our Cognitive Lines section.

Religionists of any tradition are most authentic, it seems, when they are “in but not of” the daily vicissitudes of the evolutionary currents of their time. As a result, they may find themselves entirely at odds with currently accepted standards of ethics, politics, morality, art, business, and culture—or they may not; they are at their best when their stance toward the profane world is a sovereign, inner-directed choice. The practices of integral religion offer improved tools to ensure that its practitioners are answerable only to the divine spirit and its vicissitudes. Ideally, this commitment and this devotion true holds even as they contemplate humankind’s evolutionary choices, and even as they may worship cosmic evolution as a manifestation of deity.

It is therefore our hope that the new integral religion of the sort championed by Integrative Spirituality (IS), though it is clearly embedded in the integral worldview itself, will be far more than a mere creature of the integral theory of our day. (To convey this sensibility, for example, we have changed the name of the e-zine from The Integral Commons to The Integral Spirit.) At the same time, we hope and we do expect that the integral religionists we influence will truly understand and live from within the integral worldview. Toward that end, IS has set out over the years to introduce integralism to our members, and has long supported fellowship among integralists. (Please see in this connection the latest integral commons news, in The Integral Edge department of the e-zine).

Book Cover
Most recently, to support our members’ awareness of integral consciousness, IS has just printed advanced copies of an extraordinary new book on integral philosophy, entitled Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution. This book is due out in late 2007, but its current draft has been printed far ahead of time by permission of the author Steve McIntosh, and his publisher, Paragon House. (Steve will be presenting his introduction to integral philosophy on Sunday, October 16, 6:30-8:30pm at IS’s iBoat in Sausalito.)

In line with Steve’s own thesis about the relationship of religion to integral philosophy, we at IS do insist that religion should be a thing apart from the disciplines of integralized politics, philosophy, business, medicine, psychology, and science—and that it must never conflate itself with any one of them. It also follows that an integral religious group must be separate from all other groups in the integral movement, and must confine itself to the furtherance of integral religious causes.

Ideally, the singular mission of religion is to valiantly bear witness to the One Light, the Font of Radiant Love, the First Source and Center, and do so even if all earthly things crash—especially when all earthly things crash. To paraphrase George Harrison: All things must pass, must pass away; but the truth abides. Accordingly, one legacy from modernism that gets included when we transcend and include modernism is the separation of church and state, and the vital distinction between the sacred and the profane that this makes possible. For if religion gets blended in an unholy alliance with profane this-worldly trends, it runs the risk of losing its ability to stand in everlasting contrast to the passing material world.

Seen from a second-person perspective, this One Light stands above us all as Father and Mother, and we are equally God’s/Goddess’s children. The Divine One is no respecter of persons; she/he equally loves the Christian Right, the Berkeley leftists, the liberal Episcopalians, the boomeritis Buddhists, the Islamic jihadists, and the 9/11 conspiracy people.

But while we must not overly burden our religion with the latest currents of thought, we may still need the saving grace of inspired theology and genuine philosophy of religion, which religionists can borrow liberally from integral theory. Improved cognition of spirit realities can serve religion’s exclusive mission of salvation, healing, fellowship, service to humankind, and true worship. (Toward that end, we offer you some unique essays in this issue of the e-zine.) Indeed, integral theory actually contains analytical tools needed to save current religious traditions from its unholy alliances.

Let me restate: There is a species of criticism and philosophical work that is permitted for a religion—call it direct religious criticism. One can criticize other religions using exclusively religious categories, as Jesus, Buddha, and other great religious teachers did in their day. Today we can use integral religious categories. But such criticism should be brotherly, tolerant, fair, and ethical, and should never be disguised or hidden behind some other agenda or worldly concern, as cultish and sectarian religionists usually do. Religion must be a haven for the heart; true religion is purifying, redemptive, transformative, and salvific—and beckons us toward the universal, the eternal, the absolute, and the infinite.

From the staff at The Integral Spirit:
Letters to the editor are welcome!
Please submit to: editor@universespirit.org (1000 words or less)

INTEGRAL RELIGION
- Essays, scriptures, & testimonials

[Editor’s note: At this time of acute inter-religious warfare across the globe, especially in the lands of Islam, we believe these passages excerpted the great 19th century Iranian prophet Baha'u'llah are more relevant than ever. In this public domain translation, Baha'u'llah observes that religions are culturally conditioned, but he appeals to humankind’s religious leaders to let religion transcend time and place so as to become the planet’s peacemaker and unifier. –BB]

“The Great Announcement to Mankind”
By Baha'u'llah, founder of the Baha’i Faith

Bahaullah
O YE children of men! The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men. Suffer it not to become a source of dissension and discord, of hate and enmity. This is the straight Path, the fixed and immovable foundation. Whatsoever is raised on this foundation, the changes and chances of the world can never impair its strength, nor will the revolution of countless centuries undermine its structure. Our hope is that the world's religious leaders and the rulers thereof will unitedly arise for the reformation of this age and the rehabilitation of its fortunes. Let them, after meditating on its needs, take counsel together and, through anxious and full deliberation, administer to a diseased and sorely-afflicted world the remedy it requires....It is incumbent upon them who are in authority to exercise moderation in all things. Whatsoever passeth beyond the limits of moderation will cease to exert a beneficial influence. Consider for instance such things as liberty, civilization and the like. However much men of understanding may favourably regard them, they will, if carried to excess, exercise a pernicious influence upon men....Please God, may the peoples of the world be led, as the result of the high endeavours exerted by their rulers and the wise and learned amongst men, to recognize their best interests. How long will humanity persist in its waywardness? How long will injustice continue? How long is chaos and confusion to reign amongst men? How long will discord agitate the face of society? The winds of despair are, alas, blowing from every direction, and the strife that divideth and afflicteth the human race is daily increasing. The signs of impending convulsions and chaos can now be discerned, inasmuch as the prevailing order appeareth to be lamentably defective. I beseech God, exalted be His glory, that He may graciously awaken the peoples of the earth, may grant that the end of their conduct may be profitable unto them, and aid them to accomplish that which beseemeth their station.

O CONTENDING peoples and kindreds of the earth! Set your faces towards unity, and let the radiance of its light shine upon you. Gather ye together, and for the sake of God resolve to root out whatever is the source of contention amongst you. Then will the effulgence of the world's great Luminary envelop the whole earth, and its inhabitants become the citizens of one city, and the occupants of one and the same throne. This wronged One hath, ever since the early days of His life, cherished none other desire but this, and will continue to entertain no wish except this wish. There can be no doubt whatever that the peoples of the world, of whatever race or religion, derive their inspiration from one heavenly Source, and are the subjects of one God. The difference between the ordinances under which they abide should be attributed to the varying requirements and exigencies of the age in which they were revealed. All of them, except a few which are the outcome of human perversity, were ordained of God, and are a reflection of His Will and Purpose. Arise and, armed with the power of faith, shatter to pieces the gods of your vain imaginings, the sowers of dissension amongst you. Cleave unto that which draweth you together and uniteth you. This, verily, is the most exalted Word which the Mother Book hath sent down and revealed unto you. To this beareth witness the Tongue of Grandeur from His habitation of glory.

THE Great Being, wishing to reveal the prerequisites of the peace and tranquillity of the world and the advancement of its peoples, hath written: The time must come when the imperative necessity for the holding of a vast, an all-embracing assemblage of men will be universally realized. The rulers and kings of the earth must needs attend it, and, participating in its deliberations, must consider such ways and means as will lay the foundations of the world's Great Peace amongst men. Such a peace demandeth that the Great Powers should resolve, for the sake of the tranquillity of the peoples of the earth, to be fully reconciled among themselves. Should any king take up arms against another, all should unitedly arise and prevent him. If this be done, the nations of the world will no longer require any armaments, except for the purpose of preserving the security of their realms and of maintaining internal order within their territories. This will ensure the peace and composure of every people, government and nation. We fain would hope that the kings and rulers of the earth, the mirrors of the gracious and almighty name of God, may attain unto this station, and shield mankind from the onslaught of tyranny....The day is approaching when all the peoples of the world will have adopted one universal language and one common script. When this is achieved, to whatsoever city a man may journey, it shall be as if he were entering his own home. These things are obligatory and absolutely essential. It is incumbent upon every man of insight and understanding to strive to translate that which hath been written into reality and action....That one indeed is a man who, today, dedicateth himself to the service of the entire human race. The Great Being saith: Blessed and happy is he that ariseth to promote the best interests of the peoples and kindreds of the earth. In another passage He hath proclaimed: It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.

…THIS is the Day in which God's most excellent favours have been poured out upon men, the Day in which His most mighty grace hath been infused into all created things. It is incumbent upon all the peoples of the world to reconcile their differences, and, with perfect unity and peace, abide beneath the shadow of the Tree of His care and loving-kindness. It behooveth them to cleave to whatsoever will, in this Day, be conducive to the exaltation of their stations, and to the promotion of their best interests. Happy are those whom the all-glorious Pen was moved to remember, and blessed are those men whose names, by virtue of Our inscrutable decree, We have preferred to conceal. Beseech ye the one true God to grant that all men may be graciously assisted to fulfill that which is acceptable in Our sight. Soon will the present-day order be rolled up, and a new one spread out in its stead. Verily, thy Lord speaketh the truth, and is the Knower of things unseen.

See the entire text of this Proclamation at this LINK
More Baha’i links HERE

 

A Heartfelt Invitation: Support Integrative Spirituality!
Do you truly believe in the values of the integral worldview? Are you committed to supporting the emergence of integral spirituality? Do you wish to foster the growth of a new non-pathological integral religion, and support the integralizing of the religious traditions? Do you see these goals as vital to your personal practice, your social-spiritual life, and the planet’s future?

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COGNITIVE LINES
- Musings on philosophy of religion

Honoring the Sacred Core of Islam
By Stephen Dinan

Dinan Americans have a singular challenge in relating to Islam, one that long predates 9/11 and al-Qaeda. Across the political spectrum, people assume that Islam—or at least extremists within it—is more likely to goad its followers into religious violence than other religions. Others, who are more cautious, differentiate Islamic jihadism from Islam’s peace-loving core that is based on the believer’s surrender to the merciful will of Allah. But generally, there is an uneasy feeling that the modern West and Islam are like oil and water, and that a “clash of civilizations” is inevitable. Healing this split—especially in light of today’s so-called War on Terror—may be the single most essential act in creating a true global community.

Last year’s eruption of controversy around the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed serves as a Rorschach test for where this relationship is blocked. Westerners tended to see the reaction to the cartoons as out of proportion to the insult. Muslims saw the cartoons as a deep dishonoring of their revered founder, and as being yet another example of the West’s disdain. More recently, Pope Benedict’s faux pas in which he explicitly referred to Islam’s violent tendencies, combined with the embarrassing backpedaling that followed, is yet another vivid illustration of the problem.

The all-to-human tendency in situations like this is to point fingers at the other: It must be something intrinsic in “them” that makes the relationship unworkable. However, the truth in all relationships is that each side plays a role in a breakdown. Our Western way of relating—for example, our economic globalization and our seemingly imperial arrogance—has had a strongly negative influence in Islamic lands, be they Iran, Palestine, Iraq, or Afghanistan. This then feeds back to us in a cycle of mutual exchange, in which the “blowback” in turn causes an increasingly negative response from our side, now elevated to a global war. But the simple truth is that the act of breaking this negative cycle on either side can lead to an opening of the relationship; and if we really want to elicit change in the other, a breakthrough is usually much easier if we first change ourselves.

Islam ArtOn that note, what is missing in virtually every opinion I read—even those that offer cogent political or cultural analyses—is a heartfelt honoring of the sacred core of Islam and especially the Prophet Mohammed. The modern West simply does not authentically honor one of the most important spiritual leaders of history. The Danish cartoons spoke to the truth of how the West relates to Mohammed, as did the Pope’s unfortunate statements.

But why is all this important?

Whatever someone holds as sacred is their truest hope—their chosen bridge to a better world. For a scientist, factual truth is sacred and the scientific method is seen as a path to obtain that truth. For a Christian, Jesus is considered sacred and therefore a relationship with him is the path to redemption. For many environmentalists, the planet itself is seen as sacred, and living more sustainability becomes like an act of worship.

A sacred relationship is a love relationship, one in which we admire the intrinsic value, truth, beauty, and transformative power in something or someone. A sacred sensibility leads towards a feeling of awe and reverence, and can guide us beyond our less-evolved patterns. Thus, when we cannot bless what someone else holds as sacred, we create a rift with the other at the root level of our consciousness, which will inevitably undermine the relationship. Without this honoring of what another holds as holy, we cannot truly connect with their heart, since their heart is intimately engaged in that sacred relationship.

It is in this sense that I believe that the lack of a deep honoring of the Prophet Mohammed and his revelation in the Koran—by both the secular and Christian West—has helped fuel the nuclear core of hatred, division, and reactivity we see today. If we were better able to celebrate the great blessing, illumination, and transformation that his words and his life and Islamic civilization itself have brought to people around the world, we would come back into resonance with the hearts of Muslims. And that, in turn, would soften the political divides, culture clashes, and historical animosities, or at least create stable common ground upon which solutions could be built.

We need to be willing to stop pointing the finger at Islam and start seeing where we worsen the situation with our own lack of honoring and disrespect. Sadly, I will admit that I can see this absence of honoring in myself. Although I’ve explored sacred works from almost every religion, I find myself mostly in the dark about the Prophet Mohammed’s life and teachings. I have never sat down to read the Koran or study the history of Islam or attend a service in a mosque. I do revel in the mystic poetry of Rumi or Hafiz, but mainstream Islam is, in many respects, a mysterious land for me.

Why have so many in the West been so blind to the beauties of the Muslim world?

It has to do in part with a tendency to see what we hold as sacred as the only thing that is truly sacred. Our devotion then turns to disdain for what others hold as sacred. The scientist’s devotion to free inquiry turns to disgust for religious beliefs. The Christian’s devotion to Jesus turns to disdain for Jews. And so on.

These behaviors assume an exclusivity of sacredness—that there are certain things or people or teachings that are sacred and others that are not. Rather, the truth of mystics from traditions the world over is that everything is kissed by the spirit of holiness, and everyone carries the spark of God. We are right to be deeply grateful for the particular people or things that have opened the door to sacred relationship for us. But we need to resist the tendency to then denigrate the people or things that are sacred to others. Instead, if we can truly see the world through the eyes of the other, then we can begin to expand our relationship with the sacred dimension of life, eventually seeing it in all people, cultures, religions, and even the entire planet.

Yet that doesn’t necessarily mean that a Christian will become a Muslim; we each have our own unique way of unfolding and growing. We will always have a more intimate and personal connection with our native teachers, beliefs, and practices. But that doesn’t exclude a deeply respectful and honoring relationship with the teachers, beliefs, and practices of others.

The Islamic tradition does honor Jesus as one of the most important spiritual teachers in history, as a key prophet in the Abrahamic lineage. On the other hand, the secular and Christianized West, by contrast, has largely denigrated the importance of Mohammed and therefore Islam. Even if Jesus has become the primary spiritual exemplar for much of the West, we should also be able to honor a man who brought great gifts to the 1.3 billion people who follow the religion he founded.

If we are able to truly celebrate the sacred power in the life of the Prophet Mohammed and the religion that has flowered from him, healing the roots of our relationship with the Islamic world will begin to become possible, which in turn can allow the softening of positions required for political bridges to rebuild. Until we are able to do so, the modern West will be out of resonance with the world of Islam and thus prone to unnecessary friction, or open war.

HONORED ARTISTS

We view that one can be an artist in any field. Even an organization can do what it does so well that it acts as an artist in life. The Artists of the Quarter award winners are helping to emerge and forward the new Integral Worldview. Click here to view our Honored Artists for the Fall 2006 quarter.

CALENDAR OF EVENTS

October 2006
4-8 - Integral Christianity Denver, CO
7-8 - Awakening the Genius Within, 2-Day Workshop with Yasuhiko Genku Kimura, Toronto, Canada, Vision in Action
14,15 - Weekend Introduction to Integral Life Practice Miami Beach, FL, Integral Institute
15 - Integral Consciousness and The Future of Evolution by author, Steve McIntosh, at the Creative Spirit, Sausalito, CA
16-18 - Integral International Development Gathering Perpignan, France
15-20 - Women’s Integral Life Practice - Omega, Rhinebeck, NY - Integral Institute
20-22 - Everlasting Love:The Rhythms of Relationship www.itp-life.com, Esalen Institute Big Sur, CA
26-30 - Integral Life Practice Weeklong – Denver, CO - Integral Institute

November, 2006
4-5 - I-WET: Integral Weekend Experiential Training, Toronto
8-9 - Two lectures on Authentic Thinking: Basis for a Life of Passion, Denver area
17 - Integralizing Goddess: Revolutions in Pathways of the Divine Female, at the i-Boat Creative Spirit, Sausalito, CA
18 - Authentic Thinking for Creative Evolution, Los Angeles

December 2006
2 - Authentic Thinking for Creative Evolution, New York
4-8 - The Integral Leader, Denver

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

The Creative Commons Deed: All art, logos and trademarks in this ezine and on our website are property of their respective owner.

CONTACT US

Publisher: Integrative Spirituality
Editor: Byron Belitsos
Integrative Spirituality, PO Box 1508 Sausalito, CA 94966 Email your letters and comments to us.

To receive free subscription to The Integral Spririt and other emails, click here.

EDITORIALS
- Guest Editorial
Chandra

Bringing Goddess Home
By Chandra Alexandre, PhD, MBA

Humanity is now experiencing a shift in evolutionary consciousness especially catalyzed and facilitated by the Divine Female. Goddess, as She is often called, can be represented through a variety of guises, forms, and names; but it is because we tend to think of “God” as strictly male (and usually transcendent) that I avoid this term when speaking about Her, although she is nonetheless that. In this editorial, I will alternatively represent Her using capitalization or lower case (e.g., “Her” and “her,” or “Goddess” and “goddess”) and will universalize or particularize my articulations in order to shatter limiting notions of the Great Mystery. But why focus on Her?

Goddess is today gathering worldwide appeal even in lands that have historically denied Her. Within a global milieu that largely assigns value and power only to the male and masculine, it has become increasingly important to rebalance within levels of the mundane and sacred, holding equal space within our bodies for the feminine and equal room for Goddess to answer our prayers. Once uncovered from unhealthy layers of meaning imposed by religion, culture and society, the Divine Female can be called upon to manifest, empower, and ultimately heal. She depotentiates toxicity wherever it is found and creates new spaces for life-affirming, fuller expressions of reality. With this, I offer that the world’s goddesses, manifestations of the primordial Divine Female, are deeply transformational powers capable of awakening humanity to new potentials. And while the difficulties of certain religio-cultural constructs have imposed less-than-direct divine revelation in many of the living goddess traditions and numerous devotees suffer regardless of Her exquisite grace within them, the Divine Female (inclusive of her ancient and post-modern roots) can nevertheless help us find creative ways to break pathological hierarchies from both inside and outside the mainstream.

In today’s climate of globalization, borders do not hold Her back. Although often concretized in culture-specific ways and given names such as Kali, Tara, Quan Yin, and Spider Woman, Goddess, as well as goddesses, are required for personal, planetary and coImage3smic healing. From lands near and far She is coming to us no matter what our address, speaking to us through dreams, inspirations and synchronicities while offering boons, blessings, challenges and direct confrontations. She may visit as terrifying Kali to humble an ego, or reveal herself as Persephone to dissuade material desire. We may not speak her native tongue or understand Her sacred symbols in cultural context, yet our heart knows Her meaning and relevance for our time. Indeed, many of us are listening to our deepest yearning and finding Goddess there, quite alive.

Her healing gifts and powers, I argue, most deeply align with five principles that I have come to understand act across gross, subtle and causal levels. Briefly, these principles are:

  • Antinomian—she sits outside the mainstream, breaking normative conceptions in order to provide safe and free spaces for embracing of the whole, uncensored spectrum of beingness. With this consciousness, She helps us fly in the face of convention, questioning the doxa or unspoken agreements we have about life and our values, ethics and moral concerns;
  • Relational—She enables connection across divides of difference (gender, race, culture, ethnicity, species, age, etc.) and is facilitating new meanings for the union of opposites, particularly of Sacred Female and Sacred Male;
  • Embodied—she is sacred Earth, sacred matter, calling for a recognition of the immanence of Spirit. She is the power of our ancestors, upon whose shoulders we stand in new consciousness, demanding to be honored for the sake of including, synthesizing and then transcending their and our greatest aspirations;
  • Cyclical—she is the power of spiraling space-time and non-linear constructions of reality helping us collectively move into new awareness (such as offered through Life-Death-Rebirth and Creation-Preservation-Destruction-Transformation constructions); and
  • Chthonic—She is cāyā, our shadow individual and collective, brought to consciousness from the depths of all we have repressed and suppressed so that we may reintegrate ourselves, kissing our patriarchal wounds and coming to wholeness. She brings the Ouroboric Primordial Snake of Transformation to consciousness so that we can all do our own deepest self-reflective work.

Acting as and through these principles, Goddess is leading us to a hieros unios. This is my term for a sacred union within a multiplex reality that includes and transcends the traditional hieros gamos (sacred marriage) alluded to in ancient mythologies, alchemical traditions, and depth psychology. Hieros unios as I intend fully means first, a partnership that frees opposites from charged, pathologically hierarchical renderings of relationship; and second, allows for expansion into a radically non-dual awareness. It also means a multiplicitous coming together of all graces of divine spirit—within both the immanent and transcendent realms—in order to suggest something applicable to the condition of Creation from personal to cosmic proportions.

image4To be more specific, rather than limited to a simple pairing of opposites with restricted gender perspectives (and traditional overlays of patriarchal visionings of marriage) as with the hieros gamos, the hieros unios offers a position affirming of life’s ability to simultaneously express duality, multiplicity, and unity. It is exactly a non-dual awareness that brings particularities of perspective to bear on the appreciation of all realities and is not a monolithic One dismissive of individuality or unique expressions of the divine (whether embodied or not). Thus, a hieros unios is not simply advaita (non-duality). It is equally an awareness in which the consciousness of matter, dynamic balance of opposites, and transformational character of a spiraling involution/evolution are witnessed and understood to reflect the Divine’s yearning for itself.

Whether invoking through spiritual, alchemical, psychological or other metaphors, the hieros unios She inspires can be readily expressed as shakti—primary, activating female energy—unleashed now for moves beyond the patriarchal paradigm. Her presence thus means forcing an unpathologizing of dualities and facilitating the shattering of structures to provide liberatory spaces for females and the feminine to (re)emerge. On Earth, it means, for example, that we honor women in places of power within all institutions and allow men free and full expression of whatever are considered feminine qualities. On the level of the Divine, it means that we grant the Sacred Male his place among us here, immanent, sexual and alive and afford the Divine a Female ‘side,’ calling God “She” and opening to the principles addressed above in our formulations of Her. These examples together will help catalyze a (r)evolution of consciousness that can not only wake humanity up to the fact of what denying life looks like, but also help us make difficult choices in order to embrace our fullest potentials.

Goddess is the one holding us tenderly now as we travel through this often times painful transition. This is perhaps also our greatest initiation into thenext evolutionary phase of collective development, and her strength comes from Her vulnerability. She is with us aware of the unique position we each occupy at an inBlack Madonnatersection of identity-forming categories. She knows, for example, the color of our skin, our gender and overall make up and how that has been impacted as well as impactsus withinhuman-constructed, imposed or realized notions of s/Self. Knowing us, she makes the process personally meaningful. Call her Hecate, Oya, Mary, Guadalupe, Baba Yaga or Great Mother, but call Her. Let us open to her offerings of guidance, wisdom, energy and unabashed candor in our individual and collective quests for sustainability, truth, beauty and the kind of good, happy lives we most deeply want to have. She will listen and respond to our unique heart’s song.

THE INTEGRAL EDGE
- News from IS and from the Integral Movement Worldwide

IS Cruises with Integral Studies Students
See More Photos Here

JFKU_Cruise
IS recently honored about twenty students and faculty from John F. Kennedy University’s Integral Studies Department, hosting them for a Sunday afternoon cruise aboard our
i-Boat. This remarkable group is a part (that is, a social holon lacking a central monad, to be integrally precise) of the world’s first accredited Integral Theory Certificate, and Masters and PhD programs. JFKU’s innovative department was launched in 2004 in partnership with Integral University (www.integraluniversity.org) and heralds an exciting new era of integral higher education. Senior staff in attendance from Integral Institute included Bert Parlee and Terry Patten. JFKU’s Integral Studies Department Chair, Sean Esbjorn-Hargens, gave an opening welcome to the assembled group, as did IS executive director Lawrence Wollersheim, who invited the students to consider the vital role of integral religion and spirituality in their integral education.

A Remarkable Cruise with IONS Summit Leaders
See More Photos Here

IONS Cruise Integrative Spirituality was an enthused participant at the “Partnership Summit” organized by the Institute for Noetic Sciences and held September 25-27. The special assembly met to seek ways to empower an alliance of organizations with similar spiritual and sustainability goals. According to the convener Stephen Dinan, many organizations in this space face an acutely resource-challenged environment, and yet their systems are redundant or competitive with other organizations who share the same goals. As a remedy, the alliance is seeking, for example, a structure akin to United Way so that people may contribute to many such organizations together. Other ideas examined by the participants ranged from joint awareness campaigns in the media to simply sharing mailing lists. Invitees at the summit included the Alliance for a New Humanity, Bioneers, Peace Alliance, the Ella Baker Center, the Omega Institute, Pachamama Alliance, Planetwork, Social Venture Network, Unity, Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives, Youth for Environmental Sanity, AGNT, Steriling Alliance, and Integrative Spirituality. On the third day of the event, the participants engaged in a cruise on the i-Boat sponsored by Integrative Spirituality, where they celebrated their first steps toward cooperation.

IS Website’s New Emphasis on Integral Religion
With membership at Integrative Spirituality (IS) topping 2,200 souls, and overall traffic at all time highs, new upgrades at our website now reflect our organization's recent decision to increase our focus on being the first new religion dedicated to open-source, integral spirituality. Most notable is a special new page that lists the progenitors of today’s integral movement, dozens of remarkable names that hail from the pre-modern, modern, and post-modern eras of world civilization.
Check it out here.

Integral Spiritual Center Contemplates Integral Christianity

Thomas Keating Integral Institute’s Integral Spiritual Center (ISC) is presenting a five-day seminar on Integral Contemplative Christianity near Denver on October 4-8. The seminar is headlined by Father Thomas Keating, founder of the Centering Prayer movement, and Ken Wilber. As an illustrating of the rising interest in “integralizing” the world’s religious traditions, the event is sold out. By the way, every second Saturday, ISC hosts a popular conference call between Ken and ISC members, who pose their questions on a featured Integral Spirituality chapter, the book reviewed in this issue of the e-zine.

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REVIEWS
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Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern Worldby Ken Wilber (October 2006: Integral Books/Shambhala). 299 pages.
Reviewed by Byron Belitsos

Integral Spirituality BookCover Ken Wilber’s newest book is another landmark effort in the genre he has practically created: integral philosophic discourse, offered in the face of today’s egregious fragmentation of knowledge. In this latest work, Wilber the methodologist looms larger than usual, as he teases out the distinctions needed to better understand religion in relation to consciousness, culture, and science. The result is a mighty challenge to religious leaders and sincere religionists everywhere, one that teems with original insights that could (or at least should) define the future of world religion.

Supporters of the mission of Integrative Spirituality (IS) should be gratified to see that—among these rich insights—Wilber evokes the supreme importance of the Great Thou, the notion of a personally contactable Absolute Personality who is worthy of devotion and worship, or “Spirit in 2nd-person.” He goes so far as to point out that: “Today in America, the repression of the Great Thou goes hand in hand with boomeritis.” We at IS are moved by Ken’s inclusive reach into a realm of religious observance that has not heretofore been prominent in the integral movement.

In order to reach such far-reaching integrations, Wilber’s newest iteration of the “Integral Approach” has had to take on more granularity, and for the first time in print he expands beyond his familiar four quadrants. The quadrants can be defined as the co-arising of the interior and exterior domains of the individual and collective dimensions of any “occasion,” these being the four fundamentally different possible perspectives on any given experience. To replace this widely embraced model first introduced by Wilber in 1995, he now expands to eight zones. Each zone comes with a unique method of inquiry able to yield perspectives that produce essential distinctions for the purpose of—in this case—describing a new role for religion. The novel idea here is that one must include the additional viewpoints of the inside and outside of each quadrant, thereby bringing excluded schools of thought into play, including structuralism, behaviorism, and ethnomethodology.

Now, many may regard this addition of new subdivisions of his system—which even involves the introduction of “integral math”—as a Byzantine turn in his thought, but Wilber has large problems to solve. So read on, brothers and sisters: His suggestions to the religionists of the world are exciting, helpful—and, oh yes—rather challenging to implement.

Wilber concludes his intricate argument, mercifully laced with occasional humor, by calling for the “integralizing” of the world’s religions, whereby they become educational and inspirational conveyor belts of evolutionary progress that can carry the world’s people through all identifiable stages, or “stations,” of consciousness development. This means that traditional Islam, Hinduism, Christianity—indeed, all the world’s wisdom traditions—will somehow become the vanguard of a planet-wide integral reformation. These religions will declare “kosher” the higher stages of consciousness (as mapped by that tradition’s pioneering mystics, but rendered “integral”); they will hold the space for the entire spiral of human development, from aboriginals up to the integral Übermensch. Indeed, as Wilber convincingly argues, no other existing institution can confer legitimacy upon this crucial project. For it is only religion, it is only the guardians of the world’s sacred myths, that can adequately manage this vital transition of the majority of the world’s people now mired in ethnocentric faiths as they slowly graduate to the “world-centric” level of consciousness—or at the least manage their evolution to modernism.

Before we wonder how on God’s green earth we can get to this promised land, let us ask why. Why does Wilber, once a theorist of transpersonal psychology, now find himself advocating an integral overhaul of everyone’s life (via his new integral practice system, Integral Life Practice), along with the grandiose goal of integralizing the religious traditions? Many will dismiss this effort as being a gratuitously heady and impractical exercise. Such integralizing work, we should note, requires for starters that its practitioners (or at least its teachers) “touch all the bases” of the eight zones, and ultimately involves the operationalization of Wilber’s IOS (Integral Operating System) into religious life. Indeed, Wilber also insists on the unlikely prospect that religious leaders worldwide, and post-modern students of “new consciousness,” will have to eschew the “myth of the given”—the idea that any metaphysical belief is or ever can be utterly universal and objective or absolutely free from cultural conditioning. That means they will need to incorporate the lessons of post-modernist intersubjectivity theory, which even Ken’s own colleagues such as Michael Murphy, Erwin Laszlo, and Rupert Sheldrake—by Ken’s own account—have not assimilated. But however one may argue about this issue on the grounds of feasibility, it is difficult to disagree with Wilber in principle.

That said, I believe Wilber’s conception is a profound civilization-building project that offers real hope to one and all in times of potential cataclysm. Perhaps the reason why Wilber makes these sometimes surprising moves in his theorizing can be found in the very pattern that underlies evolution itself: Ever-increasing complexity demands ever-increasing integration, and Wilber delivers both like none other.

We truly need such philosophic daring as Wilber’s, for example, in the face the chilling prospect of an unending War on Terror—truly a war of religions and an epochal clash of civilizations. Underlying that challenge, Wilber explains, is the tragedy of the three-way culture war between the claims to truth of (1) the traditions, (2) modernist reductionism, and (3) post-modernity’s savaging critique of both. Wilber is right in arguing that this clash is the direct cause of intractable deadlocks in the progress of spirituality, politics, the humanities, education, ecology, and medicine. Stagnation and even war on each of these fronts may be the only possible result.

And beneath all of that, each side faces intellectual incineration in a philosophic war, Wilber shows. This war is waged between the “subjectivist” claims of spiritual consciousness and, as earlier noted, post-modernism’s claim that all truth is intersubjective and contextual. (And don’t forget, both of these stand in stark opposition to the equally valid but conflicting claims of materialistic scientific method.) These apparently incompatible perspectives offer daunting problems to solve; Wilber offers equally daunting solutions, nobly holding out the olive branch of integral peace between the warring factions. And what is his ultimate solution? First of all, he envisions that success at the personal level in any given “integralized” religious tradition would now be defined as the ability to graciously (i.e., “nondually”) become intimate or conversant with all existing stages of cultural evolution (e.g., primitive, modern, post-modern), as well as competent with (“one with”) all states of consciousness and all perspectives on truth, and to fully integrate one’s shadow. (No problem, mate!) And second, at the collective level, a genuine “evolutionary enlightenment” is now possible, but only if planetary civilization honors all perspectives, all religious traditions, and all levels of consciousness, through the method of transcending and including the best facts, knowledge, and insight from each.

A grand vision, this is. And yet who has the authority to make these transcending and including choices? And who will activate the conveyer belt of religious evolution by first teaching traditional religious leaders, for example, how to adopt the eight-zone perspectives on the integration of the states, lines, types, and stages of consciousness? And how will they, in turn, disseminate integral-spirituality methods to the ordinary “conformist/ethnocentric” adherents of their religions who are now engaged in an epochal clash with homegrown fundamentalists? Who will fund this and who will train the integral trainers? And who will safeguard us from possible power abuses by an emerging new integral aristocracy who oversees the forward motion of the conveyer belt?

Wilber prides himself on the notion that nothing is missing in his great synthesis of art, science, consciousness, and culture, and very little is. But one can only hope (and pray) that he, or the emerging integral movement—now led by Wilber’s Integral Institute—will have the resources and the courage to answer such questions as they face the unprecedented challenges of integral-movement building. How can this be done without creating yet another dysfunctional “spiritual” organization with claims to possess the ultimate answer to the world’s problems?

One final word: Many of us have issues with the semantic texture of Wilber’s conceptualizations of religion and spirituality, with its apparently inescapable bias toward Buddhist nondualism. I refer here especially to his frequent practice of borrowing from Buddhist categories in his search for key distinctions and useful tools of philosophic analysis of the general subject of religion. So one must ask: Does Ken conflate his personal religion with his integral philosophy? Does he privilege Buddhism over other traditions? Does he need to “own” his distinctions and categories more than he does? And further, can someone who has spent a lifetime believing that the notion of a “personal soul” is an illusion of ego still incorporate this very notion into his integral theorizing and do it justice? Can a committed, practicing Buddhist really show us how to “integrate” Christian or Islamic or shamanic concepts that are based on an entirely different cosmology? Can someone who sees the nondual state achieved by meditation as the supreme goal of practice really do justice to the idea of the worship of God and loving service to humanity as theists understand it—or to notions that we are always dependent on divine grace by faith, or to the centrality of the will of God of the Abrahamic traditions? Or are these just intersubjective “myths of the given” that must be set aside in favor of a non-dual solution? Wilber’s theorizing about

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