Shapes in the Fire

Joel A. Wendt's website is worth linking to. I've only read a bit, but it looks intriguing--especially his views on Anthroposophy.

What is it they used to say, "so many books, so little time?" Now we have to say "so many books and web-sites, so little time."

It is in an interesting thing, being so interested in life. One has to learn the fine art of discrimination.

David Deida on Spiritual Practice, Yoga, and Therapy

From a video series on Integralnaked.org.

"Spiritual Practice, Yoga, and Therapy are approaches to life in the moment. Therapy takes dysfunction and moves it into function. Yoga increases the flow. You get function from therapy, flow from yoga, and glow from spiritual practice.”

~ David Deida.

Deida uses the analogy of a broken stained glass window. Therapy fixes the pieces of glass, while Yoga dusts the glass, clarifying it for the flow of light (energy). One becomes more translucent, but not “fixed.”

Spiritual practice neither “fixes” the glass nor transparentizes it; it involves realizing that one is the Light.

Feeling “broken” requires therapy. Feeling “obstructed in flow” requires yoga.

Therapy is defined by the culture, what it finds dysfunctional. He cites Ramana Maharshi as being dysfunctional, but realized as Light (spiritually realized).

Now here's a spiritual vision...

Is there God? God answers...

Mage & Sage ~ Actualization and Transcendence

In an attempt to not escape the calendar year without at least one post here, here is something from another still-born blog, "Integral Musings," from February 23rd, 2006:

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"With man, the natural, automatic process of evolution ends. Man is the last product of unconscious evolution. With man, conscious evolution begins." ~ Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

There are two general approaches that arise from the point of conscious evolution, corresponding with what Abraham Maslow defined as the two "Being Needs": self-actualization and self-transcendence, these as opposed to the "Subsistence Needs" of survival, safety, belonging, and self-esteem which are more automatic in the sense of what Rajneesh refers to as "unconscious evolution." According to Rajneesh there are two types of evolution: collective evolution and individual evolution, or "revolution." Society/culture takes us up to a certain point--as does our upbringing. But beyond that requires individual revolution and choice. We choose to self-actualize, even self-transcend.

Self-actualization is the process of engaging one's potentials as a human being; it is the path of being a conscious, evolving human. Artist's follow this path, whether consciously or not: they are, for the most part, "self made"--they live creatively, individually; in some cases, their entire lives become an expression of this, of self-actualization. Self-actualization is the process of exploring one's individuality, one's uniqueness, one's humanity.

Self-transcendence is the process of surrender and realization, the recognition of the larger context in which we live (and self-actualize), and thus ultimately what is referred to in the wisdom traditions as enlightenment, realization, liberation, etc. If self-actualization relates with one's humanness, self-transcendence relates with one's divinity.

Embracing and engaging in both movements is based upon the recognition that we are both human, thus limited, and divine, thus limitless. We are "God-humans."

Self-actualization also correlates with the Descending current of Agape, or embrace of manifestation; self-transcendence correlates with the Ascending current of Eros, or the transcendence of manifestation and realization of Spirit or God.

There are problems, then, with an unbalanced approach, an embrace of one current over the other. To self-actualize without self-transcending is to build an edifice of individuality, yet perhaps not be open to moreness, to the ultimate transparency and emptiness of any form of manifestation. To self-transcend without self-actualizing is to move beyond any form or structure, and thus perhaps dissociate from the "lower" aspects of one's being, one's humanity.

In the context of Wilber's spectrum of consciousness, self-actualization involves engagement with every level prior to the causal, all of which are one degree of form, from physicality to biology to sensation and emotion to mind and soul. Self-transcendence involves recognition of and surrender to the causal emptiness that is the underlying--and binding--ground of being from which all forms arise, "Spirit proper," or "Spirit unmodified." The clearest analogy for the spectrum of consciousness is that of light: Spirit is Pure Light, whereas the levels of the spectrum are akin to colors, or light modified. The nondual traditions hold that everything is Spirit; as Chogyam Trungpa said, "There is only Ati;" as the theological nondual traditions say, "There is only God."

When we self-actualize we consciously create ourselves; we make ourselves through choice, ala the Mage of the Western Esoteric Traditions as represented in the Tarot deck. The Mage, Magus or Magician engages one's potentials, one's "evolutionary packet": what has been inherited through genetics and/or karma, and consciously develops them, not for the sake of enlightenment or transcendence, but for the sake of creative manifestation. The Mage is the worldly human, who lives in the world, whole-heartedly.

When we self-transcend we inquire into the nature of self and consciousness, recognizing that there is no solid entity that we can rest on as who we are. This path corresponds with the Sage of the Eastern Esoteric Traditions--who is otherworldly, who transcends the limitations of form by resting as formlessness, for the Sage's realization is that he or she is not "he or she," but the pure consciousness-being from which all things, including "he or she," arises. The Sage transcends the world entirely, perhaps interacting, but not "doing," simply being.

The danger of the Mage is crystalization of form, as self or soul. The danger of the Sage is dissociation as formlessness, as spirit. An integral nonduality would imply engaging both aspects of existence: actualization and transcendence, or as the Sufis say, "Being in the world but not of it." In some sense the dissonance between the choice of one or the other is resolved through recognizing that they seek to answer different questions:

Self-actualization: How shall I live in the world? Who shall I become?
Self-transcendence: Who am I, truly and most deeply? What is my true nature, my true self?

Neither can answer the other's question, neither can engage the other's domain of being. Both are necessary, required for an integral approach. Exercising self-actualization without self-transcending is choosing to not become fully conscious, fully divine; exercising self-transcendence without self-actualizing is choosing to not become fully alive, fully human.

Paul Brockelman's Cosmology and Creation

The following is one of the annotations for my current study program at Vermont College, entitled "Imagination and Cosmology: envisioning a world for speculative writing." The formatting may be confusing as I simply copied and pasted from a Word document. I tried to edit a few things, like put quotes in blocks and italicize book titles, but I didn't italicize specific words...too much of a hassle ;)

Cosmology and Creation: The Spiritual Significance of Contemporary Cosmology
By Paul Brockelman

Like a twin sibling to the more eccentric New Age movement (albeit more legitimized by the mainstream) the field of ‘new science’ has created a substantial nest in the consciousness of the postmodern West. From Einstein’s theory of relativity and Bohr’s quantum mechanics to the quasi-mystical Tao of Physics of Fritjof Capra and The Dancing Wu Li Masters of Gary Zukav that came out of the explorations of the Boomer generation, to the inter-faith and inter-domain dialogues of the Dalai Lama with various scientists and philosophers, the boundaries between mysticism and science have, if not broken down altogether, become dynamically acquainted. Many claim that the external discoveries and theories of new physicists point to the same internal realizations of the eastern mystics, that quantum physics and spiritual realization point to the “same thing” (although some see this as a kind of false reductionism, that the realm of internal and ‘subtle’ apprehensions cannot be reduced to external/physical phenomena). Regardless of the degree that the dialogue of science and religion displays a commonality of experiential domains, few disagree that the dialogue itself is what is of paramount importance, that the meeting and interaction of science and religion is actually taking place at all.

Into this great dialogue comes Paul Brockelman, yet one more voice among many, but offering a jewel of a book that seemingly—and unfortunately—got lost in the mess of clamoring voices. Brockelman, the “University Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire” according to the dust jacket, offers a fresh voice, one that is differentiated from any partisanship, any attempt to co-opt one domain within the embrace of the other. He points to the importance of integrating the recent findings of scientific cosmology into the ethics and understanding of religious and secular life, that in so doing we might be able to better create a sustainable and ethical world that allows for diversity and a continuance—and nurturing—of the evolutionary unfolding that this cosmology reveals.

To some extent Brockelman breaks away from the Enlightenment approach of “de-mythification”, as if everything that came before in human ideology was wrong, was the result of magical and mythic and thus, according to that rationalistic approach, erroneous. The Enlightenment (according to its exponents) was the great dispeller of such illusions; it brought us out of the dark ages into the realm of clear (and often cold) rationality. But Brockelman sees the new cosmology—itself an outgrowth of the Enlightenment—as a kind of myth or story unto itself:

It’s not just that we seem to understand something radically new in the big bang cosmology which has erupted into our contemporary consciousness; it’s also that the whole fifteen-billion-year development of the entire cosmos (including, of course, the present world) is a story. From the various scientific fields and perspectives has emerged a single narrative understanding of all of creation and our place within it, a story with deep similarities and parallels to the creation stories of traditional cultures. (14)

Thus Brockelman legitimizes previous tellings of cosmology by revealing them as culturally relevant. It is not, then, that the new cosmology replaces these for specific (and traditional) cultures, but that with the advent of a global culture, the new cosmology comes forth as a global creation myth that is relevant to our current worldview and is rooted in our own hermeneutical practices (“from the various scientific fields and perspectives”).

Brockelman quotes Joseph Campbell, the great 20th century mythologist:

What we humans are looking for in a creation story is a way of experiencing the world that will open to us the transcendent, that informs us and at the same time informs ourselves within it. (17; from Campbell’s The Mythological Dimension).

The purpose being—according to Brockelman through Campbell—of this new cosmology/creation story to (re)connect us with the world and the transcendent dimension that enlivens it. In that sense the story itself provides a relative or particular framework that is the ‘doorway’ to the ineffable, the transcendent (or ‘divine’). Thus, strangely enough, it is the very story revealed by modern science that can reconnect us with the spiritual dimension of life.

Brockelman introduces what he calls the ‘grammar of human interpretive understanding and meaning,’ a kind of reframing of the Absolute and Relative:

The grammar consists of the bifurcation of reality into two levels…it is through this double structure that human beings frame ordinary life with an interpretive vision of what life is all about and thereby construct the various human worlds or cultures in which they actually live. The grammar functions by helping us to “see” that ordinary life and world “as” a dependent reflection of the sacred other. The “as” constitutes the interpretive understanding of nature and our lives “seen” as a meaningful whole. (33)

Thus we “see” life as this or that creation story unfolding—whether it is the new cosmology or not—which allows us to view our own particular life “as” meaningful in that it is part of a greater whole, a microcosm of a macrocosmic drama. If we “see” the universe as a 15-billion year process of evolutionary unfolding, we will “see (our life) as” a part of that process, and thus an evolutionary unfolding itself. In other words, the myth or story by which we “see” life—even if it is the story of no-story, of no-meaning (ala extreme postmodernism or nihilism)—frames and even dictates how we will not only see our own lives, but how we will live it (e.g. A nihilist who truly “sees” life as inherently meaningless will live their life “as” if it were just that: meaningless).

Brockelman integrates theism and pantheism into a seamless panentheism: that God is both immanent in and as all things, but also transcendent of all things, and thus integrates physics and theology, for physics does not see any reality beyond creation, and traditional theology sees God as the creator outside of creation. He posits four points:

1. If God is, he can only be ‘being itself’; he cannot be an entity of any sort.
2. As being, God is neither spatially separated from nor identical to existing entities. Rather, although always and only encountered with those things, he is ontologically different from them in so far as he is not reducible to any defining qualities or characteristics specific to any of them….
3. Both supernatural theism (which separates God-being from nature) and pantheism (which collapses that God-being into some kind of entity or indeed the whole set of such entities) are
untenable.
4. God is being itself. (85-86)

The extremes of theism and pantheism offer two dualities that create their own inherent problems. In our own modern Western culture we see both forces at work: the pantheistic ‘pagan’ worship of all things finite and material (for in pantheism there is nothing beyond the visible sensible world), and the theistic and often patriarchal reverence of that which is forever beyond any form of connection or experience (for if God is truly transcendent then we as the ‘created’ are forever separate from it), and thus consign ourselves to a ‘fallen’ and sinful world. A double-bind, in other words (sinful or sinning, materialistic or transcendent); one extreme leads to over-indulgence and fusion with the material world, the other with a kind of dissociative numbness and/or repression of all things earthly. Whereas Brockelman’s panentheism (related to the nonduality of the Eastern tantric traditions) brings the two together: the world is both divine, but the divinity is not encapsulated or limited to any one part or characteristic of the world; God-as-being and thus as-reality is both the sum of all its parts (the creation), but that ‘moreness’ that is always present (the creator). Or, as the Sufis say, “to be in the world but not of it;” embracing the appearances (of the One God emanating as the Many) while not getting lost in them.

Brockelman’s God—again like many teachers of nondual spirituality—is accessible because of its ever-presence.

I have argued that God must be immanent in nature, not as a finite part of it, but rather as the infinite and mysterious power-to-be that shines through it. God is the “beyond” of existence, the mysterious indefinability of reality, and it is available in nature itself. Such a God is not an
explanatory hypothesis which we infer must exist, but is directly available in the experience of
wonder. As we have seen, it may be that the new cosmology makes such an experience possible once again. (92)

Yet because ‘God itself’ is not encapsulated in any specific form, it cannot be accurately defined or framed in any finite or rational phrase (as the Tao te Ching famously read, “The Tao that can be talked about is not the Eternal Tao”). Brockelman gently admonishes scientific luminary Stephen Hawking for not understanding this, but instead searching for a final—and rational—formula that explains everything:
What Hawking fails to recognize is that the sheer BEING or facticity of nature is not intelligible or explicable: it is a mystery met in wonder at the boundary of rational discourse. (94)

In other words, the experience of God—spiritual recognition or realization—is almost comically accessible to one and all, but not as something that is ‘found’, but something that is surrendered to as ineffable wonder and awe. It is not some ‘answer’ that is found that provides this deep sense—or revelation—of connectivity and divinity of life, but the very fact of being itself: that we are here at all, that reality IS.

Brockelman speaks of the ‘sameness’ at the heart of nearly all religious traditions, while not collapsing their temporal distinctions. However, he believes that they all hold certain key elements in common, perhaps most essentially that all traditions involve a transformation that is a

turning away from what is perceived to be a present, inadequate life to focus on what is ultimately real, turning away from self-centered concerns to what we might call, with philosopher John Hick, reality-centeredness. (118-119).

(This also echoes the work of philosopher Ken Wilber, who says that we evolve from ‘egocentric’ to ‘ethnocentric’ to ‘worldcentric’ and potentially ‘kosmocentric’, differentiating ‘kosmos’ from ‘cosmos’, the former including more than just the physical realm).

It is Brockelman’s contention that this new cosmology can help catalyze this opening to what is beyond ourselves (to God) through his grammar of “seeing…as”; seeing the 15-billion cosmic process of unfolding and our individual and collective lives as part of that immense process. That by seeing ourselves as both a part of this unfolding and with a transcendent divine spark within each and everyone of us (for if God is ‘being itself,’ than all that is is part of God, emerges from and as God), we recognize ourselves as interdependent and never-separate from the entire eco-sphere around us, from the physical and natural world to the social and interpersonal realm (and into the transpersonal or spiritual). From this interconnectedness a new ethics, a global one, cannot help but follow (because of the grammar of interpretive understanding, “see…as”).

Like many of the ‘new wave’ spiritual teachers that have emerged in the West over the last half-century or so, but especially over the last two decades, Brockelman’s message is both simple and deceptively subtle and thus elusive. He speaks of a God that is both immanent and transcendent, of a balance between head and heart, yang and yin, and an ever-deepening integration and enfoldment within and as the evolving, alive universe. Yet like the teachings of the new spiritual teachers—who insist again and again that God-Life-Reality is our True Self and is ever-present, or “that which is always already the case” (Franklin Jones, aka Adi Da)—this message seems elusive, to slip away not long after it is grasped. Brockelman emphasizes the sense of wonder as the (or a) doorway to this recognition, a sense that we have all had, that is available to one and all. Yet how many truly are immersed in wonder? Even the fleeting moments…we can all leave our houses at night and stare into the depths of space and realize the fact that there lies infinity, there lies a hundred billion or more galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy, which makes a universe with, in the spirit of Carl Sagan, “billons of billions” of stars.

It blows the mind. But perhaps that is just it? The sense of wonder is perhaps reliant upon the mind being ‘blown’, or rather the boundaries of the known evaporating. Perhaps the primary reason for the ‘rarification of the God-experience’ is because the Known so rarely breaks down, and the experience of wonder—or other experiences of what could be called spiritual archetypes, akin to Platonic Ideals that lead us to the God-experience—is reliant upon the breakdown of the Known. Yet why are we so reliant upon the Known? Why are we so comfortable with it and, conversely, afraid of what lies beyond? Isn’t what lies beyond the ‘moreness’ that is always present, that is there (here) whether we recognize it or not? Is not the lack of the God-experience more of an altered and false state than the God-experience itself? Perhaps we are simply living in delusion, living in sin when Paradise is all around us.

In other words, perhaps we never left the Garden. It is unfolding all around—and as—us.

Six Feet Under vs. Sex In The City (?)

This is worth reading: Why Is Six Feet Under Authentic Innovation, and Sex In The City Is A Pure Shit Sandwich?

The Mystery of Being

Nothing to get.
No possible theory or knowledge or view or perspective that could ever "see" the totality, encapsulate it fully, except within its own limited language.
Nothing!
And everything...everything to touch, taste, see, breathe in and exhale.
Everything to feel, dream, think, imagine!

The mystery of being is impenetrable--yet we are it!
No you, no me.
All is one; one movement, the great Cosmic Dragon, writhing in the Void, as the Void.
The Void writhes as the Dragon.
Emptiness dances as form.
The mystery of being, ever-birthing.