Integral Zen

Diane Musho Hamilton

Diane Musho Hamilton Sensei is a gifted mediator, facilitator and teacher of Zen and Integral Spirituality. She is the dharma successor of Genpo Roshi, and is his first successor in the Big Mind lineage. She has worked with Ken Wilber and Integral Institute since 2004 and has been the lead trainer on Integral Life Practice. She is also a core founder and faculty of iEvolve: Global Practice Community.

 

 

Written by Corey W. deVos

With such a highly sophisticated understanding of all the spiritual states of consciousness available to human beings, Zen is an extraordinary spiritual technology, with a rich treasury of practices carefully designed for the awakening of mankind.  In terms of its ability to evoke powerful states of transcendence—leading people ever closer toward recognizing the infinite liberation that awaits us at the core of each of our souls—many consider the tradition of Zen Buddhism to be in many ways unparalleled.  Some have described Zen as a sort of "plug and play" spirituality, meaning that it is adaptable to almost any background, belief system, or vocation a person might find themselves in—in other words, it is possible to be a Christian, a Jew, or a scientist and be a Zen practitioner, and have authentic spiritual experiences while practicing.  It is precisely this sort of fluid, all-embracing quality that makes Zen such a fascinating tradition for the 21st century—a sort of spiritual "universal donor" with the ability to supplement and enrich almost any other tradition, occupation, or creative endeavor available to humanity.

"For instance, we might see how a deeply rational zen teacher—someone who has a really deep practice, but is embedded in a very materialistic level of development—has no room to understand the very subtle but powerful shamanistic aspects of Zen that can emerge. They are seen as ritualistic and archaic, but in fact, for people who are able to hold an integral perspective, they are able to see the energetic function of those things...." -Diane Musho Hamilton Sensei

The reason Zen is so universally applicable is that it focuses almost entirely upon ever-present states of consciousness, with particular emphasis upon some of the deepest states of radical emptiness, clarity, and transcendent unity—states which, by their very nature, are available to us all, babies, boomers, and buddhas alike.  Since states of emptiness might be described as being utterly devoid of content, beyond all words and locations and referents within the relative world, one can assume that my experience of emptiness while sitting on a meditation cushion would be almost identical to your experience of emptiness while sitting on a cushion.  Emptiness is emptiness is emptiness is, after all, how could it possibly be any different?  However, once we both get up from the meditation cushions and engage the world of form once again, we might very well have two completely different interpretations of the experience, using very different language to describe what happened, extracting two wildly contrasting perceptions of meaning and consequence from the very same experience of emptiness. 

In this sense, the apparent universality of Zen can be both a blessing and a blight, and has at times fallen prey to one of one of today’s most confusing issues: what is the relationship between evolution, human development, and spirituality? While the East (and the West, in its more contemplative forms) has offered us much information about the nature of states of consciousness, here we must look to the triumphs of Western developmental psychology, which suggests that human beings grow through several distinct stages of consciousness—each fundamentally determining the contours and contexts of our experiences.

One of the most approachable (and intuitively easy to grasp) models of human development comes from the work of Jean Gebser.  Drawing upon the rich historical evidence available to him from almost every major field of inquiry, (e.g., poetry, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, religion, physics and the other natural sciences, etc.), Gebser posits that consciousness is able to grow through at least six major stages of consciousness: archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral, with plenty of space beyond for new stages to be laid down in the future of human evolution.  Each of these structures of consciousness approaches life with very different values, assumptions, idioms, and meaning-making processes, even when describing the same events and experiences.  As the same states of spiritual transcendence are available to each of these different stages of consciousness, we can begin to see where most of the confusion surrounding our interpretations of spirituality, transcendence, and human potential begin to spring.