CamFession: An Apology

I want to make an apology. I’ve been a little harsh and dismissive with Schalk in the past. I thought he was an obsessive blogger just waiting for any constructive suggestion to come along so that he could toss it straight into the abyss of integral Nothingness. Although that’s probably not 100% false, since returning from silent retreat and getting around to reading some of Schalk’s (and others) recent posts, I have to say that something has changed... and I’m not sure whether it’s me or him...

I mean, some of Schalk’s recent posts have been the most honest, refreshing and penetrating reflections I’ve seen on here... There is at the heart of his most recent blogs a genuine passion for truthfulness, a brutal honesty, and an incisive analysis of what passes for spirituality and personal transformation today – and I’m pleased to see that there are still no sacred cows in sight.

And so, I was wrong. I now see in Schalk’s radical skepticism an uncompromising demand for verifiable truth, a cold hard confession about what does and doesn’t pass for knowledge, and an unrelenting honesty about the human condition... He simply wants people to see what’s really happening in an industry/movement that is all to prone to inflated claims to imaginary perfection... and all to susceptible to the self-deception of clothing ones own private illusions with values that belong to God. This brutal unmasking of second-tier truth-claims is particularly apparent in these recent blogs, and so I just want to extend some gratitude and thanks – these writings are very insightful at their best, I suspect they say out loud what many others only suspect in secret, even as they sometimes demand the impossible and tend to be a little too merciless... But I’m getting used to it...

So where before I saw only a deconstructive nihilist, there is something refreshing and liberating about this acknowledgment that so much of the spirituality/consciousness/personal transformation industry is shot through with unverifiable and un-provable assertions. It’s like a heavy burden can start to be lifted... and we can begin to come back down to earth and see things as they really are...

Imho, much of what passes for ‘higher development’ in these circles is just the fatal narcissism of spiritual perfectionism – a kind of oppressive super-ego injunction that keep people locked in guilt and self-condemnation... And as far as I can tell, anyone who has ever bothered to do the requisite ‘inner work’ can tell you that the fruits of spiritual practice are all a sheer Gift in the end anyway... we don’t deserve them, and they are not the result of our good works.

I reckon this “higher consciousness” industry (EnlightenNext, etc) is basically a screen for the projection of peoples spiritual fantasies... The neurotic self-idealization that drives this search for enlightenment is a manufactured need of late capitalist society - it’s a symptom of our refusal to face up to the only thing we can know for certain – Death, the fate of all flesh, the realization of which is quite possibly the only thing that will save us, inside and outside, individually and collectively...

All these exaggerated claims to enlightened perfection are symptomatic of our refusal to face up to our creaturely vulnerabilities, a refusal to acknowledge the gaps in our knowledge and the blind spots in our visions of a better future, a refusal to fess up to the self-aggrandizing power drives lurking within our purest motivations, and a refusal to move into the inner destitution, humility, and poverty of heart that alone allows Spirit to shine forth anew...

There’s nothing elevated or higher about Spirit – that’s the cosmic joke that God is playing on all us second-tier practitioners... Being at a “higher altitude” is the core of the second-tier spiritual fantasy, the very notion leads directly to ego-inflation – which itself guarantees a debilitating bout depression. That’s why so much of what passes for ‘higher consciousness’ these days just reminds me of a great line from the movie Fight Club: “self-improvement is masturbation...”

The very essence of spiritual pride, according to Catholic mystic/writer Thomas Merton (thanks Rollie! - I love the book you gave me) is this desire to make a division between oneself as ‘higher’ and others as ‘lower’... between the special talents and attainments of ‘us’ and the correlative lack or deficiency in ‘them’... Who can escape this secret desire to breathe a different atmosphere from the rest of men? But, its just rubbish... and encouraging people to love their own second-tier excellence is dangerously destructive, especially in a movement that wants to bring wholeness to a fragmented world.

I mean, does anybody out there know with verifiable certainty that they are “at turquoise”, or even “enlightened”? Please, I really want to know...

And how can someone who is undeveloped in moral, interpersonal or emotional lines claim to be spiritually realized?

How dare we make distinctions between first and second tier human beings when nobody has any idea how people grow and develop in the first place?

That said, at least the Integral framework explicitly sets out to ask the difficult questions, balance opposing viewpoints, take multiple perspectives and meet these difficult challenges head on... But to claim it has any real monopoly on what ‘higher consciousness’ is all about strikes me as preposterous, shot through with narcissism and spiritual pride... It’s the very thing we need to overcome...

Isn’t it funny how the God of one stage of evolution becomes the Devil at the next...

I honestly have never had any idea whatsoever what my “altitude” or level of consciousness is, and long ago stopped wanting to make such judgments about my own or any other person’s development... I just hope and pray I’m not a menace to society and that I’m not harming too many people... But it’s all been said before, and I’ll say it again: he who wants to be first will be the servant of all...

So I just want to say that as far as I can tell Schalk is doing a service to this on-line ‘consciousness/spiritual transformation’ movement with his probing questions and myth-busting skepticism... And even if nobody has any idea who he really is, “my definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared.” (PJ Plauger)

Post-Script

That said, I have to say that in relation to his central thesis about the integrity of the various truth-claims being made in transformative spirituality businesses - the real underlying issue here is the perennial conflict between Faith and Reason, Science and Religion or “believing” and “seeing”.

While it is a good and noble endeavor to want to see scientifically, i.e. to verify the truth-claims make by psycho-spiritual teachers and organizations, what Mr. Schalk seems to resist is the realization that the deepest truths (e.g. spiritual/mystical) do not conform to our rational demands for objective certainty via empirical verification. Scientific reason only applies to sensory-empirical reality - and even then with some perplexing implications (i.e. quantum physics)... The essential question for me, then, is: do we have to reduce UL (interior) truth-claims to the sphere of the empirically verifiable?

Or to put it slightly differently, it takes a little bit of faith (trust) to see truths in the spiritual domain. In fact it takes a little bit of faith to see anything at all...

That is, even our most elementary perception of the world (say a sub-atomic particle) is structured by certain "interpretive fore-structures" of the observing mind (in integral terms: structure-stages of consciousness). So just as scientific reason involves faith - i.e. confidence in a series of presuppositions (unexamined background frameworks) that cast things in a certain light, it is faith (i.e. the capacity to trust in a certain perspective or set of unexamined assumptions about the world) that allows scientific reason to see anything at all.

And so, science (seeing) here begins to look a lot like religion (believing), just as religion (believing) begins to look a lot more like science (seeing). The bottom line Schalk (if yr reading this) is, and I’m sure there are some valid objections – but maybe try to balance your penetrating analytical mind with some basic trust or faith in other people. That is, you tend to say that you’ll believe these claims when you see the evidence, and I am merely suggesting that you may begin to see some evidence it when you believe the claims... at least once every now and again... But your default position – Reason (seeing) Not Faith (believing) – tends to put you on the defensive from the outset, where with a more balanced approach we can avoid the following twin pitfalls - agnostic relativism of purely secular reason on the one hand and the blind faith of extremist religion on the other.  I’m sure you’ll disagree but in any case, I do enjoy your relentless demand for honesty about these matters...


Cameron