The 2nd-Person God As An Active Force In Our Lives

 Dear David,

This is an important issue.  You are right - many people on an integral path don't grok 2nd person "Thou" God consciousness.  Here are some thoughts on why.

But here's a note before I launch into a response to your thoughtful piece:  I steer away from use of the word "God."  This is because it is intrinsically misleading.  You can't use it without making people think you are talking about monotheism, and monotheism cannot and does not give clear expression to non-theistic expressions of the divine.  So what?  Well, for starters almost the entirety of Buddhism is a non-theistic expression of the divine.  

I do have an appreciation for why people like Robert Thurman, Wilber, and even you use it: as upaya, "skill in means," as a way to build bridges to audiences.  If we want to get cute, we can claim that we are on a level that can use any and all language.  But this allows us to define our terms according to how we want while ignoring their likely interpretation by others.  "God" also conjures up "Thou," the devotional God of our youth to whom we surrendered.  So "God" becomes a way to talk about spirit in a personal way, almost with a personality with whom we can relate.  So even Buddhists use it (more Tibetan than Zen or Theravadin) to refer to divinity manifesting in form. 

But at the risk of sounding shrill and exclusive, this type of language is pandering.  People can learn to think clearer, but only if we expect that they can.  In other words, they can learn to personalize spirit and experience spirit in form.  Once they have the right methodology, they can have devotional surrender with spirit without linguistic baggage that is misleading and limiting.    

If you want to continue to use God language, you are in good company. Wilber does too.  I am simply telling you when and how I part ways with that usage.  

Now, with that out of the way, first some background comments that concern your questions:

Many people who are religious, but not necessarily spiritual in orientation, are so because of 2nd person experiences: conversions, altar calls, experiences of awe, the sacredness of life, such as births, deaths, and experiences of themselves or loved ones escaping death and misfortune.  As you know, romantic love is also a powerful bridge to Thou, as the Song of Solomon and the poetry of Rumi testify.  In time, if they are lucky, their religiosity ripens into real spirituality.  

The problem is that these "believers" generally experience AND explain such personal experiences to themselves and others within the context of prepersonal belief systems, which generally means Christianity or Judaism in the West.  Tibetan Buddhim itself overflows with mythological deities. What that in turn means is that believers conflate the mythology of those belief systems with the "Thou" experience itself.  Therefore they fiercely hold on to the mythology because they think that to deny it is to deny the reality of Thou.  For example, they have a personal sacred experience of their oneness with Avolitkeshvara.  Now they have to venerate Avolitkeshvara as a way of keeping the transformative power of that "Thou" encounter alive in their lives.   Or, on the other hand, when they move into personal realms of development they associate anything "Thou" with prepersonal mythology and throw the baby out with the bathwater.   This is a sad part of the story of the "enlightenment" and everything humanistic.  So God becomes Deism before He disappears altogether into positivism and scientific atheism.  

The latter is a basic problem that people like Ken and you have in getting the "Thouness" of the divine across to most people who tune into you.  To elaborate:  most people who read Wilber strongly lead in the cognitive line.  What does this mean?  They are rational humanists, at least in part, and rational humanists tend to be suspicious of "Thou," because it feels like a subordination of the rational to the pre-rational, and because "Thou" is not rational.  It is thoroughly transrational.  Unless they have experienced the divine as "Thou" separate from prepersonal belief systems they are likely to either not recognize it or confuse it with prepersonal regression. And so they go for TM or Vipassana or Quantum explanations of reality.  

So the challenge is, "How do you get rational humanists to have compelling and personal 'Thou' experiences that they can appreciate as separate from mythological world views?"

To start to answer this let's think for a moment about the core of "Thou" experiences of the divine, as distinct (more or less) from "I" and "We" experiences of the divine.  If my library was not all boxed up I would go rummage around for what Wilber has to say about this, which I think is the place to start.  But I will at least tell you what I think it is.  

While "I" focuses on witnessing in all states of consciousness (dharmakaya) and "We" focuses on the interdependent web, generally as energy in form (nirmanakaya), "Thou" focuses on the interior, yet autonomous experience of the sacred (sambhogakaya).

The key here for me is that few people have experiences of an autonomous interior, so most people don't know what we're talking about.  Think for a minute about what it means to have experiences of an autonomous interior.  It means that there are parts of you that act independently from you.  This is not only contrary to the primary thrust of socialization and its worshipping of self-mastery and self-control, but it is contrary to both mainstream psychology and rationality.  It is contrary to mainstream psychology because psychology and the related counseling professions focus on developing and maintaining an integrated sense of self.   It is commonly assumed by these professionals that autonomous internal experiences do not make for an integrated sense of self.  They are considered to be threats, in that they fragment both personality and identity.  Interior "voices" are not a good sign in traditional psychology. 

Similarly, rationality is the crown jewel of ego development.  From a rational perspective, the self does not see how it can support interior autonomy and maintain rationality.  In fact, it can't, in a sense.  Doing so is sharing power and control with non-rational self aspects (irrational and transrational), and if a person has never done this, they will hear this as a regression to sharing power and control with prepersonal and irrational self aspects.  It's the pre-trans fallacy once again raising its ugly but all too familiar head. 

Not only do few people have experiences of an autonomous interior, few of those are sacred.  Experiences of an autonomous interior are usually experienced as mundane, as most of us experience most of our dreams, or as threatening, as we experience most of the rest of them.  When people do experience something internal to themselves that is sacred, they almost immediately externalize it and say it is a visitation of Jesus on the road to Damascus or a Space Brother or deceased aunt Sally or somesuch.   They will tend to interpret it in terms of their level of development, which means it will either be seen as validation of some prepersonal mythological world view (witness the interpretations of most near death experiences) or as irrational and regressive. The best example of this sort of reductionism (irrational and regressive) I know of is Julian Jayne's The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  

Since 1980 my main professional focus has been the understanding and communication of an internal collective experience of the divine, what Wilber calls "Thou."  This was years before I ran into Wilber's work.  My story was that while I knew from the Cayce material to seek the divine within and that in the realm of form, dreams were the best internal space to do that, I found the interpretive methodologies of almost all approaches to dreams to be embarrassingly projective.  

In graduate school I was introduced to the sociometric methodology of JL Moreno, younger contemporary of Freud, developer of psychodrama and almost all forms of T-therapy and encounter therapies made famous by Bill Schultz in the late '60's and '70's.  Moreno was also the chief inspiration for Perl's Gestalt Therapy, although Perls never gave him credit.  At any rate, when I applied Moreno's sociometric methodology to my dreams I discovered that I contained an unlimited number of self aspects that were highly autonomous but which often understood the dream they were in much better than I did.  Most of them were not only more wise than I was but more compassionate, more confident, had more inner peace, more objectivity, and more acceptance than I did.  This really, really, really blew me away.  It was one of the core transformational experiences of my life, along with my encounter with the Cayce material as an adolescent and then with Nagarjuna's Madhyamika when I was nineteen.  How could there be autonomous parts existing within me that were wiser than I was?  Wasn't I making them up somehow?  Weren't they some sort of sophisticated delusion?

After over twenty-five years of exploration of all varieties of autonomous self aspects within myself and in a wide variety of fellow humans, I am utterly convinced that dialoging with self aspects that either show up in dreams or that are personifications of life issues not only provides the direct experience of healthy inner autonomy but of a sense of the divine that is internal and collective, or "Thou."  

I should point out that the Stones have made a great contribution to accessing "Thou" by developing their Voice Dialogue work and Genpo Roshi with his Big Mind adaptation.  What it does is provide an archetypal introduction to "Thou" in that both processes deal with abstract roles that all of us share: the Controller, Fear, the Protector, the Way, etc.  This is a form of listening to oneself. The more deeply that one listens to oneself, the more sacred the process becomes and the more Thou is disclosed.  They resemble my work, Dream Yoga, in that both Voice Dialogue and Big Mind disclose a continuum of internal autonomy that is more or less sacred. That having been said, there are some significant and fundamental differences between what the Voice Dialogue and Big Mind disclose and what my work, Dream Yoga does (DreamYoga.Com).    In brief, Dream Yoga deals with spontaneous creations of personal consciousness, not archetypal roles.  It talks to lamp posts, dog poop, and clouds, not the Victim, the Organizer, or the True Self.  It also talks to personally created personifications of personal life issues:  financial fears, loneliness, abandonment.  It does so in a way that discloses "Thou" in all of them, not just in the "Good Guys" (the Protector, the Way, the True Self.)

Dream Yoga, growing out of sociometry, broke down my own tendencies to project my own mythological interpretations onto dream characters (as Jung routinely did) or to dismiss them as insignificant.  On the contrary, not only do our self aspects not allow us to project our interpretations onto the internal divine; they demonstrate that they are not only significant but often sacred.  

More importantly, it gave me and my students a way of consistently contacting the interior sacred any time that we want.  This is an act of surrender, and deep listening, the central injunctive method of this psychospiritual discipline, is innately devotional.     

Now, to get to the answer to your question, David.  As you know, the transpersonal is at foundation experiential, not cognitive or rational or language-based.  It is, however, informed by and disclosed through cognition, reason, and language, which is how you differentiate it from pre-rational experience, which is disclosed through faith in one's senses, emotions, and social scripting.  Therefore, the Thou needs to be understood through direct experience, such as the Big Mind process or through dream character and life issue dialoging. 

"Thou" is definitely a direct threat to the ego, as Wilber points out, because the ego can't easily handle the idea of internal autonomy.  The magic is this:  when you merge with, when you take the role of, when you actively identify with, when you become autonomous self aspects you expand your sense of self.  If you do this enough your attachment to self gets thinner and thinner.  One comes to view the self merely as another tool, like your fist or language or your body or your emotions.  It is seen as a process, not a thing, not a ding an sich or an Aristotelian/Cartesian substance.  

So you have my strong vote for making the cultivation of Thou as a core practice among integrally oriented audiences.  That's really what my life's work is all about, only I mostly do it with people who don't know Wilber and integral psychology and still get the results you're looking for from the integral people.  

The reason why people stumble on the word "devotional" is that their only frame of reference is prepersonal religious mythological.  When they do inner dialogue work they create a devotional relationship with aspects of themselves that experientially breaks up their scripted cognitive bias.  

Dream Yoga also helps to disclose the "Great It" of Dharmadhatu when you become Dream Consciousness, that aspect of yourself that creates all dream forms.  This is not a cognitive abstraction, like Voice Dialogue roles.  By definition, it is your consciousness that precedes any and all forms, including a sense of self.  This is where formless personal consciousness merges with formless non-personal consciousness, and it is disclosed by Dream Yoga.  This is one reason why it is a yoga and one reason why it is such a powerful complement to meditative practice. 

Regarding the absence of vision questing in the integral community, I think Wilber would respond by saying that is the purpose of creating and following an Integral Life Practice, that by doing so one creates a structure in and through which the divine manifests personally to guide and direct our lives.  He would say to take up a devotional practice of some sort that works for you: chanting the names of God, prayer, sacred pilgrimages, vision questing, whatever.  

While I think this is what Wilber might say, and while I not only agree with but teach the establishment of an Integral Life Practice, what I believe his approach lacks, - and I think this lack speaks directly to your concern, David - is an awareness of the priorities of internal spirit.  Wilber's Integral Life Practice, which as you know, grew out of Michael Murphey and George Leonard's Integral Transformative Practice described in their book, The Life We are Given.

Here's my rap:  Wilber, Murphey, and Leonard approach integral practice as an ego driven affair.  You set goals that you think reflect divine priorities and you follow them, making sure that they cover the different lines and are respective of the types and the four quadrants and so forth.  This is all well and good, but what if spirit has other plans?  How do you know?  Do you just "know?"  This is what everyone seems to assume.  They never seem to stop and ask, "Maybe it would be a good idea for me to check to see if my personal goals for my life and my integral life practice are in alignment with the organic ones of spirit as it manifests personally through me."  You ask yourself this question or you ask most any other member of the integral community and they will tell you that they already have, that they "know" that their goals are in accord with the divine.  My question is, "How do we know that?"  "What makes us so sure?"  What if say, you think spirit wants you to learn to lucid dream but in fact, spirit doesn't care?  What I find, when I actually stop and ask various self aspects, is that I am often mistaken; my goals, that I am sure reflect divine priorities, often do not correspond to those of aspects of myself which score higher in core transpersonal qualities.  

Part of the reason we do not ask the Thou within is because most people lack a methodology  to do so.  They meditate for validation and then maybe get confirmation of what their own self mirrors back to them.  They look at dreams and then get confirmation of what their own self mirrors back to them.  It's a version of the old "soul mate" game.  We meet someone that fulfills our dreams.  We check it out with "God."  He says yes.  But our "soul mate" ends up being a loser.  Now we get to blame "God" and swear off divine guidance from our dreams, meditation or whatever because it's proven itself untrustworthy.  Assuming we know divine will for ourselves is a method that is sure to backfire sooner or later.  

The alternative is to write out your life goals along the lines that Wilber advocates in Integral Psychology.   Then become and interview various self aspects that score high in core qualities that are associated with the divine.  In Dream Yoga those that are used are confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing.  If you ask say four or five different self aspects that consistently score nine or ten out of ten on all six of these qualities and they consensually support your goals, then you have just greatly increased your odds that your life plan reflects priorities of "Thou."  This is what I teach my students to do at Southwest Institute for the Healing Arts in Tempe and in Europe who are studying to be Dream Yoga Practitioners.  When we pursue goals that reflect the priorities of spirit life is easier.  It goes better.  

These goals change as you move up the spectrum of consciousness, and you adjust in tandem with the feedback of personifications of Thou.  It's a process that is impossible to outgrow, and it works.  You won't be perfect; you can still certainly screw up your life, as I have, but when you do you will have the tools to take a lemon and turn it into lemonade.  

On a personal note, this has reminded me of the time I was sitting in my back garden, listening to the Baptists whose Chuch abuts my property singing their hymns. Every hymn referred to 'thou, my God'. Hmm, I thought, at least I've got beyond the stage of externalising God, of seeing God as a being 'out there', (as an old man in the sky) etc. etc. That very same evening a new video came onto Integral Naked where Ken Wilber discussed the importance of the 2nd person of Spirit....

Helen

As you know, David, I fully agree with you. I was very glad to see Wilber come out so strongly in Integral Spirituality on behalf of what he calls Spirit in 2nd-person. However, I personally feel that he stopped short. He seemed to advocate a kind of heart relationship with "the great Thou," in which we surrender to that Thou and receive in return inner gifts. I think that is absolutely wonderful. However, he didn't go so far as to advocate what you are talking about--the idea that this 2nd-person Spirit is active in the world and has a plan for our lives, all geared toward the endpoint of our personal and collective evolution.

My sense, however, is that including this would require a significant revision of the Integral framework. The fact is that a God (let's just say it) who literally acts in the world is not a post-metaphysical notion--quite the opposite. Yet, on the other hand, I know that Wilber sees some sort of divine eros propelling the evolutionary process, so it seems that he is already blurring the lines here. Could that eros be stretched from a kind of general pull into being a detailed and active plan? That's quite a stretch. I personally doubt it.

Another problem is that with this notion, the higher stages that we have yet to develop into are already mapped out and waiting for us. They are not just kosmic tendencies that form as we ourselves blaze evolutionary trails. They are part of a blueprint already designed and simply waiting to be carried out.

So, unfortunately, I think that including your idea would require some fairly basic revision of the Integral framework. Sure, it's only a step beyond Wilber's Spirit in 2nd-person, but it's a step that starts monkeying with the system as a whole.

I think what would also need to change is a fuller embrace of the religious insights and attitudes of the West. Integral theory does claim to embrace and include everything, but there are always value judgments to be made of how much to include something, how prominent of a place to give it, and yes, even whether to include it. I get the feeling that we are all a bit phobic about the contributions of Western religion, as if by letting in certain essentials insights from it we would automatically be letting in all of the mythology we have so carefully transcended. Yet could this phobia be keeping out truly vital insights, truly important pieces of what will eventually become the larger Integral pie?

So anyway, I really do applaud your bringing this up. But now that I'm writing about it, I find myself feeling little hope for this aspect to receive what you and I see as its due. I think you might have put your finger on a bit of an Achilles heel in the Integral framework. But maybe you've started a conversation that will bear fruit later on. Or who knows--maybe it will bear some fruit now. That would be wonderful, wouldn't it?

--David,

Thank you for your post and thought provoking thinking.

Perhaps i am unique in my experience, but i doubt it. I suspect that i have just come to the very strong 2nd person experience of God because of my life's earlier circumstances. 

As a Catholic who grew disgusted with the church's dogmatic hypocrisy, years ago I turned away from the practice, but not the concept. Since there was no overriding religious practice taking its place, my inquisitive soul let many other subtle ones come through.

With that, and life's emotional upheavals of various dramatic flavors for some years, it was no wonder there was no1st person God, or 3rd person God for me.

It took some time and much introspection to get a handle on the meaning of it.

It's Funny, but, you can find God in a places you never expected: it is warm and very comforting, and at other times, in changing consciousness, he wield's Thor's Hammer and hits me on the head...both in a very Big way. If you only let yourself see...

It's been a good 4 years of this influence, and i hope God doesn't mind me saying so. Perhaps this helps the attainment of perspective for others.

so many ways to find a lesson