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David Steindl-Rast and the Apostles Creed
Posted September 1st, 2010 by Ed Kelly
We can spin the Creed any way we want but in it's time it was created to bind the faithful under the authority of the Church. We can play with the meaning of belief and faith attempting to create some deeper meaning to these words, but this is not a reinterpretaion but quite simply age old Christian apologetics. I think it is referred to as “old wine in new bottles”. The fact is that if this “interpretation” was taught or practiced as a congregation during the time of it's creation, it would have been considered heresy and would have been opposed and suppressed by the Church (along with all similar heresies). The creed was created to subjugate believers. But by far the most absurd statement in this conversation is that it is the "truer self that has faith in the Creed". If by truer self, David Steindle-Rast means the essence of what we are as non-dual Consciousness, Awareness, Spirit, etc what need does that Self, ever-present Spirit have for a Creed? How does trust or belief or faith,(courage?) however you interpret these words, apply to that which is already the all and everything? Again you can spin these words to somehow have some non-dual meaning, but it is, especially in this conversation, a tortured exercise. Ken, please tell me how you can give us the perfection of the last chapter of the Eye of Spirit, Always Already, and participate in this nonsense?
"When I rest as the timeless Witness, the Great Search is undone. The Great Search is the enemy of the ever-present Spirit, a brutal lie in the face of gentle infinity. The Great Search is the search for ultimate experience, a fabulous vision, a paradise of pleasure, and unending good time, a powerful insight, a search for God, a search for Goddess, a search for Spirit - but Spirit is not an object. Spirit cannot be grasped or reached or sought or seen: it is the ever-present Seer. To search for the Seer is to miss the point forever. How can you search for that which is right now aware of this page? You are that... When I am not an object I am God. When I seek an object, I cease to be God, and that catastrophe can never be corrected by more searching for objects. Rather I can only rest as the Witness, which is already free of objects, free of time and free of searching. When I am not an object, I am Spirit. When I reast as the free and formless Witness, I am with God right now, in this timeless endless moment. I taste infinity and am drenched with fullness, precisely because I no longer seek, but simply rest as what I am. - Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit, pg 294
Ed
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David Steindl-Rast and the Apostles Creed
Posted September 1st, 2010 by Ed Kelly in response to The Living Word of GodJonathan, are you saying then that the Bible and the Creed are the living word of God? My point is that whatever our reinterpretation from Orange or Green, etc, these "artifacts" are only relevant to those who wish to maintain a tradition. It is purely emotional attachment that leads us to believe that somehow the Creed or the Bible offers much more than a view into a mythic/magic past and the religious wars that brought them into being. All this effort by Steindl-Rast to restate the Creed from a 2nd tier perspective speaks entirely to that perspective, and does nothing to elevate the Creed. Why is that necessary? What value is there is dragging this artifacts along with us. Neither the Creed nor the Bible are necessary vehicles for the living word of God. They don't even offer anything much in the way of history. I quote Ken's book, the Eye of Spirit, because I am deeply disappointed with the direction he is now taking with Integral spirituality. He appears to believe he needs to appeal to the religious mentality to advance the Integral movement, and in doing so throw his inspired, direct, present realization of the truth of who we are (which was Integral) under the sunday school bus.
Ed
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Living
Posted September 1st, 2010 by Jonathan Cobb in response to David Steindl-Rast and the Apostles CreedI emphasize the word "living" in the same way the Constitution is referred to as a "living" document. That is to say, it is not something to be left behind, nor is it something to be interpreted only from the cognitive altitude in the time it is written. Rather, it speaks to us in a different way at each level of development. It serves not as a set of answers, but as a set of questions to continue asking ourselves. It is a mirror through which we can view what each developmental level can teach us. This is the value of all the religious traditions. Frankly, I don't know what "direction" Ken was taking Integral spirituality before, because he has never had the kind of reflexively anti-religious sentiment you are expressing. His inclusivity of all the great wisdom traditions is perfectly consistent with what he's always done.
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David Steindl-Rast and the Apostles Creed
Posted September 2nd, 2010 by Ed Kelly in response to LivingYes, Ken has always been inclusive, as he has said, there is truth in everything. However he has been more willing in the past to steer us away from the errors of these traditions as well. Now he seems to jump on every bandwagon as long as it somehow can be constued as integral.
Perhaps you should reassess your understanding of 'living'. That which lives is new, fresh and alive each moment. The objects of the mind have no life, including religious traditions, except what we are able to project upon them. As Huang Po said, "the perceived cannot perceive". There was once a time when Ken seemed more interested in these truths than pandering to everyone who wanted to legitimize their traditions (and their emotional attachments) by adding the integral model as yet another layer of interpretation.
"The Dharma has no tradition."
~ Ogyen Trinley Dorje
Ed
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~
Posted September 2nd, 2010 by David Marshall in response to David Steindl-Rast and the Apostles CreedHi, Ed. I don't think you are getting Wilber here. He isn't simply trying to be inclusive or trying to fit as many people into the integral tent as possible. It also sounds like you are working with an older version of the integral model (Wilber IV as opposed to Wilber V) and simply assuming that those "nondual" quotes you gave are necessarily "higher" because they refer to nonduality or emptiness. This isn't necessarily the case. Are you familiar with Integral Spirituality and the Wilber-Combs Lattice?
It's a complicated subject. Let me just throw a few quotations at you, and you can pursue them if you like. The first three are from Wilber, and then I include a few from Shunryu Suzuki to show that these ideas can also exist in the very highest realizations in Buddhism:
1) Willber:
This is one of the criticisms that I develop in Integral Spirituality, which is what I call a level-line fallacy—that the second-person view of Spirit got truncated in the West. It got chopped off at the mythic level of development. Spirit in second-person has become stunted and identified merely with God the Father, the old white-haired gentleman, the mythic patriarch of the Bible that nobody believes in anymore. . . .
Too often, we in the postmodern West tend to use only first-person and third-person—we use Vedanta and science, or Buddhism and science, and so on.. . . . In a first-person approach, there’s nothing the ego has to surrender to except its own Self. And let’s just put it this way: In your attempt to go from small mind to big mind, you can end up going from small ego to big ego! [1]
2) Wilber:
What’s so astonishing is that a Nazi can complete Zen training. That’s the point—states can be experienced at any stage you’re at. [2]
3) Wilber again:
Evolutionary spirituality is actually driven by big prana, by this big energy, and that big energy is the correlation of big awareness, of the Big Self; it’s the correlation first of what you call the Authentic Self and then the purusha, or Big Self. What the traditions didn’t understand so well is the incredibly dynamic nature of these energies, the fact that they are evolving and that the goal is not to get into some equilibration state where nothing is moving and you’re in a sort of unmanifest absorption. That’s actually a lower realization. The true realization is coming out through that unmanifest state, united with big prana and therefore finding a union with everything that’s arising, that’s driven by Eros, by this fundamentally sexual orientation toward the entire manifest world. [3]
4) Shunryu Suzuki:
To exist in big mind is an act of faith, which is different from the usual faith of believing in a particular idea or being. It is to believe that something is supporting us and supporting all our activities including thinking mind and emotional feelings. All these things are supported by something that has no form or color. It is impossible to know what it is, but something exists there, something that is neither material nor spiritual. Something like that always exists, and we exist in that space. That is the feeling of pure being. [Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen, pp. 56, 65-7]
5) Shunryu Suzuki:
We have true nature. Whatever you do, even though you not do anything, your true nature is in incessant work – activity. Even though you are sleeping, it is quite active. Your thinking, your sensation are superficial activities of yourself, but your inmost nature is always working. Even though you die, it is working. I don’t mean some, you know, soul, but something….not soul, but something is always in incessant work. Whatever you call it, spirit or soul, I don’t mind. You can put many names to it, or you will give it various interpretations to it, but that interpretation belongs to….in your intellectuality. That is intellect. So whatever you call it….inmost nature itself, doesn’t mind. Someone may call it soul.
Someone may call it spirit. Someone may say, “Oh, no, no, that is just material. Some kind of function of material is soul.” Maybe. According to the people, they will put many names to it, but our inmost nature is our inmost nature. It is quite little to do with our inmost nature.
When we sit we call it inmost….let inmost nature in it’s self, or activity…This is…we call self-use of inmost nature…Let it work. You don’t do anything, but let our true nature work by itself. This is zen practice. [4]
6) Shunryu Suzuki:
According to Christianity, every existence in nature is something which was created for or given to us by God. That is the perfect idea of giving. But if you think that God created man, and that you are somehow separate from God, you are liable to think you have the ability to create something separate, something not given by Him. For instance, we create airplanes and highways. And when we repeat, " I create, I create, I create," soon we forget who is actually the "I" which creates the various things; we soon forget about God. This is the danger of human culture. Actually, to create with the "big I" is to give, we cannot create and own what we create for ourselves since everything was created by God. This point should not be forgotten. (Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, from the "God Giving" chapter)
7) Here are a couple of diagrams that might interest you. They illustrate the change from the states-on-top-of-stages model where nonduality was always considered highest to the current model in which nonduality might be said to be the deepest but not necessarily or in every case the highest. On the lattice, "super integral" refers to Indigo through Clear Light ("third tier") in the second diagram. If you take this all together you might see why devotional paths are not necessarily "lower" but can actually be just as high and deep as any path (though, of course, often they are just mythic).
The really important thing to recognize and which most people miss is that "Nondual" in the first diagram, the lattice, is not the same as "Clear Light" in the second model, though they are both "nondual" or "empty." One can be accessed from any stage (as Wilber said, even a Nazi can complete Zen training), and one is the very highest stage. (Some traditions probably use "Clear Light" but are really referring "Nondual," which can be experienced from any stage.)
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Best,
David
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Clear light
Posted September 2nd, 2010 by Ed Kelly in response to ~Thanks for the quotes and the charts. I am familiar with most of this, but don't think how up to date with Wilber I am is the issue. It's not so much about the model, whatever the model, however elegant it might be that all this comes clear. As Rumi says,
I wish life had
some sort of a tongue
to unveil the mystery
of our lives
whatever you say
...about life you must know
you are casting another
layer on top of the veil
More and more it is seeing into the transparency of things, giving up the search for the higher definition model of the seen. Trying to resurrect or rehabilitate Christianity is just more layers on of the veil.
Ed
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Posted September 3rd, 2010 by David Marshall in response to Clear lightHi, Ed. I am a huge Rumi fan, but you know, he included the second-face of Spirit in a very big way in his teaching and poetry.
When you say, "Trying to resurrect or rehabilitate Christianity is just more layers on of the veil," it makes it sound like you don't think that Christianity is a valid path toward deep spirituality, enlightenment, and so forth. But how would Sufism (Rumi) with their very heavy use of the second-face of Spirit be okay and Christianity's use (and Suzuki's, Kabbalah's, Advaita's, the Diamond Approach's, etc.) not be okay?
Also, "seeing into the transparency of things" is just one aspect of the process (the "horizontal" one on the lattice). There is much more to the process, and, as Wilber said, even a Nazi can "see into the transparency of things."
I may have gotten carried away giving you all those charts, but I was just trying to show that there is another way to look at this and make sense of it. The most important thing is the energetic dimension Wilber mentioned in the third quotation and that not everyone who has realized these deeper states are actually acting from them and that a devotional aspect can be a part of the process in learning to act "from them."
God wants us to choose the Diamond of Love, and he wants that choice to transfigure us by stages into perfected ecstatic beings. What would such a choice be worth if beside the diamond there weren't a thousand glittering things that could distract and swerve us from it? The choice of the Diamond has to come from our full being. We must know what it costs and be prepared to pay its extreme price freely for the full gift of its shining to be given to us. That is His Law: nothing can or will change it. And because it is His Law there is a mystery of Love in it that no one can wholly describe or explain.
Rumi/Andrew Harvey, Light Upon Light
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Clear light
Posted September 3rd, 2010 by Ed Kelly in response to ~Rumi, only uses second-face spiritual terms metaphorically. You have to remember that in Rumi's day you had to appear to follow some semblance of orthodoxy or you lost your head, and he was communicating with a second-face crowd. I would never say that Christianity is not a valid path. It is the path of millions of people. It's just that I would never recommend it. There are too many options. As we know people take on what suits their level of development and conditioning (levels and lines), but as you and Wilber point out even a Nazi can complete Zen training. So we can make the same case that even a Nazi could complete Christian training (and many Nazi’s believed they were good Christians). It’s hard to know what Wilber means by “complete” this training. There were many Popes who clearly had “completed their Christian training” and were responsible for the same atrocities as the worst Nazi.
Your Rumi quote is beautiful, but again there is no second-face spirituality here, only the metaphorical use of that language. “His law”, that choice of the Diamond of Love, that must come from “our full being” is God. But again saying you are God, as some unfortunate ecstatic Sufis did, didn’t sit well with the Islamic orthodoxy.
This says it best,
“Endlessly emanating all things
One turning and burning diamond,
One, one, one.
Ground yourself, strip yourself down,
To blind loving silence.
Stay there, until you see
You are gazing at the Light
With its own ageless eyes”.
-Rumi
Coming into transparency of things is hardly a “horizontal” or “vertical” process. These terms come from the belief that there is something we must do, or know, some path to follow. As Wilber once understood it is the end of the Great Search and the undoing of the separate self (Chapter 12, The Eye of Spirit). The Nazi will never come into the transparency of things, whatever his training. To do so would mean ”gazing at the Light with its own ageless eyes”, and the imaginary separate entity known as a Nazi or a Christian would long since been burned away.
Ed
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Spirit in 2nd person
Posted September 3rd, 2010 by Jonathan Cobb in response to Clear lightSo, do you deny that spirit in 2nd person is a major part of Ken's philosophy? Is he just using the term metaphorically? Has he just been trying to "maintain some semblance of orthodoxy"? I will attempt to ignore your dismissive attitude toward my faith and that of other great mystics and philosophers from Meister Eckhart to Leo Tolstoy to Paul Tillich to David Steindl-Rast, as that faith teaches forgiveness as one of its central tenets. I will instead ask you to look within yourself and ask why Christianity is such a monkey on your back. On the one hand, I imagine that having grown up in a Christian society, you've probably been wounded by Christianity's more mythic-ethnocentric elements, in the same way that someone who's grown up in a dogmatic Muslim environment would probably have a sour attitude to Rumi and other Sufis. On the other hand, I sense that your spiritual line of development is stuck at Orange, thus preventing you from seeing any value in the myths of Amber. Spirit in second person is no more metaphor than spirit in first person or third person. Try reading Martin Buber sometime, and maybe you'll understand.
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Clear light
Posted September 4th, 2010 by Ed Kelly in response to Spirit in 2nd personJonathan, I didn't say that spirit in the 2nd person is a metaphor, I said that Rumi's use of 2nd person spiritual language is metaphorical. I also do not deny that 2nd person spirituality is apart of Ken's philosophy. His overview of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person spirituality is sound. I have read all these authors, and have a high regard for all of them, although they represent a view from their own time and theological perspectives. Meister Eckhart is a world apart from that group, and as you know was strongly opposed even threatened by the Church for his sermons. Jonathan, my point here is not to dismiss your faith. I'm sorry you have taken my comments that way. My point is that non-dual realization is not Christian or Buddhist or religious in any way, and does not require a religious conceptual framework to be known. The Christ is the abiding Presence in all of us, but Christ is just another name for the Consciousness, Awareness, Self that is reading these words right now. This post started out only to express my disappointment at the direction Integral Spirituality was taking and particularly concerning the discussion of the Apostle's Creed. This is not about being wounded by mythic Christianity, or any personal hostility. We include this stage, because we include everything, but we must also transcend it (because we are Everything and Nothing), and in doing so we recognize there is nothing to defend or honor. It's just one aspect of the dream.
Nothing that knowledge can grasp
or desire can want, is God.
Where knowledge and desire end,
there is darkness, and there God shines.
--Meister Eckhart
When I look for God,
There is no God,
And no one there to find it.
--Meister Eckhart
Best wishes, Ed
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~
Posted September 3rd, 2010 by David Marshall in response to Clear lightHi, Ed. This will probably be my last post.
Yes, of course Sufi's couldn't say "I am God," but that is just one aspect of enlightenment, one perspective on enlightenment (a first-person perspective). If that's all there is, it is divine egoism.
For one thing, Rumi thought that service was as big a part of enlightenment as nonduality (all these excerpts are from Andrew Harvey's Light upon Light):
The finest beings are those who constantly help others. The only Master is the one who is the servant of his people.
In the Koran it is written: "Never oppress an orphan. Never push away the beggar." To be just one hour is worth more than praying for sixty years. And what is justice? Putting each thing in its real place.
Once Emir Parvana said to me: "The essence of the whole matter is action." I said to him: "Of course, but where are the people of action? Where are those who are really looking with their entire being for action?. . .
Action is not prayer and fasting. Prayer and fasting are "forms" of action. What is action? An inner meaning. . . . And when that meaning is one with Love, the Fire of Passion radiates all around and in every dimension, and miracles abound.
Rumi also described this "Love" as an "evolutionary intelligence" (actually, this is a Coleman Barks translation from the Essential Rumi):
I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
evolutionary intelligence, the lift.
Often he just called it Love:
I and Eternal Love were born into the Universe
From one Light-Womb; I may seem a new Lover,
But I am older than the two worlds.
Love plays, and is the music played.
Let that musician finish this poem,
Shams, I am waterbird, flying into your sun.
He was not saying that there is no power or energetic or intelligence that is higher than the human ego and that the world is just chaos and random mutation. He believed in a kind of evolutionary, loving God--and, paradoxically, that he was not-two with that God: "I and Eternal Love" (not that he as an ego is God, like those unfortunate Sufi's with a lower realization who made this claim and got stoned, or that his lower, self-interested impulses are enlightened action).
If you truly believe that the final state is the Witness, then what unfolds for that person? From the outside that person still appears to act, still appears to do things--apparently even better than before. How, if that person has disappeared?
If you inquire into that long enough you will see that, if the Witness is indeed the highest stage, then there is also a higher intelligence than the human ego or personal will. Either that or you think that the highest stage is not the Witness and that enlightenment involves going back and forth between Witnessing and self-doing.
If you believe in non-doing, you believe in a higher and deeper energetic, which some people call God.
The fact is that any amount of action can be performed, and performed quite well, by the jnani, without his identifying himself with it in any way or ever imagining that he is the doer. Some power acts through his body and uses his body to get the work done.
Ramana Maharshi
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The Living Word of God
Posted September 1st, 2010 by Jonathan CobbThe creed, like the Bible, should not be taken to be merely a historical curiosity. While understanding the historical context is important, it's also important that we ask what these things can tell us now. Ken has often said that there is an Amber Jesus, an Orange Jesus, a Green Jesus, etc. And the same is true of scripture and creeds. These artifacts can form a bridge to the past, but they ought not to be confined to the past. Part of development is bringing the past into the present and further into the future -- transcend and include.