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Auto assessing our state: An Integral problem?

Posted May 26th, 2010 by Federico Parra
Hi everybody. I want to share with you today a critic,
I hope it could bring something good.
 
One of the things that make me feel most uncomfortable about our Integral Community is what I interpret as a lack of seriousness when it refers to contemplative achievements or metitative accomplishments.
 
While I could bet that no one in this community would auto-call him/herself a PHD, or a MA, in Medicine -and start to asses others about their illnesses, to recommend treatments, or to do surjery, only because he/she feel that he/she have achieved that level in medicine knowledge (without any confirmation from an institution or test whatsoever) - nonetheless the average Integral practitioner appears to be ready (and willing) to auto-determine his spiritual level or contemplative achievements without any kind of certification or institutional confirmation; as if one’s own subjective understanding, or our group of friend’s one, could be enough to determine while an experience was or not what we think it was.
 
I’m frankly disappointed when I see us auto-assessing things like “I had an emptiness experience” or “I have regularly access to non-dual states”, without feeling the urge to clarify the fundaments of that assessment; if you say that you are a Nuclear Engineer, normally you are ready to say what supports that statement (namely, the University that gave you the title, the complete education system that validates that University, and so on); Shouldn’t we do the same for assessments about Ultimate, Advanced spiritual achievements?
 
Our subjectivity, with all its bias, and without a formal expertise in the intricate and complex conundrum of Contemplative practices, is NOT, alone and by itself, a trustable support or base for a statement as strong and as bold as “I had a non-dual experience” or “I had a causal experience of emptiness”.
 
We have to remember that there are many traditions (like Buddhism or Sufism), which are like “Harvard” or “Oxford” equivalents in Contemplative studies, theory and practices.
 
People fully committed to these practices only (like Shangpa Kagyu retreatants following a traditional 3 years retreat, practicing 9 hours a day and going to sleep with Dream Yoga practices) usually go through long processes to access an actual REAL causal/emptiness state; let alone to stabilize it; let alone to achieve the unification of emptiness and form (thatness); let alone to stabilize it in a 24hs a day available state.
 
This is NOT to say or to insinuate that without a formal, traditional intensive training like that a person cannot achieve mastery of all states (namely enlightenment); In fact, it is indeed possible to achieve the same in a lay way –usually taking some 20 to 30 years to achieve those same results-; and the very developed cognitive abilities of western practitioners (in comparison to most oriental ones) clearly make the path shorter for us (as many great Eastern teachers like Kalu Rinpoche have declared publicly).
 
I think one problem with Integral is what seems to me as a tendency to get away from some extremes, but unconsciously tending towards their very opposite. This is a generic statement and I see this going on in many ways, but in relation to contemplative training this show up in Integral’s  opposite attitude towards most Spiritual Tradition’s position about auto-assessment of states: in most of these traditions (specially in their amber version), saying that you arrived to any particular realization is like saying a bad word; you “should” keep silence about your spiritual successes and realizations because of  “humility”; and not even the great masters use to say “where are they at” openly, at least not in public.


Obviously this have terrible consequences; but in Integral, as we use to do, we went to the opposite extreme: everyone appears to be ready and willing to jump in and cry about all the profound realizations that he/she achieved (or think that has achieved!), and to name these realizations whatever they want, even if no one confirmed those realizations! (naming an experience “a Satori experience”, or a “One Taste” experience, for example, is like naming one draft we do on a piece of paper a “Master Piece of paintings” or a “Picasso like” painting; see what I mean? Who says it is so? Who support our merely saying or our subjective, poorly informed interpretation of it?
 
In the traditions - which again, are our most trustful support and source about contemplative studies up to date - there is a really massive corpus of written material describing the astonishing quantity of mistakes that practitioners (even serious ones) use to fall into when practicing meditation; a great deal of this corpus disclose about states that are SIMILAR to the great natural states, but that are not really them.
 
There is a great quantity of states (like altered states or trauma-induced states) that can be confused with “Emptiness” and that are NOT emptiness. There are even more states that can be confused with a One Taste or Non Dual experience while they are not that.
 
And then there are myriads of degrees; one thing is to have a 30 second glimpse of emptiness, with maybe a 40% of deepness into the experience, in relation with our level of concentration which renders the experience more or less strong, etc. Another thing is a mayor Satori into emptiness, during 1 complete night (like 6 hours), measurable by EEG in which almost all mental-waves go to nearly 0.
 
How much of the people that describe themselves as having “emptiness” realizations or “causal” awareness in this community (teachers included) would agree to do an EEG test demonstrating their claimed realization?
 
How many people that state, without hesitation, that has a daily access to Causal or Nondual awareness would actually pass the confirmation test by an enlightened spiritual teacher, or by a trained team of neuroscientists?
 
And I am not making these observations ONLY to us Integral Practitioners; but ESPECIALLY to Integral Teachers.
 
Take the ISE 2 teachers for example. They are presented as Spiritual Teachers.
 
In Tibetan, Sufi, or Yoguic tradition that would mean that these people have a complete communion with absolute truth; that’s to say, that they live mostly in an Enlightened Non Dual state (called for example Non Meditation in the Mahamudra tradition), or at least that they can enter that state at will even in difficult situations (like Ken did even while he was “unconscious” in the hospital after 10 seizures!! see here: www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/214).
 
This, again, is at least parcially measurable by EEG and other brain study technologies available today.
 
Take mostly any Rinpoche of the Tibetan tradition and they could prove their enlightenment, namely their absolute mastery of this “states” (which is to say, that they can completely abandon their identification with Ego and embrace it as part of the infinite True Self they are, no as a peak experience but as a sustainable experience trough daily life, even sleeping and dreaming).
 
I understand that there are many levels of students, and that there could be then different levels of teachers; I understand that it is “ok” to call them Spiritual Teachers in that sense;
 
But I would like that we start to make some distinctions, at least, between what we can call maybe beginning, medium and advanced meditation practices and achievements. And beginners should not so often make statements of having obtained or mastered advanced states, because that degrades Contemplative studies/practices as a whole (after all, would PHDs in Medicine let people identify themselves as being Doctors without receiving the proper University level education?).
 
Some questions for further inquire:
 
Between all of the teachers present at ISE 2, do you think that any of them (appart from Ken) is an advanced teacher in this sense I am describing? An enlightened teacher, if you will?
That for example, mastered awareness up to a degree of control, in which he/she can go through dreaming and deep sleep without losing consciousness at all? Or that had taken concentration training up to a point in which there is complete mastery of attention, that allows the meditator to set into a Samadhi as strong as to literally “turn of the brain waves”?
 
What do you think about all these observations and interpretations anyway?
 
I think this problem is becoming a serious lower left/Integral culture trait; we start to feel that we are a pretty enlightened community; and while this could be true for the most of us about Vertical development (where most of us are arguably beyond green altitude, in the edge of Vertical development) it is NOT true about horizontal development; contrary to this “popular” integral thinking, most of the amber or green Buddhist communities out there for example are far more horizontally evolved (have a more profound contemplative mastery) than the average Integral Practitioner; mostly because of the simple fact that they dedicate a lot of time to practice (the only way to obtain this expertise, by the way…), namely many hours a day, up to years of retreat; while the average Integral Practitioner is so plunged into other activities (including thinking about contemplative training) that doesn’t have that much time for practice at all.
 
I finish this post with a simple, but very profound question:
 
If most of us are, arguably, part of this famous 2% of the most Vertically enlightened population of the world; but at the same time, most of us are, arguably, merely a part of the –maybe- 99% of the world population that lives most of the time in a “gross” or “lower subtle” state-stage with only peaks of higher states glimpses; then why we dedicate so much hours a day to vertical development related practices and so little to horizontal development related ones?
 
Shouldn’t we all be practicing at least 2 to 3 hours a day of contemplative practices, with passionate effort, to try to have at least a half of the mastery we have of vertical development, manifesting into the horizontal domain? To try to at least leverage these 2 axis a little bit?


another one:
 
If we do not conform ourselves with being in the middle (or in the base) of the vertical developmental axis (let’s say, at red altitude) but instead we feel an urge to develop vertically; then why we DO conform ourselves with being at a Subtle state-stage, or even lower in the horizontal developmental axis?

We have to understand that Integral gives the SAME amount of importance to both axes; there are TWO different centers of gravity, namely one vertical and one horizontal; and both have to develop.
Freedom is NOT less important than Fullness. Fullness, without Freedom, is just a bigger and more complex Samsara. A deeper and more beautiful prison!
 
For the most of us, I think the Vertical center of gravity is pretty much higher than the Horizontal one, so why do we continue to give so little importance and time to our horizontal development?


How many hours a day do you dedicate to formal meditation or contemplative (Horizontal) training and studies? How many days a week? For the younger ones: Which percentage of your formative/study time are you planning to dedicate to horizontal growth in the following years? How many courses or retreats are you planning to take? 
 
We have to acknowledge that, in the end, even the Vertical development suffers from this lack of seriousness about Horizontal development; we CANNOT enter Third Tier vertical stages if we do not master Horizontal state-stages. We'll be stuck for a life time in Second Tier because of this lack. That is, we will not access real, authentic, transpersonal stages of life without assuming this task of Horizontal state-stage growing into freedom from self.
 
I have a tentative (and quite obvious) response to all this questions: Vertical growth is not even near as threatening to the Ego than horizontal one; we are afraid, because Horizontal growth seems to be (at least up to the achievement of Non Dual realization) pulling ourselves out of the world of form, from our lazy habits and from our pleasure-addict tendencies into the abyss of emptiness and (seemingly) no-self.


Non duality change that situation in a radical way, but it is not possible to master Non Duality (to make it a permanent state-stage) without a complete mastery of Causal; you cannot be “God + all his creation” without first being “God”.
As long as you continue to be only “his creation”, it doesn’t matter how complex or beautiful this creation become, it is still only an object crashing into other objects; you will continue to live in the world of suffering (the world that begins with the object-subject separation) and all your Vertical growth will not make that specific situation improve.
 
We have to be aware: Ego wants to stay; Ego wants to command; and it can act many roles, even an Integral one. If we allow our collective Ego (as a community) to make us think that we are ALREADY Enlightened, that now everything is one, everything is the same, all is of One Taste, etc (which turns out to be the Truth, but ONLY if you are realizing it in the moment you are saying it) we will finish simply as another New Age movement that goes nowhere.
 
And beware; I feel we are not so far from that today: As a community, we shouldn’t talk so much about descending if we do not have a fairly amount of mastery in ascending; a confirmed one :)
 
All my love,
waiting open for your comments on these topics.
Federico

 

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Agreement!

Posted May 26th, 2010 by Jennifer Grove

I fully agree about the Teachers!! Esp. for ISE. That only makes sense. If I actually had money, I wouldn't be happy about spending it on an event being advertised as a gathering of great Teachers if those teachers weren't actually in the State that they are trying to sell me. I can get better from Nithyananda on YouTube for free.

But as for the peanut gallery, I don't know if "shoulding" on us is really helpful. But then, I don't see many of us talking about our states. I have, but I have more questions than answers. Mostly, I'm observing and describing and I'll leave the labeling to someone qualified. I wish I had someone qualified to tell me what I'm experiencing! And I'd give my eye teeth to have a brain scan!! Srsly! I want an FMRI like you wouldn't even know! I want to see what is shrunken and what is enlarged and I want to know how my interior experience is represented in the exterior. I would even go so far as to say I think it should be a human right to be able to see such things. Especially if people with some mental illnesses can be "required" to take medication by some agency or another. That's like taxation without representation.

I wish iEvolve would have been a safer space because I saw that site as an opportunity to be exposed to Teachers who have actually stabilized States and Stages so I could ask them questions and practice around them - even if it's only over the web. It seems like a ghost-town right now. There is no stabilized Presence and I can't tell if the Trolls are gone or just lurking. It's not safe for me.

Good luck with your challenge. I hope they raise the bar. I have been a little troubled by this as well.

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Jennifer, Annie, thank you! and some thoughts

Posted May 27th, 2010 by Federico Parra

 Hello Jennifer and Annie!!
thank you for reflecting on this and for making me reflect too.

I stayed all day feeling "strange" about what I written in this post.

I think it's because I know, clearly, that it is a very partial post, written from a very partial place of myself.

It is, if you will, a very yang, rude masculine post.

But then I think it was written from a very pure, loving desire of trying to point
out a possible wrong turn of Integral, and that I am not this perspective, but
instead I hold this perspective between many others, many of them very ying kind,
non rational and communal loving ones; but I feel this one was important to put on
the table.

That said, I want to address some of your points Jennifer:

You said: "I wonder if we're confusing States and Lines here. Maybe not, but it seems to me that the Line of personal or intimate relating can be very highly developed into a 3rd Tier Stage even if only supported by a Subtle State."

Jennifer, one of the defining characteristics of 3rd tier stages is that for accesing them, States have to be mastered and stabilized. In another words, we cannot talk about 3rd tier if the subject we are speaking about doesn't live 24 hours a day at least in a Subtle state-stage. This is why 3rd tier stages are called literally trans-personal stages, meaning that the Personal had been trascended (and included) completely, and the new "control tower" now is on one of the more subtler bodies, permanently. 

So, yes, a subtle state-stage stabilization is (theoretically) all that is needed to access the first of the 3rd tier stages, namely Indigo -if I remember well-. 

I agree that a love constructed between two people living permanently (or accessing often) subtle state-stages is a very beautiful thing. As a personal note, I had experienced that kind of subtle love, thanks god, several times, and it is so beautiful that you don't know if you are in heaven...but that's exactly the point. You are not. Because the Subtle, or the Soul, still is an object, it is an alienation from the other objects and from the ground of being; it poses a dualism that creates suffering, and a love based only in soul to soul recognition, cannot be called (technically) TRANSpersonal love: the soul, is still very, very personal.


So, I would state that a pre-requisite for a real trans-personal love, like the one Ken described here, is the realization of the causal, ground of being, which is the (momentaneous) end of desire, and suffering; only a couple of people anchored in Nirvanic wisdom (and hopefully in Non Dual awakened wisdom) can construct a real Unique Self to Unique Self love, which is, I believe, the very subject of study here.

But again, Unique Self is True Self + Perspective. And True Self, is Emptiness, or Nirvana!
The Nirvana that people take years of hard training and study to realize (Ken had practiced meditation
for more than 35 years, for example).

It appears that most of us (like Jung Po Roshi pointed out here) want to escape practice and go into directly into the dessert! We want the delicious pie of the Unique Self and the Higher Love from Unique Self to Unique Self...but all of that are trans-personal, POST enlightment practices, abilities and posibilities by the very definition!; Unique Self is not only Perspective! is Perspective + True Self, namely Perspective + Nirvana. So what is bothering me is that I feel we should concentrate more in the getting to Nirvana part!! 

You said: "They're not teaching about States. They're teaching about Love."

Well, not exactly! They are very specifically teaching about love from a 2nd to 3rd tier space, and from a causal or higher horizontal state-stage perspective; that is the very definition of the theme of exploration in these series! it was said infinite times, so I understand you would agree with that.
This whole year of ISE investigation is about how love looks like for enlightened, integral people.
As simple as that.

But the problem is that we all jump in too fast! We have first to enlighten ourself!

If not then we will only be a bunch of people parting together, falling in subtle love sories...

How beautiful! But nothing new here right? That had happened in Green New Age circles for twenty or more
years! Including the kind of circles that follow Chopra teachings. 

But the Causal vision is far more radical than this; it teaches us that "For every beautiful moment you experiment, the same quantity of suffering will be experimented later."

It's the very law of impermanence, the Core of Budhist teachings, and understanding it profoundly is the very path to the Causal Nirvana.

Did you saw Wilber key note? Did you notice the state of his body?
Did you read about the sufferings he is going trough because of his illness?

Life is like that. "Objects crash into others" is not a made up phrase; it is a shortcut for saying Samsara is ALWAYS painful; and that finishes only in the stabilization of the Causal realization, with the end of reactivity; and flourishes (ONLY THEN!) with the Non Dual realization, where every phenomena is known to be empty, and so every phenomena is Bliss.

So, again, I agree with Ken's realizations and pointing outs; both about Unique Self and The Future of Love.

But I ask every one to analize while he/she should be taking more seriously the "True Self" part of the equation; practicing for liberation, for being able to actualize in Experience these all beautiful things that I am sure Ken IS experiencing.

You said: "However, documentation on stabilized States of the Integral Teachers would be a good thing to have on hand in general."

Well, It came up in my mind today that there should be a Standard for ISE teachers; for example, one standard model would be to require that "they should had at least a Core Integral 1 level certification, with a very good qualification; and also a confirmed, permanent capacity of accessing Nirvana or Emptiness". What do you think? 
 

As for Annie, I am very grateful as always for your nice and sincere comments.  Thank you!

What I want to point out anyway, is what I feel like an underestimation of states.

What are states?

A Non Dual state is not a Yoguic mega power for doing demonstrations; instead, it is the very cause of Infinite compassion, Infinite love, and all the "Infinite" qualities; in another words, positive emotions and actions can be performed from a much lower state-stage (like gross), but ONLY Non Dual ultimate enlightenment provides with the Infinite version of these emotions and actions, while the gross and subtle versions of them still are very limited.

So, stating that "this is about love, not about states" for example is not accurate nor really truth; 
First, because we are discussing here Infinite kind of love; not actualization, or even lower kinds of love.
And second because higher States can actually be defined as higher capacities for love!
In another words, Infinite Love ONLY EXISTS in Infinite States, namely post subtle, authentic Trans-personal states.

So, it would be very nice (if it were truth) to say "everybody, without achieving higher state-stages, can live in higher love" but it is not truth; higher states Equals higher love. What is love, if not the very thing that unites everything that is? And what are higher states, if not the realization of the non-division of everything that is? See what I mean? They are synonims.

"You want to develop infinite love? Work on state-stages." would be a very accurate advice.

At the end, what in the world would be a better "reason" to love another being than to realize and actually Experience that he/she is the same True Self you are? That you are actually One? 
 

Anyway, both of you, if you feel like, please continue with this exchange.

thank you for being there, and for your perspectives.

I love you! :)

Federico