Alarming new Integrales Forum statement paves the way for "Integral Sex Fascism"

A new statement by a group of German integralists carves out a position to the right of Ken Wilber with regard to sexual ethics in leadership positions within the Integral community, raising concerns that we may be entering a new era of "Integral Sex Fascism." As a leader within the gay/LGBT community, Integral author, and blogger, I find the reactionary stance of Integrales Forum to be a cause of grave concern.

We have approached a crossroads. Today, self-appointed leaders of Integral organizations are now donning the policeman's uniform, regulating the bedroom behavior of consenting adults who happen to teach or lead in Integral classrooms and forums. Perhaps the worst part of the Integrales Forum (IF) statement is that it does not even attempt to provide an Integrally-informed, four quadrants, all levels rationale for its decision. Although I would hope that a truly second-tier, post-conventional discourse informed the decision, there is no evidence of such reasoning in the public statement.

The ostensible point of the statement is to issue the IF's disagreement with Ken Wilber and insist on distancing itself from Marc Gafni on account of the recent controversy (see the links at the end of this article "My conclusions on the Marc Gafni blogosphere controversy" for related posts on this blog). From what I can tell by the English translation of the text, the tone is measured and reasonable sounding. It honors Marc as an Integral Thinker, promises to publish his important work and mentions that many of the forum hold him in high esteem.

I spoke with Marc Gafni on the phone yesterday. Speaking in his usual self effacing, loving style behind the scenes, he said this was just a moment in time and that eventually everyone would get back together at the right time and advised me to let it go. But just as Integrales has taken a stand very different from Ken Wilber’s, my stand here is very different from Marc’s. I think Integrales Forum's statement may be the single most dangerous piece of writing from an ostensibly integral organization that I've ever seen.

The essence of their statement is this:

In a current statement, Marc Gafni confirmed that he does not exclude the possibility of sexual relationships with students of his circle in the future [Ed. Note: actually, that's not what he said. He said it was "not impossible" that he would "date" women "in his circle"--see how they twist his words -- JP].

"Let me state formally that if in the future I enter into a monogamous commitment, then I will honor it and live in it to the fullest. If that is the right path for me then I will enter into it with full delight and even ecstasy. If I do not enter into that path, and choose to love from a different place, then I will enter into that path with full delight and even ecstasy. If that is the case then it is not impossible that at some point I will date women who are in my circle. If that feels uncomfortable to someone in principle that it might not be wise to join my circle of teaching."

We do not see this position as commensurate with the expectations for someone in such a prominent role as the leader of CWS, particularly in view of the many years of critical discussions with respect to his person and behavior [link]. Against the background of the existing spectrum of cultural values, Marc Gafni polarizes people and opinions and for this reason does not meet the criteria we expect in a personality with the ability to lead and integrate such a meaningful global project.

Let me translate the IF's paragraph into plain English. You "date someone in your circle," you're not welcome in the German Integral community. Get out. You fuck "someone in your circle," we don't want you. Get out. If people have different views about you, such that you are said to be "polarizing" by people who don't like you, you aren't welcome here. Get out. We think Integral leaders ought to behave in ways that make people from "the existing spectrum of cultural values," (read: first-tier blue, orange, and green) very comfortable and happy. Otherwise, you know, just get out why don't you.

It is a great strategy; attack someone and then say they are polarizing. By that standard almost every major creative leader who has the balls to say anything worth saying is polarizing including Ken Wilber. Not to speak of Andrew Cohen who is considered one of the most polarizing figures in the community. Not to speak of the Dalai Lama who is massively controversial in Tibet with horrible blogs written against him, not to speak of Trongpa Rinpoche, not to speak of David Deida, not to speak of Junpo Roshi and Genpo Roshi, not to speak of Warren Farrell, not to speak of Robb Smith who is a polarizing figure within the community who engenders great opposition, even if few are willing to cross him publicly because they fear reprisal. If you do not fit the convention, screw you.

Integralis Forum's new sexual Maginot Line could be the first step down the road to an "Integral Sex Fascisim": a day when the leaders of our Integral organizations (who annointed them anyways?) begin to tell us that if you act in ways that sometimes make conventional people uncomfortable (especially with regard to sex), you're not welcome. Wait a minute. Aren't people who have evolved to post-conventional lifestyles supposed to be a little different, act a little different, make love a little different sometimes?

Sometimes post-conventional people choose conventional relationships and lifestyles and sometimes they don't. WE choose. We don't have an almighty Integrales Forum telling us what we can do and can't do.

When will the leaders of Integral organizations begin to tell us that if you polarize people, you aren't welcome. This stinks to high heaven to me, frankly. Barack Obama polarizes people. Bill Clinton polarized people. Martin Luther King, Jr., right before he was killed? Polarizing. I struggle to name any truly world changing leader who didn't consistently elicit strong feelings, positive and negative.

Integrales Forum appears to be saying that if you don't play by the conventional rules, you can't play in post-conventional circles. That doesn't make any sense. For example, if you are a spiritual teacher like Marc Gafni who publishes his official views defending the possibility in rare cases of post-conventional relationships between a teacher and student in an ethics paper "Sex, Ethics, and Injury" which has been on his website for almost five years, and in a well reasoned fifty point blog post, and also refers to it explicitly a year ago in a public paper published by you guessed it -- on the Integralis Forum --  you get nobody showing you the door (maybe even some polite nods of gratitude and acceptance), and then you later act in accordance with your well-known beliefs, you can then be retroactively be told that you violated an unwritten taboo and need to be banished. And then they have the gall to explain themselves by saying that you don't meet their standards for having the right sort of "personality" for being a leader. Well, fuck that.

Are they, Integrales Forum, for real? Now of course there are rumors of all sorts of political and egoic issues playing behind the scenes in Germany and their allies in corners of the integral world here, but I want to trust the IF folks that they are telling the truth about their motivations and take them at their word.

So, who shall we show the door to next? The adulterers? The fornicaters? The prostitutes? Those into "deviant sex"? Where do we stop?

I know Ken Wilber said he expected everyone to exercise their best powers of discernment and come to their own conclusions, but really I couldn't be more disappointed with this group of German integralists. I looked for the AQAL-based refutal of the points in Marc Gafni's three essays, but it was nowhere to be found. Maybe because they have in no way come to grips with the ways in which sexuality and power relationships need to be examined in a multitude of dynamically changing contexts and ever evolving constructs, and therefore require consideration of a huge host of factors including the level of consciousness of the persons in the relationship.

Instead of admitting the complexity, as did Ken Wilber and many other people who looked at the details of the controversy, they appear to prefer the simplicity of "Teacher powerful. Student weak. Teacher, student, fuckee fuckee, bad." When you put it that way, and you shut down half your brain, it's just common sense. But the Integral worldview isn't that cut and dry, and with ostensibly Integral organizations appearing to exchange Sex, Ecology, Spirituality for Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it's no wonder the movement appears to be sputtering.

For me, this isn't about Marc Gafni. It's not about Ken Wilber. And it sure as hell isn't about some hypothetical gurus diddling hypothetical groupies. (Which, I can't believe I even have to say this because it's so freaking obvious, for anyone who read Gafni's three papers or did any research at all, this is obviously NOT what Gafni was advocating or practicing.)

It's about whether our community -- if it is a community -- is going to allow our various leaders the latitude to set forth their ethical principles clearly and publicly and then live according to them with an open heart and good intentions and a willingness to own mistakes and make amends, sometimes imperfectly...or if it is going to dictate from on high a one-size-fits-all McMorality masquerading as protecting the public image of Integral from "polarizing personalities."

Because what if IF isn't (gasp) the most enlightened source of wisdom on the planet today. What if we let them pick and choose who they want to let into the good graces of Integral on the basis of their dislike of certain sexual practices or other hidden dislikes and political agendas? So we sacrifice a few unconventional people, destroy a few lives, on the altar of protecting our image from "polarizing personalities." We let them extract some blood from the people who don't quite fit the mold in the way Integralis Forum would prefer. No big deal, right?

And by the way any trailblazing  leader or change agent who we want to move us past the life-sucking conventions into new life-ennobling territory will by definition, be in some sense post-conventional and probably imperfect. (As imperfect as all the conventional folks.)  So we can exaggerate their imperfection and demand their conventionality and in that way we will kill our leaders. Ethics from our Leaders, Yes! Shadow work by our leaders, Yes! But using sexual issues as a weapon to take down leaders who we disagree with, No! Hell no. So we have become the religious right!

Can we really trust Integrales Forum to always pick the right people to sacrifice, the right people to extract a pound of flesh from? Can we really know that the next life they are going to destroy won't be, as we Christians say, the Christ? How can we know?

Or what if we tell the unconventional people that they are welcome, but only if they sacrifice some spark deep within themselves that makes them unique, that gives them a sacred transmission that is theirs alone to give. Do we force their individuality to be sublimated into an Uber-Organization?

I could list the many gurus, sages, and enlightened thinkers today and from centuries past who have had unconventional sex lives. Many were adulterers, polygamists, homosexuals, and some -- ready for this? -- "dated women in their circle." Many of these women and men were true Mensch,  enlightened ones who I would be proud to have as leaders in the Integral world. But they won't be welcome if the Integral world begins to act more like the board of Integrales Forum and less like, say, Ken Wilber among many others.

And of course we might want to demand an accounting of the sexual lives of the leaders of the Integrales Forum -- Michael Habecker, Sonja Student, Dennis Wittrock, Hilde Weckmann, Rolf Lutterbeck, Erich Carl Derks, Stefan Schoch, and Helmut Dörmannd. Would they measure up in terms of their own sexual lives? Let's talk to their ex-lovers, especially any of them carrying a grudge or steeped in a first-tier ideology which demonizes the opposite sex. Let's push all their sexual and interpersonal shadows into the public realm via vile hate-sites and attack-blogs. (That's just what happened to Marc Gafni, and he's not the only one it's happened to.) Then let's see if THEY don't just become "polarizing figures" each one unwelome to teach or lead at their own forum. I dare them to open their own bedrooms up to transparency, or shut the fuck up already with the preaching from the boardroom.

I could also list the many leaders who had very conventional sex lives. George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Joseph McCarthy. I could go on. Would we want them leading a post-conventional revolution?

The alternative to Integral Sex Fascism -- the turning of Integral organizations into sex cops policing the lives of leaders and participants alike -- isn't moral relativism or anything goes.

Our organizations need not dictate from on high. Instead we can empower leaders within our organizations to (a) develop ethics policies that reflect their own highest ethical insights, to the best of their abilities, (b) transparently disclose their formal statements of ethics to their students, and (c) let any adult student make a choice based on their own capacities for discernment. From what I understand based on communications with folks in the past few weeks, this is a process that is now happening at the Center for World Spirituality.

Furthermore, leaders and spiritual teachers should be talking among themselves in formulating their individual ethics policies, sharing best practices, and expressing concerns about how they might be put into practice. But for Big Brother to dictate from on high is just the sort of thing first-tier organizations have to do because they aren't open to the possibility for evolutionary emergents.

IF's statement is insulting to Integral students, learners, and participants everywhere. It tells them they are too stupid to make smart choices of discernment even knowing what they are getting into. Do we really think Integralists are that dumb?

As a member of the gay/LGBT community, I am especially appalled by the IF statement. While it may seem that the specific concerns with the specific teacher in question are not directly related (he isn't gay), I can't help but feel empathy for anyone who lived for a time according to the possibilities for ethical post-conventional behavior as defined in his own expressed sexual ethics, which were published right on Integrales Forum, only to have him cast aside for what appear to be purely political reasons (i.e., showing a "polarizing personality" to the door).

If integralists don't communicate our concerns and opposition to Integrales Forum today, we are inviting the possibility for dozens -- even hundreds -- of Integral organizations now and in the future to begin regulating the sex lives of its leaders and students, forcing them to choose between living the ethical code in their own spiritual DNA or being accepted in the Integral Community. Integrales Forum could be the first stone to fall, gathering many more stones along the way, until the sex fascists have hollowed out post-conventional spiritual spaces by demanding leaders always behave in ways that aren't challenging to conventional society.

Now I'm not calling today for a boycott or withholding donations or funding to Integrales Forum. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I am simply pleading for integralists to wake up and begin asking hard questions of our leadership when they start regulating the sex lives of our leaders and teachers in order to protect integralists who they think are incapable of looking out for themselves (or, leaders who are using sex as a political weapon under the fig leaf of ethics, depending on which rumors you are listening to).

That's what's at stake. Let's empower our leaders to live ethical lives according to their highest moral wisdom, in dialogue with others, and let's empower followers to do the same. Let's not let the sex fascists colonize integral. Let's not go down that road.

Cross-posted at Awake, Aware & Alive.