Thank You

Thank you, Ken and Paul, for a fascinating and very enjoyable discussion about your excellent book, 'Integral Christianity", Paul.

I particularly liked the way the dialogue is summarising and clarifying the various levels of churches, the warroir, tribal, modern and post-modern, approach some of the main theological and philosophical issues of Christianity eg the Bible, God, Jesus, prayer, sin and salvation, heaven and hell, the kingdom of God, and the mystical.

I resonated with Ken's statement that the most comprehensive post-modern and integral description of God in the Christian understanding is that of panentheism - all things in God and God in all things ie God transcending  and including all things.

I was very interested to hear Ken speak of Jesus's non-dual or unitive state of consciousness as expressed in some of his sayings. This seems to be an evolutionary shift for Ken, when compared to his position in "Up From Eden", when he considered that Jesus had attained to the causal stage of onsciousness, as in "I and the Father are one" P244. Of course,  that book came out in 1981, many years before the development of the Wilber/Combs Lattice. I wonder where Ken would now place Jesus's structure/stage of development, in third tier.

I'm very much looking forward to hearing the final instalment of the conversation, on Mystical Christianity and the 3 Faces of God.  I hope that it includes discussion on the future development of Integral Christianity into third tier.  The lack of much discussion on this in Paul's book, which he quite reasonably said was beyond the  scope of the book, was my major disappointment with it. Instead he just mentioned any stages 'beyond integral' as just that , although he said they are sometimes called self-transcendence,illumined mind, meta-mind, transpersonal and unity consciousness, without elaborating beyond that.  I'm hoping for some insightful comments  in the last part  of the dialogue.

This is a  ground-breaking and very welcome book,  very lucidly and insightfully written, grounded in many years experience in leading your church, Paul. It sounds like a great one to belong to. Many thanks to you.

John O'Neill

Kurri Kurri

NSW Australia.