Bypassing Experience

 through hands on ,direct life experience : i am not at all that integrated as i thought, i must be much more carefull, i can´t handle certain people, i have to be more honest to admit i just don´t know what i am doing half the time and most important of all i can´t be a teacher and i don´t even want to be that teacher since even a part of me (another shadowpart) is sabotaging all i do. that was one little experience. i realized : this is much bigger then me , i can´t do it and it is perfectly o.k. 

i agree with this. i had a little bit of experience in an intensive group. it wasn’t integral, or psychotherapy or any tradition, it was something else. i was very impressed with the teacher. definitely a different quality about him. i’d say he was both very detached, very present, and had a lot of experience working with people. he pushed people quite hard, have people get into a place where, you know, it they’d had a gun at hand, they would probably have shot him. but then they’d push through and despite themselves, end up on the other side with something opened up, and grateful. i left because it was too much hard work. but i got a lot from that group.

the average local buddhist, psychotherapist, yoga teacher, whatever, doesn’t compare to the intensity of that group. so, when you write that there’s far more powerful stuff out there than anything people who are casually into integral might encounter, i am open to that. i don’t have your experience but i can appreciate it is out there. i can appreciate that those higher teachings you are talking about are light years beyond that group i was in which i would characterize as “intensive”. 

people can wax lyrical about “spirituality” but in that group i learnt:  can i do a simple task with integrity? trying to do a simple task with integrity brought up massive resistance in me -- so as you say, the path or work does it to you.  you don’t work it, the path works you. i have a bit of appreciation of that.

being inserted into a electrical lifewire , the lineage , it works you ,not you work it. 

if you do 321 in your comfortable home , i doubt it has the same effect. 

remember i had done 12 years of therapy before i even met my teacher. ken´s profiling is just not very accurate, it is very hazy like. hmm i was just rereading your post. see, i make your point : one learns through experience. 

i think experience is the only real teacher. 

but experience is not just lived, it is also engaged with intellectually. what we think is part of what we are. i’ll come back to this in a moment.

but of course we need a contextualisation of spirituality in a global world but saying: all is more or less the same, doesn´t work. better to admit : right now we are still looking and wondering, maybe it is like this ,maybe it is more like that. integral is doing in the moment though much more than that : it is almost pretending to be a new religion , a kind of meta-religion. i think that is a huge mistake and will fail.for example: in my opinion christianity is not an inch higher then the 4 .) level of the vajrayana. and it will never get higher than that.just like kriya tantra will never become somehow mahayoga. 

this is a big issue, but i’ll try to point a couple of things out, FWIW

ken wilber used to be heavily involved with the journal of transpersonal psychology, but he said that the magazine sort of sank. that made me wonder:  

did ken then ask himself, “why did it fail?” 

see, maybe wilber already failed once. maybe he then asked himself, why? and his research got him into all the deeper cultural currents that are in the background. 

maybe a journal of transpersonal psychology can’t gain influence if academics can’t even take the subject of spirituality seriously. maybe academics can’t even take religion seriously (because they are rational-moderns). maybe they can’t even take the idea of higher stages seriously (because they are postmodern-greens)

there are all these things that get in the way: the things that make people believe scientism; the things that make people believe the biosphere is god; the things that stop academia from taking spirituality seriously, and so on. wilber made a list of all these problems and wrote them up as his “orienting generalizations”.

so now, after all his research, wilber can talk about, say, the problem of a traditional muslim trying to live in the west, and trace it to concepts going back to the start of the enlightenment, and to the tribal-warrior origins of islam. he can talk about the usefulness of  the technique of reinterpretation-within-tradition, to start to ease the blockages around fundamentalist beliefs -- i got a chance to ask ken on the phone, and you know, i couldn’t have even formed the question in my mind without ken’s books setting out the concepts and vocabulary to even think about this stuff. 

i told my muslim friend, who’d been having so much trouble with his traditional family, what ken had said. my friend realized, that even his own family distinguish between muslims who have lived in the UK for a long time, and muslims who had just arrived. even amongst themselves, even though they are all deeply traditional, they still view the new arrivals as “simpletons” because they are even more traditional. it is a subtle distinction, but they already make this judgement. they already reinterpret their tradition, without leaving their traditions.  my friend realized this when i told him about ken’s suggestion that a person can reinterpret WITHIN the tradition, as a gentle step towards modernity.  he realized that he was already seeing this in his own family, even though he’d never noticed this before.  it had already been going on, but the map ken suggested, made him realize it was already a real process.  so now he can use it.  he has a way to work within his family.  so, it seems, just having a map, making it conscious and thinking about it, can already help ease things, just a bit.  previously my friend viewed the situation in black and white.  now he could see that his own family were already re-interpreting their own tradition as they gently changed whilst living in the UK. ken says the map itself can be transformative. remember, billions of people in the world are facing these sorts of issues. you mentioned the Islamization of europe. i’ve lived in african countries and i have no problem with the notion that a nation can go backwards simply because the demographics change. but if traditional religion doesn’t have to be pitted against modernity then there’s just the beginning of a potential for something different to happen. just because a map can start to unblock things a bit.

and let’s remember that they had a transpersonal journal that was supposed to become something serious in academia, but it sank.  academia has its own blockages to spirituality. they are conceptual blockages. 

i would imagine.... i think...  that ken stepped back and decided to work at “a lower level”.  he decided to work at a level that most people could engage with. it is almost like politics, you have to influence so many people, just to get a shift, that you’re always having to weigh up to what extend to  corrupt the high truths.  think about that. 

the lower level ken is offering his work at is the “integral” level -- basically the worldview possible just after green. and let’s not forget, green was WINNING. when buddhism came to the west, green took it over.  green bastardized it.  i used to try going to buddhist groups, just run of the mill local ones, when i was a student. i was very eager until they started talking about how much they hated the shopping mall, and technology, and i was like, um... (i had no words to express it, but intuitively it didn’t sit well with me) ... so i left.  i gave up on it.  now i know to spot “green” or “purple” and i know what i’m dealing with.  i can actually side-step it.  but back then it was just a BLOCK and that was the end of it.  i gave up. 

integral to me is a way to understand these blocks and dissolve them, work around them, and get things done.  if integral helps unblock this stuff, then it will be succeeding.  if it fails in that project, then yes, it will have failed.

it basically changes the way i view things.  

at some point this can be characterized as “semi-religious”.  there’s ILP as a way to practice integral. ken wrote that religion is just “organized spirituality”. so yeah, ILP, the seminars, the organization, etc. it is a religion, in effect.

but the broad aim is at post-green stages. it doesn’t mean that there isn’t more powerful stuff out there, more authentic stuff. but it is a gateway. it opens up people who are stuck in green. if it can’t do that then yes it is failing. but if it opens up post-green, the teal stage, then it is working.

so thats why the integral has become in my opinion too generalized and so totally useless, unworkable as a metareligion. it is maybe usefull as a maybe map. 

it will not liberate the world it will not even liberate anybody. and with this ideas of "we are the elite" the" new wave of evolution" it is in great danger to become just a meta sect.

yeah but consider that in a green-dominated culture, just talking about “elite” is daring. can you actually get people to start thinking about something BETTER than green?

you can call it a sect. you can call it a cultural stage. which is it?

remember, all the green scientists are trying to drag us back to the dark ages with their “global warming” anti-industrialization politics. they’re also opening the door to massive cultural wars in europe. post-green isn’t a post-ego stage, it is just a bit better than where the world is now.  if it can make for a slightly better world, then it will have succeeded.

perhaps after people learn what they can from integral, they can shift into dzog chen.  perhaps as the world shifts forward, the dzog chen masters will feel the conditions are better for really opening up the secret teachings.

if you got a book by chögyal namkai norbu rinpoche , my master, then you see immidiatly the difference. 

i partly started this by questioning whether your tradition really did shadow work. i had to ask because ken had said that many traditions don’t really do shadow work.  but you’ve also explained that you’re talking about a very specific teaching and how it is definitely far superior to other stuff you’ve done.  so i will start reading the book you’ve recommended, the one by your master.  i can at least read :-) funnily enough my wife was asking about dzog chen just the other day, so she can read it too.  

all i say is : right now it [integral] needs to be taken with a lot of salt.and anyway 

when i was on the phone with wilber, i blurted out some overenthusiastic mush.  he replied, “well, one hopes...”   he certainly has a lot of fans, and i’m sure many think it is the greatest thing in the world. well, perhaps.  perhaps integral is the best way in the world to get people who would never take spirituality seriously to start looking at it... to start looking at spirituality, whether it is christian or buddhist, whether it is enlightennext (bleah) or dzog chen.