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teaching

Posted September 5th, 2008 by Maria Baes in teaching

I have been told several times that I should be teaching a course on Ken Wilber and the Integral Method. The trouble is that I have never taught a course in my life. I have often wanted to earlier, but now I am past sixty and I have ten grandchildren and I cannot see myself starting something so new to me.  The other problem is that I do not know of anyone who has the questions that I was asking when I first came across the Integral Operating System. I had all the questions and I was so excited about the answers and the fact that all the pieces to my puzzle were finaly coming together.  I feel that people will learn when they have all the questions, not when someone broaches a new subject that they have no interest in.

When I think about all the things, the searches, the wrong turns, the hopes and dissappointments that have led me to become a Wilber fan, it didn't just happen. overnight I did not just walk into a building one day and picked the Integral Approach from a menu.  

 
I was raised in a fundamentalist Catholic tradition.  But I experienced states of consciousness that could not be contained in the confines of my religious upbringing. 
By the time I was fourteen I had  great hopes for Vatican II and the changes that it promised to make.
 
I quit school after a couple of years of home-ec to help my mother with her thirteen children. I felt deprived of intellectual stimulus and learned English at home. My parents treated me like an adult.   Today I feel I was taking responsibility for adult issues at an early age.  Something that is not uncommon in poor families all over the world.
I got married at the age of eighteen and came to Canada, not knowing if I would ever see my family again.  Letting me go was a great and painful sacrifice on the part of my parents.  They couldn’t deal with it, and I was too young for such a great loss.
 
I on my part became alienated from everyone.
 
Having to move out of one culture and adapt fully to another showed me how relative cultural beliefs and habits are. Contemplation was my way out of the confusion of straddling the two cultures. Through my reading, I felt very connected to the great mystics first of my own tradition and later of other faiths as well.  
 

The Bible became a great support to me, especially the parts that are poetic and symbolic.  I have always had a longing for what I knew to be the Unity of all that is  and this resulted in a never ending search to find what spirituality is all about.

Much as I was inspired by the Bible, I had great problem with the way officialdom uses the Bible to shore up their orthodoxy.  I discovered I was equally inspired by any great literature or scripture.

Today I see Jesus as an example of how to live with one’s Divine Consciousness. I do believe Him when he says “that those who come after Me will do greater things than I.  Besides that, He is also the unique voice who speaks for the oppressed because all human beings are called to live from their divine center.
 
The fact that I was a bit of a mystic emboldened me to enter University at the age of forty with only minimal high-school education. My search to see how all the pieces fit together had begun in earnest.
 
My husband was very threatened by my need to know and find the truth.  His is a world of technical and biological knowledge, and he had little interest in religion other than what the local church provided.  To complicate matters,  I saw everything through the eyes of a feminist as I studied feminist theology for several years. It wasn't until I began to think Integrally that I understood how feminism is only a piece of the map and not the whole territory.
 
I didn’t stop with a B.A. in philosophy.  I went to Wilfrid Laurier University where I explored the Lutheran religion and I sat in classes side by side as an equal with men and with women priests. I also took courses in family therapy to help me understand my own confusion and why I had so many problems relating to people.
I ended up in Toronto School of theology where I got a Master degree in theology. 
 
Some people may call me a career student, but my focus was not on what I would do with my degree or how much money I would make.  My intention was to remain true to myself and to figure out a way how contradicting disciplines, philosophies, and religions could ever fit together. 
 
 
I came across Ken Wilber's books at a time in my life that I was writing fiction and I tended to stay away from books that were merely intellectual.  Fortunately, I found that Ken had done all of  the intellectual work and that it was now only a matter of understanding of how all the pieces fit together of what I had learned in my long and diligent.     
 

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Good Point

Posted September 5th, 2008 by Jeff Bomberger

You make a good point.  I often find that even when speaking with people who I feel "should" have an interest in speaking of these models and ideas (i.e. psychologists, ministers, "deep thinkers") they never really seem to get engaged.  No matter Wilber, or just something a little bit more reader friendly, such as Thomas Keating, or David Richo.  It's frustrating.  But I like the point....a person needs to have the questions to want to seek the answers.  They have to want to find meaning in a more lasting way.  Maybe they are otherwise still too content in television, Playstation, football tailgating, or after-work cocktails.  I don't know.