Paradox UnDone

In the exhausted acceptance of the awe-inspiring terror that hides within the defenseless fragility of this mortal body there is found an opening to the radical and all-encompassing Mystery that resides eternally as the radiant Heart of this perfectly fragmented existence. And so what if we are this unspeakable Mystery, the indestructible Heart that gives birth to all the worlds; the already free Soul that existed from before the Big Bang and constantly sustains the evolution of inert matter into self-replicating life and even now remains radically present at each and every moment of the paranoid misadventures that we call human history…

And so, resting effortlessly in the indestructible Heart that is the true nature of each and every actual event in the space-time world, can we simply recognize that in the pure Presence of the timeless now we are already awakening from the nightmare of the ages, thus finding ecstatic release from the narcissistic self-preoccupation of an angst-ridden creature and radical liberation from the insatiable fixation to a will that wills nothing more than its own willing, as the self-existing Bliss that alone IS gives repose to the tedious desires of a perplexed and over-blown ego, an inherently conflicted and secretly anxious self that wants nothing more than to keep on desiring … for the ultimate gratification of its ravenous thirst for hedonistic fullfilment would result in the unthinkable cessation of its only reason to be…

For this dignified but damaged self-contraction, this disjointed self-reflection utterly lost and bewildered within its own private hall of shattered mirrors, this all too cherished fiction that can only pretend to cosmic significance has been hard-wired for self-preservation through thousands of generations of evolutionary pre-history. And at the threshold of this stunning new apocalypse, torn between two worlds and immersed in the tragic-comedy of unadulterated irony, this necessary hero of a frighteningly painful evolution, with fundamental fantasies of immortality still intact, is now caught in an anguished double-bind, trapped in the futile attempt to keep up the necessary illusion of mastery and self-sufficiency while being simultaneously crippled by the unshakable awareness that a certain death is the gruesome fate of all human flesh…

For while all heroic illusions are built upon the ground of their own authentic possibility, in the subtle but persistent avoidance of a horrible but ultimately wonderful unmasking, we are driven to recoil into our protective armor and persevere with our hell-bent striving for a schizophrenic triumph over the constant stench of death and inevitable decay by fabricating a counterfeit Infinity in a frantic flight from the naked finality of Death, a stark reminder of our animal mortality. In perpetual postponement of the hopeful trepidation and astonished wonder that alone can strip you bare and leave you face to face with the luminous and all-pervading Heart, while rejoicing in the fragmented ruins of a world we did not create, and in justified defiance of an ever-present Love that knows no enemy, we feel cheated by the uncontrollable chaos of our passions, while simultaneously growing cynical with learned disillusionment about the necessary self-deception that inheres within our all too human dreams and aspirations. With the ominous foreboding of a dreadful abyss being instantly transformed into the hysterical imperative to keep the demons at bay we fortify ourselves against all threats to our imaginary fortitude and pay for the damage we ourselves have done by telling mythical stories of a primitive fall from a childhood paradise and hold to the unfulfilled promise of an always-coming but never-arriving future perfection…

And so we strut about in smug self-satisfaction, invoking tales of a lost and future Glory to shelter and console a necessarily dishonest creature against the transformative fire of the indestructible Heart, a radiant Love that resides even now in the effortless luminosity of each and every moment … And in the twinkling of an eye the intractable refusal of a decadent soul gives up the task of measuring up to the conventional requirements and expectations of our clearly deranged society, the half-crazed collective values that pass for civilized normalcy, as the unyielding efforts of a bruised and battered creature are shipwrecked against the artificiality of our shared cultural hypnosis. And when the heroic survival lie is finally given up the impossible task is accomplished all by itself in a direct apprehension of the all-pervasive Mystery and an agitated heart is utterly undone as it surrenders to the limitless Delight of a groundless and everlasting Perfection, an indestructible Heart shimmering to infinity and utterly untouched by the self-inflicted devastation wreaked upon this evolving nightmare of world history…

And so with the prayers and tears of gratitude poured out over a strikingly obvious recognition of an ineffable and never-ending Mystery, and on the flip-side of a thankful acceptance of an irrevocable Gift of Love – an overflowing offering of infinite profundity that is the Unconditioned condition of each and every manifest form right now and for all time, a shattered soul with nowhere left to turn is plunged kicking and screaming into the primordial and imperishable Heart. This groundless Ground, the radical Mystery within which the entire sweep of world history takes place – with all its messy upheavals, perverse misfortunes, and unspeakable tragedies, this vast Emptiness that is also the overflowing fullness of Being endures utterly undiminished while constantly growing with intensity within the world historical process to break open and transform the hearts and minds of those who have reached the limits of their abysmal search for self-glorification, converting the sick desperation of the destitute and dispossessed into the unreasonable joy of the awakened optimist, ridiculously euphoric in the face of an estranged and alienated world, a world that has all but forgotten about its ever-present Blessing and the vast Freedom offered to each and all right now in the Gift of Life that smiles eternally on the other side of your own secret crucifixion…

And even as the everlasting Heart continually shakes the foundations of a troubled and unfeeling world through the creative inferno of evolution’s inexorable advance, the enigmatic secret of this continually unfolding story is that the entire drama of this evolutionary adventure into the never-ending Mystery is always and already over – even right now, in the invincible Heart that is your own already free Self. And so, the boundless outpouring of Divine self-realisation that is the passionate strivings and playful delights of world history is totally and completely accomplished for all time in your own primordial awareness, the always and already lucid transparency of ever-present Consciousness as such.

And just to be sure, the entire cosmic endeavor is profoundly undone and forever complete in the inexhaustible Mystery that is the vast groundlessness of your own primordial Heart, and permanently finished once and for all in the Alpha and Omega of this sacred game of hide and seek, the spectacular journey of self-discovery through the creative explorations of an evolutionary trajectory whose far-off future culmination is not only guaranteed but always and already accomplished precisely because it never actually transpired in the eternally shining and luminescent Heart, the indestructible core of a never-ending Love that is radically immanent right now in the immediacy of your own ever-present awareness, and the timeless Gift of the only Heart in the entire universe, your very own Original Face.

Post-Metaphysical Musings

I here want to start an initial inquiry into Ken Wilber’s Integral Post-Metaphysics, the latest innovation in his thought and the most recent attempt of a contemporary philosopher to move beyond the exhausted history of the Western philosophical tradition while still preserving the important truths of the worlds great religious traditions. Ever since Plato and Aristotle carved out the basic vocabulary of Western metaphysics (which asks the question “What is the meaning of Being?”) by making everything turn on clear-cut distinctions between ideal/material, appearance/reality, subject/object, Western civilization has been caught up in a series of intractable dualisms – the fractured footnotes to Plato described so eloquently by Wilber in “Sex, Ecology, Spirituality”, the result being that traditional metaphysical approaches to spirituality (and their artificial dualities) have been proclaimed dead by virtually every major philosopher of the last 100 years.

Nevertheless, in the wake of the post-modern turn and Derrida’s relentless deconstruction of the entire tradition of Western metaphysics as the search for a “non-existent fixed center of meaning” (e.g. Being, Spirit, God, Essence, Truth) there have been a number of attempts at post-metaphysics which claim to disclose the meaning of Being (ultimate Reality, Spirit, God) while jettisoning from their self-representations the now discredited adherence to metaphysics – or what Ken Wilber calls the “Myth of the Given”…

First of all, there was firstly Heidegger’s call for “the gods before who I can sing and dance”. Then there was the appeal of Emmanuel Levinas to God without reference to “the totality of Being” where the ethical response to the wholly other and hospitality to the one that is different comes before any rational accounting of the Divine. And then there is Jean-Luc Marion who re-affirms the vanity of metaphysics as a discipline that is always at a loss to find linguistic expression for God. For Marion, the mystery of God is given in a way that far exceeds our grasp, and so the short-coming has to do with the failure of our metaphysical concepts, not with overflowing excess of our experience of the Divine.

So how do these approaches to post-metaphysics compare with IPM and Ken Wilber’s Kosmic Address system? Briefly, an IPM maintains that any holon (or actual occasion) can be known in a post-metaphysical fashion simply by identifying its Kosmic address – as a bare minimum its Quadrant and Level – with the added condition that the Kosmic Address must be specified for both the object being perceived and the subject that is perceiving it. In this manner an IMP removes the need to postulate any ‘pre-given’ or ‘independently existing’ realities while applying a method of advanced perspective taking that can account for the entire spectrum of phenomena that are enacted by human beings.

In the context of previous attempts at post-metaphysics (which primarily seek to disclose spiritual realities), the basic problem with an IPM is that it constitutes the grounds by which God or Being may enter into the domain of knowledge. In other words, an IPM with its Kosmic Address system (and AQAL co-ordinates) pre-determines the conceptual horizon in which Spirit is allowed to show up and therefore forecloses on the true mark of the Mystery as an event that arrives as a Gift, as an event that disrupts any pre-supposed horizon of truth and meaning…. As Levinas, who also takes a post-metaphysical stance, would say – Spirit absolves itself from human knowledge as the intentionality of adequation and appropriation.

My own approach to post-metaphysics (see the Source Code blog on this site) maintains that when we give expression to our spiritual experience and communicate what it means to live an Integral Life, we find ourselves living with paradoxes and working to balance the creative tensions between opposing forces (inside/outside, individual/collective, presence/absence). And since paradoxes are un-objectifiable (i.e. structurally open to Not-Knowing) and since they have no “fixed center of meaning” they refuse to be pinned down by the rational accounting of an IMP Kosmic Address system which is still deeply conditioned by the traditional metaphysical assumptions that underpin the rational-scientific demand for evidence and the quest for cognitive certainty. In other words, the paradoxical nature of reality frustrates our desire to possess or “get a handle” on the Mystery, for truth be told the ultimate mystery of God simply does not depend on what we think about it…

Historically, the foremost example of paradox being utilized as a skillful means for facilitating self-awareness is found in the parabolic discourse of Jesus of Nazareth (and Zen masters) who consistently celebrated the ambiguity of those events that show up at the very limits of human experience… Rather than providing a pre-packaged program of rules and procedures for admission into the Kingdom of God, the paradoxical strategy of Jesus disrupts the quest for cognitive certainty and thereby sets up the necessary conditions for the decision of faith with an ‘aporetic anxiety’ that invites and challenges one to awaken to Jesus’ own experience of the Kingdom. By interrupting the metaphysical assumptions of the “Myth of the Given” with an outrageous abrogation of our fundamental laws of logic, the post-metaphysical heart of Jesus’ teachings consistently refuse to give us straightforward answers in response to our quest for what is Real, as his paradoxes call for a free movements of faith that is made in the face of an impossible situation, involving risk, uncertainty and an openness to the unexpected that is grounded in a confession of ultimate not-knowing… In contrast to the logical calculus and pin point clarity of an IPM, in view of the post-metaphysical paradoxes of Jesus on the ways of God an authentic faith commitment is structurally blind and takes root only when the road seems obscure and when the storm clouds of life buffet us, when we are overwhelmed, when we stumble, and fall, and yet still move forward in spite of doubt and objective uncertainty… For just as Kierkegaard wrote about paradox as the “infinite passion of inwardness” that has nothing to do with objective explanation at all, the real journey only begins when we don’t see directly where we are going… to be continued…

The Evolving Universe is the Self-Realization of God!

Check out the following links for two papers I presented at a “Christianity After Darwin” conference at the Flinders University Center for Science, Theology and Culture.

The first is titled “Heading Towards Omega?” and it leans heavily on Ken Wilbers Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by arguing that modern science has recently discovered the “self-organizing” capacity of the universe towards higher levels of complexity/consciousness. This paper therefore provides scientific evidence for the notion that “self-realization through self-transcendence” (Jantsch) is the defining feature of a fully fledged evolutionary spirituality. Simply put: evolution is God-in-the-making…

The second paper “Evolutionary Christology” looks at the more gruesome aspects of the evolutionary trajectory from star dust to Shakespear and identifies a dynamic pattern of “transformation via instability” through the cosmos, the biosphere and human history… It then asks the question: who is the person of Jesus and what is the finished work of the Cross in the evolutionary context of modern science?

Does Evolution Have a Direction?

One of the more significant contentions of Integral theory is that evolution is going somewhere, i.e. the 13 billion year process that led to the relatively recent emergence of the human species on this planet has a direction or teleology – what might be called a self-transcending current of increasing Eros/Love or successively higher levels of interior consciousness/exterior complexity. From the primordial chaos that followed the Big Bang, to the relatively rapid formation of stars and galaxies, to the stunning complexity and diversity of self-replicating life here on Earth, we are all part and parcel of this tremendous sweep of creative activity, a “creative advance into novelty” (Whitehead) that has become conscious of itself for the first time in humans and looks to all intents and purposes like it will eventually culminate with the self-realization of God, by whatever name…

Of course, the fanciful suggestion that there are purposes “other than” merely human purposes is widely held to be a useful fiction by philosophers of science like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. And so while this view that evolution is headed toward some kind of far-off Omega point where “God will be All in all” may well just be a useful hallucination, a motivational strategy to help one cope with the crippling lack of hope in the post-Enlightenment West, there is also a spiritual basis for skepticism and suspicion of this teleological view that sees the hand of God in the evolutionary trajectory from atoms to amoebas to humans…

For not only did two world wars and the atrocities of the 20th century decisively puncture the bubble of historical optimism, the very attempt to offer some sort of over-arching explanation for such evil by fitting it into some larger account of God’s Providential design in which such abysmal barbarity is but a necessary moment in an overall evolutionary trajectory, is an obscenity that defiles the very names of each of its victims, of each one, taken singly, one by one… There is something callous and inhuman in an evolutionary world-view that sees in “teleological” history a good news/bad news story in which the countless deaths were cost accounted as a good investment in the progress of the World Soul, the high but affordable toll the Spirit must pay for advancing from one historical epoch to the next.

As theologian Emmanuel Levinas denounced in the preface to “Totality and Infinity” teleological history is one in which many an innocent flower is tread on the way to the Promised Land, so we would do well not to project deeper and more sweeping patterns of redemptive meaning onto occurrences such as the Holocaust which are unambiguously evil. The death of 8 million Jews in the Final Solution is not a sacrifice in exchange for something higher, rather we may do well to turn to the New Testament and take heed of the innocent flowers, the tender shoots that are trampled under the boots of teleology and the secrets of the heart that are unknown to the “judgments of history”.

A more compassionate and inclusive perspective would be to oppose such teleological obscenities, which rear their ugly head today in the pyrotechnic vision Christian Right here in the USA that gleefully anticipates how a thermo-nuclear war would wondrously fulfill Scripture’s promises of God’s final judgment and usher in the return of Christ, the Lord and Giver of life!

Instead of such world-historical triumphalism we might wan to re-contextualize the innate capacity of the world-historical process “to go beyond what went before it” in an inexorable development from chaos to order and from darkness into the light. Such teleological views domesticate both the unspeakable horrors and the unexpected wonders of the world-historical process and falsely renders predictable and necessary an unforeseeable passage through accident, contingency and unpredictability that has no guarantee of a positive outcome and is likely to disrupt every overarching law of nature and pattern of history if it does… In other words, the ability of a thing to be reinvented and to surpass itself goes hand in hand with its vulnerability to destruction, which is all part and parcel of the beautiful risk of creation. To illustrate this point, I will end this with an often quoted passage on human origins from the Talmud

“Twenty six attempts preceded the present genesis, all of which were destined to fail. The world of man has arisen out of the chaotic heart of the preceding debris; he too is exposed to the risk of failure, and the return to nothing. ‘Let us hope it works’ exclaimed God as he created the world, and this hope, which has accompanied the subsequent history of the world and mankind, has emphasized right from the outset that this history is branded with the mark of radical uncertainty.” Talmud

This quote is cited by André Neher, “Visions du temps et l’histoire dans la culture juive,” Les Cultures et le temps , ed. by UNESCO, Introduction by Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Les presses de l’UNESCO, 1975), p. 179. This text is itself cited by Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 193-94, who is herself citing Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos, (Boulder: New Science Library, 1984), p. 313, whose translation (from the French) we are using.

An Inter-Faith Inquiry: Buddhist Compassion and Christian Love

While the popular New Age philosophy of “cosmic balance” tells us that all pairs of opposites (e.g. masculine/feminine, light/dark) are really one and the same, Integral philosophy (as pioneered by Ken Wilber) has a more discerning position: things which seem to be one and the same are really diametrical opposites.

Just a few examples of this from Ken’s own body of work include: states & stages of consciousness, pre-rational (madness) & trans-rational (mystical) structures of consciousness, qualitative depth (better) & population span (bigger) and the “mutual interpenetration of all things” in quantum physics & Eastern mysticism – all of these opposing categories were once seen to be one and the same, but in the clear light of Integral theory they are now seen to be describing very different dimensions of reality.

Likewise, it is widely accepted in the New Age movement that “All religions are the same”, different paths up the same mountain – and this is said to be especially true of Christianity and Buddhism. In other words, according to the conventional wisdom, while these two faith traditions seem to be different in their exoteric surface features they are really one and the same in their esoteric deep features – i.e. their external rites and rituals may look different, but their interior essence (usually a version of Non-dual awareness) is very much the same…

Here, I want to challenge this alleged spiritual/esoteric identity of Christianity and Buddhism and suggest that the truth is exactly the opposite – the exoteric surface features of Buddhism and Christianity are much the same – they both have priests, temples, scriptures, ceremonies, alters, sacred postures, mantras, secret brotherhoods – it is precisely in their esoteric depths that they are divided. To begin, all religions believe that we humans are caught up in a net of sin (suffering, delusion, ignorance) – and that there is some way out, a way of liberation, salvation or Enlightenment. But as to what constitutes the way out it seems to me that no two institutions in the world contradict each other so flatly as Christianity and Buddhism…

At G.K. Chesterton pointed out: simply consider the startling differences in the style of their religious art, in which the soul of these religions is made visible to us. No two inner religious ideals could be more opposite than a painting of a medieval Christian saint with eyes wide open, looking with fierce intensity outwards, staring at the world in astonishment and anguished intimacy – and a painting of a Buddhist sage with eyes shut in blissful peace, and with a peculiar inward intent oblivious to the happenings of the world around him. And the contention here is that there must be some real divergence at the innermost core of these traditions which produces such opposing symbols.

From another angle, It is a commonplace stance in many spiritual circles to say that the esoteric core of all the great traditions ascribes to the same fundamental notion of Absolute Truth in terms of a direct apprehension of Non-dual Awareness – i.e. the simple recognition that “There is only Spirit” as ones always already Free Self, a Self that existed from before the Big Bang and is fully present at each and every point of the temporal process. From the perspective of radical Non-dual Truth – which is said to be the ultimate realization of all the world’s great religion – the whole universe arises inside ones very own Big Mind, and it is just here that Buddhism and Christianity diverge in their central teachings.

To put it simply, Buddhism teaches compassion for all sentient beings because they are ultimately manifestations of one’s own true Self, while Christianity is grounded in love – and real love requires separation between persons. The Eastern sage says we are all Spirit (as un-qualifiable Emptiness) showing up with many different faces or aspects, that there are no real walls of individuality between different persons in the world. However, the Christian impulse is to love precisely that which is Other, to love the other person in the absolute singularity of who they are, to love that which is not-I.

A Christian is not called to love someone because they arise inside of his/her own Self but because they are different, strange, foreign, because that person shows up in my world from some unheard of time and place, just as a man loves a woman because she is entirely different from himself. To put it bluntly, in the Non-dual traditions of the East we are not to Love our neighbors, rather we are to Be our neighbors, but as G. K. Chesterton put it, “If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible.”

So it’s not so much that Love has no opposite (as the original punk monk himself Stuart Davis kindly suggests), but rather that opposites make Love possible!

Or again, where teachers of Eastern Enlightenment (e.g. Andrew Cohen) consider the insidious ego-personality to be fallen, like a drop of water that must return to a the vast ocean of Emptiness, it is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little fragments, because they are living, breathing fragments. So in contrast to the teachers of Impersonal Enlightenment that recognize no ultimate boundaries in reality, Christianity has always insisted that the boundary between God and the world (and the collective passions of human history) is not something to be regarded as unreal, illusory, or deficient. That is, the Judeo-Christian tradition has always seen Creation as “good, very good” (Genesis), not merely a veil of ignorance or illusion, and as such God wants us all to become real persons with a capacity to love one another, rather than the position of the Eastern traditions which teach one large ego to love him/her self and to have regard for other people because they arise inside ones own awareness…

So Christian love desires real personality, and personality requires division. That is, love requires that two people are different, set apart from each other, so that they are inseparable only in so far as they embody very real differences. In other words, there must be a creative tension between two people that are different (i.e. a masculine and a feminine personality type) for the loving union between them to be real…

So love divides and wants what is different, where many Eastern traditions tend to breed indifference and uniformity. As the 1st century Nazarene said, “I have come not with peace but a sword”, a sword which comes to separate, to set free – and even to set mother against daughter and father against son… The point being that no other religion makes God rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls, but according to Christianity it is this qualitative difference between divinity and humanity, and the real distinction between persons in relationship that is sacred…

What Buddhists consider to be only relative or phenomenal reality (remember the only thing that is real in Tibetan Buddhism is that which is present in deep dreamless sleep! – see Ken Wilber’s One Taste), Christians consider to be the whole meaning and purpose of God – persons-in-relationship, the miracle of We, i.e. the Holy Trinity. And that a person may love God it is necessary not only that there is a God to be loved but also a person to love him/her. Can the Buddhist really praise anything as really distinct from him/her self? Are we to seek God in the deeper and deeper regions of our own ego, or in the unconditional claim of the other person – the stranger, the foreigner, the widow and the orphan who come to us in their absolute singularity?

So in the Non-dual teachings of the East we get introspection, quietism, divine egoism and social indifference – Western Buddhism. But by insisting on the transcendence of God (the qualitative distinction between divine and human) we get wonder, astonishment, fear and trembling, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation and social justice – Christianity. By insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God is outside of man, man goes outside of himself. Where Christ says “Love one another”, the Eastern sage says “Be the only Self in the entire universe”, and this constitutes an intellectual abyss of the first-order that I heartily challenge each and all to respond to…

For instance, check out Ken Wilber’s 3 faces of God Audio CD)

Reference: G. K. Chesterton “Orthodoxy”, Ignatius Press, especially Chapter 8

Jesus of Nazareth: Teacher of Zen Paradox

There is a link below to a paper I gave at a Sacred Scriptures conferences on the striking congruency between the paradoxical teachings of Jesus and the enigmatic utterances of Zen Buddhist masters. There is scope in this discovery for a new kind of inter-faith dialog between Christianity and Buddhism, one that recognizes that the “deep structure” of Truth-in-Paradox has arisen independently at different times and places… Its enough to reconstruct the idea of Absolute Truth while scandalizing both atheists and fundamentalists alike! Click here for the PDF file…

Source Code: The Dangerous Memory of the Historical Jesus

I have added a link here to a revolutionary paper I’ve written that was recently published in the Journal for the Renewal of Religion and Theology. I am in constant fear and trembling over the possibility that this constitutes the biggest breakthrough in the history of New Testament scholarship! Essentially, this article shows that ALL of Jesus’ parables have the SAME paradoxical “deep structure” (aka Source Code)… and these “unexpected reversals of meaning” cut to the heart of Jesus’ own vision and practice of the Kingdom of God. As Stuart Davis sings, it’s Jesus Christ without the Christians… A radical insight into the mind of Jesus that isolates the Founder of Christianity from the Church founded in his name. Expect the Unexpected…

The Passion for Life

As Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy declared in the first line of his classic text Out of Revolution “Our passions give life to the world. Our collective passions constitute the history of mankind.”

I just finished reading a wonderful little book by Jack Caputo “Philosophy and Theology” which culminates with the question: What gives life its passion? In other words, what gives life its intensity, its urgency and depth, what lifts us up above the humdrum drift of indifference and mediocrity and gives us something surpassing to love beyond ourselves, something surpassing to seek beyond the empty consumerism of wandering through shopping malls as a hungry ghost in an endless search for more possessions?

For me life’s passion (the lack of which results in the superficial life) is a love of paradox, where paradox is the creative tension between opposing poles that orbit around a common center, held in the gravitational pull of an absolute Secret that sits in the middle while they trace concentric circles around a central mystery…

Jack Caputo writes that those of us who have a passion for paradox, the creative tension between opposing forces, have been “pierced to the heart by something precious, beautiful, deep, and enigmatic that leaves us reeling. We know that the doctors are not telling us everything, that the wound will not heal – that we are not going to recover. We have suffered a blow that has destroyed our equilibrium; we have been shaken by a provocation, by something that has left us breathless, pursued by questions that we cannot silence. We have been visited by some affliction that results in tremors (that is how it “presents itself”, as the medical textbooks say), but it also has this other oddity about it – the disorder induces an affection for our affliction, so that the patients have no wish to be healed, to close this wound over, to arrest these tremors. For we live and breath in the tremulousness of our lives, exposed to the questionability of things, made vulnerable to love’s wounds, visited in the night by questions of elemental power, shaken to the core by voices that will not be stilled…

For we lovers of paradox with a passion for the impossible, life is like a star that shines all the more brightly the darker the night. It is the darkness that gives things their depth, and we are prepared to give the darkness its due, not because we like to be obscure but because we love the brightness of the stars. The dark ring of ambiguity around life is a crucial ingredient to its richness… the opposite of all this, the result of turning our backs on the enigma of our lives and embracing unqualified and unambiguous clarity, is the superficial life, a life made artificially easy by facile answers and too easy acquisitions…

This endless questionability of things opens up the strangest sorts of wounds and the deepest sorts of cuts, wounds that cut us loose from the vanities of the superficial life and bring us face to face with the complexity and perplexity of human existence. That perplexity reaches its highest pitch in the passion for paradox, and the real ambiguity of our being-in-the-world… for the existential confession of radical Not-Knowing is precisely what gives life its beauty and depth and passion and power, even while it de-centers us, knocks us off our pins, robs us of the ease with which we negotiate the rapids of everyday life, divesting us of the sense that we have everything in control…

Ken Wilber Conference Call: Integral Post-Metaphysics

I’ve included here a bunch of questions I was given the opportunity to ask Ken Wilber – the visionary Integral philosopher who inspired my own quest for a post-metaphysical approach to spirituality – which is probably the single most important issue in regards to the further evolution of the world’s great religious traditions…

You can listen to the audio download from the Integral Spiritual Center here, (IPM No. 9, 10 & 11) but will have to be a subscribing member to do so.

Hi Ken, here’s my questions for Appendix II:

1. Are there any pre-given realities in an Integral Post-Metaphysics? Here’s a few possible examples from your own work: a) Always Already Awareness – the space in which all sentient beings and perspectives arise and pass away? b) Whitehead’s “creative advance into novelty”, without which evolution could never have gotten started? c) The Twenty Tenets (Ch. 2, SES)?

2. As Heidegger writes on the ontological difference, metaphysics asks the question of Being which concerns something “essentially different from beings”, or, more succinctly, “the Being of beings ‘is’ not itself a being”. Being, therefore, is not a determinate ‘such-and-such a being’ with a Kosmic address, and for Heidegger the very problem with Western metaphysics is that is seeks to rationally delineate the whole range of beings, entities, and things, and in this process we become duped by beings, and end up in a state of oblivion about the question of Being itself. So does an IPM with its precise way of pinning down the meaning of actual occasions by specifying the Kosmic locations of both the perceiver and the perceived still take place within the horizon of traditional metaphysics, which forgets the ontological difference between Being and beings and seeks instead to establish cognitive certainty by fixing in place a stable center of meaning based on the boundaries and distinctions of objective-descriptive language?

3. Does an integral post-metaphysics, and specifically the claim that “the meaning of a statement is the means of its enactment” (the three strands of knowledge) reduce spirituality to a scientific experiment governed by a set or rules, of the form “If you want to know this, do this”? Given that a spiritual path often involves faith – or an interior committment to something beyond any rational calculation or horizon of expectancy, the more that our assertions about Spirit are governed by these kinds of rules and injunctions, then the more easily we can refuse the objetive uncertainty of faith and excuse ourselves from moving forward by saying, ‘this is really not my doing it’s the rule’. So in contrast to specifying the Kosmic address of the different levels of God with a program of rules and procedures for the enactment of ones awakening, is it not better to tolerate ambiguity and live with a degree of uncertainty in our statements about Spirit, and confess that we do not in some deep way know exactly what is what? For when I truly do not know where I am going, and when the clear directives of enacting ones own realization are suspended, then I am faced with making a real move, an inward passionate committment to something, I know not what… as Dom Crossan says “the big difference, it seems to me, is whether you have a goal with no center (i.e. no Kosmic Address) without being scared.”

4. Regarding this claim that the meaning of a statement is the means of it’s enactment, is there a risk that IPM could become a form of what Foucault called bio-power, a technique for subjugating humans via regulatory control. While the 3 strands is appropriate and necessary for many forms of scientific knowledge, is that really how ones spiritual self-understanding deepens? The idea that the meaning of a statement (e.g. God is Love) involves a structure of rules that control the behaviour of human persons sounds like the external observances of mythic-membership religion, as if there are necessary actions that one must perform to have access to the love of God. Moreover, the idea that if you don’t follow the injunction you cannot be “in the know” may even close off the often surprising way in which new discoveries and breakthroughs tend to emerge, as in way Genpo’s Big Mind process breaks with the prescribed rules and injunctions of traditional Zen practice.

5. What is the post-metaphysical status of mystical-poetic language such as: Eckhart’s pointing-out instructions, the enigmatic sayings of Zen masters, or the parables of Jesus of Nazareth? Given that all of these interpretations of spiritual experience also deconstruct the fallacy of conceptual presence (i.e. the myth of the given), is there a post-metaphysical language that can express the inexpressible in a way that can facilitate ones spiritual awakening? Can the skillful use of linguitsic signifiers in mystical poetry, (e.g. your own pointing-out instructions), bring forth and enact (in a receptive audience) the world-space of its actual referent, i.e. Spirit? And given that such teachings do not succumb to the “myth of the given”, is mystical languge a legitimate apporach to post-metaphysical spirituality?

6. Since the fundamental elements of the world have to be set apart before we can even begin to take a persepctive, is this irreducible two-ness or the diffrential spacing of all phenomenal experience an enabling condition of the 4 Quadrants? In this sense what is the ontological status of the 4 Quadrants and indigenous perspectives? Do they constitute a “myth of the given” or are they a priori categories of the knowing subject? Or a Kosmic habit laid down by evolution?

7. You write, “Spiritual realities are on exactly the same footing as electrons, Gaia, rocks, and the square root of negative one.” Given that Spirit is structurally impossible to fix in place and cannot be grasped as a phenomenon ‘out there’, is this re-framing of the different levels of God into a Kosmic address system at risk of conceptual idolatry – the attempt to turn the meaning of God into an object of knowledge, to appropriate Spirit and close off it’s boundaries by forcing a Kosmic self-identity upon it?

8. How does one specify a Kosmic address, particularly in regard to the “possible phenomenological confusion” between madness and mystcism? Is there not always an element of uncertainty when it comes to definite statements about whether one is ecstatic or delusional, enlightened or undergoing a psychotic-inflation, a post-conventional saint or pre-conventional sinner? Is one of the roles of a Kosmic address system to dis-ambiguate these tensions and provide objective certainty and clarity to these limit-experiences and different states of consciousness?

9. Is the statement that Enlightenment is to be “one with all states and all stages that are in existence at any given time” synonomous with the statement that ones True Nature in Christ is “fully human” and “fully divine” – if one accepts that the “truly human” aspect of this statement evolves through time.

The Resurrection: Spirit Itself is Evolving!

For Christians it is the most decisive event in all of human history, the truth upon which ones faith is said to stand or fall, for others it is a pernicious superstition that props up an out-dated and irrelevant institution. Whatever else it may be, the Resurrection event that founded the 2000 year history of the Christian tradition is an intriguing and singular phenomenon that many of those awakened to an the Midnight Sun are naturally drawn to question and inquire into…

So for starters, we can begin with a brief Integral summary of the successive stages of developmental unfolding in all 1st-tier approaches to the Resurrection:

Red-Ego: At this level Jesus is a divinely ordained magician and his Resurrection is a divine power play, expressing for its adherents a denial of death and mortality awareness, and a triumph of magical wish-fulfillment released from the very real limits of space, time and embodiment…

Amber-Traditional: At this stage God raised Jesus from the dead on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. The Resurrection here is physical and bodily and it believed in as an event in which God intervenes in human history to save a new group of chosen people… The gospel narrative is taken to be literal reality, and so with the Resurrection the figure of Jesus is vindicated as God’s one and only begotten Son, sitting at the right hand of the Father, and coming again to judge the living and the dead.

Orange-Modern: With the world-view of modern science and reason there is no historical evidence for the Resurrection which is seen to be just another one of the miracles attested to in the Gospels, all of which contradict universal Laws of Nature. Although the resurrection is seen to be a myth, from this stage it may also be said that either the life of Jesus symbolizes a universal human possibility or that the Resurrection simply means the memory of Jesus lived on in the hearts and minds of his followers, who may have been suffering from some kind of delusion or hallucination in the wake of their leaders execution.

Green-Post-modern – Here the Resurrection is not so much a historical event but a myth that is found in many different pre-modern religions, or possibly a New Age symbol of the coming global transformation. The question is not, “how is such an event physically or historically possible?” but rather, “what event do these stories harbor?”, “what do these stories mean?” At this stage there are no facts, just interpretations and so all things flow in a river of meaning. The Resurrection is therefore intended above all as a matter of subjectivity or interiority

Now, while an Integral approach can see the relative degrees of truth and meaning in all these previous value-structures, it also adds its own important contributions, based on the capacity for vision-logic (multiple perspective taking) and the discoveries of the modern and post-modern world. It is these that we shall now turn to:

Firstly, from within an evolutionary context of inter-locking hierarchical systems, the Resurrection is a foremost instance of Spirit’s creative advance into novelty (Whitehead), where the risen Jesus is the first fruits of an altogether new kind of humanity… As Pope Benedict XVI said at his first Easter mass, borrowing the language of evolutionary science, the Resurrection is

“The greatest ‘mutation’, absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life and its development: a leap into a completely new order which does concern us, and concerns the whole of history.”

From an integral perspective, we see supporting evidence of Pope Benedict’s somewhat surprising view of the Resurrection event in the serendipitous creativity of the evolutionary process. From a primordial fireball that gave rise to countless swirling galaxies to a hot house planet teeming with carbon-based life to the collective passions and unceasing ingenuity of the human endeavor, the amazing metamorphoses and stunning transformations of the evolving universe are paradigmatic of the Resurrection event and give a contemporary expression to the very substance of what Jesus of Nazareth is always doing in the Gospels.

For just as evolution is marked by an inexorable capacity for bringing “order out of chaos” in consistently going beyond what went before it (from matter to life to mind), Jesus’ is also transforming lives in all of his works and deeds, giving people hope where there was despair, love where there was fear, and the intimacy of companionship where there was only isolation.

And when it comes to Jesus and his radical enactment of the Kingdom of God, none of these transformations is more amazing than his being raised from the dead. In the transformation from death to life, we see Jesus bring – not eternity – but a new time with new hope for the future out of the abject horror and radical injustice of his crucifixion. For just as evolution consistently brings forth new forms of living complexity out of the incredible pain, waste and accident of the 3 billion year history of life on Earth, the Resurrection shows us that the love of God flourishes precisely by taking up meaningless suffering and absorbing the finality of death, even as the Creator Spirit also brought forth abundant life from a planet that was formless void in the book of Genesis. In other words, Resurrection is reality.

Moreover, in accordance with Integral theory, the Resurrection can also be likened to what Ken Wilber calls a “Kosmic groove” that has been laid down by Jesus of Nazareth in inaugurating the Kingdom of God and the creative emergence of an altogether new kind of humanity. According to Wilber’s theory of Kosmic grooves, once a difficult task has been accomplished anywhere in the world—from crystallizing complex molecules to stabilizing Non-dual awareness—the same task can more easily be repeated anywhere else on the planet. In this respect, the Resurrection is a Kosmic groove laid down in human history, first by Jesus of Nazareth – who is the locus of the transformative energy of the Kingdom and the one in whom the evolutionary trajectory of Spirit’s own self-realization becomes conscious of itself for the first time. And through the temporal process of human evolution this initial Kosmic groove is now being slowly crystallized into a Kosmic habit – as more and more rare individuals take up Jesus’ radical path of crucifixion and resurrection (losing self to find Self) that constitutes the meaning authentic Christian discipleship.

Furthermore, with the recent integral insight that Enlightenment itself is perpetually evolving along with the rest of the universe, the Resurrection is not merely “always already” accomplished for each and all in and through God’s self-offering in Jesus Christ but it is also deeply and profoundly still “to come” – as an event that is by its very nature beyond any horizon of meaning and action that we can currently program or foresee. So while an Integral approach maintains that both the “already” (sudden) and the “not-yet” (gradual) perspectives are held to be 100% true, there is also a suggestion here that with the “Logos made flesh” in the Christian tradition that God is not ultimately real (in the Hegelian sense of “concrete universal”) until He/She//Thou/It actually enters into the stream of time and space and expresses God’s self as a flesh and blood human being in and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

In view of the Resurrection event, then, there is an impulse to New Creation in the depths of the Divine, which is now seen to be radically present in “anguished intimacy” with the long and painful evolution of increasing exterior complexity and deeper interior consciousness, from atoms to amoebas to humans to God knows what in the future.

For just as St. Paul tells us that all of creation “groans for fulfillment”, with an integral understanding of the evolutionary nature of enlightenment, in the passion of Jesus to go all the way, to go to the point of maximum intensity where ones soul reaches it breaking point and yet does not break – but instead shifts into a deeper expression of it’s own inherent potentials, we discover an archetypal expression of Spirit’s own self-realization through the creative advance of the world-historical process into radically new forms of sentient life and consciousness.

And from this perspective, the Resurrection is not so much an historical fact but an eschatological event. In other words, the Resurrection does not conform to our demand for historical evidence and neither does it fit into our conventional expectations or categories of thought, rather it is an event that signifies a new reality breaking into the business as usual world, bringing with it hope for a New Creation.

And importantly, as an eschatological event those who hope in the Resurrection can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. In Christ, peace with God now means conflict with the world, and as such the Resurrection, as hope in that which is “to come” becomes the source of Christian orthopraxy. Those who follow the way of Jesus and the hope and promise of his Resurrection therefore behave in this world with the eschatological goal of transforming it, in expectation of a divine transformation. Daniel Migliore grasps this well:

“Authentic Christian hope will certainly stand in opposition to present injustice and to every effort to absolutize the status quo. However, in the struggle for justice, equality, and human rights, Christians will always insist on “more”—on a different, greater future than what is ever achievable by human effort and ingenuity, a hope beyond hope. Utopian hope finds in humanity itself the resources and capacities to remove all suffering, establish universal justice, and complete history. A Christian theology of hope, by contrast, knows that the fulfillment we seek is an incalculable gift of God. Consequently, Christian hope will generate criticism both of the status quo and of all absolutized programs of progress and strategies of revolution.” (Faith Seeking Understanding, 341)

In working to honor the hope and promise of Christianity to bring about a fundamental transformation of the world as it is – as a gift from God, at the heart of an Integral Life is a call to live with paradox, to navigate irreducible perspectives (e.g. the 4 Quadrants), and to hold the creative tension between opposites in the recognition that no single perspective is privileged or pre-given.

This capacity to live with paradox and ambiguity, as well as being central to the teachings of Jesus, is also found within the somewhat fragmentary Resurrection narratives recorded in the New Testament gospels. From the two women fleeing from an empty tomb in fear and trembling (Mark), to the disciples on the road to Emmaus where Jesus disappears at the instant he is recognized (Luke) to doubting Thomas, the Resurrection is an event that is constantly vulnerable to human misperception – a precarious, delicate, insubstantial and fragile Reality – and therefore utterly precious, much like a new born baby. So, just as the risen Jesus tells Mary “do not cling to me”, the Resurrection will slip through our fingers if we hold onto it too tightly, and so we cannot be too sure that we have ever gotten hold of it fully. As such an encounter with the risen Christ breaks into our human experience world as a mystery to be approached with astonishment and awe, and is disclosed in an act of faith that is held with courage and often in spite of deep trepidation and cognitive uncertainty.

And in further developing this point, just as the crucified Jesus is himself an expression of the love of God (see Good Friday blog), if we look at the earliest forms of Christian art that depict the Resurrection we find that the glory of risen Christ is always expressed in the visual form of the wounded Jesus. The risen Christ has wounds. That is, we cannot separate the risen Christ from the wounded Jesus, they are to be held together in the creative tensions of an integrally informed faith, where the authority of the risen Christ is found precisely in his precariousness, in his very wounded-ness and vulnerability.

So, just as the passion and suffering of the crucified Jesus is always already an expression of the glory of the risen Christ, the glory of the risen Christ is always and already expressed in the form of the wounded Jesus.

So at this point of maximum intensity, where we accept and embody the irreducible paradoxes of Christianity, the more we experience the tension and intensity of the crucifixion – i.e. the violence, injustice and unspeakable horrors that have been suffered by the countless untold dead of human history, the more radically we awaken to and deepen our capacity for faith, hope and love in the Resurrection “to come”. In other words, where living through irreparable loss releases the event of a new birth, the more we pray and weep for the irredeemable sufferings of the past (in Auschwitz or Belfast, in Kosovo or the West Bank) the more we resurrect an irrepressible openness to the future.

And from this more dynamic and evolutionary perspective, the Resurrection can now be seen an Omega-point of Christ consciousness (Teilhard de Chardin), an Omega-point that has already entered into human history and been accomplished in the person and work of Jesus Christ, but whose ultimate temporal horizon is radically unforeseeable…

And moreover, the paradoxical secret that stirs within the Resurrection event also points to the transformative potential of Christianity. For if losing ones life is a necessary condition for finding it again then the critical deconstruction of the Christian faith tradition in the modern (Darwin, Marx, Freud) and post-modern (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida) world is precisely the condition required for Christian renewal, and as such may well be the greatest achievement of the last 2000 years of Christianity.

Of course Christianity has already undergone five or six major historical turnings, suggesting that it is a faith tradition that is open to transformation and novelty. And in the wake of the Death of God in the 20th century (or any over-arching center of truth and meaning) and an institutional Church that is more concerned with self-preservation than renewal, having exhausted the potentials of its traditional forms and structure, it seems that the Church is again on the threshold of crucifixion/resurrection, and as such more prepared to transform itself than any other religion.

Of course, what Christianity will become is totally unpredictable, but if it is to be true to its origins and re-activate the challenge and invitation of Jesus of Nazareth, the future of Christianity will involve an unpredictable earthquake, an event that exceeds our comprehension and expectations. For if Christians are really honest with themselves they will admit that Jesus is not the Messiah (Christ) that we either want or wish for, since the Kingdom will come “like a thief in the night” and at a time and place that we least expect…