Dr. Freeman

I’ve just finished reading “The Future of Human Nature” by Jurgen Habermas, the world renown German philosopher and one of the last true believers in the ideals of the Western Enlightenment. He has a really interesting argument against stem cell research and genetic engineering that is based on a completely rational-secular point of view.

Habermas puts the question like this: Is it morally acceptable for free and rational agents such as “bio-tech” scientists to alter the genetic code of future generations? And this is the gist of his argument:

Moral agents (e.g. bio-scientists) are members of a moral community who owe duties to each other of reciprocity, mutuality and equality. But: the alteration of the genetic identity of another requires a diminution in this presupposition of equality, and cannot be reciprocal or mutual. So such an act is not a moral act, of the sort we would want done to us without our explicit informed consent. We would consider it inappropriate if we did it to adults. It is not an interpersonal act of mutual respect. So it is not a moral act.

Habermas is basically saying that there is a reduced moral responsibility for a person whose genetic code is tinkered with tailored toward someone else’s (e.g. parental, social, bio-scientists) dreams and expectations… In other words, a person who becomes aware of his programmed genetic nature will feel less free and less responsible, because the boundary between what a person is given (biologically) and what we make of ourselves (culturally) has been irreversibly interfered with…

So why be moral in the first place? Habermas argues that our current understanding of what it is to be moral presupposes a self image of ourselves as free, autonomous, self-legislating beings, and as such requires us to treat other moral agents in a way that attributes the same self-understanding to them.

This means that genetic intervention in future generations to select desirable dispositions entails prejudgment of specific life projects, which threatens the self-image of a potential moral equal, and requires us to act toward a potential equal in a way that is incompatible with the action of a moral agent. Therefore, what is at stake in bio-ethical debates is the ethical self-understanding of the species: whether or not we can continue to see ourselves as beings committed to moral judgment and action.

The bottom line: we must acknowledge the dignity of a potential human life, the embryo; and not use it as a means to any other end than its own best interests and future autonomy. That means, no experimentation on embryos, not even for the sake of advancement of genetic sciences for the improvement of present patients or future generations.

But what if we can reasonably suppose that the embryo’ best-interests are being served? Surely genetic enhancements can be motivated by genuinely good intentions, one’s that the pre-personal embryo would agree with? Can bio-ethicists anticipate consent?

I’ve posted below a clip of Nicole Kidman in The Invasion where she mentions my favorite philosopher Ken Wilber and discusses integral theory in general… Click here

³⁰In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. ³¹A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. ³²So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ³³But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. ³⁴He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. ³⁵The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

³⁶“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

³⁷The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

Arguably the most well-known of all of Jesus’ parables, the Good Samaritan is a classic instance of the paradoxical teaching strategy employed by Jesus, as well as a foremost instance of how a moralistic misinterpretation of the early evangelists obscured what his parables are really about. For nearly two millennium the Good Samaritan has been taken by Christians as an example story illustrating what it means to be a good neighbor. We can witness this allegorical veil in its first evangelical interpreter - Luke, who takes it as an example of good behavior with a moralizing admonition appended at the conclusion: “Go and do likewise”.

However contemporary parable scholarship has concluded that in its original setting this narrative was not a pleasant tale about the friendly neighbor who does the right thing by helping a man down on his luck, but rather it is a deeply world-shattering narrative in which Jesus explodes the underlying assumptions of his 1^st century Jewish audience in regards to just who is a ‘neighbor’ and who is a ‘stranger’ when it comes to the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God.

In summary, a Jewish man having been beaten and left in a ditch to die, is rescued by a traveling Samaritan after two Temple authorities – a priest and a Levite - “pass by on the other side of the road” to deliberately avoid an encounter the half-dead man.

Now what has been overlooked in the historical development of Christianity is the fact that in Jesus’ day the Samaritans were the mortal enemies of the Jewish people and looked down upon as a symbol of moral corruption ever since they split off from the rest of the nation during the reign of King David. So where the Samaritans were a despicable race of half-breeds, the Jewish priests and Levites were considered to be the moral and religious authorities and were thus given a high social ranking within the same cultural landscape. In the context of this parable, then, Samaritan and Judean stand in considerable tension with each other, one a hated enemy of the beaten man and on the other God’s specially chosen instruments of salvation. However in the shocking reversal at the heart of this most memorable narrative, the very structure that defines the world-space of Jesus’ audience is radically inverted as a hated enemy becomes the beaten Jews greatest benefactor while his greatest benefactors (the moral and religious authorities) are exposed as social and religious outcasts.

In asking the provocative question of ‘who is the real neighbor’ the whole thrust of the story confronts its hearers with an impossible decision, one in which their world is turned upside down and radically put into question: goodness and Samaritan coincide, while badness and Jew also go together. As Dominic Crossan puts it - if Jesus’ only intention was simply to take a shot against the Temple authorities “it would have been far better to have made the wounded man a Samaritan and the helper a Jewish traveler from outside of the priestly circles.”

However, when goodness (Jew) and badness (Samaritan) undergo a bi-polar reversal the very meaning of one’s world is shaken in its foundations, and we are faced with a radical paradox that profoundly undermines everyday expectations and opens ones awareness to an altogether new apprehension of reality. For the person struggling to come to terms with the creative tension of Good/Samaritan and Bad/Jew is simultaneously experiencing in and through the language of Jesus the arrival of the Kingdom, where this embrace of apparent contradictories in the deep structure of the parable bursts open familiar ways of seeing the world with new insight and illumination and leaves us “standing firmly on utter uncertainty.”

This basic thrust of this memorable parable of Jesus is pitted against the world as it is - the commonplace myths that are taken for granted in the so-called ‘real world’. For where Jesus’ first century Jewish audience would have expected an Israelite layperson to come to the rescue - one of their own and hence an acceptable hero figure, to their horror a hated Samaritan arrives on the scene! And even as the Greek translation for “came upon him” implies that this unforeseen stranger intends is to finish off the helpless Jew once and for all, against all expectations to the contrary the Samaritan has compassion for the wounded man, his heart is wrenched open, he is “struck in his soul by a lightening flash of mercy” and goes on to exceed all normal requirement in his endeavor to restore his mortal enemy back to health.

With the unexpected arrival of the Samaritan, everything is thrown off-center as Jesus directly and repeatedly challenges the dominant religious and political structure with an “imaginative shock that can overturn worlds,” where esteemed neighbors become hard hearted strangers and a worthless stranger becomes a revered neighbor. We can see here, then, an initial demonstration of Jesus’ paradoxical reversals in the universally recognized story of the Good Samaritan: the one deemed to be a despicable social and religious outcast (Samaritan) is foremost in doing the will of God, just as those who are deemed to be foremost in doing the will of God (Temple authorities) are despicable social and religious outcasts. Or in other words, the Jewish religious leaders who initially seem to be the agents of holiness and divine favor are really objects of scorn and religious derision; while the Samaritan who at first appears to be an object of scorn and religious derision is really the agent of compassion and grace, and a foremost example of neighborly love.

In a similar vein, another key message of the Good Samaritan is that in the Kingdom help is perpetually a surprise. For after the initial shock of hearing about a fellow Jew being robbed on the road to Jericho and left to die in a ditch in a ditch, Jesus’ audience is then told that the secret of this man’s healing is in receiving help from the place he least expects - his social enemy, and that healing and grace comes only when we are powerless to refuse it. The Kingdom of God may therefore be most active in what is most unacceptable to us, and most present to us when we are forced to acknowledge the goodness of those we detest or distrust, and perhaps even to accept compassionate service from them, as Funk writes:

“God’s domain is open to outcasts, to the undeserving, to those who do not merit inclusion. In other words, all who are truly victims, truly disinherited, have no reason and are unable to resist mercy when it is offered. The despised half-breed becomes the instrument of compassion and grace – Judeans would have chocked on that irony.”

So, in reiterating the paradoxical shock of Jesus’ time honored narrative, just as a respectable Jew on his way to Jericho becomes an untouchable victim cast aside the road, what initially shows up as an untouchable victimized outcast (Samaritan) is really the respected agent of healing and a fore-runner in the ways of the Kingdom.

Therefore, by disclosing the underlying structure of Jesus’ all too familiar story of the Good Samaritan, we can now see this parable as if for the first time, as a wisdom teaching that presents an explosive paradox to Jesus’ audience in a double-edged reversal of their commonplace expectations. For whereas the forces of good (Priest, Levite) do evil; and the forces of evil (Samaritan) do good, our preconceived assumptions and unquestioned values are torn asunder and we are invited to participate in a profound shift in consciousness, an unexpected reversal where that which appears at first to be unmitigated horror is really a wonderful disguise in which the inscrutable mystery of God enters our lives in the fullest possible manner.

As such, this well known parable of Jesus is not an example story or an allegory, as has been thought throughout the development of much of the Christian tradition. For where the loaded terms of the parable (Jew/Samaritan) have lost their original strong values, the paradoxical tensions of the story have been lost. So much so that for most Christians it has become little more than a story of the friendly neighbor and we seldom realize that as it was first uttered it was more like a ‘square circle’. So the widely held literal reading that interprets this (and other) parable(s) of Jesus as only a form of moral instruction or examples of ‘right action’ (i.e. help a man in need) derives not from the Founder of Christianity – Jesus of Nazareth, but only from what was Founded - the Church. Such moral or allegorical readings thereby diminish the original intent of Jesus’ radical paradoxes, which were originally invoked to directly attack conventional structures of meaning in a “damning indictment of social, racial and religious superiority.” And by overturning our man-made religious boundaries and prepackaged value-hierarchies, there is no way of deciding who is an insider and who is an outsider in the Kingdom revealed by Jesus, which is likely to come to us like a thief in the night, and often from the place that we least expect…

Thomas Keating “The Kingdom of God is Like”

Crossan 1973, p.64

Crossan 1973, p.65-6

Giles Gunn cited in Crossan 1973, p.53-4

Crossan 1973, p.55

Scott 2001, p.60

Scott 2001, p.61

Benedict XVI 2007, p.197

Tannehill in Perrin 1974, p.180

Funk 1996, p.180

Thoman Keating, “The Kingdom of God is Like…”, K, Ch. 1

Funk 1996, p.177

FTK, Ch. 1

Crossan quoted in Perrin 1976, p.257

Crossan 1973, p.57, 65

In one of his earliest writings “Madness and Civilization” Foucault gave a fascinating portrait of Madness – what he also called Un-Reason. By the 19^th century Foucault observed that madness had been labeled a “mental illness” and therefore made an object for the science of psychology, which derided the mad and the non-rational under a hypocritical veil of morality and foreclosed on the original “experience of Un-Reason” through the confinement of the mad.

Now, beneath the modern psychology and psychiatry where madness is viewed as either a brain dysfunction or a moral failing lies its more essential truth. For Foucault, modern psychology cannot master the hidden truth of madness, for the voice of madness was closed off in the very constitution of modern psychology as a science. So for Foucault what we call mental illness (depression, bi-polar, schizophrenia) today is “alienated madness” – where the mad are made alien by our objectifying and dehumanizing sciences.

The brilliance of Foucault is that he wants to bring us face to face with madness in its original and un-alienated form, a form that is recognized in the modern world only in “lightening flashes” with names like Friedrich Nietzsche - as a kind of tragic split and radical freedom…

Foucault wants to let the truth of madness speak its own voice. In other words, rather than diagnosing and treating and the mentally ill with what amounts to little more than powerful anesthetics, Foucault wants to linger with madness for a while, to hear what it has to say…

So what do the mad know? Well, quite frankly It’s the sort of truth that would kill you… or drive you mad. The mad have been released from ordinary constraints and experienced a terrible truth…. They are extreme points of sensitivity to the human condition… And they are not Other than Us. The mad speak a truth for which we have neither the nerve nor the ear – they disturb us with the truth of who we are.

For Foucault, the mad offer a forceful testimony to the breakdown of Reason, Knowledge, Truth – they speak from a depth of experience in which both the reassuring structures of ordinary life and the reassuring comforts of scientific, philosophical or religious truth have collapsed. They experience the radical groundlessness of the world, the contingency of all its constructions, and they speak from a kind of irrepressible terror… and call to us from the abyss by which we are all inhabited. We are put into question by the mad, for they have set foot where the sane fear to tread…

In his typical transgressive style Foucault turns the tables and show how the world-view of science and reason is put into question by the mad, and specifically the madman as artist – the one who reveals the difficult truth of the human condition – we are inwardly divided, inhabited by an abyss, that we have to live within the tension between knowing and not-knowing, belief and skepticism, truth and the night of truth, the light of reason and the midnight hour when reason allows itself to be invaded by unreason…

Here Foucault rejects the idea of Truth with a capital T. The truth is that there is no truth, and we are better off making the humble confession that we don’t know who we are – our inner most truth is always already disturbed by untruth… and neither religion nor philosophy nor the human sciences can tell us who we are or what to do…

In the face of this radical not-knowing, for Foucault the most meaningful task is to refuse who we are, struggle against those who think they can positively identify who we are, liberate ourselves from the kind of individuality that the state and the social structure produces and open up new modes of self-invention… And in this sense, for Foucault freedom is fundamentally the capacity for being otherwise, a continual twisting loose from our the ways we have previously been constituted, a capacity for novelty and innovation refuses to be reduced to a fixed stereotype…

Madness is a disturbance and the disturbing thing about the mad is that they are attuned to some deep seated dissonance from which the rest of us seek to be protected… The mad disturb us because they are exposed to something the rest of us prefer to ignore… and so we are beset by an apprehensive-ness that our sane, healed, whole lives mask a deeper rupture… The Mad are a mirror of ourselves. They tell us who we are.

The whole problem of the mad person is that he/she cannot repress and deny the trauma of existence like ordinary people… And so when madness takes the form of schizophrenia it is only because the mad reflect the contradiction of a world in which humans can no longer recognize themselves… because the social world is itself marked by struggle, hostility, and foreignness…

And let’s not forget that the mad suffer from their attunement – from what they feel/experience/undergo. Their ruptured lives are the site of a wound. They live with terror, they wrestle with demons, they need healing… They lay claim to us, we who are whole, to help. We who are perhaps not so much whole and sane as just a little better skilled at repressing our madness… And so when we are called upon by the mad, we need not approach them as an object of information, but a subject in communication, and one to whom we turn with something to learn from.

The mad do not ask for scientific analysis by us but friendship, support, companionship… The healing gesture is not to explain away the abyss but simply to stand with the mad and affirm that they are not alone… that our common madness is a matter of degree, that we all inhabit the same night of truth…

And because of their terrible initiation into the “night of truth” the mad have a special kind of freedom, in spite of their painful symptoms. They can question in a more radical way than the rest of us, taking issue with things that most of us take for granted. The mad are in touch with fundamental truths about society, the “rational ego” is all in flux and fragmentation. The mad know that there is no such thing as a “whole person” and so simply stops trying to make sense, while celebrating “the numinous energies of existence in a joyous activity of free play.”

The message of the mad and the radical freedom that stems from the night of truth… is to let go and stop pretending not to be mad. Let yourself go and scream your own screams. In other words, take the plunge into Un-Reason and go against the grain of normalcy, the civilized madness of the average and mediocre. Such a person “produces himself as a free man, solitary, and joyous, a desire lacking nothing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name that no longer designates any ego whatsoever. He had simply ceased being afraid of becoming mad. . . .” (Gilles Deleuze)

Reference John D. Caputo “More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not-Knowing Who We Are…”

I’ve recently had a paper published in the International Journal of Zizek studies titled, “There’s a Crack in Everything that’s How the Light Gets In” . Slavoj Zizek is arguably the world’s most famous living philosopher. He is an eccentric wild man with a comic wit and has recently had a feature documentary made about him (Zizek!)

This paper draws a somewhat disturbing connection between Zizek’s magus opus “The Parallax View” - and the paradoxical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (a central theme of this blog). As such, it opens the space for a revolutionary politics that can shatter the co-ordinates of the existing order with an unexpected intrusion from an altogether unheard of dimension…. So this paper is basically the groundwork for the political future of the crucified God, and as good Christians have always known - we do not need to wait for the right moment to start the revolution anymore, for the Christ-event had already happened… we can simply act as of the Kingdom is already at hand

Also, check out The Universe According to Slavoj Zizek for a brief video introduction to his absurdly optimistic and unpredictable view of the world

Thanks for reading

In the present day the door has been slammed firmly shut on the 2500 year quest of metaphysics - the classical search for a “fixed center of the universe” somewhere out there, existing independently of us that can explain the ultimate meaning of Being… I therefore want to start an (all too brief) inquiry into Ken Wilber’s Integral Post-Metaphysics (IPM), which is both the latest innovation in his thought and the most recent attempt of a contemporary philosopher to a) move beyond the washed up history of the Western metaphysical tradition, while b) preserving the important truths of the world’s great religious traditions. I take it as given that this is probably the single greatest challenge that faces religion and spirituality in the 21st century…

One of the key themes of Wilber’s magus opus Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995) is that ever since Plato carved out the basic vocabulary of metaphysics by making everything turn on clear-cut distinctions between ideal/material, appearance/reality, subject/object (ad infinitum) the subsequent history Western civilization has been caught up in a series of intractable dualisms – what Ken Wilber calls our the fractured footnotes to Plato, the result being that traditional metaphysical approaches to religion and spirituality have been proclaimed dead by virtually every major philosopher of the last 100 years.

The final nail in the coffin of metaphysics came with Jacques 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, Essence), but since then there have been a number of attempts at post-metaphysics which claim to answer the question of Being while jettisoning from their self-representations the now discredited adherence to traditional metaphysics - or what is also called the “Myth of the Given”

The first of these attempts, was Heidegger’s call for “the gods before who I can sing and dance” as well as the mystical-poetic turn of his later writings, which were deeply inspired by Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki. 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 Catholic thinker 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.

And now we have Ken Wilber’s IPM which maintains that any holon (or actual occasion) can be known in a post-metaphysical fashion by identifying its Kosmic address - i.e. (as a bare minimum) its Quadrant (perspective) and Level (altitude) – 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 IPM 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 across their respective world-spaces.

So how does this Kosmic Address system of an IPM compare to these previous approaches to post-metaphysics, particularly in relation to the disclosure of spiritual realities? Firstly, specifying the AQAL co-ordinates of any given holon is precisely what one would expect from an IPM. But while the indexing system of an IPM accounts well for phenomena that arise in the manifest world, metaphysics has always been is concerned with the question of Being as such – i.e. “what is the meaning of Being?” and in this respect – i.e. when it comes to spiritual (un-manifest) realities, IPM doesn’t hold up so well.

The basic problem with an IPM is that its Kosmic address system is still metaphysical because constitutes the grounds by which God or Being may enter into the domain of knowledge. In other words, an IPM 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 tends to disrupt any pre-supposed horizon of truth and meaning…

As Heidegger writes in Identity and Difference with a critique of metaphysics (as onto-theology) that also holds for IPM, “the deity can come into philosophy only insofar as philosophy, of its own accord and by its own nature, requires and determines that and how the deity enters it”. In other words, in so far as the indexing system of an IPM permits the objectification and subordination of God to human conceptualization (AQAL), it reflects the hubris that wants to encompass everything within the limits and possibilities of ordinary, descriptive representational thinking…

As post-metaphysical theologian Emmanuel Levinas says, Spirit absolves itself from human knowledge as the intentionality of adequation and appropriation, which means that the notion of God as a source of knowledge to be accumulated and owned constitutes an inappropriate human posture toward the sacred dimension of life, in proper relation to which alone humankind can flourish…

And so while IPM succeeds in formulating a calculus of perspectives for the manifest world that no longer ascribes to any “fixed center of the universe”, it still remains within the metaphysical desire to have God at it’s disposal by rendering ultimate reality intelligible in terms of the distinctions and conceptual categories of ancient Greek thought. The bottom line is that Ken Wilber’s IPM has more in common with the genius of the ancient Greeks than the prophets of Judeo-Christianity, and as far as I can see the real excitement of transcendental experience is found only at the edge of language… and the only way to find that excitement is to test those edges and those limits…To be continued…

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…

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

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 of the Christian Right 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 want 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.

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.