Dr. Freeman

For Part 1 Click here

To continue the surprising and generous response to this post I just want to turn this inquiry upside down and begin by showing that there is indeed a strong and significant overlap between the Integral framework and the basic tenets of the Christianity (at least as I see them). For starters, “Free to be Fully Human” – the creative tension between Freedom (human) and Fullness (divine) at the core of the Integral Life catch-phrase, corresponds exactly to the paradoxical nature of orthodox Christology – where the person of Jesus is held to be 100% divine (free) and 100% human (full).

Moreover, in SES (volume 1 of the Kosmos trilogy), KW also unpacks the interlocking and overlapping conjunction of humanity and divinity (“Free to be fully human”) in Christianity in terms of the Non-dual union of Other-worldly Ascent and This-worldly Descent, which is also an integration Eros and Agape… where Eros is the love of the human (lower) for the divine (higher), and Agape is the love of the divine for the human.

So where the Christian story holds to the Absolute Paradox of God-in-time, in SES Ken also maintains this same kind of secret non-dual union of Eros and Agape: where Ascending and Descending paths are inextricably interwoven, as he writes in his footnotes on the Real: “the realization of the One-in-the-Many and the Many-in-the-One, is, of course, common and definitive of all Non-dual schools”[1] an insight which also points directly to the paradoxical teachings of Jesus and a profound convergence between Integral and Christianity…

In this respect one of the key points of SES is that an emphasis either too much Eros/Ascent or too much Agape/Descent have their own distinctive and correlative pathologies. The shadow of a merely Ascending (Eros) path is called Phobos (a repression or avoidance of the material-sensual world) the characteristic dysfunction of Western monotheistic religion; while the shadow of a merely Descending (Agape) path is Thanatos (a fixation to the material-sensory world) what Freud called the death-drive and something that is commonplace in flatland…

So where the secret Non-dual embrace of Integral can help to re-imagine, re-contextualize or re-configure the Christian tradition, and balance some of the lop-sided perspectives that have prevailed in Western Christianity, there is also something about the Gospel story of “the god-forsaken God” that slips through the AQAL net and offers a distinct alternative to the Eastern (Non-dual) enlightenment traditions.

The (real/apparent?) dissonance here has been put well by Slavoj Zizek (see The Puppet and the Dwarf: the Perverse Core of Christianity 2003) who reminds us that the Great Chain philosophy that underpins the basic orientation of the Integral model is actually a pagan philosophy (as exemplified by Plotinus, the Neo-Platonic mystic-philosopher). That is, the notion that we have to throw off the lower world of the flesh (material-sensory), purify ourselves and advance through higher stages from body to mind to soul to union with the One – is a purely Ascending (or pagan) philosophy… It has nothing to do with the Gospel message that “Jesus is Lord” (i.e. Caesar is not!) and denotes the very movement from the human to the divine (Eros) that Christianity overturns and reverses with the “Logos made flesh” (Agape)…

To get to the heart of the matter, according to Zizek (arguably the most radical Christian thinker alive today), the primordial fact is the “non-coincidence of the Absolute with itself.”[2] This means that God is not at one with God’s self. There is an irreducible gap or tension in the heart of the Real that refuses any proper resolution or any mediation of opposites in a higher synthesis - i.e. there is no such thing as a secret Non-dual union… There is only the inherent gap of the One with itself – an Absolute Paradox - and this is particularly true of the Christ-event, the dividing point of Western history where God becomes “en-fleshed”, fully participates in the worst that the life-process has to offer, and puts radically into question all other man-made religions and philosophies, which in the wake of the crucified One are exposed as barely concealed and all too human attempts at self-deification…

The key difference here is that with Jesus and his death on the Cross, the fundamental gap between humanity and the divine is now radically transposed into God’s own self. This means that the very thing that once seemed to separates us from God (suffering, abandonment, death) is now the very thing that unites us with Him… That is, in my weakness and abandonment, when I am vulnerable and powerless - precisely then I am identified with Christ, the God-man, the one who was also abandoned and powerless on the Cross. As Zizek says, “we are one with God when God is no longer one with Himself, but abandons Himself, ‘internalizes’ the radical distance that separates us from Him. Our radical experience of separation from God is the very feature which unites us with Him – only when I experience the infinite pain of separation from God do I share an experience with God Himself (Christ on the Cross).”[3] For Zizek, the basic message here is that “God now trusts us” (i.e. the supernatural mythic God that guarantees an orderly universe is dead), and he goes on to argue that this is the only original freedom and fullness available to the Western tradition.

So in Christ, God becomes Incarnate (finite, temporal) and descends into the pain and messiness of life, God internalizes the painful gap between the human and the divine and becomes one of us, a broken, imperfect and suffering creature… and this Agape (descending) path is in direct contradiction to pagan (and Eastern) religions in which human are to purify themselves and move to the higher spheres of the Great Chain of Being.

So where Christianity finds an inseparable union with God in identifying with Christ crucified, the love of God in Christ is a radical disclosure of the “non-coincidence of the Absolute with itself”, the gaping wound in the heart of God’s own self… as German theologian Jurgen Moltmann says: God cannot love if God cannot make himself vulnerable.3 And just as Christian gospels tell us that God is radically present to us precisely when God is not at one with God’s self, the paradoxes of Jesus on the Kingdom of God also renounce all attempts to collapse this minimal difference (or irreducible gap between opposites) by either reducing one aspect to the other or enacting a “higher” synthesis of opposites.

The point here is that there is a paradox at the heart of things, or what Zizek calls a “structure of imbalance”– a paradox that was also alluded to by Ken Wilber at the end of SES (1995) when he gives an all too brief prelude to Volume 3 of the Kosmos Trilogy (still as yet unpublished). Given a working title The Spirit of Post-Modernity when summarizing the basic contours of Volume 3 Ken says that all of our endless dualisms (agency/communion, coherence/correspondence, integration /differentiation, etc) are fated to battle it out forever, with no side ever, ever ultimately winning – and here we have what Zikek calls “the Real of irreducible tensions as such”, where Yin and Yang never find any ultimate reconciliation.

So there is an irreducible tension, gap or antagonism at the heart of the Kosmos, and in the Incarnation (the central mystery of Christianity) what we call God is precisely that which is fully present (and therefore becomes real) in the midst of this absolute contradiction… And in the same way, just as the teachings of Jesus challenge and overturn the ‘rational order’ of the pagan universe with a paradoxical reversal of meaning – or a “weird intrusion” that interrupts the semantic code of the default (pre-given) world - Christ himself is the ultimate diabolic figure, insofar as diabolos (to separate, to tear apart the One into Two) is the opposite of symbolos (to gather and unify).

As the Absolute Paradox (the irreducible gap in the heart of the Real) Christ brought the “sword, not peace,” in order to disturb the existing harmonious unity and turn the world as we know it inside out and upside down. Thus the Christian stance is radically different from the teachings of New Age (pagan) philosophy and Western Buddhism which claim that the universe is the abyss of the primordial Ground in which all “false” opposites - good and evil, appearance and reality, light and dark, etc. - coincide. Christianity proclaims as the highest action precisely what New Age paganism condemns as the source of all evil—the gesture of separation, a principle of ir-reconciliation, an event of rupture, a drawing of the line, a singular truth-event, a clinging to an element that disturbs the balance of the All…

This is a pretty radical position but as far as I can see the paradoxes of Christianity are thoroughly orthodox, and they also evidenced in the parabolic structure of Jesus’ teachings on the Kingdom … And while there is indeed space for convergence between the Non-dual embrace of Integral and Christianity, as Zizek says of the New Age philosophy of ‘cosmic balance’, which seeks the global harmony opposites: “precisely what I find horrible in these new forms of spirituality is that we are simply losing our sense for these kinds of paradoxes, which are the very core of Christianity.”[4]

So the question here for me is this: Does the Absolute Paradox of Jesus Christ (God-in-time) reveal the secret Non-dual embrace of Eros and Agape, Human and Divine, Ascending and Descending currents, or is this “Kosmic balance” precisely what the paradoxes of Christianity break open and throw into question with the scandal of the crucified God and the non-coincidence of the One with itself?

That is, are we, like a good psychoanalyst to resolve the enigma of existence by supplanting it by an even more radical enigma? I don’t know the answer to this one, but any and all comments would be appreciated…

Does it strike anyone else a little odd that the violence and bloodshed perpetuated in the name of God in this post-911 age makes the New Atheism of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins look like a moral imperative for the 21st century?[1]

For centuries we have been told that without God we are nothing more than egotistical animals fighting it out for our own survival, and now – with the civilized world under increasing threat from religious fundamentalist of all flavors – the traditional equation of religion and the good life has been turned upside-down… In the present day it seems that our human dignity and self-respect needs to be asserted in no uncertain terms against those religious adherents who claim to be hard-wired to the will of God!

But the New Atheist’s rational critique of religion is nothing new - philosophers from Hume to Kant to Nietzsche have been saying this for about 500 years now… But what is new is that the New Atheists are not merely atheists in the traditional sense of the word (i.e. deny belief in the existence of God) – they are “anti-theists “– or as Christopher Hitchens argues in God is Not Great, his latest NY Times best-seller - the notion of God as a Cosmic Designer or a Celestial Dictator that is aware of our every thought and deed is a wicked, poisonous and evil idea - and  we cought to celebrate the fact that it is not true…

From an Integralist’s perspective the conventional wisdom is that Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris (and others) are just throwing out the baby with the bathwater – they want to demolish the archaic, magic and mythic versions of God but they will not allow the rational, post-modern and integral versions of God any legitimacy… But if we take a closer look this is not so!

Christopher Hitchens on Transcendence

A contrarian philosopher with a razor-sharp wit and a blatant disregard for all things sacred, Christopher Hitchens has made a career out of exploding liberal illusions (see his formidable critiques of pop culture icons Bill Clinton, Princess Diana and Mother Theresa). However, while he argues that the bad things innate to our species are strengthened and sanctified by religion, Hitchens does have an unexpected open-ness to what he calls “the order of the transcendent” or the mystical dimensions of human experience.

With a kind of `luminous” faith in humankind, Hitchens at least starts out by affirming the Socratic oath of ultimate Not-Knowing that launched the Western philosophical tradition, where his definition of an educated person is that you have some idea how ignorant you are.

But moreover, he also declares his appreciation for mystical dimension of human experience (i.e. higher states of consciousness) – what he calls “the numinous” or “the transcendent” – and gives examples of where this sublime dimension can be encountered in everyday life: the beauties of science, the extraordinary marvels of nature, the wonder and consolations of philosophy, the infinite splendors of literature and poetry – all of which have mystical and devotional aspects that Hitchens is quite prepared to honor and include in his otherwise dark and ironic view of the world…

In all of these pursuits, Hitchens claims that there may be found a sense of awe and reverence that does not depend at all on any of our man made religions – and he verges on an Integral (or second-tier) perspective here in so far as his openness to the transcendent dimension of life is also one that is often bored and sickened by what passes for spirituality in the New Age - ghost stories, UFO tales, tarot charts and the barely veiled narcissism of The Secret, etc…

Richard Dawkin’s Mysticism

Probably the world’s most steadfast and notorious atheist, Richard Dawkins was up until recently the professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University.

From this colorful writings on Darwinian evolution as a deeper, richer more astonishing account of human origins than what is offered by the Genesis myth, to his most recent interview-debate with Francis Collins[2] (See Time Magazine “God vs. Science” - Sunday, Nov. 05, 2006), Dawkins is also keenly aware of the perpetually surprising and astonishing nature of the world revealed by evolutionary biology and modern science.

As Dawkins states to Collins on the belief in God “But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea”, refutable – but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect… I don’t see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it’s going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.”

Right there we have a statement that any Integralist can whole heartedly affirm, - God is bigger than our minds can contain - and furthermore, according to Dawkins: “There is mystery in the universe, beguiling mystery… There is mystery but not magic, strangeness beyond the wildest imagining, but no spells or witchery, no arbitrary miracles.”

So Dawkins is no denier of the Mystery – he does accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. “To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God–it’s that that seems to me to close off the discussion.”

In his Un-weaving the Rainbow, the positive message throughout is Dawkins’ impulses to awe, reverence – the same impulse to and wonder that leads other scientists, philosopher and poets to mysticism… He claims that the scientist has the same wonder, the same sense of the profound, as the mystic, but with an additional impulse: let’s find out what we can about it… And in close parallel with the core driver of an Integral approach he concludes the final two paragraphs of this book by saying that human beings are the only animal with a sense of purpose in life, and that our true purpose should be to construct a comprehensive model of how the universe works, i.e. a Kosmology

And with that ultimate view of things, Dawkins would do well to read Ken Wilber’s latest work on post-metaphysical spirituality — a Kosmic Giga-glossary that spans the entire spectrum of humanities experience of the Divine – from volcano gods of primitive tribes to the post-conventional claims of the world’s most realized mystics such as Meister Eckhart or Sri Aurobindo…

Sam Harris on Buddhist philosophy

Another one of the most outspoken atheists in the world today, Sam Harris is also a practitioner of Buddhist meditation, as a tried and tested path to see clearly into the true nature of consciousness.

For Harris Buddhism is more a science than a religion, for a person can embrace the Buddha’s teaching, and even become a genuine Buddhist contemplative without believing anything on insufficient evidence. The same cannot be said of the teachings for faith-based religion, for which there is very little empirically tested evidence. In many respects, then, Buddhism is very much like science. One starts with the hypothesis that using attention in the prescribed way (meditation), and engaging in or avoiding certain behaviors (ethics), will bear the promised result (wisdom and psychological well-being). This spirit of empiricism animates Buddhism to a unique degree. For this reason, the methodology of Buddhism, if shorn of its religious trappings, could be one of our greatest resources as we struggle to further develop humanities spiritual self-understanding. As Sam Harris writes in The End of Faith,

“Attentive readers will have noticed that I have been very hard on religions of faith–Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even Hinduism–and have not said much that is derogatory of Buddhism. This is not an accident. While Buddhism has also been a source of ignorance and occasional violence, it is not a religion of faith, or a religion at all, in the Western sense… the esoteric teachings of Buddhism offer the most complete methodology we have for discovering the intrinsic freedom of consciousness, unencumbered by any dogma… it would be intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge its preeminence as a system of spiritual instructions.”

So where the conventional critique of the New Atheist movement is that it’s critique of religious myth and superstition throws out the baby with the bath water by denying higher, deeper forms of spirituality (based on direct experience not beliefs), it is actually the case that all three of the major authors driving this cultural phenomenon we call the New Atheism are mystics or one sort or another, and probably just lack a language that they can use to express their sheer astonishment that anything exists at all…

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[2] Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993, Collins headed a multinational 2,400-scientist team that co-mapped the 3 billion biochemical letters of our genetic blueprint. In The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press), he laid out the arguments for belief in God. Collins believes that studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God’s creation. If your mind is open about whether God might exist, Collins argues that you can point to aspects of the universe that are consistent with that conclusion.

Jesus and the Kingdom of God

In a way that seems to go beyond the requirements of any other of the world’s religious faiths, Christianity stakes its truth-claims on certain historical events – particularly the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. As the event of God’s most explicit self-communication to human beings, Christianity is about something that happened in world-history, where the person of Jesus is the Christ – the “Logos made flesh”, the embodied story of God in time.

So it is this Jesus, the one who absorbs evil with love, that one whois radically present in the tangible depths of human suffering and death, that we must turn to if we are to speak about God from a Christian perspective.

And when we begin to peel back the layers of literal-mythic Christianity (amber), with the tools of post/modern critical Jesus scholarship (orange science, green hermeneutics) the most uncontested fact today is that Jesus of Nazareth is the one who announced the Kingdom of God (basileia tou theou).

References to “Kingdom of God” are found more than one hundred times in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), and so our ability to understand who Jesus is and the origins of his historical mission is intimately linked to his understanding of the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom that is disclosed to us today in the enigmatic twists and turns of his recorded parables.

So with the tool of post/modern critical-historical scholarship, I want to briefly re-construct here what Jesus may have actually meant by the Kingdom of God, in order to isolate the Founder of Christianity from what was Founded in his name (the Church) in the hope of getting a discussion started on what an Integral Christianity might look like…

The Parable of the Leaven - Luke 13:20-21 (also see Matthew 13:33, Gospel of Thomas)

“What shall I compare the Kingdom of God to? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount[i]of flour until it worked all through the dough.”

The parable of the leaven received the highest number of red votes of any parable among the participants of the Jesus Seminar, and is therefore considered (arguably) the most authentic of the sayings that have been attributed to Jesus in the gospels and handed down to us.

Leaven is made by taking a piece of bread and storing it in a damp, dark place until mould forms, and in the ancient world leaven was a well-known symbol or metaphor of moral corruption.[ii] So in 1st century Israel there’s an ancient association between leaven (moldy yeast) as “profane” and the un-leavened as “sacred”, e.g. the holy Jewish festival of the Unleavened Bread.

In this parable Jesus invokes a deliberate and unexpected reversal of the old standard, whereby leaven – which is held to be corrupt, is really the source of what is sacred. With Good News for those who are considered corrupt/sinful/degenerate by the established structures of power, the shocking reversal of expectation uttered with the simple word “leaven” would have thrown Jesus’ audience utterly off guard.

And just as the process of leavening is worked through until everything is corrupted[iii], those relegated to the outside of the Jewish socio-religious code would have been are astonished and overjoyed, while those inside the Temple would have been perplexed and confused, as Jesus overturns and abolishes and the boundary between the sacred and the profane and offends the deeply held religious sensibilities of the status quo.

For this itinerant Jew is essentially saying the last thing that people want or expect to hear about the Kingdom of God: it is in the concealment of something small and corrupt that the revelation of the Kingdom becomes manifest.[iv] The parable of the Leaven is typical of many of Jesus’ many pronouncements[v] and it provides a very good indication of precisely what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God. It is a decidedly “un-kingly” kingdom, one that explodes our assumptions about the very meaning of Kingdom, and one that offers a permanent challenge to our religious and political convictions about precisely who or what is sacred and profane

The Parable of the Mustard Seed

Mark 4:30-32 (also see Matthew 13:31-32, Luke 13:18-19, Thomas 20)[vi]

30Again he said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? 31It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. 32 Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.”[vii]

In this parable Jesus again reverses a 1st century symbol for the Kingdom, this time the mighty cedar of Lebanon, which was widely regarded to be a central guiding metaphor for Israel’s messianic hopes. However Jesus “lampoons the whole apocalyptic tradition”[viii] by comparing the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds while finishing with images of ‘trees’ where ‘birds made their home’ in the same breath to conjure up conventional associations with the mighty cedar of Lebanon (in Ezekiel and Daniel).

But it not simply that the mustard plant starts as the smallest of seeds and grows into a large tree for the birds of the air, it’s arresting impact is further witnessed in that the mustard plant is a relatively short lived shrub or tree that tends to take over domestic agricultural areas[ix] and grow out of control precisely where it is not wanted.

As Crossan describes it, the mustard plant is a “pungent shrub with dangerous takeover properties, something you would want in only small and carefully controlled doses - if you could control it”[x] while also attracting birds within these cultivated areas where they are not particularly desired.[xi]

Moreover the mustard plant is a weed, and in ancient Jewish times the planting of mustard seeds in a garden is prohibited by Mosaic Law (Leviticus 19:19).[xii] So the paradoxical shock of Jesus metaphor is not simply that the mustard seed starts small and becomes the largest of all garden plants (which is true enough) but that its bigness is dangerous, deadly and illegal.[xiii]

We can therefore see that Jesus again invokes an arresting reversal of his audience’s background assumptions regarding the Kingdom of God. With a comic inversion of traditional assumptions Jesus pokes fun at the messianic expectations of 1st century Jews by saying that the smallest seed – and that one which grows into the most unruly and undesirable of all plants - is really the new symbol of God’s Kingdom (Empire, Caesar).[xiv]

Of course, by the time the New Testament was written (100 AD), Jesus’ early followers had buried and domesticated the radical edges of these and other subversive teachings. But in it’s original context, it now seems that Jesus used the term Kingdom to express his paradoxical wit, to given added intensity to his provocative message, to pop open awareness with a new configuration of reality that discloses to us what the world would look like if God was running the show…. The fact that much of our current language on the Kingdom of God is no longer dissonant or paradoxical only shows us how we have domesticated it over the last few thousand years…

As an Integrally informed scholar/practitioner, the most perplexing aspect of the Gospel story for me is that the Kingdom of God is not for the best and brightest, not for those who meet the requirements of second-tear awareness, and not for those with turquoise qualifications and credentials, as Paul said of the early Christian apostles,

“Not many were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world… to bring to nothing things that are.” (Cor. I:27-28)

In his privileging of those without privilege, Jesus of Nazareth was more of a Rebel than a King, and his parabolic discourse consistently challenges and overturns this implied structural network of associations between kingdom, power, sovereignty and God. As one recent Jesus scholar put it:

“The Kingdom of God was made – 1st, for children, and those who resembled them; 2nd, for the outcasts of the world, victims of that social arrogance which repulses the good but humble man; 3rd for heretics and schismatics, publicans, Samaritans, and Pagans of Tyre and Sidon… The doctrine that the poor… alone shall be saved, that the reign of the poor is approaching – was, therefore, the doctrine of Jesus.”[xv]

The point here is that the story of Jesus is still a strange, foolish, awkward and dangerous story when read through an Integral (AQAL) lens… The love of God in the scandal of the Cross defies logic while subverting many of our religious, cultural and philosophical assumptions in ushering in a revolutionary understanding of God. For in Christ God is now fully identified with the god-forsaken - as Chesterton said: from all the religions of the world it is only in Christianity and Jesus’ cry of desolation from the Cross does it look like God, for an instant, became an atheist…

So the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a radical paradox – it does not make everything make sense, it disturbs and unsettles and throws everything off balance… So for me (and I would appreciate any comment on this thorny issue) there is this deep tension between the second-tier “elitism” of Integral - an excellence to which everyone is invited, and the undeniable privileging of the outcast, the afflicted, the powerless in the Gospel story of Jesus – who is for me the human face of God…

As Paul writes, those who find their righteousness in Christ “glory in their weakness”… where the love of God is freely given in suffering and the Cross – and where the boundless love of God is revealed to us in the form of an executed criminal, a despised and abandoned heretic…

So there is no getting around the fact that Christ shows up not at the top of the socio-cultural pyramid, but on the margins, as the menace at the Temple gates, or as the mustard seed that slip through the crack s of the established order and de-centers all fixed enters of power and privilege with good news for the poor and the permanent possibility of offense for the sanctified who put themselves on the throne of the divine…

In contrast to meeting the requirements of an ILP as one who follows the way Jesus, my main form of spiritual practice is to risk letting go of my confidence and eloquence, and to confess not the abundance but the exhaustion of my verbal, intellectual and spiritual resources… I am only really praying when I acknowledge that I do not know how to pray.

Cameron

[i] The Greek here is “three satas” which is about 22 liters – a very large amount and enough to feed about 100 people. It also reminds Jesus’ listeners of the story of the angels who give a prophecy concerning Issac’s birth in Genesis 18, among the items Sarah prepares for them is cakes made from “three satas” of flour…

[ii]For more see Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (1989)

[iii] Scott 2001, p.27-34

[iv] The leaven is “concealed” krypto (Luke), enkrypto (in Matthew) is a much more negative word for hiding (it means to keep secret) than the more neutral kalypto. The phrase “by a woman” is also an unexpected reversal and a problematic representative of the sacred. Woman as the un-favored gender role in the Roman Empire, subject to fathers and husbands and at a disadvantage when it comes to purity codes, so Jesus’ use of woman as a symbol of the sacred is again arresting and provocative

[v] Funk 1996, p.157

[vi]Thomas has ‘falls on disturbed ground’ which is absolutely right, botanically. Mark has ‘is sown’ which is absolutely wrong… it’s a weed… but this fits with Mark’s chapter 4 ’sowing’ theme. Matthew and Luke (who used Mark) also have ‘sown’.

[vii]Only the version of this saying in Thomas refers to the herb as a “plant”. Mark 4 refers to is as a “shrub”, Matthew 12 as both “shrub” and “tree” and Luke 13 as a “tree”. In actual botany, the plant is called SINAPI (Greek) and in this parable it was an annual wild herb that never grew to a size that any Mediterranean person would ever call a tree. (Mahlon Smith CrossTalk - 14 Jun 1998)

[viii]Crossan 1991, p.277

[ix] Funk 1996, p.157

[x] In putting the distinction between insiders and outsiders into question, the mustard seed is “is a startling metaphor, but it would be interpreted quite differently by those, on the one hand, concerned about their fields, their crops, and their harvests, and by those, on the other, for whom fields, crops, and harvest were always the property of others.” - John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994)

[xi] Crossan 1991 as Roman natural historian Pliny the elder (23-79AD) writes, mustard “with its pungent taste and fiery effect is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild… when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.” Pliny (the Elder) in Natural History 29.54.170 (LOEB), p.170-171 quoted in Scott 2001, p. 37

[xii] Douglas Oakman, “It is hard to escape the conclusion that Jesus deliberately likens the Kingdom of God to a weed.” (1986, p.127 quoted in Crossan 1991, p.278)

[xiii]Crossan 1991, p.278 In further establishing the mustard plants (Brassica Nigra) subversive meaning, it has been likened by Smith to “a colonizing annual that appears in disturbed ground and, often, after sturdier plants appear in a few years, disappears. This might have parabolic implications.” (CrossTalk - 14 Jun 1998)

[xiv] Funk 1996, p.157

[xv]Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus 1972, p.194-196

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…

As a Good Friday gesture I want to take a fresh look at the crucifixion of Jesus and develop an Integral short-circuit between the scandal of the Cross and the Always Already truth of the Non-dual traditions of the East, articulated so brilliantly by Ken Wilber in the last chapter of The Eye of Spirit (1998).

We can recall briefly that the radical secret of the Non-dual traditions is that you were never truly lost and that there is “nothing to attain” for ultimately: there is only Spirit. And therefore Non-dual awareness – as ones ever-present condition and True Nature - is not so much hard to find but impossible to avoid. Other ways of speaking of this profound realization on Non-dual Emptiness include: Primordial awareness, One Taste, the Is-ness of what is, I Am-ness, the Already Free Self, your Original Face and Consciousness without an object – and while these words are just fingers pointing to the moon and not to be confused with the moon itself, the basic point is that ultimate Reality is not something that can be attained, rather it is always already present and therefore impossible to avoid…

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Now, if we turn to Christ crucified and the scandal of the Cross we find the exact same teaching - but in a diametrically opposite form and context, for here also ‘the Real’ is something that is ever-present and therefore impossible to avoid… That is, in the last agonizing words of the crucified Jesus “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”(Mark 15:33-34) there is also sense of being directly exposed to the ultimate reality of “what is” – but in a contradictory and radically unexpected fashion.

For the extreme physical, emotional and psychological suffering experienced by Jesus on the Cross entails the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant of existence. And at this point, right where his suffering is “ever-present and impossible to avoid”, Jesus is riveted to being, haunted by the impossibility of escape, where the painfulness of his pain lies in the sense of being pinned to existence, directly exposed to rock bottom reality and hard-wired to the unavoidable is-ness of human existence in the here and now.[i]

In other words, in the crucified and god-forsaken Jesus there is an absence of all refuge from the present moment, nowhere else to turn, an impossibility of fleeing or retreating from reality that is virtually identical with the Non-dual pointing-out instructions of the East that the ultimate Truth is “not hard to find but impossible to avoid”.

To be sure, the unavoidable suffering of the crucified Jesus is not about standing tall against overwhelming forces and coming out on top, like a Mel Gibson’s version of Jesus in the passion of the Christ.  This kind of secret pleasure in masochistic suffering is one thing, but it is quite another thing to be beaten senseless, reduced to “crying and sobbing”, to be turned inside out, reduced from a subject to subjection, where my activity is thrown in reverse into passivity, which is what happens when suffering “attains its purity.”[ii]

The supreme responsibility of following Christ turns here into supreme irresponsibility, into infancy, where to undergo the Christian experience is to return to an infantile state of shaking and sobbing… where we pray and weep in the power of powerlessness and groan inwardly for the fulfillment of something, we know not what. So to die to self in Christ is to return to this state of extreme irresponsibility – for as Jesus says: one must become like a child to enter the Kingdom - and this is also a profoundly Non-dual state for there is no longer anything between I (self) and it (suffering).[iii]

There is, then, a subversive message in the Cross, a message more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss. For in the anguish of Jesus’ cry of dereliction there is a radical suggestion that  right here - at the very turning point of world-history - God is not at one with God’s self. That is, in the crucified Jesus – God was forsaken of God… there is a gaping wound in the heart of God’s own self, where we encounter God’s decisive self-communication to humanity in the person and place we least expect… in the very midst of this senseless nightmare, where we cannot make things make sense… and where God himself seemed for an instant to be an atheist.[iv]

The radical message here is the impossibility of Nirvana, the impossibility of us escaping from the instant of existence into the fictitious peace of Nothingness beyond the pull of contradictory forces. And furthermore, it is precisely this absence of refuge from suffering that strips away the mask of the false self and exposes the survival-lies and character defenses with which it masquerades in the world.

So the message of Good Friday is that enlightened awareness is occasioned not so much in a vast Emptiness where the entire universe arises inside your own primordial awareness, but in pain of the present – where salvation (metanoia) is occasioned in the very instant of suffering, where suffering is the precise realization that “I cannot escape myself”. From this Christ-centered perspective spiritual awakening or realization eventuates when we face up to the cold hard truth: the absence of all refuge from the gaping wound of existence where the incomprehensible Mystery is revealed in a suffering, vulnerable and broken human being.[v] And so Jesus is here the ultimate divine Fool, deprived of all majesty and dignity, the one who is ‘Lord of lords’ precisely for those who are little in their own sight, conscious of their brokenness and powerlessness, astonished by the power of the Cross to make the impossible possible and who thereby cast themselves before the Cross trusting alone in his “mercy within mercy within mercy.” (Thomas Merton)

The crucified One also overturns all we thought we knew about transcendence, about a God who is identified as the one in control and having all power. And here it could be said that Christianity renounces the Jewish God of the Great Beyond, the un-nameable Real that resides eternally behind the curtain of appearances… For in holding still before the crucified God the Mystery behind this veil of tears is now the gaping wound in God’s own self. To be sure, it is not that we “renounce transcendence” in a this-worldly embrace of human finitude and mortality, but that the Great Beyond (Heaven, the Other-world) becomes accessible precisely in and through this vulnerable, suffering Jesus that we love. So far from being a projection of what is highest and strongest in man, the purely spiritual dimension towards which all humans strive, the love of God is a fragile appearance that can only really shine through in an imperfect and suffering creature. For just as we love someone because of their lack, their vulnerability to suffering, their helplessness, as German theologian Jurgen Moltmann says: God cannot love if God cannot make himself exquisitely sensitive to our pain and vulnerable to our suffering.[vi]

Furthermore, at this point where the crucified Jesus’ cries out in god-forsaken agony and doubt, there is also an existential confession of radical Not-Knowing where we refuse the temptation to construct a meaningful universe that makes perfect sense of everything. For where we no longer demand a causal chain reason to provide a meaningful story to account of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (also see the Book of Job, which anticipates the crucifixion) and where we see through the New Age notion of ‘bad karma’ and challenge simplistic conclusions about the link between right behavior and reward… and when allow ourselves to acknowledge an irreparable loss that cannot be compensated for or covered over, it is then that we release the event of a new birth (resurrection) as the condition upon which our true nature in Spirit is awakened.

As the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams tells us, when we strip it all back, when we shatter the precious illusions we hold about ourselves, when we penetrate the ignorance of Samsara and dig beneath all of the habitual thought-forms of our socially constructed reality we encounter not one but two undeniable realities, two different but inseparable realities that are “not hard to find but impossible to avoid”: irreconcilable pain and inexhaustible love.

With the influx of the Non-dual traditions of the East to the West we have been given the Non-dual secret of ever-present Awareness – “You are always already awake!”, “There is only the enlightened mind!” Of course, this has always been called Grace in the Judeo-Christian West – the ever-present self-offering of God’s to each and all, a radically free gift of God’s own self that is also “not hard to find but impossible to avoid”.

And in the crucified Christ of Christianity we encounter the other undeniable and unavoidable reality: the irreconcilable pain of human existence. And apart from this theology of the Cross (which originates with the Apostle Paul), the glorious Resurrection that follows (and the Eastern equivalent of Enlightenment) is only a side-stepping of pain—the same sort of “avoidance of legitimate suffering” that Carl Jung names as the root of all neurosis.

An encounter with unconditional love makes us divine and an encounter with irreparable loss makes us fully human… Love and Death, two equal but opposite realities both of which are “impossible to avoid” and both of which are ultimately inter-wined at the innermost core of our experience of being human, each one unhinging and deepening the other. Or as Ken Wilber put it so succinctly, as one’s awakening gets deeper, the pain of human existence “hurts more but it bothers us less”, that is, as we deepen our capacity for living consciously we begin, sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly, to let in more of both: more suffering and more love…

Again, the matter becomes too difficult for language at this point, but encountering the love of God in the impossibility of fleeing or retreating from suffering also reminds me of the story that Elie Wiesel reports in his book on Auschwitz called Night:

Two Jewish men and a child were hanged. The other prisoners were forced to watch. The men died quickly. The boy lived on in torture for a long while. Then someone behind me said: “Where is God?” and I was silent… After half an hour the boy’s body still convulsed and shook in the throes of death and my companion cried out again: “Where is God? Where is he?” And a voice in me answered: “Where is God? . . . He hangs there from the gallows…”

[i] Caputo, J. D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, Indiana Press 2007

[ii] Levinas, E. quoted in Caputo 2007, p.332

[iii] Levinas, E. quoted in Caputo 2007, p.332

[iv] G. K. Chesterton “That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever… In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss… a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt… When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. [Mt 27:46 quoting Ps 22:1] And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt… Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.” [cf The Everlasting Man CW2:344]

[v] “A Cross is a blunt and graceless form. It has not the completeness and satisfying quality of a circle. It does not have to grace of a parabola or the promise of a long curve… A cross speaks not of unity but of brokenness, not of harmony but ambiguity, it is a form of tension and not rest… The cross is the symbol because the whacks of life take that shape… And unless you have a crucified God, you don’t have a big enough God.” Joseph Sittler quoted in Westhelle, V. “The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross” Fortress Press, Minneapolis 2006.

[vi] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, trans. R. A. Wilson and J. Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1974).