Dr. Freeman

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

Click here for For Part 1

“The 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.” John Dominic Crossan The Dark Interval (1980)

My own approach to post-metaphysics (see the Source Code blog on this site) calls us to live with paradox - the creative tension between opposing perspectives. And since paradoxes are un-objectifiable (i.e. structurally open to Not-Knowing) and since they have no “fixed center of meaning” they refuse to be pinned down by the rational accounting of metaphysics (including an Integral Post-Metaphysics) which is still deeply conditioned by the traditional assumptions that underpin the rational-scientific demand for evidence and the quest for cognitive certainty. In other words, the paradoxical nature of reality frustrates our desire to possess or “get a handle” on the Mystery, for truth be told the mystery of God simply does not depend on what we think about it…

Historically, the foremost example of paradox being utilized as a skillful means for facilitating God-realization is found in the parabolic discourse of Jesus of Nazareth who consistently disrupted conventional wisdom (the myth of the given) by celebrating the ambiguity of those truth-events that show up at the very limits of human experience…

To draw out the key difference between Ken Wilber’s IPM and Jesus’ paradoxes we can briefly refer to the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss who famously argued that “in every system of myth we will find a persistent sequence of binary discriminations as inside/outside, up/down, one/many, followed by a ‘mediation’ of the paired categories thus distinguished.”

This description of myth is a perfect description of what Integral theory claims to do. That is, the basic contours of Integral theory perform the same specific task of reconciling or mediating opposites. The conviction that ultimate reconciliation is possible is the heart of all mythic religion, so much so that more important than the proposed solution itself (religious or philosophical) is the belief in the possibility of a solution…

Now, the opposite of myth (i.e. a story that reconciles opposites) is paradox which creates contradiction and dissonance where previously there was seamless certainty, bringing not peace but a sword. Jesus’ paradoxes are hidden in stories like the Prodigal Son and the Friend at Midnight, stories that shatter the deep structure of the commonly accepted world (which can only paste over the cracks through which the Kingdom irrupts) and thereby render clear and evident to us the relativity and historical contingency of the conventional world…

Jesus’ paradoxes they do not furnish us with easy assurance of myth but challenge us with an explosive reversal of meaning that they removes our defences and makes us vulnerable to God… In this manner Jesus’ parables show us the seams and edges of “the Myth of the Given” (traditional metaphysics) by shattering expectations and creating contradiction within a situation of complacent security…

So rather than providing a pre-packaged program of rules and procedures for admission into the Kingdom of God, the paradoxical strategy of Jesus disrupts the quest for cognitive certainty and thereby sets up the necessary conditions for the decision of faith with an ‘aporetic anxiety’ that invites and challenges one to follow to this singular teacher’s own realization of the Kingdom of God. By interrupting commonplace metaphysical assumptions with an outrageous abrogation of our fundamental laws of logic, the post-metaphysical heart of Jesus’ teachings consistently refuse to give us straightforward answers in response to our quest for what is Real, as his paradoxes call for a free movements of faith that is made in the face of an impossible situation, involving risk, uncertainty and an openness to the unexpected that is grounded in a confession of ultimate not-knowing (which is itself the very occasion of Satori or Enlightenment!)…

In contrast to the logical calculus and pin point clarity of an IPM, in view of the post-metaphysical paradoxes of Jesus an authentic faith commitment is structurally blind and takes root only when the road seems obscure and when the storm clouds of life buffet us, when we are overwhelmed, when we stumble, and fall, and yet still move forward in spite of all evidence to the contrary… For just as Kierkegaard wrote, the “infinite passion of inwardness” (i.e. Christian faith) that has nothing to do with objective explanation at all, and as such the real journey only begins when forgo all metaphysical anchors and confess that we don’t see directly where we are going…

So in my view, Christian paradox is Integral grown self-aware and self-critical… Paradox (e.g. security comes from accepting insecurity as our mortal lot) enhances our knowledge of ignorance, which is the beginning of philosophy and the heart of mystical experience… So where Mythic consolations (e.g. the AQAL co-ordinates of an Integral Post-Metaphysics) establish a world, Paradox subverts this world with a story deliberately calculated to show the limitations of myth, and shatters its presupposed categories so that its relativity becomes apparent…

And by keeping us humble through the dark night of truth, where the idolatry of metaphysics in its demand for cognitive certainty is exposed for the vital-lie that it is, we are precisely therein and thereby broken open to an encounter with transcendence…

In all in Jesus’ teachings, the Kingdom eventuates when ones world is overturned and challenged in its depths… The powerful distinction in Integral theory between exoteric (bad) and esoteric (good) religion can therefore be defined thus: exoteric religion gives one the final word about “reality” and thereby excludes the authentic experience of Mystery, and esoteric religion (paradoxical) continually and deliberately subverts final words about “reality” and thereby introduces the possibility of transcendence.

So Jesus’ paradoxes ask us why things might not be just as well some other way rather than the way we expected and presumed – they tell us that the reverse side also has a reverse side… and remind us that God, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, does not play the game by our rules…

We can conclude this key distinction between the logical clarity IPM and the enigmatic vision and challenge of Jesus with Heidegger who wrote that “in the openness of authentic disclosure (the meaning of Being) we admit the possibility of something unknown, even contradictory, to our world; for we put into question our own faculties rather than blindly measuring and evaluating what is real on the basis of these.”

And as Kierkegaard reminds us, “Everyone shall be remembered, but each became great in proportion to his expectation. One became great by expecting the possible; another by expecting the eternal, but he who expected the impossible became greater than all…”

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

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’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.