Dr. Freeman

Hello friends

My first book has just been published by Peter Lang and is out now!
 
It’s titled: Post-Metaphysics and the Paradoxical Teachings of Jesus: the Structure of the Real… and you can check it at and even take a peek inside here…

It’s revolutionary stuff… Within its 330 pages I uncover the authentic voice-print of Jesus’ radical teachings on the Kingdom of God and thereby outlines a new approach to theological language after the end of metaphysics.

By showing that the paradoxical deep structure of Jesus’ most radical teachings survives the Death of God and the deconstruction of metaphysics in twentieth-century continental philosophy, this book aims to reconstruct the original teachings of Jesus in a way that can begin a new conversation on what it means to be a Christian in a post-Christian world, while drawing on a remarkable range of supporting material, including John D. Caputo’s award-winning theological appropriation of Derridas deconstruction, the pioneering work of John Dominic Crossan on the parables of Jesus, and the novel insights of Jesus Seminar scholars Robert Funk and Branden Scott. Beginning with questions surrounding the end of metaphysics in Martin Heideggers existentialist philosophy and moving on to the ethico-political dimensions of Derridas work, this volume examines Nicholas of Cusas notion of God as the coincidence of opposites, Buddhist genius Nagarjunas dialectic of Emptiness, and the Hindu concept of non-duality in raising the possibility of a post-metaphysical theology. Following an original unpacking of the parables of Jesus, the central thesis is woven together with reference to Moltmanns important work on the crucified God, as well as Kierkegaard and the Absolute Paradox, negative/mystical theology in the Christian tradition, twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro, and aspects of Nietzsche, Thomas Aquinas, Plato, Aristotle, Meister Eckhart, G. K. Chesterton, Slavoj Zizek and Ken Wilber.

Here’s a couple of reviews to hopefully spark your interest:
 
“Cameron Freeman breathes a new life of interaction with the Word into the familiar stories of Jesus that we so easily and dangerously think we understand. Freeman shows how continuously subverting is the teaching of Jesus towards all complacency and all attempts to tame that radical knowing of God that is the Gospel and that has changed the way human beings see God and themselves. With intelligence and careful scholarship this book also transmits that first thrill of seeing what Jesus is really getting at and the relief of seeing superficial interpretations collapse.”

-Father Laurence Freeman director of the World Community of Christian Meditation and widely published author

“In this fascinating book, Cameron Freeman has done two things usually considered to be between the improbable and the impossible. First, he says something new and interesting about the parables of Jesus by pondering them not just as discrete stories but as a total discourse. Second, he challenges the long-held ascendancy of philosophy over theology by using the deep structure of that parabolic complex as normative not just for Christian theology but even for post-modern philosophy itself.”

-John Dominic Crossan world renowned New Testament scholar, best-selling author and co-founder of the Jesus Seminar

“This work undercuts the assumption that post modernism’s criticism of Western metaphysics leads to either nihilism or atheism. Dr. Freeman takes to heart the criticism of Heidegger and Derrida and uses their insights to illuminate the heart of the Christian message making it accessible to the post modern mind. It is an invaluable contribution that will set the pace of theology well into the future.”

-Rev. Gregory J. Mayers, C.Ss.R., Zen Teacher of the Sanbo-Kyodan Religious Foundation and of the Empty Cloud Sangha, Director of the East-West Meditation Program at Mercy Center in Burlingame, CA 
 
Take a look and buy yourselves a copy. Why? Because the paradoxical secret in radical center of Christ’s teachings is guaranteed to shatter the complacency of civilized normalacy with a weird intrusion from the Real… for Truth is not so much “inner peace” but a painful, traumatic encounter with the dazzling obscurity of the midnight sun!
The reverse side also has a reverse side.

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…”

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.