The State of the Integral Enterprise

[JimmyAberg]

Källa:
http://integrallife.com/node/54698

We need honest feedback from other people (second-person perspectives) to compensate for our own blind spots. After all, it is far easier to see other people’s limitations than our own, and 2000 years ago Jesus famously asked, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3). Therefore, relationships aimed at recognizing and releasing psychological, spiritual, and developmental limitations are invaluable. There is no substitute for dialogue and feedback.


Of course, there are many ways to obtain feedback. These include authentic relationships, as well as formal disciplines such as psychotherapy, counseling, and coaching. However, perhaps the supreme methods for obtaining second-person feedback and coaching are intimate relationships and marriage. At their best, intimate relationships can be superb antidotes to self-deception and self-importance. Intimate partners see and suffer from our foibles more than anyone else, which is why one of the best tests of enlightenment may be that of the psychiatrist Arthur Deikman who suggests, “Ask the spouse.”


Romantic relationships are not alone in offering feedback and learning opportunities. In fact, any relationship between people committed to honest dialogue and mutual learning can be psychologically and spiritually enhancing. One of the most effective ways to transform a relationship into a powerful facilitator of growth is to make an explicit agreement to use the relationship for mutual learning and awakening. Once the agreement is made, you have given each other permission to tell the truth, give feedback, and do whatever best serves mutual learning, healing, growth, and awakening. At their best, spiritual communities are based on such agreements. Usually, these agreements are implicit, but can become more powerful if made explicit. The spiritual discipline that focuses most centrally and elegantly on peer relationships as the key to healing and liberation is the curiously titled but spiritually profound, A Course in Miracles (Anonymous, 2007).

General Traps of Multiple Stages


Devaluing One’s Previous Stage. There seems to be an automatic developmental tendency to devalue one’s previous perspective and stage, as well as those people and institutions still centered in it. This is probably most obvious in adolescents. However, integral practitioners are not immune. For integral practitioners, a common trap is devaluing the previous stages of individualistic ego development and the green meme of value development, as well as those people and institutions that espouse them. This raises an intriguing question: “What are the optimal attitudes to cultivate and hold towards people at different developmental stages?” Perhaps they are the following:


  1. Care and compassion for those at earlier stages, because these are the people we may be privileged to help and serve.
  2. Love for those at the same stage, because these are our peers, our community, and our sangha.
  3. Gratitude to those at later stages, because these are our teachers, role models, and way finders.


Egocentric Misuse of One’s New Stage or Perspective. This is the tendency to misuse a new stage or perspective in order to bolster one’s ego and esteem. At the least this produces a sense of specialness. At worst, it spawns inflation and grandiosity centered on ideas such as, “I am an integralist” (i.e., using integral ideas to strengthen one’s ego rather than to transcend one’s ego). At spiritual levels, this becomes “spiritual materialism”—the tendency to use spiritual insights and experiences for egocentric purposes (Trungpa, 1975). In my experience, this trap is very hard to avoid. Many a time I have had valuable insights or experiences, and in the next moment found myself fantasizing about how I could use them for fame and recognition. Condemnation of the process and one’s self is no help. Rather, compassion for one’s own humanness, and the necessary limitations that go with it, are useful healing responses.


Overestimating One’s New Stage or Perspective. Whereas the “myth of the given” assumes that there is a world simply awaiting our discovery, more sophisticated philosophies recognize that perception is a creation. What is crucial to recognize is that all perceptions reflect perspectives, and all perspectives are partial and selective. Each perspective both reveals and conceals, clarifies and distorts. However, perspectives and perceptions do not clearly reveal their own limitations. Therefore, it is easy to fall into the trap of overestimating one’s new perspectives and developmental stages. In general, this takes the form of what might be called “perspectival overreach” or “perspectival reductionism.” Here we seek to over-apply the novel perspective or idea, over-interpret phenomena with it, and reduce all phenomena to its purview. At its worst, this becomes the assumption that one has found “The Truth,” instead of a truth.  

[JimmyAberg]

These limitations on understanding transpersonal experiences, especially advanced ones, without direct personal experience can be conceived of in several ways. They can be considered in terms of state-specific knowledge and cross-state transfer (Tart, 2001): developmentally, as stage-specific understanding; epistemologically, as the necessity of opening the “eye of contemplation” (Wilber, 1996); and linguistically, as the difficulty of understanding the signifier (word or term) without having experienced the relevant signified experience (Wilber, 2001). Without such direct experience, the deeper meaning of these concepts—or what philosophers call “higher grades of significance”—will escape us. But what is most problematic is this: We will not recognize that their real meaning and significance are escaping us. Perhaps the best way of illustrating this is with a story:


Imagine an animal finding a novel object. This object is dark and light, has an unfamiliar smell, and tastes terrible. Needless to say, the animal spits it out in disgust. Now imagine that a woman from an illiterate tribe discovers the object. It is very curious indeed—it opens and closes, is soft and flexible, and has squiggly marks on it. Being a smart woman, she soon makes a wonderful discovery: the object is superb for starting fi res. Now imagine that a Western child finds the object. He immediately recognizes it as a book. However, because he cannot read, he has no clue what it says. Then the same object is picked up by a contemporary adult. She begins reading it, but quickly throws it away because she cannot understand it, and it makes bizarre claims about nature of reality. Then the book is picked up by a physicist. He opens it and is awed when he recognizes that it describes a profound new understanding of quantum physics. Finally, the book is found by a woman who is both a physicist and contemplative. She also appreciates the brilliant quantum physics and delights in the new understandings it offers, while simultaneously recognizing the limited ability of all words and concepts to grasp the fundamental nature of reality.


This simple story offers several crucial insights. First, each animal, child and person was correct in their perception. It was non-nutritious, it was useful for starting fires, it was a book—everyone’s perception and understanding were correct. However, their perception and understanding were also partial, and contained no information that the object held deeper meanings (higher grades of significance) waiting to be understood. The crucial point is that we can completely overlook higher grades of significance, yet be completely unaware that we are missing them. In his widely influential critique of scientific materialism, A Guide for the Perplexed, the British economist E. F. Schumacher (1977) described this dilemma:

   When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level [or grade of significance] of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious; an inadequate and impoverished view of reality. (p. 42).

The challenging implication is this: without direct spiritual, transpersonal experience, we may be like the child or ordinary adult looking at the book. We may read about spiritual concepts, we may hear of trans-personal ideas, and we may even appreciate some of the beauty of the higher reaches of the integral model. However, without direct experience of the requisite higher states and stages, their full significance escapes us. And trickiest of all, we will not realize that they are escaping us. Intellectual apprehension alone is not enough in the transpersonal and spiritual domains. Intellectual understanding is important, but is also insufficient.


Just how important this issue is can be judged from the warnings of both Muhammad and the Buddha. Both of them used animal metaphors to describe religious scholars who do not engage in spiritual disciplines. The Buddha described such people as herders of another person’s cattle, while Muhammad likened a mere scholar to an ass carrying a load of books. So how do we foster direct transpersonal experiences and spiritual insights, and thereby make ourselves better able to appreciate the spiritual heights of Integral Theory? Answer: by engaging in spiritual practices and related practices as fully as we can. This is a key requirement for anyone who aspires to truly understand and communicate the integral vision.