Integrative Spirituality: Grounded Contemporary Perspectives

Hey Grey,

I love your text. It's not philosophical on a cognitive point of view, but I'm struck by the energy that I felt reading it… Sounds maybe strange, but it was uplifting.

I'm gonna Check Joe's Garage whole writing… as it really seem interesting.

I'm not sure of the technique of colouring sentences though. But I have to refelct on that more.

Your text opened up horizon.

Love to you

I’m with you brother. I can feel the fear clamping around my throat as I ponder writing my essay for Friday. I love your willingness to be vulnerable here, and I will likely follow your lead and simply let ‘er rip from the moment, however I am feeling tomorrow when I start typing.

I’m feeling a bit unworthy of making any grand pronouncements about Spirituality. I’m just a regular dude, struggling daily to catch even a clue as to what really matters in life.

Anyway man, I salute your effort here, and now I must run off to the hospital for a long shift. I don’t know how all these folks find so much time to chime in all day long. I’ve been too strapped for time this week to join the conversations, much less think about my own essay.

Ahhhh!

–Bob

Grey, thanks for your sincere and straightforward elaboration. It's an example of what “grounded” means - not coping out into the stratosphere (“10.000 feet view”) - we practice that already, right - but actually bending the knees a bit. Good stuff!

~H

Well, Grey, you've opened the door for us!  Thank you.  Now I feel there's a wider range of ways to contribute to this symposium.  (I'm not sure yet what I'm going to say or do…)

I hadn't heard of Joe's Whole Writing exercise before, but it seems interesting.  What you are offering us here is not an Integral View of spirituality, but an Integral assessment tool which can be used in spiritual practice.  I'd like to see more of what's involved.  I imagine it's like running texts through the GigaGlossary, mapping what quadrants and levels and lines emerge most prominently, seeing where the gaps are.  And just learning to hold our words and perspectives in less fixed or “finalizing” ways. 

I'm a bit skeptical of the utility or even reliability of color coding for individual sentences.  It's possible to interpret any statement from a number of different perspectives.  I recall an experiment I read about in which students were given a variety of statements to interpret and evaluate, and the statements proved to be remarkably fluid – capable of holding a very wide range of meanings, even directly opposing ones.  The meaning does not inhere in the words themselves (as postmodernists have tried to illustrate in various ways), so we have to be careful when attempting to assess the Kosmic address of any particular statement.

Anyway, thanks for this – and for your openness in expressing yourself and revealing your “process” here. 

Best wishes,

Bruce

grey,

i loved reading this.

your willingness to share something so direct and simple is actually profoundly humbling and real.

you gave us all a window into your practice/process without even a hint of narcissistic self-agrandisement and then fleshed out the details with authentic grounded vulnerability. which for me is (when i remember) where real power lies….

thanks so much!

i also can't wait for joe to join in here after your post.

thanks for sharing this reallly interesting technique of his. he obviously does amazing work and i would like to know more…

the color coding creates a kind of meta-text that has wonderful layers of meaning/associations/feeling and reveals the moment to moment aspect fo self that inhabit the stream of consciousness.

it helps give me a context for his response to the pavlina thing - pretty cool perspective!

Hi Grey, nice post that “walks its talk” in that you invite “second-person relationship” with the reader via your openness.

You refer to the fear of being judged (a fear we all know). Who judges us? Others–the “second-person”–as well as that inner second-person who is sometimes called the inner critic, internal judge, or superego (Almaas's writings on the superego are excellent, IMO). And even “the world” is a second-person (e.g., when you write about fear of being seen by the world).

For many, God is a judging second-person, someone who watches us and is always there to catch us fucking up, and who only loves when we are (conventionally) “good.” This God only loves conditionally. But after vulnerably talking about your fear of being judged, you vulnerably talk about opening your heart to the love that you find in all things, Spirit, or God. (And I like that you ask what or who God is and answer that it doesn't matter, and indeed, in the context in which you are speaking, it doesn't.)

And I like this line in your essay: “Loving devotion to Spirit, to God, provides balance in my spiritual practice.” I think this is evident in your writing here.

Jim

thanks for this refreshing post, Grey. great contribution to the symposium! :)

i just wrote several comments pertaining to your post as a writing exercise just moments ago, and as my current internet sucks…well…have just lost them all…will do my best to briefly recall them and mention them here (again).

:)

i agree with Patrick that color-coding individual sentences is a tricky endeavor, as they can be interpreted in numerous ways. therefore, what interests me is how you color-coded them. care to elaborate a bit on your choices and inspiration in color-coding the way you did, Grey? also, it might be interesting to explore how you might choose to color-code paragraphs or entire pieces of written work. are there day-to-day themes in how you write?

i emphasize—how you write—because i do not necessarily perceive this “whole writing” as an entirely integral tool for individual self-exploration and -discovery. i do perceive it as becoming potentially dissociative as it regards inward application to the individual person…like creating a brother for the “inner critic”—the “inner color-coder.”

:)

again however, i do perceive this approach as perhaps quite useful in composing pieces of literary work that are integral in their tone and delivery of content. i do see how it could be assistful in shaping your writing.

great dharma quote too - i am enjoying the buddhist flavor of the last two days.

hold on though - i think ekg might just deconstruct it all…. :O)

delia with the scalpel of distinction…. good points.

where's mr. perez?

hi, everyone. beautiful discussion and comments. i will just add something i noticed in our mutual explorations here. while in the first big wave of western/eastern spiritual movement in '60s through '80s there was an inconsiderate amount of naive idealism (understandable), it seems that now we have quite a dosage of caution, as to the shadowy aspects of each method, practice, path, tradition, philosophical platform etc. it's great to have this sort of mature balance, however, let's not see a danger behind every bush, so to say. as we become aware collectively of the far-reaching dimensions of shadow-work (and the various types of “material” that can be repressed) we also quite naturally go searching for those same contents in the methods, whether more practical or more conceptual. gradually, we develop a critical leaning that is not warranted by the suspicious nature of what we consider, but rather by the discourse we have developed around these things…. i just realized what a mess i'm creating:-) so i'll just leave it at this. i might be completely off the mark, or just partially hallucinating, but i still feel there's something there. it's hard to be realistic in this virtual type of community exchange.

thanks again to each and everyone,

hokai

Grey,

It seems to me that the heart of your Whole Write is in the final paragraph, where you indicate in the moment that you don't know who or what God is, but you feel God's presence when you meditate, and that sense gives you a balance because the sense does not come from a place that is purely within, but has a sort of I-Thouness to it, or to use your language, a sense of otherness is necessary for you to feel yourself as a “whole person”. I get that, and thanks. I also hear that these insights seem to you to be coming from a violet (causal) place within and are supported by a blue (integrative) framework of meaning–that is the impression I get from your color coding. Your colors help me to see how you are perceiving your own kosmic coordinates as you write them. if I had seen the text color coded, say, amber and orange, I would have formed a very, very different impression of your interiority.

It's cool to see other folks getting some benefit out of a Whole Writing technique. The technique is offered as open for adaptation, and I think you've got a good sense of it. In a more formally produced Write, there would be more inquiry–asking “Avoiding?” when you encounter resistance and then probing the precise words you wrote immediately before you encountered the resistance. But in a short piece, this part of the exercise can be truncated.

I've gotta run for now, but I'll check back later. Regarding the comments above that indicated a skepticism toward the value of color coding individual sentences, I think it's important to stress that Whole Writing is a spiritual practice, a discipline of self-inquiry. Therefore, the color coding is simply an additional palate that the practitioner can use to express herself/himself. It's an indication of a person's self-understanding in the moment, and is intended to be impressionistic. Like an impressionist's painting, it's more interesting to ask how the artist is perceiving the light and how that color is conveyed through impressions rather than ask if the sense of color is formally “correct” or not. Because it's a spiritual process, there's no “correct” response. The value of the Write is to allow the author to see how spiritual process unfolds over periods of time, and to compare impressions from one period with another. However, if the Write is done in a shared group, then certainly the author will have the opportunity to unpack the significance of any particular color code for the group.

sounds like a very creative, nuanced and fluid process joe.

write on!

Die Eswelt hat Zusammenhang im Raum und in der Zeit.
Die Duwelt hat in Raum und Zeit keinen Zusam­menhang.
Das einzelne Du muss, nach Ablauf des Beziehungs­vorgangs, zu einem Es werden.
Das einzelne Es kann, durch Eintritt in den Bezie­hungsvorgang, zu einem Du werden.

The  it-world is coherent in space and time.
The you-world (thou-world) in space and time is not coherent.
The individual you must, after the process of relation, become an it.
The individual it can, by entering the process of relationship, become a you.
        - Martin Buber: Das Dialogische Prinzip - Ich und Du - Seite 32-38 (my translation)

I find the color coding beautiful as it reveals more of the you, dear Grey, making it easier for me to relate… the turning from an object into a subject, an other.  I am reminded of Delia's comment describing a  relationship with kitten… :-)

Often it seems to me that in all the spiritual and even integral theorizing what is most beautiful about relating to a living other gets lost in the shuffle of trying to understanding oneself, the other or what it's all about.  What gets lost is what I would call the “between-us”, an almost tangible spirit, a living energy, a flow of sheer delight at times.

If the other that I am relating to turns from an it, an object, into a you - in this process of relating ever more intimately I will have dropped all ideas about him or her, all theories about which level this person might be on, all theories about what he may or may not understand, whole linguistic ideas, all judgments etc.. 
I would say that only if the person that I am relating to loses all objectness (is that English?), what is truly possible between us can come into being.

It is in this sense that the relationship to God really becomes different from what I have read about it these last two days.  Then God is not an Other anymore, and God is also not The Self with which I am identical.
God has become You..

that's well said mushin.

tough to express that space between and that surrender into the flow in language - but it comes across…

my only questions would be - do these things have to be mutually exclusive?

might it be confusing sometinmes to evaluate one activity based on another?

i think the space that you have been describing is present in the practice of what all three of us have been talking about so far, no?

i so very much enjoy this share of yours Grey!  I can feel your energy so much in your writing and i experience it as a return to balance…finding footing on the razors edge…wish i understood more about the colors, but i know enough to understand what you were doing, and think i might try it sometime, if only to reinforce the coding…

We come from sort of different ends of things (i get swept up in energy and lose a bit, ok, alot, of intellect) and in a way am introduced to so much in this blog…i am somewhat lost when it comes to “meditation”…i keep trying all kinds of methods, but keep falling back into my drawings where that union with Spirit is so very the same as what you describe above…but something about this blog made me understand that that might be enough…that i am searching for something i already have…*fearing* that my methods are not “legitamite” enough…thanks for this moment of validation, brotha…

thanks for the ride on your mind buggy…

Hi Grey. As others have commented, I admire your openness in sharing your processing here…it is quite beautiful.

This is my first exposure to (Integral) “Whole Writing”; I find it interesting how you start with a right-brained stream-of-consciousness, then overlay it with a more left-brained AQAL analysis–a powerful practice of self-inquiry and analysis.

My only hesitation with this approach is in what amounts to trying to fit “round shapes” (the imaginal/stream of consciousness of the right brain) into “square edges” (the analytic AQAL mapping of the left brain). The very nature of the symbolic forms that arise from the unconscious (or however you want to define it) is that they cannot be quickly defined  or categorized. To translate right-brain forms into left-brain forms is a kind of reductionism, like trying to weigh or rank the value of art. An imaginal form or symbol, in this sense, is more open-ended and multi-faceted than it is sharply metaphorical or translative. Ursula K. Le Guin–a fantasy/science fiction writer with Jungian and Taoist flavorings–wrote of fantasy stories (ideally) being more symbolic than metaphoric, where a symbol could mean many things while a metaphor “really” means something else. In other words, a symbol = A, B, C, D, etc, whereas a metaphor = A and A only. Does that make sense?

To put it another way, because the AQAL map is so comprehensive it is tempting to fit everything into it, to assign imaginal or subtle forms neat categorizations. This is less problematic the more conscious one is that one is reducing something that is more artistic or aesthetic into scientific/rationalistic language.

BTW, this practice reminds me of Jungian Active Imagination–are you familiar with it?

it's ben awesome so far to see you interacting in this format sa'rah - though i a all for you being in mandala -land (i get to benefit from that..)

i do love reading your thoughtsream being more and more clearly articulated….

Jonny,

Generally, we use our entire brain for a given activity, and the difference between “analytical” and “intuitive” is more of a cultural distinction than a neurological one. For example, mathematics and abstract reasoning are “right-brained” activities, while language and writing is a “left-brained” activity. That said, the difference between the hemispheres has been exaggerated to support a kind of neurological yin-yang, divine feminine vs. divine masculine idea, but this has become a hugely distorted idea. It combines Eastern religious symbolism, Western gender distinctions and superficial brain hemisphere differences and the result is not very coherent unfortunately.

I think there's a tendency to equate spirituality and mysticism with (Western) femininity, which is understandable considering that Western culture has been scientific/rational and favored the male gender at the same time, but that doesn't mean that women are irrational and men are rational. We could just as easily have had a female-dominated society and invented science and the rational worldview. Logic is about operating on certain premises, and often what was considered a universally true premise actually reflected certain cultural biases, so it would be natural for minorities to gravitate toward other modes of thinking that better support their priorities. From that, there's a tendency to think that including non-rational perspectives necessarily means we are including minority perspectives, but that may not be true. Given how much we understand now about cultural bias, logic now can actually favor minority perspectives.

I'm sort of rambling now, but I don't mean to downplay or ignore real differences between modes of thinking. I think those do exist, but they are complementary. To me, its not reductionist to include both perspectives.

Hi Mr Teacup. No, its not reductionist to include both perspectives but it is reductionist to reduce one to the other (either way). And I agree with your general assessment–we can slice the pie many different ways, and I am using right and left brain in a more, ah, artistic/symbolic than scientific or metaphorical manner.

Hi Grey. I hear you–the colors allow us to refer to a shared language, for greater clarity. Again, the potential problem of this is reductionism, for nothing one says can be adequately assigned a single altitudinal marker. Back to the map/territory thing.

The whole altitude scheme is coming from certain assumptions, an AQAL worldview. If we use that as a map it can be very useful for inquiry, even transformation. But the problem becomes when we lose sight of the sentence itself and only see the color; we miss out on any “extra-altitudinal meaning,” so to speak.  When we speak of being able to take different perspectives, we shouldn't limit this to perspectives within the uber-perspective of AQAL integralism, but other worldviews.

wow excelent point mr t. - doesn't sound like rambling to me…

JB can you get a little more specific in what you are getting at - maybe use an example from the text at hand and break it down in your altitudinal and extra-altitudinal way?

my entry for the week is online

pull up a chair folks - here's some more of my poetry

you might want to get a cup of tea first…

Thanks Grey, I've been pondering that all day and finally the penny dropped. Oh the theory stuff is all fine, but relating that to experience is a whole other kettle of fish. I remember quite clearly when I first read Wilber, embarking on a search for my upper left quadrant, sent out search parties and everything. The map made sense but I was damned if I could figure what was in there for me, it took a bit of unpicking with me stubbornly resisting anything that might have helped along the way. I don't want a spiritual path, dammit, i'd shout as bits started falling into place:-)

But the second person relationship continued to elude me….could not make sense of it for love nor money. One of the reasons that bugged me was my daughter is a born again Christian and I couldn't get any grasp on what it held for her..the whole figurehead thing passed me by.

LIghts went on today, you framed that so clearly. I have never considered a sense of awe, humility or gratitude from meditation as being related ot connected to anything else, Gratitude towards what?  Humility in the face of what? Never ever entered my head to frame any of that in second person or I-Thou terms. IT's a whole new insight, relationship with spirit, or God or whatever.

I'll need to turn this around some more, I'm probably wandering incoherently, but it will get clearer, these things usually do

Thanks

Liz

JB, you have stated in a very clear manner what I intended by cautioning the potential development of an “inner color-coder” when using this “whole writing” technique—essentially, cautioning the potential for a kind of self-inquiry that may devolve into self-compartmentalization. And a kind of self-compartmentalization that is only valid within the context of an AQAL worldview, as you also stated. And I feel quite acurately, JB.

What is the purpose of a map? Perhaps describing certain landmarks that the traveler finds worthy of noting and visiting repeatedly (or by others).

And what is it that a map does to a territory? Fragments it. Divides it. For the purpose of describing it.

Is that map necessarily correct? Or is it just descriptive?

I honor the fact that Joe says that the intent of the “whole writing” exercise can be to provide opportunity for self-inquiry (especially within a group setting), yet as JB notes this type of self-inquiry is largely only applicable within the AQAL worldview, which is not necessarily correct, but merely sophisticated in the detail inherent in its wonderful descriptiveness.

Honestly, this “whole writing” exercise reminds me of an Enneagram format. That was the immediate hit I got when I read Grey's opening introduction to it. In application to writing, it could be a powerful content shaper and editing tool. However, in application to the person, this exercise appears to serve the purposes of exploring one's personaility/persona, and thereby, “typing” oneself at any given moment…or like use of Tarot symbolism—getting a reading.

And I would suggest that “typing” onself and self-inquiry are two completely different kinds of contemplative actions.

“Typing” can be reductionistic, and is summative. “Self-inquiry” can be explorative, and is expansive.

Both contemplative actions are quite useful within varying contexts. However, I feel it is important not to confuse the two.

Now, with all that said, I have many friends who say they derive great benefit from going through the Enneagram process/tests and really, really enjoy them. And I think that is wonderful. It is not my intent to rain on anybody's parade or criticize unfairly. I think this “whole writing” is a fun and creative exercise. Again, it reminds me of the Enneagram tests, or the use of Tarot symbolism, or even Astrological symbolism to explore the facets of personality and personality tendencies.

However, I would choose to apply this exercise to the development and shaping of my writing rather than for the purpose of self-inquiry. And that's just my personal choice. It is a preference. It is not right. It is not wrong. As Joe mentioned, the “whole writing” technique was created with the intent of being inclusive of differing variants. I own that this preference is my own. :)

One more quick thing…JB, your reference to that which is “extra-altitudinal” is very insightful. I understand what you say by “extra-altitudinal” to mean that which cannot be described within an “altitudinal” paradigm or map. Is that correct?

Also, I understand what you describe as ”when we lose sight of the sentence itself and only see the color” to be a potential bypass of dynamic intution for the convenience of structured mapping.

Why recall or intuit what direction you are going or looking for the north star or another natural landmark for a better sense of direction, when you can quickly stop off at a Starbucks for internet and espresso, pull up a Mapquest map, and count the numbers on the things called streets and buildings. Yes, very efficient. And very civilized. Yet not really applicable in the wilds.

Again, well-suited to description of the personality—something conditioned—whether that conditioning be by our environments, others, or ourselves.

Now playing my own devil's advocate: Can this exercise be used as a potential diving board into self-inquiry? Perhaps. Yes. I can see that as a possibility.

:)

Ouch, my centaur hurts. My contribution to the symposium is up.

I’m going for a walk. I might come back. ;o)

Yes, Delia, exactly. Sorry for not replying sooner–my computer was down for a couple days (the dog chewed the adapter a few days ago and the battery could only make it so long). By way of reply I'll put up a blog post this weekend on the Zaadz blog.

It sounds like a great idea. I have been reading Ken Wilber for about fourteen years. I don't
claim to understand the AQAL approach but I would like to get involved in this pod. I just
joined Zaads about a week ago.

I am a member of Integral Philly of which some of the members are trying to set up their
own pod. I am also a member of myspace.com, myspace.com/Biruth that is my
middle name,Lithuanian for Ruth, my paternal grandmother's birth name.