Open Integral

My blog writing has slowed because I’m now well into my novel. My protagonist is now in the Gaza strip and is about to be taken to an Ishraqiya Sufi meeting on the outskirts of Gaza city. He is being guided by Jamal, whose family can trace their lineage back to the ‘assassins’. This basically means Jamal is Ismaeli. Jamal is also a DJ and ‘blogger’ who uses ‘culture jamming’ techniques to wage an electronic jihad against the forces of darkness, the Sunni ’salafiya’. They’ve just produced a copy of a typical jihadi suicide martyr video, with the young martyr appearing with guns and paraphenalia making a serious jihadi speech, then we see him sitting in the car and driving off, the rousing music and propaganda slogans plays in the background. And then the car stalls and he gets out to look under the bonnet, steam is pouring out and he gets angry and kicks the car – cut to long shot of the car blowing up and rousing music. I think he’ll call the satirical series ‘Nasruddin the jihadi’, after the famous satirical figure, sheik Nasruddin.

Anyway – I bought a copy of ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins. Now I know many have dismissed Dawkins as a reductionist but this does not mean he does not make many valid points. I was aware that things had got bad in the US but after reading Dawkins I was not aware that it had got ‘that’ bad. It seems atheists are the new blacks and gays – actively discriminated against. Seems you have to believe in God otherwise you face all sorts of minor and even major acts of discrimination. Given that many of the founding fathers were atheists how did it get to this point?

Dawkins calls for atheists to get organized but admits its a bit like herding cats. He claims that atheists have a duty to out themselves and says that there are a significant number, greater than many strident and proud religious lobby groups.

I appreciate his argument that religion is afforded a priviliged position and he points out how in the name of religion all sorts of absurdities and nonsense are tolerated and rationalised. This is itself a form of discrimination. How absurd is it that a court will grant an exemption to take hallucinogens for completely irrational ‘religious’ reasons but deny the exemption for very sound ‘rational’ reasons.

I also appreciated his dismissal of Stephen Jay Gould’s ‘Non-overlapping magesteria’ concept. He’s particularly scathing about this and it is worth integral theorists understanding his point. The first thing he objects to is that science cannot or ought not to try and answer the ‘why’ question. The second thing he objects to is the idea that religion and theology has any greater expertise than anyone else to answer the ‘why’ question. In fact he dismissive of theology in general and provides examples of theological ‘utter nonsense’.

Most of the book is an attack on the Abrahamic faith. He does not include Buddhism because he regards it as a philosophy.

I think that integral theory leads us logically to atheism. A nondual ultimate reality is both nothing and everything. A creator God automatically leads us to dualism. So I often wonder why some Integralists seem to go soft on ‘theism’. Dawkins argues that there is an unexamined cultural norm to treat religious delusion with kid gloves. And yet I would argue this has very serious consequences. The reason the US has moved from a position where the founding fathers were either atheists or deists to where politicians cannot win office unless they declare they believe in God is precisely because religion has been accorded a ‘criticism-free’ status along with its ‘tax-free’ status. This has given it almost free reign to propagate nonsense. And when ‘nonsense’ based only on faith is allowed to trump reason then what we get is a devolution. We are supposed to move from the mythic to the rational and then to the integral. Integral should not be tolerating to move backwards from rational to mythical.

This will be a rambling post – but there is a point.

I’ve been away in Sydney researching my novel. By coincidence the Sydney Theatre Company put on an extraordinary play – an 8 hour long adaptation of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ called ‘The Lost Echo’, directed by Barrie Kosky who is well known for his unique interpretation of opera. It was a stunning and shocking tour de force that left many people reeling, capturing the true essence of ‘catharsis’. It used all the theatrical arts, music, drama, comedy, song and dance (of mixed genres). I found parts one and two just simply riveting theatre, you didn’t know what was going to happen next (try a chorus of schoolboys masturbating exaggerated penises or a famous Aussie actress – Deborah Mailman – dressed as schoolboy being fellated on stage with the fellator spitting out fake semen, etc – the one moment of nudity being underwhelming). The third part was simply harrowing and I doubt horror and disgust have ever been better portrayed. It was a complete performance of Ovid’s ‘The Bacchae’ in which the protaganist is ripped apart by the female followers of Bacchus and much of it takes place in a dirty public toilet. Huh? Well, Kosky is exploring depravity as a human emotion, as was Ovid. The public toilet confronts us with the shit and blood of humanity, something directly related to the myth of Dionysian excess with raving Maenads ripping flesh apart in orgiastic excess – an inversion of the blood, piss, shit and fluids of human birth (and referencing Freud and Artuad, etc). The fourth part went over my head simply because it used the music of someone I was completely unfamiliar with so I was largely mystified, although I did understand that it was about the existential wandering of humanity in the underworld (a metaphor for this world).

The thing that scares me about the play is that it is close to some of the themes in my book. The book has a definite pro Greco-Roman stance and it freely references Greek (and Hindu) mythology. The reason I am fearful is because I may be seen to be unoriginal, but perhaps I am just been oversensitive. We were treated to an extra session after the first night when Barrie and the actors answered questions. Barrie was asked if he thought he was simply going over old territory and he gave a spirited defence of the Greco-Roman myths and gods, saying that they will always be resourced and referenced because they say so much about the human condition.

Then in today’s The Age A2 supplement I was excited to read that Peter Greenaway is coming to town. Peter is perhaps my favourite director and I count some of his films amongst my favourites, in fact I’ve been seraching for a box set of his films. He is involved in a new project called ‘The Tulse Luper Suitcases’ an epic three parter over 7.5 hours that will be shown next weekend (guess where I will be?). Peter is a natural integral thinker and part of the Tulse Luper project is a set of VJ performances and an online game (see www.tulseluperjourney.com). The project involves the mystery of 92 suitcases filled with clues to an idiosyncratic view of 20th century history.

But what has all this got to do with the title of the post? Over the past few years I’ve come to gain a deeper appreciation of humanism, particularly secular humanism. I know that many secular humanists are spiritual sceptics. This is not a short coming of secular humanism, it’s a short coming of individuals who cannot include the transcendent as a ‘human’ experience. I’m undecided about the metaphysical reality of spritual beings. I’ve certainly had experiences that indicate they have a separate reality but I am also aware that their appearance is mediated by our own consciousness. They could just as easily be archetypes of the unconscious with their ‘transcendence’ being a trick of the mind.

I also think it doesn’t much matter if we ‘know’ if they are transcendent or not. On a purely experiential basis we can observe that encountering the archetypes can have a powerful affect on our lives. If they are not transcendent then they are the product of either the individiual or collective unconscious. And in my view any true humanist ought to take as much notice of the irrational as the rational. It is the ‘rationalist’ bias that spoils humanism.

This means that enlightenment and encountering archetypes is a profoundly human experience, an experience that any true humanist must accept.

The next part of the title of this post is the ’secular’ bit. Secular has many meanings but in this sense I mean ‘not concerned with the church’ – that is, not aligned to any particular religious or spiritual doctrine. I do not intend it to mean ‘non-spiritual’. A secularist in this sense is simply not aligned to any doctrine and in the best sense is open to all. The key word here is ‘open’. An essential part of the humanist project is open inquiry.

My own sense of the spiritual is influenced by several strands; Ibn Arabi, Abhinavagupta, Padmasabhava, Jung and both Greek and Hindu mythology. From Ibn Arabi I get the concept of ‘ta’wil’, which Henry Corbin reformulated as the ‘imaginal’. Ibn Arabi had the insight that the transcendent (he was a Platonist) appeared to each individual in a unique manner. This ties in very neatly with Jung’s concept of the process of individuation. It also ties in neatly (I think) with with the Tantricism of Abhinavagupta and Padmasambhava. The Tantric path involves a direct encounter with the gods, with Shakti. According to Abhinavagupta the guru can appear as a physical guru (either purusha or siddha) or a transcendent guru or daiva guru. The daiva guru can take any form s/he pleases – and this feeds neatly back to Ibn Arabi who understood that the beautiful young girl he saw in the market place was an apparition of Gabriel and that his attraction was not erotic in the mundane sense but erotic in the highest sense (as revealed by the fact that Eros was a god).

Because the transcendent appears to each individual in a unique way (and the Tantric traditions explain this in terms of karma) it is impossible to fix any single interpretation. So again we return to secularism, a refusal to bow to any tradition and to follow the path of transgression – transgression of what? The transgression of all fixed ideological and religious positions and the free engagement with the archetypes.

I see this act of intentional transgression as a humanist act because it frees the human spirit to beneficial acts of creativity. It’s a sometimes dangerous path because, as the Greek and Hindu myths adequately explore, it touches on madness. Properly guided and understood the process of individuation leads to enlightenment.

The tragedy of modern society is that through fear of the demands of authentic spirituality many opt for mediocrity. Very often conventional religion is a strategy of this fear, a way to control genuine mysticism and ecstacy. The project of conventional religion is to convert the spiritual impulse to rather mundane and boring social conservatism. It’s actually a way to stop the divine from entering life.

So I guess I’m a ‘radical’ secular humanist, someone who wants to unleash the creative potential of humanity.

And so I return to the stage and Kosky’s ‘The Lost Echo’ in all it’s madness, humour, tragedy, horror and eroticism. This is what we are. Piles of shit and blood who love, cry, fear and create great horror and beauty. The Greeks and Hindus understood this and the follies of the gods are the perfect metaphor for the follies of humanity. We have the Greeks to thank for theatre and for the concept of ‘katharsis’, the emotional purification that good theatre was supposed to produce. And this finally links me back to Abhinavagupta who was also one of India’s leading aestheticians – he argued that the purpose of all art was to point to the divine through the various ‘rasas’; horror, comedy, eroticism, pathos, etc.

The audience applauded long and vigorously, people laughed, gasped and cried – catharsis was achieved. Will it last? For many, probably not, but the best art can be life changing and some were deeply affected. Art is the product of humanity and ‘inspiration’ the moment the archetypes break through. Who would not want to surrender to the numinous, even if it doesn’t have any solid, transcendent existance?

But no, best be safe – best edit the archetypes, cut out the difficult bits and create a safe, nice archetype, say a baby Jesus? Lol. No Kali’s here please.

I’ve been following the consciousness thread with some interest and contemplating what I might want to contribute to the discussion. At first I held back because I didn’t think I had anything ‘new’ to add. But as I thought about it I realized that I perhaps have quite a different perspective, although I’m not sure how I’d categorize it – but then my contribution is about how we categorize these things.

The first point I’d make is that we experience a number of what I would call (for this exercise) primal (or raw) experiences (PE). These are experiences that invade our awareness outside of our control and include primary perception of exterior events and interior events. We know that we react to PE’s before we construct a narrative about the PE and why we reacted to the PE. To give an example – there is a technique in film making where a sound is placed before the related image. It’s most often used in the horror and suspense genres to shock the audience before the mind can explain the shock. It’s most often used to create false anxiety. The classic example is the cat jumping out of the locker in the first Alien movie. The screech of the cat is heard before we see the cat. We jump at the screech and then relax because we create the narrative that it was only a cat.

I include internal PE’s – sometimes we are overcome by internal states (emotions, false perceptions, spiritual experiences, etc) that are outside our control. False perceptions are an interesting case. Who has not been startled by something they thought they saw but relaxed when they realized it was not what they first thought it was? This is the classic Hindu tale of the person mistaking the rope as a snake.

The important point here is that after the PE we naturally try and explain it by creating a narrative. It was such and such caused by such and such and it means this and is related to that. Here Gebser’s categories are temporarily useful – the meta-narrative (worldview) we use can be archaic, magical, mythic, rational or integral. It might also be useful to further divide these categories into sub-categories, rational might be further divided into pre-modernist, modernist and post-modernist rationalities (or Western and non-Western rationality).

If you get the chance I highly recommend you go and see ‘Ten Canoes’ a co-production between Rolf De Heer and the Ramangini (sp?) people of Arnhem land. I say co-production because the film is their story told from their traditional perspective. A documentary on the making of the film revealed some interesting differences between the ‘rational’ approach to making the film and the ‘traditional’ (magical) view. One of the constraints on the Western film makers is that under traditional law only people of the right clan relationship could portray certain people. The concept of acting was foreign and there was some difficulty in finding the correctly related people to play certain roles. There was also some difficulty in maintaining a coherent narrative for film. Traditional stories are complex, atemporal and ahistorical. They are about relationships and not accurate events.

The point of this slight digression does involve Wilber. When I met him we spent most of our time together talking about is post-metaphysical theory, including his idea of morphogenetic grooves. I thought it was flawed for this reason – he seemed to be mistaking PEs and deep structures for surface translations.

I maintain that most PEs have remained consistent for most of humanity for most of modern history – but this is impossible to know with any certainty. What has changed are the narratives used to explain the PEs. I would argue that the spiritual states of psychic, subtle, causal and nondual are PEs and have remained consistent and accessible throughout history but that they have been interpreted differently as the human narrative builds in complexity. The grooves Wilber sees are not grooves in our capacity to have these spiritual PEs but grooves in the way we explain them.

In which case the narrative will always change as more perspectives are added. This is the result of natural accretion. The Shaman of the Neolithic age may very well have had all of the spiritual PEs but they would have had far less narrative options. Wilber does know this because in some of his earlier writing he admits that high spiritual experiences can only be explained using the narrative tools available – if that happens to be within a magical worldview then so be it.

I appreciate everyone’s recent comments but wish to add a simple cautionary note about what could be called the hermeneutic or narrative trap. This is that all explanations and theories about PEs are narratives. All descriptions and definitions, categories and sub-categories, systems and meta-systems are narratives. They are internal constructs that do not exist outside. Even the distinction of external and internal is itself a construct. Edward might remember that on the Cohorts list Bonnitta and I talked about spiritual PE’s belonging to a category we called the ‘anterior’ – to describe a realm that existed beside/outside the dualistic concepts of interior/exterior. Consciousness in the Eastern sense of Chitta exists in an anterior space.

I think Anand’s discussion about redefining ‘reality’ might find some benefit in stepping outside the interior/exterior spacetime paradigm into an anterior atemporal/aspatial paradigm.

However, what we must be extremely careful about is constructing the self as a character in whatever narrative we are using. The self/ego is also a narrative construct. And we must have a narrative, although we can, as some sages have done, choose to remain silent, not only refraining from externally creating a narrative in the intersubjective space but from imagining an internal narrative in our subjective space – iow, telling ourselves a story.

Another cautionary note is that even elaborate and sophisticated philosophical views that consider both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions are also narratives. They just happen to be complex narratives. As I’ve said, if we are trying to communicate our PEs to others we have to create a narrative that will be understood by their narrative. In the end that’s what an intersubjective space is – a common narrative which can translate and understand subjective narratives. For example – vad, ptd’oof fliftip mnomitopitone! If you get my meaning Miscommunication readily happens when the intersubjective space has huge gaps and cannot hold and translate the various subjectives narratives of all the participants. In fact most of the problem of cross-cultural communication lies in co-constructing a sufficient intersubjective space. This is often made more difficult when any participant defiantly holds onto their narrative and insists that everyone else accepts their narrative as the base ‘truth’ or as the only ‘valid’ narrative. Please note that this defiance can even go as far as denying PEs that do not easily fit into a pre-conceived narrative.

And it is the internal PEs that cause the most difficulty, simply because not all people experience all of them, especially the spiritual PEs. So it becomes difficult to construct an intersubjective narrative that acknowledges certain internal PEs. And here we have to admit that certain narratives dismiss, censor, forbid, ignore, etc certain PEs. Not too long ago many women in the English speaking world did not know about clitoral or multiple orgasms, or female ejaculation, because the then current intersubjective space would not construct a way to discuss these PEs. So a woman who had experienced multiple orgasm might think there was something wrong with her and a doctor might say she was ‘hysterical’ (from the Greek hustera – meaning womb). And I might add here that part of my age of consent concerns are about children being denied a safe intersubjective space in which they can develop a healthy internal narrative that adequately explains their early sexual PEs – children can and do have orgasms but have no way to safely ‘narratize’ them (if such a word is permissable) just as women were denied a safe intersubjective space (and men for that matter – try talking about orgasm through prostate stimulation to your mates, lol).

So the same problem exists for spiritual PEs. How do you explain them to people who never had them? Yes, you can construct a clever ‘rational’ narrative that allows their ‘logical’ existance, but such narratives do not create the PEs.

And finally, another cautionary note. If the concepts of external/internal are narrative constructs then so too are the concepts of consciousness, the absolute, spiritual, non-spiritual, etc, etc. Perhaps there is no exterior (or anterior) mind/body problem because the concepts of mind and body are all in the mind to begin with? I know this is not a new idea.

So, in summary – I view this problem in terms of PEs and narratives. Which probably puts me in the phenomenological/hermeneutic camp – of course, remembering the hermeneutic trap (paradox?) – it’s all hermeneutics anyway. The AQAL map is just a map.