The spiritual journey takes many forms, from paths marked by gradual evolution to crises requiring cataclysmic upheavals. Integral theory says that faith changes over time from prerational to rational and transrational perspectives. But much as I hate to question the spiritual path of others whose journeys have been more consistent or more gradual in their shifts of perspective, I find little to recommend in taking the path of least resistance.

I say: be bold in your belief, and even bolder in your unbelief. In my book, the transition from prerational to transrational faith is best accomplished with an extended period of denial, doubt, despair, and disillusionment. In any case, that’s the only way that worked for me. I had to doubt and deny for many years before I ultimately found a form of belief that was completely natural, totally sincere, and — I believe — ultimately true.
When the shift from pre- to trans- is complete, it may be the case that a believer’s preference of terminology has changed. Or perhaps not. The believer may yet utter the same words to the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, Allah, or Shiva. But it’s not the terminology that matters, but the meaning bestowed on the acts of devotion.

Julian Walker worries that for believers who say their belief is transrational, it may be problematic to keep the same terminology as believers with a simpler faith. He writes in “Contemporary Theology: A Wide Spectrum with a Common Premise?”:

For me the ideas of both “transcend and include” and “differentiate to integrate” are useful here. What are we transcending and what are we including? How do we differentiate transrational ideas from prerational ideas if we continue to use the same terminology?

Speaking for myself, I would say that it usually matters very little to declare one’s own faith superior in rationality to that of others. A personal faith seems to beget a certain respect for, and sometimes admiration of, the faith of others. It’s usually of no importance whatsoever to wall off “transrational” faith and set it apart from the beliefs of the lesser educated, and those whose spiritual station of life is more conventional.

But let’s grant Julian that in some contexts it’s important to conceptually differentiate the pre- from the trans-. Doing so is not so much a matter of separating “prerational ideas” from “transrational ideas” (per Julian, emphasis mine), as separating those whose faith is fundamentally not an affair of ideas from those who have subjected their instinctively felt, emotionally charged, and unconsciously held beliefs to the cooling, tempering, and sobering demands of reason. A prerational Christian loves God because she has been taught that doing so is the proper thing to do, and because it feels right. The same person may evolve a rational love for God following appropriate education, choosing to believe that the love of God is a natural affair, human beings having been inborn with a need to find a source for meaning and a common direction for their moral compasses.

Julian continues:

If sophisticated theologians, literalist believers and non-dual mystics the world over all use the same terms from different points of view might we not do better to find specific terminology for what we really mean - so as to be clear about what we don’t reallly mean?

Perhaps this is so, but I’m skeptical that it will solve much over time. Disagreements over the meaning of God will simply become disagreements over the nature of mystical experience, Nothingness, Being, Spirit, Higher Power, etc. In this debate, it’s worth observing that if the more spiritually subtle thinkers all abandoned the use of the word “God”, then they will allow the most irresponsible of thinkers to control the most powerful and enduring idea in the history of human thought. That can’t be all good.

Julian continues:

I wonder if this kind of exploration of the terms we use and what we do and don’t mean might reveal that we are more sentimentally and superstitiously attached to prerational formulations of spirituality than we’d like to admit.

It’s obvious that emotional attachment to childhood beliefs plays a huge role in adult spirituality, and this is problematic in important ways, so I don’t have much to debate here. But the same point should be stressed about all manner of beliefs, not merely religious beliefs. Beliefs in moral principles, political affinities, gender roles, sexuality, and so forth, are all subject to evolution from lesser to more mature expressions. What strikes me is that nobody feels it’s particularly clever to argue that an adult’s attitude towards his parents is “more sentimentally and superstitiously attached to prerational formulations” of parental roles and powers “than we’d like to admit”. Nobody speaks about the process of maturation as if it were possible to eliminate belief in mother and father altogether, let alone eliminate the “terminology” of mother and father, yet in discussions of religion it is often presumed otherwise.

Julian continues:

For me, contemporary transrational spirituality has to do with meditative expansion, mind-body integration, energetic initiation and dedicated development of the spiritual gifts of intellect, contemplation, intuitive creativity, embodied experience and the raw emotional honesty of our existential condition…

And so it is worth responding that perhaps the best argument for keeping alive the transrational notion of God — say, as a panentheistic vision of Ultimate Reality, as I do — is that this approach is the most meditatively expansive, most integrative of mind and body, most initiatory of energetic flow, and most valuable for developing an honest understanding of “our existential condition”. Making such an argument in full, of course, is beyond the scope of this blog post, so I don’t want to drag this discussion too far afield. But it strikes me as enormously intuitive that the reality of God extends far beyond our concepts of the divine and into the realm of our bodies and unconscious associations.

God is embodied within our holistic being(s), and the path of progress from body to mind to spirit cannot skip over any part of the self or collective. For most of us, the content of belief changes as an individual matures, but the sentiment of the believer — oriented to living with hope rather than fear, trust rather than mistrust, and love rather than selfishness — remains a powerful attractor to religion. Where some understandably see this faith as sentimentalism, it can also be seen as a personal style (i.e., an existential option) alive with both emotion and reason. God, embodied within our holistic being, reveals its eternal consistency as a force of liberation in a changing self alive in an evolving world.

Technorati Tags: faith, God, panentheism, spirituality, theology, Walker

The experience of Ultimate Reality is ultimately indescribable, ineffable, and irreducibly mysterious. But the theory of spiritual experience is different entirely. Theory translates immediate experience into ideas that can help to orient our mind towards Ultimate Reality. And on the other hand, our theories can impoverish our ability to be receptive to spiritual truths.

Perhaps the most central concept underlying any spiritual worldview is that of the nature of Ultimate Reality itself, and how it is related to the manifest reality. As students of religious thought are well aware, there are three major theories: transcendent (theistic), holding that Ultimate Reality is wholly separate from the world; immanent (panthestic), holding that Ultimate Reality is completely identified with the world; and panentheistic, holding that the world is “in” the Ultimate Reality, and that Ultimate Reality is both immanent and transcendent.

The varieties of religious thought can be categorized according to this threefold distinction. Christianity is usually presented as a theistic (transcendent) religion. Hinduism is polytheistic (transcendent). Paganism is usually said to be pantheistic. Buddhism is usually identified as transcendent (the world is illusion, and Reality is wholly Other). Atheism is a sort of ireverent or indifferent pantheism.

However, these simple stereotypes betray the complexity and richness of spiritual views. A panentheistic thread of one variety or another runs through many of the world’s great religions and even some schools of secular philosophy.

In a series of posts on this Weblog, I’ll argue the merits of the panentheistic philosophy, and its superiority over theistic, polytheistic, atheistic, pantheistic theories of reality. Closely related to this argument, I will contend that a panentheistic worldview is the most Integral way of conceiving of Ultimate World. the essence of these arguments is my contention that panentheism is the most accurate way of describing the nature of religious experience and the most useful way of orienting our intellect towards direct religious experience.

As a Christian, I am interested not only in panentheism in general, but Christian panentheism in particular. There are many ways of conceiving the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, but the most intriguing are concepts of Trinity that are in keeping with panentheism. The traditional notion of “one God, three persons” can be very misleading if the religionist takes the notion of “person” too literally. The more sophisticated view is that the Trinity describes the relationship between the manifest world (Many) and the spiritual world (One).

A highly insightful and wide-ranging discussion of the doctrine of Trinity in relationship to the One and the Many can be found in a recently published dialogue between Brother David Steindl-Rast, a practicing Benedictine monk, and Ken Wilber, the psychological theorist. In “Integral Christianity: Theory and Practice. Part 1. The Relationship of the One and the Many. Brother David Steindl-Rast” , these two thinkers meditate on the Father of Ultimate Mystery, the Christ as the Kosmic Christ, and the Holy Spirit as the orientation of the immanent world towards God. Ken Wilber:

Discovering the One is, in a sense, the first step. But then the relation of the One to the entire manifest world, the whole world of relationships to the world and all manifest world … both One and Many are integral to a full understanding of the world.

I am most impressed by Brother Steindl-Rast’s point that the Trinitarian understanding of God is most clearly distinguished from non-Trinitarian orientations by the importance it places on gratitude. Purely immanentist philosophies have no role for gratitude, because there is no Other to which the believer is related. But transcendent philosophies also have no role for gratitude, because Creation itself is viewed as empty of God, and therefore of little importance (and ultimately seen as obstacles to be overcome). But the Trinitarian view says that the appropriate attitude of the Many towards the One — and the fruit of spiritual practice — is that of gratitude (in other words, praise or worship).

Technorati Tags: atheism, Christianity, gratitude, panentheism, pantheism, praise, theism, Trinity, worship