There’s a problem with associating the impulse towards integration primarily with progress, growth, transcendence, and enlightenment. Those spiritual impulses may enable our potential, but they don’t embrace what’s actual. A more grounded spirituality marries spirit and soul–the impulses towards both evolution and involution. Happiness may be a sign of spiritual contentment, but not if it’s divorced from the natural need to express the full range of human emotions, including sadness.

A poignant article on the subject of America’s obsession with happiness and its harmful consequences has been written by Eric G. Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University. Here are a few short passages concerning the virtues of melancholia:

I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life’s enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.

I’m not questioning joy in general. For instance, I’m not challenging that unbearable exuberance that suddenly emerges from long suffering. I’m not troubled by that hard-earned tranquillity that comes from long meditation on the world’s sorrows. I’m not criticizing that slow-burning bliss that issues from a life spent helping those who hurt. And I’m not romanticizing clinical depression. I realize that there are many lost souls out there who require medication to keep from killing themselves or harming their friends and families. I’m not questioning pharmaceutical therapies for the seriously depressed or simply to make existence bearable for so many with biochemical disorders.

Technorati Tags: emotions, psychology, soul, spirituality

A stream of consciousness meditation …

I sat down and ate.

Avoiding?

Eating. And Spirit. What do I know about eating and Spirit? Spirit eats the world. Spirit consumes all, a monster making atoms and electrons into a feast, trillions of tiny particles like so much what germ, so many grape nuts, so many grains of wheat, so many — I see a meal composed entirely of tiny grains of sand — like oatmeal, llike cream of wheat, the world is the grain in the bread of the mill of time, and Spirit the eater of the fantastic meal of the universe. Stars for lunch, the galaxies for dinner, and the universes as a bedtime snack. Not just a billion stars, or a trillion galaxies, or trillion trillion universes, but the total of all stars that ever were, and the trillions that are yet to be, the galaxies birthed countless eons ago and galaxies to be born egos from now.

The universe offers itself to Spirit as a sacrifice. Take me, it says. Feed on my flesh, for then we shall live once more in you.

Avoiding?

I am not who I think I am. I am every thing that I have ever ever eaten. So much soda pop and candy, so many chickens, so many cows, so many ears of corn, so much Gaia, so much world. So much, it’s beyond my reckoning. Though I say that it is knowable. The number of things that I have consumed to make me what I am, an eating machine, a consuming machine that eats to live, and also simply to have my pleasure. The rodents that are cut by the blade of the tractor that cut the corn that made the biofuel that runs the bus that I will ride today. If we could see a record — a toll of all that we have killed, all the death — if we could see what we have done…

Mass murderers are more than honest than us. The ones who collect trophies from their victims. The soldiers who add a notch to their belts for every enemy soldier they have slain. They are the honest ones. They know that they are killers. That is who they are. They kill, everything kills, everything hurts, everything dies, and in this arising time … could we stop killing for just one moment?

Could we run into a cave? Could we waste away? Could we refuse food, medicine? Could we? Could we make ourselves pure? Could we run away from the killing that we do, from the dying that we do, from the pain of existence?

Even then, locked alone in a cave, eating not, wearing no animal fur for a blanket, shivering in the cold. Even then, we kill. Even then, we die. We kill Time. We kill our future, our possibility, our ability to transform the world into a better place.

Or is that wish only illusion? That is a very old paradox.

Avoiding?

If we starved ourselves in a cave, killing nothing, do we kill the future? Do we kill the possibility of a more liberated world? Do we do nothing … or do what? What we can? Everything we can?

Avoiding?

The answer is yes. We are killers who do not … who are not … it is not “I” who kills … It is not the “I” who dies. I do not kill the future. No choice I can make Now can possibly kill the future. I am the Future, Now. And I will be, am, and have already been, eaten, redeemed, million billion trillion times over. We are all Eucharists now, though not all who are the Body see, not all who are Christ know, not all believe.

Technorati Tags: death, Eucharist, food, Spirit, spirituality, Time, violence

Let’s talk about sexuality, spirituality, and the AIDS epidemic. I’ll be a member of a discussion panel of religious leaders, community leaders, activists, and authors meeting July 10th from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the Capitol Hill Library in Seattle.

The forum is sponsored by the Absurd Reality Theatre, the group putting on “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches”, the award-winning play by Tony Kushner. The panelists will use Kushner’s “gay fantasia on social themes” as a springboard to discuss the place of the gay community and persons living with AIDS in contemporary American spirituality.

Technorati Tags: HIV/AIDS, Kushner, spirituality

“If all the roads end up in dead ends, you will be shown the secret paths no one will comprehend.”

Technorati Tags: poetry, Rumi, spirituality

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

Originally posted on August 19, 2007. Note: Most of this post was originally composed via a method of stream-of-consciousness writing called a Whole Write. Be on the alert that there are a few moments of letting my shadow out to dance. Read at your own risk.

John wants me to define involution. So I wrote this.

What do I mean by involution? What can’t you guys get out a fuckin’ wikipedia or get out a fuckin’ dictionary? Oh, I suppose you want my definition. Well, since you asked … Any moron can see that involution is the metaphysical process by which the Absolute or God or Brahman involves itself in creation through a series of manifestations, generally regarded as a sequence of stages of enfolding. Evolution is the opposite of involution, so generally what we know about involution is by inference: it is what evolution is NOT. In terms of concepts within time, evolution may be fruitfully viewed as a process of emergence out of the Spirit, so you can say involution took place before evolution. On the other hand, you can also say that involution does not take place within time and therefore it makes no difference whether involution precedes or follows evolution or occurs simultaneously.

Got that? If you don’t, I’m not surprised. It’s rather abstract to me, too. And apart from placing involution within the context of a fully fleshed out metaphysical edifice such as Sri Aurobindo’s, it’s tough to really speak about involution and come away feeling satisfied. It’s easier for me to feel like a moron. And yet I feel called to speak about involution because it’s part of my own process of self-discovery and self-realization. Metaphysics is a layer of abstraction, an overlay, that attempts to interpret personal religious or spiritual experience. (As I use metaphysics, it’s always provisional–my best effort at explanation within a plethora of socially and culturally created contexts.) For example, I may have a sense of connection to nature, for instance, and this may show up as the belief that Nature with a capital N or Gaia with a capital G is a mystical Oneness which is not separate from the self with the little s. You probably do something like that, even if you don’t call what you do metaphysics.

If you’re trying to wrap a layer of theory around evolution — and that’s what the 20 tenets of all holons is — that’s what Integral theory is all about — that’s the perennial philosophy and most of theology in general whether it knows it or not — then in large part you’re trying to make sense of your own holistic development: the various processes that led you from where you were as an infant to where you were as a toddler, then a child, then a school age kid, then a teenager, then a young adult, and then an adult, and then a middle-aged adult and then… Evolutionary theory is, in large measure, an attempt to grasp the process of development. So involutionary theory is, at least for me, an attempt to grasp the process of regression.

Have you ever regressed? Really regressed? Have you ever let the torrents of madness and the tsunamis of irrationality overcome you, destroy you, and leave you for dead? Have you ever been such a danger to yourself or others that you could not be trusted to take care of yourself minimally? Have you ever lost it, really really lost it? Have you ever watched Psycho or One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest or A Beautiful Mind and said, you know Anthony Perkins or Jack Nicholson or Russell Crowe’s performance is really good, but it’s not quite like that in real life? It’s like this. Madness is…

Have you? Well have you?

Have you felt yourself as an infant? A fetus? A sperm? An egg? A womb? An atom? An electron? A quark? How far, how deeply, how intensely have you sensed the interiors of matter? You know it’s possible, don’t you. That’s why you are comfortable by speaking about “involved matter”. Because you’ve been there, felt it, breathed in the electricity and the subtle currents of sound, light, and vibration …

Have you ever woken from a dream and wished to all hell you could get back into the dream somehow, someway? To see a lost love? To raise the dead? To recover your youth? To feel your passion, your sex?

Have you ever looked at your body aging? Have you ever seen it decay, decline, fall away into an unrecognizable person? Have you ever seen your muscle waste away, or your hair fall out? Have you shrunk, shriveled, pruned with age?

The question isn’t whether you’ve regressed, but how. How have you regressed? How have you fallen backwards in your spiritual journey? How have you lost enlightenment and stumbled into the maya and stayed there? How have you lost your recovery in a long, dark relapse? How have you forgotten who you really were? How have you lost track of your true nature? If you’re trying to grasp involution and you haven’t yet really wrestled with your own experiences of regression, then you will get nowhere. Go back to the textbooks and the definitions and the metaphysical formulations.

As for me, I’m still working on understanding involution from the inside out. That’s because I believe that I have touched my true nature — and it was a crazy, mad, psychotic fool, a paranoid, delusional, weirdo — and that it was not separate from the Godhead, the Absolute, the Spirit of All. (How could it be? If you subscribe to any notion of nonduality whatsoever. Doesn’t God go crazy? How could He not?) And then, having touched that space, I fell out of space and time and suddenly ordinary perceptions of “reality” had no bearing on me. Miracles happened. The world lost form. Time moved backwards. Time stood still. Time skipped around. The world and my mind and time were all wrapped up in a fantastic maze of my own design, and I was a lost seeker journeying in the dark on the adventure of a lifetime. An adventure that I would be lucky to survive.

There is a point that is forgetting of who-you-are in the service of who-or-what-you-might-and-must-become.

There is a point when you have recovered a memory and are, for an instant, holding both the reclaimed memory and that which is forgotten, together. You are both forgotten and reclaimed.

There is a point where synthesis looks back at antithesis and almost, but not quite, becomes antithesis.

There is a point where an actor loses herself in her role utterly and becomes invisible, forgotten, unconscious.

There is a point that is the letting go of Godhead for the relative world of illusion, willfully and knowingly giving up Absolute for a mad, crazy dash at freedom.

Evolution is the copying of DNA millions upon millions of times, in the hope and sincere wish for mutation. A mutation that could maim, kill, sterilize, destroy. And must, millions upon millions of times over. All for the sake of that glorious mutation that takes Spirit in the direction of novelty and joyous self-discovery. Because evolution is boring. Evolution as reproduction is predictable. It’s the mutation, the Agape, the homophilia, the perilous and dangerous mutation, which brings the excitement.

But you already know this. There is a point which occurs when you walk in the footsteps of mutation, OUCH! or WOW!, and say: Ahhhhhh, I remember this. I remember this. This… changes everything. This expands me. This is new.

The point of which I speak is the Cross where involution and evolution meet, a juncture that is made possible (for me) by faith, a gift on my journey towards an even Higher Reason than I have yet known. Faith, sheer faith. Faith that the new realization awakens my slumbering Self to the lurking Spirit, Faith that I am walking on the bleeding edge (for me) of Spirit’s self-knowledge. Not yesterday’s enlightenment, but today’s, right now’s is-this-enlightenment? when it feels like yesterday’s enlightenment pushed to a new and scary place. That’s why I get angry when I’m asked to define involution. You’re asking me to justify my faith. Fuck you. My faith has no justification that could convince you. I cannot bring you to the beginning of time or the end of time and say, “there you go”. Proof at last of the metaphysical conception.

Hell, I can’t even bring myself there. Involution does not take place in time; it must be encountered tentatively as if through a mirror. And to encounter involution is to taste death, to become what you have already been, surpassed, and to lose yourself in the process. I must be forcibly taken there. My reality must be raped. I can only go there, if I choose to go at all, by a process of remembering what I have forgotten, seeing the magical signs and allowing them to open me to the morass. I don’t go there very often, if I can help it.

So instead I would invite you to stop worrying about the definition of involution and start exploring, if you want, your experiences of regression. Make sense of them. How did they elevate you? How did they destroy you? What secret messages were hidden in their logic that gave you a weird feeling of deja vu? Look at deja vu. Look at synchronicity. Look at the prerational and the irrational and the Lord-knows-what rational (if your ego isn’t too big to let you). You’ve been there before. You know you have. Some ineffable part of you — some long forgotten part of you — has been there before, exactly, and is there right now, and will be there again. If you think you’ve tasted enlightenment and you have not tasted involution, then think again. Asking about regression is as good a way as any I know for getting in touch with that You. It’s a fast way, good if you’re in a hurry. But it’s not the only way, and maybe a particularly dangerous and risky way, but it works. Discover involution for yourself, if you dare.