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Towards a World Spirituality theology of gay marriage

April 20, 2012 at 12:54 pm by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

In a World Spirituality perspective, the theologian is more like an symphony composer, with theologians from different theological traditions translating the musical notation for the musicians of different instruments. Clearly there is give and take between the symphony composer and the composer for piano, violin, drums, etc.; but ultimately they are creating new music together.

In our times, a major crisis has emerged for theology which could help to doom religion in many countries unless it is redressed: the crisis of homosexuality within the churches. No, not the crisis that gay people are religious (there have always been gay people in churches, probably in disproportionately large numbers). The issue is that our religious traditions have holy traditions and scriptures dating to pre-modern times when there was no contemporary understanding of homosexuality or modern lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities (LGBT).

Consequently, a rift has arisen — sometimes leading to endless discussion and ultimate schism — on whether and how to include gay people in the religion. The regions which are most open are also, frankly, typically the most evolutionarily sophisticated. Their membership is more educated, more aware of cross-cultural differences, more able to see the social construction of sexual attitudes, and they are probably also more likely to know gays personally. These religions are also in decline, for a variety of reasons.

On the other hand, conservative religionists have dug in their heels. Feeling their entire belief system threatened by modernity and post-modernity, made irrelevant, and even worse, dismissed as intolerant, they have drawn their line in the sand. They will not permit gays to participate openly in their churches unless they adhere to celibacy or try to change their sexual orientation (yeah, right). Deep down, they know they are on the losing side of history, but this only fuels their anger and resentment to cover their disappointment. They fear losing the battle, but in the short term, their churches are the ones often growing rapidly, especially in the developing world, adding hundreds of thousands of new adherents daily.

In “Out and Ordained,” Brett Webb-Mitchell tells of his journey as a gay Presbyterian pastor and offers his prayers for the Church. In 2011, the Presbyterian Church formally allowed openly gay and lesbian ministers. Now, there are new challenges ahead:

Webb-Mitchell writes:

In order to become more inclusive, there are many “next steps” to be taken in righting past wrongs. For example, as more states permit LGBTQ people to wed, churches will need to craft a theology of marriage that includes LGBTQ congregants.

To this, I offer my prayer that theologians in the Presbyterian communion realize that their work is not to be done in isolation, looking mainly to the Bible and the Westminster Confession.

We live in times in which people in every religion are awakening to see their sacred texts as historically conditioned and requiring much discernment to see how their authority can be reconciled with recognition of the dignity of gays and lesbians and others.

What does a World Spirituality theology of gay marriage look like? Remember, that it is not one which starts from the Bible to argue the morality of gay sex. It does not start from Thomistic/Aristotelian principles which were created centuries before the emergence of evolutionary biology and cultural anthropological research. Nor does it even start with “the experience of the oppressed,” which would give us only a subjective accounting of phenomenona much more complex than can be felt by any one individual or group.

No, a World Spirituality theology of same-sex marriage must not rest content with looking to old texts to seeing how they have been misinterpreted; we must be willing to see our knowledge of God evolving over time in the fullness of history. A theology of marriage inclusive of gays must be one which acknowledges spiritual evolution, or it will only be a stopgap, an ethnocentric adjustment made at a time when what is most needed is a worldcentric transformation.

Affirming the sacredness of gay marriage isn’t about people embracing diversity for diversity’s sake, but finding in committed same-sex partnerships a new and essential expression of the Divine Love. That’s why the perspective I staked out in Soulfully Gay is so relevant to the future discussion about the sacramental worth or sacredness of gay marriage. I have been encouraged by the many, many readers who have found in the book a roadmap for moving forward with their spiritual journey as lesbian or gay people. On the other hand, the book has had very limited adoption by theologians, who will ignore the book’s central theological anthropology to their theology’s peril.

Soulfully Gay does not tell Christian theologians how to solve gay marriage in their Bible studies or Church doctrine (though the book has been taught in at least a few Christian seminaries). Soulfully Gay does not tell Jewish theologians how to reinterpret the law or Muslim theologians how to reinterpret their sacred texts and traditions, and so on.

What it does is take a step beyond the “diversity for diversity’s sake” rationale offered by postmodern religionists for affirming gay marriage, staking out an argument for gay marriage based on a post-metaphysicial philosophical and spiritual anthropology (that is, a vision of human nature) which describes how understanding the proper nature of gay love is essential to understanding the nature of God’s love for creation.

Theologically, affirming gay marriage is an evolutionary step forward in humankind’s understanding of the nature of Divine Love, a gift from God for all people, not just a tiny minority. The love of Same to Same is viewed as theologically distinct from the love of Same to Other, one giving us a mirror to self-immanence and the other a reflection of self-transcendence. Heterophilia gives us a picture of how humanity loves God; homophilia gives us a picture of how God loves humanity. Integral Theory can help to bridge the gap between Soulfully Gay’s theological anthropology and their own tradition’s rich tradition of reflection on marriage and sexual ethics.

Such a vision is not merely a Presbyterian theology or even a Christian vision. It’s a philosophical-spiritual statement about human nature that can be affirmed by integral Christians, integral Jews, integral Muslims, integral Buddhists, integral Hindus, and even — by looking at self-immanence and self-transcendence as biological drives situated within a general theory meta-theory of evolution — integral secular humanists.

At the risk of sounding overly promotioinal (I’ll take that risk), if you want to build a theology of same-sex marriage, then you simply must read Soulfully Gay, especially Chapter 1, Chapter 3, and Chapter 4, where the philosophical anthropology and social ethics are sketched in enough detail to guide your own theological reflections.

Of the True Self, there is only one: neither straight not gay, neither man, nor woman. But in our uniqueness, overlapping that True Self in our self-identification, we come on-line as fully diverse, richly colored, textured, embodied, and sexualized according to our liberated natures as being free to be ourselves in a blessed and ultimately good universe.

Photo Credit: bodies-of-art

Filed Under: Belief & Practice, Featured, Love, Sex & Ethics, Unique Self, World Politics Tagged With: bisexual, gay, homosexuality, human nature, lesbian, marriage, same-sex marriage, soulfully gay, theological anthropology, theology, transgender

Daily Wisdom: The Alchemy of Love

April 16, 2012 at 12:00 pm by Marc Gafni Leave a Comment

By Marc Gafni

From Your Unique Self:

“IT DEPENDS ON LOVE.” In this old Aramaic phrase, “it” refers to shadow. This phrase will guide you on the path of shadow integration that the old Unique Self masters called the “left-handed emanation” or the “way of the dragon. ” The left hand implies the power of transmutation, while the right hand symbolizes the power of force. The left-handed path is referred to by the Tantric Kabbalists as Derek Hataninim, which I have often translated as “the way of the dragon ”. The way of the dragon invites not the slaying of the dragon, but rather its befriending and healing.

To follow this way is to serve and to grow through the light and energy that emanates from the darkness itself.

With the understanding of the New Enlightenment, the energy that emanates from the darkness is not foreign to us. It is none other than the displaced fullness of your Unique Self and the dis-owned freedom of your True Self. It is the energy of the radical breaking of all boundaries. You have shattered the limits of your skin-encapsulated ego, and stepped into the fullness of your distinct expression of all that is. You have realized your full identity with the divine, and all false boundaries crumble before the audacious power of your penetrating love. This is the ultimate expression of Eros.

The energy of darkness is but the pseudo-Eros of breaking boundaries in the world of illusion. When you follow the attraction to the boundary-breaking pseudo-Eros to its root, it is revealed to be the yearning for the full enlightenment of Unique Self manifestation. The coiled boundaries of separate self melt before the radiance of Unique Self.

Filed Under: Featured, Love, Sex & Ethics, Shadow & Psyche, Unique Self Tagged With: divinity, kabbalah, love, new enlightenment, tantra, unique self, way of the dragon

Psychology and karma: Connecting the dots

April 16, 2012 at 8:27 am by Mariana Caplan Leave a Comment

By Mariana Caplan

Reprinted from the Huffington Post.

If somebody had to live my life, why did it have to be me?!

As a young woman on the spiritual path, I was always both intrigued and bothered by the concept of karma. It just didn’t seem accurate that everyone I knew who remembered a past life was a princess in Egypt or a king in medieval Europe. Or perhaps they had done something really terrible in a past life and they were being punished by God by not being able to get pregnant or running into continuous relationship landmines. The deeper principle of karma called to me, while many of the explanations seemed superficial and overly linear. So I did what any diligent young spiritual journalist would do, approaching each spiritual teacher or great yogi I met on my travels, and asking “What is karma?” and over the years try to sift through it all.

My conclusion, to date, is twofold: 1) The deeper principles of karma are so subtle and intricate that a lifetime of skillful inquiry and practice are necessary to begin to near a real understanding of it; 2) Viewing karma through the lens of deep psychology provides a means to approach the question of karma in a user-friendly and practical way.

Our personal psychology is how our karmic patterns show up in this lifetime. A general Buddhist or Hindu perspective on karma suggests that the individual soul moves through consciousness lifetime after lifetime, incarnating again and again in the school of life in order to complete various tasks and lessons, and to release contractions of consciousness.

The conditions and circumstances of each incarnation are based on forces far greater than most of us can conceive of. These forces determine the quality of consciousness we are given, the culture and families we are born into, the bodies we have and the significant experiences and relationships we encounter. “The accumulated imprints of past lives, rooted in afflictions, will be experienced in present and future lives,” writes Patañjali in The Yoga Sūtras, the text that outlines contemporary Classical Yoga. If we want to unravel the karma we have accumulated in past lives, we need look no further than our present life circumstances.

Whatever we are experiencing in the present moment is both the fruition of our previous karma and the planting of seeds for future karma. The circumstances we encounter are our karma, are the expression of our consciousness, are the seeds of our future. We are in a great hologram of karma, and our lives reflect the intersection of our family or genealogical karma, the collective karma of our culture and, in many cases, a particular set of karmas that is expressed through the teachers and communities we encounter on the spiritual journey.

There are confrontational moments of bare honesty in life during which we perceive clearly that we are reaping the seeds we have sown at an earlier time, whether through accident, illness or misfortune. An illustration is the case of the father of a friend of mine who ran drugs for many years. When he tried to get out of the business, he was brutally tortured by a group of hit men who had come to his house looking for his hidden stash of cash. He could change his karma, but he could not evade having to experience the karmic seeds he had sown.

More commonly, many of us have found ourselves in a situation in which a seeming white lie, innocent exaggeration or an act of ignorance or indulgence comes back to haunt us. At other times, there is a nonlinear ripening of certain past karmas arising from a time or circumstance that is beyond our conscious capacity to perceive. To even consider that the psychological and practical circumstances we face are powerfully influenced by karmic forces requires a willingness to significantly broaden our viewpoint; it also offers the possibility of accepting a degree of self-responsibility that can be simultaneously daunting and liberating.

It is possible to trace our current psychological challenges not only to our parents but to our grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents and even earlier. We discover that so many of the deep challenges we face on many levels, and that sometimes feel so devastatingly personal — not only emotional challenges but relational, physical and circumstantial ones — are literally passed down through generation after generation and result from a degree of conditioning that is totally impersonal and unconscious.

We may be shocked to realize that the essence of many of the powerful experiences we have are influenced in an immediate way by our great-great-grandparents and even further back in history. These include depression, relationship patterns, illnesses, divorces and even the age at which we die, as well as many “choices” we experience ourselves making, such as how many children we have, having an abortion or who we choose to be in relationship with. Only now, they are being lived out in a different circumstance and moment of history. For many people, it is easier to understand and believe the reality of karma when perceived in this tangible and practical way than through the vague notion of a soul moving from lifetime to lifetime.

It is not easy to open ourselves to a wider perspective of reality in which challenging questions of justice, victimization and fairness are seen through such a wide lens. Yet, as with everything, even this perspective can be misused. Here is one example: A woman I know was kidnapped, badly raped and almost murdered. Her New Age boyfriend persuaded her to drop the charges, convincing her that she had attracted the situation to herself. Later, she suffered for this premature psychological “bypass” of the trauma she had endured. We cannot presume to understand the full complexity of karma, as it is vast and difficult for anyone to grasp.

The implications of this perspective are manifold: On the one hand, we are not at “fault” for many of the thoughts, feelings and challenging circumstances that arise in our lives; on the other hand, we are totally responsible to our lives in the present and for the implications of our actions. We release shame and self-blame, while strengthening our personal accountability and responsibility.

A number of therapies concern themselves with past-life traumas, and spiritual students are endlessly fascinated by who they might have been or what they might have done in their past lifetimes, but from a practical perspective we need look no further than our present circumstances in order to address our karma: It is all right in front of us. Whether we were a farmer in Mesopotamia, a slave trader in the American South or a bus driver in the 1940s is irrelevant for most of us. What is important is whether we are able to meet our present circumstance with a clear and discerning perspective and refrain from taking actions that further the endless repetition of unfavorable and limiting aspects of our karmic conditioning. From this perspective, psychology becomes a tool we can use to unlock, work with and evolve our karma.

Adapted and updated from Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path (Sounds True, 2010) Reprinted from the Huffington Post.

Photo Credit: vramak

Filed Under: Featured, Health & Medicine, Shadow & Psyche, World Politics Tagged With: karma, psychology, reincarnation

Prayer is not a dogma. Prayer is pointing-out instruction for God.

April 16, 2012 at 12:00 am by Marc Gafni 6 Comments

By Marc Gafni

We are all despearate for communion. It is what makes our lives worth living. Communion is the movement from loneliness to loving. It is the experience of being held and received.

We are all systematically mis-recognized. To be recognized is to be seen. To be seen is to be loved. To be love is to be in communion. It is only when we are seen that we are called to the fullness of our glimmering beauty as unique incarnations of the the divine treasure. It is only when we are seen that we feel moved the personal evolutionary impulse that lives in us to give the unique gifts that are only ours to give and that are desperately desired by the all that is.

To be in communion is to know that Your deed is God’s need. It is the realization of communion that gives us joy and calls us to evolutionary responsibility.

Communion as God in the 2nd Person View

‘Communion’ is the name that Kabbalah scholar Gershom Sholem gave to the experience of God in the second person. This is the inner experience of a human being who is not merged with the divine but rather stands in relation to God. This state of relatedness to God is the essence of Hebrew biblical consciousness. According to Scholem, it defines Hebrew mystical consciousness as well.

God in second-person perspective is all about relationship–whether it is the relationship of a servant to his master, a lover to her beloved, a relationship with a partner or even a relationship with a friend. All these can be ways of “relating” to God, and all of these models of relationship find expression in Hebrew wisdom teachings. All are ways of approaching God in the second person.

The most powerful form of God in the second person is almost certainly the prayer experience. It is told that when Hassidic master Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev used to pray, he would begin to say the standard liturgical form of blessing–“Baruch Ata Adonai”, “Blessed are you, God.” Then he would break out of the formal mode of blessing, crying out in sheer joy, “YOU YOU…YOU …YOU!” He would lose himself in these words, repeatedly shouting in ecstasy, “YOU… YOU… YOU!!!”

This is the rapture of God in the second person. For Levi Yitzchak, the blessing is what the Buddhists call a ‘pointing-out instruction’. But the words point not to sunyatta or emptiness, but to God as a beloved Other.

Nachman of Bratzlav taught the spiritual practice of Hitbodedut. In one form, this meant walking alone in the forest “talking to God as you would to your friend.”

With “God in the second person,” we meet God and bow. With “God in the second person,” we meet God and partner. With “God in the second person,” we meet God and love. With God in the second person, we meet God and pray. The key to experiencing God in the second person is the encounter. It is the encounter with God in history, and in the lived reality of every human being, that is the essence of the “God in the second person” experience.

This is the God of prayer. The God of prayer is not a concept, but a realization. I recall a recent conversation with a well-known Buddhist teacher. He said to me, “how can a serious teacher like yourself believe in the dogma of prayer?” I asked him, “How can you believe in the dogma of awareness”? He said to me, “Awareness is not a dogma, it is a realization”. To which I responded, “Yes, of course it is. And so is prayer.”

He told me later that this simple pointing-out instruction shifted his entire relationship to prayer. Prayer is not a dogma. It is a realization of God in the second person. It is the felt sense that every place you fall, you fall into God’s hands. Not the god of the mythic, ethnocentric church or synagogue or mosque or temple. Not that God. Not the God that as a modern or post-modern skeptic, you do not believe in. The God you don’t believe in does not exist! Rather, God in second person is the personal face of Essence. It is the aspect of personal Essence that knows your name, and cares about every detail of your life.

Feel into the quality of the personal that lives in you, as you and through you. Remember, perhaps, a time when you felt alienated in a relationship and you said to your partner, ‘I feel you are being so impersonal.’ Or when you critiqued some dimension of society as being too impersonal. Inherently, you sensed that Essence has a personal quality. This personal Essence is beyond the grasping of the skin-encapsulated ego, which still believes itself to be separate from all that is. It is rather the personal quality of Source.

Levi Isaac of Berdichev in the story above did not faint in ecstasy because he was moved by the dogma of a personal God. Rather, he fainted in ecstasy at the felt experience and realization of the lived encounter, in that very moment, with the personal face of God. It is the experience of God in the second person that inspires prayer. So, prayer is not an act of dogma, or a religious obligation.

True prayer is the ecstatic realization of God in the second person. Prayer is an expression of the radically personal nature of enlightenment–the place in which the personal unique self talks to the personal God. In prayer, the personhood of God meets the personhood of a human being.

It is the flight of the lonely one to the Lonely One. Or as Hasidic master Ephraim of Sudykov said, the meeting of misunderstood man with misunderstood God. Human being and God meet – realizing that they are both strangers in the land. They up in a friendship in which both are liberated and redeemed from loneliness.

We are used to thinking of Essence in impersonal terms. In the usual thinking of the spiritual world, the human being has a personality or separate self, which is transcended in enlightenment and melts into the impersonal Essence of all-that-is. This, however, is only a part of the story. As I have described in depth in my book, Your Unique Self: The Future of Enlightenment, there is a personal Essence, which is beyond the impersonal.

To truly understand and embody the interior face of Essence, one needs to move through four core levels of consciousness.

Level One is re-personal. This occurs before the emergence of an individuated separate self.
Level Two occurs when the Pre-personal emerges as the Personal Self. This is the important level of separate self, ego and personality.
The Third Level is when the personal–-in a healthy and non-dis-associative process–is transcended and included into the Impersonal. This is the classic state of enlightenment, which appears in all the great traditions. The personal is trance-ended. You end the trance of the personal self, and realize that you are part of the vast impersonal Essence of all-that-is. It is impersonal in the sense that is beyond the individual personality of any one person. It is the seamless coat of the universe of which you are a part.

However, that is not the end of the story. The seamless coat of the universe is seamless, but not featureless. Some of its features are expressed uniquely as your personal incarnation of Essence. Your irreducible uniqueness is an expression of the personal quality of the divine, beyond the impersonal.

In this stage of development, the impersonal then reveals its personal face. You experience the personal face of the vast impersonal divine Essence that suffuses, animates and embodies all that is. Here, we are not speaking of a kind of Santa Claus God-in-the-sky. That is merely your personality, or perhaps your your mother’s or father’s personhood, writ large!

Rather this fourth and most profound level of consciousness is the personal face of all-that-is, the aspect of universal Essence that knows your name and cares about your life. It is the divine Mother who holds you in her loving embrace, comforting you, yet challenging you to your greatness at the very same moment.

The second face of God is an infinity of intimacy, which invites your approach and your prayer. Prayer and intimacy are almost synonymous words. The personal face of Essence, which knows your name, affirms the infinite dignity, value and adequacy of your personhood, even as your prayer affirms the dignity of personal needs. Our praise and our petition, our confessions and even our crying out in need are all addressed to the second person of God, which is invoked through the sacred art of prayer. Prayer is our way of initiating a conversation with, and thereby invoking, the infinitely gorgeous face of the personal God, God in the second person.

Pictured: Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev

Filed Under: Belief & Practice, Featured Tagged With: faces of god, gershom sholem, god, kabbalah, prayer

The top 10 spiritually transmitted diseases

April 15, 2012 at 12:02 pm by Mariana Caplan Leave a Comment

By Mariana Caplan

Note: adapted from Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path (Sounds True, 2009).

It is a jungle out there, and it is no less true about spiritual life than any other aspect of life. Do we really think that just because someone has been meditating for five years, or doing 10 years of yoga practice, that they will be any less neurotic than the next person? At best, perhaps they will be a little bit more aware of it. A little bit. It is for this reason that I spent the last 15 years of my life researching and writing books on cultivating discernment on the spiritual path in all the gritty areas—power, sex, enlightenment, gurus, scandals, psychology, neurosis—as well as earnest, but just plain confused and unconscious, motivations on the path. Along with Marc Gafni and many other people at the Center for World Spirituality, we are developing a new series of books, courses and practices to bring further clarification to these issues.

Several years ago, I spent a summer living and working in South Africa. Upon my arrival I was instantly confronted by the visceral reality that I was in the country with the highest murder rate in the world, where rape was common and a huge portion of the population was HIV-positive—men and women, gays and straights alike. As I have come to know hundreds of spiritual teachers and thousands of spiritual practitioners through my work and travels, I have been struck by the way in which our spiritual views, perspectives, and experiences become similarly “infected” by “conceptual contaminants”—comprising a confused and immature relationship to complex spiritual principles—that are as invisible, yet as insidious, as sexually transmitted disease.

The following 10 categorizations are not intended to be definitive but are offered as a tool for becoming aware of some of the most common spiritually transmitted diseases.

1. Fast-Food Spirituality: Mix spirituality with a culture that celebrates speed, multitasking, and instant gratification and the result is likely to be fast-food spirituality. Fast-food spirituality is a product of the common and understandable fantasy that relief from the suffering of our human condition can be quick and easy. One thing is clear, however: spiritual transformation cannot be had in a quick fix.

2. Faux Spirituality: Faux spirituality is the tendency to talk, dress, and act as we imagine a spiritual person would. It is a kind of imitation spirituality that mimics spiritual realization in the way that leopard-skin fabric imitates the genuine skin of a leopard.

3. Confused Motivations: Although our desire to grow is genuine and pure, it often gets mixed with lesser motivations, including the wish to be loved, the desire to belong, the need to fill our internal emptiness, the belief that the spiritual path will remove our suffering, and spiritual ambition—the wish to be special, to be better than, to be “the one.”

4. Identifying with Spiritual Experiences: In this disease, the ego identifies with our spiritual experience and takes it as its own, and we begin to believe that we are embodying insights that have arisen within us at certain times. In most cases, it does not last indefinitely, although it tends to endure for longer periods of time in those who believe themselves to be enlightened and/or who function as spiritual teachers.

5. The Spiritualized Ego: This disease occurs when the very structure of the egoic personality becomes deeply embedded with spiritual concepts and ideas. The result is an egoic structure that is “bullet-proof.” When the ego becomes spiritualized, we are invulnerable to help, new input, or constructive feedback. We become impenetrable human beings and are stunted in our spiritual growth, all in the name of spirituality.

6. Mass Production of Spiritual Teachers: There are a number of current trendy spiritual traditions that produce people who believe themselves to be at a level of spiritual enlightenment, or mastery, that is far beyond their actual level. This disease functions like a spiritual conveyor belt: put on this glow, get that insight, and–bam! –you’re enlightened and ready to enlighten others in similar fashion. The problem is not that such teachers instruct but that they represent themselves as having achieved spiritual mastery.

7. Spiritual Pride: Spiritual pride arises when the practitioner, through years of labored effort, has actually attained a certain level of wisdom and uses that attainment to justify shutting down to further experience. A feeling of “spiritual superiority” is another symptom of this spiritually transmitted disease. It manifests as a subtle feeling that “I am better, more wise, and above others because I am spiritual.”

8. Group Mind: Also described as groupthink, cultic mentality, or ashram disease, group mind is an insidious virus that contains many elements of traditional codependence. A spiritual group makes subtle and unconscious agreements regarding the correct ways to think, talk, dress, and act. Individuals and groups infected with “group mind” reject individuals, attitudes, and circumstances that do not conform to the often unwritten rules of the group.

9. The Chosen-People Complex: Unfortunately, the chosen people complex is not limited to Jews. It is the belief that “Our group is more spiritually evolved, powerful, enlightened and, simply put, better than any other group.” There is an important distinction between the recognition that one has found the right path, teacher, or community for themselves, and having found The One.

10. The Deadly Virus: “I Have Arrived” This disease is so potent that it has the capacity to be terminal and deadly to our spiritual evolution. This is the belief that “I have arrived” at the final goal of the spiritual path. Our spiritual progress ends at the point where this belief becomes crystallized in our psyche, for the moment we begin to believe that we have reached the end of the path, further growth ceases.

“The essence of love is perception,” according to the teachings of Marc Gafni, “therefore the essence of self love is self perception. You can only fall in love with someone you can see clearly—including yourself. To love is to have eyes to see. It is only when you see yourself clearly that you can begin to love yourself.”

It is in the spirit of Marc’s teaching that I believe that a critical part of learning discernment on the spiritual path is discovering the pervasive illnesses of ego and self-deception that are in all of us. That is when we need a sense of humor and the support of real spiritual friends. As we face our obstacles to spiritual growth, there are times when it is easy to fall into a sense of despair and self-diminishment and lose our confidence on the path. We must keep the faith, in ourselves and in others, in order to really make a difference in this world.

Photo Credit: AJC1

Filed Under: Belief & Practice, Featured, Love, Sex & Ethics, Shadow & Psyche, World Politics Tagged With: chosen people complex, confused motivations, fast food spirituality, faux spirituality, group mind, group think, i have arrived, spiritual experiences, spiritual mass production, spiritual pride, spirituality, spiritualized ego, unique shadow

Teaching Marc Gafni’s “Unique Self” Enlightenment in the classroom

April 15, 2012 at 11:05 am by kathleen brownback Leave a Comment

By Kathleen Brownback

Note: This blog post is adapted from “Teaching Marc Gafni’s ‘Unique Self’ Enlightenment in the Classroom: Reflections from a Phillips Exeter Class in Mysticism (for the annual conference of the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education, November 2011, Amherst College).”

A new course introduced at Phillips Exeter Academy in the spring of 2011 began with these words on the syllabus:

What we are about to explore has many names. It has been called the mystical tradition, the perennial tradition, the direct path, the path of the heart, the journey to (and with) the beloved, the practice of yoga, and the contemplative tradition. Aldous Huxley called it “the science, not of the personal ego, but of that eternal Self in the depth of particular, individualized selves, and identical with, or at least akin to, the divine Ground.” What these traditions share is the understanding that there is the possibility of union between the self and whatever we might call Ultimate Reality or God or Spirit, and that this union is primarily realized through a path of spiritual practice.

There is no possible way to make a comprehensive study of all these traditions in one term, and no need for us to do so. The main goal here is to locate various paths within the religious traditions, and to begin to understand what is meant by “spiritual practice.”

As the first teacher of this class, my main goal was to engage the students in a deeper understanding of ego development and the way in which the contemplative or mystical dimension of religion could help them both intellectually and practically as they move into their adult lives.

Phillips Exeter is a secular independent secondary school in New Hampshire, an hour north of Boston, with a 200-year history as an academic powerhouse for boys. It became coeducational in 1972 and has retained its high academic distinction, with all students headed for college and many to the top schools in the country.

The students are bright and lively and curious. But as anywhere, they struggle at times with nonacademic life circumstances that have the capacity to affect their intellectual engagement—a superficial and highly commercialized teenage (and often adult) culture, a pervasive unease about the future of their society in an era of environmental and economic challenge, and for some, personal or family histories of addiction or depression. For this reason I sought out texts and readings that were inclined to prompt questions at the interface of psychology and religion. I had the sense that these would speak to students in both an academic and a personal way, as in fact they did.

In this paper I will first describe student background and interest, then give a brief overview of the course, then focus on the work of one scholar and teacher, Marc Gafni, whose writing in particular spoke to the students in a powerful way.

In the course of the term I had to develop and articulate to myself my own changing philosophy of teaching, which I began to explore in a 2009 article in the Exeter alumni/ae bulletin entitled “In Pursuit of Truths.”

I will describe this evolution more deeply at the end of the article, but also briefly mention it here.

Daily Wisdom: On James Joyce’s definitive return to Yes

April 15, 2012 at 6:00 am by Marc Gafni Leave a Comment

By Marc Gafni

From Marc Gafni’s Your Unique Self:

One of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century is James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce spends reams of pages portraying the No reality encountered in the streets of Dublin by the main character, Leopold Bloom. Joyce masterfully maps the life of the archetypal human whose life is a series of unnecessary losses. The death of Bloom’s son and father, his daughter’s leaving, the passing of his youth, and finally the adultery of his wife.

Yet in the last scene of the book, Bloom returns home to his sleeping wife. Never mind it is a recently desecrated bed. Never mind he sleeps with his feet at her head. It is still home, the erotic haven of the inside. The book ends with a crescendo of Yes. As his wife feigns sleeping, we float along in her stream of consciousness, finally concluding with reminiscences of the early ecstatic hours of her and Leopold’s love. It is a definitive return to Yes:

And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes
and then
he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain
flower and
first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down
to me
so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his
heart was
going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Photo Credit: the queen of subtle

Filed Under: Arts & Culture, Daily Wisdom, Featured, Love, Sex & Ethics, Unique Self Tagged With: erotic, james joyce, leopold bloom, love, sex, ulysses, yes

A hidden danger of high states and structure stages: unkindness

April 13, 2012 at 6:30 pm by Marc Gafni 1 Comment

By Marc Gafni

There is great danger in both in the New Age idolization of state experiences and the excessive premium that much of the Integral community places on complex levels of cognition. As I have pointed out in many teachings, higher levels of cognitive complexity do not a better human being make. It is not by accident that we rarely see posts in the blogs of persons at higher stages of development about kindness.

Kindness is a value that all to often is relegated by writers and thinkers to the lower levels of amber (AQAL) or blue (Spiral Dynamics Integral) consciousness. It rarely appears as a value in many Integral contexts. Or worse still it is given lip service even as it is ignored in practice when the real gods of cognition and power are worshipped.

In New Age contexts “Love” is the buzzword which often means very little. The more practical and actionable kindness gets very little play. At the same time, the most powerful mechanism to assure kindness is fairness. Fairness is a conventional value of law and integrity, but it is also more than that.

A Need for Berur, Clarification

While both Integral and New Age spiritual contexts revel in the appeal of post conventional possibility all to often there is a failure to appreciate the requirement for what my teacher called berur, for the clarification that comes from the due process of law including impartial parties hearing all sides, clarifying ulterior motives and getting the facts straight.

Many New Age spiritual contexts place a high premium on wonderful state experiences of ecstasy brought about through chant and prayer or high structure stages of cognitive complexity, while all to often engaging in spiritual bypass in relation to essential issues of ethics and integrity. Hiding behind the group think which no one dares to question, cloaked in distorted narratives that sometimes have even fooled the unconscious narrator, political fear and small self egoic preservation, all manner of injustice and suffering is inflicted.

The consequences of this failure are substantial. One cannot move beyond the conventional without first honoring the great wisdom of the conventional.

In the Radical Kabbalah of my teacher Mordechai Lainer, it is precisely in this transcending and including of the conventional in post conventional contexts that the Eros of the goddess, the Shekinah is incarnate. As I describe in my writings on Radical Kabbalah (including my forthcoming books from Integral Publishers), the entire Eros of the goddess for Lainer is poured into assuring the correct verdict in what appears to be a petty case in small claims court.

It is in the precision and caring of justice–in the details of justice that the Eros of the goddess lives. Certainly when issues of even greater import are at hand which meta implications on the lives of individuals and entire communities is at stake, the genuine Eros of Shekinah, demands careful fact checking, revealing of complex motivations at play, appropriate deliberation and mechanisms established to assure fairness, decency and healing.

Minimally a fair “court” must be established which truly seeks justice and healing and which is willing to think past self-interest, communal pressure. Group-think and simple ignorance are not options. When issues of gravitas are instead resolved in smoke filled rooms and in the darker corners of blogosphere then the goddess is violated indeed. The Integral community needs to pay heed to this.

Minimally all sides need to be in direct communication, talking and trying to work things out with integrity and love. The failure to put such mechanisms of fairness and integrity in play is tragic and is exactly the kind of violation of the goddess which post-conventional contexts whether of the Integral or New Age variety must passionately and rigorously avoid at all costs.

Filed Under: Featured, Love, Sex & Ethics, World Politics Tagged With: decency, eros, fairness, goddess, healing, integral community, kindness, mordechai lainer, new age, new age community, radical kabbalah, shekinah, virtue

The narrative of conscious business

April 13, 2012 at 5:00 pm by Marc Gafni 2 Comments

By Marc Gafni

Note: Marc Gafni recently participated as a guest scholar at the Conscious Business Conclave at Esalen. Here is an excerpt from Marc’s reflections on the urgent priority of articulating a narrative of Conscious Business. In Marc’s words, there is no World Spirituality that does not include the spirituality of the workplace.

The world of business is becoming one of the great cathedrals of spirit. Businesses are becoming places in which meaning can be created, in which mutuality begins to happen, in which intimacy and trust become core values, in which the expression of one’s unique self as part of a larger context becomes a reality.

Capitalism is the force that has lifted humanity out of poverty through voluntary exchange. Communism tried to life people out of poverty through coercion, but wound up killing 17 million collective farmers in the Ukraine and countless millions elsewhere. Business has lifted more people out of poverty than any other force in history. That is so shocking and so powerful that it makes you sit up in your chair and say “Oh my God! Could it be that evil corporations are actually responsible for lifting more people out of poverty than any other single force in the history of consciousness and the history of the planet?”

What does it mean to lift people out of poverty? It means babies not dying, it means mouths being fed, it means girls going to school and getting educated, it means a response to slavery that never existed in the world before. It means that all the values of the great traditions get enacted on two levels: by ending the physical oppression of poverty and by opening a gateway for human being to be able to experience genuine growth with spiritual, emotional and personal evolution.

We need to bow deeply to business, which initially did all this unconsciously. Lifting people out of poverty was never the conscious intention of business; it was the by-product of a business well enacted. Now business is awakening to itself and becoming conscious. It is recognizing that it is a force with enormous power and responsibility. By becoming conscious, it can do what it does even better, creating a tide that lifts all boats. It can create more community, more mutuality, and paradoxically, more profit, by engaging everyone in the system. That is exciting!

Business and the Great Traditions

Business is the force in the world that is actually accomplishing the goals of all the great traditions. What a paradox! Every major value of the great traditions is fulfilled in business: intimacy, trust, a shared vision, cooperation, collaboration, friendship, and ultimately love. After all, what is love at its core? It is the movement of evolution to higher and higher levels of mutuality, recognition, union and embrace.

The core principle of capitalism is the expression of mutuality between people – the voluntary exchange of value. That mutuality is the cultural force of transformation and healing that is lifting people out of poverty in a way that the great traditions were never able to do. Business enables large bodies of people in voluntary mutuality to work together for a higher purpose, which is to create the prosperity that enables people to live, to love their children, to create a context to grow morally, spiritually and socially.

The great traditions, which are beautiful and from which we have received so much, thought in terms of charity, which is a one way gift from the haves to the have-nots. That was essentially the technology of the great traditions. Business moves us beyond the arbitrary split between the haves and the have-nots, between giving and receiving. Business understands a deep truth of evolutionary mysticism, which is that giving and receiving are one; at their core, they are the same. Business enables a mutuality in which the giver is receiving and the receiver is giving; there is no split between giving and receiving. That deep momentous leap in consciousness has created the most potent force of social transformation in history.

Evolving the Narrative

Narratives are the stories that infuse our life with meaning. The narrative of business matters greatly, not only to the business community, but to virtually every human being. The majority of people on planet earth are working in some form of business. But the dominant narrative about business is that it is greedy, exploitative, manipulative and corrupt. Since that is the story being told, the majority of human beings on the planet experience themselves as furthering and supporting exploitation, greed, corruption and manipulation. When people experience themselves that way, they actually begin to become that way. They think, “I’ve sold out. This is what I am. Isn’t it a shame that I didn’t open a soup kitchen? Isn’t it a shame that I didn’t become a volunteer worker in Sudan?”

But the true narrative is that by participating in business, they are creating prosperity through productivity and lifting people out of poverty. They are creating stable conditions for families to be raised, they are helping build communities that can create schools, they are creating places for people to exchange value and meaning and relationships and intimacy and trust. When people realize that they are part of the largest force for positive social transformation in history, their self-perception changes.

We must awake to the reality that business has the ability to change the self-perception and the self-narrative story for most of the human beings on the planet. We thought that was the role of psychology, but it’s not. Psychology can only deal with the broken pieces of people living in a society which pathologizes their core activity, which is business. We must change the essential narrative of business to make it an accurate reflection of the transformative impact of business, its true identity as the great healer. This is not a kind of Shangri-La vision; it is an accurate narrative of conscious business which should become internalized by the majority of citizens of the planet who are engaging in business. It is a huge and dramatic paradigm shift that actually shifts the very source code of our self-understanding.

Filed Under: Belief & Practice, Featured, Learning & Work Tagged With: business, conscioius capitalism, economic growth, money, narratives, poverty, story

John Mackey: Evolve new paths of business leadership

April 13, 2012 at 9:05 am by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

By Joe Perez

Big Think summarizes a recent interview with John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, with the phrase, “Congratulations, You’ve Succeeded! Now, Its Time To Evolve.”

The interview’s big idea?

Letting your business follow its own path can be difficult. There is the risk of losing control, of overextending your resources. Clearly, the evolution of a company’s purpose has to be managed intelligently. But the potential benefits are immeasurable. By valuing and incorporating the visions of your stakeholders, you can crowdsource ideas that keep the organization creatively competitive while honing its brand. You can create a community of evangelists committed to your success. And you can discover new, unexpected sources of vitality to drive your company’s future.

In part, Mackey appears to be communicating some points about Integral Leadership, a style of management based on “flex and flow” tenets.

Filed Under: Featured, Learning & Work Tagged With: business, integral leadership, john mackey

When spirituality goes global

April 13, 2012 at 8:28 am by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

By Joe Perez

Andrew Cohen, who is currently promoting his new book Evolutionary Enlightenment, is discussing the globalization of enlightenment on the Big Think blog. he describes how he originally traveled to India as a young man in 1984, and three years later returned to the U.S. to begin to teach enlightenment, and he draws a contrast to patterns in global spirituality today.

Whereas Americans have often sought spiritual illumination in India, Indians are now turning to Western Enlightenment.

Andrew writes in “Globalization Isn’t Just for Economists”:

The great surge of modernization in that ancient land is generating enormous stress for the multitudes who are striving to cash in on the new opportunities for prosperity. I could feel it most strongly when speaking to young people. They are under overwhelming pressure from their families to excel and conform: do well in school, get a good job, get married, have kids, send them to college, and—best case scenario—move to the USA so they can do it all in the promised land. Three decades earlier, I had come to India to find my soul. Now young Indians want to come to America to find material success.

The most revealing incident happened at my first talk at a college in Mumbai: I noticed that the title had been changed from “Spiritual Self-Confidence” to “Self-Confidence.” I was surprised—India has always seemed to me to be the one place in the world where no one has a problem with the word “spiritual.” When I inquired as to why it had been removed, the organizers informed me that if they used the word “spiritual” in the title, young people wouldn’t come. “Spirituality is for grandparents,” I was told.

After describing how he pushed his audience of Indian young people to “think their own thoughts,” just as India’s spiritual luminaries have done, Andrew says:

If fifty years ago you were to tell somebody that Americans would teach Enlightenment in India and that Asian seekers would come to California to learn about what the Buddha taught from an American Jew, they would never have believed you. I can hardly believe it myself.

Cohen’s article is a valuable perspective on the emerging World Spirituality movement. No campaign for human liberation will be complete until (to put things much too simply) Westerners discover the riches of Eastern enlightenment and Easterners discover the riches of Western enlightenment. My point being, Spirit’s next move is drawing people from every nation into a global encounter with our True Self, and we are all doing so in ways uniquely our own.

Filed Under: Belief & Practice, Featured Tagged With: andrew cohen, asia, evolutionary enlightenment, globalization, india, worldcentric

Marc Gafni and Joe Perez in Dialogue (II): Where is the World Spirituality Movement at Today?

April 12, 2012 at 7:42 pm by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

By Joe Perez

This is the second post in a series on Awake, Alive & Aware featuring short dialogues with some of the leaders of the World Spirituality movement. Today there is a transcript of a telephone call with Marc Gafni, Director of the Center for World Spirituality.

Continued from Part 1: “Marc Gafni and Joe Perez in Dialogue: What is World Spirituality?”

Joe: Where is the World Spirituality movement today?

Marc: The World Spirituality movement has many expressions in the world. There are many people practicing World Spirituality not in an organized way, not in a theoretically consistent way, often not in a dharmically completely sound way, but they have this core intuition and they are grasping and looking for ways to express it. At some point, we are looking to develop means to allow this grassroots world movement expression, and the book you’re working on, The Rise of World Spirituality, I hope will at least in part, the way you described it to me which sounds really exciting, you’ll be able to point to this, that it’s already happening.

The leading institution in the movement is the Center for World Spirituality. We just finished our second annual board meeting. I want to give you a sense of where we are because it’s really exciting. We’ve decided that our mission, our mantle, is to shift something in the source code of consciousness. The evolution of the source code of consciousness is our core mission statement. Some of our board members, Tom Goddard and Kathleen Brownback, are heading a group to work on this. It’s a fantastic board of people from around the world.

What we’ve done is identify what we’re going to do. We identified two things at the meeting. One, what is the theoretical framework of World Sprituality? And two, what are the action items? The theoretical framework is different, so I’ll talk about the action items.

Joe: So by “action items,” just so my readers are clear, you’re talking about this organization, called the Center for World Spirituality, you’re talking about what this organization has in store for the near future. Is that right?

Marc: That’s correct. The Center is one I founded a few years ago with Mariana Caplan and Sally Kempton, and Ken Wilber was involved as a very important member on the Council, and any number of fantastic leaders and teachers from around the world. We’re partnering with our friends who have a Global Spirituality website and we will be integrating that into the Center in a very deep way.

The center is both a lower-left and lower-right expression, actually an all-four-quadrant expression now that I think about it, whose prime purpose is to articulate the dharma of a World Spirituality and to evolve the dharma of a World Spirituality. That’s the job of the Center. The job of World Spirituality itself is to evolve the source code of consciousness.

What are the methods for doing this mission? We’re focusing on three major areas.

First, the Center has decided to focus on acting as a think tank / publishing concern. We actually chartered approximately 12 – 15 major projects of different natures.

Joe: I’m glad you were able to keep track of them. There were about 25 different people in attendance, and just about all of them committed to some sort of project or other key way of supporting World Spirituality. That’s more than I expected. I heard that too from some of the other board members, the newer ones who didn’t know quite what to expect. Once we engaged with the rest of the board, we got a feel for the caliber of the people in attendance, our expectations were exceeded, and we ended up feeling more optimistic than when we sat in our first meeting.

Marc: That’s great feedback to receive. Even though I knew going into the meeting all of the different pieces, but just hearing all the pieces spoken aloud into the room, hearing the interaction of the board community. Of the 20 projects, if the top 10 happen, we’re in really good shape. The top 10 include a book on The Rise of World Spirituality, a collection of essays on the Enlightenment of Fullness. There will be a major book on World Spirituality based on Integral Principles with Ken Wilber. There will be a book on shadow work – Lighten Up. There will be a World Spirituality practice book. Without going down the entire list, there’s … people like yourself, to Kathy Brownback, to Ken Wilber, to Warren Farrell, Wyatt Woodsmall, Helen, Tom, Mariana. And there were some board members who weren’t there who all have fantastic contributions to make. So we’re very excited about the think tank / publishing dimension.

The second dimension is training. We’re working on creating a new series of trainings which are rooted in World Spirituality and Unique Self technology.

And third we are calling “community lab.” Instead of creating one big World Spirituality Center or Church, there will be smaller circles meeting around the world, circles of people. That’s a big deal, that’s exciting, that’s good. At least at first, those circles will be circles of study – whether in Holland at Venwoude or Shalom Mountain or San Francisco, perhaps in Seattle something will emerge.

And finally a very strong Web presence which we are going to be working on in the next six months. I hope by six months from now the Web presence will reflect this vision of World Spirituality, its five-part theoretical framework – which we won’t get into on this phone call – but which is a beautiful, modular way of understanding the core principles, which you can understand on a popular level and a deep mystical level, will appear as the core of the website as the core module of all the books. It’s a lot.

Joe: We’re running out of time today. On this topic, we could drill into detail on all of these and talk much longer, so we’ll need to look for updates on the CWS website, watching for news as it develops. I know there’s a lot of information coming in the future. But if somebody wants to get started today practicing World Spirituality in Toledo, Ohio, or the jungles of the Amazon, what are they to do?

Marc: We’re not completely yet prepared to fully receive that question, meaning, the framework is not yet completely articulated. I would say, go to the website, go to the teaching tab – “Core Teachings” – and they’ll be able to read the basic principles of World Spirituality, which will give someone a framework for practice which they can immediately implement.

Joe: What about the book Unique Self which we’re all waiting for?

Marc: I don’t have a final word. But the last word I have as of a few days ago is that it’s supposed to come out in mid-June or July. The latest it would come out is the fall. We’ve just completed the transactional pieces of that book. We’re very excited that Your Unique Self: the Democratization of Enlightenment, will be out by the summer. And there’s already some key pieces on the Web. On our website, there’s a keynote address I gave at J.F.K. on Unique Self, and there’s the Journal of Integral Theory & Practice, Vol. 6, 1, on Unique Self. There’s a core article there, a 40 or 50 page article there, which gives you the core of the teaching, which is already available and will be fully fleshed out over the book. We hope over the next 18 months there will be about 5 volumes coming out covering these dimensions even as we’re writing the next stage for the library.

Joe: Thank you for your time today. I’m excited to be working with you on this movement.