By Marc Gafni
“What is World Spirituality? How do we realize this vision of World Spirituality? Who does it address? And why is World Spirituality so essential and possible today, an opportunity that hasn’t existed in 2,000 years?”
Exploring the Unique Self and beyond …. Searching for God’s place (Part 3)
By Hans Jecklin
This post continues from Part 2.
On my walk around the old pitoresque city of Fribourg, I suddenly got struck by an inspiration: The old images of God have been de-mistified long ago — I started to talk in my head – but many of us still experience a fear of being judged or even punishment by an unconscious authority that is being projected to the outside of ourselves: if it is not God whom we fear, it is society with its threat of exclusion, if we do not fit expectations.
But where could we imagine or locate God or — if we prefer — that all-encompassing force of eternal love and wisdom that is the origin of all that is? I believe to know a spiritual map with only “my” Unique Self and the Prior Unity of all cosmic potentials between myself and the ONE. But there is no room for God, especially if I understand my experience of the ONE as merely the state of oneness at the edge of that huge black (w)hole from which the cosmos manifests and where it might collapse into in a far ahead future; maybe manifesting a new cosmos on the backside of the hole?
And if I imagine a creative pulse from matter to antimatter between the two sides of the black hole, it would be logic — according to the law “as above so below” — that not only the tiniest particles of matter, or my energy centers, but also galaxies and the cosmos all live in (or even: from) this pulsation of expansion and contraction. This image of an all-inspiring cosmic breath is present in most ancient cultures around the planet, but it also exists as a vision for those cosmologists that expect the expansion of the universe to reverse at its culmination — in millions or billions of years — into a huge contraction. The bigger the organism the longer must be the time spans of out — and in breath: a cosmic day of Brahma lasts according to the Hindu knowledge 4,320,000,000 (4.32 billion) solar years; whereas at the quantum level pulsation happens in immeasurable time fractions.
Can we imagine God as a presence beyond the widest in- and out-breath, beyond unimaginable dimensions of trans-cosmic galaxies? With the whole “creation” breathing in a holarchy of pulsations from the seemingly eternal down to the tiniest?
While these imaginations take place, I realize that — even while walking — I have changed in a different state of consciousness. And I suddenly perceive the picturesque old town of Fribourg. sitting on top of the cliff above the Saane river canyon as a kind of theatrical stage set or even as a doll house, I used to play with as child. The state that has taken me in is huge, of absolute grandeur. And it is at the same time so real and intense that I must have stumbled over a dimension I had not known before. God — or trans-cosmic intelligence in whatever form — has found me again, as an unquestionable REALITY. I feel being part of a great pulsation that breathes me and vibrates on all subtle levels from spirit to vital.
Perspectives as Post-modern Revelation
By Marc Gafni
Every evolved culture and every evolved individual may realize Unique Self when True Self awakens to its Unique Perspective. An early expression of this equation is sourced in pre-modernity in the great teachings of the Kabbalists. For these masters, the sacred text of the Torah is the word of God. Yet, paradoxically. in Hebrew mystical teaching a human being who is deeply grounded in True Self while fully incarnating his or her own uniqueness, also speaks the word of God!
Human insight HOWEVER is considered the word of God and, given the status of Torah, only when it derives directly from the clarified unique perspective of a human being who is connected to the ground of True Self. In this radical teaching the supreme identity between the human being and the godhead is only realized through the paradoxical portal of radical human uniqueness. Irreducible uniqueness, the full inhabiting of unique perspective or voice, is revealed to be an absolute quality of essence.
In modernity and especially in post-modernity, the early realization of the Kabbalists in regard to the primacy of perspective takes center stage. There is an emergent cultural realization, placed front and center in Integral theory, that perspectives are foundational. But in post-modernity perspectives have to often been used as the key tool of post-modernity’s deconstructive project. The sentence used to deny all truth is “that’s just your perspective.”
Our conclusion in World Spirituality teaching however, is not that of the post-modern deconstructive thinkers who were among the champions of this insight. Deconstruction wrongly assumed that when perspective is revealed to be part of the process of meaning making, there is no longer any real meaning. Rather, when we understand perspective, we understand that every culture and every great tradition of spirit has its own Unique Self.
Perspective reveals a plentitude of meaning and not a dearth or death of meaning. All cultures perceive essence, but each unique perspective gives a particular resonance and cast to essence. Loyalty to one’s religion and culture is not, therefore, (as modern and post-modern fashions sometimes suggest), primitive or fundamentalist. It is rather partially true, in that it is how my culture is intuiting essence.
The pre-modern mistake was the failure to realize that every religion has a particular perspective, and therefore not to realize that no religion can claim that its intuition of ultimate truth is the only truth. Now that we understand that every great tradition and culture perceived essence through a particular perspective, we can avoid the tragic mistake of deconstructing the traditions as meaningless.
Instead, we understand that every tradition is a particular perspective, a particular instrument in the symphony of spirit that is indeed making sacred music. All of the perspectives come together to create a symphony. And at that point, there is the possibility that the followers of each tradition can begin to realize that their particular religion is not the music but an instrument of the music.
The Kabbalists foreshadow our post- postmodern World Spirituality reconstructive project. Nothing is true, says post-modernity, because everything is contextual. For the Kabbalists, foreshadowing World Spirituality teaching, the opposite is correct. When you fully inhabit your unique perspective you become Source. You not only speak the word of God You incarnate the word of God.
World Spirituality based on Integral Principles, including the first principle of Unique Self, understands that Uniqueness reveals essence through a particular prism. Perspective creates not a dearth of truth, but a magnificent kaleidoscope of truth. Every authentic insight deriving from Unique Perspective is true but partial. No part is reducible to the whole but no part stands alone. It is this insight of Unique Self that is the foundation of the great reconstructive project, which is Spirit’s Next Move.
Photo Credit: Jason A. Samfield
Greetings from Venwoude’s community days event
By Chahat Corten
Hello dearest friends,
Sending you all love and blessing from Venwoude in Holland. This is the first blog post from the Venwoude community days in Holland. In the first couple of days, we had an ecstatic evening with chanting, a teaching on chanting and storie-telling. Ecstatic and passionate ending!
Simply said Marc Gafni has been working round the clock since he got here. First he created a new World Spirituality process which he called “Growing Up,” which was four four-hour sessions in which he guided the community a brilliant and beautiful exploration of what he called Evolutionary We Space.
The process guided people through seven levels of consciousness in which Marc would describe the level and then put us in the voice of that level of consciousness and have everyone talk in first person about they experienced god, community, love and integrity from that level of consciousness.
It was awesome to see, how Marc used this process to kind of surprise everybody into engaging and enacting all the issues on surviving, belonging, power, rules and the great topic of autonomy and community. All the hidden issues were surfaced in away that inspired everyone, made no one bad and gave great honor to each person and the whole community. It was really awesome awesome to watch. It reminded me again of what Center for World Spirituality is so precious.
We have been recording the whole process and there will be some great clips coming from this!
Tomorrow Marc will have a day of conversations (and some students in between) and then Monday-evening diving in 3 days of visioning process, with the leadership group of our community….. I have the sense that something really will shift these days…. :). It also awesome to watch Marc’s love as he makes the issues and dynamics of our community “his issues” and holds everyone with so much care and love and with firmness and direction.
I’ll have another blog post for you soon.
Sending Love,
Chahat
Exploring the Unique Self and beyond … Discovery and Gratitude (Part 1)
By Hans Jecklin
When, more than 40 years ago, I undertook my first steps into the cosmos of Jungian psychology, I was soon confronted with the opposition of an “I”, the person I am in this life, and the “Self” that Carl Gustav Jung understood as both the source and fulfillment of the “I” or as the prior source of potentials for the “I” to manifest in life. Jung was aware of the danger for the “I” to identify with this “Autonomous Reality” or “Divine Archetype” and warned of ego-inflation when a person would – even unconsciously – try to occupy or control that higher reality.
This mostly intellectual differentiation of “I” and “Self” accompanied me for a long time after I started my spiritual search. The longing for the direct experience of God had not only led me beyond psychology, but also to quit the reformed (Christian) church that had been my parents’ choice. I then spent nearly twenty years of practicing Zazen, Tao Yoga and Kashmir Shivaism and went through many dis-illusions, having mis-taken the impermanent for the eternal, until finally grace took over.
Tired of the year-long search through cultures and places, I had at one point asked my Self to make no more fuss and take me over to the Siddhis: “This is like dying” it responded and faster-than-I-could-think a chorus of inner voices exclaimed “This is what we have been waiting for!”. When after a seemingly endless fall through extreme darkness, I ended in indescribable bliss, I realized that this was the unconditional love I had always been looking for and that the irresistible longing that had led me through this labyrinth of temptations is the nature of GRACE.
The natural wish to bring this deep experience into my life of a family-father and business-man soon brought me to understand that — yes! — one hand there was nothing more to search for, but that, on the other, this was just the beginning of the real exploration into spirituality, one that might never end in this life-time.
Happily enough, my longing and curiosity had also led me to a form of past-life therapy where I could experience the “Inner Self” as an undeniable reality: as the presence of eternal, all-encompassing love and wisdom within me. Within this setting, I learnt to surrender to its guidance as an ever-present source that would not only send showers of love through my cellular, emotional and mental bodies but was capable to help me understand and transform traumatic imprints that had been limiting the unfoldment of my life purpose: Unconscious imprints or conditioning, resulting from this lifetime and — depending on our understanding — from cultural heritage (familiar, ethnic, racial, human) or past lifetimes.
Having become a facilitator of this transformational work — which I do not label as strictly “past-life” anymore — I have over the years been enriched by so many experiences that I can gladly surrender to it, without any doubts about its unique power of love and wisdom. It is my supreme inner guide that not only carries the potential to manifest my unique role on this planet (or in the universe?!) but its wisdom is constantly guiding me into perfect circumstances and moments, right people, books and teachings that I need at a given moment to better respond to the challenges of the ever-evolving present.
I have learnt that I can grow into such subtle intimacy with this endless source of love and wisdom that it has become a supreme partner of dialogue It may — at my request — permeate and transform or expand my consciousness by its love and wisdom in order to more completely perform my role in the favor of humanity, our planet and the cosmos.
I know that the “Unique Self” that manifests through me is but an aspect of what I would call a “Prior Unity” of all possible potentials, ready to manifest in this or other universes. These potentials constantly arise from the “ONE undivided and eternal presence”; they must originate from before the singular event that we assume as the BigBang and — according to limited human understanding — have evolved through the play of eros and agape ever since.
I have been shown by GRACE how to knock at the door of the “ONE” that as to my present understanding might be my eternal home, but I know at the same time that NOW my role within this life will be guided by the “Unique Self” that is constantly present within and beyond me.
————
I am open for additional inspiration to enlarge my present view which — as we all know — is provisional. Please also do not hesitate to ask whenever my limited capacity of writing in English needs support.
Photo Credit: woodleywonderworks
Self-confidence: a sign that you have arrived spiritually
By Joe Perez
Self-confidence is a sign that you have arrived spiritually, according to syndicated columnist Norris Burkes. In “Spirituality: Be your own person,” the Air National Guard chaplain writes:
Jesus … flat out ask[ed] his adoring crowds, “Who do people say that I am?”
The throng fired back some wild-eyed guesses, as some even said he was the ghost of an old prophet.
Others said he was a lunatic, but Jesus brushed those speculations aside and turned to those who were important in his life, his students, and asked, “Who do you say that I am?”
Peter stood and set it straight. “You da man!”
OK, he didn’t exactly say that. Peter said, “You’re the Christ.”
Jesus responded to this astute conclusion with an astounding command. He told them to not tell a soul.
Why would Jesus ask for such anonymity? Some scholars say that he was trying to avoid being crucified prematurely.
I think it was much more.
I think Jesus had arrived at the moment in his life where he knew that he didn’t need to “proclaim” who he was.
His walk, his breath, his talk exuded the confidence of one who was truly different.
He knew his purpose, and he knew he was the only one who needed to feel contentment in that purpose.
Read the whole thing.
World Spirituality suggests that Burkes has identified an important principal of enlightenment, that moment which he says you stop trying to proclaim who you are and just put your effort into being who God wants you to be. Of course, there are many different ways of interpreting what God wants, and I am using this expression as another way of pointing to the Thou in the I/Thou relationship we all have with All That Is.
Norris says of Jesus: “His walk, his breath, his talk exuded the confidence of one who was truly different.”
Or … He exuded the confidence of one who was truly himself, fully realized in Unique Self.
Photo Credit: Andy Houghton
Oleg Linetsky’s open letter to Ken Wilber and other integral teachers
Oleg Linetsky
By Joe Perez
Recently the Center for World Spirituality received a welcome and intellectually stimulating letter and paper by Oleg Linetsky from the Ukraine. We’re pleased to be reprinting the letter and paper on the CWS website. These include a major rethinking of “boundaries” in integral theory and an innovative application of Unique Self.
Open letter to Ken Wilber and integral teachers
Dear Ken,
First of all I would like to express my deep love and gratitude for the light of wisdom you bring and your incomparable contribution for the good of sentient beings. Your works had a great impact on my own life, for which I am very grateful to you. On my journey through the pages of your books I experienced a true divine joy.
In this letter I would like to illuminate a side of the Integral Approach (IA) which up until now remained in the darkness, i.e. boundaries. Just like any other objects inside the quadrants, boundaries are objects that can be felt and realized, so they cannot be ignored and left outside the integral map. There are boundaries, even though also illusory for the non-dual witness.
In the natural state of non-dual oneness it becomes clear that all forms arise from the light of primordial ground, and even boundaries are a concentrated light of clarity of the nature of the mind and the final barriers on the way to the inexpressible. They are the very core of our feeling of aliveness and awakeness. They let us feel joy and suffering of life and make life meaningful. The message about boundaries (as five elements, fivefold mahabhuta or five skandhas) came to us from ancient traditions dating back thousands of years. This message is as valuable for humanity as The Great Chain of Being. There is a special method which lets us study boundaries today even in our usual waking state. Boundaries are the missing link between the absolute and the relative, emptiness and form, spirituality and religion, IA and its popularity.
Today we see that the message about boundaries actually describes the mechanism of conscious evolution, understanding of which can promote a progress of humanity towards 2nd tier and simply help us living from the deepest part of us that you and Marc Gafni call the Unique Self. Five boundaries described here are right about how to live in resonance with our Unique Self and how to resolve the problem of wise choice in everyday life using an integral approach.
I want to share my view of boundaries which arose from combining pure non-dual vision (when all boundaries are seen but seen as illusory) and integral vision. Five types of boundaries initialize the format of our evolutionary Game. Here I speak of a timeless, but not of an absolute wisdom that is also called diamond or vajra wisdom in Buddhist tradition. As you know, the state of oneness is paradoxical: everything is “I am,” but “I” remains above everything. But living in this state brings another paradox: although everything is ”I am,” “I” is not the only source of game novelty, so “I” constantly has to face challenges from a nameless source. Each of us is simultaneously the great Creator and an ordinary player on the common playground structured in a certain way.
The text below is composed as a very brief set of theses which are written in terms of IT and still have to be discussed and elaborated. I talk in detail about the message of boundaries in my book The Game. User’s guide. This message can be called “the integral approach to experiencing” as well. It is astonishing that today the wisdom of vajra is being revealed to the world again, largely through the integral approach. This letter is the expression of gratitude to you and all the pioneers of evolutionary spirituality and the integral approach. I would appreciate your feedback and hope there’s a possibility of a broad dialogue about boundaries with you and integrally oriented spiritual teachers like Sally Kempton, Marc Gafni, Terry Patten, Roger Walsh and others.
Love, light and wishes of good health,
Oleg Linetsky
20th of march 2012
Read the entire paper here.
Man changes name to Tyrannosaurus Rex, citing desire for distinctiveness
How much is having a cool, unusual name worth to an entrepreneur? Enough to change Tyler to T-Rex. The socio-economic value of distinctiveness is highlighted in a story today by NPR:
Tyler Gold of York, Neb., is now officially named Tyrannosaurus Rex Joseph Gold, the local York News Times reports.
But there’s no sign that Tyler … er, Tyrannosaurus Rex … is rethinking his choice because of any breaking news about breaking wind.
According to the News Times:
“In Gold’s official filing with the court, he said he wanted to change his name ‘because the (T-Rex designation) is cooler. Also, as an entrepreneur, name recognition is important and the new name is more recognizable.’ He verbally repeated his reasoning during the court proceedings, while on the witness stand [Monday].”
Commenting on the Good Men Blog, Joanna Schroeder adds:
Folks these days are naming their kids more, shall we say… creatively. Cracked.com has a great list of the top 20 unusual celebrity baby names that includes my favorite: Pilot Inspektor, child of Jason Lee.
Personally, I love it. I like that kids don’t get teased for their names being unusual anymore – because almost all the names are unusual.
Our names are all written together in the Cosmic Scroll, to use an image popular with Marc Gafni and other students of Kabbalah. Meaning, in other words, that the Cosmic Scroll, seen as our True Self, is only manifest in the world when it appears with a Name, with a Unique Self.
Each name is already unique, whether it is John, James, Mary, Patricia, or Tyrannosaurus Rex Joseph. But T-Rex’s decision demonstrates spirit’s next move: as individuals strive to build careers for the 21st century, defining their personal brands in a crowded marketplace of individuals with impressive resumes, they are looking to milk value out of every unique, distinguishing characteristic in their portfolio.
Whether T-Rex is just a gimmick or if it will turn Tyler Gold into a mammoth entrepreneur is hard to say. But if the name captures something essential about his Unique Self that lets him be more fully who he is in the world, then let’s bless him on his journey. And then let’s get out of his way…. quick!!!
Photo Credit: Billings Productions, Inc.
The Daily Wisdom: Unique Self is the Enlightened Realization
By Marc Gafni
From Your Unique Self:
Unique Self is the enlightened realization that you are both absolutely one with the whole, and absolutely unique. You are free from the contractions of your personality, even as you experience yourself as personally engaged in the great evolutionary unfolding of consciousness.
Realizing your Unique Self will fundamentally change the way you understand virtually every facet of your awakened life. Once we’ve engaged the core teachings of Unique Self, we will look separately at how these teachings fundamentally reconfigure and dramatically revision our understanding of love, joy, shadow, sexuality, parenting, death, relationships, loneliness, evolutionary spirituality, malice, ego psychology, and the integration of East and West.
Your Unique Self is God’s love-signature written all over you. God loved you so much, He personalized himself as you. You are the individualized heart and mind of God. This is your Unique Self.
The creative process that mysteriously moves from nothing to something is the God-impulse. To live as your Unique Self means to align yourself with that process, with the ecstatic evolutionary impulse that initiated the kosmos, with the ecstasy of God, which re-creates all of reality in every second of existence.
Are you ready to respond to this invitation, to offer yourself to the infinite love intelligence that wants desperately to show up in the world through and as you?
Photo Credit: Stuck in Customs
The Daily Wisdom: Your Unique YES
By Marc Gafni
Reprinted from Your Unique Self (forthcoming, Integral Publishers).
Love is a perception of the infinite specialness, the full uniqueness, of the beloved. To love another is to say Yes to their Unique Presence, to their Unique Being and Unique Becoming The greatest of love affairs begins with a simple imprint of Yes.
Remember, we come into this world trailing clouds of glory with core knowledge of our omnipotence, beauty, infinite power, and infinite potential. And then we hear a chorus of voices for the first ten years of our lives, and the only word they seem to be saying is No, No, No. We gradually come to associate maturity with saying No. When an idea or new direction comes up, our first response is why it can’t work. We are brilliant at it. Even the most simpleminded person becomes a genius when it comes to saying No. We can think up twenty reasons why it will not work before we can think up two reasons why it could. We have all become Dr. No with advanced degrees. But somewhere deep inside, the Yes remains, an eternal child of your Unique Self. We know on the inside of the inside that Yes is the answer.
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 as 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. Nevermind it is a recently desecrated bed. Nevermind 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
The Yes here is sexual. The sexual in this passage models the eros of life. The overwhelming perfume of this sexual Yessing signifies hope, promise, and possibility in the most expanded erotic sense. For the sexual is the full ecstatic urgency of the urge to merge and the urge to emerge throbbing inside of us. This final Yes has magically transformed the seven-hundred-plus pages of modern existentialist Nos. It was James Joyce who reminded us that Yes is a feminine word that signifies the end of all resistance.
The high priests entering the Holy of Holies once a year say Yes with every step. The cherubs murmur to each other, “Yes, yes.” The Temples of God and Man are built with Yes stones. The Presence of God is a great green light that says, “Yes, you are gorgeous. Yes, I need you.” The Uni-verse is an open entryway, crowned by a neon Yes sign. To be lived as love is to know that—as Wallace Stevens reminds us.
After the final No comes a Yes. In those heart-opening moments when truth suddenly bursts through your everyday routines, you know that the purpose of your life is to uniquely incarnate in the story of your life the love-intelligence that governs the Uni-verse. Are you willing to utter a sacred “Yes!” to your conscious participation in the evolution of consciousness?
To awaken and say Yes to the unique invitation, delight, and obligation of your life is the reason you were born. It is the only authentic source of joy and meaning in your life. When you slumber and say No, your loneliness, fear, and contraction live in you, through you, and as you. When you awaken and say Yes, you are living as Source. When you awaken and say Yes, Source lives in you, through you, and as you.
Photo Credit: josef.stuefer
Enlightenment is not loss of identity but a reclaiming of your true identity
By Marc Gafni
One of the simplest definitions of sanity used in the psychological literature is knowing who you are. To be sane is know your identity, to recognize your name.
For example if I tell you that my name is Ken Wilber when my name is really Marc Gafni and I insist on being called Ken Wilber there is a fairly good chance that I am a bit insane. Or more than a bit. Because I am claiming a name not my own and I do not know my true identity. But the distance between the identity of Marc and Ken is relatively small, actually almost negligible, when compared with the vast distance between my separate self and true self.
The distance between belief that I am but a skin encapsulated, merely Marc, and the knowing which literally blows my mind, that I am True Self, and that the total number of true selves is one- is literally infinite. To be sane is to know that I am not merely a separate self but true self. From the place of true self I am able to access not only my limited power, knowing, creativity and love, but rather all of the power, knowing, creativity and love in the universe flows through me.
From the place of true self there is no reason for me to be jealous of you, to lash out at your or to do anything other then love you as myself. Because in some sense you are myself. The pathological competition, grasping, and abuses produced by the contraction are deconstructed in the emergent glory of True Self. You access a spacious sense of peace, joy and harmonious equilibrium with all other expressions of being and becoming on the planet. The world literally becomes a different place. These are the goods of what has classically been called enlightenment.
So here is the great question. If enlightenment is sooo good, why isn’t everyone doing it? If enlightenment is the answer and it actually delivers on all of its wildly amazing promises — which it does — why is the world not flocking to Center for World Spirituality and other contemporary enlightenment schools, for intensive enlightenment studies? The enlightenment teachers for the most part explain that this is because of the clever brilliance of the ego which does everything in its power to avoid its own death. The ego does not want to die so it attaches you to a narrow identity of small self. Other teachers say that the work of practice required to liberate into True Self beyond ego is simply to demanding for most people. Still other teachers blame the blandishments of culture and society as being so seductive with their pseudo comforts that is hard to free yourself from the game.
All of these explanations certainly carry some weight. But the deeper truth is that the problem is not with the seekers of enlightenment who are in all of the explanations considered in some sense deficient. Rather there is a core defect in the teaching of classical enlightenment itself. You see the teaching of classical enlightenment is boring, dislocating and alienating at its very core.
It is dislocating because the seeker, student, asks rightfully, If I give up my separate self –ego identity, then where am I? The seeker asks correctly, “but what about me”? The enlightenment teacher responds by saying this is just the voice of the ego. The price for enlightenment is, “ die to separate self”. Well that is true but also partial. The seeker senses that “I will disappear into the undifferentiated oneness of True Self — which while blissfully seductive – at some deep level feels not only terrifying but wrong. It feels like a violation of the sacred dignity of the individual.
But not only that, it is also boring. The sense of creative edge, vitality and becoming seems lost in the being-ness of it all. In this case it is the students of enlightenment not the teachers who are holding the higher intuition. The classical teaching of True Self enlightenment is counter intuitive and our intuitive and are intuitions are. It is the Unique Self enlightenment that liberates enlightenment and reclaims its vital energy of transformation as a genuine and necessary option. Enlightenment is not a loss of identity but a reclaiming of your true identity.
Rather enlightenment is the move beyond your separate self to True Self, which is the ground for the awakening of your Unique Self. You correctly sense that the source of your dignity and value is your irreducible uniqueness. What Unique Self teaches is that enlightenment is not a loss of individuality. Rather it is the reclaiming of your infnite individualty as the unique expression of essence that lives as you. To be enlightened means to your realize your True Nature as an utterly unique perspective and manifestation of consciousness. This is not boring. Rather it is the energized edge of your evolutionary creativity and becoming that is both indivisibly part of the greater one and ecstatically You. This is sanity. This is what it means to live in a larger context as an evolutionary lover. This is enlightenment.
Photo Credit: Tie Guy II
A Bouquet of Truth Tests: Reflections on Certainty and Uncertainty (Part 2)
By Liza Braude-Glidden
Reflection Six
An Opportunity and Crisis Truth Test
When uncertainty engulfs the present, how do you respond?
Hot winds off the Mojave Desert engulfed our neighborhood in towers of fire when I was seven. Dive-bombers careened overhead as if we were at war. Our teacher rushed us out of our second grade class crying, “ we must evacuate,” words instilling more fear than understanding in our seven-year-old hearts. Soon our bus rumbled though familiar streets made hellish by black smoke. We huddled together, wondering if our parents had saved our pets. When would we see our families again? Some of us wondered if our parents were alive.
We were right to wonder. My father, for example, stood on the roof of our home with a hose until the water ran out. One third of my friends lost their homes and possessions. Whirlwinds of fire charred the tops of our trees. The Fire spared my father and our home, but it could have gone another way. Miraculously, no one died. Yet in those moments we shared as children it was as if God had suddenly thrown all the balls of our young lives up into the air. No one knew how they would come down, MAYBE not even God.
We call our historical moment “the age of information.” We seem to know whatever we care to know on almost any subject including the chaos and suffering that seem ready to overwhelm our humanity daily. We know enough to be awestruck by the forces in play. Do we know enough to be willing to dance with all the balls God has tossed up in the air?
Reflection Seven
A Solitude/Isolation Truth Test
Am I allowing this truth to isolate me or using it to connect to a larger whole?
Most expansions of consciousness wrestle with shadows of isolation. I am connected with the universe in a new way and suddenly bereft of anyone with whom to share my new world space! William Blake is an example of a visionary who complained bitterly that the gutless cartoonists of his time received glory he deserved. Eastern influenced Westerners may see his rage as a lack of equanimity, yet wrestling with this shadow may have given Blake’s vision greater strength and integrity. One can imagine Blake alone in his workshop by the light of a single oil lamp, working furiously through the night on his engravings of the story of Job.
The shadow, the truth that I am alone in my revelation, is true enough, but not as true as the sense of belonging that knows that every opening to a wider embrace weaves me deeper into the fabric of life and being.
Expansion of consciousness connects. Its shadow dissociates and alienates. This dissociation and alienation is an important shadow truth. In it’s best expression, it aids in the evolutionary process of differentiation. At the same time, truths that connect me, that bring me into engagement with the whole and its parts are truer than those that isolate me from my fellow humans and the universe we share.
Expanded consciousness is sometimes described in terms of increasing self-reference and individuation and this is of course, true. Such beings are recognized by equanimity and lack of fear. And in the truth test I call Solitude/Isolation, an expanding consciousness is described as an increasingly vulnerable, engaged connectedness, thus the apt term, embrace. Such beings are recognized by monumental acts of love.
Reflection Eight
A Mud Hole Truth Test
How much humiliation does it take to humble me where intuition is concerned?
Glastonbury, England, home, some say, to the Holy Grail, has more than it’s share of mud holes. On You Tube, you can see a couple on their way to an outdoor concert disappear when what is beneath the wet, reflective surface of their path is much deeper than it appeared! Soon two thickly coated brown, demoralized beings are shown, struggling out of the depths.
Have you followed intuitions’ path only to land in a messy, inconvenient and perhaps wounding mud hole? Were reflections sometimes misleading? What was revealed in that messy instant that was invisible a few moments earlier? Did you hear, at loud volume, voices that ordinarily mutter in the background? Does the drenching shock of the mud hole discredit the original intuition? How does the baptism of the mud hole inspire your courage and resolve?
Like old-fashioned cartoon characters, we may walk a long way with only intuition supporting us and only notice we have done so when we fall painfully to earth. Does that mean that the steps we take on solid ground are more real than those we take in flights of intuition?
Maybe there is strength and integrity in both. Maybe each informs the other. Mud holes are crucibles of evolution and you never know whom you’re going to meet there. While the baptism of certainty may be water, perhaps the baptism of uncertainty is mud
Reflection Nine
An Authenticity/Complexity Truth Test
How can authenticity emerge from complexity in our historical moment?
Recently an iconic photo circulated on the web of an indigenous man in traditional dress weeping with his face in his hands as he received the news that his tribe had lost the battle to save their entire cultural homeland from destruction by a hydroelectric project. Have you faced an uncertainty that wiped out all knowledge and meaning?
Many of us have experienced a dark night of the soul or considered that God might be dead. It’s still more painful to consider how many of us have come to a moment when it seemed our fellow humans had just executed God. How do we move forward from such a moment? This is one of the deep uncertainties shaking the foundation of our world.
A central task of World Spirituality is to help us respond to such moments in a state of engagement with one another and with All that is Holy, rather than in a state of alienation from one another and flight from the Divine.
How can our personal encounters with truth become a part of this Holy engagement in the face of convulsive forces? How can these encounters become a gift to the Pool of Knowing that connects us with one another and with the Whole? Our power as individuals and as groups comes in our ability to respond.
Certainty and Uncertainty emerge in the most intimate places. What we long for in our romantic partnerships is often certainty in the face of our almost infinite vulnerability, yet what we discover, both in our own hearts and in our encounters is often uncertainty. Every therapist and pastoral counselor faces endless variations on this dilemma.
In the hearts and minds of seekers of truth resonant questions on certainty and uncertainty continue to surface. Theorists in many fields speak of the importance of novelty, a scientific term for the emergence of stuff scientists can’t predict. Psychologist and Complexity theorist Terry Marks-Tarlow in her new book on clinical intuition in psychotherapy writes:
…clinical intuition is an inner faculty necessary for therapeutic change both in therapists and patients alike. True change requires openness to novelty. This is the bailiwick of the right (and not the left) hemisphere. Transformation during psychotherapy harnesses imagination and creativity. Unless we can conceive of a future that differs from the past, we cannot live one out. (emphasis mine LBG)
What does it mean to us as an emerging global community to conceive of a future that is different from the past? How do we, as a global community address what every psychotherapy patient addresses: Stuff has become unworkable. We need new stuff. Yet self-replicating bots are hard at work in our global consciousness. We need new intuitions (on a personal scale) and new revelations (on a global scale.)
The Traditional Christian Author, Lael Arrington, blogging in the women’s Christian collective, Tapestry, laments that faith in a post-modern era has become a process of sitting with unanswered questions. These questions sit in the post-modern heart where conviction once was. Yet she knows we cannot go back to our old certainties. She quotes Jesus in the Book of John: “• Jn 18:37-38 “…for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
What could it mean, in a post post-modern world to be “on the side of truth”? Arrington reflects: “But how do we do this (testify to the truth LBG) with cognitive humility? Authenticity is the key.” These terms authenticity and cognitive humility lead into a rhythmic engagement with certainty and uncertainty that gives access to both.
Personal truth tests, such as the ones I recounted here, are a source of knowledge of my unique authenticity. Through sharing them and relating them to liberating structures, I am able to know and test both my authenticity and cognitive humility, even in those intuitions where I am currently alone, or in a small cohort of understanding.
Testing personal truth, inquiring into authenticity and cognitive humility invokes the liberating structure of Marc Gafni’s teachings on Unique Self. The emergence of Unique Self in the face of certainty and uncertainty, is, Marc says, a transition from the statement “It is true.” to the statement “I am true.” Through my eyes, God reveals unique and essential features of truth that sheds light on my inner life, my human family, and on the physical and practical world. I reveal myself as a Unique and necessary source of revelation. When I am true, I am making my truest contribution to the Whole. I am offering my unique piece to the puzzle of an emerging World Revelation.
Up until now, revelations of our collective spirit required compromises of each individual spirit, placing every human in an unacceptable dilemma: either narcissism or cream of wheat. Neither makes much of a party.
Can we tune our antennae to the signs of a revelation of the Whole that not only permits but in some sense requires the full expression of each unique human perspective?
Reflection Ten
Care to Dance?
Inviting an important person to dance creates a bit of trembling- will you? Won’t you? Dear Reader, have you found one exquisite detail here that got your feet moving to a rhythm?
We dance best in festive rooms full of dancers. There is music, maybe a live band. Perhaps interesting lighting, firelight, or maybe it’s warm and we’re dancing outdoors. World Spirituality’s invitation to the Dance of Certainty and Uncertainty is an invitation to gather enough inspired certainty and cognitive humility to engage such macro complexities as population growth, climate change, diseases of starvation and overindulgence, the extinction of species and cultures; and to engage intimate complexities such as how to be human and humane in a world of accelerating novelty and complexity.
To dance in affirmative engagement in such a world, each of us must do our best to embody an inner spiritual authority that provides alternatives to literal readings of scripture and fundamentalist ways of knowing. In these ten reflections, we have explored seductive glimmerings of alternatives. We have glimpsed World Spirituality’s challenge to apply liberating structures to our unique encounters with truth. MAYBE, dear reader, you have found renewed enthusiasm for offering your tests of truth as gifts to a matrix of collective wisdom without diluting their unique authenticity.
Some truth tests didn’t make the cut, so I’ll mention two: The truth test of the market place in which my daily life is engaged deserves an essay of its own. Another, as important as any I’ve mentioned is gratitude: How grateful am I for the opportunity of this moment and the consciousness I am able to bring to it? How grateful am I for you dear reader, for your response, whatever it may be, and for the teachings of World Spirituality that brings us together?
As consciousness evolves, we evolve new ways to recognize revelation in ourselves and others. I’m hoping for a good party with lots of dancing. I am grateful to be invited, grateful to remain curious about the unique gifts arising in each moment in you, me and we.
I hope for both Divine and human help in finding the courage to act in the face of uncertainty. For without such action I may not find enough knowledge and energy to contribute to the evolutionary momentum of the Whole. This means being willing to act with the certain knowledge that infinite numbers of God’s balls are currently up in the air. Which will come to earth? Which will hit me on the head? No amount of mapping will provide an answer, yet maps are glorious and needed.
The Integral map is like a pattern of landing lights on a runway. When God throws me up in the air, I use the map to return to Earth safely. I land where important others live, people with whom I can talk, people with whom I can build. Together we find the power to resist easy certainty and MAYBE in that resistance, a revelation of WE is being born.
Notes
“Physics Jokes, Number Three”, From Jupiterscientific.com, 2012
Life on Mars, BBC Wales, 2009
* It turns out this Einstein quote is a persistent urban myth. It’s likely Einstein never said it. The quote simplifies an insight that Einstein did exemplify. Intuition was central to his process and values. The quote was likely born out of a need to have one simple phrase to express that fact.
Lao Tsu, trans. Mitchel, Stephen. The Tao Te Ching, Harper and Row, 1988, 1
John 1.1, King James Version, 1769
Gafni, Marc, “The Path of Wrestling,” in The Marc Gafni Blog, 2011.
Mark-Tarlow, Terry. Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy, W.W. Norton and Company, 2012, P.29
New Testament, New International Version, John, 18:37: “You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, “You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
Arrington, Lael, “Certainty Versus Cognitive Humility, Why Does it Always Have to be Either/Or?”, Tapestry, 2010.
Photo Credit: Liza Braude-Glidden
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