Gospel of Thomas: The Invitation and the Obligation

Gospel of Thomas: The Invitation and the Obligation

Integral Sainthood

Recently, I have been experiencing a period of deep sadness. It is different from the crippling depressions I have experienced in the past, when it felt like I was trying to walk and think surrounded by mud; my body, mind, and emotions so weighted down that I could hardly move, think, or feel. What I am experiencing now, however, is just sadness. I can still move, think, and feel. So, bear with me as I attempt to clarify what is going on for me. And, perhaps find the gift or the light in this dark experience.

Yesterday morning when I was meditating, I felt a deep grief over the current state of our Integral Family, which naturally expanded to our entire human family. There may have been an element of depression in this, too, as I felt very unimpressed by myself as well, as if all my efforts and accomplishments have not amounted to much. Hopefully, this sadness is a precursor to my next developmental step. I have learned to trust these periods of darkness, sadness, and fallowness as a necessary part of my own personal process. It doesn’t do any good at all to try and fix them (other than to continue with my regular ongoing practices). I just need to be present, invite the feelings in, and greet them as teachers.

Let me start with our Integral world. Perhaps what sparked this grief was the public demise of Genpo Roshi, one of our Integral elders and teachers. Not that Genpo was particularly integrally informed, but his Big Mind teaching has been very influential in the formation of our Integral Weltanschauung. Since the scandal involving Genpo broke, I have heard much anger and disappointment among my young Integral friends that another elder, whom they had taken for a role model of wisdom, deep spirituality, and elderhood, had fallen, due to very self-centered and venal personal failings. What makes this especially painful and disturbing is that this was done by the apostle of Big Mind and Big Heart. It is sad and embarrassing to us as a community, movement, new evolutionary stage, or whatever the heck we are.

Another thing that bothers me is our seemingly endless turf wars and obsessions about making money. There is nothing wrong with money; money is energy and our current lingua franca in the world, along with capitalism. But we simply don’t have to be ugly about it. Again, in a healthy Integral understanding, money is oxygen―not the highest or even the best thing, but a foundational necessity to provide energy, comfort, and support to our higher aspirations. But somehow we are always getting the cart before the horse and this feels sad to me. For me, healthy capitalism is about the circulation of wealth, not merely the accumulation of wealth by those smart enough or crooked enough to win the game. (As in the Monopoly games of our youth, where the bankers were always stealing gold $500 bills and yellow $100 bills. I used to hide mine under the Monopoly board.) The bankers always seem to win and I think there is a lesson there. Healthy capitalism circulates wealth: material wealth, intellectual wealth, artistic wealth, spiritual wealth, etc. Keep the goods circulating and the body politic healthy.

I think that developmentally some of our current issues around money and our unhealthy relationship to it are because that many of us, in the mix that makes up our Integral community, have spent many years in the green meme despising $$ and capitalism. When we move into Second Tier and rediscover capitalism, orange, and money, we get obsessed. On the other hand, I think there are also many of us hanging around in Integral circles that never went through green but simply made the leap from orange, or somewhere, into Second Tier, without the prerequisite compassion and caring for all beings that healthy green attempts to bring on line. As someone said, green makes us worthy of Second Tier. SO, what I am saying is, as per normal, we have money problems, sex problems, and power problems and it hurts my heart.

Over these last few years of intense meditation and contemplative work, my personal understanding of God has become that he is the Light and the Darkness and I do see the light in this. In my own inner work, in my commitment to Integral practice, in my work with my students, in my relationship with my wife, my family, my friends, and the animals that live in my neighborhood, there is light. And, occasionally, maybe quite often, the light comes through a crack in the darkness and I can see and it is somehow all unbelievably okay. I think as we continue to commit ourselves to a life of Integral practice, or life as Integral practice, and we dedicate that practice to the indefinable, amazing something that is our greatest good, we will experience reality more as an early nascent dawn in the desert, where our darkness has lightened and we can begin to see and perceive the light more clearly. Or, perhaps it will be more in the order of experiencing an incredibly violent electrical storm at night, where the flashes of world-revealing lightning blast through at incredibly short intervals, so as to seem nearly constant. The darkness is still there but, my God, there is so much light. So, what I am seeing, I think, is this: that through our intentions to nobly dedicate our practices, intentions, projects, and relationships to that indefinable, mysterious, and ever greatest good, which is probably easier to define as Love, we will do better and, yes, perhaps save the world so that something good, noble, and deeply planted will be brought forth by our efforts for our children and their children’s children’s children (this includes monkeys and donkeys and dogs, even cats!) and all the other life forms who need our love and care and their own evolutionary space and opportunity.

Again, what am I saying? I see it more clearly as I write. What I am asking is that we recognize the need for and cultivation of, for lack of a better word, Integral Sainthood. This would mean the clarification and the purification of our desires, drives, and wants though the Holy Grail and transformational cauldron of our own hearts as we confront and accept experience and bless all of this evolutionary raw material in the deep yet ever present mystery of our own truest, deepest, and most real Self. To cultivate this philosopher’s stone, this elixir of life, we must bring forward our best and noblest intentions and our clearest attention to all of those things that will create the conditions from which the lightening storms of our full awakening will blast forth. And, these “things" include so much! Our daily sacred transformational practices that refine, polish, and tune us as instruments to be played with miraculous skill and Grace. We must honor our artists and thinkers, mystics and poets, managers and doers, lovers and shakers and cultivate all of these parts of ourselves. We must honor and cultivate our relationship with nature as emptiness made form right in front of us and all around us, ever renewing, ever blessing. The path of what I am calling Integral Sainthood is not a path of renunciation but of absolute and total embracing of all that is and all that we are―that which is not accepted is not redeemed and that which is not experienced is not transformed. Our Integral agendas and yogas include practice, art, science, literature, mysticism, nature, sports, sex, economics, technology, and politics, all held in the light of the redeemed, transformed, and evolved Holy Grail of our deepest divine hearts. The fruits of this will be greater kindness, greater wisdom, and much more skillfulness so that we can fulfill our Integral mission of being a light to the world and not an evolutionary dead end, as a bunch of inbred, infighting, and feuding Integral hillbillies, isolating ourselves as we lose it, lost in our feuds, squabbles, and turf wars. The good news is that God is everywhere, and we are it and always have been and always will be. Let’s not lose that. Let’s not forget it.

And sometimes, sometimes, often times…  I am listening to BB King. He plays a four or five note riff―so simple, so beautiful, so incredibly impossible and FLASH! Lightning strikes and I see so clearly.

Another One Bites the Dust

I hesitated a few days before posting this. I felt that the tone was too preachy and righteous and didn’t take into account Genpo’s suffering and the responsibility of the other adults involved. And, when I chuck rocks, I am well aware of Jesus’ injunction, "He that is without sin…" Nevertheless, I feel there is enough in the article below that merits reading and deserves to be a part of this ongoing conversation. We are all One, your sin is mine, and mine is yours, as well as your glory and beauty. My request is that we hold this deep knowledge and compassion as we skillfully and courageously sort out this relative fur ball. I feel there is a great gift through and beyond all this hurt, anger, and pain. God bless us, One and All.

Another One Bites the Dust

Or, Why are so many of Our Spiritual Teachers so Screwed Up?

As I’m sure everyone knows by now, another one of our founding Integral teachers imploded under the weight of a sex scandal (not his first). When I heard this, I was completely underwhelmed and had a “What else is new?” attitude. In fact, when someone told me he had been “disrobed,” I quipped, “That’s a double entendre, right?”

Our meditation group was discussing this after our sit on Sunday and I said, “I would prefer my spiritual teacher to be a little less screwed up than I am. These teachers can’t seem to teach us anything about ethics, skillful means, or self-sacrifice, so what the hell can they teach us?” This latest hero is, I believe, somewhere in the vicinity of 67 years old. I guess we could infer that meditation practice keeps the libido alive and well and generally out of control! So, if one can’t teach wisdom, morality, or compassion, what’s left? Non-duality? Big deal. I got it. If that is what you’re after, I recommend that you practice meditation an hour a day, using the meditation technologies that we now have at our disposal, and that stuff will come online of itself.

As Ken and the AQAL map show us so well, there is the little matter of levels and lines, as in, well, he had a deep or high spiritual realization or line, but didn’t do the emotional line work. Well, why the fuck not? I have to. What makes these folks so damn special? I was a wilderness guide for years and often led groups of beautiful young women through the wilderness for weeks, if not months, at a time, not to mention the beautiful young staff members I worked with. Am I gay? Most certainly not. Did I find them beautiful and attractive? Most certainly. Well? They were my charges—my job was to lead them, teach them, keep them safe, and help them heal. Would I have laid down my life to fulfill these responsibilities if I had to? I think I would have. Because that is what good leaders do. They put those they serve and lead before themselves.

Am I without sin? No. Am I at risk of falling on my own face? I am. But I think I can safely say that I will not have sex with any of my students! God helping me. The power differential thing is a mess and simply undeniable. That is why it is off limits and strictly taboo to have sex with children, for crying out loud! Maybe if you claim to be a Grand Poobah, you necessarily no longer have a peer group and the only suitable or desirable partners are your lessers, as in less enlightened, or your students, and your wife or husband doesn’t seem so desirable anymore. What to do? Well, you could start by renouncing your claim of Grand Poobah-hood or keep it in your robe or pants. Radical, huh? If you do not care about your people enough to renounce some of your own lusts, then you have no business being in the spiritual Poobah business. And, if you are a spiritual teacher, then you better initiate a practice that is Integral and includes and deals with your emotional, shadow, and sexual issues or you are a disaster waiting to happen. To paraphrase Ken, “Sex is not bad; bad sex is bad.”

We simply must negotiate this thorny and horny issue with more intelligence, honesty, a sense of responsibility, and, OMG!, impulse control. As one of our prominent Integral spiritual teachers said, you can sense the appropriateness of a liaison by the aftertaste. But by then, of course, the damage is done.

One final word. If you spiritual teachers don’t want to misbehave yourselves out of your jobs, and become clichés and objects of derision (look at the Catholic priesthood), you will work on your stuff. I have a young colleague and student, Shachar Erez, who is starting an Integral Practice group at JFKU, and he came up with the slogan “Practice is the Guru.” I like it a lot. Teachers take note and beware.

That which is not Lived is not Redeemed

I was recently reading Cynthia Borgeault’s remarkable book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene. In this book, on page 142 to be exact, Cynthia quotes an adage from the early Church fathers: “That which is not lived is not redeemed.” Cynthia paraphrases this  as "That which is not accepted is not transformed.” These sayings hit me hard and I jotted them down on my legal pad and sat with them for a few days.

As the readers of this may or may not know, I have been engaged in transformative inner practice for going on six years now and have been working with others to develop the same practice in their lives. I’ve also recently helped to bring a new, very powerful transformative tool, the Profound Meditation Program, into the world. Many of us who are using this product’s technology are getting our worlds rocked.

One of the things that enhanced meditative technology does very well is get to our trauma and our shadow issues. In his teachings, Ken Wilber has often stated that normal meditation just doesn’t reach the shadow—that one can observe it in meditation, but it does not really become transformed or released. In other words, just to see your self-hatred, for example, is not to heal it. It is a step in the right direction because it comes into awareness, and that which was not understood or known becomes an object of consciousness. There it is. I hate myself. But that does not transform it. It is an essential step, and in the right direction, but it is just a first step.

So what must we do? We must live it and accept it and go deeply into the darkness of our self-hatred, or whatever the shadow issue we are dealing with, and simply be present with it.

I think many people who are using the Profound Meditation Program would like to think of it as happy sounds—if I listen to this, I will feel better, my brain chemistry will optimally balance, my brain will function at a higher level, and all will be good. Well, that is certainly partially true. But oftentimes, I hear reports from people using the meditation tool, who are beginning to run into their shadow issues and their demons in their meditation, who therefore think it is not working. They may be experiencing floods of terrifying thoughts and images, sensations in the body that will feel like pain in the heart or gut, anxiety, etc. But this does not mean it isn’t working. Rather it means it is working. One of the essential and great promises of this technology is that it opens the doors of our heart and the doors of our unconscious and enables us to be fully present with our darkness, our sins, our pains, and our sufferings, both individual and collective.

If we can hold that darkness as a gift and fully experience it, then we can indeed redeem it. And if we can hold that darkness and absolutely accept it and bless it, as the gift of God, then we can transform it. This is profoundly simple, yet at the same time amazingly difficult. But I truly believe that those of us who develop the capacity to accept that which is unacceptable inside of us, those of us who develop the capacity to fully hold in our hearts, our bodies, and our minds that which we have always both consciously and unconsciously rejected and run from, will be those who will break through into the depths of our true being and will quite possibly become the guides and the leaders that we have been waiting for. Because there is no redemption, either individually or collectively, without this plunge and recognition of who and what we truly are. There is no way into this redeemed self and there is no hope without the passage into and through the darkness.

So, back to the here and now. If you are practicing with these transformative technologies, or perhaps even the transformative techniques of the past, and you are gifted with the encounter of this doorway into the dark, of this journey into Hades, know somewhere in your deepest heart that you are on the right path. And, if it feels like too much, a million times too much, and like the darkness will absolutely overwhelm and crush you and break you, know that is exactly what needs to happen. With the last bit of your hope, faith, and courage, ask God for the grace to expand and hold it. The task is not to fix it; the task is to be present. Absolutely present.

Sometimes, as we journey into our depths, our experiences can be this apocalyptic, this profoundly mysterious and mortally fearful. At other times, they are simply the annoying little pests and states that emerge moment to moment as we experience and live our lives. A friend of mine said recently, when such and such happens, it makes me feel guilty. I responded, "What do you do with your guilty feelings?" He said, "I don’t know." And I said, "You just feel them. That’s it." So, if your practices and your prayers and your meditations are painful, this is a good thing. Expand, bless them, and thank God, because you are on your path and both we and God have need of you.

Deep Practice and Playing the Blues

About five months ago, I was at a friend’s house in Salt Lake City, who had started a business buying and selling vintage guitars. I started playing guitar when I was thirteen years old, so I have had a 40-year relationship with the instrument. Somewhere early on, for various reasons that I won’t get into, I became a rhythm acoustic guitar player, singer, and eventually songwriter. So, there I was, in a room full of old guitars, and I picked up a Fender Telecaster and began to play it. It was love at first touch. The action on the neck felt as if it had been brushed by the wings of angels and I remembered my first love and my first guitar—a Gibson SG Standard, which I bought when I was thirteen with money I made painting a house during the summer. All those feelings of wonder with an electric guitar came flooding back and somehow I knew that this guitar was meant for me. The guitar was a ’72 Fender Telecaster custom. I told my friend, “I gotta have it.” And bought the guitar.

This caused some consternation with my wife, but she was generally supportive and perhaps thought that it was just a phase of mine, as I had recently bought a new acoustic guitar as well (my first new guitar in about 30 years). I took my new love home and began to play. I soon found that the internet, and You Tube especially, is a virtual treasure trove of instructional videos on how to play any kind of guitar and style that one wants.  My first guitar hero was Eric Clapton, so I went back to my roots and started studying Eric Clapton’s guitar style. I began practicing regularly, from an hour to two hours a day, and started applying the principles of deep practice and mastery that I had learned on my Integral journey to the task of mastering the electric blues guitar.

I had recently read a book by Daniel Coyle called The Talent Code, in which he discusses the principles of deep practice and how exceptional mastery has very little to do with raw talent, but with the capacity to practice in a deeply committed, repetitive way that is constantly pushing one just beyond one’s comfort zone.  (By the way, I highly recommend this book as one of my favorite practice-oriented books, which also include Mastery by George Leonard and Integral Life Practice by Wilber, Patten, Leonard, and Morelli.)

For over five years now, I have religiously dedicated myself to an Integral Life Practice, which largely features intense exercise and binaurally-enhanced meditation. These practices have changed my life so profoundly and positively that time and space fail here, but, to put it briefly, I have become convinced that one of the essential disciplines necessary to a useful, actualized, and even realized life is dedication to transformative practice. As I often quote Diane Hamilton, practice is the cultivation by repetition of whatever quality one wants to bring forth.

In Daniel Coyle’s book, he gets into the neurological changes caused by repetitive deep practice, describing how new neural pathways are created and how they are reinforced by living sheaths of myelin that form over these neural pathways. The new pathways, reinforced by myelin, are actually formed very quickly, however, they will also disappear very quickly if not reinforced by more practice. This substantiates and explains one of the truisms of Integral Recovery, namely relapse happens when one stops practicing. This is especially important when dealing with deeply ingrained, addictive habits that are hard-wired into the brain—practice is deep re-wiring for new and healthier neural pathways.

So, armed with this experience and knowledge, and also with the fact that my confidence and capacity to learn new skills has increased greatly through my dedicated binaural practice, I set out to master the blues guitar.  And, more specifically, to master Eric Clapton’s blues style of guitar. Have I accomplished this in five months of dedicated practice? No way in hell. Sometimes I feel almost overwhelmed studying at the feet of this guitar master—by the fluidity, grace, and emotion that he brings to his guitar playing.  But the journey…. oh, the journey has been beautiful. And I am playing a better electric blues guitar than I ever dreamed possible.

Somewhere along the line, I had got the message that I was a rhythm guy and didn’t have the capacity to play lead electric guitar. Needless to say, I am nowhere near the level of Clapton’s mastery, however, I am playing better than I ever dreamed possible for myself and I have no idea how good I may become if I continue at this rate of practice and growth.  It has been very interesting to watch the peaks and plateaus that arise from any dedicated practice. One feels periods of great breakthrough and then one works at a certain plateau level until the next breakthrough occurs. Every time I learn a new lick, or a new nuance, it becomes integrated into a larger Gestalt that develops into a free-flowing, creative guitar playing experience. It’s like learning katas when one studies martial arts. One learns very disciplined moves through constant repetition of the particular patterns of the katas, so that when one is actually confronted with a combat situation, one can move freely and creatively to meet the opposing force in a skillful and effective manner.  The same goes for practice with my guitar. I practice certain patterns and licks over and over again, so that finally, when I am playing along with certain songs, these learned patterns can be expressed with new creativity as they respond to the rhythm and the melodies of the music.

It is inspiring. It is spiritual. It is definitely a flow state and fills my soul with a longing for ever greater mastery and union with my instrument and the music. As I have said in other writings, I think one of the greatest challenges of the newly emerging Integral/Second Tier level of consciousness is to embrace and engage in Integral transformative practice, not merely as a theoretical good idea but as a daily and lifelong embodied commitment.

I write these words in extreme wonder and gratitude at the gifts that are arising from my discovery and embracing of deep Integral practice. I’ll end this with a quote from the master:

“Bet you didn’t think I knew how to rock and roll

Oh, I got the boogie woogie right down in my very soul.

There ain’t no need for me to be a wallflower

Cuz now I’m living on blues power.”

Eric Clapton

Deep Ethics and the Gettysburg Address

For some time now, I’ve been feeling that I should throw my hat in the ring on the subject of ethics. A lot of my ideas and intuitions crystallized around a talk I attended, given by Roger Walsh at the Conference for Integral Theory at JFK University. In my soon-to-be-published book (SUNY Press), I even have a short chapter entitled “Ethics, the Fifth Line.” In other words, in addition to our body, mind, emotional, and spiritual practices, that are necessary for a truly transformative integral practice, we must include ethics as a discreet line and ongoing practice.

Why is this? Well, many of the things that we have to deal with in the practices that are strengthening, healing, and evolving the body, mind, heart, and soul are due to our often unconscious and, almost always, unethical behaviors. It seems that we live in an age when ethics are so often ignored—in almost any conversation about anything that we are proposing to do.  It seems to me that in many circles, even Integral ones, we are often seduced by the overarching, greedy, self-interest dogma that has become part and parcel of our American vision and which, in many circles, is embraced with religious fervor.

The current conservative mantra goes something like this: If we are all greedy to the max, and follow our own individual self interests, we will create a pure democracy, a healthy economy, and a near heaven on earth. If that leaves a large residue of poor people and suffering, well, to hell with them, they’re just lazy anyway. This is perhaps on my mind because I am going to be wading into a family reunion in the next few days, where I will be probably be surrounded by a bunch of Tea Partyists. Bummer. And, I love these people. I was thinking about handing out a 8 1/2” x 11” flyer upon arriving, that says, Yes, I know you think that Obama is an African-born Islamist, probably the Anti-Christ, and trying to destroy American freedom, that government is bad, that taxes are evil, and that if we could only do away with all three (Obama, taxes, and government), we would somehow live in a Mayberry-like paradise. Oy vey!

Forgive the rant, but I wanted to put that out there.

Back to ethics.

The contention is that most of our suffering—in this case, I am speaking of suffering of the ignoble type, in other words, suffering that comes from our own dumb, self-centered and unconscious acts—causes most of the things we have to spend a good part of our lifetimes healing and correcting. In the case of addicts, if one had thought about the ethics involved before one stuck the first needle in one’s arm to inject heroin, there might have been a different outcome. For example, one might have considered: How will this affect my life, and that of my children, family, and loved ones? How will this affect my life purpose? I wonder what God thinks about this, etc. This may sound very naïve, as in, you mean we’re supposed to think about right and wrong before we do things? For God’s sake, it could destroy the economy! The reason that this sounds so weird is because most of us don’t do it. How many of our politicians actually consider the ethics of their policies as opposed to the short-term benefits to their political power and financial wellbeing, and perhaps how to stay out of jail.

I think our greatest presidents (Lincoln comes to mind) did struggle with the overarching moral and ethical issues that confronted them during their presidencies. In studying Lincoln’s life, one can clearly see Abraham’s transformation from a smart and ambitious politician to a man who carried within his heart the soul of his country and the great ethical and moral issues of his time. For example, in the early days of his presidency, he was willing to go along with slavery if that would keep the Union together. Later, he realized the centrality of the evil of slavery and that perhaps this was what the whole war was really about. This transformation did not come about facilely; Lincoln struggled with this issue and often suffered deep depression. So, when he used the phrase “by the better angels of our nature” in his first inaugural address, he was seemingly predicting his own struggles within himself as he wrestled to find the deeper meanings and purpose of the long and immensely bloody Civil War. Lincoln also fought the war in his own heart and soul.  He knew what this meant from his own life experience because his ethical and moral struggles had transformed him from a mere politician to a man of destiny and a world-changing hero, and ultimately a martyr.

In less lofty terms, but no less real, the question is, Why are ethics important and why should anyone including myself be ethical? Isn’t it easier just to seek one’s own self-interest? The simple answer is that when we act in a conscious and ethical manner, we feel better. We experience less needless suffering and we bring our small ego selves more and more into alignment with our higher God selves. This is the perfect expression of what Dr. Marc Gafni calls the Unique Self. I am convinced that the greatest human joy, or the highest level of pleasure, is when this alignment takes place. Conversely, it often takes a lot of pain, suffering, and surrendering to achieve. In addition, I believe it requires an ongoing serious contemplative practice, in which we examine our motives and can begin to distinguish between the truths generated by our rational minds and emotions and those that come from a deeper and wiser source.

This morning, for example, when I was meditating and praying, I was feeling a lot of pain around that which I feel is a slight, and perhaps a betrayal, by someone I consider a close friend. My mind attempted to objectively collect and analyze the data and come up with a judgment. It wasn’t a pretty judgment. And I had the feeling, Wow, I’ve been a fool and I should have seen this coming. On the other hand, I realized that this was just my mind, and, as on other occasions, I could be completely wrong or largely wrong. So, I let go of my largely redundant thoughts and centered in my heart, surrendered to the pain, surrendered to God, and asked for help and guidance that all of this might unfold to the greatest good for all. Toward the end of the hour of my meditation and prayer, I began to feel a sense of presence and grace, which surrounded the wound in my heart. The pain did not go away, but somehow was held in a more loving and greater context. As I sit here and write this, I still do not know how this will unfold and what the correct course of action will eventually be, other than I need to talk with this person and see what emerges from there.

Recently, a student of mine said, “Getting sober is the easy part—it’s all the stuff that arises after that, which is difficult.” I have often taught that, with addiction, one gets to feel good (albeit temporarily) without doing good. But in sobriety, or perhaps we should say, in a spiritual, conscious life, one has to do good to feel good. And, I am not simply talking of another reductionistic way to spike our dopamine, but in a much deeper and essential way. In other words, if we continue to strive and work in our hearts, our actions, and our thoughts, to live and act in a deeply ethical way, the ultimate fruits will be joy and a deep sense of peace and alignment with our higher purpose and higher power.

I was recently reading a book by Rabbi Abraham Joshua  Heschel, Man is Not Alone, who said that the ultimate question in life, and perhaps the ultimate ethical question is, What is the Universe requiring of me? What is the Universe asking me to do? So much of our time is spent trying to figure out what we want to do. Perhaps that is fine because if this inquiry is followed to its ultimate conclusion, we will find out that our deepest and most profound desires are none other than the desires of the universe, or our greater soul.

I have found that many of my newly-sober students have no idea, once the drugs are out of their systems, about how to act ethically in the world or why that is necessary or even desirable. It’s often, Well, I can’t do drugs any more, so what can I do to please myself and scratch that itch? I think there is great wisdom in the emerging dharma of Dr. Marc Gafni, and his teaching about levels of pleasure, that what gets us ill and causes so much suffering is not pleasure in itself, but the substitute of what Gafni calls “pseudo eros” to satisfy our deepest desires, such as drugs, unhealthy relationships, inappropriate sex, money—the Seven Deadly Sins. It is not that these deepest desires should not be satisfied and weren’t put in us for the very purpose of becoming satisfied, but that our misguided attempts to fulfill these desires with that which never can or will leads to incredible suffering, dysfunction, illness, and lost potential for true pleasure guided by a deeply connected sense of ethics and morality.

So, how do we do this? We wake up, I think. Through our repetitive Integral practices, which foster health and growth in our essential selves, our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls.  We examine our motives and our inner conditioning. And, through our inner contemplative work, we purify our motives through awareness and the continued plunging into the depths of our deepest selves and true natures. From this, I believe, there emerges a true and vital and juicy ethical life, based on our own actualization and our own Self-realization. Of course, we are all fallible and, as Ram Dass once said, “proceed on the spiritual journey one body length at a time” —i.e., we fall on our faces a lot—but this is good as we are strengthened by the process of falling and getting up. And, perhaps we can be more compassionate as we realize that we do not struggle and suffer alone: each pain, each wound, each tragedy, every depression is shared by the millions of beings that have come before us, who are suffering now, and yet to be born. We do not suffer alone. We are the Universe suffering. This is the true meaning of compassion, “com-passione,” to suffer with. It is the capacity to open to our own suffering and deepen into the co-suffering with all that true ethics arise from. It is in the tears and pain of our own weeping hearts that we find the ecstatic bliss of our own true nature that can and will wipe away all tears and suffering, as we and all beings awake from the dream of our own separateness and remember who and what we really are.

I will finish with the words of Lincoln that he scribbled on a piece of paper before consecrating the newly filled graveyard at the Battlefield of Gettysburg. While our vision may have evolved since Lincoln wrote these words, nevertheless, I find the call for a higher purpose that is worth whatever the cost we must pay as moving and as relevant as it ever was.

“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

From Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

The Addiction Worm

The Worm’s Waking

There is a worm addicted to eating grape leaves.

Suddenly, he wakes up,

call it Grace, whatever,

something wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.

He is the entire vineyard, and the orchard too,

the fruit, the trunks,

a growing wisdom and joy

 that does not need to devour.

This poem by Rumi is so good that it doesn’t need any comment, but that has never stopped me before! 

It became clear to me early on in the evolution and development of Integral Recovery that the agenda (Yes, I do have an agenda!) was not merely sobriety but waking up (and staying awake). And what I have found is that with the beautiful practices, technologies, and wisdom brought together under the aegis of Integral Recovery, this awakening is not only desirable but imminently possible.

Let me back up a little. In the late ’80s, I attended JFK University and studied to become a transpersonal therapist. One of the things we did at that early stage of development of transpersonal psychology was to define what transpersonal therapy was. The standard answer was that transpersonal psychology happens when a therapist “holds” a client in a transpersonal awareness, or space. This definition still holds true today. The only problem with the therapy is that simply holding people in a transpersonal space does not literally move them into that space very well. Traditional meditation methods were not doing it fast enough for my likes at the time either, and  using entheogens didn’t seem advisable for many reasons, foremost being they are illegal.

All in all, I became disenchanted with the whole talking therapy practice as I was looking to hit home runs and only occasionally seemed to be getting to first base. Eventually, this led to my becoming a wilderness guide and using vision quests, wilderness journeys, and sweat lodges in order to facilitate deep transformational and healing experiences. These techniques were certainly more impactful than talking therapy and many of my students were beginning to experience states that could be called transpersonal, but most of the time these states were merely temporary, always coming and going as states do.

In Integral Recovery, what we have been finding is that by integrating IR practices, the foundations of which are Holosync® binaural brain entrainment technology and contemplative wisdom from the great world spiritual traditions, a process of revelation occurs. I use the word revelation quite seriously because it seems that a lot of what we are learning is truly being revealed and, at times, this feels like grace or a gift from a higher source (in between all the hard work). Clients are not only getting sober, but are beginning to wake up―in the sense of Rumi’s worm. They are becoming less rigid, more spiritually connected, more caring for themselves and others, and are not getting stuck in their own habitual conditioned patterns of thought and behavior. As a consequence of this waking up process, or as a part of it, the addiction to eating grape leaves, or whatever the addiction, begins to lift. There is new care and new connection that grows from love of self to love of “my group,” then on to love of everyone and love of all beings and all things. Finally, because we have added and integrated these practices, talking therapy has now become incredibly illuminated, useful, and transpersonal!

When I first started coaching people online, I thought my main job would be to get them to do the practices and the rest would take care of itself. This is partially true―a lot of the first part of my work with clients is about explaining the process and holding them accountable to do the daily practices. After that has been established as a foundation, however, the discursive part of the therapy has become extremely powerful because both client and therapist have access to these transpersonal dimensions of our beings. So, it is no longer merely a theoretical proposition or how we hold the client, but we are actually exploring the terrain together. In this context, one of the very interesting and inspiring things that I am discovering is that I (the therapist) and we (the client) don’t really have to understand what is going on, but as we work together there seems to be a source of wisdom that we can tap into together because of the practices that we both do on a daily basis that keep us in touch with and growing more deeply into our own centers and spiritual selves.

I recently heard a talk by Father Thomas Keating, a pioneer of bringing the Centering Prayer and the contemplative dimension back into current Christian practice, say that he did not feel that mental health was possible without access to the spiritual dimension. That access is now available to us using Holosync®, or binaural brain entrainment technologies, along with the wisdom of the great contemplative traditions. When, two or three weeks into the process, I explain different mediation practices such as Centering Prayer to my clients, they seem to grasp what I’m talking about almost immediately. This is because they are actually beginning to experience these dimensions of depth in their own daily practice. This happens within a few weeks, not a few years.

One of the greatest challenges to a contemplative or meditative practice, one facilitated by Holosync®, is what I call the meditative super ego. In other words, we have many ideas and assumptions about what we think successful meditation should look and feel like. Once I get my students over that hump, the process becomes much more graceful and exciting as the exploration deepens. What we are doing in the Upper Right Quadrant, on the physical level, is rapidly integrating the brain and having it function more coherently. In the Upper Left Quadrant, or in our individual interiors, all kinds of interesting things are happening. Each client or student has a different experience but emotional and spiritual progress is accelerated and a radical hope begins to emerge, stemming from the grace that we seem to have access to now.  I find this a beautiful example of putting theory to work, using the theory or map to enlighten and infuse the territory and the journey though it with clarity and meaning. Remember, the Integral impulse is not this or that but this and that, or yes and, yes and. Every time that I find a new technique, technology, nuance, or connection, the whole process constellates into a more beautiful, graceful, and functional pattern.

In this practice, we are not only working on our spiritual line, but also on our emotional line. In Father Keating’s work on Centering Prayer, he talks about something which he calls divine therapy, which is what occurs when one surrenders in contemplation on an ongoing basis. It seems that the locks to the unconscious begin to let go and the split off, unconscious material, sub personalities, etc. begin to surface into awareness and are able to be released, healed, and integrated in this spacious, open (divine) awareness; the self becomes more functional, resilient, and more contextualized, in an ever deepening field of connection and meaning. This closely parallels what we have been finding in IR practice. Not only do my students begin to access their own depths spiritually, they are also able to quickly get in touch with their own core wounds. These two processes work together beautifully: the spiritual aspect supplies the faith that everything on the deepest level is okay, and emotionally there is an expanded context or sense of Self, in which space the painful unconscious and shadow material can surface and be released and transmuted in the light of our pure loving awareness.

So, what we have here is a growing, living  Integral spirituality that can be understood and languaged in whatever tradition or language one chooses and, at the same time, a way of getting to the unconscious, yet powerfully controlling, material that keeps us trapped in our own rigid defense mechanisms―or slaves of our own chaotic attempts to avoid the pain, i.e. addiction.

…And, we don’t have to eat the grape leaves anymore.

A Gift from Christmas

This Christmas, I found myself at home in Teasdale, Utah with a house (and guest house) full of mostly new faces, one of whom was detoxing off a heavy mix of drugs and alcohol.  Welcome to my world. A new Integral Recovery intensive was in its first week. I had to cancel my almost yearly Christmastime visit to my weird, wacky family, all of whom I love and who are delightful in their own ways but often a couple of levels apart on the good old dynamic Spiral, or whatever developmental map we are using this week. It makes for interesting conversations, both spoken and avoided. I have as yet to take the bait in the “Obama is the Anti-Christ” challenge.

Anyway, I was working in my office and my charges had gone on a hike to Lion’s Head, a red rock wonderland about a mile and a half from my door. I was drowsy and decided to take a nap. When I awoke, I was in a deep funk. I left the house and drove to the local do-it-yourself car wash and began to wash off the accumulated muck that my wife, a wilderness therapist, collects on our Toyota 4-Runner when she visits her clients in the wilderness this time of year. Keeping our cars up is one of my domestic duties that I kind of enjoy and do faithfully. I think this is one of the biggest miracles that my wife cites, when asked her opinion on my transformation over the last few years of intense Integral practice. She starts in, “You should have seen his old pick-up…”

So, as I’m driving to the car wash, a feeling of sadness is growing in my gut and covering my whole body. And I realize that I’m missing my family and my wife, who is with her mother, and this is the first time that I have had to really feel these feelings. Before, I was just shrugging them off with the whole “a man has got to do what a man has got to do” routine, as I worked with the new arrivals for the intensive. “Man, what a Christmas,” I think and my ego starts trying to conjure a way out of this profound growing sadness.

Some wiser voice asks, “What would you tell your students to do in this case?” I answer, “I’d tell them to open to the feeling, be totally present with it, and invite it in as a long lost friend or teacher. So, I take the long way home and allow the loneliness and sad isolation to sink into me. It builds and I breathe and it builds… Then something that has begun emerging in my practice happens, my personal pain begins to shift into something larger, a collective pain, and I realize that many people are having this same sort of suffering right now, perhaps millions all over the planet. And, instead of feeling isolating and dreadful, the pain starts to become warm and somehow infused with light and compassion. I am deeply moved.

When I get back home, my group is returning from their hike and we go up to the meditation room for our nightly meditation. My sit turns into a prayer of gratitude for all the wonderful people and places that I have in my life. The day and the night that follow are filled with song, laughter, tears, and good fellowship-an extraordinary gift.

So, this is the gift that I offer to you: When pain arises and suffering comes, as it surely will, invite it in as a teacher and allow it to express itself in your body and mind as it wants to. Then go deeper yet and allow that pain to connect you to all who are suffering similarly in the world, past, present, and to come, and something very beautiful will arise, the gift compassion, which literally means, in the Latin root words, “to suffer with.”

With all the Love of God that was said to be born into the world this day, I offer this gift and wish you a Merry Christmas and a Holy New Year.

Integral Recovery and Shadow Work: The Recovery of Spirit

In the unfoldment of the work that is Integral Recovery, the Shadow and its releasing and transmutation have become ever more one of the chief cornerstones of the building. First, what is Shadow? It is that which is in the darkness, which either through conscious thought or unconsciously has been relegated to the realms of the unseen, unheard, and unknown. This unconscious material can be good stuff, bad stuff, or indifferent; pre-personal, personal, or transpersonal; individual or collective. This realm of darkness contains our greatest gifts and our greatest sins and curses, and unlocking the doors that bar these hidden aspects of ourselves is the key to our survival, transformation, and continued evolution. In and through the Shadow lie our unique selves, our true faces, and recovery of the Spirit. Diving into this realm seems completely counter-intuitive and contrary to all common sense. Shouldn’t one avoid this journey into the nether realms that promises death, dismemberment, pain, and suffering? No, we shouldn’t. Why? Because it is the only way out of our human tragedy.

Again, I deeply bow to the great wisdom of Ken Wilber in including the Shadow as an essential aspect of the Integral map. Without this key, the key of the Shadow, all our work is done in vain: our sanghas become cults, our teachers become tyrants, our recoveries are temporary, our hope forlorn, and our future on this planet devolutionary and catastrophic.  In the words of Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest, spiritual teacher, and sacred activist:

“The mystics call it the apophatic tradition, the tradition that has to accompany the cataphatic. The spiritual life has a way of light and a way of darkness. The cataphatic is the way of the light. The apophatic is the way of darkness. Since the Enlightenment, most Western Christians have not been trained much in the apophatic tradition. But the tradition of darkness is the greater teacher, the necessary teacher, really the teacher that breaks a person down through and into this realm that our biblical tradition, our Judeo-Christian tradition, calls faith. At its depths, our tradition acknowledges the primacy of darkness as the greater teacher, as the greater expander of the soul, as the greater opener-up of the eyes.”

“This seems to be the wisdom that we should be bringing to the West today, but that certainly hasn’t been where most Catholic Christian theology has been for the last 300 years. We’ve wanted answers, we wanted clarity, we want closure, we want solutions which tell me that we have been more influenced by the ascendant Western civilization than what I will call, as a Christian, the descent language of Jesus, or Job, or the Jewish prophets, who are talking much more about this way of tears, this way about going into the Shadow, into the pain, into the dark side if you will, and that being where we would find wisdom. I think we are at a very difficult position in terms of Western spirituality, because it often feels, in many established church groups that I talk to, that we’re on a course that needs to be turned around 180 degrees. We will never find wisdom in this search for closure, answers, certitude, fixing, and explanation. It simply isn’t the path of wisdom.”

The way of healing, the way of wisdom, the way of transformation is the way of darkness, or the Shadow. The way of defeat is the way of trying to defeat the Shadow. The way of victory and the way of grace is the way of letting the Shadow defeat us. In the words of Rilke, from The Man Watching, translated by Bly:

“…When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.”

“Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.”

This is the way of darkness. And when we can, by grace and practice, begin to relax the contractions that keep the doors shut tight from these realms of darkness, pain, and the unknown, we begin the journey that perhaps could be called the beginning of wisdom.

How do we do this? I think the answer is in deep, contemplative, and meditative practice. In the words of Thomas Merton, “The contemplative learns that God is in the darkness too.” And, I might add, almost always comes through the very same. How does this work on the ground in 2009? One of my clues that something wants to emerge from the Shadow realms is I feel a sense of disquiet and want to do something to distract myself. The last thing I want to do is to sit with it. In the words of Quaker wisdom, I must “labor” with it.

The formula, as taught by Sally Kempton, is the following:

Identify the hurt,

identify the thoughts associated with the hurt,

let go of the thoughts,

and stay with the feeling.

This is the process, as Rilke said, of letting ourselves be overcome. And let me tell you, you will be overcome. This realm can be absolutely terrifying and as dark as your worst nightmare. But the job of the individual or the spiritual teacher is to help us hold the pain and the darkness. And in holding it, to be overcome, dismembered, and ultimately transformed and resurrected.

The capacity to do this takes practice, grace, and faith in the ultimate goodness of the universe. Because sometimes it can feel like one is drowning in gore-infested quicksand. And this is where we come to the end of our rope. In the words of T.S. Eliot,

“You say I am repeating

Something I have said before.

I shall say it again.

Shall I say it again?

In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are,

To get from where you are not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.”

Let me, at this point, give an example, something that happened in my meditation this morning. Over the last few days, I have been increasing my meditation from the normal one hour a day to two hours because I was beginning to pass through a period or a spell of depression and despondency. Again, as I have learned and been taught, the way out of this darkness is to literally get to the bottom of it-through the dark thoughts, painful emotions, and the coldness of fear and dread, where there is no light, where the world has lost its luminosity, and where hope and faith seem like cynical jokes.

To be in this space, and to hold it, to release all contractions and be devastated by it, is the point of return to the light, to your unique essence, and into the infinitude that is God. At this place of deep despair, my fear, despair, and self-loathing began to be transmuted. At this point, I had a vision in my meditation of the hero confronting an enormous, awful dragon, who was standing in front of a luminous treasure of gold. As I struggled with this dragon, with the terror and the fear, somehow I broke through to the treasure, and the dragon was no longer in opposition to me but became a great force, the power of faith, to protect the treasure and help me bring it forth into the world.

This is the secret of inner alchemy, that as we learn to lessen our egoic contractions through faith, in the Love that is God, that is our truest Self, the lead of our baser emotions changes and transmutes into the gold of pure luminescent Spirit, that which is beyond all states. What a great secret! It ain’t easy, but again and again it comes to me, “The only way out is through.” You can do it. It takes grace, faith and cohones the size of Mt. Sinai, but there it is, the way beyond the tragedy of human egoic existence into the Light of the incomprehensible Love of the all.

How do we develop this capacity? We practice as if our souls and world depended on it. As Sensei Diane Hamilton is wont to say, “Practice is cultivation through repetition.” This apophatic path of inviting the darkness has transformed my life and practice and it is doing the same in the students I am working with.

Recently, I was on a panel discussing Integral Christianity. And someone asked the panelists, “What is God for you?” The answer that arose in my heart without thought, like break of dawn over the Southern Utah desert, was… “God is the light in the darkness.”