A year or two ago i recorded this piece with Ken Wilber during one of the live conference calls at Integral Spiritual Center, and i found the discussion to be absolutely fascinating. Synchronicity has long been a defining texture in my own spiritual path, and was a topic which, until this call, i had never heard Ken speak or write about. Although i can certainly understand his silence around the subject, still i believe that the Integral vision can give us a much more lucid understanding of how synchronicity actually works, beyond the deeply confused interpretations offered by New Agers, Quantum Meta-Physicians, and peddlers of various consciousness-scams such as The Secret.

Do you think the Integral map can help us to better understand the energetic mechanics of synchronicity? Is such an inquiry even useful for integral practicioners? Let me know your throughts!

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Just as human beings intrinsically possess 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-person perspectives of the world, so do we possess those same perspectives in our experience of spirituality.  And while these dimensions of the divine can be found in just about any spiritual lineage—Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, Islam, etc.—many of these traditions explicitly emphasize only one or two of these perspectives, resulting in one or more important aspects of spirituality often being left out of their conceptions of God.

God in 3rd-person is often described as the “great web-of-life,” and is frequently experienced when observing objects of miraculous beauty such as the Grand Canyon, exquisite music, transcendent art, or the mind-boggling elegance of deep-space photography.  Many astronauts returning to Earth have experienced powerful states of transcendence triggered by simply looking at our planet floating in the vacuum of space, the sublime fragility and significance of the human condition clearly reflected in their retinas.

As John Glenn said, “To look out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible. It just strengthens my faith.”

Or, consider the words of another NASA hero, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell:

“On the way home from the moon, looking out at the heavens, this insight—which I now call a transcendent experience—happened. I realized that the molecules of my body had been created or prototyped in an ancient generation of stars—along with the molecules of the spacecraft and my partners and everything else we could see including the Earth out in front of us. Suddenly, it was all very personal. Those were my molecules.  It was an experience of interconnectedness. It was an experience of bliss, of ecstasy… it was so profound. I realized that the story of ourselves as told by science—our cosmology, our religion—was incomplete and likely flawed. I recognized that the Newtonian idea of separate, independent, discreet things in the universe wasn’t a fully accurate description.”

God in 2nd-person is traditionally defined as the “I-Thou” relationship with the divine, where Spirit is experienced as a living intelligence that we can actually interact with in our own lives.  As Ken often says, borrowing from renowned theologian Martin Buber, in the “I-Thou” relationship, God is the hyphen connecting the I and the Thou.  And of course, our conceptions of God in 2nd-person evolve right alongside the rest of humanity, growing from magical animistic immersion, to the mythic “old bearded white man in the sky” interpretation, to rational and pluralistic recognitions of divinity within our families, communities, and humanity itself, to the simple intuition that we all exist within the unimaginable Mind of some Supreme Being, by whatever name.

This is reflected beautifully from the lips of George Harrison:

It’s been a long long long time
How could I ever have lost you
When I loved you

It took a long long long time
Now I’m so happy I found you
How I love you

So many tears I was searching
So many tears I was wasting, oh oh

Now I can see you, be you
How can I ever misplace you
How I want you
Oh I love you
Your know that I need you
Ooh I love you

Or 12th-century Sufi mystic, Jalāl ad-Dīn Rumi:

A lover asked his beloved,
Do you love yourself more than you love me?
Beloved replied, I have died to myself and I live for you.
I’ve disappeared from myself and my attributes,
I am present only for you.
I’ve forgotten all my learnings,
but from knowing you I’ve become a scholar.
I’ve lost all my strength, but from your power I am able.
I love myself… I love you.
I love you… I love myself.

Also from Rumi:

The Beloved is all; the lover just a veil.
The Beloved is living; the lover a dead thing.

God in 1st-person refers to the actual phenomenological experience of God, in the form of satori, kensho, ecstatic reverie, and other sorts of “peak experiences” of the divine.  These are most frequently exercised through some form of contemplative practice, such as meditation or prayer, in which we can directly experience consciousness as the “singular to which the plural is unknown”—and the effortless, open awareness behind all of our experiences is recognized as the consciousness of God (or Godhead, as Christian mystics might prefer).  In this space, all of our thoughts, emotions, and experiences, as well as the rest of the world around us, are simply and effortlessly witnessed, in much the same way that clouds float effortlessly through the infinite expanse of the sky.  And that effortless expanse at the center of each and every moment IS God transcendent, looking at His/Her own immanence through each of our eyes.  A wonderful description of this sort of personal experience of and as God can be found in Ken’s book One Taste:

“It is true that the physical matter of your body is inside the matter of the house, and the matter of the house is inside the matter of the universe. But you are not merely matter or physicality. You are also Consciousness as Such, of which matter is merely the outer skin. The ego adopts the viewpoint of matter, and therefore is constantly trapped by matter—trapped and tortured by the physics of pain. But pain, too, arises in your consciousness, and you can either be in pain, or find pain in you, so that you surround pain, are bigger than pain, transcend pain, as you rest in the vast expanse of pure Emptiness that you deeply and truly are.

So what do I see?  If I contract as ego, it appears that I am confined in the body, which is confined in the house, which is confined in the large universe around it.  But if I rest as Witness—the vast, open, empty consciousness—it becomes obvious that I am not in the body, the body is in me; I am not in this house, the house is in me; I m not in the universe, the universe is in me.  All of them are arising in the vast, open, empty, pure, luminous Space of primordial Consciousness, right now and right now and forever right now.  Therefore, be Consciousness.”
Any spiritual tradition is capable of expressing all three of these forms of spiritual experience—in fact, if you are leaving any of these out, chances are your understanding of spiritual realities is incomplete in some way.  Historically, Eastern and Western traditions have emphasized different perspectives in different ways.  For centuries Christianity has focused upon 2nd- and 3rd-person aspects of spiritual life, while being distrustful of 1st-person reports of God—using them at times as the grounds for heresy.  Buddhism, on the other hand, tends to emphasize first-person experiences and 3rd-person perspectives of spirituality, while often denying the existence of any sort of “personal” God in 2nd-person—a major source of tension for many Christians.  Although these traditions express these perspectives in very different ways (some in the spotlight and some in the shadows), all three faces of God can be found at the core of every tradition—for example, Christians are still having powerful 1st-person experiences of transcendence, reverie, and revelation; and Buddhists still practice Spirit-in-2nd-person in the form of compassion, devotion, and kindness.

Strictly speaking, nothing can be said about the true essence of Reality (including that)—but in the finite, manifest domain, the three faces of God appear to be intrinsic to Spirit’s radiant display. And unfortunately, Spirit’s expression as 2nd-person Thou has largely gotten stuck at the mythic-membership fundamentalist level of development. The modern world not only rejected the marginalization and cruelties associated with the mythic god, it threw out God in 2nd-person altogether—and thus a huge baby got thrown out with the bathwater of mythic consciousness: one-third of God’s own ever-present Face. After all, when moving from a 3rd-person description of God directly to a 1st-person experience of God, without the soul-cleansing qualities of extreme humility, grace, and gratefulness that God in 2nd-person bestows upon us, it can be deceptively easy to sneak the whims of the ego into our interpretations of spiritual experience—and, rather than transcending the ego, our spiritual experiences can ironically become the last refuge of the ego.  Indeed, one of the key dilemmas for humanity is discovering a way to help the great spiritual and religious traditions grow into their modern, postmodern, and integral forms of being-in-the-world, with all three faces of God shining brightly.

What do you think of when you hear the words “Unique Self”? Childhood memories of gold stars and “I am special, look at me” nursery rhymes? Stacks of self-help books intended to help bolster and reinforce the ego? The latest New Age The Secret-type fads that place the self at the center of the universe, instead of the universe at the center of the self? A particular constellation of Jungian personality types, Enneagram typologies, astrological signs, and countless “Which Battlestar Galactica character are you” quizzes on Facebook?

The Unique Self is much more than a Myers-Briggs test with a spiritual overlay. It does not refer to any of these ornaments of the self—though it is immanent to the trials and tribulations of the ego, it utterly transcends the ego, remaining forever untouched by the appetites of identity. The Unique Self represents the deepest possible expression of consciousness, a subject that can never be made object, the union of ever-present consciousness and individual perspective at a radically fundamental level. Read the rest of this entry

“Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being. Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.” –Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Simply love.

This is all Christ, or any other enlightened master, has ever asked of us.  Love fully, love freely, and love completely.  Love to the bottom of our hearts, to the depths of our souls, using every moment as an opportunity to express gratitude for our blessings and our devotion to one another.  It is such a deceptively simple instruction—so much so that we rarely find it being followed in a wholehearted way in our own lives or in the world around us.  This is one of the central paradoxes of Christ’s message: it is so simple that almost everyone misses it.  So simple that most people would have an easier time walking through the eye of a needle than they would walking the path of God’s love. Read the rest of this entry

In the beginning, there is nothing.  There is nothing at all.  There are no stars, no moon, no mountains or ocean or sky.  There isn’t even nothingness, not even the absence of absence.  There is only pure reality—infinite, boundless, and silent.  There is only pure unobstructed Awareness.

Resting in the eternal stillness, Spirit is complete, fulfilled, lacking nothing at all, for there is nothing to lack.  Resting as the eternal stillness, Spirit is infinitely All-One, infinitely alone.

A tiny point of light, impossibly bright, pierces through the Void.  It is barely a pinprick, a pixel of light that somehow contains all space, all time, and all possibility.  Here, in the heart of the Void, Spirit exhales.  A universe is being born. Read the rest of this entry