“My reading of Charles work left me with both a feeling of and intellectual understanding that he is not applying CT to deconstruct religion in order to supplant with a new “religion”.”
Right, and I am just wondering where in the integral space you have seen folks “applying CT to deconstruct religion and supplant with a new religion”. Once again I am inviting you to substantiate your claims, since you are taking yet another opportunity to disparage the community. I’m not sure it’s being “pro-Trump” as much as “aggressively anti-left”, and I see you again trying to claim that integral is subservient to the left and would therefore relish in applying an “evil” lens like critical theory to all domains, including the spiritual.
Critical theory is a methodology, one of many. Integral does not privilege any singular methodology, but rather situates all available methodologies into a post-methodological pluralism. The integral claim is that no methodology is “evil”, that the majority of these methodologies have value, and disclose some important aspect or dimension or zone of reality that other methodologies cannot disclose — but that each of these methodologies is also essentially limited to a particular zone of reality, and get in trouble when they overreach into other zones they are not equipped to disclose. Which is why integral says things like “everyone is right” and “everything in its right place” while simultaneously saying, “but stay in your zone.”
Critical theory is a lens that people can use to disclose how power moves in the world, the sorts of structures it creates, and how those structures can be challenged. It can be useful for seeing certain dynamics in zones 4, 7, and 8. It is not an “evil” lens, it is simply partial. The “evil”, as it were, is when people only enact reality through this single lens, which then creates an exaggerated and distorted perception of reality, as EVERYTHING gets reduced to power structures.
But this is true for every methodology in existence, if it becomes the only lens we use to enact reality. This is as true for phenomenology in the upper left (everything is subjective!) as it is for hermeneutics in the lower left (everything is a social construct!) or behaviorism and empiricism in the upper right (everything is dead matter!). And of course there are factions of people who insist that all of reality can be reduced to any of these four quadrants (or more specifically, any of the eight zones), and they can make that claim from any stage of development (for example, emphasizing the LL from Amber, the UR from orange, the LR from green, etc.)
Could critical theory disclose anything useful about religion? Sure, it could look at how various religions amass and exercise and protect their power. It might be able to show us how certain beliefs were enforced over others in order to maintain power. It can probably say something important about matters such as the Catholic coverup of pedophila in the church and how such an obvious evil was sustained for so long.
But can it tell us anything about our actual spiritual experiences and states of consciousness in Zone 1, or the structures of consciousness in Zone 2 we use to interpret those experiences? No it can not.
Can it show us our own 1st-person Original Face, the face we had before the Big Bang? No it cannot.
Can it tell us anything about our intimate 2nd-person connection with God, Spirit, the Universe, etc.? No it cannot.
Can it say anything about our 3rd-person perception of the sacred, the self-evident beauty of sunsets and rainbows and galaxies and every day acts of kindness? No it cannot.
Critical theory, properly applied, MIGHT help us understand why we have some of the symbols and reference points for these experiences that we do, and maybe how these symbols became selected and institutionalized and passed down through the centuries. It can probably say something about how certain states of consciousness have been politicized and regulated and often banished by religions over history. But it can’t say anything about the actual experience itself.
Integral resists methodological fundamentalism, and makes room for all stages This is known as the principle of nonexclusion. Integral also understands how these methodologies fit together, and that higher stages bring greater resolution and more granular methodologies to be integrated. This is related to the principle of enfoldment. So critical theory is in no way a primary lens for the integral approach, but it’s a valid one if applied appropriately and supplemented/integrated with other lenses.
And I am again suggesting you may have a serious misreading of integral and it’s application to things like spirituality, that your own primary lens you are using in this community seems to be politically adversarial, and that you should familiarize yourself more with the approach before making the strong claims and criticisms that you make.
“Did you have any thoughts on the paper?”
I think it’s great from what I’ve read so far, but it would take me much longer than I have right now to offer a substantial review to see whether it is adding to the integral spiritual model, or if perhaps it is another in a series of much-needed non-Wilber translations of the model that can speak to new audiences in new ways.
