I can see a connection between this definition of enlightenment and the one I explain in my presentation. My conception of enlightenment essentially boils down to peacemaking through sensemaking. And by peacemaking, I’m referring to holonic and developmentally-oriented processes toward greater harmony, both internally and externally, singularly and collectively. And by sensemaking I’m referring not only to the intellectual rationally-oriented processes to better understand reality but also feeling-based and deeply embodied and autopoetic sensemaking. This conception of enlightenment builds upon the work of Wilber, Vervaeke, and several others.
2 Likes
Yes, this is an exciting approach and does seem to be the way to go forward.
1 Like
Do you see what you did there?
Made an ambiguous statement that provokes discussion? Anyway, after posting a sort of open-ended question like that, I mulled it over myself quite a bit. A typical Christian theological response is that yes, there is a lot of suffering in the world, but God participates in all of it and takes it upon Himself in the person of Jesus. Then - today being Easter (in the Western Church) - it’s all overcome through the Resurrection.
For many Christians, that sort of theology settles these matters, so discussion over. Another point of view is Book of Job. Namely, puny humans have no business questioning the ways of the Lord. Actually, I see a lot of sense in that - Being in general does not care much what I think of it! Or if does, so far I made been spared plagues, boils, tragic loss and so forth, evidently being able to process subtler hints …
The ambiguity in this case struck me as funny. In Christianity, yes, all the atrocities of everyone is laid on Jesus. Jesus was punished and every time I look at pornography (for example) the Roman’s spear twists another time in Jesus’ side so that I don’t suffer in eternal hell and damnation. At least, that’s how it was explained to me in Sunday School.
Where it gets sticky is “The Church” believes that they and Jesus are the same, whereas I prefer to separate the members from the Church and the Church from Jesus (if I recognize Jesus did exist). Each member of a Church is not responsible for the entire history of that Church, and neither is Jesus “responsible” for what is done in His name by the Church. A Church is responsible for the actions of it’s members to the degree it supports, fosters and harbors such behavior either actively or through inaction.
When it comes to various theisms and The Great Question:
I approach this as where I am now and from this place I am, what makes the most sense for me to move forward?
For example, I recognize the path of Buddhism as a valid path - but not for me in this lifetime and there are other paths. Some are faster, some are slower, some are dead ends and some achieve more than Buddhism. I see similar wisdom in the origins of Judaism, and Taoism. In Hinduism is see equal wisdom along several paths and some Hindu paths are the origin point of later systems like Buddhism, Gnostic Christianity and many others.
For me I’ve never really been concerned with which was the actual Truth that is completely 100% impossible to verify as truth.
I have always myself been more interested in which “makes the most sense” bot in terms of Theology and practice. Some Churches / paths make it literally impossible to practice because of their dogma. For example, if a “lineage” is required and that lineage is broken, then practicing it requires breaking the lineage rules. As and example Tibetan Buddhism is going face this problem within the next few decades. How will they choose a “legitimate” reincarnation?
Other prohibitions or requirements just violate my common sense so completely and profoundly that I - just can’t. This is my issue with 99% of Christian faiths. In order to advance beyond a member to some kind of legitimate Pastor or Priest, you are required to swear a believe in the Literal Mythic views in the Bible. So with Christianity I have the choice to never advance beyond just a member of the congregations because I could never swear to a belief in the Literal Mythic interpretation of the Bible.
All of these and many other mundane matters tend to be more important to my decision making than any feelings of “truth” about Theisms.
2 Likes
To circle back to where this topic started in the first place, Western Enlightenment needs to be understood as the critique of the “philosophes” against the perceived outrages of Christianity in preceding centuries. (Wars, Inquisitions, heresy trials, etc.) Eastern Enlightenment traditions have had their twists and turns along the way, but continuity seems more featured than revolutionary upheaval. (Lots of exceptions, however. It’s never been all bliss in the mysterious Orient.)
If there is such a thing as a pan-species Enlightenment in the offing, I am imagine we must both criticize and re-appreciate a wide range of traditions. My feelings about Christianity are obviously ambiguous, as my laughable post clearly revealed. The theology you learned in Sunday School, is not the only one, I’m glad to say. Is so far as Christianity and Enlightenment are not polar opposites, another turn or two on the Christian Dharma Wheel seems required.
1 Like
This goes back to the definition of enlightenment, and I would also add in that there needs to be a language for various degrees or types of enlightenment.
One type of enlightenment is a the spontaneous variety, where people “freak out” in various ways, but usually in a state of bliss.
One Christian group that does this very well is the “Born Again” Christians, and their rites of Baptism and Sacrament could be considered a kind of “Tantra” (an external thing that accelerates a spiritual process). Christian Rock also fascinates me as a means of Channeling devotion to access states of Bliss. Instead of “Indigenous” Drums or other traditional instruments, the electric guitar and snare drums are used to “Praise the Lord”.
Thanks for sharing the Wilber-Combs Lattice. I’ve been bothered by the Wilber III-IV stacking solution, so I’m glad Ken Wilber himself is sensitive to the issues. It seems plausible that cognitive and spiritual development are different “lines” of development that can run parallel, and not at the same pace.
For reasons related to my personal shadow work, I think Pentecostal Christianity has the potential to leap into just about anything. For a non-Christian analogue, Gebser’s Ever-Present Origin may have a similar effect.
Yes. So far so good. But the “altitudes” model is more about some unified, across-the-board sort of development. So the integration of “lines”, the “ups” and the “altitudes” is under-theorized, from my POV.
On the Western spiritual development topic, here is my initial hack at using Integral and fistfull of other metatheories to help people sort out world history, in general. At only 10 pages or so, it’s clearly not a narrative history of everything. Rather, it shows how one can use different frameworks to peer into history, hopefully with good effect. For what it’s worth. Any sensible remarks I might want to make about the ups and downs of Christian spirituality over the the millenia would be against the background of some of these more materialistic (but still very AQAL) ideas.
If we look at @EnlightenedWorldview’s definition of Enlightenment as “peacemaking through sense making” and if we mean “peace” to be a kind of inner peace and sense making to be both emotional "sense and intellectual sense, then …
There are many militant Enlightenment traditions throughout history. There are the Eastern martial arts masters, who are considered to be Enlightened and also wise. Tai Chi, Kung Fu and the Samurai come to mind. South Asia has Kalaripayattu and I’m sure there are many others around the world.
Though I believe these are distinct from the Holy Crusaders of the Judeo-Christian-Islam traditions. The J-C-I Holy warriors seem to be more conquest oriented and looking to find salvation through heroic deeds and conquest. We might add in Viking to this, where salvation and access to Valhalla is found in a heroic death. The Viking, J-C-I seems goal oriented and uses war as a necessity to gain salvation. This is a parasitic relationship where one group must die for the other to benefit.
Contrast this to the first traditions I mention, where salvation comes through inner work and usefulness in warfare is a secondary benefit. The Shogun did not need war for his practice. Japan did not project it’s military outward until the 20th Century and there were centuries at a time of peace during various historical periods.
So what would a Russian soldier’s enlightenment look like today? I guess along either path because he had access to the internet and could have learned a multitude of traditions and philosophies.
Love a good history discussion! Wikipedia backs you up. (See the Edo period) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_Japan
Now, the interesting question is why … and how does that compare/contrast with the West and other places? Here’s a perspective. The Tokugawa shogun consolidated power, forcing the samurai warriors to become courtiers instead. This is extremely parallel to the state formation process happening in Europe at the same time. The old medieval free-for-all was giving way to organized states with courtiers and bureaucracies to run things on behalf of monarchs. One huge difference though - although the European states were consolidating within themselves, no one state - not England, not France, not Spain - was able to dominate the entire region. So although within states things calmed down (relatively speaking), between states war was periodic and almost perpetual. In Japan, the shogun had no rivals. Between the Mongols on the one hand and Commodore Perry on the other, Japan got to run its own show.
Everything that happened with Japan between 1853 and 1945 shows that the warrior spirit had not gone away however. The shoguns kept warrior culture in a bottle, so to speak, but the genie got out. The whole question of Zen master support for the Japanese Empire needs to be viewed in this light. “Peace” is term that can mean different things in different social and personal contexts.
The funny thing is much of my world history is courtesy of James Clavell and while it could be said he muddles history a bit, so do History Textbooks, lol.
1 Like
I’d love to hear you unpack this a bit, so we can see what kinds of meat we might want to pack onto them bones!
The one piece we might want to be careful about, though, is that “waking up” is technically not a “line” that moves through different altitudes, but rather a sequence of states that can be accessed from any altitude. Adding to the complexity, we can also talk about a “spiritual line” that does move through these vertical altitudes (e.g. James Fowler’s Stages of Faith), but this does not necessarily predict what sorts of horizontal states one might experience from each of those stages.
So, in short:
1. Growing up: general growth of the self-system through vertical structure-stages of unfolding
2. Waking up: training states of consciousness through horizontal state-stages of awakening, producing experiences which are then interpreted according to our current position in the growing up/opening up process.
3. Opening up: similar to growing up, but assessing and working with each individual line of development (interpersonal, aesthetic, emotional, etc.)
4. Cleaning up: Reintegrating dissociated pieces of ourselves, which can occur either in the growing up or waking up process.
5. Showing up: Taking all of this predominantly upper-left quadrant work, and allowing it to flood into the other quadrants of our being (e.g. our behaviors, our relationships, our career, etc.)
In terms of both “peacemaking” and “sensemaking”, I can see how all five of these would directly apply. For example, “peace” (which I am enacting here as “harmony or integration of self and other”) can be defined differently from ego-centric, ethnocentric, and worldcentric stages, which determines our overall circle of care. Meanwhile, our capacity for inner peace and equanimity is often associated with increasing familiarity of gross, subtle, causal, witnessing, and nondual states. And cleaning up clearly has an important role here, as we learn to reintegrate the various inner conflicts and hostilities that we may be projecting onto others, which may be making genuine “peace” that much more difficult to achieve. Cleaning up is something like peacemaking with our own self-system.
Similarly, “sensemaking” is going to depend not only on our cognitive capacities (we can only make sense of the phenomena we are actually capable of perceiving/cognizing, which means a 2p perspective can never make adequate sense of systems that can only be cognized at 4p, which is a huge issue underlying our culture wars), but also any number of other “opening up” lines of intelligence — our moral intelligence, our aesthetic intelligence, our spiritual intelligence, etc. And of course “cleaning up” also becomes critical in our sensemaking, or else we risk following our own confirmation biases further down the rabbit hole, resulting in broken sense-making and world-modeling.
Sorta related to this, I’ve been working for the last couple weeks on a new approach that tries to use polarity work to scaffold growing up, cleaning up, and showing up processes. What I’m doing is creating a “giga-glossary” of critical polarities in each quadrant, at every stage of development. So here are three critical polarities in the UL of the red stage, three critical polarities in the LL of the red stage, etc. The idea being, each of these polarities comes to the forefront at particular stages, and once they do, they remain in the self-system. And if any of these polarities remain unintegrated for us, chances are it is producing some sort of shadow material, which can hopefully be re-integrated simply by contemplating and reintegrating the core polarity itself. Still a work in progress, but I’ve compiled over 120 polarities so far, and happy to talk more about it if anyone is interested!
2 Likes
Serious point about that …
With the volume of factual, empirical information about world history growing exponentially, along with the exponential growth of every other discipline, the idea of forcing all undergraduates to take something like the 400 credits of history required to learn it all in detail is a non-starter. So we need … integral meta-models for purposes of cognitive organization.
Apart from meta-theory, art in general is also a great information delivery mechanism. So bully Clavell! There are always geeks like me lurking to fact-check the art if the artist takes too many liberties …
Hi @corey-devos. Good game you have going on there … can I play to?
Here is a body of essays I hacked a couple months ago. In this post, I’ll just give a bullet point synopsis of what these essays may do for (or to) integral meta-theory.
https://openwa.pressbooks.pub/worldciv/
-
shores up the “altitudes” model with good old fashioned cultural materialism, systems theory, history of civilizations, and all LL, UR, and LR factors in general.
-
allows spiritual freedom and creative genius in the UL, coupling that with the larger model through the systems theory concept of “agency”.
-
adapts R. Kegan primary to claim that the “leading edge of culture” is far from a gimme. As a teacher, I well know you have to bust your butt to get students all the way to Kegan’s level 4 consciousness, not to mention level 5 or anything resembling second tier.
-
I make a tentative gesture towards integrating “waking up” and “growing up” by claiming that to transcend postmodern (Kegan level 5) you need a new “witnessing consciousness”. The “witness” is the new subject, and the old post-modern self is the new object, under the Kegan system of growth in which previous subjects become objects when new subjects emerge.
-
not in my essays - but I just figured this out while typing - ancient sages have been going straight to a witnessing subject without all the Western-centric altitudes (at least not the usual content used to illustrate those altitudes.) So no, you need not read Derrida or become a SJW to practice meditation. But if you do read Derrida and become a SJW, I strongly advise that you begin a serious spiritual practice stat. Otherwise you will likely manifest symptoms of “mean greeness”, or, among our elderly, the often-fatal condition of Boomeritis.
So, that’s a start. All that was written before I studied Gebser or Vervaeke at all. Stay tuned …
1 Like
Actually above I defined “peace” in much broader terms to include inner and outer, singular and collective. So working toward peace within one’s social relationships, one’s community, and the wider social context in which one has some sort of awareness is essential for achieving the highest level of enlightenment that is available to them. Of course inner peace is essential as well. Cleaning Up is essential for that and also the “existential depth” inner developmental dimension that Hanzi Freinacht described in The Listening Society.
Then Militarist “Enlightenment” doesn’t seem to fit into “peace” in this model in the wider social contexts, unless we seriously consider NRA Jesus “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition”. Or speaking of Jesus, there is also that Krishna was a fierce warrior, but is worshipped through religions of nonviolence today. Though some say he did not engage in direct combat, paintings do depict him fighting enemies.
1 Like
Very cool! I’ll take a more thorough look when I have more time.
I think Ken would likely agree with this, maybe with a couple little wrinkles:
-
You are totally right on in your intuition that the “subject becoming object” is the core mechanism here, not only in terms of “growing up” but also “waking up” and “cleaning up” as well.
-
Technically, the new subject would be a “Teal subject”, which is now looking at “Green” as an object. That is, the subject of the prior stage is now being observed as an object by the subject of the present stage.
-
However, as we enter into Teal and Turquoise structure-stages, the state-stages are becoming more integrated into the structures themselves. By the time we make it to Indigo, for example (I am using “we” very loosely here LMAO) Witness consciousness becomes more of a permanent trait than a temporary state. This is apparently confirmed by Terri O’Fallon’s work (check out her recent talks with Keith Martin Smith, if you haven’t already).
-
And of course, it can be a bit tricky to talk about that “witnessing consciousness”, because as you mention, it is available at every step of the way. It is the empty container within which “subject becomes object” is taking place. But of course, what that consciousness is capable of witnessing depends on the complexity of the consciousness itself. A three year old can theoretically be plugged into the Witnessing state, but that doesn’t mean she will suddenly be effortlessly aware of calculus.
Fun discussion guys!
Yeah, I just got done with a long walk in the park, which is about as “spiritual” as my practices get. But during the walk, I pondered deeply how to be cautious and measured in approaching the “spiritual”. A few ideas –
-
the origin of “spirit” as a symbol is complete freedom. From the Hebrew ruach, by way of the Greek pneuma, through the Latin spiritus. Vervaeke and Gebser have quite a bit to say about this, as do any number of Biblical scholars.
-
the spiritual thus enjoys complete freedom vis-a-vis the altitudes.
-
if the spiritual is “horizontal” to the altitudes, I consider it “horizontal” in the sense of coming straight off the page or the computer screen and piercing the heart of the reader.
-
my geographically-oriented theories will now adopt the terminology of a “lateral” or “geo-spatial” dimension for the altitudes to allow for cross-civilizational comparison of altitude content. (What Freinacht means by “cultural code”).
-
Corey, I like what you say about the witnessing self becoming more stable at higher altitudes. That tracks.
-
so here is the nub (remember @EnlightenedWorldview started this thread way back when!). Do you need to grow spiritually to obtain second tier cognitive complexity?
-
Case 1: search the history of math and science. You will find many cognitively complex geniuses who were not distinguished by spiritual or other forms of development.
-
Cast 2: most people. I will assert from a standpoint of praxis, that without spiritual practice leading to something like the witness, most people will hit the wall cognitively somewhere around the level of multiculturalism. Teal, second tier, integral - not happening. Why? I view the “spiritual”, among other things, as a matter of energetics. Without the breath of the spirit in their sails, most people do not have enough oxygen to scale to the highest levels of cognitive complexity. It was easy for Emerson to dismiss “foolish consistency” and embrace paradox, because Emerson absolutely manifested the witness. For anyone not there yet, paradox will be a massive energetic burden and too much weight to carry. So yeah … you can hit the books to climb the MHC scale without any self-awareness at all. But the right practice will get you there far more reliably. See John Vervaeke on detailed theories on how this works.
1 Like