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meditation
December 2008 
AQAL Contemplative Religion
Posted on May 10th, 2007
by 
Rich
Rich
Current Project; I am thinking on what AQAL can offer to Contemplation and would love to hear from people via [ze]e mail or via blog response and public debate.
I will say here, just to get the ball rollin', that it seems recognizing Form/ The World actually has depth and Evolves is a great thing and is very articulately detailed by AQAL.
What do you think?
I will say here, just to get the ball rollin', that it seems recognizing Form/ The World actually has depth and Evolves is a great thing and is very articulately detailed by AQAL.
What do you think?
Access: Public
Hey Rich,
The first thing that comes to mind is that having an understanding of AQAL is literally going to change or at least alter the phenomena that arise. I can see this happening in a few different ways. One, given that, unless one is completely absorbed in formless emptiness, then the interpretive framework is going to be present at least in a very basic form. Thus the understanding of the interior phenomena is going to be deeper, wider, and more complete than the interpretations available to practitioners of other practices. Who practice. Yeah, I just used three variations of the word “practice.”
So that would be my initial response to the question. Not only does the interpretation change, but, by the kosmic law of co-creation, the phenomena are going subtly change also. The question is, what does this do for a contemplation practice?
The biggest immediate change I can see is in relation to shadow work. Getting familiar with shadow work is going to release some, certainly not all, of an individual's contractions. This not to mention that getting familiar with AQAL will likely release some contractions too, simply because of its depth of understanding regarding developmental levels, both in the practioner and in the people/society around the practitioner.
And, something has to change given the insights of postmodernism, the insights that Ken uses as integral to his theory. As in, there is no way to be a functional, living and acting human being without acting out of some kind of cultural context, since, as I mentioned above, the only time an individual is actually free of context is in the very deepest causal space. Thus, no more bullshit about ego being the enemy of the contemplator, at least not in the sense that one can function without an ego (which is actually psychotic, right?). So, as far as I can tell, one of the major contributions of integral theory is that very observation: the ego is only the enemy when its the only thing level of reality present. I.e., the intellect is a terrible master, a wonderful tool. And since AQAL theory has the potential to immensely deepen the ego's self-reflexivity, AQAL also has the wonderful quality of making the ego a better tool, a sharper sword, a better opening through which the Heart of the kosmos might shine.
Deeper understanding of the phenomena arising while sitting, better framework for post-meditative considerations, release from the (understandable and forgivable) ignorance of prior frameworks lacking the understandings brought to light by modernity, post-modernity, and integral post-metaphysics. Them's my thoughts.
S.
Emptiness; For Everything Else There's AQAL.
Thank-you very much for your thoughts Sterling, boring as I am I agree with them! What follows is a kind of thinking out loud of just a few thoughts I've been having and wanting to explore.
I have been wondering recently “what is liberation?” and placed within an AQAL context, or seen actively from an AQAL perspective, we can say there are indeed many different liberations and also One Liberation, that is spoken of by the Religions. I was watching Cornel West recently and he was applauding the charity of Bill Gates. However he then followed this by saying “do not confuse charity with justice”. By this he ment that unless we take a systemic perspective and see the ways in which systems generate oppression we miss injustice, we miss suffering. Great reformers such as Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Ghandhi were systemic thinkers. This reminds us of Foucault's accute understanding of the way structuralism brings forth realities that go completely unseen by phenomenology [meditation].
Now, why is this important? For me this is one way to highlight partiality within practice. As a young man of 14 I started to become interested in my mind and went to the bok shop, looking at books on Buddhism, this continued until I was19, when I first sought a teacher and it continues to this day. Well, good for me. The thing is however that unless I realize the partiality, this is not a negative word, of the perspective I am being shown in the teachings and by teachers, I can cause a lot of harm to myself and my loved ones, without being aware of it, or (more tragically) being aware of it but not knowing what to do about it.
I wonder how many male Buddhist practitioners get into relationship trouble and counsel their partner “ok, it's ok, just breath, breath with me … *in* ah . . .*out*, your thoughts are not who you are, you are free, feel that spaciousness”. I am sure it's a few. What does this do? Neutralize the situation or look for Masculine release (peace and quiet!). If we are in a sexual relationship do we want our main option to be neutralizing our partner [and squishing her femminity at the same time]? I don't. How can we be aware of this? We can be aware of types, we can be aware of Deida's work. Types are only revealed by structuralism. Surprisingly this is not taught by most teachers coming out of a heavily monastic and [unconsciously] masculine community.
I also read a chapter recently on sexuality by a Buddhist teacher who said sexual greed comes from the delusion of thinking subject and object are seperate and the tone of the article as I read it was casting out passionate, sweaty, swearing, hair pulling sex as something “greedy”, “evil”, creating “suffering” an so forth. Again, this is a relative perspective, this is not Dharma. The problem with saying that sexual greed comes from the delusion of the seperate self is that while that statement is partially true and deeply profound it is also very crude. There are personal historical (even genetic) reasons why jealousy (for one example) occurs or is increased in certain situations and merely recommending seeing past the opposites doesn't cut it, it's not practical as it takes so damn long. Am I doomed to have unhealthy greedy sexual relationships until I am Enlightened?
I have also read that people become addicts because they falsely believe they exist as a seperate self. While, again, this is partially true there are many other causes to a phenomenon such as heroine addiction than not Waking Up.
I am not however trying to “trash” Buddhism or the Contemplative Religions, I am merely trying to work in such a way as to increase clarity, while honouring the Truth of Buddhism. By the way, as many Buddhists often know, the way Buddhism is often accepted into the mainstream is by a distortion, by seeing Buddhism as an Eastern version of Cognitive Psychology! An Integral Psychology/Spirituality acknowledges the Deepest Truth of the Contemplatives yet also acknowledges the relative and evolving truths of people such as Freud, Jung, Perls and Rogers, as well as Foucault, Marx and Richard Dawkins.
I also want to be VERY careful in not lumping together all Buddhists in some sort of unified camp as if that were actually the case, because it obviously isn't. There are more sophisticated Buddhists, more Realized Buddhists, more active Buddhists [or Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Shamans etc.] than others. It appears that AQAL can go a long way, or at least be a powerful first word, in actually mapping these sophistications so we can more clearly understand what is going on in this relative world.
Well, that seems enough for now; sex and systems. I am still working on the myth of the given and integral post-metaphysics, they are indeed very sophisticated thoughts indeed!
Oh, I also agree that seeing the ego as a GOOD thing is an absolute must. A good ego is good, it's only a crappy ego that's bad!! [of course this is a crude statement but it's useful to make a point]. The 'anti-ego' stances are philosophically incoherent and damaging.
Much love, yearning for 2 types of clarity.
Rich
Hi, Rich. Just dropped by to leave a note. Looking forward to join you for a discussion of AQAL Buddhahood, or at least an AQAL path to it.:-), as soon I'm back from the Integral Buddhism seminar.
All best,
Hokai
Hi Rich,
Loved your commentary. Wanted to make something explicit that was implicit for most of your last post. That is, most of the difficulties you were citing with regards to Buddhism and its mediocre interpretations of the problems of today are problems relative to Stage 3 enlightenment, right? All these practitioners who are stuck at Stage 3 conveying teachings that seem to say “there's nothing beyond Nirvana. This is as far as you have to go. This is all there is. Ultimate Reality. Get here and your job as a human being is done.”
So before I go on, for anyone unfortunate enough to actually read this dialogue, I should explain this stage crap I'm talking about. I'm referring, of course, the the zen perspective on the five stages necessary to becoming a fully realized human. Stage 1: relative self only; stage 2: getting brief tastes of Absolute Reality, Nirvana, etc., riding the wild ride between relative reality and Absolute Reality; stage 3: stabilized realization of the Absolute, i.e. I'm the only thing there is, I'm the only real thing, everything is empty and I am that, (including: my thoughts, my body, my relative self, you, us, none of this really exists); stage 4: Fall From grace (to quote Genpo Roshi), i.e. guess what? while you thought you were completely and totally enlightened, really you were only at stage 3, and now all those things you did that you didn't take responsibility for, all those things you didn't think about because you thought you were beyond karma, well, they've all caught up to you, i.e. welcome to the most pain you've ever been in you're life; stage 5: endless process, a realization that holds both emptiness form as non-reducible, interdependent, one.
Ok. That was a long sentence. What I'm saying, anyway, is that Stage 3 is pretty fucking appealing, yeah? Constant Nirvana? Who the fuck doesn't want that? And - drum roll, please - Stage 3 fits perfectly into the cultural context of the West, i.e. spirituality as something utterly apart fromt the pain and suffering of this life. That is, as Ken Wilber points out, Christianity, during the time of the creation of the Church, not only started repressing actual mystical practice (here's how you do that: just burn anyone at the stake who claims to have had direct experience of God) but also got stuck in a purely ascending mode spiritual discourse. In other words, Heaven isn't here, it's somewhere else, thus this world is merely a battleground for souls. I'm not saying, in a really strange way, this life isn't a battleground for the destiny of souls. What I am saying is that's not all it is. The problem with the purely ascending current of spirit, pure Eros, is its tendency to dissociate from physical reality and, as a result, woman, sex, the earth, etc. Also something you were talking about, Mr. Rich. So. Here we are, in the West, still dissociating from the relative world, and doing our damndest not to, and still fucking up. And so of course teachers at Stage 3 realization are going to appeal to us. They fit perfectly, and here we go, trying to turn Buddhism into another form of unhealthy Christianity.
And, as an aside, I am not, absolutely not, hammering on Christianity or Buddhism per se, I am criticizing two specific forms of these amazing systems.
Now that, frankly, is a situation that someone who doesn't understand the nature of contextual reality is going to understand at all, not to mention care about. My guess is that most people in the west actually think the Buddhism we've got here is verbatim the same stuff the Buddha was teaching 2,500 years ago, or whenever that was. Which, if only because of linguistic differences, it is not. I don't want to step into post-modern hell here, and get lost in relativity, but I just think that needs to be pointed out.
Answer to the problem? Genpo Roshi. I'm only half-kidding here. The answer to the problem, in part, is more Stage 5 teachers. People who have explicit understanding of the stages of Zen.
Which brings me to something I find interesting. My theory is that Zen is by far the best tradition, in terms of ease of translation, of all the Eastern imports. I'm not saying Tibetan Buddhism is no good, obviously it's great. And so are all the other traditions. But Zen, because of its bare-bones approach to practice - and its interpretation of reality - seems best fit to be most easily translated into the West. It seems to carry less cultural baggage that simply isn't going to make one bit of sense to westerners. Or at least it seems to be most easily stripped down to its essentials. And, given the work that Genpo Roshi is doing, developing the Big Mind process, which is already a synthesis of western psychology and Zen, I think it's already becoming apparent. Zen is more easily translated.
Problem with that is, well, Zen is really fucking masculine. Almost too much even for me. So obviously, in its more traditional form, it's only going to appeal to a particular segment of the population. And, given that more and more men and women are moving in the green stage of development all the time, which means they're far more balanced in terms of their masculine/feminine energy, a practice that *purely* masculine is going to be less and less popular, it seems to me. Or, at least that's a possibilty. Anyone up for Zazen dancing? Hmm…I really think we're going to see the traditions change pretty radically in our lifetime. It's already happening.
As for me, just to clarify a point I made earlier, not every tradition in the West is dissociated, namely the shamanic traditions that were here, in North America, prior to European contact. They are, in fact, extremely earth oriented. I witness that every time I go to a sweat, once a week. Problem with these traditions is that I have yet to encounter any teachings regarding emptiness and/or form. I don't think they exist. That's something I'm personally interested in, like synthesizing the Big Mind process with the Blackfoot spiritual tradition. It has some very interesting potential, I think.
Ok. Thanks for your posts, Rich. Let's keep this going. S.
Hey Sterling,
Yes, the mis-translation of a teaching by a mystic into a mythic dogma, it's funny, as I type that I can hear church bells in the distance. Again we are pointing to the interpretive framework and how important it really is. States of consciousness do not come with a label attached! One does not experience something and then hear a little voice that Divinely tells you “you are now experiencing unconditional Love and here's how that should be applied”, we interpret that afterwards. Sometimes there are less-than-aware factors that shape our thoghts without us even knowing what those factors are. When this happens we have failed to be Socractic, to be critical, to pierce through the givens, by using our intellect and observation, our critical reason.
So how does AQAL help? Why should we bother to study these weirdly named “quadrants, levels, lines, states and types”? Put simply because if we don't we are not fully aware of what is shaping our lives and our actions. We meet people all the time who know what their views is (even if that is “I don't cling to views”) and do not want to entertain the grains of truth in other people's perspectives. We all do this. There are good reasons to do this too, we can't just keep changing our minds every 10 seconds. Yet maybe once a year we can open up a new box of thought, like at Christmas or something.
I think AQAL has a way of being a great framework for the relative interpretation and view. I would say that there are many teachers with the same degree of Realization as Genpo. yet something is different about Genpo and Terry Patten (just to name two people). What is that difference?
It seems that because Genpo acknowledges deeply the relative structures of the self (the 'voice' of voice dialogue) he can more fully inhabit the relative domain. The cognitive framework he is using actually helps him more fully explore the Realization that Samsara is not other to Liberation. I think others know this directly but do not have a framework that allows them to explore the relative structures of the self in such a way as Genpo (or others like Genpo, Genpo has mentioned how Tantric his system is) and I would like to see this trend expanding. The relative structures of the self, types such as Masculine and Femminine (as aspects of men and women), the aspect of I, We and It/s in every moment, lines of development in teachers and practitioners and the levels they move through.
Why do I want to acknowledge this? Because I want to show that while it is possible to Awaken to the Unconditoned that does not even blink in the face of the Conditioned, it is never touched or harmed that the Conditioned breaks down all the time, and AQAL is a great mechanics manual. The better the manual we can have the better the vehicle we can have. Just because someone has Woken Up doesn't mean they drive a good car and often we can confuse these things so painfully.
Sterling, I am really excited to see what can be done with your Tradition and Big Mind process, I think there are some amazing avenues in that area, that's keep that on the map!
with Love, wishing you strength
Rich
So, I want to start to try and distill juicy AQAL nuggets (not before the fruit is ripe but let’s have a taste and see if it’s sweet or bitter and see right now), because of this I find myself writing what’s below!
My main interest is in seeing people that are well versed with AQAL who also start to specialize into a particular field, such as Zen Buddhism and what AQAL really means in terms of Philosophy and Practice pertaining to deepening our experience of Awareness.
I am interested in;
teasing apart The Truth from the relative expressions, facts and opinions given by teachers and students
expanding the notion of Right View to include the AQAL Philosophy, which seems to nicely compliment the heavily ‘zone 1’ perspective of Contemplation
avoiding the absolutisms that can occur [always bringing all conversations back to ‘zone 1’ truth claims]
including the ‘we’ space more in a Traditon that is typically more comfortable with ‘I’ and ‘It’ (also appreciating the Its as outlined by thinkers such as Cornel West)
including ‘types’ such as Masculine and Femminine in a Tradition that often seems unconsciously Masculine
seeing what practice looks like for me and others in an AQAL context seeing that we can only often speacalize in one or a few areas and creating a mutually supportive ‘we’ that accounts for this explicitly.
I love to hear people’s views.
with heart and mind
Rich