I just had the pleasure of participating in a week-long group blogging event at the Zaadz website.  The topic was Integrative Spirituality: Grounded Contemporary Perspectives.  The symposium was the brainchild of Julian Walker, a regular blogger on the Zaadz site and a recent guest on Integral Naked.  I really enjoyed the event and all of the perspectives that were shared (both in the actual essays submitted, and in the comments that followed.)  Seven of us participated, each person posting an essay a day.

If you're interested in checking it out and maybe discussing some of the perspectives shared, I welcome you to do so here.  The following link will take you to a blog entry where Julian summarizes the event and then provides a link to each of the seven essays at the bottom.

The Symposium is Over 

Best wishes,

Balder

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May the boundless knowledge that time presents and space allows illuminate the native perspectives of your original face.

THANKS! Balder and all for that great use of cyberspace,

I was about ready to chime in with the long line of comments on your blog, Balder, when I came across this opening here.

Reading your clarification of the terms contemporary, and grounded, I began to glimpse certain implications of the three bodies (gross, subtle, and causal) in play.

You wrote: ..." a grounded approach is one which is intimate with the living knowledgeability of Being, the open-ended knowingness which is the creative ground for all particularized acts of knowledge and all individual knowledge claims, and which enact our self-world horizons. In practical terms, this means having reached a point, through sustained inquiry, that one recognizes this knowingness, this open clarity, not as an ideal, not as a position to be adopted, but as the actuality of being. Because this knowing is foundational, being grounded means being open to what is, in and as its presencing, in uncontrived intimacy."

Your languaging, I think, orientates groundedness as more a process than a charecteristic, or a quality. As you've related this view of groundedness it sounds functionally sourced in the causal, mediated by the subtle. Which, to me, rings intuitivly true. This frees up much of my conventional assumptions of grounding as primarily an URq act. This, along with Julian's emphasis on adequate attention to both surface work, and depth work, are glaringly appropriate pointers for my own current practice needs.

Through considering the three bodies, the terms grounded and contemporary are further qualified for me. That gross, subtle and causal fulfill, respectivly, differing relational dynamics to time and space, and can be said to transcend and include (heading east on the W-C Lattice) as our CoG progresses. Simply that the mind doesn't share all the same constraints as the physical body, and the subtle and causal are successively less constrained. Anchored, but contained with greater parameters of function. I've come away from the zympozium with the sense that the time of the contemporary, and the space of the grounded are open enough to correspond to our actual experience of human spirituality.

You guys, feel free to bow, 'cause you are applauded.

all for now,

jikishin

 

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'takes all kinds.

Thanks, Jikishin.  You're right:  I was intending to convey a sense of "being grounded" as a process rather than a fixed characteristic or quality.  Your comments about being functionally sourced in the causal are right on.  I was thinking of the causal as I wrote that piece, but I was not consciously trying to point to the interrelationship of the three bodies.  Thanks for putting that language to it, though -- it makes sense to frame it that way. 

I love the gifts we can bring each other.  Your re-languaging of my comments helps me to see freshly too.

Warm wishes,

Balder

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May the boundless knowledge that time presents and space allows illuminate the native perspectives of your original face.