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This Week on Integral Spiritual Center....
Why Practice? - Diane Hamilton/Ken Wilber Why Wait? - Fr. Thomas Keating
Why Practice? (audio)
Like a procession you walk together towards your god-self. You are the way and the wayfarers. And when one of you falls down he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone. Ay, and he falls for those ahead of him, who though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.
Kahlil Gibran
“As a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree,” says the Lebanese poet Gibran, so too do we share in the development of our brothers and sisters (and we are all brothers and sisters!). Their journey is our journey. In this week’s featured audio, ISC Teachers Ken Wilber and Diane Hamilton discuss the remarkable ways in which our own development affects the development of those who follow in our footsteps.
Ken points out that developmental altitudes constitute a sort of history of consciousness. The magenta and red altitudes, with their corresponding magical worldviews, began as rivulets tens of thousands of years ago and are now something akin to the Grand Canyon, cut a mile deep. At this point, their features are largely defined, for better or for worse. What seems “given” to us was in fact laid down by the first humans who blazed those trails. The universe has picked up these “Kosmic habits” or “Kosmic grooves,” and those who journey through them now experience them in a fairly predictable way. Each subsequent altitude (amber/mythic beginning about 3000 years ago, orange/rational beginning about 300 years ago, green/pluralistic beginning about 30 years ago) is less well defined, and in fact, is being defined by those who journey there now.
From the integral altitude, our responsibility becomes clear. To the extent that we identify with some form of the Bodhisattva vow (to become awakened as soon as possible, for the benefit of all beings), our practice becomes incredibly important. We must not delay (acting, as Martin Luther King put it, with the “fierce urgency of now”). And we must walk softly, for the ground on which we tread is sacred ground, for the countless others who will follow in our footsteps.
Diane points to an intuition that sometimes, during her practice, she is mysteriously working through some knot (or karma) of another person from another place and time. Indeed, says Ken, Alfred North Whitehead warned against the danger of “simple location”—that is, that a given phenomenon can be definitively located in a particular time and place. Where is the red altitude? We can’t really say—but in the light of AQAL, we know that it arises in four quadrants. And in four quadrants, our own actions influence it, for better or for worse.
Why practice? For the good of all beings, who will benefit from the perspectives we will be able to take—and the “right action” that we can take from those perspectives. And for the good of the path itself, so that, laid down with deep intention and great care, those who follow may have safe passage into greater freedom and greater fullness.
Why Wait? (video)
As we
deepen in practice, we deepen also in our realization of how important
it actually is. This excerpt is taken from the autumn 2024 Integral
Contemplative Christianity seminar.
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