PREFACE
Seminars in Integrative Studies
This work is designed to serve a distinct and special kind of learning. Integrative studies focus on searching for a principle of unity or integrity to hold together our knowledge and our life. These studies concern themselves with consciousness and conscience. Consciousness and conscience are different from mere knowledge and value judgments. Both consciousness and conscience are comprehensive and integrating instead of single, narrow and analytical. Consciousness integrates your understanding and conscience integrates your sense of the good. Each has a role in the work of integration.
We concentrate here not on offering a preliminary and superficial “exposure” to the concept and practice of integrated knowledge. Instead, we address those with a serious commitment to integrative research and to those working together as a permanent community dedicated to integrative studies. Thus, the idea of “seminars” in integrative studies refers not to classes in any ordinary sense of external enrollment but to personal intention, interest, and involvement. This work is not intended for casual readers but only for those who already have taken up integrated studies in a seminar and are currently involved in its work whether they are new to it or not.
Seminars are regular gatherings of those devoted to pursuing integration in knowledge and life. These seminars have formal and informal rules. They require an inner commitment and a desire to grow to knowledge of life through investigating the nature of life using the only concrete and direct perspective we have: our own existence.
INTRODUCTION
The title of this work, The Science of Life, is both ironic and misleading. It is misleading because of the word “science” and ironic because positive knowledge of life is impossible. Three qualities imprison contemporary science. First, science today means “objectivity.” It means that you must deliberately suppress yourself in your study of the world outside, or “objective to,” yourself. Second, “science” today means using a certain kind of logic exclusively — the logic of “yes” and “no.” This logic does not tolerate as “logical” the presence of contradiction and paradox. Finally, today the highest expressions of science are formulated not in ordinary language but in the language of mathematics.
That this modern “science” is enormously powerful and useful is obvious. Modern science, therefore, needs no defense just as success anywhere needs no defense. It is, however, severely limited and self-limiting when it tries to understand life, particularly human life.
Knowledge of life must start from the living self that seeks it. If you are after knowledge of life, you must focus on the life you know best and most intimately. That is your own life. Only in yourself are you alive. Any science that diverts you from your own life — away from yourself — and forces you to dwell only in the “objective world,” even though it directs your attention toward your own self and your own life “objectively” (your life and yourself as objects of empirical investigation), has lost the possibility of knowledge of life. It has done so even before it starts seeking this knowledge. Life is the relation between subject and object, neither object nor subject should be estranged from each other.
The “yes-or-no” logic of modern science that devotes itself exclusively to demonstrating, validating or proving non-contradictory propositions (hypotheses such as “viruses cause disease”) fails to reflect the logic of life. The logic of life contains contradictions and paradoxes. Every aspect of yourself and your life is a combination of contradictions, of yes and no, of good and bad. Thus, the logic of modern science applied to human life is worse than useless. It is destructive. It seeks to eliminate contradiction and paradox in thought and so to eliminate them in life. Death is the domain of modern science. When applied to life, science becomes nothing but anatomy. It cuts everything into pieces before it examines it. Anatomy is the study of dead things. Death is what modern science brings to life.
Once deadened by the logic of science, modern life is embalmed by its language, mathematics. Mathematics may attract you emotionally, but, even if you love it, you can never find your life in its constructs. The ancient Greeks thought they could, but for them “mathematics” was not the dry, desiccated thing it is today. They were more interested in geometry and the study of measure, balance, and harmony as opposed to formulas, calculations, and commerce.
Modern science is a coagulation of objectivity, logic, and mathematics. As such, it dominates all education today, from the primary to the post-doctoral. Paradoxically, critics of contemporary educational institutions claim there is not enough science in it. This is because they conceal, to themselves and others, how much all the elements in education represent science, not just the courses with a manifestly scientific content. The science in education does not exist solely in science courses. All courses today are rooted in a scientific orientation. For example, all standards of quality learning in courses are “objective” — achievements of students in writing and understanding novels are measured by standardized and objective tests whose results are embalmed in mathematical scores. That this is an educational travesty can be understood only by those who have sufficiently survived the deadening processors of modern education to trust their natural judgment of the absurdity of it.
Education used to be — a long time ago — the drawing forth of the self and soul into the world. Its function was to allow the budding personality to take charge of life by understanding the world but, more, by understanding how the true self could survive and prosper in and also re-create the world it inherited from its ancestors. Now, education has become a process of stuffing students with information and skills as fast as possible so they adjust to, and fit properly into, the worldwide political and economic machine. This change was not the result of a planned strategy. It evolved, out of forces operating in the world, in small increments and was, therefore, largely invisible. “Educators” felt increasing pressure to guarantee that the young entrusted to their care did not fall behind the young in other schools, states and nations in job-training. It also happened because of the ideology of individualism, an ideology particularly virulent in the United States. This ideology holds that all healthy individuals are adequately equipped to judge good and bad in the world and do not need social institutions to help them develop. This was paradoxical because in today’s world it is only by virtue of collective action that humanity can control the massive international machine. Under this circumstance, the ideology of individualism guaranteed the defeat of the person. Those who sense this defeat in the world, ironically blame the schools for not adequately educating their children to individual excellence. They have sought hopeless alternate paths of withdrawing their children from the public schools or withdrawing themselves from the world into some splendid isolation in the “frontiers” of Montana.
Higher education everywhere continues in decline. Once the universities renounced and began to abandon it and put in its place at the pinnacle of their institutions merely higher learning and job training, they committed it to oblivion. They masked their desertion of higher education by talking instead of “higher learning” or of “life-long learning” and insisting that they were devoted not just to job training but to scholarship and learning above all. While learning is necessary to education, not all of it is educational and much of it is downright anti-educational. Learning requires that the human self submit to scholarly studies instead of submitting scholarly studies to itself. Few realize how the recent radically reactionary revolution that has taken place on campuses has exiled higher education from the university. Now homeless, higher education wanders the land seeking a shelter.
Just how higher education got displaced is the subject of a long and complex history and is not our primary concern here. In brief, however, what happened was that the idea of education as the process of drawing out and developing our humanity to enable us to represent the human in the world and so to live as mature human adults shrank. Education was abandoned to the primary school. There it remained but only in the crude and primitive form of drawing out the child’s human potential through reading, writing and mathematics. Once it brought out and trained these talents, then the school had only to refine them and direct them to socially useful functions in a huge variety of specialized fields of study.
Three forces decided the fate of education. The first was the rise of the climate of individualism that held education to be beneath the dignity of anyone beyond childhood. Individualism as reflected in the Utilitarian thinkers of the past, viewed the individual as the best judge of the good. It rightly argued that others should not direct the free and mature individual. Later utilitarians omitted from this formula an adequate notion of maturity. They assumed that adults who had learned to read, write, and do mathematics well were inwardly mature and needed no more inner development. Since their minds were developed, they needed nothing else. Character and essence required no further aid to develop. Besides their primary education, they needed no further tools to help them perceive and understand the good.
The second force coalescing to undermine awareness of the need for continuing education at higher levels was modern social organization. It not only did not require mature human beings who could evaluate good and bad for themselves and live by their evaluations but also found that maturity in the work force (increasingly that includes all of us in different ways) was an obstacle to efficiency. Organizations needed, not independent thinkers who could consider for themselves what was good and bad, but obedience to the good established by the mission the organization defined for itself. To all institutions, from the schools themselves to the factories and banking systems and whole nations, human maturity became a dreadful possibility to be avoided at all costs.
The third and crowning force undermining higher education was advertising. It flattered the ego of all by encouraging individuals to judge for themselves (as it cynically manipulated their judgments psychologically) what products would best satisfy them. It got them to accept absolute individualism by the oblique strategy that created the notion that human freedom meant an ability to follow the standard of pleasure in getting products — emotional pleasure (in entertainments and amusements) as well as physical pleasure.
Because of these forces, neither the individual nor the society wanted higher education. They saw that higher education set up obstacles to production (society) or obstacles to pleasure (individuals). Enlightened by education, workers would start to judge for themselves whether the work they were doing was directed to a good end. Consumers would find that much of the pleasure in consumption was an escape from, instead of a fulfillment of, themselves. The production-consumption image of social and individual life came to prevail and it found higher education intolerable.
The emptiness and suffering thus generated in the depths of human life, however, drive more people to awareness of their unhappiness in the midst of all their liberty and toys. This unhappiness can become the ground for their return to higher education. It can motivate them to break away from prevailing realities. Unfortunately, the tools of higher education (the programs and courses that encouraged and permitted it) have disappeared from the universities. The rich resources, the product of millennia of effort, have dried up there. Thus awakened, however, personality can find higher education on its own. Until the arrival of reforms that would renew the commitment of universities to education, self-education emerges as the only practical way to encounter and engage the forms and processes proper to higher education. The integrative studies seminar is one formulation of a method for people to gather in communities to generate the necessary conditions for it. Such seminars can operate either within established educational institutions if they allow it or outside them.
This Guide was designed to serve dual purposes. The first is to introduce to those attracted to higher education the nature and methods of these seminars. The second is to help support those who have long participated in them.
Part One
The Nature of
Integrative Studies
Chapter 1
The Two Dimensions
of Education
All true education moves in two dimensions. The second and most important of them we conceal, neglect and betray today. We cannot, however, deny that this dimension is important once we pay heed to it. The first dimension of education, called “learning,” is common today. It rests on a horizontal plane. You may envisage it first as a point. From the point it radiates in innumerable branches moving in opposite directions. Its branches stretch out like a tree but on a flat plane. The farther you go in this plane of education, the farther you travel along the horizontal lines and their many branches, the more refined and sublime your learning grows.
This plane is the dimension of education in the outer world. The farthest formal education on this plane takes place in modern universities. You travel far when you engage in graduate and postgraduate studies in a major or minor branch of specialized knowledge there. You may or may not be pursuing higher studies for the sake of your career. In the end, it makes no difference why you pursue them or whether they are “scientific” or “artistic” or “philosophical.” You need not, of course, attend an institution of higher learning to pursue knowledge on this plane. Besides attending those institutions, you can move far along the branches of higher learning here either by growing in your profession or even in playing a sport on the professional level.
Individuals occasionally and universities usually awaken to the danger to human life in this learning. It is obvious that it engenders narrowness. Unfortunately, the antidote to narrow- mindedness that leaps fastest to mind, particularly to those of university administrators, is to combat the one-sidedness of specialized learning with shallow studies of other specialized areas. Thus, the university will require specializing students to enroll in courses that briefly expose them to other specialized fields. They will also encourage this shallowness by appeals to “diversity” and the need to stay “informed.” They warn that the “information revolution” demands that we overcome our narrowness of mind.
The only proper response to the problems of losing the Self by dwelling in the outer realm of knowledge, however, is to balance it by the inner. Inner education is self-education. It is education to, from, and by the self. It is learning that leads us to the depths of self — where we are coming from or what is motivating us even in our pursuit of specialized studies. It is also learning of the heights where we are longing to go. This dimension or plane of education may be envisaged as moving up and down on a vertical line rising and falling from the same central point that horizontal knowledge radiated from. This is the realm of values and motives instead of worldly realities. We cannot travel in it by the same methods of thought that dominate the study of the outer world. This is why it needs special and different attention and why it is so hard to pursue.
In modern societies, this dimension is wholly neglected even though every specialized field of work and study has its roots in the vertical dimension. We derive our motivation, our sense that our specialized studies are good, from contact with this dimension. Contact, however, is not knowledge or learning. Without understanding this dimension and how to travel up and down to explore it and discover whether our impressions of value are faulty, it is a trap. For example, students of human physiology or human medicine may assume their motive for specialized study is human health or, more basely, prestige and a high income. The question of what is health or what is good they then set aside and ignore as they examine some specific disease to discover a cure for it. All-too-often the antibiotic they develop only temporarily alleviates the disease. Indeed, it often encourages the development of more virulent strains of the disease-causing microorganism and when it is given, produces unfortunate and even unseen “side-effects.”
Everyone gets their inspiration to act in the world from this dimension but few today are practiced in the method of investigating it. Every institution and every specialized field recruits its members by appealing to this dimension of the human good. However, once recruited, their ignorance of it makes them vulnerable first to manipulation by tyrants in the field or institution and then to destruction as victims of the tyranny.
This is why today self-education to the vertical dimension is necessary. It is no longer, as it was in the past, an essential part of specialized education. Industry and government, instead of encouraging it, positively discourage it. Established leaders want nothing more than to preserve our ignorance and our malleability to keep their own power over us. It is a hard kind of education to undertake under any circumstances because it places us in conflict with the world and with our own inclinations toward success in it. Nevertheless, the humanity of the world will die in the individual and the society unless we undertake the task.
Broad but shallow information about the world and about other specializations does not solve the problems of unity and life. It does not balance and integrate the self. It does not allow us to integrate our life, and it does not enable us to take charge of our life when we need the service of specialized professionals like doctors and lawyers. Only mastery of the vertical dimension permits us to judge both our own motive and the values and standards others and other specialized fields serve. Only this allows us to integrate our knowledge and so our life. Only this allows us to serve also the human health and freedom of society.
Both dimensions require discipline. The discipline of learning, however, is inspired from the outside by the content of what is to be learned. Thus, students of biology submit their minds to a field of study, a structure of concepts, and an appropriate method. The discipline of education is inspired from the inside and by the nature of the study that demands the liberty of the genuine self, not its control by ego or scientific fields. Here the discipline controls the ego for the sake of the self. There, the discipline controls the self for the sake of the ego and the world. It is just as important that the seeker of education be allowed freedom of self as it is for the pupil in learning to be kept from self-indulgence.
Inner education requires withdrawal from the world. However, this withdrawal is itself inner. We do not externally retreat from the world. We cannot do that if we try because the world follows us in retreat, and the world we are retreating from remains within us. In religious terms, inner withdrawal means giving to God what is God’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s. In mystical terms, it is the purification of the spirit that happens when the soul detaches itself from loving the objects of the senses.
Previously, this detachment from the world did take a material form — the retreat of monks and nuns to the monastery and cloister and of hermits to the hills. While this retreat could accelerate the process of detachment, it could also interfere with it. It could create the illusion of detachment simply by the external fact of separation. It could even forestall it the way keeping children from the illusion factory called television fails to strengthen them in body and mind and ends in making them only more vulnerable to the enticements of entertainments when they are old enough to get them for themselves.
At any rate, today the primary method does not involve exterior retreat from the world but purification while we are still living in it. Nevertheless, the great hermits and saints of the past who did withdraw exteriorly from the world reveal in their outward acts and words the inward movement we must make to master the vertical axis of knowledge. Just as religious language is symbolic in the sense that it never refers to specific objects, so the behavior of these saints is symbolic. It embodies itself in visible behavior to reveal what happens within. Mimicking the saints is as absurd as the expectation that by putting nails through your hands, you take up your cross and are crucified like Christ.
Internal education we achieve only by ourself, like the hermits, but always in communion with others, like the monks and nuns. The aloneness is not physical, however, and the community is a community of saints, both living and dead. Thus, you may today cut yourself off from a physical community of others and yet participate in the community of the saints who lived physically only in the past. Or you may have many fellow travelers in your work and meet with them constantly and yet realize that you are as alone in this educational work as the ancient hermits were in theirs. Others are absolutely necessary but not the others we can see. Solitude is absolutely necessary, but not the material solitude of having no people around to encourage, support, and guide our efforts.
All these expressions and ideas are paradoxes. They have one meaning in external and conventional terms. Everyone knows the material and conventional meaning of solitude and community. Here their true meaning is internal and immaterial or spiritual. It is paradoxical. Learning to use each paradox gives our knowledge the boost that is central to internal education.
Chapter 2
Basic Orientations
A Principle. Integrated knowledge needs a principle of integration. It needs something above and beyond the fragments of knowledge to draw and hold them together. Separate fields of study in the more superficial social and physical sciences, are commonly drawn together for researching a practical problem. Thus, the problem of pollution draws together the fields of biology, geology, physiology, and others. Similarly, the problem of poverty unites the fields of economics, political science, health science, and so on. It is the same with life knowledge. What integrates knowledge of human life is a problem. We can start with problems we find in life, but gradually we need to realize that the problem that integrates knowledge of life and so life itself is the problem of life.
The problem of life takes many forms and has many expressions. The common experience of being bored at work may conceal a problem in your fundamental orientation to life. Or you may find yourself unable to get along with a member of your family. This, too, may be the visible expression of a more hidden problem of existing in the world. Life is a problem because there is a difference between our inner selves and the world. Everything of the world, including our own flesh, ends in death, but everything that ends in death lacks meaning to us. Since there is too little meaning in it to sustain our spirit, we lose a will to live once we face the fact of our own death.
The Readings. An individual or a group that is intent on growing in knowledge of human life can help itself greatly by carefully selected readings. It makes no difference what classification these readings fall under. They can be fictional novels, psychologically oriented literature, or scientific, philosophical, and religious treatises. What is important is that we select them because they explore or enable us to explore the problem of life. Obviously, we cannot know before we read them whether they will help illuminate the life problem. That is why it is most important that we understand that we must appropriate the reading as we study it. Our reading must be active instead of passive. We cannot wait to be stimulated by the work. We must work to stimulate ourself. It is always what we bring to a work that matters most about it.
The process of appropriating readings, making them your own, is trickier than it might first appear. This is so because we tend to bring to the reading the problem of life as we have already characterized it in our mind. Thus, if you are already psychologically-inclined and define the problem of life in psychological terms, you will inevitably bias your reading with a psychological slant. Moreover, you will more likely than not use the reading merely to reinforce the level of knowledge you are at instead of allowing it to prompt you to still higher levels. When we try to relate readings to our life, we inevitably refer to ourself, and we will cast the problem in terms of how we already think about ourself. We will not work at transcending our old self, the one defined by social relations and conventional language, but at preserving it.
This is a paradox. The reading must be active but also passive. You need to be alert and pay attention to what in an interesting writer does not look as if it relates to your life. If you find writers who appeal to you, it is vital that you examine what they write not when you immediately recognize yourself in it but when you want to ignore it as irrelevant to you. It is for this reason that reading takes effort. It is work. Moreover, it is painful work because it involves death. It involves our willingness to let go of our most cherished notions about ourself and the ways of conceiving of life that felt most clear to us.
Shared Work. This tendency to misuse readings is one reason for working not alone, but in a group. The group, however, needs leadership. It needs some who are already advanced in vertical knowledge, the traps involved in pursuing it, and the methods that are appropriate to it. This is because the same obstacle exists in our relations to others as is there in our relationship to our readings. We will have an automatic affinity for those in the group who most share our self-concept and how we conceive of life. If you speak a psychological language, you will have an intellectual affinity for those who also do. This is so even if you are always disagreeing with them. Disagreements are a more certain sign of corrupt affinity than agreement. They also afford us more deception in thinking we are actually challenging our former self and ideas.
Among the greatest dangers to the life of a group devoted to internal knowledge are special relationships that grow up between two or among more participants. (This is a problem we will explore further in the second part of this study.) The serious dangers embedded in these relationships are completely invisible to those absorbed in them. They are obvious only from a higher perspective. In more superficial psychological terms, they involve a codependency. One person plays up to another who will feed into his preconceived self and preconceived personal “problem.” From a lower perspective this distortion not only is not visible but also usually looks like something healthy. The group struggling with unpleasant but meaningful work and trying to maintain the will to continue may suddenly find a large influx of energy. When two or three of the co-dependent start feeding each other and feeding off each other, at last it looks like the group finally “gets something going.” In this way, the entire group can be destroyed and its usefulness betrayed and reversed. The malignant energy becomes something that everyone enjoys.
Others who rely on a different mental framework from us but are on the same level may also attract us. If you are more intellectually developed and the other person is more emotionally developed, what they have and you lack may attract you. Your attraction arises from a longing to go higher, but gets inadvertently invested automatically in seeking growth in breadth instead of height. It is, of course, those who repel us in the group who most represent our chance of growth. We can take advantage of them only if we can genuinely unite ourself to them in the higher purpose.
Leadership. In all these interpersonal displacements, leadership from those who have already reached a higher level is invaluable. Experience is needed because we cannot tell from mere behavior whether there is something wrong with relationships. Affinities are not always bad. An influx of energy is a blessing and a curse. From the lower level, we can see only the affinity or only the higher energy. We cannot discriminate between the healthy and the diseased. This can be judged only by how far upward it is pushing growth. Only from on high can anyone judge the direction of the movement of affinity or energy.
The difficulty of selecting others to work with merges with that of selecting a guide for ourself or our community. The guide must be someone willing and able to keep everyone on the upward route and following the principle of the problem in life. The problem of life that afflicts us is like a wound that is unhealed. It drives us forward toward a health we do not yet have and so one we cannot yet conceive, let alone understand. We want to forget the wound, cover it over, and take painkillers so we will not be constantly reminded of it.
We cannot trust our natural inclinations when selecting a guide because we will be naturally inclined to comfort and consolation. This evokes another paradox because we can find comfort in those who seem to keep probing you and reminding us of pain instead of those directing us to healing. The healing is beyond us and both preservation of pain and painkilling can be methods of avoiding the upward path. Our guide can be one who both prods and consoles us. In essence, we do not choose our guide; a choice is made for us from within and beyond. Nevertheless, we need to consent to and validate that choice. We can do so only when, after a period of work under the guide, we look back and notice that subtle changes have taken place that put us beyond where we were before. This we can know directly and immediately. We are better off although there is no evidence of it apparent to standards we used before. We can see our growth when we associate with old friends whom we have now transcended.
Ego and Altruism. Inner work is work you do in your own soul. It, therefore, appears to be selfish. The seeker of integrative knowledge withdraws from the cares of the world to the cares of the spirit. This withdrawal is one of the hardest things to do particularly for highly developed people. In the world few motivations are more highly regarded than altruism. People caring for others is seen as the pinnacle of nobility. The love you experience that leads you to care for others, particularly for members of your own family, and the rewards you get from doing so will make it hard for you to take up integrative studies, and if you do so, it is likely to interfere with your progress.
Integrative studies require that you “cultivate your own vineyard.” It does not mean that you cease physically taking care of others or loving them, but it does mean that your spiritual investment in such care ceases. The development of your spiritual knowledge in the end benefits not only yourself but also everyone you touch in any way. It is the most valuable gift you can give others, including your own children, and it is the foundation of the value of all other, more material gifts you bear them.
Your caring love for others interferes, however, in your integrative studies in two ways. Of course, it means you have less time to give to them. You may regret or feel guilty about the reduction in your involvement with them. Even more important is that as you develop spiritually in your knowledge of the integrating good in life, you will suffer because you see the unhappiness of those you care about. You want to share what you have found out with them. Your efforts to do so will bring you much sorrow. They will not be able to accept what you offer. All who approach integrative studies must come to them on their own. They must be called by an inner voice, a divine voice, the voice of God. It is not in your power to bring them into these studies. Your involvement with efforts to do so, moreover, can have serious consequences on your own progress. This is because, one way or another, your efforts are inspired by and a reward to your own ego or flesh. It is pride in what you have, a sense of superiority to others, and arrogance in your own powers that can be your motivation. If so, your progress will halt. We must love others and yet respect their divine freedom and our human limitations.
The Problem of life we have been referring to, which is finding the principle above that focuses, unites, and integrates our knowledge of life and so also our life, is how to live simultaneously an inner and an outer life. It is the question of how to live up to the standard of good that is always inner and yet remain in the flesh and in the world. The answer to this question is never definitive. It is always tentative and developing. Human life consists in constantly answering it. Existence always throws new challenges before us. Every time we have answered it in one place, it pops up in another. As we grow in our knowledge of the inner standard, in our sense of “the good,” our capacity for more knowledge increases as does the quality of our life. It is the combination of this struggle and this growth that is the principle of integrative knowledge reflected in our work at reading and our work with others.
Chapter 3
Who Should Participate?
The simple answer to the question who should participate in integrative studies seminars is: “anyone who is interested.” In practice, however, the simple answer turns out to be not so simple after all. This is so because while many are interested in the idea of integrative studies, few understand what they entail and almost no one today understands how to go about them.
The first error in understanding involves the form of integrated studies. We can pursue studies only according to the methods we know. Methods generally available today are not only inappropriate for integrative studies but also downright destructive of them. These inappropriate methods include not just the empirical and impersonal method of modern science but also any that demands that discourse lead to definite conclusions. Those who insist on definite conclusions always judge the progress of their intellectual work by the standard of how many more conclusions they have added to their store. The goal of integrative studies, however, is growth in comprehensiveness or wholeness in consciousness. It is the search for the One in the many. Definite specific conclusions not only do not help but are positively obstacles to this.
Another flaw in approaching integrative studies concerns the motive of those undertaking them. Many do not fall into the error of seeking logical conclusions. They might not much care about conclusions at all. Their motive is to enjoy themselves — to get a good feeling simply by listening and talking. They judge progress by whether the work was “fulfilling” or “satisfying,” or “interesting” — by the amount of energy generated instead of the light produced. Commonly, such people are interested only in diversion, in wasting time and so wasting their lives, even as they concentrate on pursuing these “fulfilling” experiences. They fail to realize just how much they are victims of the age of entertainment where the essence of life is to amuse yourself to death.
People who adopt either of these orientations harm the whole endeavor of integrative studies. Their participation in a seminar would worse than hinder its progress. Nevertheless, those who are already successfully working together in integrative studies must not exclude others because of the orientation they happen to have. On-going groups must welcome everyone. A combination of forces will expose and weed out those who cling to inadequate orientations and prove destructive. First and most commonly, they will leave voluntarily after they grow disillusioned when their expectations are not met. This self-separation is the best and most fortunate way except that a cluster of disillusioned people can spread a bad reputation for the seminar. The worst reputation unprepared former participants can create is, of course, not that the seminar is worthless but that it is wonderful, exciting, and enjoyable.
Second, longstanding participants who have progressed need to prevent the misguided from dominating the studies until they do leave. The vigilance of older participants who know how to turn the energies invested in seeking definite conclusions or diverting amusement in a higher direction can avoid incalculable damage. This takes wisdom, however, and nearly always requires the cooperation of two or more older participants. On the other hand, when it is well done, like the third strategy below, it itself can advance the progress and benefits of the seminar.
Third, the most experienced participants must discourage those who become destructive influences from continuing to take part in the sessions. This can and should be done so subtly that those thus turned away think that they left voluntarily. They must not leave with a sense of rejection or bitterness toward seminar members. To the extent that experienced participants produce any bitterness or unhappiness in a discouraged participant, they themselves are flawed in spirit.
Long-standing participants have the obligation to protect the studies from harmful forces but always with humility and compassion. Obviously, they need keen vision. It is not easy to distinguish the most harmful forces from those who only seem harmful initially because of their inexperience. The greatest injury comes from those new participants who seem the most charming, bright, and charismatic. Since all newcomers will be inexperienced and awkward in the studies, older participants need to be most careful. Particularly this is so because it is most often the case that those newcomers who feel most unworthy to begin with will turn out to be the most worthy in the end. Any discouragement when they are vulnerable would be devastating to them and to the future hopes of the seminar. It is also so, of course, because the most abrasive and aggressive newcomers often eventually become the most successful practitioners of integrative studies and the most valuable to the success of the seminar.
Chapter 4
Community Work
I have sometimes spoken carelessly and characterized work done with others in integrative studies as working in a “group.” Worse, I have even referred to those who are doing so as “a group.” I have heard others call the shared activity simply “group.” Even something as simple as how you refer to this activity can become an obstacle to integrative knowledge. Here the danger arises because the word “group” has conventional connotations in our minds that set up barriers to our entering knowledge we do not realize we have.
Normally we automatically associate the idea of “group” with the opposite idea of “individual.” Thus, someone says, “I (an individual) am going to group (a collection of individuals) Thursday night.” Their conceptualization of their activity is, “I am going to enter a relation either with ‘others’ or with a ‘thing’ called ‘the group.’” They have a sense of a given, established “I” and a given, established set of other “I’s.” Once this formulation congeals in their mind, so does their knowledge. It is controlled by how they formulate the nature and purpose of their activities. This is so because the nature of integrative studies is on unifying the goods that motivate us. When we formulate an idea of the nature of our activity and imply a motive for our doing it, we confine that activity to a motive we already know. This stands in the way of our discovering contradictions in our sense of goodness and so in our established motives. It thus prevents us from doing the work. The very conception of what we are going to do and how we are going to do it prejudices our activity so we cannot grow in knowledge beyond where we were in our pre-conception.
While using any words to refer to the community (including the word “community”) can have the same effect, the words that come easiest to our mind when we want to tell someone where we are going and what we are going to do are usually the worst. This is so particularly if we do not want to bother ourself with reflecting on the nature of the community work and wish to avoid having to explain to someone outside the activity what we are about when we do not think they would understand anyway. The clearer to us and the person we are telling and the more precise the meaning of the words we use, the worse is the effect.
In modern psychology, there is a specific kind of “therapy” that involves “groups.” In using the precise jargon of psychology, if you are participating in, or leading, such a therapy group, you often drop the article before the word “group.” When you tell someone where you are going, you do not say “to attend a therapy group.” You just say “I am going to group.” Should you use this expression when you refer to cooperative work in integrative studies, you will unknowingly cast your own mind (if you have had any contact with psychology) into the precise psychological meaning. This is particularly unfortunate because most psychological meanings of “group” include dealing with “problems” in life whether they are practical or emotional. You focus on “what to do” about a problem or how to solve it. Integrative studies involve not problems in life and not directly doing anything about them. Instead, they devoted themselves to the problem of life itself and to growth in being. To the extent that it absorbs itself in problems and solutions, your mind will not be free. Such a biased characterization of the activity can undermine it entirely. This is even more serious, of course, if you have had psychological training and are using this term when talking publicly and privately with another psychologically-trained participant in the work activity. Then the two of you may mutually reinforce the prejudice and have even less of a chance of noticing its bad effects.
Naturally, we will need to use some words to refer to this shared activity. The less clear and the less narrow they are, the better. Broad and ambiguous language helps preserve our own openness. It keeps us aware that we do not know precisely where the work will take us. For example, you might inform some one the activity by referring to where you are going Thursday night. Or you might name the people you are going to see there. Or you might refer to the kind of activity you are going to participate in there (“I am going to seek myself”).
No alternative is entirely free from the danger of limiting, by our use of preconceived and biasing concepts, our chances for growth in integrative knowledge. What is most important, therefore, is to keep always in mind the danger of any labeling and always to feel discomfort when we name activities like integrative studies. It may be well occasionally to explain to someone who asks us where we are going why we cannot tell them because we do not know ourself. In taking the step, of course, we need to exercise discretion. Be selective because most people you tell this to are likely to regard you because of it as at least eccentric if not mentally unbalanced and “inappropriate” in your responses.
This issue only underscores what we need for success at integrative studies. Our most basic act in undertaking them is one that we must consistently perform as long as we continue in them. It is to suspend all kinds of preconceived expectations of what the work is like and where it will lead. The most destructive of such expectations are not conscious but are built in to our established conceptualization of life, relationships in it, and study for it. We can sustain continued efforts only if we experience a good in them. We will achieve the best results in this effort to the degree that we can maintain as strong a sense of good as possible while keeping our sense of what that good is as vague as we possibly can.
Chapter 5
Work Rules and Cults
An essential part of growth in integrative knowledge that is hardest to accept is the role of rules. Conservatives misunderstand the nature and function of rules even as they embrace them. They think rules exist merely to preserve quality in social and individual life. Liberals, especially liberal intellectuals, tend to reject all rules as restrictions on free enquiry. Rules, however, are one of the most valuable things seminars in integrative studies can give their participants.
The conservatives are correct in that rules do have to do with maintaining quality. It is not the quality of being, however, that they preserve as much as the quality of the work on being that they advance. Liberal intellectuals often find themselves attracted to integrative studies because these studies involve the free pursuit of knowledge. They may neglect to note that integrative studies also require growth in being and, therefore, need rules. Indeed, the greatest obstacle to growth in integrative knowledge is the rigidity of the being of those who think they are pursuing knowledge. Beyond a certain point, new knowledge challenges the old being. Thus, before you can advance, you must be willing to surrender the old being. Rules provide the levers that loosen its hold on the self.
This “old being” is your identity or ego. Your identity or ego is only who you think you are or who you “define” yourself to be, not who you really are. All of us have the problem of having to confront and conquer our false identity or ego. I have to die as a child to be born as an adult. I have to die to be born as a human. “Being” refers to our relations with our self and the world as we live. All these relations are conditioned by the perspective we have, and this perspective is determined by our identity or ego. Identity may be narrow or broad but it is always restrictive of our knowledge of self and the world and so is restrictive of our relations with the world and the knowledge we can gain from studying them.
This problem does not involve errors in our reasoning or logic but in the ground upon which our logic is based. This is why we cannot resolve it by reason even if our logic is impeccable and our minds acute. All logic starts with certain premises or assumptions. The thinking that advances integrative knowledge is, therefore, a form of meta-logic. It must be or else it does not work. We can use logic to explore issues in life; we need meta-logic to deal with the issue of life itself. You can grow in understanding your life by using logic, but you cannot grow to a new life by logic alone.
Liberals who reject the need for rules in the personal study of life itself really reject them only because they mis-understand them the same way conservatives do. Followed in the light of this faulty understanding, rules really do oppress both knowledge and being. Rules of marriage, for example, were originally created to guide a couple in the enhancement of their lives and being. Looked at as if observing the rules were the good state of being as if by following the rules you were thereby guaranteed a good marriage, rules become prisons. Liberals then rightfully rebel against them.
Rules are natural to any work we do. This is so even in physical work. There is a right way to saw a board and a wrong way, a better way and a worse way. The right way is the way that leads best to success; the wrong way is the one that leads to failure. Anyone who practices sawing a board and observes the activity with intelligence can grow in understanding of the right way. This means they have come to apprehend the rules of sawing.
The same is so for work on our own being. There is one major difference, however. It is that in sawing a board, we are in charge. We direct an activity; we seek to master the skill. In work on ourselves, we are both the worker and the imperfect object worked upon. Even in carpentry, you may want to apprentice yourself to a master-builder instead of simply leaping into the work and learning by trial and failure. The master would indicate the rules and then you could come to see why they were the right way as you practiced sawing while trying to follow them. In the case of working at growth in yourself, rules are even more important since what resists your intention and effort is not only the stubborn quality of the wood but also your own will for it is rooted in the fear of the loss of ego that feels like death. You want to grow but you resist what you need to do to accomplish growth.
In integrative studies, we need rules, and we need to have them articulated before we can understand their validity. The problem is that rules are infinite in number, and we find more and more of them the farther we progress. To try to introduce beginners to all the rules would not only be impossible, it would be overwhelming to them. Moreover, since the more advanced rules would remain beyond their understanding, what they heard would give them every reason to reject the whole effort. The advanced rules would be offensive to them and sound absurd.
Four Rules
I have been involved in a seminar for many years. There, we have articulated just four rules. The fourth is the only one that has caused trouble and dissension. These are our rules: 1) attend all sessions; 2) do the readings scheduled for the session; 3) do not read ahead; 4) do not discuss seminar subjects with other participants outside the sessions.
Since these rules are guides to quality in individual and community work, acceptance of them has never been and can never be a “condition” of participation. Participants are welcome regardless of whether or not they “observe” the rules—as long as they are willing to admit and discuss “violations.” Even if they do not admit and discuss them, however, they are not excluded from seminar sessions (that would be tantamount to the conservative error concerning the nature of rules). The rules are not primarily prescriptive but diagnostic. They can help account for lack of progress in the individual and a decline in energy in the seminar.
The first rule, attend all sessions, anyone—however new to the seminar—can know. It rarely causes any problems of dissent. This is not because everyone fully understands it but mostly because it is so common a rule in social organizations. Thinking that the rule is behavioral and exists for order and discipline, most of us let the significance of this rule in integrative studies pass us by. Of course, if you are not present at seminar sessions, you cannot benefit from the help and support of the special presence of others the seminar offers. Skipping sessions seems to hurt, if anyone, only the person who skipped. This is, of course, not true. Each person who decides to participate in the seminar makes a special, unique, and valuable contribution of energy to the activity. Their absence actually subtracts from it. But, worse, irregular attendance leaves gaps in the mind of absentees when they return. As these gaps accumulate, they create a drag on meetings since the lapsed participant cannot follow the movement of the discussion. Even this, however, is insignificant when you consider the central purpose of the rule. The rule exists so participants have a standard to measure the seriousness of their commitment to growth in integrative knowledge. There will always be occasionally good reasons for missing a session. Good reasons, however, can all-too-easily become convenient excuses, and even good reasons can be the result of poor planning earlier in the week making it necessary for the participant to miss. The rule of attendance should remind participants to make sure that reasons for not attending are strong, persuasive, and not a product of neglect. Since integrative studies to be successful require a personal dedication and commitment to struggle with flaws in being and not just in knowledge, laxity in attendance would reveal lack of seriousness. This represents a flaw in being. Lack of commitment in being would contribute an explanation for absence of progress.
The Second and Third Rules
The same principles hold for the rule “read the appropriate material.” Failure to do so guarantees a fairly fruitless attendance—or, worse, one where participants try to take without giving. Again, leaving a seminar session with the feeling that you are making no gain through it can be entirely because of a failure to prepare adequately.
The first rule that causes participants trouble is the third: “Do not read ahead.” The primary purpose of the rule is to help those who are “attached” to intellectual work or those whose ego is embedded in intellectuality. There is a tendency among the most devoted participants to think they can advance faster by doing more reading. Where the readings are concerned, we have a true case of “more is less.” Excess reading involves two problems. The first is that by reading ahead (or by reading extra texts), participants dissipate their energies. They thus fail to pay enough attention to the appropriate readings to make connections and derive the benefits only depths of attention can bring. For myself, I have found it impossible to get significant benefits from a reading unless I go over it three times. Individuals may differ and some may read the material fewer times than I do but with greater attention, concentration, and reflection each time, but three is my minimum. It is also likely that the farther a participant progresses, the longer the reading will take. At higher levels of development, there are more insights and connections to be integrated. Newcomers, on the other hand, may need to spend a lot of time reading because they are unfamiliar with the methods of integrative studies.
It should be clear now how rules multiply as you progress in integrative studies. Violating the rule against extra reading may interfere with a newcomer’s progress hardly at all, but it would be devastating to that of a long-time participant. Moreover, since devoted participants are likely to be identified with “work” (it has become part of their “ego”), extra work can be a way of preserving and flattering the ego instead of transcending it and growing in being. The humility of accepting this rule when it challenges your self-image is very valuable for progress.
The Fourth Rule
As should now be obvious, the fourth of the rules I will mention here is important mostly for advanced participants. Newcomers probably need not even be told of it, and, if they are, they should know that it is not important for them to focus on. The rule is not to discuss what is proper to the seminar outside the sessions. Since those who are at all advanced in integrative knowledge will quickly realize the frustration and dangers of discussing material with non-participants, the rule mostly bears on talk between participants. This is the kind of rule that astounds those who do not understand the nature of integrative studies. It even sounds like an attempt of seminar leaders to control and suppress communication and the free exchange of ideas. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As usual, there are many both outer and inner reasons for the rule. By “outer” I mean reasons that have to do with the quality of the seminar sessions. One of the great values of the seminar in contrast with an attempt to “go it alone” in integrative studies, is that the diversity of personality types present acts as a prod to growth. It challenges the old ego and makes participants uneasy. Seminars require a certain spirit, one related to mutual care and trust. Participants who meet outside the seminar usually do so because they have something in common. They like each other or are like each other in some special way. This means that the special spirit or energy the seminar needs and is hard to achieve under conditions of diversity is likely to be invested outside. Thus, the seminar will suffer.
The biggest reason for the rule, however, is “inner.” Participants challenged in ego by the seminar will seek out others they are more comfortable with, can communicate more easily with, or can dominate more effectively. They thus are likely to reinforce old identities and old patterns of thought. The value of the rule, again, is that it is diagnostic. A lack of progress in integrative knowledge can be due to this kind of co-dependent leakage. The burden, if the seminar is to survive, grows unbearable on the few who stay faithful and bring spirit to the sessions.
Naturally, there is nothing wrong with merely talking with other participants outside the sessions particularly if you are employed at the same place as they are or have to meet for business reasons. Nor is there any problem with exchanging pleasantries at social events. But to single out fellow participants for purposes of discussing seminar subjects is likely to stand in the way of the individual’s progress and the progress of the seminar itself.
There is, of course, one exception to the fourth rule. Married participants are never under a rule to avoid talking with their spouses about seminar ideas. This exception applies whether or not the spouse participates in the seminars. The exception also applies to unmarried participants who have a significant relationship (unique friendship, blood brotherhood bond) with one other person. This is because these unique relationships have a sacred quality. Nothing must be kept outside them. This does not mean a participant must talk over seminar subjects with their partners. It only means they may at their discretion. There is no rule against it.
Culture and Cult
The distinction between a culture and a cult is sometimes hard to see. There is a very sharp difference between them, however, and it is only from the outside that the can look the same.
“Culture,” as easily seen in its common usage in terms like “agri-culture,” refers to any methods human beings develop to improve their lives. We apply the fruits of culture to the land and we call it “agriculture.” It is the “culture” of farming. It is designed to enhance the quantity and quality of the goods we call food and fiber. All professions—from physics to psychology—and the whole of education are cultures and products of aeons of human cultivation.
The same principle applies to the culture of integrative studies. Like in agriculture, there is here a specific good that is cultivated. The good is growth in the integrative knowledge that is the source and result of growth in being. This book seeks to express what we have learned through several decades about how to produce integrative knowledge. It articulates the methods that we have found workable and the mistakes that would be obstacles to success. It represents a culture.
A cult, by contrast, is a negative thing because, while appearing from the outside to be very much like a culture, it is the exact opposite. A culture is a means or a series of tools designed to better reach a human good. In a cult, the tools become the end.
In a cult, rules, for example, exist for the sake of the culture. It makes the culture an end instead of a means. This is why rules in a culture, which are designed to advance the good that transcends the culture, are not conditions of admission to the work that seeks the good. They are guides from our predecessors who have cultivated the good. Generations of our ancestors have produced and have passed on to us in the form of rules the experience and techniques they have accumulated.
To an “outsider” who does not know the good the culture seeks to serve or who does not understand the connection between the means and this good, the rules are cultish. Such persons would create a cult if they were to adopt the rules without this understanding. This is one of the reason rules should not be pushed on newcomers to integrative studies. They would either reject them without understanding and even, as a consequence, reject the studies themselves or they would accept them, also without understanding them, and so make them the basis of their cult.
To those who do not understand the relationship between water and good crops, the behavior of farmers would appear cultish. Once, every few days. The farmer gets up and sprays water over the crops. Ignorance of agriculture would lead an outsider to consider this behavior and the rule of regular watering it follows to be the manifestation of a cult.
One of the dangers involved in discussing concerns belonging inside the seminar outside is that different members of the seminar will have a tendency to misunderstand the functions of the culture’s rules or they will treat the seminar as an exclusive cult. This faulty attitude they will then communicate to others. This they do not do consciously. It is their state of being and the quality of their understanding that communicates the error without its being explicitly formulated. Consequently, others will get a false impression of the culture itself, will consider it a cult because that is what it is to those participants in the studies that they talk with most often and most intimately, and will, understandably, reject it and its rules.
As long as such discussions are subsequently brought to the whole seminar, the diversity and experience of the seminar participants can correct misunderstandings and in the process contribute to clarifying and improving the work for everyone. Then a healthy culture can go forward. But if the original violation of the rule against outside discussion proceeds without any opportunity to correct errors, then the disease flourishes and grows. It may even be fatal. No one is intentionally acting destructively. All are serving “the good” as they see it even though they are violating a rule. Their state of being is not highly developed and they see everything from the level they are at. The disaster is unintentional but real. Even those who bring it about may not see that they caused it, let alone how they caused, it even as they see and suffer from its consequences.
Chapter 6
Recollection
The primary strategy for gaining access to integrative knowledge is through recollection. So important is this method that we may even regard it as the only effective one. The term recollection is confusing. Even rightly understood, it refers to a complex process. Confusion arises, for example, if you interchange the term with “memory” or “remembering.” Normally, memory involves recalling “things” — events and objects. While recollection involves recalling our specific actions, its focus is not on them but on what good we were seeking in doing them. Moreover, it includes not merely our physical behavior but also our mental and emotional behavior. All these are involved when we apprehend a good.
Recollection means considering the operations of all three of these together. Its particular focus is on discovering where there are contradictions in them and among them — that is, contradictions in our motives. For example, you say you do not want to lie and so you avoid the action of lying when you have and impulse to lie. Some part of you sees good in lying and another part in not lying. This is a contradiction in your actions even where, since you never do tell lies, there is no contradiction in your behavior. The Bible reflects this problem when it points out that when we feel lust for another person’s body, we have already committed the adultery our mind defines as bad and we avoid in action. Similarly, you may remember that you believe that raising a child is good but you also feel that raising a child is bad. Both fragments of your knowledge of good were flawed.
Recollection thus exposes how far we are from inner and integrating unity in our life. Recollection also, therefore, brings us to humility. As the Bible shows, we are less likely to hanker after punishing adulterous physical behavior in others if we realize how adulterous our own emotional behavior is. Recollection is preparation for reconciling and unifying these contradictions. Recollection by itself brings us to reconciliation with other people.
In recollection, you may recall that you believe that raising a child is good but also that you feel that raising a child is bad. Both remembered fragments of your knowledge are flawed. They represent a faulty apprehension of good. You grow in finding truer and more integrative knowledge first by discovering the contradiction, then by eliminating the false elements in both so that, finally, you can reconcile the true parts of each of them. This reconciliation of original opposites is the final test of your success in identifying and eliminating the former flaws in your knowledge. As you eliminate one, however, you are likely to find another so your task continues and you are continually drawn forward and upward. This is very much the dialectical method of Socrates. It is also the exact method presented by Christ in the Christian Bible.
In this endeavor, of course, other people are invaluable. By revealing openly the conflicts they have discovered in their lives, they can expose to us similar ones in ours. They can act as goads, questioning and probing us further to help us find and face our special contradictions. They provide a necessary security by standing with us as we work. They also afford a valuable encouragement as we despair when we keep discovering more conflicts. Without others, we are in danger of losing heart although we are progressing. They also can provide us models of those who have traveled this path before us. They can reveal to us how far we have progressed when we doubt. This is necessary because at any given point in our work we have no standard of evaluating how well off we are and because we will become more sensitive to other conflicts as we resolve some of them. We will feel that our condition is worsening as it actually grows better.
As we do this work of seeking integrative knowledge, others can contribute enormously to our efforts. This joint effort elevates the quality of our life and of the lives of all others we meet. Others are so important to this work that a community is almost an essential requirement for it to be successful. Some can make their way alone, but it is highly unlikely that they will succeed.
There are, nevertheless, serious dangers in working with others. Many of these I describe in another article entitled “Vampire Tales” in this study. They mostly consist of ways participants can feed negatively on each other or how they can use each other to forestall growth while creating the illusion of working at it. Because of this, certain steps are necessary to prevent misunderstanding and misdirection. Here is one of them:
In the early stages of their involvement, participants in a work community probably should have no contact with each other outside the actual group session. This is to prevent reproducing and preserving in the community the faulty patterns of social relationships they bring with them. These patterns are based on conventional intellectual and emotional orientations toward relationships. For example, most people normally expect emotional gratification from their relationships and will not continue them if they do not. Unfortunately, most of what they experience as emotional gratification is the support others give to their illusions. For example, if you have an illusory identity as strong male, a feminine woman may make you feel good. Or, if you have the idea that it is good to work at doing something to overcome the flaws in your life, anyone who will talk to you about them while you are exploring what to do may make you feel that you are working when you are only talking.
Even experienced participants who have contact outside the sessions with each other should never discuss the content of the work and the problems of life they are suffering from though they may refer to the fact of the work without much harm. Should they feel a strong urge to discuss some issue in their lives or in the ideas of the seminar with another person, it should be only with the recognized leader and guide of the community. Finally, if they do talk with each other outside the sessions and about the work or about something in their lives that is relevant to the work, they must without fail bring up the fact of the meeting and the subjects discussed in all detail at the next session of the community. This must be done because otherwise not only do they drain energy from the community by their special relationship but also they are likely to crystallize because of their communication faulty notions about themselves and the useful concepts the community has developed.
Chapter 7
Psyche and Spirit
For those working at integrative studies, a distinction that is important and yet hard to make is between self, psyche, or soul, on the one hand, and spirit, on the other. While the two operate together, their work is very distinct. The psyche or soul is a being and it can change. It changes by virtue of the movement of spirit. Soul changes. Spirit is the instrument of change. Soul changes but it cannot change itself.
The human soul can emerge in early childhood only by virtue of the movement spirit has already undertaken into the world. The soul we are “born” with in the sense of what it is when we first become conscious is thus a natural and world-oriented soul. Spirit has moved into the world by being attracted to it. Spirit is the energy of the soul’s movement into the world. Spirit is attracted to the Good, but soul finds itself involved in the world and begins to command spirit by the images of “things” it receives, preserves, and develops. “Things” are identified objects in the world and are presented to the soul by virtue of the created images it receives & constructs and, later, also by virtue of names and concepts it receives and develops.
The soul’s entrance into and absorption in the world of “things” transforms it into an ego. The ego is itself a “thing.” Ego constructs itself initially out of objectified goods. Its earliest elements are the images of the goods that attract the spirit. Once attracted to them, spirit sends energy toward them. Finally, it identifies with them. Your ego emerges when you make your self into an object. You do this when you identify the good you seek as an object or thing. While not articulated as elegantly, all this is perfectly consistent with modern, even Freudian, psychology. When they interpreted his psychology, however, Freud’s successors often made the contents of the psyche — ID, Ego, and Ego Ideal — the foundation of their psyche. For Freud, however, prior to the realization of the contents of the psyche is what he called “libido.” Libido, more properly named, is spirit or the energy that seeks, and attaches itself to good.
Freud is correct also in his notion that the soul begins its motion when spirit attaches itself to objects and finds pleasure in getting. Only later does it begin to attach itself to human beings. Human beings to it are objects that are not only models but ones that represent what it longs to bring into being in its own soul. The soul that falsely identifies the “objects” as the source of good, however, is not happy and fully developed with any objects it gains and can make of itself. Indeed, it may even confuse an object it seeks to get with an object (another person in the world) that symbolically represents is principle of development it hopes to attain, such as power and courage. Unsatisfied, the spirit grows restless.
It is this restless spirit that the world seeks to capture and no world is more completely and cleverly devoted to capturing it than is the modern world. It is this restless soul that the modern economy marshals in its own support both as consumerism, where the products of modern industry, technology, medicine, and science keep offering to bring the soul to rest but never do so, and as work, where to get the promised products or to achieve the false image of the soul’s development as a “creator,” a captain of industry it pours itself out. So clever are marketing and advertising that they can keep souls utterly unaware that how they are seeking satisfaction is wrong. Few souls today can awake to understand the actual emptiness of toys, homes, travel. When intellectuals recognize the restless spirit, they call it a characteristic of human nature. As Marx and Liberal economists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries noted, it is this insatiable spirit that keeps the wheels of progress going until, for Marx at least, a final redemption of spirit arises through the age of plenty. Capitalist economists of the same period decided that the hunger of the restless human spirit was essentially insatiable and would always demand more so the economies that marshaled this spirit would endlessly grow.
The soul can satisfy itself, however, and the restlessness of the spirit find peace only through growth engendered by supernatural objects. This means, of course, by a kind of object essentially different from any thing and any person we see. This kind of object is natural, the kind we are born knowing and wanting. The soul is unhappy and the spirit restless not because they have not found the right objects but because none of the objects of this kind can ever be satisfying. What satisfies the soul and brings peace to the spirit is the development of the soul that can take place only when it flies from the objects that exist in time and space to the timeless and eternal. Spirit must detach itself from goods and soar upward to the Good itself. Other timeless focuses such as truth, beauty, and justice can help the spirit begin its flight. Spirit must soar from the earth before the soul “knows” the higher kind of thing. The spirit needs to free itself from the soul so the soul can later free itself from illusion.
The upward motion of the spirit can begin in reflection or “philosophy.” Through reason, you can recognize the relative emptiness of the things of the world and of the ego that aspires to them. One by one, you can show yourself that they do not satisfy you. The work of philosophy is thus the work of detachment from the world. For the spirit to find where to fly to when it detaches from the world it usually needs more than the work of philosophy. Since it cannot know mentally where it is going before it gets there, it travels by faith. Faith is not utterly blind but is guided by the fruits of efforts of an activity that experience has shown to be beneficial in the past. It knows this realm by faith and hopes for results. Spirit needs the language of symbol and myth to stir in it a level of apprehension beyond reason.
The Christian Trinity is an image that reveals the distinction between soul and spirit and how the spirit can shift direction and raise the soul to the level of development it longs for. The Father is unchanging, eternal Being and dwells in heaven. However, the Holy Spirit moves down from heaven to stir the pure virgin. The virgin is an aspect of the soul that has not attached itself to anything in the world. This is the part that knows only dissatisfaction with the world. It has remained untouched by the world. The virgin and only the virgin bears the child of the Holy Spirit, and that child is Christ. When the Christ is mature in us after being fostered by other aspects of our soul, then the Holy Spirit returns. The Holy Spirit then cleanses this anointed one and establishes a permanent connection between “the Good” itself, the eternal and unchanging, and this Christ. The garden of the soul where dwells the Christ is a garden of combat between the world, the flesh, and the devil, on the one hand, and the eternal Father, on the other. In every garden (in every soul) there is a serpent to tempt the Son to betray the Spirit to the World. Once the Son utterly dies to the world, then the fullness of union with the Father occurs.
The journey of the spirit to accomplish its destiny and create a soul that can live well in the world we can describe by an analogy. This analogy occurred to me while riding my bicycle on my morning ride on August 13, 1995, the day before I was to return from my Minnesota summer retreat. As I rode down the highway, it grew foggy, then more foggy. Finally, I realized that not only was I traveling in fog but also the fog was settling on my glasses. What normally helped me to see now helped blind me. This is the experience that you should expect in the journey of the spirit in integrative studies. As the spirit moves forward, the soul sees less and less; the darkness of fog grows. You think you are getting more confused and lost. You come to understand that part of the reason things appear so indistinct is that the means by which you look are fogged. The old tools of knowledge you used before not only do not help but also positively hinder your perceptions. Simultaneously, you recognize how dangerous the world has become as cars suddenly rush at you from front and back. Despite it all, you persist in moving forward. Your forward motion will get you to a destination as long as you keep moving, though blinded by the fog, forward. You know a direction you cannot clearly see. Faith, hope, and love keep you going.
Chapter 8
Spiritual Faculties
The greatest obstacle you will find in pursuing integrative knowledge is that it requires that, before you even begin to gain it, you first must develop your spiritual faculties. You cannot just start seeking and getting this knowledge no matter how much you long for it or no matter how much work you are willing to do to achieve it. Before you can gain it you must undergo arduous efforts to prepare a capacity for receiving it.
From the ancient Greeks down through the medieval period in Europe, philosophical systems embraced the notion that we have three spiritual faculties. They are understanding (or “intellect”), memory, and will. They are intimately connected with each other. Each operates from the entire psyche or soul.
Plato’s notion of the way that the attraction or love that seizes the will of the whole soul needs to be directed to wisdom illustrates the close connection among them. When the whole soul is “philosophical,” which means for Plato that it is seized by the “love” of “Sophia” or “wisdom,” it gets on the path to its highest development. Once the soul loves wisdom or “knowledge of the truly good” above all else, its three separate parts can become rightly ordered. Reason, the Spirited Part, and Appetites fall into a righteous harmony when reason rules by virtue of its capacity to seek knowledge of the good of the whole, the spirited part backs up its leadership with energy, and the appetites are allowed to fulfill themselves at the optimum level, which is the mean between excess and lack. These three parts are, of course, distinct from the three functions of the whole soul. For Plato, when the whole soul loves wisdom above all and practices this love in life, its three parts unite and it grows in harmony and peace within itself. Also, its outer life matches its inner in happiness. Guided by this love of wisdom, the person lives the happiest life possible.
Normally, before someone undertakes integrative studies, the information of the senses commands and coordinates all three of their spiritual faculties. Commonly, we can distinguish two levels of the senses: the exterior and the interior. The exterior senses include all of what we ordinarily mean by the word the “senses” — the five senses plus the emotional senses. The interior senses include primarily images mentally constructed out of exterior sensations or fantasies that come to the mind, which is also preconstructed, out of exterior sense information. For example, the eye sees an object, memory preserves the impression, understanding identifies it as an apple and so good food according to the appetites, and the will is drawn to it and draws the person toward it. Thus, the will is commanded by the understanding of the good, the understanding is commanded by memory recalled, and memory contains the residue of a sensuous perception that is either immediate or in imagined or fantasized form.
On the other hand, concepts held in the understanding — concepts such as apple, food, good food, and so on — already influence the perceptions of objects themselves. This is why, ultimately, our senses cannot rule our soul. The soul rules the senses. Every act of perception requires a remembered concept. Without it, we would have no perception of anything for our senses would be a chaos of impressions. The remembered concept automatically organizes the sensuous information so that we experience seeing a “thing” in the act of perception.
Similarly, we can experience a longing of love although we have no concept, understanding, or perception of a good that is its object. This longing of love that arises out of emptiness or without of knowledge of a good thing can stimulate our understanding to search the memory for a possible object. Then the senses can seek the fulfillment of that love.
These descriptions of the operations of the soul illustrate how interconnected they are and how they naturally command the senses and, simultaneously, fall under the domination of the senses. They show how one faculty leads to the other and how they all depend on each other in life. The problem for integrative studies is that the knowledge these natural operations of the soul get us and the direction they lead us are never to integrity and unity. When we rely on our senses either as the stimulus for knowledge and guidance in life or as the tool the love of our will uses to achieve its fulfillment, they lead us into division instead of unity. We are lead into the many instead of into the one. Each object sensed and pursued, whether inanimate, animate, human, or divine, is different from every other object we sense and pursue. Thus guided, our knowledge and our life will be disintegrated and disintegrating.
Besides, since every object we sense is already partly the product of preconceived concepts in our understanding, we can go only as far in following our senses as our already-established concepts can stretch. Sensuous knowledge is limited knowledge. Moreover, since a given culture and society always partly condition, if not determine, the concepts we have already in operation, we will be unable to transcend history and our time and place in it using our senses. This is the essential reason for the limitation and ultimate failures of modern science. Modern science longs for transcendence and holds out the promise of transcendence. It even offers false proof of transcendence by pointing to the vast changes it can bring about. Because it yields such dramatic changes in them, it creates the illusion that it transcends nature, society, and culture. All these changes, however, do not prove it stands outside society and culture. Because they are all rooted in the cultural limits imposed on concept and perception, they all take place within it. A central promise of science is liberation from society and the past, but its fate is servitude, and it leads you into servitude. Modern scientists, of course, are unable to understand this limitation. This is because the intellectual powers that would allow them to understand it are themselves the primary victims of it. Even if they were to use all the powers their form of understanding gave them, they could not perceive these limits. The very exercise of the power of understanding merely reinforces its limits. Only occasionally might it dawn on them how limited, limiting and unfree the practice and results of science are. The light that produces this dawn comes not from science but from life.
To achieve integrative knowledge, each of our three spiritual faculties must be turned from the senses and from their natural functioning. The memory must not be loaded with things previously perceived. The understanding must not operate from concepts built out of perceptions. The will must cease loving sensuous things. All three of these faculties must enter what St. John of the Cross calls “the dark night.” Their functioning must become supernatural instead of natural. They must focus on objects of pure spirit not of the senses.
Plato in The Republic shows how the soul that loves wisdom can achieve in a gradual, sequential way this transformation from the natural and sensuous to the supernatural and super-sensuous. It gradually detaches itself from the objects the senses find in the world to things that exist only in the realm of intelligence and appear only to the developed intelligence. He calls these “eternal things.” He illustrates them by using geometric shapes such as “the circle” or “the square” to represent them. These shapes exist nowhere in the world but the intelligent mind can apprehend their nature and use its knowledge of them to produce shapes in the sensuous world that approximate, but never attain, the eternal models. His claim is that true “justice” is one of these eternal models. From the beginning the soul has a sense of what is right or just but grows closer to knowledge of it only by seeing how conditions in life formerly thought to be just instead depart from it.
Religions such as Christianity go farther than Plato and hold that to gain integrating knowledge we must follow two paths that converge: the path of Plato where the soul seeks, and works toward, knowledge of eternal things and the path of Christ where the ruler of eternal things, God, reaches down to raise the soul that practices love of it. Both paths are ways of love. Both loves are for the eternal that is inaccessible to the senses. The Christian way claims, however, both that we must love supernatural good and that the good must send a supernatural love back down to us. Our love reaches for the eternal and the eternal love reaches for us. The two paths are not mutually exclusive. We need not choose between the path of Plato and the path of Christ. The path of Plato leads to the path of Christ, and the path of Christ contains the active path of Plato. The active pursuit of wisdom through the teaching of paradoxes combines with the passive path of the Cross.
It is important to understand that because our senses are informed by intelligence and inform it, when our intellect develops and is purified so that it can know objects of pure intelligence, it informs the senses properly and is informed properly by them. The purity of intelligence purifies the senses, both interior and exterior. Intelligence does not abandon and depart from the senses but redeems them.
This description of the outcome of progress in integrative studies is complex and may be confusing. Put simply and in terms of an analogy its meaning should be clear. When your intellect knows the pure geometrically eternal thing called “circle,” it informs the senses that nothing they perceive as round is true or perfect “circle” but only an approximation. In turn, your understanding is not deceived by the impression from the senses that an object looks like a perfect circle (it looks perfectly round). The purely intellectual knowledge of “circle” thus integrates all sensations of diverse things that are apparently round. It contrasts and unites all under “circle.”
Once we know objects of pure intelligence such as “circle,” “justice,” or “the good,” we cannot describe them adequately in language to anyone who does not yet know them. We can describe them at all only by referring to the sensuous objects that appear circular. Yet a good teacher can lead someone who did not know “circle” and has not purified their intellect from these visible round shapes to develop their intellect and gain knowledge of objects of pure intelligence. There is great intellectual satisfaction in this achievement and this knowledge, but the intellect, its development and progress, exist only to serve life, not to be served by life. It serves life by correcting the senses so they can become more useful in practical life.
Part Two
Problems of Personal
Relationships
Chapter 9
Relations of
Non-Participants:
Spouses and Adultery
Inner studies are always a challenge to ordinary relations among the sexes. This is why it is often beneficial either to put aside ordinary sexuality upon beginning the work or to share it with the beloved. Participating together is especially helpful for a married couple. Moreover, the marriage relationship is the only exception to the basic rule that participants must not discuss the community work with other participants outside the seminar sessions. Members of sacred relationships such as marriage and blood brotherhood must have no secrets from each other. As with everything else in ordinary life, however, you can turn problems arising in relations with a non-participating spouse into benefits if make them part of the educational process.
Ordinarily, passionate sexual attraction nearly always involves spiritual projection. Each partner discovers part of its lost and undeveloped Self visible and embodied in the other. This perception engenders the spiritual illusion that the attraction is for the other instead of for the integrity of the Self awakened in the presence of two of its alienated aspects. The illusion stimulates sensuous, passionate love for the other. In the best marriages, this passionate sexuality dries up as time passes and as the couple moves from a passionate attraction of opposites who pursue the hopeless quest for integrity of self through outer sensual union to the fulfillment of inner spiritual union within each Self. In these marriages passionate sexuality first shrinks as the self-projections decay as they will since they cannot sustain themselves in the face of the constant presence of the actual complexity of the other person. What the other is in the flesh rejects the perfection of the spiritual projection that created an illusion out of that flesh. The evidence destroys the image; spirit withdraws from the projection automatically. This happens before any healing transformation of the Self can take place.
The healthy outcome of this withdrawal comes only later. Those who had formerly engaged in the projection can no longer. Through staying in love and in faith with the beloved they absorb it back home into the Self. This means they have made real in the Self what the projection represented of it in the other. They cannot and do not want to be the other, but they do want to actualize in their own being what of the Self the other symbolizes. What that is is hidden at first because it contradicts who they think they are, their identity. They can find it only after they accept the death of this ego-identity.
By contrast, the unhealthy alternatives to bringing home the projection are either to find another to generate a second projection or to rekindle it toward the same person as before by games and devices. These tricks allow their partner to recapture the illusion of the projection’s spiritual meaning. The other option is to seek a new partner outside the marriage or original relationship, a partner whose newness allows the refreshment and excitement of novelty. Certain cultures, where marriage is important primarily as a social and economic organization and not so much as an arena for personal growth, accept and even encourage extramarital affairs and the use of prostitutes. These cultures conceive of them as supports for a marriage that can no longer sustain the illusions of mutual passion when there is no genuine growth in the partners to reintegrate themselves.
Inner studies, if they are serious and not merely themselves a form of prostitution that sustains the old ego, challenge ordinary passionate relations among the sexes. This is because they directly undermine the old false ego. They directly involve work at reintegrating the dissipated and projected Self. A partner who is not also participating in these studies and is otherwise clinging to a falsely sensuous union will experience them as a threat to the relationship. If the relationship is marriage, that partner will see them as the same as a seduction that destroys the marriage because it is a flight to another partner. To put it bluntly, they will see them as adultery.
In one way, the experience will be worse than that of ordinary adultery. The nonparticipating partner will feel the same sense of betrayal but will be unable to identify and accuse a seducer. The frustration will express itself consequently in innumerable, diverse, confusing, and seemingly irrelevant ways. The participating partner, on the other hand, will feel innocent and not understand the source of the hostility directed at him. It is possible to survive in a marriage where only one partner is participating in integrated studies. However, this means that, at least partly, the nonparticipating partner must grow to the Self through their suffering and that the participating partner to a larger extent should be patient and understand the source of the partner’s distress.
If those who engage in integrative studies are married, their marital relationship is the primary arena where the work on Self-development will take place. Should they turn these studies into an ego-inflating perversion, where they seek ordinary personal relations that replace the marital relationship, however, they lose both the benefits of study and the benefits of self-development sacred to their marriage. Then they are committing not just what feels like adultery but adultery itself.
Thus, problems of destructive relations between two participants in integrative studies and those between a participant and a nonparticipant merge. This happens when participants create between themselves ordinary relations. They project undeveloped parts of the Self into others. These projections may be either of parts different from those in relations with non-participants or parts that are the same. Thus, within and among participants there can be actual adulterous relationships where a participant shifts the projections from a marriage partner to a participant. On the other hand, a participant can project into another participant those parts not projected in a marriage. Thus, a man may seek to establish a “male bonding” relationship with another male participant of the kind he might have with work partners, teammates, or camping buddies. This is worse than the other adulterous relationship for the nonparticipating spouse because she will understand that her husband is seeking something that she not only does not give him but cannot give him. To her distress will be added a sense of helpless despair. In his wholly immoral adulterous affair, the man will falsely feel completely pure and entirely innocent of any violation of the marriage.
Those who undertake inner studies and seek reintegration, must do so in a pure way. They must be warned of, and alert to, their own tendency to these two kinds of adultery. The bond any participants have must be in their mutual work. The love they share must be ordinary in no sense but only for the higher they are seeking and the higher they are trying to give birth to. They will need guidance in this both intellectually through information concerning the dangers and personally through explaining and exploring their potentially adulterous (not their marital relationship) relationships with a trustworthy guide. Unmarried participants, of course, are responsible for avoiding adulterous relationships with married members no less than the married members themselves.
For those participants who have a deep ordinary love relationship with a nonparticipant, the best protection from abusing their partner is to adopt the attitude that the partner does not need integrative studies. While it would be absurd for us to believe that all those who do not undertake them do not need them, it is both absurd and presumptuous to believe that all people need them in the form we are undertaking them.
It may be said that there is a flaw in our love if we assume people we love need but choose to reject these studies. This is so for two reasons. First, we will experience their rejection of the studies as a rejection of us. The intensity of this feeling of rejection will be proportional to how important the studies are to us and how good they are in our own mind. Second, and more significantly, we will unknowingly reject them and not love them because they reject what we value. If they are sensitive, they will feel this rejection and respond out of it with bitterness toward us. We will then feel this bitterness as a reproach to ourself originating in them instead of in us. From this source, endless trouble can bubble forth particularly in a marriage.
It is not necessary to be convinced and certain that they do not need these studies. Instead, it is enough to suspect that they might not need them. There is an opposite danger in going overboard in the belief that they do not need them because this attitude can be a way of keeping them off our turf and a way of neglecting a need they genuinely have for these studies. Both outcomes are obvious flaws in our love for them, and this love needs to be perfected.
Finally, it may be desirable while accepting the possibility that they do not need these studies, to encourage the loved one to participate in them. This is, of course, another extremely delicate task that involves balancing an expression of concern for them on the one hand, with a respect for their lack of need and their independent human judgment, on the other.
In all this the only reliable guide is our love for each other. We must, in every way we can, make it transparently clear to the one we love that it is our very love for them that we are trying to perfect and that our love for them should only grow greater if we progress in these studies. Even this is hard because it involves an admission that your love for them is imperfect. For us to do it requires that they understand that our love can be only as perfect as we are and, as they should easily know, we are far from perfect. Again, this challenges an inferior kind of love based on mutual need where the partner represents our perfection and so creates the illusion of perfection from us when we are together. The partner may apprehend that we are going elsewhere to other people for our perfection. These others may perceive falsely or truly that we are using others in the study community for the illusion of perfection that they give us. Since we may be doing this without our knowing it, their disturbance is a necessary part of, and contribution to, our self-study. But if they are mistaken, we should show them the higher and elevating kind of love that results from our growth and that, wherever we pursue studies that advance our integrating knowledge, they constitute for us the living relationship out of which alone our growth can go on. We can probably show them that we need them more, not less, as we focus less on an inferior kind of static dependent love and more on a dynamic and growth-inspiring love. We can do this only if we avoid ordinary relationships with other participants.
As anyone knows who is in an intimate ordinary love relationship, there are endless traps on both sides as we strive to live in this love. The way is straight and narrow. To move to one side or the other is a mistake. Nevertheless, this is exactly why living in such relationships can be an unparalleled way of learning and gaining integrative knowledge. The very fact that we need to care for the well-being of another, sometimes better than the other wishes, can help us realize all of the following: (1) our need to separate from the illusion that we are well-off in our soul because we have another person to represent underdeveloped elements in ourself, (2) to find out just how much problems that arise in our life come from our own flaws though they appear to come from another person, (3) and to realize that the studies are not something we do so we can improve ourself and our relationships or marriage but something that, for better or worse, we are engaged in with the one we love, that it is mutual work that both do though only one is “studying,” and that any improvement is less in any one than in both and is above both our old “selves” or egos.
Last of all, it is vital to understand that problems in marital relations never arise from the integrated studies seminars or from the fact of participation in them. Those that arise because of our partners misunderstand them are the invaluable challenges that life presents to us and to all participants, although in different ways, as we continue our studies. The only serious danger in our relationships arises from flaws in us that we bring to the seminars. They usually are of two kinds. First, we misuse and abuse the content of the studies by employing them in defense of our ego generally and in verbal combat with our loved ones. Second, we establish personal ego relations with other participants so we both deprive our loved ones of what is their due and undermine the seminar and its work as a whole in the process. Thus, what truly endangers our marital relations simultaneously endangers the health of the seminar and the benefit everyone draws from its sessions.
Relations Among
Participants:
There are two opposite kinds of vampire tales. The first is told from the standpoint of the victim, the second, from the standpoint of the vampire.
The simplest vampire stories are those told from the standpoint of the victim. In them, vampires present themselves to the normal members of the reading audience as a dark threat. Few readers who succumb to the excitement of these stories and to the terrors that result from reading them believe in the real existence of vampires. They get excited and fearful, nevertheless. This is so because the vampires represent a dark inner element that can grow by feeding off the blood of the innocent parts of the soul. Since they do not believe vampires exist, the only explanation for their interest and fears while they read such tales is that the characters represent elements of their own souls and dangers within them.
Vampires inwardly represent in audience members the development of an ego or personality that is false in the sense that it cannot live without feeding on the goodness of the purer elements of their souls. Keep in mind that “soul” is the name given to the activating and motivating element in you. It is where you find a standard of good that leads you to love and that excites your spiritual and physical energies. It is where you understand the nature of good. It is where you remember different degrees of attaining it in the past and hoping for it in the future. Vampires feed off this sense of good. Since they reflect no actual good, they can live at all only as illusion. As illusions, they drain off energy into false directions. They cannot sustain themselves except through the constant process of sucking the life out of victim after victim. They can maintain their immortality only because innocent victims (elements in the soul that do not understand what is going on) are always available. Their greatest delight is in draining the energy of others. Their victims commonly swoon with pleasure themselves whether the attack they suffer turns them into vampires or not.
Light is death to the vampire. This deadly light is the light of knowledge. The understanding power of the soul gets enlightened. It loses its innocence. It suddenly sees the demonic nature of the vampire element, its presence and its processes. Light allows the soul to turn away from the demonic and toward love illuminated by the true good. Vampires do not die, however, by artificial light. The light generated by the weak candles and lamps of human invention, the perceptions and theories of reason, is not adequate to destroy vampires. Vampires thrive in it. This artificial light conceals the demonic presence and even makes it look divine. Only the supernatural light of the Sun, the light of God in religious terms, has the power to destroy vampires.
You can, of course, kill vampires in another way. Besides slaying them by exposing them to the light of your enlightened understanding (something that is next to impossible for a mortal since to catch a vampire in so vulnerable a state while active is unlikely), you can exterminate them by driving a stake through their heart. This kills them by depriving them of the illusory love that feeds them. You can catch them when they are asleep in the darkness of their coffins, hiding from the sun and there drive that oaken stake from the tree of life through their hearts.
The drama of these simplest vampire stories is in the struggle among the villain vampires, their victims, and their heroic enemies. The innocent reader of vampire stories who in inward reality might be the easy victim of one or a whole coven of them succumbs with excitement to the danger of vampires and thrills to the final victory of the hero who drives the stakes through their hearts. These tales are harmless both to the innocent readers and to the real vampires. However, they are not harmless to innocent readers when they lead them to ignore the reality of vampires in the soul and to seek diversion, amusement, and escape from it through the tales. Whether harmful or harmless to the innocent element of the soul, however, such stories are nearly always harmless to existing vampires. They continue to survive and prosper in inner reality even as stories that explicitly describe their inner activities terrorize potential victims.
The vampire tales that are potentially dangerous to vampires, however, are the kind that tell the story from their standpoint. There was a series of vampire tales spun by Anne Rice. Critics described them as vampire tales of, by, and for vampires. Vampires mock the first kind of tales both because they are superficial and childishly external and because they are harmless to them. Vampires enjoy the second kind both because they are accurate and represent what vampires take as a glorification of their immortal existence. Vampires do not usually understand just how dangerous to them these tales are.
Those of us who devote ourselves to perfecting our souls will find this second kind of vampire tale interesting and most important. This is because such stories are like a book the devil wrote describing the mechanisms he works by. Normally, if you are not a demon, you cannot understand these workings. If you did, you would be immune to them. In his vanity, however, the devil wants to celebrate openly with his fellow demons the marvels of his craft and life. In his contempt for ordinary mortals, he believes they will not find these tales attractive, and, even if they do, will not have the cleverness to pay enough attention to them to learn about him from them. He is usually correct. Ordinary mortals will not be interested. Fear repels those who are struggling with growth as human beings exactly when the tales might reveal the presence of their own undefeated inner vampires. Therefore, they will turn away. The vampires will be left to enjoy contemplating the glories of their lives in story form.
With courage, however, a seeker of truth can learn a lot from the second kind of vampire tale. What follows is what I think you can find out from them that is most valuable to know as you pursue integrative knowledge.
Vampires, of course, do not exist physically. They do exist spiritually. There are two levels to their spiritual existence. The first is a mixture of the spiritual and material where spirit gets invested in the sensuous world. The second is purely spiritual.
A major attraction in being a vampire is not only that it gives immortal life to your false ego but also life that is intensely sensuous. The most delightful of all sensuous experiences to vampires happens in the sucking of blood. Taking the life blood of innocent victims in the soul is so pleasurable that it supplants for vampires the highest sensual pleasure in human life, sexual orgasm. There are other sensuous pleasures as well. The eyes, ears, taste, smell, and sense of touch are enormously enhanced. As usual in spiritual inversions, this greater sensitivity and the abandonment of sex apes in inverted form the higher spiritual development saints achieve. The vampire attains a genuinely higher sensuous delight than normal human beings ever experience. Thus, vampires have good reason to celebrate their superiority. On the other hand, of course, the vampire pleasure is perverse. It is actually beneath the human level instead of above it. It is a greater spiritual investment in, and spiritual loss to, the senses than that of ordinary mortal life. The saints free their spirits from false investments in objects of sensation. Their spiritual joy is higher than normal because it is purer. They do not abandon sex because they find greater sensuous pleasure elsewhere but because they recognize its pleasure as an illusion of the spiritual satisfaction they are after. While they need not abandon all sensuous pleasure, they abandon all spiritual attachment to it.
There are many spiritual people, however, who can see through the illusions of sensuous pleasure and fight its attraction in themselves. They cannot be seduced to vampirism by the promise of an immortal life of sensuous pleasure. They know the addiction to physical pleasure for what it is: a continuing spiritual dying in the deflation of one sensual ecstasy after another. There is, however, a deeper level to the vampire existence than the sensuous. This is revealed in the relationships of vampires with each other instead of with their victims or with sensual pleasures in the world. While still perverse, it is a more purely spiritual level to their vampire lives.
In the vampire tales of Anne Rice, the drama is not in the relations of vampires with their victims and the heroes who defeat them but in the relationships among the vampires themselves. The best of them, named Louis in her stories, is ambivalent to the sensuous life he must lead to survive as a vampire. Consequently, like a mortal who tries to advance spiritually by his own efforts, Louis tries to diet. He tries to restrict his indulgence in blood and refuses to take so much delight in the general intense pleasures of the senses. Because of this and because, consequently, he suffers diseases he would like to cure, other vampires find him irresistibly attractive. This is particularly so for the most sensuous of vampires, Lestat. There is a mutual attraction of inverse brotherhood between Lestat and Louis, one that those involved could not distinguish from true brotherhood. The drama of the Anne Rice tales rests not in the conflict between the innocent and the heroic, on the one hand, and the vampires, on the other. It is instead between these two vampires. They are involved with each other not sensually but spiritually. Their spirituality is demonic and leads spiritually downward, but it is purely spiritual.
This possibility is most important to understand for those who are seeking spiritual growth. While they may easily escape the dangers of investing spirituality in the sensuous world and in sex, they are most vulnerable to developing vampire relations with each other of the kind displayed by Anne Rice. They can develop relationships with others who are working at “spiritual growth” that perfectly parallel the relationship of Lestat and Louis. They feed spiritually off each other. Since the feeding is not sensuously pleasurable, they fail to notice its negative demonic quality. They feel fulfilled by, and are spiritually pleased with, their relationship. They are likely to feel disturbed by the Anne Rice story of Lestat and Louis and more disturbed by healthy spiritual relationships of true brotherhood because both hold the threat of exposing the vampirism and demonic quality of their lives. Like the vampires who have contempt for the inferiority of mortals, these spiritual vampires look down on “lower” levels of spiritual involvement. Their relation is indeed “higher” in the sense that it is more spiritual than normal social relations that have a sensuous element, but it inferior because in it they have demonized the higher spiritual faculties of their souls.
Vampire tales of this second sort show that on the physical and sensuous level vampires live off innocent victims while on the more purely spiritual level they live off each other. They also show the paradox of vampires who possess consciences and so vampires who appear to themselves and others to be morally sensitive and striving to achieve a moral life. These vampires feed the conscienceless vampires. In turn, they are attracted to them and feed of their feeding on them. They feed on the mockery other vampires make of their consciences because they long not to have a conscience. In their operation their consciences do not improve the quality of their lives nor do they lead to their perfection. Theirs is a conscience that serves only to create the negative spiritual food generated by opposing it. They oppose conscience in their attraction to the conscienceless, and they live off opposing it in themselves.
This sort of vampire relationship can destroy a community of seekers. It is manifested in a participant as a struggle against the spirit of sensuous pleasure and so appears as a sign of perfection. Afflicted by this kind of vampirism, individuals fight against the spirit embedded in the sensuous attraction when they should fight against the displacement of spirit in the sensuous object or activity. They and everyone around them can think they are fighting evil because they are fighting a sensuous pleasure or activity. They are really fighting against a good spirit, one that is only temporarily lost in illusion. In merely opposing the sensuous investment, they oppose not only the sensuous pleasure but also the good spirit lost in it. In their love/hate relationship with other participants, they feed on the attraction others have for them and the criticism others make of them.
When this happens to individuals who not only do not regard themselves as vampires but also see themselves as seekers of perfection, literary images of spiritual vampires will repel and disturb them. They may like vampire stories of the first kind where the innocent are endangered and the hero destroys the evil monsters because they can use these stories to support their perverse war against sensuality. However, the second kind of vampire story will at least bore them and usually repel and disturb them. This is so because, seeing the perversity displayed in the spiritual struggle with conscience and in the relationships between vampires, they are in danger of recognizing their own perversity. Thus, they will deliberately not see the significance of such stories and will be disturbed and repelled by them. On the other hand, genuine seekers of truth will recognize the importance of the second kind of vampire story and learn from it of the great cloak of concealment vampirism can wear in inner reality and in outer relationships.
Chapter 11
On Trustworthy Guides
A community of seekers of integrative knowledge needs a guide or a leader. While those who work on their own also need guidance, it is greater for a group. Leadership is vital if a community is to survive. Who this leader will be, however, cannot be decided through ordinary reason or ordinary affection. Faith must provide the guidance. Faith may be blind in the conventional sense; it is unguided by ordinary reason and judgment. Faith, however, is not blind in another sense but completely clear-sighted instead. Faith is founded on belief and belief is granted when someone or something is true. The true is the faithful; the faithful is the true. True love is faithful, complete, and unwavering love.
The one who is trustworthy and so deserves the group’s faith and trust is the one who is faithful to the higher good it aspires to. The community should trust only those who prove themselves over time. They must prove their faithfulness to the search for integrative knowledge. They can do this by showing that they do not let themselves get bogged down in rigid formulas and exchange the love of truth for the love of “truths.” Their words (“truths”) may vary and sometimes seem contradictory, but all can see the truth in the life behind the words. They treat participants because, and how far each participant is different.
The Biblical notion that we can know them by their fruits holds true. Over time, the true guide brings forth good fruit. The fruit may not be apparent in the beginning since then most of what the work is producing is only seed, soil, water, and fertilizer. Eventually, however, even from a lower level of knowledge, all can see this fruit and its goodness. For example, the guide maintains inner harmony among diverse and sometimes antagonistic participants not only at single moments but over long periods. The guide is the catalyst that allows oil and water to mix and dissolve one another in unity. True guides occasionally expose those in their charge pain but only very rarely do they themselves cause it. True guides reveal the defects in others gently. The subsequent pain they feel comes from the revelation. At first, true guides, like the decision to work at integrative knowledge, appear to restrict the freedom of individuals in the group. Only later do participants realize that both the work and the restrictions have actually expanded their genuine freedom. It should be obvious that any guide can make what looks like a good fruit appear magically from time to time, but only the true guide can do so over time.
Doubt, of course, is never itself an enemy of faith. Doubt always tests faith. It is a tool faith uses for its own development. This means that the proper reaction to doubt is to entertain it not to kill it and put it aside. Doubt should lead back to the foundations of faith in belief. We should allow our doubt to test our faith by examining the faithfulness of the object of that faith over time. This applies to everything we have faith in. Where you have trusted your eyes but now doubt them, reassess the quality of your trust and ask whether your eyes have proven trustworthy in the past. Investigate where they have not. The result may be that your old trust is reaffirmed. It is likely, however, that a new trust in your eyes develops and strengthens. It is also likely that some qualities of the faith you had placed in your eyes you now place in other faculties such as reason and the power of concepts. Thus, in every way your faith, the faith itself, is elevated and strengthened. This is so even as we change the direction of our faith and place it in different objects.
The same process works when we doubt a formerly highly-trusted guide. Doubt may, of course, lead us to abandon all faith in a guide. It is more likely, however, (if before this we were not totally insensitive) that we will end either in strengthening our faith in the guide as it existed before. Greater faith arises because our doubts allowed us to develop more understanding of why we had faith in the beginning. Our studies have, often without our noticing it, allowed us to develop our powers of understanding. We developed the capacity for greater understanding and our doubt allowed us to exercise that greater power so we come to grasp better the nature and basis of the guide’s own faith and faithfulness.
To bring us to this new place is, after all, a function of a guide. The guide exists not “to be a guide” as a permanent role or identity but to be a river carrying us closer to its source. The closer we get to the source, the more we appreciate the guide and so the more our faith in the guide grows. Our old need for the guide (or the old level we had been guided on) dissipates like the fog when the sun comes out. The bond with, and the benefits from, the guide, however, only increase. Now we know the nature of these benefits and we long for more help to get further up the stream to the source. Our relationship with the guide changes but, like good wine, improves with age.
While it is important to remember that proper guides should have already progressed in knowledge beyond us and that this is the only reason for having or needing them as guides in the first place, we must not delude ourself by the dangerous illusion that our guide is not human. This means that at whatever level of growth guides attain, they still suffer inner and outer conflicts. Moreover, their suffering is often more, not less, severe than our own. This follows the principle that the farther you go, the more sensitive you become. Usually, even (and especially) in the midst of their own suffering, they can comfort us and other participants. However, their own condition of suffering can occasionally prevent them from doing this.
Something that cannot be fully understood at first is that the Guide is never embodied in a single person. People who gather together motivated by the proper intention generate the presence of the Guide as their work progresses. This Guide is above all individuals but each individual participates in It to different degrees. This is why some may “lead” more than others but Guidance comes to all from each. Nothing is more important to understand ultimately about seminar work. Leaders only keep the members of the seminar attending to the Guide.
Because of the intimate nature of the connection among all participants, including the guide, each is likely to be affected by negative conditions in the others. Intimacy in this context is not, of course, what is conventionally meant by the term. It is not physical or emotional in any ordinary sense although since it is spiritual, it may have physical and emotional effects and expressions. It is intimacy under the good pursued in studies. Where many participants are in distressed states, particularly when two or more have created a faction by joining in privately discussing their stresses, there sessions may be so burdened that guides who are already weakened under the burdens of their own humanity, will be unable to absorb the suffering of others.
You should expect under these circumstances that you will not enjoy the sessions. They will not alleviate your suffering. They may even expose you to the suffering of others. This is an addition to your discontent during the periods when the old kind of benefit you had drawn from the sessions dries up — as they will once they have achieved their goal in bringing you to development — but the new benefits you do not yet know how to receive are coming to you. Thus, in the progress of the sessions, expect not only dry spells but also the sense that you are getting more pain and confusion from them than they are alleviating. We need to find a way of carrying on in faith. To carry on in faith does not mean we ignore, or blind ourself to, the bad things that are happening to us, but face and persist despite them because of a hidden “knowledge” based on our experience that there is a goodness in the activity.
Challenges and tests like these will come. They are a necessary part of our growth in knowledge. This is not something we “get” from the seminar sessions, from other participants, or from the guide but something we accomplish and achieve in and from ourself through their help. The temptations to abandon the seminar are an essential part of it. They force us out of comfortable ruts of self-satisfied egoism and force us to put ourself back into our efforts and our life back on the line.
Part Three
Warnings of What to Expect
Chapter 12
What to Expect:
The Burden of Freedom
The first step in the process of our liberation is to recognize just how unfree we are. We must realize that we have been living a mechanical existence. This means that images of sensual objects have been commanding our spirit or energy. We are likely to have a great deal of spirit so our days have been filled with activity.
Three kinds of images engage our spirit. They are all of the ego or what symbolic language calls “the flesh.” The first is our attraction to physical things. These can be food, clothing household furnishings, or other people. In all cases, we want to possess them. The notion that these are objects of ego is in line with Sigmund Freud’s idea that the ego, unlike the ID seeks objects in reality while the ID merely seeks pleasure. The second, and more obvious kind of image that attracts our spirit is our own body and its beauty. The third image of fleshy attraction is for reputation, fame, or prestige.
In itself, of course, none of these images of the flesh or ego is bad. The badness is in how they attract us. We are drawn to them in slavery instead of freedom. Two terms refer to this unfree relationship to the flesh or ego. They are mechanicalness and passion. Mechanical relationships to the flesh are those that happen when our spirit is seized by a fleshy image without the intervention of our consciousness or conscience. We find ourself automatically drawn to the object without having decided whether the object is good or bad. We assume that is good merely because it is attractive and because it is drawing us to it. We have an appetite for it. It is an object of passion. The word “passion” refers to passivity and suffering. Under the power of passion, we do not actively choose the object; it chooses us. Although we may feel ourself enjoying the attraction and the object, we are suffering in the pleasure. When people ask us why we want such a thing or to do such a thing, we answer that we like it or like to do it. If they persist and ask why we like it, we say we do not know. Under passion, moreover, we are likely to say we do not need to know, and, if pressed, we do not want to know.
This mechanicalness — this slavery — of the passions is the worst kind of slavery and the foundation of all other kinds. It is more ignoble and degrading to be imprisoned by them than by the walls of a jail. Moreover, slavery to the passions makes us vulnerable to enslavement to the state or to the wealthy. The picture of a car shown on television, stirs your passion. You want it. To get it, you must give money to those who now have it. To get the money, you must work. Thus, you become a wage slave. The greatest effort in the social sciences today is directed at finding out how to present images that stimulate our passions and so are tools of dominating us. This is so both in business and in government. Both are devoted to stirring our passions by appeals to fleshly images. The one creates the lying image of a candidate for us to want; the other, the no less lying image of a product. However, it does not matter which candidate or product we choose since every choice is mechanical. It is not really we who are choosing. We are completely unfree. We are conditioned to respond to one or the other. The act of choice only gives us the illusion we are free.
There are four phases in the emergence and transcendance of passion. First comes the perfectly mechanical slavery where the thing chooses us. Then the illusion of liberty where we choose it. Third, the liberation where we deny it. Finally, the freedom where it leaves us.
The first burden we must shoulder to work toward our true freedom is figuring out how the spiritual has embedded itself in the material. We then need to fight our way out of the prison of passion. This is spiritual warfare, but it has a material core. We need to detach our spirit from the flesh. This means we need to stop responding automatically to sensuous images and, once we have done that, we need to start asking ourself what the good is in those that attracts us. We must oppose the mechanical “yes” to an object with a conscious “no.” The “no” stops the mechanicalness. It does not stop the attraction. Thus, we reach a stalemate of “yes” and “no.” The second step is to find a “higher” “yes.” The higher “yes” is the product of our having investigated what it is about the object that attracts us. We are, of course, never attracted by the object, whatever we think. Now we must find out what we did not know: what about it attracted us. This shifts our sense of the good from focussing on objects of perception to focussing on elements of understanding. Elements of understanding are higher, and the knowledge that they embody is higher.
With success at managing this first burden, however, another emerges and grows heavier and heavier. Its weight increases in proportion to our success at dealing with the first problem. This is not a spiritual problem with the flesh but a spiritual problem with the spirit. We have left the world of activity while practicing warfare on the first level. With victory, we must reenter the world. We do so now with the world no longer “inside” us in the form of the passions. Our problem is that, detached from the flesh or ego, we stand inwardly in the Nothingness. Now there is nothing in the world that automatically attracts the spirit. The second task is far harder than the first. We must consciously move from Nothingness, where our spirit is dwelling, into the things of the world that can no longer attract spirit. It is detached from them. How can we enkindle our spirit toward the world? That is the new problem. We need to develop a method of moving and acting in the world by pure faith. Here we are guided by undefined goodness. We will never find in the world anything adequate to draw spirit. We become creative. We create from Nothing as we live in the world. As we are doing so, we generate spirit. The act follows the lead of faith, hope, and love. We act before we have a definition of our destination.
This does not mean that understanding is not operating. We are not acting without guidance. We are fully aware of the world on one level. It is the spirit that remains untrapped by fleshy or worldly images of the good. The good that spirit follows remains spiritual. Thus, freedom is not identified with having a large range of options of things in the world nor with “choosing” the one that best fits our image of the good. Instead, freedom is of the spirit. It exists wherever the spirit refuses to tie itself to any image of the good. Only in this way can it avoid prison. Only thus can the human person secure the blessings of freedom in life.
Chapter 13
What to Expect: The World
One challenge that students of integrative knowledge will face eventually is the realization that the world neither needs nor wants them. Were it not because of the feeling the world needs us, it would not be hard for us to achieve some degree of detachment from the world. Detachment from the world is always much easier for us to accept than the world’s detachment from us. Since the world always disappoints us, our souls will pull back from it automatically. We had sought satisfaction and fulfillment in the world; the world inevitably failed to deliver; consequently, our spirit spontaneously withdraws from the world. This detachment is nearly always temporary. It passes like a fleeting dark cloud when we find a new illusion in the world to chase after. What ultimately binds us to the world with stronger and more unyielding ties and what possesses our ego most completely is the impression that the world needs us. We cannot give up the world because it needs us, and we experience what feels like a moral responsibility to fulfill its needs.
“The world” here means principally two things. First, it refers social organizations, which are structures of roles. These can include everything from our place of employment, to our nation and our family. Second, it refers to all other people we encounter in life in as far as they are “other” to us.
Some of us have the hardest time recognizing how little the organization we work for needs us or how insignificant the work we do is to society. The more important we take our job to be, the harder it is for us to accept how little needed and wanted it is. This is particularly the case with physicians although no profession is immune to this illusion. Even insurance agents can get an inflated sense of the importance of their jobs and of themselves in doing them. Insurance companies seek to instill in their agents as part of their training a sense of mission. They want the agents to be ingrained with the notion that they are not selling insurance but bring the blessing of security to families. It is nearly impossible for parents to avoid the illusion that their children cannot live without them. Of course, children need material sustenance and shelter and also love and care, but they do not need “me,” a particular person.
What we mean when we say the world does not need “us” is that it does not need or want our “ego.” “Ego” means the social function we identify with. This social identity is the world’s presence in us. Few people can believe how little their absence would be missed and how easily society and work would go on were they to disappear from the earth. We imagine our departure would leave a gaping wound in organizations. Instead, the small crack left by our departure would immediately fill. The space would so completely disappear it would look like skin overgrowing a pinprick in the finger in matter of hours. Everything would be smooth. Where we were, another would already be.
The illusion that the world wants and needs us is sustained outwardly primarily by visible evidence. When you go on vacation, your work does not get done. When you return, everyone flies at you with demands and “needs.” When you leave your children for a week, they weep; when you return, they rejoice. Despite the appearance, however, that the world wants our ego/identity or wants us to continue to perform our social role, it actually wants our spirit. The only way it can possess this spirit, however, is to get us to invest our soul in the world. We do this by identifying ourself with a social function or role. We displace spirit in the role we identify with, and then the world can suck on our identity and suck out our spirit. The great sucking sound you hear when driving to work Monday morning is the world ready with waiting mouth.
While pursuing integrative studies, we will come upon two types of evidence that the world neither wants nor needs us. Since the knowledge that it does not will be intolerable to us, we are likely to devise ways of denying it. The first evidence may come, for example, when we are away from our family or work. While under the illusion of your importance to the world and how much it needs and wants you, you are driven to telephone your professional answering service with a tidbit of information you forgot to leave it, or you cannot bear to fail to check in with your family. If you listen carefully, you will hear how little you are missed. Of course, you may get the reverse impression because the people on the other end of the line express their gratitude for your call or express happy emotions when they hear your voice. The first instance may be phony gratitude expressed because others think you expect it. The second can be a symptom of missing, not you, but the spiritual energy you have deprived other identities of. Their very emotions are keyed to your identity and operate to manipulate you (and you want to be wanted so you welcome this manipulation) to talk with them from your own identity emotionally responding to theirs so they suck on your spirit over the phone.
The second type of evidence comes when you are in the midst of work or of family life. While you are doing your work conscientiously, you keep your spirit for what you have come to understand because of your studies as the more truly good. You find, however, that others get unhappy with you. This is because you have withdrawn your soul from your role. You have surrendered your false self or identity. That means their identities are not reinforced by your spirit. They can no longer suck spirit from it. Often, they will stay unhappy, complain, and try to make your existence unpleasant until you respond in some way. Either you get irritated and so invest spirit in dealing with them or you give in and reenter your social role. If you yield, you will mistakenly think you are yielding for their sake instead of you own comfort.
Spirit, of course, must invest itself in life and action. It cannot avoid doing so. It is good for it to do so. However, spirit needs always to allow the true good to guide it in the investment. That true guide never is an identity although it may lead us to do the things that others see as taking on a role. Staying true to our sense of the good will please us while making other identities unhappy; to give in to them, will make us unhappy. We must develop the intelligence to distinguish between investing spirit where it belongs in the service of other souls from where it does not belong in the service of the ego of others. We must also develop the strength that will allow us to refuse to give in to the blackmail of other identities who threaten to withdraw their “love” for us if we do not yield to them.
Chapter 14
What to Expect:
Childhood’s End
Among the severest obstacles we will encounter as we pursue integrative studies and one we must surmount before we can progress in this knowledge further are the results of spiritual damage we suffered in our childhood and youth. Particularly significant is our reaction against expressions of the spiritual faults of our parents.
Everything we are involved with in the world reflects spirit. Therefore, the involvement of parents in the world would also reflect any faults of spirit. However, the most serious damage their child could suffer would be the result of where in the world they were involved with what most concerns the spirit. Normally, this would be their participation in religion. Manifestations of parental flaws in religion are most serious for two reasons. The first, as just indicated, is that parents often invest the greatest of their spiritual energies in religion and so it is the most potentially damaging to their children. The second is that religions themselves are ancient methods of integrative studies. Disabled in religion because of parental flaws, a child may be disabled in all methods of integrative study.
Children may, for example, have been brought up under the guidance of a falsified and malignant distortion of Christianity. Consequently, they reject all of Christianity even though, and particularly because, they have a highly religious nature. Because of this rejection, all of their religious searches and integrative studies (by whatever name you call them) either take them into alien religions such as Buddhism or the Sufism of Islam where they say the “respect” all religions, which means they practice none, or lead them eventually into disillusion for, and rejection of, all religions. This despairing state is, of course, itself a form of negative religion just as their former rejection of Christianity was. It is a religious rejection of religious forms.
Both reactions are barriers to their future growth. To go further, they must pass over them. There is only one way they can do this. It is by returning to the childhood religion they had originally rejected. They must gain an appreciation of the truth behind the very religion they had received and had found, in its distortion, intolerable. This might happen when they can understand that their problems were never with Christianity but only with some flawed priest, minister, or parent who had shoved their own spiritual disease down their child’s throat in its name. However they accomplish their task, however, children who have thus rejected their childhood religion will be unable to grow in integrative knowledge by any other religion or by any other meditative practice or by anything else until they first make peace with that of their childhood home and their youth.
The same holds for anything spiritual from our past where malignant distortions led us to reject the whole thing. None, however, will be as serious and as hard to deal with as religious distortions and rejections. If your parents inordinately invested spirit in wealth and travel and you rejected them, you must make your peace with them. If in your youth you developed spiritual addictions to drugs or the beauty of your own or others’ bodies and you rejected them, you must make peace with them.
“Making peace” means the same thing in all cases. It means seeing through the religion, the body, or the wealth down to the root of the impulse that led us or our parents to them. The ultimate root of all impulses is pure spirit. It was derailed in your parents when you were a child and in you when you were a youth. You rejected the derailment and the root together. Now you need to see and still reject the derailment but learn to treasure the original impulse, which is always divine, that energized the subsequent distortion. You need also to see that the distortions are always the result of a fault in those who produce them but that the fault-ridden are hardly ever blameworthy. Those who fall into distortions do so because of the ignorance and illusion that arise from flaws they had not corrected. Of course they should have corrected them once they found them producing unhappiness in life, but that they did not is rarely entirely to their blame. It was their human responsibility to correct them, but neglect of responsibility is hardly a failure equivalent to the horrors than can flow as a consequence of the neglect. In criminal law, we hold someone responsible for their neglect, but we do not blame and punish them for deliberately causing the terrible injuries that resulted from neglect.
It is not enough that we intellectually understand that our parents are flawed nor even that we forgive them the damage they did to us out of those flaws. What is important is that we repair the damage they did to spiritual things because of these flaws. This means that, if their flaws distorted Christianity, we are responsible for restoring Christianity to its purity. To try merely to see our parents as flawed and forgive them the damage they did to us ultimately does not work. This is because it is still the spiritually damaged “me” that is trying to do the understanding and forgiving. In some way, it is still the assertion, therefore, of the flaw created in us earlier. There is a religious notion that the sins of the parents carry into and through their descendent generations; the equivalent notion is that the responsibility for ending the sins also descends to these generations. This is, indeed, the highest spiritual obligation we have to our ancestors and our own progeny, to the past and to the future.
The same holds true of spiritual distortions of our parents and ourselves that involve things less completely spiritual than religion. While usually more superficial and easier to deal with, these are no less important if we are to progress in integrative knowledge. If your parents were addicted to food, it is not enough as an adult for you to recognize, accept, and forgive this flaw. You yourself must develop a spiritually sound relationship to food. This means you do not diet, since dieting is only the inverse spiritual disease of gluttony. You must reach a point of fully enjoying food while naturally eating in moderation without concentrating on it. If you had taken excessive spiritual pride in your body as a youth, you must not now reject and neglect it. That, too, would only be the inverse but equivalent spiritual distortion. Your body may be even more beautiful than ever and you respect and care for its grace. You dwell on it to excess neither positively nor negatively.
A great mistake in modern psychology is that, while admitting we suffer from the sins of our parents and that we can end the suffering by facing those sins, accepting our parents as flawed, forgiving the damage they did to us and “getting on with our lives.” This is not enough. We need to see the original purity of their motivation. If we cannot see the goodness in the source of their motive, we cannot escape the continuing consequences of their sins. Moreover, many of our attempts at “psychological healing,” such as taking parents to court for child abuse twenty years after the abusive event took place, are not only an abomination but also multiply by duplicating the essential character of the original abuses. Out of distortions of spiritual energy you were abused, out of distortions of spiritual energy you become the abuser.
The pain we suffer now is not the direct result of an act of damage done by our parents decades ago. It is the result of the spiritual flaw that is still growing within us either because we adopted our parents’ flaws and made them a permanent part of our life or because we rejected their form in our parents but preserved the same flaws in opposite form in ourself. Physical and spiritual suffering are both the same and different. When a knife cuts into your finger, we say your finger is wounded; the pain continues until the wound is healed. When modern psychology falsely describes hurtful events in your childhood as causing wounds that need to heal, it all-too-often implies that the damaging knife is gone so all you need is a painkiller. Spiritual suffering is, however, more like another kind of physical pain. When you have a sore leg, your body is telling you to stop the running that is damaging your leg. You stop and the pain goes away. You abuse your body when you take a painkiller and keep running. If you are under the care of a wise physician, you may do both: stop running and take a painkiller. Spiritual suffering is like the runners pain; it shows the need for a change. Unlike the runner’s pain, however, spiritual sufferers must indulge in no painkillers. Spiritual pain is an essential part of the healing. Moreover, every spiritual painkiller is itself a spiritual disease. That is why the relief of pain you get when you drag your abusive parents to court is only a distraction from one of your own spiritual distortions to another.
Forgiveness of ourself for how we were in our youth and of our parents for how they were in our childhood are authentic signs of development. This forgiveness, however, must proceed not from our heart or head alone. Obviously, it is not enough for us to mentally understand that our parent or our youthful self was flawed nor is it enough, however, to add emotional good feelings toward the youth we were and the parents we had in childhood. These are results of superficial, but valuable, developments of our faculties. What we need is to develop ourself and our character, to grow in integrity. Then our forgiveness is entire. The sign of this forgiveness is not that the past no longer bothers us but that our parents in the present do not and the youth that remains in us in the present does not. Achieving this state of forgiveness is necessary. It is much harder to attain than anyone thinks.
Chapter 15
Wh
A unique aspect of integrative studies is that they are lifelong. Indeed, they are the only studies where lifelong participation is not only possible but necessary. This is so not only because progress in them is unlimited but also because life continually throws new events and experiences at us. These will bring disintegration automatically unless we deal with them. These challenges, while not constant, are continuous. Should we fail to pay attention to them and refuse to overcome their disintegrating influence we will not only stop developing more knowledge but also the knowledge we have already gained will fade. The forces of disintegration will gradually come to dominate our lives once we lapse into the downward slide.
While there is a need to continue integrative learning, each of us can do so in several different ways. You may, for example, try to work on your own. It is more likely, however, that you will find it important to stay, at least in a limited way, a participant in seminars. Integrative studies seminars are unlike those in most of academe. Academic seminars are voluntary only in a limited sense and are restricted to brief periods, usually a single academic term at most. Integrative seminars, however, are entirely voluntary and ongoing. They continue as long as there are people willing to persist and end when there are not. It is possible for such seminars never to end. Because of their continuity, participation in them creates special challenges. Not least of these challenges is the inevitable distance between the new and the old participants, the “young” and the “old.”
Naturally, new joiners are going to find it hard to adjust to, and to fit into, any long-established organization. This is even more true of integrative studies seminars because they are usually unlike anything new participants will have ever encountered before. Unfortunately, they will, usually inadvertently, tend to define them as similar to seminars they have known. As newcomers, they will feel particularly unfamiliar with the kind of bond that holds the seminar members together, with what they should bring to the meetings, with how they should behave while there, and with what they should expect to take from the sessions.
New participants are likely to experience intellectual and emotional disorientation when they first immerse themselves in the work of the seminar sessions. One element in these sessions is always personal. Participants occasionally expose even intimate aspects of their lives. These are not intimate in the usual sense. They rarely, for example, involve aspects of a person’s sex life. Nevertheless, joiners will sense an intimacy that might falsely prompt them to expose details of their lives that are intimate in a more conventional sense. Newcomers will expect to see an emotional bond that justifies the kind of intimacy present. The problem is that, while there is such a bond among the participants it is not of a kind newcomers are likely to have found anywhere else. They may see what appears as an emotional bond, they may sense a deeply-rooted closeness, but they are likely to see a lack of the kind of emotional support they have come to expect. Hearing about intimate problems in the lives of one participant may evoke what appears as harsh and unfeeling responses from others. Moreover, newcomers may feel excluded from the bond. This is not because they will be but because they are insensitive to its presence. They may even make the mistake of trying to create normal friendships with older participants only to be gently rebuffed. Newcomers should expect all this and not let it distress, discourage, or prompt them to desert.
The bond holding the seminar together is also intellectual. Obviously so, because these are integrative studies. Like the quality of emotional involvement, qualities of the intellectual activities of the seminar participants will be disorienting. This is for many reasons. One is that older members will appear not to take the most serious of writings they read seriously. They will not treat intellectual treatises academically. On the other hand, they may treat what seem to be frivolous lyrics from popular songs with the utmost gravity. Newcomers will often witness great intellectual dedication in the older participants, but they will not see what it is that they are dedicated to. For example, the seminar might study a work describing the steps in spiritual development and exercises recommended to climb them, but members will not necessarily follow or practice these steps though they show they attribute great importance to them. Newcomers should expect to have the disorienting sense that something intellectual is going on but have no idea what it is.
Newcomers often puzzle over how they should prepare for the seminars and what they should bring as their contribution. About preparation they should not worry. Every seminar will have established methods and rules of procedure. These they should follow scrupulously. If they do, they will be preparing properly. Usually, the minimum rules are: to attend every scheduled session without fail; to read and reflect on in relationship to life any assigned readings; to read no more from the works the group is studying than the assignment requires; to refrain from talking with other participants outside the sessions about the readings or the personal issues brought up at the meetings. Since in ongoing seminars the older participants know these and other rules, they may need to ask what they are if no one informs them of them.
Newcomers also need not be concerned about what to prepare as their contribution to the session. It is important that they understand that they must make some kind of contribution of spiritual energy. However, nearly anything in their lives that energizes them in any way is appropriate to introduce as a subject for discussion. Since all energy is ultimately spiritual, even what does not seem so and refers to what appears to have nothing to do with spiritual things is useful. Energy that they do not perceive as spiritual is even more useful since the seminar can explore and reveal its spiritual roots. This activity is its essential function so their contribution would be invaluable. Of course, they need not bring any thing whatever; the best contribution is often an energized and attentive presence. If their attention and energy falter, however, it is their responsibility to intervene in the session to bolster it up. The unwritten rule of all integrative studies is that you cannot get anything where you do not give anything. If you stop giving but keep on taking, you damage the whole seminar.
Finally, newcomers should know that they must not ahead of time characterize in any way the nature of the benefits they will draw from the sessions. Like everyone there, they must take what is offered. As long as they maintain the sense that the seminar is good, its work valuable, and its leaders worthy, they should partake of what is there. Much that is offered them will not see in the beginning as healthy food; sometimes it will be barely palatable. Old standards of health that kept them from sweet and buttery food must yield; old standards of taste that kept them from bitter flavors must also yield. Strangely, many newcomers have an easier time swallowing the bitter than the sweet. This kind of discrimination must also cease. They prefer the bitter because it feels intense and challenging and so can create more easily the illusion of being something valuable. Ingesting the bitter rewards their ego and sustains it rather than assaulting it. They reject the necessary sweets as ego weakness and unhealthy self-indulgence when the reverse is the truth; the sweets are healthy to the soul but a challenge to the ego.
This does not mean that any participants are ever to forgo their own deep judgments of fundamental goodness and badness in the seminar. Similarly, it does not mean that just because others have been at it a long time they are necessarily more advanced either in knowledge or in appreciating and respecting the special bond alive at the sessions. It does mean, however, that newcomers must suspend old standards of discrimination between good food and bad food so that they can build new ones on a foundation that is purer and truer.
There are expectations that both old participants and new should have and some that are special to old participants, but these we shall explore in the next article.
Chapter 16
Wh
A natural assumption of both late-joiners and old participants is likely to be that the old, having been around so long, know what to expect. Both often assume, therefore, that the old need no warnings about new expectations. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
As mentioned in the previous section, both young and old should not expect that long and continuing participation in the seminar will produce automatically a high level of understanding or a high level of development. For instance, you could participate in it for twenty years and still not respect the special bond you have been experiencing and benefiting from. You may even abuse this bond by seeking to establish relations of normal friendship with other individual participants. You may also violate the rule against discussing the content of the readings or personal subjects raised at the seminars with other participants outside the sessions. Those who have been participants for a long time should not only know this rule but also understand why its violation is so utterly damaging to future sessions. This knowledge would prevent them from violating it. Yet they may violate it and not realize that their own actions caused the decline in the quality of their experience in subsequent meetings. They produced the decay first by draining spiritual energy when they drew on it for their ego-purposes outside the sessions. They also generated decay because their contact with other participants outside the meetings, discussing what necessarily belongs to the seminars and must be kept there to unite its members — to integrate them and bring them to integrated knowledge, created a faction.
One more caution specifically for old participants. They should expect to learn from the young — from both beginners and those who have done little work so far. The old are inclined to try to teach instead of learn. The young, however, have immense gifts to offer the seminar. One of these is obvious. They always bring a fresh perspective of life in the world. This is an invaluable opportunity for the old to better their understanding both of eternal principles and of how to connect these principles to life. By trying to understand the unique position of each new member in the world, they thus can grow themselves. Moreover, nearly always they can bring the old the gift of humility. The old will see how intelligent and how developed the young are without the long and hard work they have done that all-too-often can feed their pride.
Both young and old alike need to be prepared to expect to experience getting nothing from a particular session or, worse, bad nothing. They need to expect that there will be times — occasionally lengthy — where their participation will leave them dry and empty (nothing) and other times when pain and suffering (bad nothing) will accompany the dryness and emptiness. These are either tests of their commitment, consequences of their not surrendering confining prejudices of the nature of the work, or failure to understand that as they work the benefits they accrue will change.
Whenever you are working to gain new kinds of knowledge and to attain higher levels of development of your faculties, you must expect that the process of moving requires effort that is not immediately rewarding. If it were immediately rewarding, it would require no faith, no commitment, and everyone would pursue it. It is not immediately rewarding because the rewards you get you can appreciate only after the changes have occurred in you. The old, “you” cannot enjoy them and will often find them dry and irksome. All creative work demands commitment in faith and the surrender of previous prejudices.
A harder thing to understand is that as you work, the benefits you derive change. They alter in their basic character. Thus, for years you have, in the work, been gaining enormous satisfaction. Then suddenly everything about it seems dry, particularly the meetings. If this is not due to your having abused the seminar by outside talk and factionalism, it is likely that you are being introduced to new levels of being and knowledge and so to new levels of satisfactions. New benefits are pouring in on you but you are unready and unwilling to accept them. You prefer to cling to the old. You fight the new as the enemy of the old and produce not only more dryness since the old no longer can nourish you but also suffering and pain. When you feel such dryness, the best response you can make to it — once you have done your best to determine that it is not the result of your abuse of the seminar — is to ignore it. Getting upset and striving against it will only lead you to develop a new and more insidious and truculent ego.
Both young and old should expect doubts. These doubts will concern the seminar itself, its content, and its guides. Some doubts will be severe. Accept them as friends of your progress. They may work to free you from false guides, false community, and your own false ego-investment. As with young children when they doubt the childish level of religious teachings they were raised in, you must doubt your previous understanding to acquire knowledge at a higher level. Whether your doubts eventually lead you away from a specific seminar after you search the roots of your former faith or whether, instead, they leave you reconfirmed in your original participation, they inspire the quality of your involvement. They can make your involvement with guides, communities, and your ego truer and more pure. Never be afraid of doubts, but never automatically yield to them.
Finally, both young and old should expect that outsiders will appreciate what they are doing less and less the farther they go. When you reach out to an old nonparticipating friend and give them a passage from a reading that most excited you, be prepared for disappointment. Such friends are most likely to either fake an interest for their sake or yours or express trivialities about it. Of course, your own motive in giving them the passage may have been tainted. You may have done it to prove to them and to yourself that you are doing something valuable or to engage them in it so you can continue the friendship. You found that the old basis of friendship was gone and you wanted to preserve it. Be aware that pickles can be preserved, strawberries can be preserved, but ordinary, non-essence, friendships cannot. They either exist or they do not. You can no more do something to hold onto them than you can hold onto your old ego. Essence friendships endure eternally, of course, and you may have had the good fortune to form one of them. They are beyond ego and its vicissitudes. After substantial growth, you will find new essence friendships, but their quality will be very different from what you could have expected.
Chapter 17
What to Expect:
Misinterpretations
It is almost inevitable that throughout integrative studies students will from time to time misinterpret the ideas designed to represent higher levels of integrative knowledge. Misinterpretations are unavoidable for two reasons. The first is that language is inadequate to definitively express these ideas, and the second is that, at any point in our development, there will always be gaps in our awareness of our lives.
Whenever we try to use words to express aspects of what transcends the perceived world or is purely spiritual, we can speak only analogically. Words themselves are invariably connected to the senses and so are never of pure spirit. We can use them only to point beyond what they designate. As a student, you need to know that this is so to keep yourself from slipping into the illusion that by receiving and holding on to verbal expressions you also have the understanding you seek.
This would not be a particular danger except for the other source of misinterpretations. The words deal with aspects of your life you are not yet aware of. Thus, you cannot relate even to their analogical meaning. This is so even when you know that their meaning is analogical. You will take the analogy and misapply it to an aspect of your life that you are already aware of. You cannot avoid doing this. This is why you need the help of others and particularly an advanced guide to offer corrections. Some examples are in order. These will at least hint at the nature of this problem of misinterpretation and the severe dangers that arise if it is not corrected.
We might consider an historical example. First, let me state a principle of integrative learning. When we are seeking the kind of knowledge that would produce integration in mind and life, we cannot have a definite goal. We must travel with our intellectual faculties blinded. We do not know “the good” yet; this is why we are seeking it. In the recent past, this spiritual truth of the “blind” journey got falsely transferred to the material realm. In the nineteenth century, particularly among European and Russian revolutionaries, an idea emerged that some revolutionaries in the United States in the 1960’s adopted. It was that the liberal approach to improving the conditions of life had to be abandoned, that specific ideas of a good to be achieved should be surrendered, and that revolution must merely seek to destroy the foundations of the old. No one, they held, could foresee what the great new good would be. Since it did not exist, it could not be seen. It had to emerge out of the ashes of destruction. This attitude not only allowed an extremism of “anything goes” but also made the revolutionaries immune to all criticism. Since the whole foundations of society and thought were bad, any thoughtful criticism of the revolution was inherently flawed. Liberals were said to be bound unknowingly to the chains imbedded in their ideas of reform. The revolution existed for its own sake — to tear everything down.
Thus, revolutionaries transposed an idea of change that is proper to the realm of spirit into the realm of the world. Inward travel is blind travel. We are seeking to transform ourself. This is something the self obviously cannot do since the self is the very thing that needs to change. The inward traveler travels by faith. Faith, as we have shown elsewhere in this work, is both blind and sighted. The error of the revolutionaries was to take an idea valid for inner development and apply it where it is not appropriate. Revolutionaries did not even note the circularity of their position: change in the world may have to be blind and unreflective, but the concept of a blind revolution is not blind and unreflective; it is a definite idea developed in and from the past that they claim needs to change. Thus, when we are involved in movements for external change, we cannot but travel using a goal tainted from the past. It is a severe illusion to think we can avoid the influence of the past. The movement for such change comes from faith but not pure faith. It arises from faith in a thing, a concept of human past manufacture. Only the growth in pure spirit rests on pure faith and only pure faith can produce it.
It was understandable that this confusion should reach its most severe form in Russia. Russia in the nineteenth century was among the most spiritual nations in the world and had been rooted deeply in Christian Orthodox inwardness. There the idea of blind movement was more familiar and more attractive spiritually. Thus, when western European rationalism arrived, it tapped into this tradition and appropriated it for its worldly purposes. What happened in Russia, the displacement of blind travel from inner to outer development, can serve as a clear example of how more subtle derailments took place elsewhere. Russia illustrates the principle of this inversion where, instead of being drawn by faith into “blind” growth, you first accept the concept of blind growth to provide the false impression that you are experiencing a divine call. The acceptance of the concept of blindness itself creates the illusion that the direction you are going in is godly.
This derailment descends from the philosophy of Hegel that dominated the nineteenth century. Hegel defined history as the march of god on earth. Both the Marxist descendants of Hegel and his worst perversion by Hitler arose from the consequent conclusion: all you had to do is to make yourself a force of historical change or of the “world spirit” in your nation and you would be doing the divine will; your own moral restraints you needed to abandon. These obvious perversions also reveal the less apparent but identical derailments practiced by spiritual leaders who were inspired by Russian culture: Gurdjieff and Madame Blavatsky.
A second example refers to a recent experience that happened in a seminar in integrative studies. Once in the midst of reading mystical work by Christian saints, we associated the notion of the “Abyss Absolute” with an idea of what St. John of the Cross calls, the “Dark Night of the Soul.”
The ideas of the “Abyss Absolute” and the “Dark Night of the Soul” are both analogies of the experience of absolute Nothingness. This experience is not one that “we” have “of” nothing, an abyss, or total darkness. It is one instead where we ourselves are annihilated. There is not nothingness in relation to the self; there is absolute Nothingness and no ego. This means that while the words “Nothingness” and “Darkness” are negative, the experience is not negative. There is no “thing” to negate. Of course, it is not “positive” in any normal sense either because “positive” ordinarily means a good feeling we have. A feeling is always related to, or relative to, us. It is not, therefore, absolutely positive any more than it is absolutely negative. This is why much integrated knowledge we can gain only by means of paradox. The “Abyss Absolute” is absolute negation and absolute affirmation. The “Dark Night of the Soul” is absolute darkness and absolute light.
What happened in our use of these terms is that participants falsely applied them to experiences they had. Thus, when we would say that this experience of absolute Nothingness was greatly beneficial, participants would interpret the idea as referring to a time when they felt the horror of facing an abyss of darkness. In reading about the “Abyss” and the “Dark Night,” some participants even began to experience exaggerated images and dreams of being forced to face utter darkness. It was as though the work at integrated studies was requiring them to endure and even welcome the horror. Of course, it was something they could barely stand. When they tried, the terrible consequences also hurt their friends and families who were horrified by the horror. These experiences were negative. They were not, however, absolutely negative. They arose not from the annihilation of the ego but from the opposition of the ego to the absolute abyss and darkness. It was the resistance of the ego to the Absolute, not the Absolute itself, that caused the horror.
This kind of misinterpretation is nearly inescapable. Participants must relate concepts to their experience; the experience is even exaggerated and worsened by the concept; they cannot connect it to the proper experience because they have not allowed themselves yet to have it. The inevitability of this kind of misunderstanding underscores the need for many things. The first is to express such interpretations to others, particularly when you find yourself experiencing serious problems with them. This is even more important where the studies are generating experiences so severe and extreme in you but you think no one else is having them. You should do this as soon as possible. You should make sure to bring up the subject at seminar sessions where experienced people are present, however, and never under any circumstances to those who are at or below your level of integrative knowledge. You should not tell it to fellow participants outside the sessions. This is for two reasons. The first is that fellow participants, instead of correcting your misinterpretation can feed it by relating to it other similar experiences that they have had. They thus not only feed it but themselves feed on it. It then affects them as well. The second is that, again, such private contact among participants sets up a faction within the seminar that thinks it has experiences no one else does. Thus, the unity and integrity of the seminar are damaged and everyone, especially those involved in such factions, loses the benefits of the sessions.
For the participants who realize they may fall into misinterpretations, the best attitude is to approach ideas with humility, admitting that their understanding may not be adequate to grasp ideas and that the experiences they represent may still be beyond and ahead of them.
Chapter 18
What to Expect:
Health and Disease
What is most diverse and unclear in itself and in its effects is hardest to write about. The most obvious example of something nearly impossible to express because of this is the connection between integrative studies and disease. It is clear that we pass into diseases, physical and psychological, as we progress in integrative knowledge. Everyone will get some diseases and some will have bouts with serious disease.
There are two reasons for this. Integrative studies make us both more sensitive and more vulnerable.
Disease increases because of greater sensitivity. This “increase” is, however, at least partly illusory. Greater sensitivity only seems to increase disease but what actually happens is that we grow more conscious of a diseased condition that already exists. This condition may be either of the spirit or of the body or of both. Physically, increased consciousness of distress related to breathing, such as an allergy, is most common particularly congestion of the chest. Greater suffering might also arise because of increased sensitivity to environmental conditions associated with changes in the weather or air pollution.
The simplest explanation for this experience is that, while the distress was always there, we were too distracted by life in the world to notice. We were not genuinely armored against the distress or disease but it seemed that way because we were not aware of it. We may also have avoided paying attention to the distress because we thought what we were doing was good and important and giving heed to the disease would hinder us from our tasks. Disease does not interfere with our pursuit of these tasks but even energizes and inspires us to go forward with them. We use our discomfort as an indication of how vital they are since we are willing to suffer it to complete them. We avoid thinking about our pain because concern over our health under these conditions would be an admission of a “weakness” in our ego we refuse to admit to.
There is not a lot that we can do or should do in the face of this physical distress except bear with it in all patience. Unless it is obvious that the symptoms are of a series physical ailment, we should not do anything to alleviate them. The distress is only a symptom or sign of a problem, not the problem itself. Attention to the distress allows us to turn away from everyday activities but only to deflect our energies. We should avoid any self-medication. Our attempts to reduce the discomfort will not only conceal the problem but also worsen it. This is so both physically and psychologically.
Self-medication, of course, conceals the symptoms of what could be a serious disease and prevents us from seeking help from others who are wiser than we are. Most medications, moreover, have so-called “side-effects,” which are subtle and, therefore, generally unknown or ignored, that only multiply the problems we are physically suffering. Thus, in medicating the symptoms, we multiply the diseases and eventually feel worse than before. Then we medicate ourselves more. By the time we seek the help of physicians, our new problems are so intertwined with the original problem and the “side-effects” of our medications that, even if the physicians understood the original problem, they could never find it except by pure luck. The medication conceals the original symptoms and so hides a serious illness should one exist. Thus, we fail to get needed treatment. People have actually died, for example, from asthma because the were using steroid treatments to alleviate the stress of hard breathing and led them to ignore actual problems. At any rate, such treatments of respiratory distress have strange and apparently unrelated “side-effects” such as reactions in the blood vessels that result in hemorrhoids.
If integrative knowledge makes us more sensitive to existing physical diseases and physically stressful conditions, they make us even more sensitive and vulnerable to spiritual distress. We grow more sensitive to the displacements of spirit. Thus, parties, news, films, travel, amusement parks grow oppressive. We find we can hardly bear them and have a hard time bearing with others who are involved in them or talk about them with passion. If we enjoyed these mind-deadening activities in the past, moreover, they will greatly distress us now, and it will bother us even more that we are losing our desire for them. We will feel we are “losing” ourself, becoming “abnormal,” and “destroying” everything that made our life pleasant and everything we looked forward to doing in our leisure. All our pleasures and consolations are disappearing. Our whole life feels hollowed and emptied.
The impression that spiritual disease is growing can also be generated by increased sensitivity working in memory. The well-known “psychological” idea of wounds or psychological “traumas” in childhood that suddenly re-appear in adulthood is only a weak image of the spiritual distress of earlier years re-captured as mature sensitivity grows. External events happening to us in the past are not the cause of spiritual stress or conflict but instead are occasions for the expression or revealing of intangible spiritual conflict. Even the most perfected soul still suffers from the memory of spiritual conditions and activities flowing from them that happened during what Eastern philosophy calls “previous lives.”
Since there is a well-known connection between all psychological distress, anxiety, or depression and “physical” ailments, perhaps including even certain cancers, we become more vulnerable to physical disease. Because we are more sensitive to life physically and spiritually and we resist the changes that are leading us to health, we begin to “catch every bug that goes around.”
Thus, integrative studies place us in great danger. Much of our vulnerability we can reduce simply by understanding that we are more sensitive. Aware of that fact, we can suffer the physical and psychological distress without spiritually reacting. The danger in physical sensitivity is mostly that we get tempted to invest much spirit in doctoring or nursing ourselves. In this way, we abandon the call to the higher good our spirit is moving us toward for the good of ego and the world. We get increasingly bottled up spiritually in the quest for an unattainable “health.”
If anything, our reaction to spiritual stress is still more dangerous. Our fears of becoming “abnormal” and alienated by, and alienating to, our “friends,” family, and comrades at work can drive us away from our studies or at least destroy any benefit we could derive from them since we hold back our heart from them. Our heart fears the consequence of the studies and withdraws from them even should we continue to “do” them conscientiously. If we also grow reluctant to surrender our former pleasures (including the pleasure we got from dieting and disciplining our own flesh) then we also avoid paying attention to the studies that undermine our enjoyment of them.
The most seductive of these pleasure is to indulge ourselves in an ego-image of being hardworking and “sacrificing” persons. Thus, just as the great mistake of responding to physical distress is self-medication, so too, the great mistake of responding to spiritual distress is self-discipline where the ego administers strong doses of control over our activities in an attempt to preserve what we conceive of as our spiritual “health.” We cannot transform our ego because it is ruling our life. It utterly absorbs itself in this strategy of nursing and self-medication. This absorption sucks out the higher spiritual abilities so the more severely we impose bitter remedies on ourselves, the more satisfied our ego grows as it gorges itself on our spirit.
Besides knowing ahead of time that all this can happen, the best way to avoid its most serious consequences is by working with others in the seminar. It is extremely important that, while these distresses are coming to us, we do not discuss them privately with individual participants of the group. This is because our ego will direct us to associate with those who suffer from similar confusion. We will feel “closer” to them and find it “easier” to talk with them. However, not only will they not help us but also will make our condition worse. Precisely because they are so much like us already, they will only reinforce our confused state not just when they encourage our strategy but even more when they discourage it. We need the presence of the seminar members at an open session and help of the guide. We must expose to them not only our “psychological” distress but also what we think is our “physical” distress.
A great fallacy of intellect that will keep us from progress in integrative studies is the prejudice that considers seminars as places for “psychological” study and regards guides as if they were “experts” in the realm of “spirit” but sees “physical” distress as the exclusive province of physicians. This prejudice is exactly the primary intellectual obstacle to integrative knowledge because it pre-judges that there are two separate realms of existence and two separate realms of knowledge. This is utterly contrary to the notion of integrity in knowledge. As long as you hold these as separate, it matters not at all that you believe that “spiritual knowledge” is higher than “physical knowledge.” The fact of separating them means you lose the entire possibility of gaining integrative knowledge.
Conclusion
Final Thoughts
Students of integrative studies will avoid many missteps if they keep just a few principles in mind. Two of the more important of these involve the nature of integration in knowledge and life and the qualities of spirit involved in the quest.
While the nature of the knowledge we seek is integrative, integration is neither the goal of knowledge nor the standard of achievement in it. The goal of integrative studies and knowledge is life — better, fuller, richer life. We do not seek integrative knowledge for its own sake nor even for the sake of uniting ourselves as we act. It is goodness in this life activity and goodness in our state of being while acting that is the standard. It is happiness or blessedness of life that is our goal. This is why the central question we try to answer in integrative studies concerns what is “the good.”
Integration of knowledge and self cannot be the standard of evaluating our progress toward higher knowledge for another reason as well. It is that we can seem to achieve “integration” by force instead of by knowledge of the good. You can grow so devoted to a cause in life that you focus all your energies on it. It constantly occupies your thoughts. Because it is there dominating every thought, it seems to unite them. You never think of your family, work, pleasure, friends, home, country, government except in relation to the cause. This cause might be material or spiritual, but in either case, it could be malevolent. The cause may absorb your whole mind and your whole life and so brings unity and wholeness to your existence. Nevertheless, this still does not prove it represents higher knowledge or a blessed life .
The force that forges a false integration may be material; it might arise from the military, police, and cause fear. It may also be spiritual and from ideas that compel and coerce the minds of citizens. No matter, it can in either case forge a chain linking members of a society together. Similarly, force within us can chain in lock-step unity all the elements of our being and our life. While completely unyielding, tough, and rigid, the fabric of the unity that force establishes is fragile and fleeting. It is hard like a rock, but a single blow at the right spot can shatter it. Moreover, it is a temporary unity and knows itself to be so. Therefore, it always has a desperate and obsessive quality that betrays its falseness and unreliability.
Thus, we can generate the illusion of integration by means of a false good — one that does not draw the elements of the soul together but drives them together. Because the fruits of the false integration are extremely destructive and the devotion to the good that drives us to pursue them is internally temporary and desperate, we can with effort usually recognize the differences if we want to.
The second warning, placed alongside that of using the condition of integration or “unity” as proof of success at integrative studies is more serious. It is the problem of quality of spirit. Just because an activity is spiritual does not mean that it is good. What makes it good is the quality of the spirit that inspires it, not its quantity.
Even highly spiritual endeavors run into two pitfalls. The first happens when we forget that spirit is merely the energy of the soul. It can draw us downward as well as upward. Just because we are investing a great deal of spirit in an activity does not reveal whether we are being drawn in the upward direction. Indeed, when great spirit is most obviously present in an activity, it is almost a certain sign of a downward and destructive direction. This is because when spirit flows downward, it also flows outward. Thus, it manifests itself in ways visible to the senses. You may, for example, clearly invest great spirit in playing or watching a football game, but this does not mean you are investing your spirit well. The more you yell, scream, and curse, the more obviously your spirit is great, the more your public behavior reveals a destructive investment. By contrast, when great spirit moves in the upward direction, its presence is very subtle and hardly at all visible to the senses except as a withdrawal from visible objectives. Thus, such greatly elevating spirit on the surface and from the outside looks dry and empty.
The second problem with quality of spirit is that we cannot invest great spirit in the lower channel or descending direction without our having been taken in by an illusion of the higher good. You can fight a horrible war with great spirit, for example, only in the name of higher goods such as loyalty and patriotism. Only they can create the illusion that torturing others is good. Or you can kill and maim others simply because you are caught up in excessive spirit itself — the energy and excitement that had found no outlet in your normal deadly life since you were serving no great good there gets released in a passing orgy of pleasure no matter how dastardly is the deed that releases it.
This illusion, of course, is the absolute essence of evil. Evil is using an authentic good to mask what is horrible. The good creates an illusion that draws your spirit into what is bad. To effectively conceal the bad and achieve this travesty you need the image of a genuine good. The bad has no substance and can draw no energy from the soul. This is exactly why and how we must examine our lives if we are to grow in knowledge. We need to ask ourselves whether what looks best to us (what represents the appearance or image of good) is. Similarly, we need to examine what feels worst to see whether it is bad. This quest is harder than it sounds because the conditions we face when calling into question both illusions entails a suffering that would make such study itself appear bad.
As always, the standard to follow is truth. True integration is permanent not temporary. False integration can be very strong but the stronger it is the briefer its life. True spiritual activity is faithful and abiding. False spiritual activity can involve great spirit but we cannot be faithful to it for long and the stronger it is the shorter it lasts. We can measure the quality of integration and the purity of spirit not by their strength but by their truth.
