Integral Buddhism by Ken Wilber

Author:Ken Wilber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

STATES AND VANTAGE POINTS

2. As the second major item, a Fourth Turning, Integral Spirituality would include states and state-stages (or Vantage Points). Most schools of Buddhism already include this (with some exceptions at magic, mythic, and pluralistic Buddhism, as we earlier suggested). But most forms of Western religion today lack any direct spiritual peak experiences, let alone contemplative systems spanning the entire spectrum from gross to nondual. This is odd, in many ways, because virtually all forms of Western (and Eastern) religions began as a series of mystical states and peak experiences in the founder of the religion. The very first Christian gathering—the Pentecost—was marked by massive subtle realm mysticism (flames encircling heads, at other times doves descending, and so on); and for the first several hundred years, mystical experience defined Christian awareness (“Let this consciousness be in you that was in Christ Jesus, that we all may be one”). You sought out a Christian teacher if he or she were sanctus—sanctified or enlightened. But as the Church increased in power (“No one comes to salvation except by way of Mother Church”), Christianity increasingly switched from direct mystical experiences to mythic narratives, beliefs, and legalistic creeds. Mouthing the creeds replaced experiencing Spirit. By the time of the counter-Reformation, virtually all the contemplative branches of Christianity had been severely curtailed, and the Spanish Inquisition was fully in place to guard against any experiences of the Supreme Identity, or identity of subtle soul and causal God in nondual Godhead. Saints like Giordano Bruno were burned at the stake for stepping over the line, not to mention upwards of perhaps 300,000 women burned for their experiential revels, charged with “witchcraft.” (The extraordinary Meister Eckhart, universally regarded as one of the greatest sages the world, East or West, has ever known, had his theses condemned by the Church, which means, I guess, that while Eckhart is now in heaven, his theses are burning in hell. That must not leave the poor man much to be thinking about….)

The mythic structures of spiritual intelligence at that time—which were still adequate, as structures, for that pre-rational, pre–Western Enlightenment era—were, alas, permanently moved into place, and states were in essence banned across the board, especially since states, unlike mythic creed-beliefs, could not be controlled by the Church. The double problem with this move, in addition to losing states, was that the Mythic-Literal View of spiritual intelligence was frozen into place and made everlasting dogma, never to be questioned henceforth. As the other intelligences—in the sciences, in medicine, in law, in art, in education and politics—moved into modern rational, then postmodern pluralistic, then possibly even unifying Integral, religion remained frozen at mythic-literal—ethnocentric, racist, sexist, patriarchal, dogmatic, unquestionable. (The previous pope, Benedict XVI, announced that having women admitted as priests would be equivalent to the sin of pederasty. No offense, but which of those two has he experienced such as to be able to make such a judgment?) The Western world, in effect, ceased its spiritual growth. Spiritual intelligence—the way

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