Transformative power of development: Feedback 1/3

This is an unusually long post... If you're a regular reader here, then you know I appreciate Julian Walker's engagement in formulating a sober 21st century spirituality, which is realistic and inspiring, inquiry-based and psychologically astute. Julian Walker and I write with a different purpose, on a different continent, coming from diverse backgrounds, immersing our minds into distinct arenas of individual and cultural transformation, and having disparate feelings on zaadz/gaia.com, yet we share an interest in genuine integral and post-metaphysical spirituality, and often we see eye to eye on important issues.

Here follow some of my thoughts on Julian's recent article "The Transformative Power of Development: A Three-Part Distinction", which you can read at his blog, followed by the ensuing discussion (Julian is great with initiating discussions, and you get pulled in before you know what happened). I will quote the whole text, then emphasize in italic the passages I find significant, and then critically reflect on their implications, which will not exhaust or perhaps even remain faithful to their intended meaning. This is a response based on reading the article at the level of its language. Julian may have used "reason" and "rationality" as a designation-only for a general critique of widespread nonsense in popular "spiritual" discourse, but I don't accept such abstraction as conducive to solution, so I'll simply reply to the obvious. Julian's article is divided in three sections: Growth, Interior depth, and Telling the difference. So, Growth first.

Something happens. It happens to all humans. We grow. Our minds literally become more adequate to reality. Each step forward in development is both a deepening and a clarifying of our relationship to both inner and outer reality. Cause and effect becomes clear. The inner and outer worlds get better differentiated. As such, many perceptions - in fact an entire worldview, get left behind, negated, transcended - call it what you will - the way we formulate, interpret and interact with reality completely transforms.

So far, so good. Though, everything I left unitalicized belongs, in my opinion, to the „horizontal“ enlightenment, that is spiritual awakening in strict sense. But let's move on.

This is good. Growth is good. Its what happens.

Growth in itself is, as confirmed in the third sentence, something that simply happens, so saying it's "good" is unnecessary and tenuous at best. Growth can go wrong, which doesn't make it bad either. There's potential, of course, which when unfulfilled tends to cause problems. But growth, unlike change, is not a constant. And, in humans especially, not all growth is a given. Therefore, not all growth "happens", including both growth in wordlviews and spiritual growth.

Its why we know that: There is no Santa Claus. Your mom can't see through walls. Jesus was not born of a virgin. There is not an evil spirit under your bed. Grandma didn't die because you wished she would in a moment of petulant frustration.

"We know that" refers to a specific "we", and a specific "knowing". What is mirrored in following statements is a rational perspective on relative truth, specifically applied to dismiss magical and mythical relative truths, by which such rational gets passively defined. But, beyond rational, a different "we" would insist on formulating the developmental dynamics of facts, not just of knowledge, and so the postrational perspective on relative truth will specify the altitude at which pronouncements are made, and make clear whether that altitude is enacted and voiced a priori or a posteriori, whether as an adequate stage-level-station of discourse and meaning making or a caricature of a regressive slide.

Otherwise, to someone saying "There is no Santa Claus", we could reply in the same vein, "What are you talking about? What Santa Claus?" That is, the object of negation cannot be totally nonexistent. It must exist in some way in order for the refutation of its existence to make any sense at all. Therefore, we must be careful to define the existence we are refuting, and the resulting existence we are establishing. And the way to do that is in developmental terms, allowing a sequence of qualified existences.

The shift from prerational to rational is an absolute revolution. New software comes on-line. Cause and effect becomes apparent and the place-holder of magical causation becomes less plausible. The narcissism of placing oneself at the center of the universe and reading personal magical significance into random events and special communication from god to your tribe gets relinquished.

The shift from prerational to rational was a revolution 300 years ago. Now it's just a transition, part of conventional, and kids today don't get much excited about it, mostly because its unrealistic promise, typical for every revolution, has worn off. In real life circumstances, those of enmeshed philo- and ontogenetic unfoldment, worldviews and paradigms tend to establish themselves and persist in dual structures (one leg in the previous structure, one in the next, which allows some vertical flexibility, and provides for creative inner tension), so that we often have magico-mythic, mytho-rationalist, and rational-relativist positions. But yes, the shift from any level to any new level is a huge move, unexplainable only in terms of anything previously existing. However, it's not and has never been an "absolute revolution". Rational (universalist) remains blind to all things that lay ahead of it, and applies to the magico-mythic (absolutist) components the same narrow judgement, only from a relatively more elevated vantage point. While the absolutist claims, "You are wrong, and you're going to hell for it", the universalist retorts "Actually, you're wrong on both counts." The obsession with proving others wrong remains strong in the rational view, and only begins to be recognized, albeit in confused or partial manner without any effective remedy, by the relativist. So, in an important way, placing oneself at the center of the universe is really done by the rationalist for the first time - at magical and mythical structures, the self is not completely separate from the universe and the meaning of it to be placing itself anywhere; it is being placed in the continuum of meaning as a node, not at the center as a regressed narcisistic ego. Specifically, while I'm aware that this isn't a treatise on complex developmental patterns, nonetheless I'm convinced that transitional structures known as magical and mythical, as well as historical phases - at different times in different places - when these were adequate stations of life and vantage points for individual and social meaning making, should be given due respect and distinguished from sordid regressions, whether partial or wholesale, after higher structures have been established, as well as from troublesome fixations which amount to mere developmental pathology. I believe this has been done insufficiently, so that these distinctions are often collapsed, resulting in refutations of something that is a necessary precedent. This, then, is similar to what some extreme relativists have been doing with those structures that preceed the advent of contemporary relativism, and are therefore to a significant degree a necessary precondition for it. At the same time, rational as an available structure and potential should be distinguished from rationalism in any of its calcified expressions and formulations, conditioned during the initial breaking-away from the mythic order by means of desacralization. For example, Wilber does this by speaking of the dignity and disaster of modernity, offering to heal the disaster while redeeming the dignity. He applies the same dual wisdom to premodernity and postmodernity. I believe we should replicate this general approach. In short, we should demonstrate the cruelty of magical and mythical realities in their socio-economic aspect, as well as their narrowness in their interpretation of human interior. But we should never confuse or even compare magical pockets in 21st century adults with actual primitive thinking. The later is much more benign, the previous much more destructive. Just as the magical worldview and its developmental equivalent transitional structures need not impress us as anti-rational, but instead be clarified as simply pre-rational, even so the various rational and relativist claims, oblivious as they are of their non-superior status in the unfolding of paradigms and eventually meta-paradigms, become clarified as pre-integral, and yet not anti-integral.

What's more the magic of the real becomes more available. Looking through the lens of the natural sciences, reality gets more deeply revealed in it's powerful, mysterious wonder!

"Magic of the real" is discovered through initial spiritual awakening, and structural shifts are insufficient to produce one. Furthermore, "looking through the lens of the natural sciences" warrants exactly nothing, without the I that is doing the looking being inclined to discover an intuited powerful, mysterious wonder. Never before have pictures of this immense universe and sights and sounds of this beautiful wilderness been available to everyone everywhere: yet never has the sense of mystery and awe been more absent on all levels of society. Looking through the lenses is not enough! Understanding who sees what is crucial. A non-reductionist interpretation of what is seen is certainly necessary to make sense of what is "discovered", by complementing it with what remains even more obviously hidden to those lenses, namely - the mysterious wonder itself! - that remains a primarily interior affair.

Using reason we begin to interact with the internal world and the love of truth - philosophy. Using our newly developed, beautiful ability to self-reflect, we begin to interact with that other aspect of inner life - psychological awareness. The moral dimension of our being deepens too as we begin to be able to have more empathy for others and see the reality of suffering and injustice through the less self-centered and tribally identified and now more humanistic and world-centric lenses.

Reason has been used in defense of the mythic truths for centuries prior to European enlightenment, and much before in Indian thought. Indeed, most philosophers worth their salt have practiced their philosophy to reconcile reason and that which, for whatever reason, defies reason. In doing so, they have jointly established an elevated vantage point that takes reason itself for an object of inquiry to discover both its virtues and limitations, known sometimes as vision-logic or mandalic reason. But the problem of a recurrent magical thinking and rampant narcissism awaits at the level beyond mere rationality, when the reconcilitation of reason and that which defies it is carried out in absence of depth, as if to make everything equal and thus cease all claims to superiority - the relativist revolution - which has already proven impossible, or at least intolerable. Rationality is insufficiently reflective of its own role in developmental dynamics, since complex developmental dynamics go quite beyond orderly natural laws.

From rational orange-altitude vantage point, magic and mythic are less moral, and more self-centered, yet also less self-aware (therefore less responsible). It is a dialectical fact that the most self-aware structure available in "1st tier" exclusivist range of structures, namely the green-altitude, relativist, pluralist etc. is also potentially the most narcissistic when it resonates with poorly integrated magic impulses, producing a spiritual culture where "ego" - itself a product of previous rationality - gets hated and loved simultaneously in widespread bewilderment and confusion. The semantic mess created in the last 50 years, a period of simultaneous expansion and collapse of horizons, won't allow any easy solutions, or straight answers to these issues.

Notice that in this whole thing no mention is made of how these structures of magical, mythical, rational, relativist and further tend to light up - or collapse sometimes - with stages of spiritual awakening. Also, Julian uses a simple scale of prerational, rational, and transrational, which these days is only useful for explaining the pre-trans fallacy. No use of relativist and existential comparative signifiers too add depth and granularity. No mention of rationality's inability to handle anything truly paradoxical or downright immediate. The second and third part of the text develop the initial argument to point toward a "transrational" integration, and yet arguing for strengthened rationality not just as a capacity, but as an enduring framework. So I'm not sure what to make of it.

I intend to continue this critical reflection with the remaining two parts of the article: Interior depth, and Telling the difference.

UPDATE:
Interior Depth: Feedback 2/3
Telling the difference: Feedback 3/3