To Mark Forman (and other members of the integral community): I have been wondering what perplexes me in your response to my posts, here and there, on this Andrew Cohen thread (https://facebook/groups/273921915997057/permalink/512631598792753/) and elsewhere. Yesterday, for the entire day I have been feeling into a field of contraction. It was my own contraction for sure, but also I believe in a sense it was a shared subtle contraction in the “nonlocal” interpersonal field (I refer, e.g., to the works of Amy and Arnold Mindell for further reference that it is not my own invention). I have been working with these kinds of shared states of consciousness for quite a while, this has been a part of my ongoing process of self-transformation, at the same time I feel myself to be only a novice in this area. In the depths of my mind I was wondering what to say to you and others and how to respond; and at some point I realized I shifted into a field of egoic contraction from the state I had been for the entire previous week (not permanently, but oscillating). I might be wrong in my interpretation, yet I will put forth this interpretation, because you stated that you wanted to challenge me, my assumptions, and the way I seem to authoritatively represent some Integral ideas (which was fine, in your opinion). In a free-roaming public exchange here, on Facebook, you wrote that, in your opinion, I was naive and my understanding of the situation I was writing about was abstract; I repeatedly pointed out that you seemed to misrepresent my stance and also, if paraphrasing now, I continuously felt lack of hermeneutic resonance with the full amount of the meanings I tried to share. And these meanings I find so important that I want to put myself on the line of fire to share them. In fact, I woke up today and I am typing this message realizing that this subtle contraction I have been feeling in the subtle space goes much beyond just me personally, my ego, and you. In fact, had it been just about my ego, I would not have written it, because my smaller ego is very sensitive and it usually prefers to stay away from much communicative tension—otherwise it loves to go into a defensive mode, and I don’t like going into a defensive mode, since I appreciate the shrine of my expanded and intensified awareness. I will risk now and go into this tension and speak up what I truly think right now, with full acknowledgement that I might be almost completely wrong and full acknowledgement that I have a partial truth as well as partial misunderstanding. I also give you a benefit of a doubt that what I write might not relate to you personally—in fact, it most certainly is about some pathways of oscillating contraction in the entire social systems. Now I will cut to the point. Remember, you called me naive and challenged my understanding of Integral, you also, in my opinion, in most of your commentary exchanges with me continuously differentiated from my position (especially, in the Andrew Cohen-related thread). I return to the first sentence I wrote in this message: I have been wondering what perplexes me in your response to my posts. As I am typing, I pause here to sense into my own subtle contractions. I feel into the often arising contraction in the neck area. This contraction is very familiar to me. Whenever it is released I expand into a transpersonal state and mode of consciousness. Whenever it is there and goes unnoticed, I cling to a rationalistic personality. I have been inquiring into this contraction for years. It’s not something I can relax, it’s always something I can undo by patiently releasing into the vast expanse of my expectations and dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs in my AQAL-matrix. I know that Facebook or, say, email correspondence could be a deceiving way of communication which allows for many unrecognized projections. And I also know that it can be a wonderful tool of enlightenment both in a Western and Eastern sense. I was astonished to see what I perceived as your denial or at least lack of recognition of a transpersonal impulse, wisdom and compassion that are present in my posts. In my opinion (which might be a wrong assumption, but I would like to propose it as a construction rather than assumption, as a proposed injunction rather than a metaphysical description of what “must be”—nothing that has been is wrong), a high-ranked leader of the emerging field of Integral academia, if he really acquired integral and transpersonal wisdom and compassion, would recognize an authentic transpersonal impulse that is evident at least in some of my posts and that I sometimes (not stably, not permanently, but quite often) embody. And in the case of recognition he or she would attempt to resonate with this impulse in order to help its manifestation as a stable pattern of collective awareness. Correct me if I am wrong, but I never registered your showing an explicit acknowledgement or recognition of the transpersonal awareness which is evident in my communication to some others (and I don’t assert that you never recognized it; yet you never danced with me in its flames explicitly, or at least I was too blind not to see it), instead you apparently devalued me as naive, as abstract and disconnected from pragmatics and what’s really happening, as someone who didn’t work with the fabric of actual experience and who used abstract thinking and knowledge instead. The way I see it, this transpersonal awareness has been gradually emerging in me in waves and coming and going as states experience and also intensifying as self-recognition experience. In my opinion, it brings forth wisdom and compassion which are grounded in seeing emptiness and cutting through suffering or impatience with being. This probably doesn’t undo me as naive in some of the relative spheres; I admit there are way too many fields of expertise in which I am not. By no means I have any permanent and profound realization—I’ve been visited by glimpses of something very special which wants to arise in the world; and I accept authentic assistance of every power in this and other world so as to permanently realize these impulses (in my practice I tend to look within into the inner sources of wisdom). Yet I received quite a lot of feedback from others who recognized these transpersonal impulses in me and shared a transpersonal worldspace with me. Many of them have been helping me quite a lot in my journey. To me the presence of this shared transpersonal awareness is something abundantly releasing, something that brings profound relief, something that is accompanied with transcendental bliss and quietude. Of course, your challenging me is a help too, as I recognize now. But do you recognize the transpersonal impulse, the immanent and transcendental force that I sometimes let myself to speak from—in an attempt to differentiate it from my purely egoic or purely abstract formulations? It is the same impulse that many of us once recognized in Wilber’s works, what drove us into this field—the instant recognition of the energies that lead to a more integral awareness and to more integral modes of being in the world. Speaking of spiritual teachers, it is this inner impulse, this energy, this presence, this recognition that has been my teacher ever since I encountered it (rather than any single human being, including Wilber, for whose heroic commitment to this impulse I have enormous respect and gratitude; I receive this impulse as a supreme awareness that doesn’t belong to any thing in the world while shining through it and as it). So, in this Andrew Cohen-related thread what I was asking was a simple injunction: I invited everyone who is looking for such a presence to recognize this transpersonal-integral impulse or awareness and supplement the mainly egoic and often reactive discussions with this field of spontaneous presence beyond judgments. I invited to resonate with this energy. To dance with it. To be seduced by It (by id, pun intended). It’s a profound and radical and integral naked intuition of emptiness, of spirit, of compassionate wisdom I am calling forth to be invoked by each one of us who is capable of this in the current debate and in all other kinds of Integral activities. This is the constant Call that wakes me up, the Divine Bell that tolls for me, and the moral imperative into which I grew that drives me into continuously manifesting this Call in every moment when I can remember that I exist. When I began to write this long message, I wanted to write a simple thing, I wanted to experiment and put a simple projective construction of mine as a hypothesis for a communal judgment or verification (while fully recognizing that I am now and always simply a novice, not a wise man, I have my own clinging that arises from moment to moment). I think in the matters of Integral there is a possibility that you might have “lost it” or “got sidetracked.” (Unless this is really our typological differences.) Even if this is not true, I think this is something which is always good to be reminded of as a possibility—for too many people stop in front of the obstacles and start committing the stupidest mistakes of running in circles instead of actualizing their potentials. I am not speaking of the ever-present radiance and nondual realization or what not—that’s impossible to avoid and lose; yet I am speaking of some kind of shakti or power or force that colors, in my opinion, the wave of authentic awakened or at the very least awakening Integral activities, at least in the path that I and so many others recognized as being Integral. You have access to these referents, for sure, because when I held your book for a few times I always recognized love in it. In your last short email to me that you wrote I also recognized profound love (not in the contents of the dry email but, poetically speaking, something shined on me through it). At the very least I felt love in my heart, and I tend to believe this is something that is inherently yours as well. So, what I think is as follows: I think that there are numerous possibilities (including the ones I haven’t taken into account). One that comes to my mind is that it is possible that for some reason you are masquerading your true embodied transpersonal self in this public forum and in a communication you are following some deeper wisdom that is of different style, of different color, than that which I am capable to recognize. What for, I don’t fathom. The other possibility is something for which I found evidence in your responses to me (that is, lack of explicit resonance with me): I have found many of your responses to be very egoic up to the point of aggressivity; so far you aggressively rejected or ignored every transpersonal impulse I tried to bring forth the table. The results of the years and, perhaps, lifetimes of labor. I stop here because I don’t know what to say next. I don’t want this to be about you and me personally. You are, I believe, a wonderful, admirable, and heroically hard-working individual, no doubt a good writer, a good psychotherapist and probably a good psychodiagnostician. I communicated with some people in Integral community, some folks whom I recognize as adequate in terms of their sensitivities and sensibilities; I will never disclose their names; but what they said was that they thought there was some kind of contraction in the current American Integral academic circles. That guys there are kinda stiff. Boring. Egoic. That their actions and behaviors often do not resemble anything meta-Integral or Integral at all. These people I communicated with still choose to support these kinds of activities; but they voiced their concern that something gets lost in such an excessively egoic activity. I don’t know the precise extent to which it is true, since I am here and you are there, however this impression, this feedback comes from a few independent sources and is definitely worth inquiring into—if only to release the subtle contractions. And it always comes in addition to the praise for all the wonderful activities that are being done. What I propose is that we need to have more enactments of the distinct signatures of transpersonal Integral awareness. I ask all of us to return to our source—the primary source of energy, of wisdom, of compassion. This is a necessary step in legitimizing integral transpersonal discourses and integral experiential pluralism. I could be partially wrong (and partially right) in every single assessment of the relative state of being that I generated: I could be wrong and naive in my assessment—which comes through direct intuitive resonance. I could be wrong • that Andrew Cohen might benefit from this apparently complex occasion which is also probably a spiritual emergency, an opportunity for the emergence of something new; • that it is possible that he would come out of this situation as a better and more sensitive man with more integrated feminine energies of caring compassion—in addition to the fierce aggression against ego contractions which had been his previous style of communicative action and personal teaching; • that he may bring more benefit to the world (as he already helped to co-create a wonderful EN/EE community, despite of his—alleged, misunderstood or whatever—“narcissism”); • I could be wrong in thinking that he is not an Evil Incarnate™, unlike the way he is—often reactively—painted here and there by those who, in many cases, were his biggest supporters yesterday; I only know that I privately received very convincing and informed testimonies in defense of Andrew Cohen which make the entire situation not so black and white. • Also, I could be wrong in my assessment of your responses to my messages and me personally as a whole person, since we never met personally: I am on the other side of the pond and come from a country which has been struggling with preconventional and conventional dimensions of being for the past 30 years or even a century (and repressing everything postconventional). Sure. Okay. Time will tell. (Or it won’t.) If I were to bet on one thing in which, as I think, I am more or less right, it would be this call to use our primordial awareness and heart as a blacksmith for transforming our consciousness. Always, always in all our integral activities explicitly and implicitly call forth and resonate with this source of transmental wisdom. I feel that I have the right to authoritatively speak from this impulse or force, since it’s a part of who I truly am right now. In the rest, I am a humble (and, of course, not so humble and quite arrogant) student. When you called me naive, I actually took this as a compliment and recognition of something I am proud of (in addition to my thinking it was an inappropriate political attempt at devaluation of whatever perspective I have to share in this existentially important debate). There is a brilliant Russian thinker from St. Petersburg, Alexander Sekackiy. He, no doubt, has a great spiritual presence in addition to his panoramic vision-logic cognition. One of the strongest voices in the contemporary Russian philosophy. In his recent essays and public appearances he outlines a theme which seems to enthrall him. He writes about the necessity and emergence of holy simplicity which arises as an alternative to either cynical reason or utter stupidity. Today, we often see only two alternatives: either being a stupid proponent of ignorance or wearing a mask of skillful cynical politician. Sekackiy proposes that there is, indeed, a third way, that of holy simplicity and naivety. In the growth of my consciousness one of the most important teachers for my heart was and is Fyodor Dostoevsky. In his IDIOT novel he described the portrait of Prince Myshkin. He, too, wrote about a holy simplicity and naivety—and Sekackiy is clearly inspired by this master’s vision of humanity. I hope that in my naivety or unspoiled compassionate vision that in its ultimate manifestation doesn’t exclude any sentient being from the grace of whatever compassion arises spontaneously from within me and from within the opening of my world I come at least a step closer to Prince Myshkin. And I wish everyone to open their hearts to this ideal. Zen mind is a novice mind. Integral scholars might be prone to forgetting this. We need to constantly remind ourselves of holy naivety.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 10:57:32 +0000
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