Our Individual Quest To Be Integral

Human beings are born and begin their evolution through the great spiral of consciousness, moving from archaic to magic, to mythic to rational to perhaps integral, and from there perhaps into genuinely transpersonal domains. But for every person that moves into integral or higher, dozens are born into the archaic. The spiral of existence is a great unending flow, stretching from body to mind to soul to spirit, with millions upon millions constantly flowing through that great river from source to ocean.

No society will ever simply be at an integral level, because the flow is unceasing, although the center of gravity of a culture can indeed drift upward, as it has over history. But the major problem remains not, how can we get everybody to the integral wave or higher, but how can we arrange the health of the overall spiral as billions of humans continue to pass through it, from one end to the other, year in and year out.

Ken Wilbur, in his book The Theory Of Everything, does an excellent job describing the contrast that exists within human consciousness. We are all born into the archaic state of consciousness, and then move through different stages as our awareness expands. We all want and do experience the magical stage and then progress to the mythical and so on, but some of us get stuck in a certain stage. If that stage fits our innate plan of subconscious expansion, we make that stage our conscious home .

There are several reason why we decide to remain in a particular stage. Our perceptions and beliefs as well as associations and influences contribute to that subconscious decision. We make that subconscious decision long before we become conscious of that decision. Our view of our environment, our religion and our politics as well as our view of our individual reality create walls of fear. Those walls can be unsurmountable, so we accept our chosen stage as the only stage that is true for us. All other stages seem foreign and make little sense.

Consciousness is fueled by the desire to expand in the action of awareness. All stages in the spiral of consciousness don’t have to be experienced in one reality. Most of us don’t go from the archaic to the integral stage in one lifetime, but we are aware that all stages exist. So in a sense, we know what we don’t think we know about our consciousness. We just choose to experience stages in time sequences that fit into our individual quest to be integral.

Soulful Tree

The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like all ripe fruit, from our experience and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows wither. The landscape, the figures, Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past, or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is the world.

The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world for her, leaving worlds behind her. She has no dates, no rites, nor persons, nor specialties, nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 1841 essay The Over-Soul paints a mental picture of the soul, but that picture is far from the finished product. The soul is never finished expanding in the churning vat of energy that expresses itself in a variety of ways. We are ripe fruit hanging from one branch on our soulful tree of life. As our emotions and beliefs manifest, we sense other fruit within us. These counterparts are clothed in different beliefs, different times, and different emotions. Each counterpart contributes to the expansion of our soulful tree.

We feel the emotions that are associated with our beliefs while we blossom on different branches. We feel these energy responses, but we are not just those belief-filled expressions. When we get angry when something uncomfortable occurs, we feel betrayed. The soul does not. Anger and joy are feelings that enrich the soul in some way. Experiencing anger or joy gives us the ability to feel our beliefs. When we look at the emotions we experience as things we feel rather than something we are, we gain the power feel the soul in action.

Our feelings are pieces of our experiences. They are not the complete experience. Just like the soul that only knows the soul, we can know the self as the ripe fruit that nurtures the flowing robe in which we are clothed.

We Salt Imagination

Every spiritual happening is a picture and an imagination; were this not so, there could be no consciousness and no phenomenality of the occurrence. The imagination itself is a psychic occurrence, and therefore whether enlightenment is called real or imaginary is quite immaterial.

A man who has enlightenment, or alleges that he has it, thinks in any case he is enlightened. What others think about it can determine nothing whatever for him with regard to his experience. Even if he were to lie, his lie would be a spiritual fact.

Yes, even if all religious reports were nothing but conscious inventions and falsifications, a very interesting psychological treatise could still be written on the fact of such lies, with the same scientific treatment with which the psychopathology of delusions is presented

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytic psychology, wrote those thoughts in the foreword of D.T. Suzuki’s 1964 book An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. We forget how important imagination is to reality. We’re taught that imagination is a dream figment not a precursor to the physical reality we experience. Imagination is a psychic occurrence, and for the most part, we don’t understand the nature of our psychic experiences.

Our imagination is filled with the energy of our intuition and inner knowledge. Those energy forces create our reality in one way or another. The challenge is to recognize that energy in physical form. We usually credit other people, places and things for our experiences, but in this reality we create experiences using our imagination. The concept of real or imaginary is perception playing word games. Everything we experience comes from imagination. Lies become truths, and truths become lies as we salt imagination with the toxic granules of associations and influences.

Enlightenment, like other spiritual concepts, is a truth to some and a lie to others. We are not alone in our physical reality, so the imagination of others influences our experiences if we choose to allow that energy to pepper our beliefs.

Enlightenment, through our imagination, makes the unknown recognizable. The word, not the energy, attaches itself to certain significances and ignores others. That is the nature of duality. But the nature of our imagination is not restricted by our concept of real or imaginary. Imagination's main function is to create experiences. Experiences expand our own version of enlightenment.

Free Floating Invisible Eye

The ego is a very specialized portion of your greater identity. It is a portion of you that arises to deal directly with the life that you are living. The ego can feel cut off; lonely and frightened, if the conscious mind lets the ego run away with it. The ego and the conscious mind are not the same thing. The ego is composed of various portions of the personality… it is a combination of characteristics, ever-changing, that act in unitary fashion. It is the portion of the personality that deals directly with the world.

The conscious mind is an excellent perceiving attribute, a function that belongs to inner awareness but is turned outward toward the world of events. Through the conscious mind the soul looks outward. Left alone, it perceives clearly.

It is only when the conscious mind becomes rigid in its direction, or allows the ego to take on some of its own functions that difficulties arise. Then the ego allows the conscious mind to work in certain directions and blocks its awareness in others. Do not confuse the ego with the you of your greater reality for the ego is only a portion of you that deals with the material portion of your existence.

Jane Roberts expressed those thoughts in one of her Seth Books. We all know we have an ego, but we don’t really know what it is. The ego has been described as the conscious element of our psychic apparatus. We believe it is an inner portion of us, and we call it the self. But, as Roberts points out, the ego is not the complete self. It is a characteristic within the complete self that distinguishes us from other individuals.

The ego is the free floating invisible eye of the self. It looks out and reports its findings to the conscious mind. When the ego works in tandem with the conscious mind perceptions become clear decisions, and ideas materialize without issues. There is a uniform bond between inner perceptions and outer actions.

But the ego doesn't have to conform to the wishes of the conscious mind. It has the ability to distort and reject perceptions in order to experience certain physical situations and things. The ego can block innate information when it feels threatened by it. If fear rules the ego, the conscious mind adjusts its messages. Eventually the ego conforms to the new messages, but that transformation can be challenging.

Awareness heals and vanity fails when the conscious mind cleanses its free floating invisible eye. The cleansing process is not the same for everyone, but the message that results from this inner operation is always the same. We begin to see the world with a different lens. We realize that our thoughts and emotions create reality. We slowly sense our inner power. We accept the perception that we are in control of our personal experiences regardless of our status, physical condition, circumstances or position.

Wholes Of Wholeness

Your brothers are everywhere. You do not have to seek far for salvation. Every minute and every second gives you a chance to save yourself. Do not lose these chances, not because they will not return, but because delay of joy is needless.

Gary Renard’s book The Disappearance of the Universe is filled with food for thought. The notion that we don’t have to seek salvation certainly opens a can of religious worms. Salvation is the golden carrot that dangles in front of our fear-based, programmed minds. Sin reigns supreme in our world of duplicity, and we organize religions to dethrone it. But what if we choose this time and space to work on challenges and problems not in just one form, but in many forms?

Religion talks about a greater being. Most religions put that being outside and above our consciousness. Like the primitive cultures before us, we are taught to worship this being without question. But what if our own greater self is actually part of that being? What if there is no separation between us? What if we have the ability to divide our self, and materialize a portion of the self in the flesh of several individuals with completely different backgrounds? Each self has a free will, and each self is whole within the whole of complete consciousness. The individual self chooses to embark on some kind of creative challenge in order to expand the whole of the whole.

Given that scenario, a white man or woman would be black in the same time, but they would live in a different place. The black man or woman would be white, and the oppressed individual would be an oppressor in another part of our world at the same time. The conqueror would be the conquered, and the sophisticated individual would be primitive in some area on earth. The murdered is the victim in one place, and the victim is the murderer in another. Each one chooses the framework of individual experiences according to the consciousness of which each is an independent part.

When we recognize our connection with all forms of consciousness, we begin to realize our inherent brothers and sisters are everywhere. Each one working on a problem or challenge that will be solved without the need for salvation, or the belief in sin. Each whole expands in the wholes of wholeness.

The Many In Each One Of Us

It is not enough to recognize the many ways in which we are all different; we need to go further and start recognizing the many ways that we are all similar. Otherwise we simply contribute to heapism, not wholeness. We need, in short, to move from pluralistic relativism to universal integralism. We need to keep trying to find the One-in-the-Many, which is the form of the kosmos itself.

Ken Wilbur has been working on an integral map of consciousness for years. His thoughts about finding out similarities is one of the fundamental points in his integral map. In order to recognize the One-in-the-Many within all of us, we must understand that there are many in the one of us. There is more to us than we believe. When we stop and think about what we believe, we find ourselves dreaming in a moment.

Our dreaming self is as aware as our wakeful self. In fact it is more aware. That self has a memory of all our dreams, and the mass dreams experienced by all of us. We put moments in time-space, but the self that functions in our dreams is not restricted by those limitations. All dream experiences happen simultaneously, and we live them in their entirety even though the waking ego-self has no recollection of them. The dreaming self impacts our wakeful self as well as our probable selves. Probable selves are the selves that live the thoughts we don’t materialize. In the grand scheme of things we have many probable selves, and they are constantly creating experiences from the impetus of One-in-the-Many within us.

One similarity that Wilbur writes about is the notion that we live in several realities within the One-the-Many. We are all part of a connected family that seeks to physically manifest our dreams and ideas. All dreams and ideas are connected. The energy within dreams and ideas expand the richness and uniqueness of the world we call real, the One-in-the-Many and the Many in each one of us.

The Laws Of Our Own Reflections

Every law that you have on your books today, whether it's a religious or a secular law, has come about because you're trying to get somebody else to do something that will make you feel better.

Ester Hicks wrote that thought in her book, Ask And It Is Given. Some laws make us feel better while other laws make no sense to us. Our laws are mish-mash of righteous living, and frivolous whims. That sort of duality is not unusual for us. We live by the laws of nature in our waking world, and live in the mish-mash of what we call unconsciousness in our dream world. We wander through a psychic landscape in our dreams, and our man-made laws have no substance there.

There’s no doubt that our moods alter our perceptions when we are awake in time. Moods also have an impact on the natural environment of our dream world. In our world of time there is a lag between the conception of an idea, and the materialization of it. There are several reason for that lag, but in our dream world feelings and thoughts can be expressed and experienced immediately. Our thoughts manufacture products, people, places and things in the dream world, but our ideas never manufacture laws in that world.

The psyche doesn't need laws in the dream world to express itself. Our mish-mash of unconsciousness understands that we always feel better when we are free to express our inner nature. When we look into a mirror while we are awake we see our reflection, and it never talks back to us, but when we look into the mirror of our psychic in our dreams it has eyes and a voice. We see and hear the reflections of our thoughts, desires and fears, and we experience them. We live in a world where the only laws worth having are the laws of our own reflections.