Spiral of Development

So, just for kicks, I’m going to chronicle my development over the past several years. I’m really just talking about the spiritual line here though. That’s all I care to get into for now.

So my starting position I think was this: I know God exists, but I don’t know anything about Him really. But I know he’s "out there" somewhere, and there’s a heaven, and its a place you actually go to when you die.
Hell? Well even at this stage in my development I thought it was lame and hard to believe that God would punish anyone forever.
Forever? Think about how long that is. So, even then I thought that idea was bogus.

Next, I started reading. Studying, developing a more rational mind. Started becoming more agnostic about God and religion. At this phase I was really asking a lot of questions, but primarily being very critical (in my head mostly, but a little bit outwardly.) I was critical of everything I heard from any organized religion that sounded bogus to me. Primarily I was starting to really doubt a lot of the myths, obviously because of the rise of rationality.

So then, and this is mainly the same phase, just the latter half, then I read Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason, and started listening to Tool. At this point I said, "right on Tom, you’re the man, christianity is totally wack!" But I also really dug the whole Deist thing: ie that there is a God, but he’s perfectly reasonable, and we don’t have to believe the myths of traditional religion to believe in God, as First Cause, the Creator of the Universe, the Creator of Science. At this stage I would almost characterize myself as Anti-Christian. I was Voltaire, shouting, "Remember the Cruelties!"
In other words, I saw mythic religion as BAD. Really bad, like the source of all evil bad. And I saw the masses that believed in these religions as troubled souls, lost and naive.

Ok then I made a major leap. I stared learning about lots of other philosophies – eastern, and some Western ideas i had never heard. Descartes, some other stuff. I also was really intrigued by the Mystery as introduced to me through Tool’s music. I felt that there was some really deep spiritual meaning there. I was having feelings when listening to certain songs – Pushit, the Live version, for instance.
I learned about meditation, and I started doing a certain type of it.
My relativistic self was arising, and I was starting to be drawn into new-age sort of stuff. I started to experience God and the spiritual realm, the higher self, as something that was not necessarily anti-rational, but beyond rational, or transrational. I still believed firmly in science, but I started to experience things and think things that went beyond mere rationality. I was on the tip of the iceberg. Altered states began to grow very interesting to me (although I never experimented with drugs – just music and meditation).

This was all good stuff, starting to develop a transrational spirituality, but then I made a huge mistakte. I can’t really put my finger on it, but I started scouring the internet for spirituality, and found LOTS of new agey stuff.
It was very hard to tell the difference between what I was experiencing as real and true – primarily that God is Love, and I have a higher self that has all the same qualities as God – and what was new age bunk.
I ran into a lot of stuff that was not trans-rational. It was non-rational, but not trans-rational.
I found and started to really buy into some very pre-rational stuff.
I made the blunder of the pre-trans fallacy.
I read some fascinating books, but I started to believe things like, physical immortality, that if I could just live correctly, and spiritually, actual physical death would not happen.
I also started buying into the idea that my thoughts literally created reality. I read Richard Bach’s Illusions – which I still think is a good book – but I took it a bit too literally. I learned about "melting clouds," or the "practice" of looking at a cloud and willing it to disappear.
This worked, but its a hugely EGOCENTRIC fallacy to think that my thoughts were what did it. Clouds come and go all the time, affected by real factors, and not by my thoughts.
New age people say, "your thoughts create your reality", but, as Wilber puts it, psychotics create their own reality, not enlightened people.
I still won’t completely abandone the idea that there may be some subtle energies that we’re unaware of normally that *might* have some effect on clouds and such, but its doubtful.

Another big thing was astrology entering my life. I never got too big on it, but I let a certain website convince me that the planets were going to align along with a lunar eclipse and that this event in itself was going to completely transform the human race and the planet from one of strife to one of peacefulness, and that the planets were going to make everyone ascend to spiritual lives.

It’s embarrassing now to think that I bought into this so much.

So, I was getting lost in a relativistic spiritual haze, feeling that there was deeper spiritual meaning, but unable to discern what was good and true, and what was regressive magic fantasy.

And then, Grace stepped in. True Grace, from the Lord if you want to put it that way. Grace is a real phenomenon. I’m not right now saying anything about a mythic concept, but truth.

The Grace that hit me was that my friend Erin bought me a book. I’m not sure why she picked this one book in particular. Later I asked her and she said it was because she knew I was into metaphysical stuff and it looked right up my alley. But basically she was browsing a metaphysical book section and, by Grace, just happened to pick the one book that completely would change my life forever – pull me up out of the relativistic, often magic-regressive stage I was wallowing in.
"A Brief History of Everything" by Ken Wilber.
This was it! It hooked me right in, because it acknowledged that there IS a transcendent SPIRIT, and that it is truly an amazing, hopeful thing, and that spirituality is real and powerful.
But the book was also incredibly rational, and this was the biggest kicker for me. This grounded me in my rationality, while letting me explore deeper spaces.
The book basically lays out Wilber’s Integral Theory, which identifies, among other things, STAGES of development. Exactly what this rambling blog is about.
The biggest thing Integral has done for me since reading that book, is pull me up into an integral stage where I can see things for what they are.
Now I am able to see where I went wrong with some of my crazy new age ideas, and even see how that happens, and how it is happening right now to a large percentage of the population.

I developed from (and there were earlier stages as well, but not that I talked about here) a mythic stage where I just sort of implicitly believed in some of the religious myths, to a rational stage where I saw rationality and science as the only route to the truth, and then up to a pluralistic stage where I saw many different points of view and was able to widen my scope of concsiousness. But at the pluralistic stage its so easy to get lost. Pluralists think that all truth is relative – that every truth and belief has equal validity for the person thinking it or believing it. When everything’s relative, how do you know what to believe? How can you search for truth, find ANY truth, when the claim is that there is no universal truth?
And here’s what I did – I was starting to experience that rationality had its limitations, but I mistook some pre-rational ideas for trans-rational truths. Its irrational to believe that I could make a pencil levitate with my mind, but I tried it, precisely because I believed there was a truth out there that was beyond rational. And there IS! There is trans-rational truth, but most of the gobble-dy-gook I got into in that time was PRE-rational, not POST-rational or TRANS-rational.

But some of it was. Particularly the very personal, inner experiences I had during meditation. My meditation was somewhat premised on some pre-rational thoughts, but it still let me access some authentic spiritual experience. This was the shining value of it all.

Now here is my current level of spiritual understanding:

The separation of all things that we see in the world – the duality, the good vs evil, us vs them, me vs not-me – it’s all an illusion. Every THING I can Witness is an Illusion.
I can go back to Descartes here: Descartes’ famous line was "cogito, ergo sum" – " I think, therefore I am."
What this does not mean is – I’m a rational person, therefore I have value. What he meant was, any THING I see, touch, hear, smell, or observe in any other way I can doubt. I can doubt that these things exist. Some demon could be fooling me – I could be in the Matrix, and the whole world is fake and not real at all.
However the one thing that is IMPOSSIBLE for me to doubt, and that is impossible for any demon to fake, is that I am witnessing these things.
The matrix can be as fake and fantastic as you can possibly imagine, but the one that experiences it is REAL.
Neo, for example. His body in the matrix – fake. A computer program. His job, his home, his computer – none of it was real. But HE was real.
I can doubt everything, but I can’t doubt that there’s something that is doing the doubting.
So, this leads to the question, "Who am I?"
What is this thing that is really real, and not a possible illusion.
Is it my body? No, I experience my body, therefore I am not my body. My body exists within my awareness, therefore I can not BE my body.
My mind? My thoughts? Again, these arise within my awareness, spontaneously. My name – Jeff…this arises within my awareness. All my memories, from earliest childhood to now – these are all arising WITHIN my awareness. So I am not that.
What is it that witnesses all these things? To find the answer, just rest in that witnessing.
Think about it: that which is writing this right now – not Jeff, but that within which Jeff arises – now think about that within which you, the reader reads this. Not your body, not your mind, not your identity, just that witness that experiences it.
Is there a difference between what is witnessing Jeff writing this and what is witnessing you reading this?

That is the true nature of consciousness. The Witness, some could call it God.

So here’s the rational understanding – all that arises within this awareness, this vast expanse – all that arises with it is temporary, like clouds passing through the sky. Therefore none of that is really REAL, not permanent, not ultimate reality. Only the awareness is real.

The awareness is Spirit.

But here’s the beautiful part. Spirit is not just that formless awareness. Spirit crystallizes from that pure formless empty awareness into matter. Spirit crystallized into time, into the big bang, or whatever came before it.
Then Sprit, as raw matter – protons, electrons, etc – over time evolved into complex molecules.
Then the molecules evolved into organic compounds. These evolved into the first life. Basic life evolved into higher forms – those capable of some kind of feeling.
Those beings evolved into animals capable of emotional impulses. These evolved into the beginnings of thinking creatures – the evolution of Mind.
Humans evolve along a whole spectrum, from matter, to biological life, to a mind, a thinking being. Then mind evolves into a soul – a higher self beyond just the mind. The soul can then grow and finallt realize itself as Spirit, as that one, pure consciousness, spirit itself.
And then the game is up. Spirit starts out formless, morphis into the most basic of forms, evolves into the most complex and luminous of forms, and then dissolves again into absolute spirit.

So all these things that arise in my awareness – they are manifestations of Spirit. Spirit plays into manifestation.

I know realize that all the stages i’ve gone through – they are normal and necessary stages of development – stages that every manifestation of spirit – or person – goes through, in their own unique ways.

When I truly got this, I felt a new peace I’d never known before.

But I am still evolving – still spiralling out. Some day, I will have a better, more deeper understanding than even this.