Integral Subtle Energy: Call Notes from New Thought

The four Integral teachers on the Subtle Energy call of 3/8/15, clockwise from upper left: Diane Musho Hamilton, Jeff Salzman, Ken Wilber, Terry Patten. Background image is Emanations, a collaboration by Victor Raphael and Clayton Spada.

Some of my friends in New Thought were befuddled by the heavy Buddhist terminology in the first part of a recent Integral Living Room call on Subtle Energy.  So I want to share some of the highlights for me, as someone interested in what's next for New Thought.

The many levels of energy described by ancient and contemporary mystics are summarized in Integral as

GROSS: electro-chemical, gravity, etc.

SUBTLE: Images, dreams, visions, the "feeling" of a room, etc.

CAUSAL: "The subtlest possible patterns of consciousness and energy, a fractal pattern of causation that ripples all the way down though subtle and gross realities," as per Corey deVos in his excellent article "What is Subtle Energy."

From a New Thought perspective, it might be said that affirmative prayer (aka treatment) "works" when it shifts us into the realm of Causal energy.

Subtle as the Gateway
But Ken Wilber started out the call by claiming that Subtle states are the gateway to Causal states. All states are available all the time. But you can't skip the gateway. This might explain why treatment starts with an acknowledgment of union with the divine--that opens our awareness to subtle states.

Ken reviewed the tendency in Buddhism to seek escape from form by jumping from Gross to Causal -- from form to emptiness in meditation. He told the story of a great Japanese Zen monk. No matter how much he meditated, he could not cure his headache. Another monk provided the key to healing by telling him to visualize butter melting on his head in a golden glow that flowed down to the ground taking the pain. Visualization employs subtle energy. "Imagine that," said Ken. "A great meditator who didn't know how to cure a basic kundalini headache." (of repressed gross energy)

The need for Subtle energy as a mediator, Ken said, is indicated in Christianity in that nothing transcendent happens between the Father and the Son without the presence of the Holy Spirit -- visualized as a Dove descending at the baptism of Jesus or tongues of fire at his ascent from form. This echoes the New Thought trinity, depicted in the symbol below.

Science of Mind symbol based on charts by Ernest Holmes.
The "V" represents both the devolution of Spirit into form and the evolution of form into Spirit

Dangers of the Subtle: Transcend and Include
Because a subtle experience is inherently subjective, each person's experiences will be different, Ken said. And this leads many moderns to be "allergic" to subtle experiences as non-scientific fantasy. The opposite danger, he said, is becoming too fascinated by subtle experiences, becoming "addicted" to them. The solution, he said, is Transcend and Include. Transcend the fascination with subtle experiences, but include their useful manifestations.

Start with Mindfulness
But how do we develop awareness of subtle energy? The most useful comment for me was Terry Patten saying that the way to go to a place in the subtle realm is to think about it. Wow, I thought, That simplifies a massive field. Diane Hamilton told of a meditation student who wanted to leave her classes after six years because nothing was happening. She gave him instructions to point out subtle energy experiences he was having but not noticing. It revolutionized his experience and changed his mind to continue.

Bringing the Subtle to Relationships
Terry said that the work of Integral should not primarily be teaching people to achieve samadhis  (states of bliss in meditation), but about developing a live engagement with each other in relationships. He called for an "indigenous" Integral approach, not based in Tibetan or other cultures. And for this approach he may have been "off the reservation" of previous Integral discussions. But now he is squarely in the center of them.

Terry said we can think of two kinds of spiritual practice.

• Space-based: in which we wake up to nondual dimensions of consciousness
• Time-based:  in which we discover the unique blueprint for our soul's journey using the animating energetics of this world.

Enchantment and Second Person relationship to the Divine
Jeff  Salzman told how his primary focus these days is reclaiming the sense of enchantment he had in his traditional religious youth. As he nurtures a Second Person (I-You) communion with the Divine, he likewise communes with all of nature. For example, he said he loves tulips in the springtime. He grows masses of them and surrounds himself with them. He speaks to them, telling them he loves them. And he likes to imagine they love him back. The trouble is, he says, enchantment can go too far. He begins to realize they may not love him because he chops their little heads off. And when he chooses one,  is the one next to it lonely or jealous? I  love the joyful way Jeff always brings things down to earth.

The Course in Miracles tells us that the Holy Spirit resides in relationships. Second person is about relationships. And relationships, Jeff said, are messy.

This call was offered in advance of an October Integral Living Room workshop in Boulder on Subtle Energy and Soul Work. I may consider going.

Beta testing HyLighter: speed learning by integrating all documents?

What if you could glance at a document and see the  overlaps between your thinking and that of many other readers, including the input of smart machines. Would you learn faster, think bigger, and come up with better solutions to problems?  And might such a process support worldwide dissemination of multiple perspectives? This is the dream of genius entrepreneur David Lebow, founder of the startup HyLighter.

In grad school, Lebow set himself the goal of coming up with a new idea for improving education. But after vast research, he realized he was only regurgitating the ideas of others. So he took scissors to his sources and spread clippings across his living room floor, arranging and rearranging ideas to see connections. The result was an "Aha" moment  that led him to write an award winning paper that is still influencing how we teach twenty years later.*

It became Lebow's passion to automate his thinking process so that others could benefit it from it. His initial impulse was to help instill love of learning among young students. But the system he developed may equally serve to track terrorists, solve corporate problems, get loans to 3rd world farmers, harmonize world religions, and turn academics into gleeful pigs in slop.

All the World's Sacred Texts

I met David while he was in the Washington DC area recently to attend Idea Connect. When he told me he was looking for groups to beta test his system, I knew just who to connect him with: my fellow Integral fans at One Spirit Wisdom Integration Circle (OSWIC) who are plumbing the sacred texts of all world religions to find common themes and Integral memes. Indeed it was pigs in slop all the way down when I introduced him to developmental psychologist Barbara Kinney and Pakistani academic Nomi Naeem who works for Brooklyn Public Library while writing a masters thesis on Integral approaches to education. Excited talk of "social sense making" and "curated conversations" hinted at new possibilities for how we learn and work together.

Meaning, Mormons, and Motorcycle Maintenance

Because I used to teach the document commenting system of Adobe Acrobat, I was eager to get a peek at how Hylighter compares. So Lebow gave me a testing account into which I uploaded some Ken Wilber essays and the Sharma-Cook Greuter paper on Polarities and Ego Development. I test drove HyLighter's ability to cross-link documents in the system and on the Web. And within ten minutes I was having that Internet wormhole experience where one delightful stumble-upon leads to another. A Sharma-Cook Greuter reference to too much meaning-making sparked a thought that led me to a book about mythology in Mormonism, Tinkling Cymbals and Sounding Brass. Then I was off to a forum for fans of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, where the instructions to new members fascinated me for twenty minutes and  reinforced my belief that Pirsig's work foreshadows Wilber's. I put those links into my comments on the Sharma, Cook Greuter paper. So the question is, will other readers find them to be as titilating as I did?

Possibilities and Work to Do

After numerous readers have placed comments, links, and tags in a document, those items can be assembled into various reports including a "mashup" of comments, links and tags common to many documents. Lebow says HyLighter needs several more months to work out bugs and build a sleeker interface. But it already looks to me like a tool that can greatly enhance how we integrate the vast amounts of data we must swim through to reach the new perspectives we need.

HyLighter screenshot shows on the left  multiple reader comments for each fragment of highlighted text. Comments from many documents can be assembled into a Mashup as illustrated below.

Illustration of a Hylighter Mashup showing reader comments from many documents on selected topics.
Illustrations from Hylighter.com.

* Constructivist Values for Instructional Systems Design: Five Principles toward a New Mindset, David Lebow, 1995

Thank God for Michael Dowd: Evidentiary Mystic

Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd

Beyond the "save the planet" message of evolutionary evangelist Michael Dowd, it is his way of being that may role model our best hope for the future. I had the privilege of spending time with Dowd and his wife, science writer Connie Barlow, at an event yesterday. The were in the DC area finishing up a six-month, cross-country march for climate change. Dowd spoke at one of my spiritual communities, Celebration Center for Spiritual Living, Falls Church. on "Coming Home to Reality: The Future is Calling Us to Greatness."

Dowd and Barlow demonstrate a belief-busting bundle of contradictions.

Is Dowd a hyperactive nine-year-old or a highly disciplined samurai for goodness?

Is Barlow a bookish intellectual or a warm passionate activist?

Is their marriage a mission trip or a love match?

The answers are Yes! Yes! and Yes! Polarities reconciled. "Both-And" held in precise, dynamic flow.  Is this what second tier looks like?

In fact, it's polarities as far as the eye can see with these two. "Thank God for Evolution" is the title of Dowd's best-known book. He and Barlow travel the country in a van adorned with an image of the Jesus and Darwin fishes kissing. She is a self-described atheist in alignment with the Unitarian churches where they most often speak, yet she arrived early to our New Thought service expecting mystical music that feeds her, (she got it).

I  am eager for answers in the forthcoming "Evidentiary Mystic," the lead article Dowd has contributed to the latest issue of ONEing,  the journal of Richard Rohr's Center for Action and Contemplation.

Action and contemplation.

That's it. These two people integrate being and doing in a big bang's worth of passionate energy that fills the space around them with a background radiation of love, purpose, and integrity.

Integral Name Dropping
After the event, my Integral Emergence Meetup buddies hosted Dowd and Barlow for a meal at a Vietnamese Buddhist restaurant, aptly named Present. ("Be careful not to over-emphasize the present," Dowd had said. "If you are in love with time, you will equally honor the past and the future.")

Dowd spoke fluently of knowing every big name in the human potential and Integral communities.

He used to teach the Spiral Dynamics developmental model. Now he argues with his good friend Jeff Salzman that human progress is not inevitable.  He feels himself a soul brother with Terry Patten, who also questions the inevitability of progress but passionately advocates holding nature as sacred. He argues with Ken Wilber that a Buddhist metaphysics penetrates Wilber's supposedly metaphysics-free Integral Theory. There is no evidence that consciousness precedes existence, Dowd says.

And yet, this man who says he has "no belief in anything supernatural," radiates the sacred.

Practice as the secret?
How does he do it? I may have found the answer when I rushed home to read chapter 11 in Dowd's book on practices for building evolutionary integrity. Dowd lives by his practices. In the set-up before the main event and in the lunch afterwards, I saw him practice at least three of the "practices" recommended in his chapter. Whether ordering a meal, managing a conversation,  expressing gratitude to a host, or sharing stories about the management of sex and addictions, the man walks his talk. And that, more than anything he said in his eloquent and passionate presentation, is what sent me away feeling hopeful and inspired.

Integral Movie Review: Perspectives on Perspectives in "The Stories We Tell"

Canadian director Sarah Polley has a secret in "The Stories We Tell," but I don't think it's the one critics are raving about. Supposedly the movie is a structure-bending, acted documentary about the director's parents. Most critics see it as a rich exploration of memory and the way each of us constructs a different version of events from our perspective. As such, it aligns with Integral's call to take perspectives on perspectives (P on P) as the best way to grow. But I left the movie feeling hollow, confused, manipulated. A friend's comment that we got to know everyone but Sarah herself tipped me off as to why. I think possibly this movie is just a shadow of the real story the director is hiding. But--spoiler alert--I can't explain that without giving away the plot in the next paragraph.

Through interviews with each member of Sarah's family, we learn how the polarity mismatch between her vibrant mother Diane and cool father Michael--both actors--led Diane to an affair with a producer, opening the possibility that Michael is not Sarah's biological father. The uncovering of this secret impacts the family in ways that would, indeed, make  a great Lifetime made-for-TV movie. And techniques in how the story is told break new ground in that postmodern, twist-it way (leaving me personally feeling first charmed and then manipulated).

But the supposed layering of perspectives that critics are hailing to me amounted only to minor differences in detail--a who-knew-what-when. As such, the story surely provides moving grist for other families touched by affairs. But I see a much more unusual story hidden within. How does Sarah feel about her discovery and its impact on the beloved man who raised her? That is the one intimate detail we never learn, and within it is the key to the story beyond the story.

Sarah Polley goes on a quest to find her biological father. What she discovers will devastate Michael, the  man who raised her. And so, to soften the blow, she brilliantly decides to make a documentary, giving him the role of a lifetime as both writer and star. It is a ploy that succeeds magnificently.  Michael is able to turn the devastating revelation into an homage to his dead wife and a chance to publicly do the right thing in how he responds. Sarah is let off the hook for exposing Michael to pain and  wins Canada's best film of the year.

Now that's a story.

Integral Life of Pi Movie Review

Because  reading "Life of Pi" affected me deeply when I was just getting to know Integral, I approached the movie with longing and dread -- both of which were fulfilled. Where many critics saw a sea adventure with a "tacked on introduction," I saw a magnificent example of integration in the life of a small boy in India -- with a tacked on sea adventure for an ending.

The movie does better justice than I might have expected to the boy's attraction to three religions. It even hints at the attractions of each: Hinduism for its lush sensuality of color, incense  and dance; Islam for the physicality of its prayer and daily practice, and Christianity for its love. But what most people see in these scenes is a bland commercial for interfaith tolerance. Whereas I see an integration of beauty, truth, and goodness. In the book, for me, Pi is not just absorbing every belief system he comes in contact with. Fueled by his mystical experiences (not in movie), he is instinctively integrating polarities by ignoring beliefs. Here he is, for example, being attracted to Christianity by the warmth of a missionary priest who takes time to sit with him each day.

The first thing that drew me in was disbelief. What? Humanity sins but it's God's Son who pays the price? ... What a downright weird story. What peculiar psychology. 

I asked for another story, one that I might find more satisfying. But Father Martin made me understand that the stories that came before it were simply prologue to the Christians... 

That a god should put up with adversity I could understand. The gods of Hinduism face their shares of bullies, kidnappers and usurpers. What is the Ramayana but the account of one long bad day for Rama. Adversity, yes. Treachery, yes. But humiliation? Death? Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? 

Love. That was Father Martin's answer.

The boy's quest to integrate is immune from both his family's insistence that only science can save modern India, and from the objections of  the Hindu, Muslim, and Christian clerics who tell him he must choose among religions. Indeed, the movie drops what for me was the climactic scene of the clerics fighting for Pi's soul. Perhaps the director considered it too incendiary--especially post Benghazi.  But it was that scene in the book that fused itself with my personal experience like honey on a host  (early Catholic childhood analogy alert) such that I couldn't tell where Pi began and I left off.

I was reading  "Life of Pi"  in 2004 as I was having my own re-introduction to Christianity from a bishop who seemed to cross boundaries of love and firmness in ways that seemed impossible (as recounted in my book, The Bishop and the Seeker.) And just as I was introduced to Islam by an Imam who crusades for applying reason to the ancient stories of his faith (as this post).

As my husband read that scene of interfaith tug-of-war to me in my hospital room following a surgery, I laughed and cried--clutching a pillow to keep my stitches from popping--with that sense of SOMEBODY UNDERSTANDS WHAT I'M GOING THROUGH.

So I have always wanted to enact that scene, and now that the movie has expurgated it, I plan to produce it  at a gathering of friends. We'll discuss the movie Dec 8 at a swank club off Dupont Circle  which is co-owned by a friend of mine who teaches mythology at Georgetown University. Contact me if you'd like an invite or a re-enactment at your own gathering.

And please tell us below how Life of Pi affected you.

Integral Occupy Wall Street: Love and Shadow

Integral commentator Joe Perez notes that an Integral presence at Occupy Wall Street will not be based in resentment but in love and full acknowledgment of our own shadows.

Integral politics knows you can't just burn down the banks....Integral morality does not arise from resentment, feelings of jealousy, or animosity of any kind. It asks us to look at our individual shadows and acknowledge when our own antagonism towards the ultra-rich borders on its own sort of greed and will to power. Integral politics is based on love.

Beautiful Joe!

Because my Integral Life Practices Meetup group in DC was just working with the book's shadow module last week, I wondered how such a shadow-aware protest might look. Just for fun, I've revamped an old sign: