TETRA-ENACTION: In the UL (upper left) quadrant are the letters "TE", in the UR quadrant are the letters "RA", in the LL quadrant are the letters "ENAC" and in the LR quadrant are the letters "ION". In the center of TETRAENACTION is a letter "t", the space that makes the quadrants and stands for tetra-enaction. fulfilling the missing letter for "Te_ra enac_ion". In order to SEE the whole word one must look at the CENTER to see the quadrants simultaneously arise, as is the definition of tetra-enaction.
To check out Integirl's/Jana's blogs please check out:
http://integralcreatives.zaadz.com/blog/2007/7/integirl_and_the_momentous_leap
INTEGIRL NAKED: A Ken Wilber experiment
By Jana Espiritu Santo
As a closet-Wilber fan for many years, I was totally stunned, shocked, and overwhelmed when I won the first-ever Integral Naked written submission contest in February 2005. In a state of exhilaration, I was flown out from Southern California to Denver to attend the first Integral Rave. At a popular downtown club, I pimped my Maps of Meaning vest (a thrift store score with copied and pasted models from SES) and my hand made colored coil SD bracelet, ready to party and be merry with the I-I folks, integrating into a we-space I had waited years to find. It was a joyous and delightful experience, yet not with out its other half...
I felt like I was on top of the world, which was the perfect set-up to hit bottom (law of gravity!); for over a period of time after the “trip,” my inauthenticity reached its summit. I realized that I was NOT an integral “culture carrier” as I would have liked, but the pseudo-integral cultural virus: the Boomeritis poster child from the West Coast Valley (like OHMYGOD!?); all sparkly Flatland personality and not much character depth. My inner dissonance and self-contradictions eventually peaked into crisis as my self-system reached its saturation point of "sin". Life seemed to have distilled into a binary choice as I set myself up for annihilation; there was no other place to hide as my Green community (my identified affiliation) disintegrated leaving me totally and utterly alone. I could either stay within the comfortable ignorance of self-absorption and turn away from the truth of that crisis, further embedding into the Matrix (the blue pill), or take the difficult path of growth and self-awareness to SEE the Matrix and deeper truth from facing that crisis even if on some level it meant radical death (the red pill).
With trepidation and fear, I
swallowed the red pill as I knew where the first would lead to and had been
leading to: a dead-end revolution, rather than open-ended evolution. Here are
some things I have learned from that choice
(which ends up being a living choice in every moment), its sequential path,
Ken Wilber's theory, and from a very special person who entered my life at the
RIGHT time thereafter, Eliot Bissey, my Integral Creatives partner. This is simply the journey of becoming HUMAN.
AUTHENTICITY
Nothing is more prevalent in Boomeritis than the infatuation with the transpersonal self-image, at the cost of authenticity, what Wilber refers to as the UL growth requirement (necessary but not sufficient). Investing energy into an image stifles the growth process by virtue that a REAL person has to be present before healthy development can occur; energy is used to maintain the LIE rather than deepen the truth. Although I was sincere, I had manipulated, consciously and unconsciously, the content of my own subjectivity to create a fragmented self-concept in which I could identify with and project to others, thereby escaping the REAL movements and attachments going on in my interior all my life. It might have been a “high-quality” image (under the integral slogan) but functioned just like any other image: to win the approval of others at the cost of (UL) self-awareness (Byron Katie has helped a lot in this!). Carl Jung once said, “The foundation of all mental illness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering,” and likewise, inauthenticity and the manufacturing of a "construct" to attach to and present to others delays facing interior turmoil of the REAL self-system. My conceptual mind dissociated from my subjective experience as I used Integral Theory (and other such transrational rhetoric) to hide the territory, asserting a pseudo-territory with endless (meta-) theoretical violations, speaking hollow signifiers with absent signifieds (words without meaning). As a beginner meta-pilot, I have only begun to use the map more appropriately to navigate the actual territory, while becoming more aware of when I use it inappropriately; the 2-fold play of 'fullness and emptiness in the mind.'
After realizing the importance of authenticity, I was able to appreciate
authentic people at lower developmental levels. Stability at a lower level is better than fragmentation at a higher; so the beginning of the integral journey for me was about getting centered, stable, and clear. In my job I work with people at stable rational level which is helping me grow out of many pre-rational tendencies; I am learning more from them than so-called spiritual people. Many people like to promote
themselves as more evolved (part of a construct in which to conceal aspects of
reality and maintain distance from the shadow) in their association to theories
about evolution and identification to words such as “spiritual.” I have quickly
learned to keep it REAL even when it is relatively “low.” As my priorities have shifted, now I would rather have the REAL me disliked then the fake me liked.
This image can also be known as the persona (in Jungian analytic psych) and in Wilber's theory persona + shadow=ego. Becoming aware of the whole ego is essential before ego-transcendence can even be a possibility, otherwise the splits and fragments of ego can be destructive to the spiritual path, while so called "transcendence" can actually deepen this fracture. (Stages cannot be skipped!) Currently, I am working on becoming aware of the shadow and persona simultaneously, developing into a whole ego! (It's harder than it sounds!), rather than elevating myself with some spiritual praxis.
GROWING PAINS
Prior to this transformation, I had denied and escaped LOOKING AT the structure of my consciousness with the license of interpretation in the lateral expanse of Flatland. Lost in the infinite sea of relativistic pluralism of a Green Bond, I could easily escape from looking at my own center-of-gravity by constantly dressing up in multiple (1st tier) perspectives at random (although particularly convenient!). Before I went through this crisis of consciousness, I thought my perspective was deepening (or more accurately I convinced myself it was through cognitive rationalizations) when it was only the shuffling CONTENT (re-arrangement looks like change!), the horizontal friction of translation within the same stuck perspective (paraphrasing Wilber: a furniture change NOT a floor change!). So for many years, I thought I was growing and expanding consciousness when I was merely shape-shifting and playing various magic tricks to myself, an illusionist if you will (and in Flatland, when wide is interpreted as deep you're fucked!!). I interpreted reality in a way that supported my inauthenticity, blind spots, and egoic contractions and because this interpretation was in STRUCTURE rather than CONTENT, I could NOT SEE... until the lightning bolt struck and I began to slowly gain some objectivity of the meta-mechanics to this internal implosion (awareness of the transformative process). Any model can be used for good or for evil, for evolution or for regression, under the guise of its opposites. I did not experience the glamorous butterfly metamorphosis of the Fluffy New Age, but structural demolition with a universe-sized wrecking ball!
In the same way one would
identify with the physical body, I had identified to my subjective perspective
(my center) and so the transformative experience was a very excruciating
immanent death, much harder than I ever imagined. It caused a great deal of
instability and chaos initially, as letting go meant that there was NO-THING to
hold on to and this went from months to years (stage growth takes time). Eventually this yielded greater liberation (less suffering) and
transcendence (as this process is virtually endless) but certainly not at the beginning; which is why many abort this process and rationalize that it isn't good! [Of course, this is a SPIRAL that we are talking about here and so the same process occurs in increasing orders, don't fool yourself that it is over and some kind of final plateau has been reached, NOT in the relative, hehe!] Because my perspective WAS me
rather than WITHIN me, the pain of dis-identification was in direct proportion
to the intensity of identification, Kosmic Symmetry, indeed! ME-as-persona simply died.
I changed my whole
life by aligning my intention more towards truth and objectivity rather than
towards ego and over-subjectivity, with the help of my Beloved who naturally
prioritizes truth over ego comforts (a special gift of his, yet he terms it his
“curse"). On the identity line, this helped me become
aware of my CENTER, which I admit is 1st tier. I am in the process of
letting go of the attachments to mental concepts that "arranged" what
was arising within the territory to be something it was not, and to the behavioral
secondary distractions that have originated from interior pathologies (when
DOING escapes from BEING). I stopped "doing" a lot of things to start seeing, giving up my art and music for a few years. Krishnamurti once said that "seeing is acting," and I am slowly learning what this means.
This new intentional alignment also accelerated
growth in the spiritual line as I differentiated SEEING from THINKING,
spiritual from cognitive. For the first time I could SEE the SPIRIT behind some
of my choices and all of the dark 4th dimensional "spirits" within me tugging for my life force by ceasing my identity. Without spiritual awareness there is unconscious resonance with
SPIRIT, in which SPIRIT is not questioned but allowed entry into the human
vessel through contract/payoff. I can remember when Eliot once told me that
“the choice is made in spirit before it gets to the thinker’s mind." The
mind can only rationalize the choice and allow it to take root in the body-mind, who then defends it till death perpetuating the wheel of karma…. anything to prolong its inevitable demise (it burns in
the light). We are the channels of the spiritual realm and seeing the spirit
behind our energy, actions, and interior movements demands an incredible amount
of objectivity and vision (beyond the mind). Direct experience means to be free
from thought, to see before the confinement to mind, which is usually in the form of perspective, LOL! Many integral theorists can think, but not very many can SEE. And no one can teach one how to see. In this way, we are all alone, in this particular esoteric part of the spiritual journey.
Many spiritual communities assign the notion of "spirit" as pure goodness (spirit-as-concept). I have learned that in the spiritual realm there is a spectrum from good to evil as with all realms in duality (mind, body etc.). To bias "spirit" in this way, is an excellent trap by that "spirit" to never see itself. Once you label anything as good; you have lost the ability to see in the Dynamic. This is the world of the living, not a world of static things. Self-awareness is a continually regenerating feedback loop (with all quadrants) with endless potential in all directions.
DEVELOPMENTAL HEALING
From one context
“higher is better,” yet in another context the opposite is quite true (a gift
from postmodern context-bound truths!). A more integrated lower level is more
stable and grounded than a higher fragmented level. Lacking authenticity, my
self-system had to eventually crack and crumble as it was unGROUNDed; Thanatos
in collaboration with Eros! I broke down the pseudo-SIGNIFICANT for the REAL
FUNDAMENTAL, as a misalignment only gets increasingly further from the
Source and the "perfectly vertical". I was very lucky that my
external life conditions supported such a drastic “regression” (Tetra
was in action, LOL!), as I started over, stripping down to the bare essentials:
eating, sleeping, and getting by… life at infrared/survival altitude! I
was fortunate to have not had a crystallized identity (no college
degree, no career, no status, no social construct, essentially) as everything supported
this ego death, even my job in science/biotech allowed for transformation as scientific work is silent, repetitive, and alone. Although, without such solid identify, my life hasn't been easy! I have days to sit and think about anything I want, while my hands move. Traveling back to childhood fusion and the pre-egoic swamp, I began
the differentiation process anew, feeling like an infantile mute with all these
prerational twitches. I decreased social interaction and moved into the I-half
of the Spiral, feeling internally uncomfortable, behaviorally awkward, and
neurologically tweaked (increased interior sensitivity with increased exterior
complexification, perhaps). Prior to my transformation, I had used the relative concept
of the “eternal moment now” from my embedded perspective to hide from
space-time dissociations and developmental fractures (unseen Zone #2). I was
attached to the present moment and so could NOT see my own structural
pathologies. Using ideas of the ABSOLUTE, I was RELATIVELY fucked, LOL!
Stressing the importance of the genealogical perspective along with the
nondual perspective, Wilber has quoted Dilthey: “Not through
introspection but only through history do we come to know ourselves.” Of course, the integral path would include BOTH introspection and history.
THE OTHER
In IS, Wilber discusses the absence of 2nd-person perspective in Boomeritis and its inability to worship and surrender to the Other outside the self. Becoming more structurally aware, I realized that I never participated in genuine inter-subjectivity as my consciousness could not hold the subjectivity of another, embedded in my own subjectivity (Zone #1 absolutism). Call this FEAR OF INTIMACY, if you will (because I had no self-intimacy). It is the Zen teaching that you must empty your cup of tea before you allow another to fill it. 3rd-person and 2nd-person perspective were a projection and extension of my 1st-person perspective, creating a closed feedback loop of narcissism, sacrificing LL meaning and UR & LR objectivity for UL self-involvement and self-absorption. At this time in the past, my LL community (Green coalition) was a host for inter-subjective co-dependence, in which unexamined mutual resonance was dysfunctional resonance of UL viral swapping (Boomeritis sharing interpreted as caring!). We elevated pre-egoic and egoic resonance as transcendent, while unconsciously feeding a sickly dark “transcendent” spirit. Boomeritis tends to interpret SPIRIT-as-ONLY-good in its lack of truly balanced and objective transrational perception; an integral framework would see that there are good and dark forces in body-mind-spirit; or for those sensitive to language we could call it healthy and unhealthy spirit. Eliot came into my life when self-worship and self-absorption reached its destructive limit (crash and burn time!) and has helped me tremendously on this path along with the Integral Matrix group who synchronistically formed at this time, all with whom I can now experience the “miracle called WE”.
To read the letter that Eliot wrote me at the beginning of this crisis go to eyeDialogue (SPIRITUAL CRISIS). I read this over and over for an entire year (and still read it) as a meditation for evolution.
GROUNDED INTELLECTUALISM
The integral path also demands strengthening the Rational Mind; it is not merely a mental position for the ego’s supremacy, as the Rational can become the many creative ways to “rationalize.” I used the notion of “nonduality,” mostly a pre-rational sentiment (perhaps valid some of the time…well…until interpreted by my structure, hello!!), to rationalize my behavior and escape responsibility in the RELATIVE (after all, if we open our mouths (a space-time endeavor), we are speaking of and in the Relative!). Elevating stupidity (PTF), I indulged in pointless mental abstractions as “probing the Mystery,” calling absurd contradictions ‘profound kosmic polarities’. More conscious of this, each day I work on weeding away irrational beliefs, pre-trans fallacies and mental distortion that block clarity and penetrating insight. Part of what differentiates integral awareness from New Age fluff is the ability to be totally objective about the transrational, cognitive sharpness combined with technical analysis applied to All perspectives. In the absence of discernment, “spirituality” may be nothing more than a tantalizing sensation or a monological monologue sprinkled with integral rhetoric!
SHADOW DISTORTION
Before I looked within
to SEE, the “shadow” was a pathetic, lost aspect of myself who forgot my true
nature as love and light; later I realized that this was a retro-romantic
rationalization of a cozy concept that I didn't have to take much responsibility
for. I rationalized away the existence of “evil” or "bad" with
transcendent truths that were in reality comforting myths hijacking
transrational rhetoric for pre-rational security (a cluster fuck deluxe!). I
have found this error, I call the “abolishment of hell (for the purposes of
selective blindness)” quite popular in Boomeritis (especially with the
"Conversations with God" camp), and under logical analysis becomes
absurd and so “fluffy” seems more and more of an appropriate description for this
type of extreme IRRESPONSIBLE spirituality. If we exclude evil from our meta-map then we are certainly in trouble as we have decided to not look at half of reality.
A less biased meta-view with greater objectivity sees duality in the unmanifest and the manifest: infinite good and infinite evil manifesting its spectrum in finite form. (i.e. Jesus Christ and Hitler or our modern-day version of Krishnamurti and the Global Elite [?]). The Good, True and Beautiful have their relative opposites and are “not” the ABSOLUTE, which cannot be spoken about and has no opposite. Our childlike selves may want to make the better half of the RELATIVE (i.e. love, goodness, truth, beauty, bliss, heaven, divinity etc) to be ABSOLUTE (emptiness), but that appears to be a misuse of the word. Our meta-view must incorporate EVERYTHING, if it is truly integral. One man is having a blissful satori on a lotus cushion and another man is getting his head sawed off with a dull blade, very slowly while alive. This is what is happening, all of it...the best and the worst. Which part are we willing to see and which part do we turn our backs to? Are we awake to the "war" within and without? How important is that wakefullness to us?
Experiencing authentic shadow work
(a euphemism?) has been the hardest work of all, and has felt precisely
like “burning in hell for my sins”; religious metaphors can often be useful. In
the words of Kant, “Only through the hell of self-knowledge can one achieve
Godliness.” Healing and understanding of the world without, begins with
the diabolical descent within of redemption, humility, and purification
(a never-ending process). As Eliot once told me, “evil doesn’t get less
the higher up in consciousness you go, just less obvious and more
subtle.” Murder, torture and rape happens in the psychic just as it does
the gross (i.e. false gurus prey on immortal souls; serial killers prey
on mortal bodies). When we abandon and reject others we murder; when we use and
exploit others we rape, and when we abuse and neglect others we torture from
the crude to the subtle, from the passive to the active. Once we take off our
rose-colored glasses and look into the mirror, we may become AWARE that BOTH
good and evil potentials increase within us as we travel up the Spiral (the "damage" becomes less obvious and yet more significant.) This is
the living full-spectrum that we are responsible for, as the Gatekeepers
between Form and Formlessness, Heaven and Hell.
THE LL JOURNEY AND TODAY
Some so-called “spiritual” communities blindly promote pseudo-growth with egoic cross-validation, identifying with the Good, True, and Beautiful (selective blindness and projection). I know because I’ve taken part in some, and they served my need to appear like I was evolving, while I could stay comfortable in the self-acceptance that was self-absorption; when you wake up you have to change (and FUCK! says the ego!). Eliot says, “The corrective feedback from exterior correlates is rarely seen (or acknowledged) by this consciousness, let alone focused upon as something to integrate. That would require BOTH the authentic decision and resolve to consciously participate in one’s own evolution, AND the mindfulness to pay attention to what you don’t notice, watching the movement of both the fullness and emptiness of the mind.” As partners, our goal in community today, as being practiced in the Santa Monica Integral Matrix, is to help facilitate a cultural space to nurture the transformative process and its “legitimate suffering” with balanced awareness as well as the practice of ILP. We encourage grounded and stable growth, tested with the dynamic multi-dimensional quadratic truth tests (authenticity, accurate measurement and interpretation of data, depth of meaning, contextual appropriateness, functional fit, etc.), while committing to the ethical, moral, and spiritual responsibility of free will.
I am deeply grateful for this
community, I-I, and Eliot for supporting my own transformation that “saved” my
spiritual life from being a fashion statement of a shallow social parasite,
LOL! (Eliot and I have BOTH helped each other grow but in this essay I am just focusing on my growth. I sometimes feel that growth and change are sugar coated and wanted to give people a glimpse of the reality.) I am slowly becoming less of a suffering animal chasing my tail and
more of a peaceful centauric human-being. ;-) But I've got so much more to grow (remember BOTH fullness and emptiness).
Thanks for allowing
me time into your life to share. I am sharing the intimate side of the integral journey in hopes that it touches a few people in the larger community in which the complex process of growth and transformation becomes realistic and grounded and not some grandiose idea, image, or dream!!
....:JANA:....