First responding to Tim

Tim wrote: ...  I have had that thought, and it does seem to align at least to some degree with various existential crsis. (i.e. I could be having a crisis and not really be conscious of it? And thus, not grow from it or be forced to becasue of it. I really think that could be true!)  ....  Martin, ... : I have been thinking very heavily lately that so much of what causes shadows to occur is "survival" or very simply, existential crisis. The shadow is so often a literal survival mechanism when the self experiences something which it just can't handle, process, "survive," digest, integrate etc. and this immeidatley causes the shadow phenomenon. Is this what you mean by these spheres of existence going along with the shadow? What an important insight if this is so.

I think this is all correct, Tim. If the existential dimension of stages and states is about self-transformation (of one's stages and states), then one can be aware or not aware of a particular shadow or crisis. This would be the second sense of "boomeritis" of which Ken writes: one is that at a lower stage even high meditative state reproduces certain problems from the lower stage in the higher state, and certainly if one has not embraced and then disowned one's shadow, it will interfere even in the "religious" nondual state and also at a high level culture. So existential sphere indicates, as one climbs the mountain, besides the altitude and the state, also the intensity of one's consciousness (of its stages and states), or the quality of awareness.

On this Lattice, the kosmic address would read three axes 3D:

consciousness  (vertical stages or line altitudes and horizontal states) + awareness (transversal existential spheres of self-transformation or the self as integer).

Responding to "mrteacup"

You said: "... terms such as despair, sin-consciousness and even faith seem foreign to what integral spirituality has thus far been about, which is that it tends to exclude the submissive modality of spirituality. This appears to be in the process of being corrected, and yet often I feel the need to translate these terms and be able to view them on both sides, even though my first I have a lot of familiarity and comfort with Christianity as my first encounter with spirituality, and Kierkegaard's anguish also resonates with me. So the question is more of an observation: its difficult to integrally navigate this terrain."

Wonderful question. I write and think freely and in my own voice, so I am not familiar with all ins+outs of integral thinking, what fits and what does not, and I am not trying to satisfy this or that approach per se. I hope this does not interfere in dialogue with those who follow IS and its framework more to the letter and systematically.

Take sin-consciousness out of popular culture, Nietzsche's critique of slave morality of Christians, and even certain Calvinism, and think of it, perhaps, in terms of Jewish Yom Kippur or compassionate Buddha. To own one's shadow is to arrive at a psychoanalytic sense of one's neuroses and repressions or at what Sartre calls bad faith or Heidegger guilt and "they" self; to own one's shadow before God or spiritually is to arrive at the religious intensity of one's despair or sin-consciousness. Nietzsche has it wrong: There is nothing submissive about the sexo- or cocain- or alco-holic saying before others and the cosmos or Life that s/he is powerless to stop the addiction and only power greater than the self so addicted can save one, this is an act of faith, risk, and courage. There is nothing per se Lutheran about it either. On Yom Kippur service one repeats I believe 5 times all levels of addiction and failure one has done to self and others, and so one is inscribed into the Book of Life. Part of the personal relation to spirit (I-I, UL) is the I-Thou intensity of awareness in which one is in need of unconditional love and healing, and in this perspective, one is not God, one prays to God without and deeply within. The other side of sin-consciousness is faith and joy, fully creative self.

Perhaps what is missing from the seemingly religious master-forms of heroism, e.g., of a suicide bomber or a religious-sounding crusader of the war on terror, is an awareness of one's shadow of being a Christian, Jew, Moslem .... What is missing from militant forms of these religions is sin-consciousness or their owning of the dissociated shadow. The European thinking after Auschwitz is all sin-consciousness, perhaps without God, so without redemptive healing, and yet even as such a phantom limb of the religious, this awareness has a harder time being so cock-sure as the younger North American zeal to export its world-view to others. There is a lot of religious talk in the American culture, but are we aware of our national shadow?

You said: The second question concerns Kierkegaard's rejection of Hegelian developmental logic. I wonder if an integral view would reconcile Hegel and Kierkegaard. If it is correct to say that Kierkegaard was concerned that Hegels's views of Spirit in the lower-left quadrant made obsolete a personal approach to the divine in the upper-right quadrant, as integral thinkers we can affirm Kierkegaard in this respect, but at the same time, affirm a non-deterministic, non-mechanistic interpretation of Hegel in the lower-left quadrant. It seems that in fact, LL development does not in any way preclude the need for individual transformation - the work still needs to be done at the individual level. Even if my culture is at Green, I must still undergo despair, long dark nights of the soul and transformation to get there. Another way to think of it is how freshman students always believe that they are the first ones to discover knowledge -- there's a sense in which, just because you didn't dig up Plato's works and translate them yourself, you have still made a discovery when you read them. So, is it possible that Kierkegaard's spheres of existence incorporate both stages and stages, but he could not accept their developmental nature because of the similarity to Hegel? In this sense, we might even view Kierkegaard as a Green rejecter of Hegelian Orange and Catholic Amber hierarchies.

Many thinkers tried to reconcile Kierkegaard and Hegel-Marx: among these prominent are the early Marcuse and Sartre and even Habermas. I believe AQAL can do it very well, and that is why I brought it up in my question. I have tried to bring Habermas and SK together in my published work, but I think it can be done more thoroughly with Ken's stages of c., which really are levels of social and cultural evolution studied by Weber, Durkheim, Piaget, Kohlberg, Habermas=Hegel-Marx, yet going beyond all of them in positing religious forms of postmodern culture, what I say is the religiosity "after the death of God" proclaimed by Nietzsche. I plan to write on this precisely, as this is the way to go to articulate, contrary to Hegel-Weber-Habermas, the 4th domain of culture (religious) arising after postmodern rationalization, linguistification and secularization of traditional forms of culture.

You said about my conference call:
"You say "spheres of existence are not a direct result of social or cultural evolution (archaic, mythic, feudal, modern, green, etc.) and they are not achieved by picking up at the highets level where the previous generation left off. With stages of consciousness one can begin where previous historical evolution left off, or one can regress all the way to archaic level, though one cannot outdo prior holons of development..." To my understanding, UL stages are also not the product of LL evolution, nor is UL development a simple matter of picking up where the previous generation left off. A young child encounters a great deal of despair while developing out of Red into Amber, though her culture is at Orange or Green. Kierkegaard uses cultural language to describe his spheres, so he seems to have believed that an individual interacts with her culture in the particulars of a sphere's final expression, so why would that individual be influenced (indirectly?) by the culture, to transform herself? My impression is that Kierkegaard wants to preserve some aspect of the individual that is apart from and prior to culture, and I'm not sure, in the context of both Whitehead and post-modernism, that we can really do that. The problem that Kierkegaard faced is that God must be able to judge an individual. I do not know that integral spirituality faces that same constraint, but my intuition is that it does not. You say that with stages of consciousness, one cannot outdo prior holons of development -- I think that this is not the case. In fact, individuals must outdo prior holons of development, or cultural development would not occur at all.
But beyond these points, let's assume that spheres of existence refer to shadow states of some kind. Can we say that shadow states tend to fall into the basic categories of aesthetic, ethical, ethico-religious, religious spheres? But does the shadow not also experience stages, and gradual, increasing re-integration of projected aspects of the psyche?

I liked this question a lot, thanks, it clarifies great deal!

I see it this way: One stages emerge, they are there for all to start with or not, and I meant it only in this Hegelian-Marxian-Weberian sense that we cannot undo, e.g., the French revolution, as a stage of culture, even though some individuals and groups even in 2006 might think of the U.S. president as a king with sort of divine rights. So yes, LL does not dictate where UL will begin, it can be lower, but you cannot begin in UL on a higher level that has not emerged in LL, or can you? Or you can do so only as a Buddha, Socrates, Isaiah, Jesus...pushing LL to the next level.

 But in terms of spheres, unlike stages, one can begin anywhere, go up and down, and so existential self-transformation is not dictated by stages of cultural development. The same applies to states. But I agree also that spheres of existence cannot be thought of apart from cultural altitude or states of consciousness. So the challenge for us--if we had a seminar or a reading group on this--would be to find out exactly what the relation is among altitude (stages of consciousness), states of consciousness, and existential spheres (intensity or awareness of one's self, from shadow to transparency before oneself and Godhood).

What do you think? I guess, we do need a reading group, semester class, longer time ….

Lastly, there is a debate in Continental philosophy of religion about what Ken calls "the myth of the given" and what in my profession is called the hermeneutical context for all r/Revelation and communication, on the one hand, and unmediated or direct relationship to r/Revelation or what Jean-Luc Marion calls in phenomenology "the saturated phenomenon". Is there a place for the latter or does the postmodern, hermeneutical-linguistic turn require that all relation to self, others, the Other is of a mediated form? What then happens in awareness of prayer or in phenomenology of the saturated (uncommon) phenomena whose intuition exceeds the concepts we hold? Marion says that certain phenomena are saturated with the excess of intuition, and so they exceed the concepts, symbols, knowledge we have. I think this newest debate in postmodern phenomenology of religion is far from settled, and I suspect it will come back to Ken's thinking as he engages it more directly.

Presently, I want to hold ( and I stand to be corrected) that even after the postmodern, hermeneutical-linguistic turn there is a possibility of life, spirit, cosmos, call It/Thou/I God, speaking to us in ways that exceed the terms of that turn. So this is far from holding to a myth of the given, but it is also far from holding the divine hostage to poststructuralism or the claim that all reality is text. I think that the best of Judaic midrash and hermeneutics has some time ago already solved this conundrum of infinite interpretations of the Bible as a literary text and at the same time being able speaking to God as Moses did (not uttering the name, yet speaking in r/Revelation).

Thank you

MBM