YOUR great-great grandparents
would find it hard to believe the Boeing 747, but perhaps they’d have a
harder time believing last week’s news that obesity has become the second-leading
cause of death in the United States. Too much food a menace instead of
too little! A study released by the federal Centers for Disease Control
ranked “poor diet and physical inactivity” as the cause of 400,000 United
States deaths in 2000, trailing only fatalities from tobacco. Obesity,
the C.D.C. said, now kills five times as many Americans as “microbial agents,”
that is, infectious disease.
Moon
landings might seem less shocking to your great-great grandparents than
abundance of food causing five times as many deaths as germs; OutKast might
seem less bizarre to them than the House passing legislation last week
to exempt restaurants from being sued for serving portions that are too
large.
Your
recent ancestors would further be stunned by the notion of plump poverty.
A century ago, the poor were as lean as fence posts; worry about where
to get the next meal was a constant companion for millions. Today, America’s
least well-off are so surrounded by double cheeseburgers, chicken buckets,
extra-large pizzas and supersized fries that they are more likely to be
overweight than the population as a whole.
But the
expanding waistline is not only a problem of lower-income Americans who
dine too often on fast food. Today, the typical American is overweight,
according to the C.D.C., which estimates that 64 percent of American citizens
are carrying too many pounds for their height. Obesity and sedentary
living are rising so fast that their health consequences may soon supplant
tobacco as the No. 1 preventable cause of death, the C.D.C. predicts. Rates
of heart disease, stroke and many cancers are in decline, while life expectancy
is increasing - but ever-rising readings on the bathroom scale may be canceling
out what would otherwise be dramatic gains in public health.
O.K.,
it’s hard to be opposed to food. But the epidemic of obesity epitomizes
the unsettled character of progress in affluent Western society. Our lives
are characterized by too much of a good thing - too much to eat, to buy,
to watch and to do, excess at every turn. Sometimes achievement itself
engenders the excess: today’s agriculture creates so much food at such
low cost that who can resist that extra helping?
Consider
other examples in which society’s success seems to be backfiring on our
health or well-being.
PRODUCTIVITY Higher productivity
is essential to rising living standards and to the declining prices of
goods and services. But higher productivity may lead to fewer jobs.
Early
in the postwar era, analysts fretted that automation would take over manufacturing,
throwing everyone out of work. That fear went unrealized for a generation,
in part because robots and computers weren’t good at much. Today, near-automated
manufacturing is becoming a reality. Newly built factories often require
only a fraction of the work force of the plants they replace. Office technology,
meanwhile, now allows a few to do what once required a whole hive of worker
bees.
There
may come a point when the gains from higher productivity pale before the
job losses. But even if that point does not come, rapid technological
change is instilling anxiety about future employment: anxiety that makes
it hard to appreciate and enjoy what productivity creates.
TRAFFIC Cars are much better
than they were a few decades ago - more comfortable, powerful and reliable.
They are equipped with safety features like air bags and stuffed with CD
players, satellite radios and talking navigation gizmos. Adjusted for consumers’
rising buying power, the typical powerful new car costs less than one a
generation ago.
But in
part because cars are so desirable and affordable, roads are increasingly
clogged with traffic. Today in the United States, there are 230 million
cars and trucks in operation, and only 193 million licensed drivers - more
vehicles than drivers! Studies by the Federal Highway Administration show
that in the 30 largest cities, total time lost to traffic jams has almost
quintupled since 1980.
Worse,
prosperity has made possible the popularity of S.U.V.’s and the misnamed
“light” pickup trucks, which now account for half of all new-car sales.
Exempt from the fuel-economy standards that apply to regular cars,
sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks sustain American dependence on
Persian Gulf oil. A new study in
the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty showed that the rise in S.U.V.’s and
pickup trucks “leads to substantially more fatalities” on the road.
So just
as longevity might be improving at a faster clip were it not for expanding
waistlines, death rates in traffic accidents might show a more positive
trend were it not for the S.U.V. explosion.
The proliferation
of cars also encourages us to drive rather than walk. A century ago,
the typical American walked three miles a day; now the average is less
than a quarter mile a day. Some research suggests that the sedentary lifestyle,
rather than weight itself, is the real threat; a chubby person who
is physically active will be O.K. Studies also show that it is not necessary
to do aerobics to get the benefits of exercise; a half-hour a day of brisk
walking is sufficient. But more cars, driven more miles, mean less
walking.
STRESS It’s not just in your
mind: Researchers believe stress levels really are rising. People
who are overweight or inactive experience more stress than others, and
that now applies to the majority. Insufficient sleep increases stress,
and Americans now sleep on average only seven hours a night, versus eight
hours for our parents’ generation and 10 hours for our great-grandparents’.
Research by
Bruce McEwen, a neuroendocrinologist at Rockefeller University in New York,
suggests that modern stress, in addition to making life unpleasant, can
impair immune function - again, canceling out health gains that might otherwise
occur.
Prosperity
brings many other mixed blessings. Living standards keep rising, but
so does incidence of clinical depression. Cellphones are convenient,
but make it impossible to escape from office calls. E-mail
is cheap and fast, if you don’t mind deleting hundreds of spam messages. The
Internet and cable television improve communication, but deluge us with
the junkiest aspects of culture.
Americans
live in ever-nicer, ever-larger houses, but new homes and the businesses
that serve them have to go somewhere. Sprawl continues at a maddening
pace, while once-rustic areas may now be gridlocked with S.U.V.’s and power
boats.
Agricultural
yields continue rising, yet that means fewer family farms are needed. Biotechnology
may allow us to live longer, but may leave us dependent on costly synthetic
drugs. There are many similar examples.
Increasingly,
Western life is afflicted by the paradoxes of progress. Material
circumstances keep improving, yet our quality of life may be no better
as a result - especially in those cases, like food, where enough
becomes too much.
“The
maximum is not the optimum,” the ecologist Garrett Hardin, who died last
year, liked to say. Americans are choosing the maximum, and it does not
necessarily make us healthier or happier.
Gregg Easterbrook, a visiting
fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the author of “The Progress Paradox:
How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse” (Random House).
Godhaven Ink started out
as four of us: Gyrus, Mahalia, Phagus and Merrick. We found we’d had and
were having the same kind of ideas, motivations, heroes and villains. We’d
been finding incredible, beautiful righteous stuff that all seemed to link
up, although it never got mentioned anywhere Out There. There was something
about the writers, the music, the films and comedy that didn’t merely amuse
but really spoke to us and affirmed our spirit. But Out There our morality
and politics and motivation seemed dismissed or misunderstood if not completely
ignored.
Elsewhere we knew others from totally different backgrounds and circles
who felt the same; people we’d meet at gigs liked the same books; people
we knew as activists liked the same music. We knew there must be more people
who felt the same but who were isolated and doubting themselves cos they
were surrounded by people who ridiculed and ostracised them for not eating
meat, not watching The Bodyguard, or displaying some other trait of humane
intelligence. We knew there was a whole subculture that needed to affirm
itself by declaring itself.
It was
the middle of 1994, a very active and charged time in Britain for the counterculture,
and indeed for the culturally aware in general. After 15 years of increasingly
fascistic government, there was a new law proposed; the Criminal Justice
Bill (becoming the Criminal Justice Act when it was made law). It was a
massively broad-ranging attack on civil liberties and marginalised groups:
it criminalised - at least partially - access to private land, picketing
and peaceful protest, it tampered with an accused person’s right to silence,
gave police sweeping new powers to search people without any suspicion
of a crime, and the power to set up a five mile exclusion zone around a
rave party, and made a crime of even being suspected by police of getting
ready to go to such a party!
The actual
effect of the Criminal Justice Bill was the opposite of what the government
intended. In fact, it did what so many radical groups have struggled and
hoped for in vain for years; it created - by way of opposition to it -
a solid collective network of diverse groups, a true unity of oppression.
It was hunt saboteurs and trade unionists, it was the Socialist Workers
Party and Druids, it was hill-walking ramblers and the Lesbian Avengers,
it was environmental activists and Labour MPs. And above all, it was colourful
and joyous: a celebration of our vitality and diversity. At all times it
was a clear contrast to the homogenising repressed repressive dull greyness
of those who designed the Bill.
The Bill,
inevitably, did become law, but only after a summer of carnivals and rallies
numbering tens of thousands, only after connecting people who are still
working together now, only after kicking thousands of people out of apathy
or complacency and into a life of action.
The four
of us realised that it was no good just talking about our visions, our
truths. We found so much coming from and to us that really needed to be
heard louder and further. As Ghandi said, you must be the change you
want to see.
So we did a
zine in September 94 called Godhaven A-Z. It was 44 A5 pages photocopied
illicitly by Merrick on the copiers at the bank where he worked. It had
articles and collages that we’d done (some collectively, some separately,
all of it discussed, tinkered with and approved by all four of us), and
numerous quotes, articles and pictures that were nicked from other places
too.
If you
have a head full of ideas you need to get Out There, a zine is the quickest,
easiest and most direct way. To make music or paint or whatever you need
to learn technique; with a zine you just write it down and photocopy it.
No technical skill, no interpretive power beyond basic literacy, no mediation
required.
And we
needed to do it not only because we were not seeing our concerns and truths
addressed Out There, but the stuff that was Out There was so insulting,
so deadening, so stay-sat-there, consume-and-die. We needed not only to
say our points but also to counter the McDonalds-ising stuff that was welling
up in our culture.
Our publishing
policy is that if there’s an issue worthy of more discussion or a point
of view that speaks a Big Truth or a keen wit that’s seldom expressed and
we can say it well, we put it out. Although it’d make us wads of cash to
give the world more junk like another Diana memorial book or whatever,
there’s no point, no real worth, no integrity, and no dignity. There’s
already enough cultural pollution. Right now, with just a few clicks of
your mouse, you have unimaginable amounts of information at your disposal.
Understanding is no longer about the gathering of information so much as
the making sense of it, finding real use for it. And keeping the bullshit
at arms length.
We swiftly
did a second Godhaven, which came out in spring 95, and a third in June
95. We had always intended to do no more than three, we wanted to be absolutely
certain that it’d always be vibrant, fresh, and buzzing, never formulaic,
tired or putting in any filler. We did it collectively under pseudonyms
so there could be no ego glory; we put them out at 7p, 8p and 9p so there
was no money to be made; we had no advertisers or paid employees so there
was no commercial tempering; no deadlines so that we didn’t rush anything
or put in filler if there wasn’t enough. We wanted it to be absolutely
clear that the only reason the zines existed was because we thought they
should.
And we wanted
to make them look good. The zine format is an inherently scrappy thing,
full of extreme points of view (which is fair enough ˆ people are obviously
going to write about what moves them the most). We wanted to do something
a little different; to make something good not just within a piece of writing,
but in the way it’s presented, in the way it’s set among the rest of the
zine. We know that populism and intelligence need not exclude each other.
We’re not afraid of specialisation where required, but we wanted to make
everything as accessible and straightforward as possible. As George Orwell
said, “never use a long word where a short one will do.”
We got quite into the swing of the zine lark, and as well as the Godhaven
zine trilogy we put out a few leaflets and mini-zines on a few things (beginners
guides to hitch-hiking and self-publishing, as well as stuff against the
Criminal Justice Bill). But after Godhaven The Third, we went off to other
things. Gyrus, (who wrote in the Godhaven zines under the name T), continued
his other publishing thing, The Unlimited Dream Company, launching the
frankly breath-taking Towards 2012 magazine. He’s currently working with
renowned Yorkshire pagan historian Paul Bennett on turning Paul’s 20 years
of research into a series of books in the Fylfot imprint.
Mahalia
(whose Godhaven zine name was Harper) is also a painter and a songwriter,
and with Phagus (a multi-instrumentalist musician of an outrageously high
level of effortless talent), they are a band called Slumberwall. Both of
them have spent a lot of time being ill and making music (separately and
together on both counts), but the music is reaching the end of its long
gestation and the first CD, The Spacecat Concert, has been released. Mahalia’s
songwriting shows the same intimacy, fearlessness and precision of Leonard
Cohen or Nick Drake, but as Slumberwall it is played with a shimmering
fluid effervescence reminiscent of Jeff Buckley, Sly Stone or Nusrat Fateh
Ali Khan.
Mahalia’s
writing is consistent whether it be a lyric or a poem; several of the works
in his books Doubting and Surrender have started life as one and become
the other. His consistency also applies whether he’s writing of internal,
intensely personal-yet-universal matters or external things like the captivating
writing from tree protests in his book Surrender.
Merrick
got The Call and quit banking in 1995 on the same day he quit wearing underpants.
Like Mahalia, he got into environmental direct action, spending months
at the Newbury Bypass tree protest in 96 and at Manchester Airport’s Runway
2 protest in 97, as well as a variety of other actions and things.
None
of us could quite kick the writing thing. Merrick says, “I do try not to
write stuff, I’d rather DO things, but sometimes I just can’t help it.”
Battle For The Trees, his book about the Newbury campaign, started life
as a letter then grew into an article, then a long article, then a book
manuscript. Because we are our own editors and publishers, it would’ve
been fine to put it out in whatever form was best.
Not being
tied to any contract, or indeed anyone’s expectations but your own, grants
tremendous freedom to let you do and present your work in whatever way
you see fit. We all work in several media, and knowing that the area you’re
working in is not the be- all and end-all takes away a lot of pressure
and lets creativity flow and play much more easily.
As well as the writing and the songs, we’ve done radio shows too. Named
Radio Savage Houndy Beastie, they’re a mix of treasured tracks, oddities,
and a lot of our own creativity in scripted comedy and spontaneous soundscapes.
The soundscapes can mix, say, Gregorian monks chanting with bits from albums
like Outstanding Recordings of British Mammals & Amphibians and snatches
of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The shows are on Leeds Student Radio, which
broadcasts twice a year for a month at a time, and hopefully they’ll be
webcasting them in future. Each show moves between a number of extremes
and styles, and between the political rants and the Bruce Forsyth albums,
the records of great stuff by obscure people and obscure stuff by great
people, the comedy sketches and the way we fuck about with the adverts,
there’s a cohesive collage effect that’s very much in keeping with the
Godhaven zines.
It’s so important
that we act whenever the spirit moves us, no matter what the action or
the medium, and no matter how small the deed. We mustn’t let the big boy
corporate media make us feel impotent. Yes, today’s Daily Mail has sold
more than everything we’ve ever done combined, but we know the impact of
our stuff on those who do read it will be greater. It only takes one voice
of truth to show up a whole crowd of liars. As Morrissey said in a very
early Smiths interview, “I’d rather sell ten records and change ten lives
than sell a million records and change nothing.”
See,
just because they shout louder doesn’t mean they actually get listened
to. People know the corporate stuff is there for the wrong reasons, to
patronise us with lowest-common-denominator nonsense in order to sell advertising
space. Whereas with the small press publishers there are no advertisers,
deadlines, editors, and certainly no profits or wages. So before you’ve
read a word of it, you know you’re dealing with something more real, more
true, something heartfelt. And it’s not just zines and publishing, it’s
all media, all art, all creative output.
And we
mustn’t be worried if we don’t make a living out of it; it’s those who
do get paid who are under suspicion of just being in it for the money.
Here’s two lists:
People who
know they’re getting paid before they start
All Saints
Hello! magazine
Barbara Cartland
the police force
People who never got properly
paid
Van Gogh
Reclaim The Streets
Franz Kafka
Godhaven Ink
Which team do you want to
be with?
Allen
Ginsberg once said that every day the New York Times is read by more people
than any of his poetry ever is, but that a day later the New York Times
is in the bin, whereas his writing stays relevant and true, that poetry
broadcasts across thousands of years. It’s easier to claim people’s
attention by not challenging or moving them in any way; it also makes it
easy for them to move on and forget. The meaningless stuff rarely lasts.
When Patti Smith released Horses it was being outsold hundreds of times
over by the Osmonds. History does a fairly thorough job of bringing much
of the worthy work to the fore and consigning talent-free buffoons to obscurity.
We have
to leave truth and beauty all around to inspire others and show up the
lie of McDonaldsocracy that tells us we can’t have it and we don’t deserve
it, as it takes our money and treats us as morons and tells us there can
be no other way.
It’s
OK to think and feel. Not only is it OK, it’s essential, and it’s just
as essential we affirm it by expressing it. We must make clear our denial
of the popular culture that tells you that passion and integrity are just
another superficial style choice.
Godhaven
have no grand schemes in mind, and we know there are no Final Answers.
What Godhaven affirms and promotes is a process, an attitude that encourages
a more humane world and brings us closer to being a species to be proud
of. If we are to head towards this it has to be by establishing a culture
of a broad network of compassion, tolerance, understanding and mutual help,
and realising that we’ve all been duped into participating in and depending
upon the stuff that ruins us.
The prime
motivation of Godhaven and the lesson we pass on to others is; if it’s
what you feel and you’re not seeing it Out There, then put it out there
yourself. There will be others who feel the same as you, and will be affirmed
and inspired by what you do, like when a hitch-hiker watches hundreds and
hundreds of cars pass by without being picked up, then you can be the thing
that stops and carries them forward.
Mahalia’s only
line on this right now is “Godhaven is whatever human heart still beats
at the start of the 21st century”. It is that which makes us special, if
anything, and the only thing important for us to be judged against, for
anything to be judged against. Whatever we count for is not due to marketing,
academic waffle, or recommendations from the Observer colour supplements,
but that innate human desire for something more, for something better and
something true. We hold on to what Patti Smith calls “the right to create,
without apology, from a stance beyond gender or social definition, but
not beyond the responsibility to create something of worth”. It is that
which makes us worth anything at all, and it’s that which resonates with
the people who’ve read the things we write and have been moved by them.
Zines that Godhaven Ink did a couple of hundred copies of over three years
ago still bring in the most beautiful and wonderful letters, and of course
they’re working their magic on so many more people who don’t write to us.
As Ginsberg said, we broadcast across the years. Get it together and get
out there. The only measure of your words and deeds will be the love you
leave when you’re gone.
A song written by Ian Brown
about the French student riots of 1968, Ian Brown said “Imagine a protester
singing [it] in a policeman’s face during the Paris riots. Then you’ll
get some idea what it’s about.” Indeed, the song seems to be a call
for revolution disguised in a gentle strolling guitar song.
The cover painting on
The Stone Roses is called “Bye Bye Badman”, and the things that John
Squire has put into the Pollocked mosaic make sense when you know what
the song is about. There is a French flat clearly visible and Ian Brown
said he was told that the students used lemons to cancel out the effects
of CS gas - hence the lemons.
Ian mentions this at Blackpool
1989 too, chucking lemons into the audience and shouting “Suck ‘em - you
don’t get your eyes watered with CS gas, it’s true!”.
In a moment of irony, during
the Roses’ Paris gig in 1989, a CS gas canister went off during “Waterfall”,
a moment the Roses probably enjoyed.
The song is a wonderful arrangement
of jangling guitars, the only Roses song where Squire takes his hat off
to Johnny Marr of the Smiths in his guitar style. The Roses never played
it live, possibly due to the amount of guitar tracks on the record being
too hard to reproduce effectively.
Ian Brown still drops references
to the Paris riots today, the first track on Unfinished Monkey Business
being “Under The Paving Stones - The Beach”, which was what the student
protestors were meant to have said when they dug up the pavements in Paris
and found sand underneath.
10 MARCH 2004: “Finally
she begins to realize that she is either reality’s only hope, or its worst
enemy.”
Amazon.com:
Disturbing, perplexing, sometimes
infuriating, Ryutaro Nakamura’s serial experimentslain
covers some of the same themes as The X-Files and the films of David Lynch.
When introverted 13-year-old Lain receives an e-mail from a dead classmate,
she gains access to “the Wired,” a virtual world that promises unlimited
power to those who can exploit it. Gradually the borders between the real
and the virtual blur, and Lain’s own identity begins to fade and fragment.
Her parents tell her that she is not really their child, her online self
grows in power and independence, and shadowy organizations pursue her in
both worlds. Finally she begins to realize that she is either reality’s
only hope, or its worst enemy.
Nakamura keeps the pace of serial experiments lain deliberately slow, imbuing
the early episodes with a sense of mounting dread that pays off as the
plot develops. The anime technique of panning across static images creates
a meditative stillness that works perfectly, and the repetition of certain
key images gives them a dreamlike significance. Viewers will either love
or hate the complex plot, which seems intent on incorporating every possible
paranoid conspiracy, from sinister nanotechnology to alien plots. However–unlike
many other anime–it somehow hangs together, and frankly not understanding
everything is part of the pleasure of this kind of story. Fans of action-heavy
anime and people who like every loose end tied up should steer clear, but
those who surrender themselves to the slowly unfolding mysteries of the
plot will be amply rewarded. –Simon Leake
The silken thread that unites
the world’s great wisdom traditions.
What’s my philosophy? In
a word, integral. And what on earth˜or in heaven˜do I mean by „integral‰?
The dictionary meaning is fairly simple: „comprehensive, balanced, inclusive,
essential for completeness.‰
Short
definition, tall order.
What would something like an inclusive or comprehensive spirituality mean?
What could it mean? And would it even be remotely possible? Integral, in
a sense, would be the ultimate ecumenical movement, if such a thing is
even desirable. It would be a spirituality that claimed to leave nothing
essential out. It would be a spirituality that in principle could be recognized
and even practiced by believers in all the world‚s religions without abandoning
their own essentials. It would be based on what seem to be universal human
capacities to interface with the Divine. It would be inclusive and comprehensive,
touching on all the bases of this elusive thing called „spirituality.‰
It would be?.
Impossible, is what it would be. But consider where we are in today‚s modern
and postmodern world. We have, for the first time in history, easy access
to all of the world‚s great religions. Examine the many great traditions˜from
Christianity to Buddhism, Islam to Taoism, Paganism to Neoplatonism˜and
you are struck by two items: there are an enormous number of differences
between them, and a handful of striking similarities.
When you find a few essential items that all, or virtually all, of the
world‚s great religions agree on, you have probably found something incredibly
important about the human condition, at least as important as, say, a few
things that physicists can manage to agree on (which nowadays, by the way,
ain‚t all that impressive).
What are these spiritual similarities? I‚ll come back to those shortly,
honest. For now, simply notice what it would mean if there were a handful
of general items that regularly recur in humanity‚s attempts to know God
(and presumably God‚s correlative attempts to reach a slumbering humanity,
if God indeed exists). These similarities would seem to suggest, among
other things, that there are spiritual patterns at work in the universe,
at least as far as we can tell, and these spiritual patterns announce themselves
with impressive regularity wherever human hearts and minds attempt to attune
themselves to the cosmos in all its radiant dimensions.
And that
would mean, would have to mean, that the standard-issue human being is
hardwired for spiritual realities. That is, the human organism itself seems
to be hardwired for these deep spiritual patterns, although not necessarily
for the specific ways that they show up in a particular religion important
as those are. Rather, the human being seems imbued by the realities suggested
by these cross-cultural spiritual currents and patterns, with which individual
religions and spiritual movements resonate, according to their own capacities
and to their own degrees of fidelity. The simple recognition of these deep
spiritual patterns would be the glimmering of an integral spirituality.
That recognition would also imply that, any practices that would help individual
human beings attune themselves to these patterns would increase humanity‚s
understanding of, and attunement with, the spiritual patterns of the universe.
This attunement could occur through any of the great religions, but would
be tied exclusively to none of them. A person could be attuned to an „integral
spirituality‰ while still be a practicing Christian, Buddhist, New-Age
advocate, or Neopagan. This would be something added to one‚s religion,
not subtracted from it. The only thing it would subtract (and there‚s no
way around this) is the belief that one‚s own path is the only true path
to salvation.
If humanity‚s attunement to the spiritual patterns of the universe are
helped by various practices˜which might include prayer, meditation, yoga,
contemplation˜then modern psychological and psychotherapeutic measures
would surely be part of any integral spirituality, since those measures
can help increase a person‚s capacity for various sorts of practice. What
do I mean by „psychotherapeutic measures‰? This in itself is a large topic,
so let me say, for introductory purposes, they are any measures that might
be taken if you have an emotional problem and visit the office of a psychologist,
psychotherapist, or psychiatrist˜all of the measures for treating human
psychological issues that have been developed in the last century or so,
and that have demonstrated the capacity to help alleviate or remove emotional
problems or obstructions.
Finally,
integral spirituality˜as the very name „integral‰ implies˜transcends and
includes science, it does not exclude, repress, or deny science. To say
that the spiritual currents of the cosmos cannot be captured by empirical
science is not to say that they deny science, only that they show their
face to other methods of seeking knowledge, of which the world has an abundance.
Well,
then, what are some of these spiritual currents, or some of the similarities
that recur in virtually all of the great wisdom traditions? These are items
that we will be discussing in future essays and interviews in this column,
so let me start with a short and simple list. This is not the last word
on the topic, but the first word, a simple list of suggestions to get the
conversation going. Most of the great wisdom traditions agree that:
1. Spirit, by whatever name,
exists.
2. Spirit, although existing
„out there,‰ is found „in here,‰ or revealed within to the open heart and
mind.
3. Most of us don‚t realize
this Spirit within, however, because we are living in a world of sin, separation,
or duality˜that is, we are living in a fallen, illusory, or fragmented
state.
4. There is a way out of
this fallen state (of sin or illusion or disharmony), there is a Path to
our liberation.
5. If we follow this Path
to its conclusion, the result is a Rebirth or Enlightenment, a direct experience
of Spirit within and without, a Supreme Liberation, which
6. marks the end of sin
and suffering, and
7. manifests in social action
of mercy and compassion on behalf of all sentient beings.
Does a list something like
that make sense to you? Because if there are these general spiritual patterns
in the cosmos, at least wherever human beings appear, then this changes
everything. You can be a practicing Christian and still agree with that
list; you can be a practicing Neopagan and still agree with that list.
We can argue the fine details˜and will do so in subsequent columns˜but
the simple existence of those types of currents profoundly changes the
nature of belief itself.
If we
add to those spiritual currents the other two ingredients that I mentioned˜authentic
spirituality must transcend and include modern science (not deny it), and
psychological measures can help accelerate spiritual capacities˜then we
are getting very close to what might in fact be an integral spirituality,
a spirituality for the modern and postmodern world that includes the best
of the premodern traditions as well.
„Integral: inclusive, whole, essential for completeness.‰ Please join me
in future Beliefnet columns as we explore this exciting and exhilarating
topic.
Renowned author, philosopher,
and psychologist Ken Wilber is the founder of Integral Institute.
