Integral Spiritual Maps

Feel free to share your views and the people whose maps resonate for you the most.  I'll write something on this soon.

Re: Integral Spiritual Maps

Hi!  This looks like a most valuable inquiry and exploration.

Just for clarity, would you please write what you mean by “maps,” or perhaps give a specific example of a “map”?

I have some different maps that I work with, but I am being very literal when I say “maps,” like actual visual matrices to help understand a spiritual process.

Your own definition of maps would help a lot, in terms of your goals for this pod.

Thanks for putting this one up for our consideration… Also, I like the way you are presenting your spiritual mini-autobiography in sections. That makes it seem much less overwhelming. 

Re: Integral Spiritual Maps/AQAL and other maps

HI DawnCoyote,

 Thanks for your question.  Personally I see spiritual maps as the general way that you represent or map your own spiritual quest and spiritual development.  I'll summarize or provide links to some of the more influential spiritual maps for myself.

Ken Wilber/Integral Institute's AQAL theory

The most recent issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine does a whole issue on this map and I highly recommend reading this.  There is also an article titled What is Integral Spriituality? somewhere on the web but I can't seem to find the link.  I believe it's somewhere on the Integral Spirituality Website.  If you'd like a copy, feel free to let me know. 

Wilber's (V) theory can be broken down into 5 basic components:  All Quadrants, All Levels, All Lines, All States, and All Types.

If you are not familiar with this, you can go to http://www.integralinstitute.org/approach.html for a brief summary.

Jorge Ferrer/Participatory Embodied Integral Spiritual Practice

Jorge has written an excellent book entitled Revisioning Transpersonal Theory that I highly recommend.  Wilber appears to have incorporated some of his criticisms and insights in more recent writings.  To take a look at a couple of articles that he has written you can visit http://www.integralworld.net/ under Jorge Ferrer. 

Jungian/Archetypal Psychology

This is usually associated with Carl Jung and James Hillman.  I find both of their perspectives very illuminating and very deep.  Jung's Map of the soul by Murray Stein is a good introduction to Jung's perspective.  Here's a good introductory website to Hillman's work http://www.mythosandlogos.com/Hillman.html

Various forms of Buddhism

I am strongly influenced by Buddhism mostly because most of my insights that I have come upon simply by investigating life itself line up nicely with Buddhist practice and doctrines.

Waking Down in Mutuality

I mentor people in this process and the general map I see as extremely helpful in cutting through a lot of deep defense mechanisms employed by spiritual seekers.  It, along with good psychotherapy, tends to be oriented towards very deep depth work.  The thing that makes this work special is the allowance of all of who we are as divine human beings, from the depths of our wounded damaged parts to the heights of our divine identity (or non-identity/mystery).  www.wakingdown.org

Hope this clarifies things!  I'd love to hear your thoughts and what other people have been influenced by.

Re: Integral Spiritual Maps/AQAL and other maps

Excellent! Thanks. Lots of invaluable work-points here. ^^

Re: Integral Spiritual Maps

I really dig the newest map that we got out of the recent WIE issue. I am also big on the Kabalah (specifically the Tree of Life) and enjoy using a Neoplatonic model, which I often associate with Kashmirian Sivaism and I am also partial to the Chakra model. I often create my own map's based on comparing those above and use the Wilber-Combs Lattice a lot.

Namaste

Re: Integral Spiritual Maps

Thanks for sharing Drake, I'd be interested in hearing how you put those maps into use with your spritiual practice and in your everyday life?

Best,

Kelly

Re: Integral Spiritual Maps

Sorry it took me a month to respond I have been on the road a lot lately and have had some trouble keeping up.

The bulk of my work is to move into subtle and casual states of consciousness during meditation so as to touch the next stage, if you do it often enough your center of gravity will shift and you will be left with a new stage acquasition.

My meditation practices themselves are typically Kundalini Yoga Mantra Sat Nam which translates to “Truth is my identity” followed by meditation focusing on Chakra breathing most often through the heart and third eye, often using body locks to stimulate Kundalini movement. I also use diety visualization by building the image of God in my mind's eye and super impossing it (usually Shiva is my image for this) I also read from the Corpus Hermetica or the Siva Sutras.

As far as my map goes

Wilber has already drawn comparisons between Chakra's and his map, as well as his map and the Tree of life, I have also compared the tree of life with the Heremetic Planetary spheres (which seem to either have been inspired by, or are themselves the inspiration for the Neoplatonic Great Chain)  which the Tantrics also compared with the Chakra system. Its really just a matter of lining them up next to each other and using the best explination for the Stage features that I experience in the meditative state.

Namaste

Re: Integral Spiritual Maps

Hi Drake,

Thanks for sharing.  I'm curious about the notion that contemplative states in what in Wilber's system would be the subtle and causal realms would promote stage acquisitions.  Do you have a reference for that or know what type of study he's basing that assertion on?  I'd be curious to take a look at it. 

It's interesting what you mention about the tree of life and the chakra system 'cause in undergrad when I was studying comparative religion, one of my teachers, Barbara Holdredge, who is a religious studies scholar with extensive background in both of those systems presented the tree of life and one of the students and myself saw that if you looked at it three dimensionally it looks a lot like a type of chakra system.  I don't have much background in Neoplatonism so I must claim ignorance but your practices are quite intriguing. 

I wonder what the differences would be between doing various subtle and causal level practices in say Tibetan Buddhism in contrast as to what you experience.  Would be interesting to examine the similarities in differences. 

Thanks for opening your world to me,
Warm Regards,
Kelly

Re: Integral Spiritual Maps

I have practiced several Tibetan techniques and compared them with similar Kabbalha practices as and have found that they have very different personalities (if that makes sense). However, my Tibetan experiences are very similar to my Neoplatonic work. I often experience similarities during insight meditation as in discursive meditation on the One, which is itself very similar to the Big Mind experience that Wilber is so fond of, which again is similar to the experience of the Middle Pillar practice in Occultism which is based in Kabbalha. A tremendous amount of cross pollination went on between these traditions during the 19th and early 20th centuries that made comparisons within these systems very applicable. Another great combination of techniques that you can find in Integral circles is the Use of Big Mind-Big Heart with Tonglen.

I beleive Wilber bases his theory in consciousness evolution as a result of repeated exposure to altered states upon his experience within the meditative community comparing consciousness expansion with the practice and frequency in different traditions. He is however quick to point out that evolution in consciousness does not free the rest of your quadrants from their stages, which is why you must practice integrally in order to make sure the rest of you catches up to your evolving consciousness.

Namaste

Re: Integral Spiritual Maps

I just joined zaadz and this is my first post.  I hope there is no problem replying to a post that was written 2 months ago.  The topic is timeless, I can't imagine there would be a problem with month long period between responses.

I have been into Spiral Dynamics and enjoy Ken Wilber's take on it.  The map is extremely good for ploting how cultures class.  An excellent example of this is the current blue Hazballah versus the Orange/blue Israelis.  I have been exploring the many forms of this map from Clare Graves, Don Beck and Ken Wilber.

Though I have a criticism of this system as a linear movement.  I have been thinking that the course of this progression is not so much linear as evolutionary.  One level emerges from another but it is impossible to prodict the shape of the emegence.  Let me elaberate.

Boomeritus (Wilber 2003) is a book about the movement of the formal orange meme code towards the green post formal meme codes.  The example of this are the Boomers who rejected conventional success oriented society and embraced a pluralistic  meme codes.  (much of the book discusses the inherent disfunction of this transition into narcisism).

I would like to suggest that this emergence of orange to green has been happening in various forms over the last 200 years.  One of the greatest forms of this orange to green emergence was Marxism.  Here a 19th century economist saw plural, anti hierachical social system as a cure for the ills of the orange memed industrial revolution.

But like any evolutionary movement, it represented a mutation in capitolism with a new emergence of a political economic system.  But it did not survive, because it was not stong.

Perhaps the green meme that Wilber calls boomeritus is the same.  It is not a strong enough cultural code to survive.

I believe that we have not seen the emergence of a healthy thriving green meme system soon.  We probably won't see one for a while.  After all, the blue meme conventional form existed in various states for a couple millenium before orange emergence.  Why should we not expect a few millenium of orange before we see green?

Isn't getting a little ahead of ourselves to consider second tiered memes as anything other then a small subculture?

S.

Re: Integral Spiritual Maps

I think that the healthy green worldview will be held by the average American within in a few generations. The speed of our evolution of consciousness is accelerating. Were coming so close to a time when, stated in What is Enlightenment, the children will be tested in the integral theory as part of the standard education. I must be a little impatient these days with all this kool integral stuff going on and the majority still in the not in the loop about our next step in spiritual evolution.

Re: Integral Spiritual Maps

Centaur, you are absolutely right that progress is not really very linear but messy and organic. The nice and tidy maps that are generated are definetly graphics meant to illustrate as oppossed to photographs of progression. I am however, not sure that I would agree if the instuition of Marxism is a Green development. I think that the fact that Marxism focuses so much on the loyalty to the state the inherent nationalism seems to take it back down to blue. I think Marx's original points in the communist manifesto may have originally steamed from a Green outlook but the instuitions that ended up embodying his ideas seemed to regress more then progress.

Namaste

Re: Integral Spiritual Maps

this is related to the issue of linear/nonlinear maps…

Each level (stage, chakra, meme, need, etc) already exists. It is our conscious awareness of each level that evolves/develops/changes. That is to say, the oak exists within the acorn. A seed develops into a tree but the code is inherent. Each level is the holographic progression/development of the original code.

(Like musical variations on a theme. The notes are all there. You may or may not be using all of them. Maybe your hearing is such that you can only hear a certain range of sounds. ((Or maybe you can hear all the notes but you play an instrument and you like to use the same three over and over or you have a handicap that impedes your ability to play. Or maybe you are simply just a beginner who is still learning how to play.)) The point is that the notes already exist. It is a person’s awareness of the notes ((and subsequent ability to use them)) that determines the quality, range, complexity of the sound that is heard ((or created)).) (The ability to use something is really an interactive awareness as opposed to an observational awareness.)

Imagine each level on a vertical grid. In terms of a spiral/chakra/hierarchy of needs grid, (1) beige/root/survival >>> (2) purple/sacral/security >>> etc (or whatever map you prefer). If you imagine a mature tree on this grid, you could say that the root system corresponds to the first level, the base to the second level, the trunk to the third level, the main branches to the fourth, leaves to the fifth, fruit to the sixth.

Then imagine the growth process of a seed into a tree on the same grid. At one foot tall the tree is still in the second purple/sacral/security level (the pre-sprouting phase having been the first beige/root/survival level). But within that level are also the formative levels of a mature tree. If you took a picture of a young tree and a mature tree then made the pictures the same size, you can compare the development of the root system, the trunk, the leaves.

Our personal development is the same process. We view it as a primarily upward growth process, but it is also outward (e.g. branches, leaves, fruit), inward (photosynthesis), and downward (?) (root systems).

Tree analogies aside, the most important implication of this developmental perspective is that because (A) in a sense each level already exists, then (B) while our *conscious* awareness is at a particular level, how we answer/embody/satisfy the questions/energy/needs of that level affects the continual *unconscious* development of subsequent and previous levels.

…This is my understanding. Or at least this is the map that I am using at the moment.