[Dialogue] Killing Wilbur's Abstractions.

Sun Feb 19 12:09:35 EST 2012

"So Darrell got any thing to share from your life? This is a direct question. You show me yours, I'll show you mine...open kimono style."

It took me probably ten years to get my mind around Ken Wilber's concept of spiritual evolvement.  I'm a little slow.  But when I did get it, a different perception of reality formed in my being.  Spiral Dynamics embellished Wilber's concepts.  Clarity about social dynamics allowed a broader, compassionate view of where people are on the journey, surpassing RS-1 in my experience.  Cindy Wigglesworth's DVD entitled Conscious Evolution that describes the Spiral Dyanamics spectrum is recommended for those willing to release themselves to rise to second-tier experience.  

St. John of the Cross describes the Dark Night of the Senses as a transition from Wilber's Psychic level to the Subtle level.  I am in the midst of that experience and I recommend that you not hurry towards it.  It is, on one side of the coin, the sh__ts.  However, on the other side it has the experience of pure bliss.  To get some understanding of how it works, reading Michael Newton's books, Journey of the Soul and Destiny of the Soul, are essential for getting the concept of Spirit Guides in mind.  In the past two years I have gradually become acquainted with my Spirit Guide in a very personal way.  He/she, at times, has taken hold of my mind and portrayed before me the dastardly repressed material from both my subconscious and conscious mind.  And when I say takes control of my mind, I mean one's sanity comes into serious question.  But in the process I have started dealing with sexual and emotional issues that I have hidden and there is a feeling of release as this is playing out.

On the blissful side.  My wife and companion of fifty-one years died last April.  I spent six months doing the expected blue funk of loneliness and aridity, nothing unusual.  But October 30 last, my Spirit Guide, through devious means, promted me to not attend my usual church but instead attend another church service where I knew absolutely no one.  Before the service began, two ladies sat down next to me.  A switch flipped in my mind and I went on full alert, knowing something was about to happen although I didn't know what.  After church one of the ladies invited my to go to lunch with them which I did.  During lunch I gazed into the lovely brown eyes of a lady named Beth and I knew.  In that moment I knew we would be together the rest of our days.  Beth and I have been together in the four months since and I cannot imagine a better fit.  My Spirit Guide searched greater Phoenix, found the ideal mate for me and through irrational means brought us together.  For the first two months I experienced pure bliss including the "grinning ninnies" as Richard Rohr describes.  

So, the Dark Night of the Senses is both the absolute pits and pure bliss.  Aside from the emotional jolt accompanying this transitional state, I have learned acceptance in a way unimaginable at the previous level where RS-1/EI/ICA reside.  I no longer try to judge or fix people.  People at the religious fundamentalist and political conservative level are exactly where they need to be and that is okay.  RS-1 offered a means of transition level for those who had the "itch" to move on.  But the level they moved to was not the ultimate, merely another step along the spiritual path.

The concepts of "God" and "church" are now moot for me.  Spirituality has become intensely personal.  I am having dealings with a spirit--a person--in the spirit realm who is a mentor for me and a small group of my soul mates, some of whom I know.  All this God-talk is totally boring and useless.  Rising above Spiral Dynamics Green and its narcissism is a blessed awakening.  I heartily recommend it.

    Is this enough personal stuff?  If not I can go on ad nausium.
        Darrell Walker

  Darrell

  Sorry I don't do Wilbur Abstractions so I don't actually know about the correct levels and color combination codes...I don't know what your comment means:

  "Also your continuing condemnation of Mythic religion (per Ken Wilber) shows your arrogant Spiral Dynamics Green level in its most elegant narcissistic colors.  If you had any rudimentary understanding of spiritual evolution you would know that the Mythic level (read fundamentalist) is a necessary step in the process and not to be denigrated".

  Seems like layers of Cartesian abstraction where protagonists engage each other by flinging paradigmatic abstractions at each other.  

  I like Mike May's question much  better - what are you practicing these days in your life?

  If you watch Kaze Gadway's talk she speaks from the center of her life not from the peanut gallery. She shares personal history, what is real and alive for her, what she is up to, how she has respect for and pays-forward something to someone. You can get a sense of what she is up to, what she is practicing now in her life.

  For curiosity I asked Walt Epley who is digitizing old talks,  for a copy of Kaye Hayes' Freedom Lecture about 1972. Still an amazing talk. 

  Is she still even the same person? Kaye the Pedagogue & Kaze the Storyteller. It took me a long time to recognize who she was being as a storyteller. 
  . 
  As a Pedagogue the Freedom Lecture goes like this: Lucid, Sensitive, Exposed, Disciplined

  As a Storyteller the Freedom Lecture seems more like Exposed and expressing some thing real from your life, having the discipline and the courage to say what you see from your life, to put it out there, to say it into existence. 

   It is in the telling that your lucidity and sensitivity show up... or not. For me wisdom is about what you practice not opinionating about something. 

  A Zen monk I've been studying -the founder of Soto Zen from 800 years ago -  asks the hard question at the end of a famous koan: 

  "what did the monk see that he expressed by bowing. Which I hear something like: what do you get about your live that you are willing to share about being a human being of integrity. 

  A lot of current Christian and process gurus leave me the space of spectator of neck-up detached and  disembodied knowing, there is very little effort to share & grant being to others, very little intention to do something with the knowing

  So Darrell got any thing to share from your life? This is a direct question. You show me yours, I'll show you mine...open kimono style. 

  No autobiographical expression = spectators and critics view not players and practitioners sharing something of their life. I'd much rather listen to some personal expression like Kaze's stories of freedom than libertine abstractions. 

  For me personally it is more  interesting "what you do with what you know" than perseverating about  what you know and what categories you are stuck [or not stuck in] at the moment. "You" is you, me and us. 

  I'd much rather share a YouTube video clip like this
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjvJHsJD8ic

  Then have an online movie conversation...

  These days the question isn't What's one thing that grounds you in history.

  A better question is: what are you cooking up in your life or even better:
  What are you practicing in your life now? Tell me a story...the way Kaze does...

  I'd much rather participate in an ecology of generous speaking and listening than I would engage in sharp-shoot stingy abstractions, which is the way your quote [above] occurs for me: sharp-shooting, abstractions, opinionating. 

  Sorry is isn't personal, Darrell.  It is a little bit of a push-back on the abstraction noise factor.

  Steve 

  -- 
  Steve Harrington

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