Why would we not want to share Life with another being?

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I have been wondering again about being a Parent and how I received the Gift of Life because my Parents choose to have children... and allowed it to happen. I am specifically wondering if the choice not to have children is a breaking of Life's Trust? After all, might we not owe an obligation to give to Life the opportunity for a new form--which is what each of us has received?

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Of course, this is totally in keeping with the notion that Life Is A Gift. If we view Life as a Gift then we will want to share that Gift.
 
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It goes without saying that not everyone views Life as a Gift. Many millions of people probably view Life as a Trap.... Life as a Curse... Life as a form of Bondage.... in short, Life as anything but a Gift!!

Think about it---if you are given something precious and rare (and you are of a generous spirit or disposition) then you will want to share that with others. You will find a happiness and discover a joy in sharing the Gift. You will pass it on. You will pay it forward. You will allow Life to flow through you and into another as the Continuum of Life is extended from you, through you, as you, for you, and because of you.

You will give the Gift you have been given.

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Unless we perceive Life as a Gift I don't think we will feel like sharing Life with another being through the Parent-Child Matrix. If we are of an extreme position that regards Life as a Trap.... a a form of Bondage... as an Unconscious or Conscious Hell.... then clearly we will try to keep the pain and suffering to ourselves and not spread the disease.

It's kind of funny that we can be of a Loving Heart and keep the pain and the suffering to ourselves. After all, if we perceive Life as a Curse.... then only a Loving Heart would seek to have that Curse find its end in us and our death and passing.

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Could everyone be right? Both those who don't spread the Curse out of Love, along with those who share the GIft out of Love, do what they do because Spirit dictates they do so. That some of us live in such a way as to indicate the potential traps in Life.... the curses and the crimes... to me is a precious gift given to All who shall know Life. It's like a way of bringing to end certain genetic-lines that have maybe mutated in ways that will not be beneficial in the future. So their conscience dictates that they don't pass the evolutionary buck to another generation: that the buck stops with them.

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Yes, I believe you can love Life and adore Children so much that you refuse to allow the inheritance of genes that may prove detrimental. And what if there is something to that: What if there is some secret Intelligence whispering to the childless that they should be wary: that there is risk that the sins of the Fathers could be visited upon the unsuspecting child. So Love says.... "Do not spread the disease.... do not share the sickness.... be Christ-like and bear the suffering upon your own shoulders."

And for that you will be loved... when the not-giving too is a Gift.

Adapt or die!

In a world such as the one that we now find ourselves in events are constantly challenging our homeostatic inclinations. We are being pushed constantly. Nothing is static. And yet we have this way of falling into 'ruts' and 'comfort zones' that we don't like to be far from. It is as if they become 'home' for us--if only in the psychological sense.

Some have called this Power moving the ever-changing, fluxual nature of events 'Fate'... others 'Destiny'... and others yet, 'Spirit.' Some have called it 'blind chance' or 'dumb luck.' Still another group might label the shifting nature of a world constantly testing our adaptability as the direct result of this process Darwin named 'natural selection.'

Adapt or perish indeed!

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Sometimes I feel like the staunchest biologist--the one who owes all of his or her philosophical tenets to the strictest form of materialism--is not that far away from the often-whacky flower-power of the ever-smiling New-Age Life Coach encouraging his or her clients to 'rwach for the stars.' In both cases there is a sense that real success in life--be it evolutionary or enlightenmentary--is the result of being able to flow with and adapt to events that just seem to happen and come out of nowhere. The creature that adapts must readily to the events unfolding in her or her proximity will be the healthiest among all of those creatures and beings that are required to adapt to the Inherent Flux of the Floral and Faunal World.

You've got to 'roll with the changes' as the 1970's rock group REO Speedwagon once sang it. Changes are inevitable. Buddha said so. Darwin said so. Deepak Chopra said so!!  No really, I saw him fundraising for PBS and he said so. He really did!  ; o )

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Oddly enough, though, after thousands of years of the same message being repeated in countless forms, in numerous locales, through all manner of song, poetry, sacred text, dance, and drama... the fact of inherent change (and our requirement to adapt to the altering events taking place around us) is... well... to put it lightly.... not very friggin' easy at all. For all we know about change and the altering of the landscape we walk in, as, and through day-after-day anmd night-upon-night we still seem to be a species capable of kicking and screaming violently when we are initially faced with the prospect of change.

"Nope!! Not me!! I'm not gonna do it!!"

Besides, it is against my values.   ;  o)

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But who wins the War? Isn't it Fate... Destiny... Spirit... God... Dumb Luck... Blind Chance? Isn't the (non)Accidental Universe, in all of its gruesome Glory, the ultimate victor when we go to-to-toe with this Mysterious Power that we have named and narrated; and yet, in spite of that, still eludes all of our labels and definitions, our schemes and agendas?

Ultimately our trifling efforts to encapsulate the nature of what is going on are exposed for what they are: our attempts to measure the Immeasurable falter in the face of a Situation that always and forevermore exceeds our capacity to get our heads or our hearts around IT. Which is why I contend that ultimately it is a matter of allowing IT to peremeate and saturate our own consciousness.... our own person.... our own song and dance routine here on this dusty stage where scenes play out with nary a pause in between them.

We can't get our heads and our hearts around IT.... because we can't step outside of IT---be it Fate or Chance or Dumb Luck.... Spirit or Source or Suchness or the Great Whatever!! We are THAT... we are the 'dumb luck' and the 'blind chance' and the 'selfish genes' and the 'Fate' and the 'Destiny' and the Accidental Evolution and the Intrusive Spirit all rolled into one great big California Roll at the Sushi Bar of THIS!

Which is why I would dare to end this in the awareness that 'This is not happening to us,' as much as 'We are all happening.'

 

I always counted myself lucky--if not in my more arrogant moments, wise--when many of my friends had their youth interrupted by that quick and unsuspecting fall into fatherhood--at least of the biological variety. I tended to be paranoid when it came to sex. I was hyper-vigilant in the extreme. I am sure this diminished the pleasure of the experience--even though recollecting the events now I feel that pleasure was definitely primary amongst the short list of sensations being felt at the time!

I knew. I knew that sex could result in a severe interruption of my burgeoning adolescence. I could be a frickin' father for Pete's sake!! And that thought scared me to no end.


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How would I ever be able to parent a child? How could I? I had so many issues going on. I had been in trouble with the law for petty crime (though to a parent...  any parent... what crime is petty when the perpetrator is their son or daughter!!??). I had minimal education and lived in an economically depressed area with no future prospects. Father? Children?? You got to be kidding me!!

Needless to say I was not much of a 'Play-uh' back in the day. Play-uhs end up leaving a trail of fatherless children in their wake. I saw what happened to the Play-uhs. I knew guys that had more than one young lady knocked up at the same time. And still they would go out on the weekends looking to 'score' yet again. I despised that attitude. Because I was.... yup.... you guessed it.... the child of a Play-uh.

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That's what 'Free Love' and 'Flower-Power' did for me!! I ended up being created and brought into this life a consequence of casual sex. I am the result of that easy 'hook-up' that is free of burdens and consequences. I am what happens when the 'one-night stand' becomes more than just 'one-night.' I am the child of the Sexual Revolution in the truest sense imaginable. 

You may be too. I was born in the spring of 1968. Two days before Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death in Memphis, TN. The Vietnam War, Acid, and Automobiles all mixed in my blood. Outlandish Ideals and Deadly Facts joined together. Free Love and Assasinations. The Beatles and Malcom X. Robert F. Kennedy and Charles Manson. Timothy Leary and Neil Armstrong. Apollo's man on the Moon and the Rolling Stones Altamont. Hell's Angels and Haight Ashbury.

Free Love and Fatherless Children.

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I think it all started back then. I honestly do. I don't feel it is a 'Black Man's Disease' and that White Folk have just caught the contagion from our African-American Brothers. I honestly believe that the epidemic of Fatherless Children was/is a direct result of the ungrounded ideals and sheer hedonism of the late 1960's. And I am not even an extreme Right-wing Conservative!!

What if Free Love and Flower Power gave us the millions of boys and girls who would all be unable to pick their own Fathers out of a Police line-up? What if the.... ahem.... road to hell is indeed made of good intentions? What if the most exuberant Ideals are full of unsuspecting Shadow-material that takes a Society or a Culture... or even a whoe Civilization.... decades to discover? What if we are right now living in the midst of the fallout owed to Free-Love's explosive revolution? 

What if Free Love---two words we would never associate with tragedy--has its casualties? What if Flower-Power forgot it needs roots:that an ungrounded Flower is a Dead Flower?

  

The ramifications of my own conception--exposed here--have instilled in me a life-long question. I have always wondered if freedom, at any and all costs, is an inherent good?

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Should we seek freedom no matter what? Is the liberation of human energies--sexual, emotional, physical, spiritual, or otherwise--always a good thing?
 
A cursory reading of history makes it seem as if History itself is the slow march of ever-increasing Human Freedom. As the story goes--and you may recognize this story--we are told that we are all moving away from bondage and oppression, repression and restraint towards freedom. We are heading into the unfolding of greater and greater capacities: capacities that we have always held within us, but have not been actualized due to repressive social and cultural forces and factors.

As Freud told it, Culture is the repressive constraint of the Individual and his or her instinctual nature (id, libido). All of the energies that exist as part of our Human Nature are made to conform to the dictates of Culture: Culture is the container.

Further, it is through threats of punishment and suffering that the Individual learns what is an appropriate use of his or her Energetic Nature. The INdividual learns what is 'right' and what is 'wrong.' And yet, the Individual cannot totally deny his or her Living Experience of Energy-Being, so the Individual will tend to come into a state of ongoing tension, as the forces of Culture and Nature collide within the Human Psyche.

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How we deal with that tension--both collectively, as revolutionary Movements, i.e., the Hippies, Flower Power, the Religious Right, the Taliban, or Feminism, and as individuals--pretty much sums up the main Plot of what it is to be Human. We have the two forces (Culture and Nature) doing battle within us and we seek to deal with--manage, treat, address--that ongoing state of tension through manipulations of both Culture on the outside and Nature on the inside.

For instance, the Revolutions of the 1960's were attempts to liberate Inner Nature through the removal of Cultural Norms and Standards. Nature wanted to move (or should I say that Humanity went through a period of dealing with psychological tension through asserting the Indvidual's Freedom over and above the primacy of certain Cultural Norms?). As a result we saw all of the attempted destruction of Cultural Norms--like the traditional Family, traditional Roles, Gender typologies, Sexual Orientations, and so on.

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The attempt of Nature to reassert itself in the face of Culture can easily be felt as the reawakening of Freedom. It feels good to let your Nature flow and to be Free. It can feel.... ahem.... very liberating. And yet, that is not the whole of the story. It doesn't just end there. There are consequences to Freedom. Liberation has its repercussions. In fact, Liberation of that sort is a type of loss. One's Freedom is another's Tragedy. And though the story has not often been told, the Chaotic fallout of the 1960's is, in my estimation, a story about just that: that with Freedom and Liberation come consequences that few, if any, who were caught up in such heady times could have ever foretold.

I am going to take a bit of a turn here and refrain from speaking about the family and child-rearing issues I have in the previous few entries collected here on this blog. I want to turn in another direction and finally zone in on what has been bothering me about the whole Integral Scene developed and fostered by Ken Wilber. I feel that I have finally come across a way of explaining what has completely 'turned me off' about the whole Integral Spiel as of late.

I'll begin by prefacing the remarks and comments that are to follow with an underlying appreciation for what Ken Wilber initially accomplished prior to the turn of the Millennium. In the years prior to about that of 2000 I was taken up with the promise of Ken Wilber's vision as formulated in his many books. I found Sex, Ecology, Spirituality especially powerful. What Ken poured into that work absorbed me for several years. From the moment of its release in 1995 until the year 2000 I was nothing short of being steeped in the comprehensive nature of what Ken Wilber was sharing with the world through his calling. That process culminated, for me, in the authouring of the works Framing The Postmodern: Language, Culture, Commerce, & Consciousness, as well as Naked Guide To Life & Death: Experts, Extremism, Evolution & Education.

It was the comprehensive nature of the philosophy that Ken Wilber espoused that resonated with me. It was as if in reading Ken Wilber's books I was listening to a voice that issued forth from my own Higher Self.

And yet... and yet... things do change.

Over time I began to resonate less and less with Ken Wilber's work. I stopped being interested in his books. I was actually unable to make it through many of his new releases (which as many of you may know were generally rehashes of earlier inspirations, like a song-writing trying to recreate the formula for an old Top Ten hit). I wasn't resonating with Ken Wilber anymore. I found myself being more and more critical of the populist direction he was taking with his work. The marketing and the hype, the hyperbole and the advertising exaggerations of 'changing the world' were abrasive to me. I was not jiving with Ken.

Yet, I was still taken up with the promise of what a comprehensive philosophy would look like. It wasn't Ken Wilber's vision that held me in thrall anymore. It was the underlying nature of a comprehensive philosophy--i.e., a non-reductionistic philosophy--that I sensed as being the original basis for my resonance with Ken Wilber's work and what I might now choose to call 'Integral Cognition.'

Others might glean that same sense from a Sri Aurobindo or a Jean Gebser, or a William Irwin Thompson. Others might recognize the comprehensive philosophy within the historical period of Renaissance Europe, where art and science, ethics and aesthetics were once again appreciated for their overlapping nature.

The Renaissance is now widely perceived as being a transition point between the Medieval Era and the Modern Era. It was a time when the overlapping, comprehensive nature of the Zeitgeist allowed an old age to pass away and a new age to be born. That new age was the Modern Epoch.

So, fast forward 500 years or so and land in the late 20th Century were a new form of comprehensive cognition is sprouting up amongst the human population and maybe you can begin to appreciate how the Integral Period (not unlike the period of the Renaissance) is itself going to be a bridge to a New Era.

Medieval. Modern. Postmodern?

Synthesis births new possibilities. Even in terms of what we now know about genetics it is oncreasingly obvious that cross-pollination and hybridization are essential for the creation of new life and novel forms. There could have been no Modern Era without or apart from the Renaissance. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada! So much of what we have come to appreciate about the Modern Era--the Age of Modernity--could not have been possible apart from the spirit of syncretism that marked the Renaissance as the Time in which it was. Art fed Science, Science nurtured Art. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty found themselves once again in each other and were not left to lie down in separate beds... distinct categories... alone on there islands of exile.

It was in the Heart-Mind of those like a DaVinci, a Michelangelo, and a Marsilo Ficino that the syncretism of the Renaissance first took root and began to emerge. The exiled Trio of Lovers---Goodness, Truth, and Beauty--where rescued from their solitary confinement and reunited in the consciousness of those lone souls and solitary individuals from whence whole Historical Movements--which inevitably sweep up the masses (planets and populations alike)--begin.

It as if the Fragmented World comes back together in us. It is as if the dissociative distress of a Culture is healed in our Heart first. It begins in the rare individuals who sense the diabolical nature of dissociation and what that dissociation breeds in the consciousness of individuals on the level of the particular and whole species and planets--if not universes--on a far grander scale. That dissociative distress becomes a pain: a form of suffering that demands redress. For the wounded are the world and the world seeks healing through the wounded. 

Thus, those who feel and sense the nature of the suffering present in their times are compelled towards Wholeness and Comprehension (provided, that is, that they don't seek to numb and anaesthetize themselves to the wound through everything from sex and romance--i.e., losing themsleves in others, even Integral Movements and Evolutionary Spiritualities!--to drugs and drink, or distracting forms of popular culture via entertainment and media). Where so many forces conspire to tear the Fabric of Creation and Existence apart it can become a process of increasing difficulty to be mindful of the overlapping nature of our many dimensionalities. For instance, where evolutionary biology may reduce you in your imagination to the collection of so many competing 'selfish genes' it can be hard to remain aware that you are not 'just that!' 

It is painful to be reduced to less than your Nature. It is also painful to be confined to less than your Potential. This is why we can state that suffering is often no less nor more than you denying you your Self. Deny you your Nature via Self and you suffer now. Deny you your Potential via Self and you suffer now. Both or either can result in the most chronic and debilitating forms of suffering imaginable. And the trick I am hoping to expose here is just how it is that the dissociative distress of denying both Nature and Potential are culturally-accepted and reinforced terms and conditions of our present existence.


...... to be continued.

 

(continued from here....)

Are our lives torn apart? Are they in need of some remedial form of relatedness; such as where we connect body to mind and mind to soul and soul to spirit? Has life---er, Life--become a socially-sanctioned and accepted form of dissociative distress? Are we just so many unrelated pieces: pieces lost; pieces scattered; pieces uprooted; pieces in exile, alienated from any familiar turf or ground, recognizable to us as that which might just be indicative of something we could call 'home?'

It is beyond arguing that the ongoing experience of many millions of people is just such a sense of lostness. Reflect on that for just a moment: isn't lostness a sense of not re-cognizing where one Is?

Lost: who am I?

Lost: what am I?

Lost: where am I?

Lost: how did I get here?

Lost: (and) how might I find my way when all familiar landmarks and signposts are nowhere in sight?

Lost: (and finally) how might I come to relate and orient myself in such a strange world?


Living In The Existential Lost & Found

Do you wonder what the popular TV series Lost says about the world we have come to inhabit: a world of unfamilar ground; a world where our 'former selves' are little more than ghosts from the past who have no relation to our present circumstances and conditions; a world where we are both open and uncertain, free and fearful?

I wonder if such circumstances can leave us a bit vulnerable. That th combination of our being 'open' and 'uncertain' is liable to make us prey to the Great Pretenders. Might conmen be said to thrive in the Open and Uncertain Ages, in the Free and Fearful Times? Could it be that due to our being uncertain we are more disposed to gravitating to someone who appears to have 'all the answers.'

In short, those with maps can be highl;y attractive for the Lost.

A New Map of the Middle East. This is what we are going to do. This is what we need to do. Here is the answer. Here is where we are going.

The seeming certainty and unshakable conviction of one who appears to have 'a map of the unfamiliar and unprecedented' can be like a psychological balm to a weary psyche torn from all familiar referents. Consciousness is vulnerable in that sense: apart from familiar referents there is a compelling urgency to find some 'thing' to hang onto--even if that 'thing' is a map of this New Land we have fallen from the sky onto.


Emptying Out Traditions

The promises of greater human Freedom have been proclaimed from the rooftops. Yes, we need to break free of what has held us back. Yes, we need to step boldly into a future where we are not conditioned by the past--a future sans History, perhaps (uhm, which is a future that is profoundly antidevelopmental to the core, I might add).

After all, if we deny the Traditions and the Norms which have brought us to the present moment in time where we seem to be standing on the precipice of a whole new Historical Epoch, then do we really have any ground to stand upon? Perhaps that is what the more Conservative-minded among us are pointing to (minus the often shallow intellectualism, and the spiteful accusations against the new and novel): that we cannot go forward unless we honour and respect our origins.

In the TV series Lost we see just how true this can be. The past---though not present in physical terms--is present psychologically and exerts a weight upon the present moment for each of the characters. The characters in Lost are not a-historical or anti-developmental. Rather, they are precise glimpses into the fact that we carry History with us and to a great degree that History is un-avaoidable. We are History.


Running From HIstory

The funny thing is that as much as we are History we also run from it. That's the ironical, slapstick nature of what Ken Wilber has called one of the twenty fundamental tenets that all holons (er, uhm... can we say people, more particularly?) exhibit. That we include History and yet we seek to transcend History.

Word of warning is that to the extent that we deny History... in a transcendent only arc... we are falling into inevitable dissociative distress. The same can be said to the degree that we deny transcendence. An example of the latter can be seen in the arche-Conservatives who seek to uphold Tradition at any and all costs, i.e., for whom there is no transcendence... but only conformity.