A Leading Integral Blogger Joe Perez wrote an insightful short piece today about the leading edge work of Center for World Spirituality.
An urgent must-read for anyone interested in Integral spirituality:
“We need to once again begin to engage in Meta theory and big picture thinking. For the truth be told, there is much that we know in every discipline. We do have deep knowledge which have been arrived at through carefully engaging double blind experiments enacted in the realms of the both the physical and spiritual sciences. We do have shared depth structures of knowledge and meaning, which have been arrived at independently and virtually unanimously by the leading researches of mind, heart, body and spirit. We have — for the first time in history — been able to gather their data and reveal the profound shared depth structures of knowledge that they all share in common. These sturdy knowings form the basis of a powerfully effective and inspired human user manual. And when we string together these solid beads of knowledge a truly stunning integral worldview begins to emerge. This is the world view of a World Spirituality. But in the mad rush to deconstruct all knowing, we have forgotten. We have forgotten that we know. But even more then that…we have forgotten that we have forgotten.”
~ From “Essential World Spirituality Teaching,” by Dr. Marc Gafni
As we begin 2012, I am drawn to express how much I resonate with the vision of World Spirituality advanced by Marc Gafni and other spiritual leaders and change agents involved with the Center for World Spirituality. Their particular work and vision inspires me more the alternatives that I’ve seen presented by other Integral organizations and leaders. It is the vision they carry of a emergence of an organized worldwide spiritual movement, but not a new world religion. If spirituality in modernity divorced itself from religious traditions and spirituality in post-modernity divorced itself (paradoxically) from all grand narratives, then we have reached a pivotal juncture: to continue to forget the past or forget the forgetting, or to remember. Only by remembering can we rebuild constructively a new, more fulfilling and beautiful way of being human which the world desperately needs.
About Joe Perez
Writing professional, blogger, and Seattle-based author of the breakthrough spiritual memoir Soulfully Gay (Shambhala, 2007). Joe Perez is an Honors graduate of Harvard University and has studied at Pacific Integral and The Divinity School at The University of Chicago. He’s a little bit country and a little bit part and whole.
