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Integrative Spirituality: Grounded Contemporary Perspectives
Bruce Alderman

Coming last in the Integrative Spirituality Symposium has been both a luxury and a burden.  I've had the luxury of being able to read and reflect on everyone's contributions before considering what I will bring to the table; but my position in the lineup is also somewhat daunting, because now I have the difficulty of trying to come up with something original after all of these fine posts! 

In this essay, I will not attempt a comprehensive statement on the nature of integrative spirituality, but will offer several perspectives on it which have been helpful to me and which guide me in my own inquiry and practice.  Many of the essays in this symposium have approached the subject of integral spirituality primarily in terms of personal practice, and I will consider that dimension of it as well, but I also plan to give a little attention to its LR and LL manifestations.

Writing this essay, I chose at the last moment the convention of defining and commenting on each word in the title of this symposium.  In this way, I hope to open up and “evoke” the spirit of this topic, as it finds its expression in my own understanding and practice.  At the end, I will offer a few personal reflections.

INTEGRATIVE:  Formally, by integrative, I mean being committed to some iteration of Integral Methodological Pluralism.  This does not require adopting a particular integral model (which may privilege Eastern, Judeo-Christian, humanistic, or other principles), but instead requires an appreciation for the multiple perspectives by which our worlds are enacted, and a commitment to honor and value the knowledge afforded by each of them.  While Wilber's Integral Theory is a powerful example of this approach, and perhaps one of the most comprehensive, this notion has been around for a long time.  One of the central tenets of Jainism, for instance, is anekantavada, which is variously translated as non-absolutism, non-one-sidedness, or non-one-perspectivism.  This principle holds that no single language, conceptual model, or perspective is capable of disclosing the fullness of Being, and that multiple perspectives must be held together, as the many facets of the jewel of Spirit, if we wish to understand and appreciate the richness of reality.

On a more fundamental level, if we acknowledge knowingness as an inherent aspect of the unbounded wholeness of Being, then we may recognize that knowing itself is integrative - that its uninhibited movement in time is toward the apprehension of greater and greater wholes, and that it is an ally, and the occasion, for growth.

SPIRITUALITY:  In broad terms, I define spirituality as active engagement with ultimate questions; openness to the optimizing thrust of Being; an occasion for inquiry and enjoyment; commitment to authenticity, freedom, and transformation; appreciative relationship and intimacy with Being (and other beings); and a celebratory dance in time and space.  These short descriptions are not exhaustive, but they give a taste of where I am coming from in the comments that follow.

INTEGRATIVE SPIRITUALITY:  When we join these words together, we evoke a way of life which honors, or in which we simply and finally recognize the wisdom of cooperating with, the promptings of Spirit, the optimizing thrust of Being, in all domains of our lives.  Every perspective available to us simultaneously reveals what Spirit has done, and is its enacting and enabling Presence.  We realize that every perspective-dimension is valuable, and is a facet of the burgeoning of Spirit within us.

In practical terms, we do what so many of the contributors to this symposium have already suggested - we attend with compassion and commitment, and bring healing, transformative light, to body, mind, and spirit, in self, culture, and nature.  In Wilber's terms, we work for relative and absolute emancipation concurrently - recognizing the value of conventional growth and development, without losing sight of the vertical deepening in Spirit that is available at every point.

GROUNDED:  What do we mean when we describe an approach as grounded?  Conventionally, we may mean that it does not stray far from common sense or conventional wisdom, or that it relies only on those “facts” and models which have been most firmly established, or that it is practical and workable rather than abstract and disconnected from daily concerns.  I respect each of these definitions, and do not intend to undermine their relative value, but I question the ultimate stability of the grounding they provide.  To the extent that conventional wisdom, reliable models, and even workable approaches are all necessarily limited and circumscribed (by the availability of information, the horizons of one's Kosmic address, and so on), they are perpetually subject to challenge and revision.  

One of the implications of post-metaphysics is that the Kosmos is, in an important way, groundless: that the given ground, at any given point, is still a perspective, and therefore not really given at all.  At any stage in our development and understanding, we may work to “ground” ourselves in the knowledge available, mastering and masterfully employing the models at our disposal and the tools they provide, and this is indeed a wise use of our energy, but we should also recognize the inherent vulnerability and instability of the ground they establish.  Other perspectives will always arise to challenge our own; the evolution of knowledge in time will eventually undermine or overturn our founding stories.  If we mistake our beliefs and models and convictions for solid, inviolable ground, we will find ourselves called again and again to defend the territory we have claimed, and upon which our felt sense of identity rests.

As an alternative to this conventional definition of being grounded, I propose that a grounded approach is one which is intimate with the living knowledgeability of Being, the open-ended knowingness which is the creative ground for all particularized acts of knowledge and all individual knowledge claims, and which in its spaciousness accommodates the multiplicity of perspectives which enact our self-world horizons.  In practical terms, this means having reached the point, through sustained inquiry, that one recognizes this knowingness, this open clarity, not as an ideal, not as a position to be adopted, but as the actuality of being.  Because this knowing is foundational, being grounded means being open to what is, in and as its presencing, in uncontrived intimacy.

In terms of state training, this involves realizing and stabilizing in the spontaneous clarity of non-positioned knowing.  In terms of philosophical perspectives, it may mean recognition of the postmodern truths of constructivism and contextualism, or a profound (AQAL) grasp of co-dependent origination.  In terms of moral grounding, it may involve recognizing the wisdom of insecurity or growing comfortable with uncertainty (to borrow from two popular book titles which address the question of groundlessness). 

CONTEMPORARY:  Literally, the word means current, with the times, modern.  But I want to propose something a little different:  that con-temporary be read as “with time” or “with the fullness of time.”  Because a perspective which recognizes only what is immediately at hand, which lacks historical depth and speculative reach, is necessarily myopic and unstable, and would be a liability, not an asset, in a project such as the one we are exploring.  A truly adequate “contemporary perspective” is one which understands and acknowledges what has come before, while also standing on the brink of the future infinitive, working with time in its creative unfolding.  It is a perspective which encompasses and integrates the evolutionary thrust of knowledge in time, cognizant of the indelible prints of the past on the present without being bound or wholly determined by them.

PERSPECTIVES:  The fact that the final word in the title is plural is an acknowledgment that the understanding we seek is bigger than any of us, beyond the grasp of any single model or formulation.  It is a reminder that the foundation of our identity, the groundless ground of our being, is ultimately so deep and inviolable that we can only be enriched by an encounter with otherness; that we need not fear contradiction, or flinch at the appearance of alternative perspectives.  Relatively, some perspectives are more adequate and encompassing than others; ultimately, each is a beautiful ornament, and a testament to the awesome fecundity and “allowingness,” of our basic nature.

Multiplicity does not need to be reduced to singularity or uniformity in order to accomplish oneness; the union that matters is already given.  In my view, we have reached a point in our evolution, with the world shrinking daily and all the world's cultures pressing up against each other, that we are being called to transcend those habits of thought which have opposed us one to the other - not by demanding allegiance to a grand meta-narrative, or cleansing the world of every perspective which strikes us as inadequate or outmoded or uncomfortably alien, but first and foremost by finding that ground which cannot be opposed, the inexhaustible heart of Spirit, and from there meeting each other in and as the gifts of our othering.  As Catholic theologian, Raimundo Panikkar, writes, “Isolation is no longer possible and unity is not convincing since it destroys one of the parties.”

In my view, a truly integrative spirituality will honor the integrative impulse in the development of knowledge and the growth of human perspectives, while yet retaining the humbling insight that the infinite riches of Spirit will never be captured by any single project, however grand.  We are called now to find a way forward together, which at this stage in our human evolution appears to demand a non-relativistic, integral pluralism, through which we recognize the creative heart of Spirit behind and within the scandal of particularity, and in and through the profusion of perspectives that have evolved over time.

Personal Reflections

This essay has perhaps tended too much towards poetry for some people's tastes (including my own!).  I wanted to find a way to communicate the “spirit” of the topic under discussion, as I understand it, without simply reiterating the various recommendations and observations that have already been made (most of which are excellent).  If you will indulge me a bit more, I will turn very briefly to the particularized ways that I relate and aspire to “grounded integrative spirituality” in my own life, still using the poetic voice I have established.  In the comments section, I will be happy to speak in more concrete terms, outlining practical applications of this vision (if anyone is interested).

I view my spiritual path largely as a path of inquiry.  Several of my main practices in recent years - Buddhism, the Time-Space-Knowledge vision, and the Diamond Approach - place inquiry at the heart of spiritual praxis.  For this reason, I resonate more strongly with Wilber-5 (post-metaphysical, integral methodological pluralism) than with earlier versions of Integral Theory.  From one perspective, inquiry itself is a vehicle of transformation, a means of carrying those who engage it to greater freedom, wider vision, and deeper intimacy with being.  But from another perspective, it is already an expression of that freedom and knowledgeability, as revealed by its very availability at the heart of ordinary experience.  My commitment to the paths these various vehicles lay out is a commitment to total questioning, which is at the same time an uninhibited welcoming of experience.  This does not mean that I do not encounter resistance, reactivity, deflection, and so on in my exploration of body, mind, spirit, and shadow.  I inevitably do.  Rather, it means that each “failure” of inquiry is itself an invitation to go deeper; that we are never ultimately “stuck,” nor can we ever really stray from the Agapic pull of Spirit, the vitality of Great Time.  To inquire is to participate with Spirit, to join God in his creative play.