Alive, Only for those who have actually listened to it please! Options

[SinfulEyes]

Tell me.

[FishOutaWater]

Fish has brought up information about some priest he may be following, but he's still been talking about bible references and such in interviews and such .. he may not be evangelical like Fish stated, but it's out and out Christian themes and music.

I think that at the center of Ed's spirituality for the last ten years, is Ken Wilber. Ken Wilber has a sort of guru status, and Ed seems to be in one of those classic "eccentric rock star follows guru" patterns for a long time now. First it was Krishnamurti jolting Ed out of his stoic Catholic upbringing. Then Ed found Wilber. Wilber is a deep thinking genius. I have gotten into conversation with Ed about Ken Wlber. Around the time when Ed was into Genpo Roshi, who is one of Ken Wilber's spiritual faculty members, Ed signed an autograph for me that said "Everything is happening in Big Mind". He told you "you have to try this! It will blow you away!"

Around June 2005, Ken Wilber started the Integral Spirituality Center. He has had a few conferences. For the first conference, he wrote this brilliant piece called Integral Sprituality. The first draft was free as a pdf download on the internet for a little while after he wrote it and now you can buy it. I downloaded it and read it. It is really brilliant. He allegedly wrote the whole thing on a train ride in a few hours. If you read the thing, that claim comes close to a claim that he turned water into wine - but that is for another discussion. In the beginning, he summarizes the thesis as follows:

"I won't give a summary of the conclusions this essay reaches, but simply point
out that it addresses perhaps 4 or 5 of the most pressing issues concerning spirituality—
such as stages of spiritual development, meditative training, Eastern and Western
approaches to religion—and their relation to currents in the modern and postmodern
world.

I do believe that this essay points the way to a role for religion in the modern and
postmodern world that has been overlooked entirely, and this radically new role for
religion not only works, it holds a very real type of salvation for humanity on the whole."

So Ken basically tried to create a framework for all world religions to offer a new path to salvation in a post-religious world.

The interesting thing about WIlber's thesis is that it categorized stages of development from an "archaic" to "magical" to "mythic" to "rational" to "nondual" stages. Incidentally, the lower stages are sort of indicative of evangelical Christianity and voodoo witch doctors. A fully awakened, nondual stage is more indicative of a fully realized, enlighted zen practitioner. This is part of the reason why I find it surprising that Ed has returned to his Christian roots after realizing so much spiritual development.

Ken developed a grid that demonstrates the concept. He suggests that mystical expereinces and heightened states of spirituality happen to various people in various places and times throughout history. And depending upon what level of development you are at dictates how you interpret that experience. It is the "lens" through which you see the experience. For example, a Christian fundamentalist in Texas may have a hightened spiritual experience and to that person, it will clearly and unambiguously be interpretted as the Lord Jesus Christ speaking to the person and offering a direct conversation (or something like that). An enlightened individual at a higher stage of development may interpret that same experience as pure consciousness and true reality and relate it in a different way than the person at the "magic" level. So the same experience, but interpretted and understood in different ways depending upon the stage of developments.

The faculty of the ongoing Integral Spiritual Institute includes Genpo Roshi. It also includes Father Thomas Keating, as well as a Rabbi, buddhists, etc. Keating is not your typical Catholic priest. He developed this thing called "Contemplative Prayer" which is basically meditation and mysticism within the framework of Christianity. Ed has attened at least one of the conferences. I read that online a long time ago. I know Ed is still associated with Wilber. So I think that Ed is still influenced by Wilber and his posse. And I think that perhaps Ken Wilber may have opened the door and shown the path for Ed to get reintroduced to Christianity through this thinking. I am guessing that Ed has met Father Keating.

But who knows, maybe Ed is just a plain old Christian now and I have overanalyzed it.