“Hymn of the Universe.”
“Son of earth, steep yourself in the sea of matter, bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the source of your life and youthfulness.
You thought you could do without it because the power of thought has been kindled in you? You hoped that the more thoroughly you rejected the tangible, the closer you would be to spirit: that you would be more divine if you lived in the world of pure thought, or at least more angelic if you fled the corporeal? Well, you were like to have perished of hunger.
You must have oil for your limbs, blood for your veins, water for your soul, the world of reality for your intellect: do you not see that the very law of your own nature makes these things a necessity for you?
Never, if you work to live and to grow, never will you be able to say to matter,”I have seen enough of you; I have surveyed your mysteries and have taken from them enough food for my thought to last me forever.” I tell you: even though, like the Sage of sages, you carried in your memory the image of all beings that people the earth or swim in the seas, still all that knowledge would be as nothing for your soul, for all abstract knowledge is only a faded reality: this is because to understand the world knowledge is not enough, you must see it, touch it, live in its presence and drink the vital heat of existence in the very heart of reality.”
Second excerpt:
Hymn to Matter
“Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock: you who yield only to violence, you who force us to work if we would eat.
Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untameable passion: you who unless we fetter you will devour us.
Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of truth.
Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God.
Blessed be you, impenetrable matter: you who, interposed between our minds and the world of essences, cause us to languish with the desire to pierce through the seamless veil of phenomena.
Blessed be you, mortal matter: you who one day will undergo the process of dissolution within us and will thereby take us forcibly into the very heart that which exists.
Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.
I bless you, matter, and you I acclaim: not as the pontiffs of science or the moralizing preachers depict you, debased, disfigured–a mass of brute forces and base appetites–but as you reveal yourself to me today, in your totality and your true nature.
You I acclaim as the inexhaustible potentiality for existence and transformation wherein the predestined substance germinates and grows.
I acclaim you as the universal power which brings together and unites, through which the multitudinous monads are bound together and in which they all converge on the way of the spirit.
I acclaim you as the melodious fountain of water whence spring the souls of men, and as the limpid crystal whereof is fashioned the new Jerusalem.
I acclaim you as the divine milieu, charged with creative power, as the ocean stirred by the Spirit, as the clay molded and infused with life by the incarnate Word.
This is taken from a prolific chapter from Teilhard de Chardin’s Hymn of the Universe.
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Duff 8:39 am on November 16, 2009 Permalink
Good thoughts. One of the reasons I stopped being interested in integral is because it is a closed, top-down hierarchy with a fair amount of corruption and power plays, and no real access to the dialogue from participants who don’t already have money or power and aren’t willing to kiss Ken’s butt.
I’ve found that almost all notions that integral is “beyond” green are pre-trans fallacies. Integral culture is mostly orange and blue (and I refuse to call it “amber”), as stated by Don Beck himself. Beck’s description of yellow in SD is that of a ecosystems-thinking forest ranger, a description that would be rejected by nearly all integral community members as being too “green.”
Bob D. 5:18 pm on November 16, 2009 Permalink
I couldn’t agree with you more, although I think you’re being a bit too kind and apologetic toward the Integral Institute approach toward mainstream engagement. When Integral Naked first came out five or so years ago, there was so much potential to take Integral into the mainstream. Since then, Wilber’s style has gotten increasingly insular and self-referential. Eventually I just got sick to death of the Integral Naked dialogues, which didn’t seem dialogical at all, but rather just exercises in translating various issues and topics into AQAL-ese. Perhaps this has changed with Integral Life, but I’m not paying money to find out. Of course, it’s not all about what I like or don’t like, but I’m a person sympathetic to the Integral cause, and a huge fan of Wilber’s books (at least through SES). So if I feel disengaged by the Integral Enterprise, I can imagine how tough a sell it must be to Joe Mainstream. I doubt I-I will open up in the way you suggest, although that would be awesome. Jon Kabat-Zinn is a good model, I think, of how to successfully engage the mainstream. And Alan Watts too, albeit in a different way.
shamansun 5:42 pm on November 16, 2009 Permalink
@Duff: Interesting that you mention the integral culture is orange and blue. I thought of something similar. AQAL/SD and the language in Wilber’s books are heavily rational-oriented, all theoretical. So it’s no surprise a community built around that would tend to be top heavy, or watered down theory into “blue.” Even using these terms at this point isn’t really comfortable/natural for me. But at any rate, I do like Don Beck’s description of “integral,” being more like a forest ranger or someone who has returned to nature consciously.
@Bob: You’re probably right about me being too soft. I didn’t want to seem too overbearing at the outset of the discussion. I definitely agree that Integral Naked had so much potential (the list of celebrities and musician dialogues was a lot of fun).
You hit the nail on the head about the “core” problem with this organization. It’s like it’s trying to engulf the world by translating popular culture into its own meta-theory. But a theory is just a pile of words, after all. What about the experiential component? It seems that has become secondary. I don’t think this is truly the original spirit of Wilber’s books or integral. What about igniting the consciousness that is “already” present? They recently interpreted Eckhart Tolle’s dialogue into an “integral” perspective, but in my opinion, Tolle is already doing what the Integral Enterprise wants to do: help people shift their own consciousness.
Alan Watts definitely had a good way to “engage mainstream.” It’d be nice if Wilber left the nest and went on a book/speaking tour, I’m sure many universities and colleges would love to host him. The potential is there, or rather was there. My question is, what’s going to happen now? Is I-I headed for a dead end? My gut tells me more creative, open engagements will pop up eventually. It’ll happen naturally, not in an overtly insulated, over-engineered way.