A tear drops,

Waterfalls of simple reflection.

The breath of beauty,

offered in a glance of passing perfection.

I had a young man not much older than myself come to speak to my class this past Friday.  He was originally from Darfur Sudan, a region of Africa that continues to be torn by genocide, rape and displacement of the Sudanese civilians living within its borders. 

He was thin, dark and carried a wisdom that was deeply grounded in reality and his own humility. He found his purpose in life in  traveling and giving talks to awaken peoples awareness. His stories of trauma plundered idealism, and yet he also seemed genuinely grateful for life.

I was especially disturbed by the stories he told of the young women of Darfur who often met similar fates of gang rape and torture before being left for dead in the deserts.  The talk provoked a tornado within my being, the first day was filled with full bodied nausea that flooded through me like unforgiving waves of painful contractions. I felt myself as "her", felt the humiliation reach itself like fire over my stomache and watched the tears pour themselves uncontrollably over my cheeks. But then the next day, without warning, I felt myself become the killer, felt the surge of evil running through every vein of my being as painful images flashed across my mind and rage pulled everything beautiful in existence into darkness and destruction. I felt the other side just as equally, just as painfully and just as fully.

The juxtaposition of these two overwhelming waves caused me to once again realize the need to honor and embody the polarity of existence within my own being, the many faces of Self that we all carry. I still struggle at times to hold the waves that can come to overwhelm my heart and mind but there seems to truly be a sacredness in the teaching that "evil" evokes that is best listened to within the responses of the body. How it curls the stomache and shortens the breath, how it causes fear to rise through the heart and parch the throat before receding back to the emptiness. It seems that it is the recognition of the deepest "evil" that stretches compassion into a new form, a compassion dwelling in darkness, a recognition of Self in a pool of hatred, and a willingness to offer oneself as a full embodiment of the very real duality that pervades our often painful relative existence. 


Sands swept through darkened folds of forgotten land,
It was here that she found no body left to lean on.

A wasted gift, a severed vein,
a world seen through the eyes of broken perception.

A pain that shakes, 
A body that aches, 
A hand that surges to the hips in vain.

This was how she came to a stillness that moved,
when the strength of humiliation split the body and mind in two.

She dreamed of clear waters coursing the skin across her chest,
while the world dressed her in their semen and spit,
A burden she would own in her death.

Could we allow ourselves to feel her? Put our body in her own?

The scene always reflects the soul, 
The shadow opens the gate,
And we meet ourselves in every form,
Both the killers and the maimed.

We could never escape the constant stare,
the faces that held our shame.
The Self that looked straight back on us,
From the other side of a thousand names.

 
 

Who writes these words?

Who reads them?

Spirit is playing hide and seek,

PEEK-A-BOO!

I've always been drawn to the importance of existentialism.  Okay yes, I was a bit of a dark teen and yes I went through the whole phase of wearing black and smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, but so does everyone right(-:  Okay but Seriously though, the existential confrontation is a critical junction and in need of greater attention here.

The existential edge is the tipping point, the place where meaning folds in on itself. For Kierkegaard it  was the existential anxiety that held the first possibility of our freedom, for it was this anxiety that demolished all finite aims.

The existential dillema, the last limited "choice"  The red pill or the blue?

The body trembles, shakes and whispers incoherently.
A heart freezes and melts with ease as the soul begins its dislodge from the skin.
Don't look to reflections, the shell will be unrecognizable.

A dream breaks, a wave caves, the breath finds no origin.

A word stalls, vision leaks,
comfort falls, silence speaks.


It is anxiety, Kierkegaard said, that brings us to the brink of oblivion... which was also the brink of our own infinity...  and the next step.... to renounce dread without dread, a feat, he said, that only faith was capable. 

Okay, this blogging thing is getting addicting(-:  I know I have two papers to write for class but this blog just felt important to write.  Due to time restraint I will only start the seed of the idea here and hopefully continue it in future blogs. 

My interest today surfaced around the need to salvage the importance of the green meme and the gifts that it brings to the spiral.  In this sense, how to disentangle it from the pathological snare it has wound itself in but also to address what I sometimes feel has become a simplistic caricature of the green meme for some people who first start learning SDi theory. 

I'll start with admitting my own background is deeply rooted in the green meme, both its healthy and unhealthy sides so I feel that I know the system pretty well.  I was born into an intentional community in a small town and although I didn't stay there, I grew up being put in and out of such kind of communities so I know the beauty that green awareness and community can offer and yes I also have participated in more endless green conversations than I can count(-:  I also grew up in and around poverty and because of this I know I am naturally more inclined to be aware of green meme concerns such as real structural inequalities and oppression. 

My concern is that the caricature of green meme has become so negative in many SDi circles that the real healing that its system brings has started to be lost and this to me is a true tragedy.  I started studying SDi three years ago and for some reason the first thing that I remember sticking out to me about the green meme was a description I read in one of Grave's writings.  He said that the job of the green system was to cleanse the spiral, to heal the pathologies that had broken out to such a severe extent within the five first tier systems.  It was this cleansing that was essential for a healthy emergence into second tier, one that could properly integrate and transcend the first six systems. 

Now that description hits home for me.  All the healing that I've seen done in green through emotional work and shared community values as well as the sense of universal care that addressed massive inequalities and oppressive systems that the unhealthy sides of blue and orange systems had created.  Of course there is much to say for green's pathological side, but I worry for what I sometimes see in people as a need to "be at the top", to "get to second tier" and they bypass the important green cleanse along the way.  The stop and check point that was designed by Spirit's intelligence as a place to go back and figure out what we've dissociated from and pathologically transcended over in our own development up the first five rungs. 

I watch the gut reaction of laughter and repulsion that some people have when I even mention the green meme and I can't help but feel sad for how its been glazed over as unimportant and ultimately only a block to second tier consciousness.  It is true that it can become that, but that isn't the green that I am trying to salvage here. I'm hoping rather to resurrect green's healing qualities so that yellow can gain the benefits.  

It's so important to honor the tools of all the first tier systems and the reasons for their emergence, and yes that includes the green meme(-:

To be continued....  

Okay, again, I still have two papers to write but I had another idea I wanted to explore briefly in continuation of the conversation below on Salvaging the Green Meme.

Matthew made an important point in his comment about the desire to bypass the green cleanse being more of an orange desire, for yellow is inherently inclusive of all the first six tier systems, but here's my question...

What happens when we start looking at lines of development? Reading through Wilber's new book Integral Spirituality, I've become really interested in the complexity that lines add to our discussion on development. When we talk in SDi language it is true that no stage can be skipped in the unfolding, but when we add lines to the equation we suddenly get different lines developing relatively independently through each stage. Although always interacting, the key is that they all develop from precon to con to postcon relatively separately.  And when we look at development this way it becomes...well frankly, really messy(-:

I don't know how many people I've met who so obviously carry yellow if not turquoise to coral cognition yet are emotionally, psychosexually, or relationally still extremely underdeveloped (we all know this problem both in ourselves and others in our life).  I think a healthy relational and emotional line evolves out of a strong green base and without which yellow and turquoise cognition can still be developed but very asymmetrically and perhaps sometimes without the heart.  Now maybe this is an unfair assessment, I'm open to criticism (isn't that green of me(-:), but I would argue that I've seen this problem enough to be relatively concerned by it.

The other thing I was thinking today was that Beck and Wilber often say that an emergence into a new system, in this case yellow, is accompanied by a rejection of the previous level, and that this is an important part of its detachment process.  So it's definitely essential that we keep this in mind but also watch that it doesn't become dissociation.  

The last thought I wanted to throw out there and which is open to feedback is something I've been wondering about for a while.  We often talk about the pathology of green being its affair with an unhealthy narcissistic red that we never truly healed and transcended and so sits at the base of a lot of green motivations.  So here's my concern... As we now try to move ourselves up to second tier, what happens to that red if we still haven't done our good HEALTHY green emotional work that would allow us to re-identify with that red and then transcend it?

 Pathologies don't just disappear because we get to integral; in fact shadows grow the farther up we go without dealing with those pathologies. So my question is, if we haven't healed that red that was sitting at the core of our unhealthy green is it possible that that red viciousness can then transmute to become that which vehemently rejects all things green and attaches itself to the new discourse of power (integral) for the purpose of its own survival? Discourse is power (yes I'm a fan of Foucault(-:) and I just worry that discourses can be learned and used even when we don't necessarily completely embody integral in a majority of our other lines.    

Just some thoughts...still to be continued...