1b: A Divine Encounter (Kevin Kelly and Ken Wilber - Exploring the Technium)

www.IntegralLife.com

For full description and free download, please visit:

http://integrallife.com/editorial/technology-evolution-and-god

Here Kevin Kelly shares one of his most powerful experiences. At the age of 27, he slept on the supposed spot where Jesus was crucified, and upon awakening had a powerful spiritual experience. Many people are aware of the fact that Kevin continues to be a devout Christian, which might defy some expectations of those who otherwise consider him extremely rational—trans-rational even—while pushing the vanguard of digital culture. In many contemporary thinkers' minds, spirituality is little more than a quaint vestige of antiquity, and once we transition from the mythic/traditionalist stage to the rational/scientific stage, there is no longer any room in the universe for God.

This, more than anything, has been the rallying call of the "New Atheist" movement of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and (to a lesser degree) Sam Harris. But it is important to note that it's not spirituality per se that the modern world should jettison, but the magical and mythical interpretations of spirituality that are transcended by the rational or postmodern mind. The present schism between modernity and spirituality does not need to exist, as long as we allow ourselves enough room to re-conceptualize what we mean by the word "spirituality."

While nobly trying to dislodge humanity from the monolithic tyranny of fundamentalism, many modern and post-modern thinkers have inadvertently thrown the baby out with the bath water. When Nietzsche accurately exclaimed "God is dead!" he wasn't actually talking about God Him/Herself, but the mythic conception of God, along with all the dogmatism, absolutism, and ethnocentrism that follows. While the mythic God was dying, the rational God was only just being born. Possiby stillborn, some might argue, but born nonetheless—with both a pluralistic God and an Integral God close on its heels.

This is one of the most extraordinary insights of recent years: while the universe (and our experience of the universe) is constantly evolving, so is our spirituality. It is a sad reality that spirituality remains such a confusing and controversial topic. How is it that religion has brought more liberation to more people than any other human endeavor, while simultaneously causing more pain and suffering than anything in human history? As mentioned, both individuals and cultures develop through increasing waves of subjective and intersubjective complexity, from archaic, to magic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral stages of consciousness and culture, with infinite room at the top for future stages of unfolding. This is the profound role religion can potentially serve in the 21st century—a sort of "conveyor belt" of consciousness, designed to facilitate growth through each stage of consciousness.

And this is an absolutely crucial point—you can taste God at any stage in your own psychological development, as these experiences are always available as ever-present states of consciousness. However, your interpretation of the experience will be largely determined by what stage of consciousness you have achieved. For example, a mythic/traditional person might interpret a spiritual experience as a revelation from a personal God intended solely for the chosen people, a rational/scientific person might interpret reason and mathematics itself as the language of a Deistic God (the great clockmaker in the sky), while a pluralistic/postmodern person might interpret his or her experience as emanating from Gaia and felt as a radical interconnectivity with the Great Web of Life. This is demonstrated in the graphic to the right, known as the Wilber/Combs matrix, which plots four different types of commonly-acknowledged spiritual states against seven evolutionary stages of consciousness, yielding at least 28 different kinds of spiritual experience. No wonder we are so confused!

About Kevin Kelly:

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. He is currently editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets 1 million visitors per month. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control.

For full description and free download, please visit:

http://integrallife.com/editorial/technology-evolution-and-god

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Kevin Kelly
• Ken Wilber
• Technium
• Wired Magazine
• Evolution
• Technology
• Spirituality
• Integral Life
• Google
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computers
• Consciousness
• science fiction
• futurism
• Jesus Christ
• Christianity

[integraleric]

Going to meditate now :-)

[CoachAlvar]

The fact that conversations like this, conversations between 'big' progressive thinkers are uploaded and freely available to anyone, the world over, willing to think and learn, gives me great hope for the future. Never before in history has this been possible! Interesting times indeed...

[luismedina2008]

God Bless you.

[Imperativism]

Evolved implies direction. And to be evolved for life in one context entails unfitness for another. Your view of "absolute evolutionary fitness" contradicts itself.

[lorerax1]

umm....what about the consept of property?

Since the governments own the land.....

So the land is the property of the government.

Since we have a right to destroy our property, could not governments destroy the land?

If land can not be owned or taxed for that matter, then....shit

See I think something is supposed to happen.

[CloudshadowMan1]

If God is everything maybe we should love and take better care of everything. What we are most sure of is our basic existence and awareness.

May all beings be love.

[S2Cents]

Ken Wilber's political views are *ahem* UNenlightened seems to me.

Bush defender? Iraq War supporter/ Tony Blair fan. Blair was the most "integral" politician. LOL!

The most advanced way politically is mainstream liberalism in the U.S. Which in my book is what Beltway pundits call "centrist" . If your conservative or progressive your less evolved!

[HumanEnergy47]

And, how do you know there is not a God of the God we can conjure......and the systems we know...how do you know there's not a whole other dimension or something that's totally different than dimension....who determines or what determines what is "good". In theory we can sungaze and never need food, so is there really hunger? Or were we taught to be hungry...so what is "good"....

[spectrumfrequency]

3rd reason yeah yeah yeah!

[jazzemagic]

Thank you!