The Unique Self of a Religion
The Unique Self of a Religion
Frameworks Matter Ultimately
Frameworks Matter
Charles Taylor in his classic work Sources of Self reminded us that frameworks matter because frameworks are foundational, and the foundations affect just about everything else. Particularly critical, insists Taylor, is the model or framework for Self. In a post-traditional world, new frameworks of meaning are being established by those on the leading edge of thought. There is enormous privilege and responsibility in articulating and enacting new source code frameworks of meaning. Not only substance, but nuance, tone, and flavor matter. We need genuine dharma dialogue to clarify important distinctions in our core frameworks.
A deeper discussion of frameworks or what I might simply call context or prism through which reality is understood and enacted in daily life seems therefore worthwhile before we engage our essential inquiry, the distinction between two models of self and why they matter.
It is at this particular moment in history that frameworks matter more than ever. We live in a web of ubiquitous lies. As cultural critic Brad Blanton and many others have pointed out, in many significant ways marketing has replaced meaning and commodification has replaced genuine communion and commitment. Or to say it more starkly, lying is a way of life, and the sense of any form of ultimate truth is greatly eroded. This is true in economics, politics, religion, and even in the once more pure world of alternative spirituality. The commodification of spirit has spread from organized religion to the world of Internet marketing that drives so much of the new spiritual, fitness, and health and wellness worlds. Despite, or sometimes even because of, all the grand claims, it is difficult to get hold of a genuine truth sense. There is a pervasive sense that there is little that has ultimate value, and particularly a genuine post-postmodern sense of self, purpose, and obligation remains elusive at best. At the same time, virtually every social critic correctly recognizes that it is precisely these maps of meaning that align our life purpose not only with success, but also with significance. More than that, repeated studies show that the average Westerner believes in some form of God, higher spirit, or meaning. But what that is remains at the best elusive and more often than not, confusing. it is therefore, not genuinely instructive or inspiring for enacting a life that cogently serves the good, the true, and the beautiful.
When Taylor reminded us that we all live in inescapable frameworks, he was articulating the best of post-postmodern realization. It was not a cry of despair, but a wake-up call which demands that we take seriously the passionate—and what we might even term, the ecstatically urgent—need to explicate and clearly articulate our implicit frameworks of meaning and particularly of self. The articulation of a compelling vision of post-dogmatic meaning is the key goal of each division within our think tank, the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. Each division addresses a specific pivotal domain in our public or private lives. One of our most important domains is that of a post-dogmatic universal spirituality which transcends and includes the core wisdom of each of the great traditions. This is the mission of the World Religion Project within the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, whose purpose is to articulate a World Religion as a context for our diversity that unites the great truths still dormant in the many profound wisdom traditions, transcending and including the best of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern realization.[1]
Once subscribed, you can learn about our different newsletters here and then manage your subscription. If you click on the first newsletter (Center for World Philosophy and Religion), you will see an overview of ALL our posts. The other newsletters on that page show you the different section newsletters (with a brief description and sample posts). You can subscribe or unsubscribe to these sections separately by managing your subscription:
You can always manage your subscription preferences here:
More on Frameworks
Reality is virtually never confronted directly; rather, it is engaged through a prism or a framework. Another way to say it is a framework is a perspective through which we engage reality. In the pre-modern and modern period, when we human beings used to think we were engaging reality as it is, each religion felt that its insights were absolute truth. At the same time, they held that the perceptive faculties of other religions were somehow distorted or inferior to their own. The great realization of postmodernity, emergent from the epistemology of Kant, is that ordinary consciousness cannot engage reality without the prism of perspective. Every individual and every human being has a perspective. To put it another way, reality itself is fundamentally constructed from perspectives. Perspectives are irreducible, and at the same time, always mediated through larger contexts. All of reality is contexts within contexts. Context is, simply put, the constant matrix for perspective. The pre-modern mistake was the failure to realize that every religion emerged in a very specific context, which had a very particular perspective. Therefore, no religion had a right to claim that its intuition of truth was either ultimate or exclusive, and yet, that’s precisely what every religion did.
That is where a lot of the trouble that undermined the credibility of spirit in the modern and postmodern world began. When the truths of all the great traditions were gathered, they were in many respects contradictory. Each claimed to know directly an exclusive set of truth claims that were contradicted by the other religions. A simple example among dozens would be the dogmatic Christian claim that eternal salvation was only available through the acceptance of Jesus as the Christ. This caused much of modernity and most of postmodernity to reject the great traditions. After all, every tradition was claiming absolute truth, and the claims contradicted one another. Initially this was a major contributing factor in the rejection of the great traditions.
A second factor was the failure of the religions themselves to distinguish between their own surface structures and depth structures.
By surface structure, I refer to rituals and dogma which were asserted as true, but not empirically experienced as true through the enactment of practice, and therefore, not subject to third-person verification. The context of a religion was sometimes a pivotal variable informing the surface structures of the religion. Historical, cultural, topographical, economic, and other factors often had significant influence on the surface structures of rituals, rites of passage, holy days, and beliefs. Context also influenced some dimension of the depth structure. For example, a Hindu, a Jew, and a Christian doing the same practice for accessing the divine feminine might each access her presence in a different garb, with the Hindu seeing Parvati, Lakshmi, or Kali; the Jew seeing the Shekhinah in the image of a widow weeping at the wailing wall in Jerusalem; and the Christian seeing Mother Mary.
Depth structures refer to precisely those assertions that were arrived at through practices to open the eye of the spirit, and therefore, were subject to third-person verification by others engaging in the same practices. Nonetheless, the eye always sees through a prism. The prism affects both how the depth structures manifest in the world as well as some of the texture of the depth structure itself. We now understand that the medium and the message are inextricably intertwined. Even with this established insight, there is still a significant dimension of depth structures that transcend context conditioning and are a reflection of the universal essences shared by all the great traditions.
The Unique Self of a Religion
A great deal of the depth structures are shared between the great traditions, but not all of them. A depth structure is also the production of the irreducibly unique perspective of that religion which, while mediated by context, is not in any way reducible to merely context. The distinction between surface structures and depth structures, coupled with the postmodern realization that every great tradition and culture perceived essence through a particular perspective, allows us to avoid the tragic mistake of deconstructing the traditions as meaningless. Deconstruction wrongly assumed that when perspective is revealed to be part of the process of meaning-making, there is no longer any real meaning. Perspectives may be taken to indicate a plentitude rather than a paucity of meaning. From this point, we can understand the perspective of every great religion as true but partial. This understanding need not lead to a leveling of differences between traditions. All perspectives are true but partial, and it may also be fairly said that each authentic perspective incorporates, or more accurately discerns and reflects, a unique dimension of the true, good, or beautiful view of reality.
The unique perspective of every religion is what I might term the Unique Self of the religion.[2] This Unique Self of a religion—mediated through its core contexts—helped form a cultural worldview. This worldview was the framework through which reality was lived, through which our ethical calculus evolved, and through which meaning was made. Each worldview told a story, a grand narrative. How each narrative understood the role of the personal or the individual, was of enormous consequence. It was a key pivoting point, which affected everything else in the narrative. The status of the individual was virtually always a central factor in establishing values, ethics, and obligations.
Participate in the conversation:
For a significant sector of humanity, religions no longer play that role. Religion is no longer the explicit, nor for many, the implicit framework for meaning making. Worldviews are often not explicit, and even when implicit, not rooted in religions, or at least not rooted solely in religion. Grand narratives, to the extent that they exist at all for the leading edge of democratic pluralistic people, are often not sourced in spirit. Moreover, for most of postmodernity, the only grand narrative was that there was no grand narrative. The one universal of postmodernity was the paradoxically dogmatic assertion that there were no universals. Of course, this is an implicitly contradictory claim that has been referred to as a performative contradiction. That simply means that the claim that there are no universals is itself a dogmatic universal claim.[3]
This realization and others have led us into post-postmodernity. As we move into post-postmodernity, a new movement is arising which, after internalizing the wisdom of deconstruction, is initiating a new reconstructive project. This movement seeks to integrate partial truths of all the great systems gnosis into a new and more complete integral framework. The thinkers within this movement have the courage to stand in the breach and articulate a new story of patterns that connect. It is the simple truth that the classical sources of cultural wisdom, the academy and churches, are not addressing the core challenge to meaning. Now, new visions of the patterns that connect are emerging.
The old churches are either pre-modern or fig leafs for an insipid relativism, failing to articulate a vision that either compels or inspires.
The academy is paralyzed in two core ways. First, it is for the most part under the sway of various forms of scientism, which see narrow sensory empiricism and rational-deductive method as the only true source of gnosis. Second, departments virtually all focus on their narrow area of specialization so that links between arenas of knowledge, meta-theories, or grand narratives are met with dogmatic disdain and dismissal.
So, it remains for Integral visionaries on the leading edge to engage in the age-old practice that once belonged to the great traditions, the articulation of meta-frameworks and the formulation of meta-theory. A particularly powerful expression of this impulse is the initiation of a World Spirituality based on Integral Principles, or even a World Religion as a context for our diversity, which, as previously stated, transcends and includes the best of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern thought into a larger post-postmodern Integral framework. In this emerging World Spirituality or World Religion, a new vision of freedom and obligation are emergent as the awakening of the Evolutionary Unique Self within an evolutionary we space.
In the pre-modern world, there were religious wars for three core reasons. First, there were the most base of human motivations: greed, egoic power, and grasping. Second, each religion thought they were absolutely right and were thus fighting for the sake of God and truth. They were unaware that they were seeing reality through a prism and had little sense of the distinctions between surface structures and depth structures. Third, and this is the most often forgotten point in liberal circles, people fought because ideas, one’s view of the interior nature of reality, was understood to matter, and to matter ultimately.
Today, we are standing in the place of the great traditions. We must articulate new frameworks of meaning. We now understand that so much ostensibly religious contestation over ideas was regressive and primitive, rooted either in egoic power agendas or inappropriate pre-modern claims to exclusive truth. However, we must reclaim the responsibility for contestation for a very different reason. One’s interior view of reality does ultimately matter. That view of the interior face of the cosmos is the implicit framework in which life, love, and meaning are enacted. Frameworks matter. Frameworks are at their core the interior perspectives through which we see reality. So frameworks are foundational, as stated above. A weakness in the foundation has dramatic effects on the entire edifice. Frameworks matter ultimately. Frameworks are not only mediated by ephemeral and relative contexts, they also create essential contexts in which we live and love, including but not limited to our moral context. Frameworks create the meta-meanings that shape the very fabric of our lives and commitments.
This is particularly and poignantly true if we are indeed on the leading edge of the post-postmodern world, catalyzing the emergence of new meta-frameworks. If, as so many of us in the Integral communities often claim somewhat grandly, we are indeed creating the future, as expressions of the evolutionary impulse, then we are creating the moral contexts for the future. This is a great and awesome responsibility, which requires gravitas and courage. To borrow the Sanskrit word, dharma matters. We have to take our dharma responsibility seriously. We need genuine dharma debate and dialogue to clarify important distinctions. It is all about deploying the best faculties of perception, available through the eye of the spirit and the eye of the heart, to articulate a new framework of meaning.
It is for this reason that in this essay I feel called, even obligated, to engage, if only in broad brush strokes, a foundational issue in the source code of Integral thinking, the nature of the self. A pivotal issue of momentous significance in creating a moral context is the relationship between autonomy and communion, self and other. The quality and texture of intersubjective engagement in virtually every major developmental model is the litmus test of evolving consciousness. This, in turn, depends heavily on one’s model of self.[4]
The dialogue between the two models of self that we discuss in this book must be held in the spirit of honor and love, with academic rigor and open heart, much like the Talmudic scholars in the study hall engaged in havruta. These scholars, who look like they are “battling fiercely and thrusting lances, leave the study hall as beloveds.”[5] These Talmudic battles were not egoic battles. They were not about turf or branding, but about a truly enlightened and egoless search for the most integral truth that could be realized. The multicultural and ostensibly pluralistic consciousness that fails to discern or create any value distinctions between alternative frameworks creates a new age potpourri of truths in which there is no hierarchy, no genuine responsibility, no true sense of obligation, and of course, no compelling moral context. If the Integral framework is going to avoid being degraded into but another commodity in the marketplace hawking spirit, it must engage in genuine post-egoic loving dharma combat. In that spirit, this is a first foray into the burning question, what are the contours and textures of the emergent Integral Self? I will not cover this topic exhaustively, but will rather focus in this essay on one particular dimension of this issue. In a future essay, I hope to speak about this issue in a more complete manner.
An earlier version of this essay was published in Dr. Marc Gafni’s Self in Integral Evolutionary Mysticism.
Footnotes
[1] At the same time, World Religion is the culmination of the Neo-Perennialism of CosmoErotic Humanism, which seeks to clarify the core structures of value and meaning that make human civilizations possible. See more at https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/world-religion/.
[2] We will naturally discuss some dimensions of Unique Self in this book. However, for a more complete understanding of Unique Self, see Your Unique Self (2012, Integral Publishers); JITP 6.1, the Awakening Your Unique Self online course (2013); and the Wake Up, Grow Up, Show Up, and Participate in the Evolution of Love online course (2013). Both telecourses can be accessed on https://cosmoerotichumanism.shop/courses/. A complete timeline of the Unique Self teaching evolution is also available in Appendix C of this book and on the Unique Self website at https://www.uniqueselfinstitute.com/timeline-introduction/.
[3] Important writers in this vein include Thomas Nagel, Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, Huston Smith, and Ken Wilber.
[4] This article is but a first step of an Integral theory of Self. A more complete discussion of an Integral theory of Self I hope to share in a forthcoming book co-authored with a leading Integral theorist.
[5] Tractate Kiddushin.