Integral Postmetaphysical Spirituality
= concept + forums and blogs to discuss the emergence of participatory spirituality for the 21st century
The Concept
Bruce Alderman
"INTEGRAL POSTMETAPHYSICAL SPIRITUALITY (IPS) does not yet fully exist. It is what Bruno Latour (2013) might call an instauration – something that is at once being uncovered and created, discovered and composed. It is a risk, an artist's gamble as she puts chisel to stone, and its final form is not yet decided. But given its internal tensions, it is likely it will never be so decided; it quivers most vitally right in that gap of in/decision, each shape it takes riven by difference and haloed by an unmasterable excess. As integral, IPS invokes the One. But it must always do so in scare quotes; its "one" is the count-as-one, a consistent multiplicity, a oneness that is always two or more. This is not a watered down oneness; it is what the one has always been. Non/dual. As post-metaphysical, IPS invokes invocation itself. It is ascetic in Nietzsche's or Sloterdijk's sense: its sorcery is practice; its magic, participatory enactment. It is not opposed to religious forms of belief or modes of speech, but it sees them also in enactive terms: as forms of participatory engagement, which can be generative (growth-promoting and integrative) or degenerative (leading to forms of demi-reality and soul-loss). As spirituality, IPS invokes the sacred excess of spirit through four practices in particular: the quaternity of waking, growing, cleaning, and showing up. More generally, as we discuss in my essay for this issue, spirituality is the practice of building generative (en)closures which allow for the disclosure of deeper truths (through inquiry), and the cultivation of surplus coherence (through individual and collective action and modes of integration). As a holistic orientation, IPS proceeds on both meta-metaphysical (post-metaphysical) and metaphysical levels simultaneously. Meta-metaphysically, IPS embraces metaphysical pluralism, viewing metaphysical systems as enactive operators which play a role in the enactment of particular, ontologically rich worldspaces. In this context, post-metaphysics, as Joel David Morrison (2007) well describes it, "is not ultimately a feature of the metaphysical system itself, but a cognitive or conceptual aperspectival stance which imposes an a categorical imperative – a meta-metaphysical and metacategorical framework – in which the absolute truth claims of any metaphysics are suspended in the relative world of justification, partly through the rational truth that all truth claims may be subject, endlessly, to further analysis" (p. 50)."
Discussion
Theurj:
"‘Integral’ is the term generally used to refer to Wilber’s integral theory, or the integration of body, mind, soul and spirit in self, nature and culture. The idea is that there are increasing levels of progressive development within all those domains, and to explore how those domains interrelate. Metaphysics generally refers to the exploration of reality. Postmetaphysics then is a kind of metaphysics but without some of the assumptions and premises traditionally associated with that study. Those include the notion that humanity can accurately perceive reality as such either through some meditative state of consciousness, and/or through the notion of pure Platonic forms via abstract, a priori reason. The postmetaphysical turn in philosophy instead grounds metaphysics in the empirical study of intersubjective cultural communication and the second generation cognitive science which sees the topic as embodied, enacted, embedded and extended is all domains.
How then does spirituality express postmetaphysically? First of all it is no longer a domain diametrically opposed to the material domain. Another hallmark of metaphysical thinking is this opposition, with the spiritual or absolute domain the source and cause of the material or relative domain. Postmetaphysical spirituality acknowledges the virtual realm, akin to the absolute realm, but in a very different relationship with the actual or material domain. The virtual domain is still generative of the actual, but its own genesis lies not in a metaphysical plane but within its relationship to the actual in a co-generative process.
It also has to do with the difference between the transcendent and the transcendental. The former assumes a metaphysical foundation for knowledge as described above. Transcendental deduction bypasses such a framing by speculating on what virtual preconditions must be supposed for knowledge to be possible. The virtual by this definition is multiple and immanent without any any need of a transcendent, metaphysical underpinning and thus postmetaphysical in that sense.
The meta-awareness of meditative states is often contextualized as something that transcends the world of manifestation by directly perceiving the absolute. But Thompson and other neuroscientific researchers see such a state as an embodied, pre-personal base state of consciousness, a naturalist conception of the embodied mind. What is being accessed is a baseline attention that is fully embodied and thereby limited by that embodied constraint. Such a consciousness without an object doesn’t lay claim to access to the reality of all, or even access to all of our personal cognitive unconscious or collective unconscious. It’s just accessing that embodied part of our natural awareness available to us by virtue of having the body and brain we do with all its limitations. Furthermore, the above research makes clear that meta-awareness itself is not strictly an individual affair but rather involves internalized social cognition and interaction with the natural environment. Hence spiritually in this context is not only about a syntegration within the domains of self, culture and nature but also between them."
(Metamodern Forum, May 7, 2021)
Community
"What paths lie ahead for religion and spirituality in the 21st Century? How might the insights of modernity and post-modernity impact and inform humanity's ancient wisdom traditions? How are we to enact, together, new spiritual visions – independently, or within our respective traditions – that can respond adequately to the challenges of our times?
This group is for anyone interested in exploring these questions and tracing out the horizons of an integral post-metaphysical spirituality."
(ttp://integralpostmetaphysics.ning.com/)