Modern Spirituality

Here's another Wilber excerpt from Integral Spirituality.

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From Chapter 10: Integral Life Practice

Where Is Spirit Located?

Here's a simple thought experiment. Picture the following men (or make them women if you like), and then tell me which you think are probably the most spiritual?

1. A man in an Armani suit.
2. A man driving a red Ferrari.
3. A man pitching baseball in the major leagues.
4. A professional comedian.
5. A mathematician.
6. A man in a tank top lifting weights.
7. An Olympic swimmer.
8. A college professor.
9. A model.
10. A sexual surrogate.

Which do you think is the most spiritual? Which do you think is the least spiritual?

It's funny, isn't it, the things that we think are not spiritual? Why do we picture most of those people as not being very spiritual? Or conversely, why do we have such a hard time seeing them as being spiritual? Aren't we actually just giving our own prejudices about where we think spirit is or is not to be found? Or worse: aren't we really just announcing how old and fragmented and NOT INTEGRAL our ideas about spirit are? Why is telling jokes not spiritual? Why is something beautiful—a car, a suit—not spiritual? Why is physical excellence not spiritual? Why is sex not spiritual? Why is . . .

It's a new world, it's a new spirituality, it's a new time, it's a new man, it's a new woman. All of the above categories are deeply spiritual. Mostly all that list is, is a list of things we are afraid to allow spirituality to touch. Dead from the neck down, with no humor, no sex, no aesthetic sensibility whatsoever, wasting away, spending one's days and nights ignoring the world and lost in prayer . . . what a strange God, that.

Well, no more. Dead to life, dead to the body, dead to nature, dead to sex, dead to beauty, dead to excellence: that never was a real God, anyway, but merely a desiccated distillation of the things that men and women always had the most difficulty handling, and things from which God became the Great Escape, a distillation and concatenation of every phobic and repressive impulse a human being possessed.

Well, no more. It's a new world, it's a new spirituality, it's a new man, it's a new woman.

The Spirit is integral, and so is the human being.

So how do you define spirituality?

That was an interesting excercise.

But again, I'm lost on integral. I know you and others allude to Integral a lot.

And you have those maps.

But it's all gobbledy gook to me. And I don't say that negative in any way. I mean it truly honestly, I just haven't checked it out.

So you could say the excercise was still fascinating despite my not cottoning on to the whole integral thing (is it a cult?)

But it's funny it was the physical things that I didn't deem spiritual, i.e.

1. A man in an Armani suit.
2. A man driving a red Ferrari.
9. A model.
10. A sexual surrogate.

Hmmm. Where's Al when ya need her. We need some analyses here.

Helium wrote:

(is it a cult?)

No it's more of a metaphilosophy. The point is, if something's done very well it can be spiritual.

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The point is, if something's done very well it can be spiritual.

Yes that's a good point.

What's the prefix meta.

In this sense it's meant as a kind of basis or foundation for one's own philosophy that integrates (or at least attempts to) many areas, fields, and wisdom traditions.

I agree with Aaron that anything done well can be spiritual. I would add that anything done with awareness can be very spiritual - which is actually a very Zen concept.