PAT BAILEY’S SPIRITUALITY WITH RELIGION

10 Nov PAT BAILEY’S SPIRITUALITY WITH RELIGION

Editor’s note: In his doctoral dissertation, Pastor Pat Bailey of Telluride’s Christ Presbyterian Church is claiming the need for a re-visioning of the Christian church’s theology and its understanding of mission, the need for a more natural, integrative theology and for an earth-focused, contextual approach to mission. To that end, he is reviewing the theology of three contemporary theologians whose thought is very integrative of Nature and Spirit, but  from three very different approaches. This blog is part of a weekly series.

Pastor Pat Bailey

I have found philosopher Ken Wilber’s stages of consciousness helpful in identifying various modes of religious conceptualization. Adapting the stages of cultural development identified by Jean Gebser, Wilber proposes that the evolution of worldviews includes at least seven major stages: archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, integral, and super-integral. This locating of worldviews or worldspaces is one of the main objectives of Wilber’s Integral Philosophy.

The important thing to note in Wilber’s thought is that he is not describing noninferential structures of reality. Rather, he is rendering a map of constructed perspectives that have emerged and are emerging in human and cultural evolution.  These perspectives, then, are cosmic realities in the sense that they are phenomenological or experiential realities. Without such a map that identifies the sources and the directions of imaginative discourse, even a fictive or metaphorical interpretive enterprise can end up with metaphysical assumptions.

So, the point is not that a signifier has a referent, but that a signifier represents a perspective that can be identified in relationship to other perspectives. For Wilber, then, “‘exist’ means to ‘ex-ist’: to stand out, to be known, to be disclosed, to be . . . enacted.” By his developmental approach, Wilber is offering not a universal given but a way to better identify the contexts within which perspectives are constructed.

Another aspect of Wilber’s framework is the division of experience into four quadrants, what he calls the Integral Operating System (IOS). The four quadrants simply represent the four perspectives or persons from which all experience is observed: I, We, It, and Its.  The IOS I relates to the interior and individual aspect of experience.  The IOS We relates to the interior-collective or cultural aspect of experience.  The IOS It relates to anything exterior and individual or anything that might be viewed in third-person, singular terms.  Finally, the IOS Its includes the exterior-collective aspect of experience or anything that might be viewed in third-person, plural terms.  The IOS insists that all four quadrants of experience are necessary for a fuller perspective and a mature spiritual life.  In addition to the quadrants of experience, Wilber identifies four states of consciousness that he calls gross, subtle, causal, and nondual.

I will apply Wilber’s development stages and IOS to better locate the thought and metaphysical claims of Sigurd Bergmann’s orthodox and liberation theology, David Ray Griffin’s process theology, and Mark I. Wallace’s post-modern, rhetorical theology.