Quotes about Integration

Enlightenment doesnt occur from
sitting around visualizing images of light,
but from integrating the darker aspects of the Self
into the conscious personality.

....all the things and events we usually consider as irreconcilable, such as cause and effect, past and future, subject and object, are actually just like the crest and trough of a single wave, a single vibration.  For a wave, although itself a single event, only expresses itself through the opposites of crest and trough, high point and low point.  For that very reason, the reality is not found in the crest nor the trough alone, but in their unity...

We should, I think, look upon modern despotisms as hostage crises.  Kim Jong Il has 30 million hostages.  Saddam Hussein has twenty-five million.  The clerics in Iran have seventy million or more.  It does not matter that many hostages have been so brainwashed that they will fight their would-be liberators to the death.  They are held prisoner twice over – by tyranny and by their own ignorance.  The developed world must, somehow, come to their rescue.  Jonathon Glover seems right to suggest that we need “something along the lines of a strong and properly funded permanent UN force, together with clear criteria for intervention and an international court to authorize it.”  We can say it even more simply:  we need a world government.  How else will a war between the United States and China ever become as unlikely as a war between Texas and Vermont?  We are a very long way from even thinking about the possibility of a world government, to say nothing of creating one.  It would require a degree of economic, cultural, and moral integration that we may never achieve.  The diversity of our religious beliefs constitutes a primary obstacle here.  Given what most of us believe about God, it is at present unthinkable that human beings will ever identify themselves merely as human beings, disavowing all lesser affiliations,  World government does seem a long way off – so long that we may not survive the trip.

Human cultures progress through a dance of specialization and integration.  The problem is that the human trait of abstract thinking has allowed our ability to specialize to outpace our ability to integrate knowledge.  Thus, we know more and more details about nothing particularly relevant.  Life becomes a game of trivia played between people who don't have an intrinsic understanding of who, or what, they are and who have little idea how larger social, scientific and cultural systems operate. 

All the "freedom" in the world can not solve this problem, but rather leads to greater confusion.  Lack of freedom throws us into panick and again causes confusion.  We often seek grounding in religion or political movements, but the price of suspending our disbelief is our relinquishment of authority to others no more qualified than the rest of us.  We can not afford, in our globalized, interdependent world, to turn over our otherwise intelligent minds to ideologies and theologies.  We can not afford the divisiveness and arrogance inherent when one believes that theirs is the only way, the "right" way, and that other paths are "evil" or inferior even if they work very well.

If we declare our race to be HUMAN, our religion to be KINDNESS and our nature to be A WONDERFUL SPECIES OF PRIMATES, we will gradually learn to exercise rational control over our minds, our culture and our planet.

Integration proceeds by just the opposite route: a deliberate heightening of every organic function; a release of impulses from circumstances that irrationally thwarted them; richer and more complex patterns of activity; an esthetic heightening of anticipated realizations; a steady lengthening of the future; a faith in cosmic perspectives.

Listen.
In every office
you hear the threads
of love and joy and fear and guilt,
the cries for celebration and reassurance,
and somehow you know that connecting those threads
is what you are supposed to do
and business takes care of itself.

Within a change process is a period of not having the old way of thinking, while not yet integrating the new way of thinking, which is the chaos of creativity at an important juncture.

Love is creation raised to a higher degree.

[Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas – shadow work]

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

It is the difficult, but unavoidable, task of the modern individual to assimilate consciously all of the contents – from darkest degradation to profoundest purpose – contained in the psyche.

While our absolute nature, as pure being or open presence, is timeless and changeless....our soul evolves and deepens through cultivating and embodying the seed potentials -- for courage, strength, generosity, humor, tenderness, wisdom -- contained in this larger nature.  The essence of spiritual work is to realize and continually reorient ourselves toward our being, our absolute nature; and this is what leads to ultimate freedom.  Yet spiritual realizations often remain compartmentalized, apart from everyday life, or become used as a rationale for living in an impersonal or soulless way.  That is why, if we are to live our realizations and bring them into this world, we also need to work on the vessel of spirit -- our embodied humanity.  Soulwork is the forging of this vessel......If spiritual work brings freedom, soulwork brings integration.  Both are necessary for a complete human life.

We don't accomplish anything in the world alone...whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something.

Fulfilling the four needs [spiritual, mental, physical, social] in an integrated way is like combining elements in chemistry. When we reach a "critical mass" of integration, we experience spontaneous combustion--an explosion of inner synergy that ignites the fire within and gives vision, passion, and a spirit of adventure to life.

On the plane, back to Boulder, back to a life that seems somehow far away from itself.

Is this a topic whose time has truly come? The integration of science and religion? Or have I just written a clever book that temporarily impressed a few people and will otherwise go as quickly as it came?