21st Century Integral Monasticism

Where the idea for this talk came from. I told Jeff Salzman that I tell my clients I’m a therapy monk, and he and I began to discuss the monastic qualities of our lives. The more we talked the more curious I became about how similar the forms that had emerged were. 

Looking into monasticism led me to Michael Murphy’s evolutionary panentheism and Integral’s waking up, cleaning up, growing up, and showing up. 

• Evolutionary panentheism is having a belief in evolution, feeling how everything is connected, and believing we all have an energetic spark—soul, atman, Almass’s pearl beyond price—that connects us to Spirit. Vast numbers of seekers are united having these qualities and feel kinship with others who share them.
• Integral waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up are directions for embodying Buddhism’s eight fold path—right view, right conduct, right resolve, right speech, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right samadhi.  

Jeff and I share the Integral meta-theory lineage (The Future of Religion, Radical Wholeness, and all of Ken Wilber’s books)—a multiperspectival form of evolutionary panentheism. This embraces multiple traditions but surrenders completely to none, even Integral.

A developmental stage for some seekers? Monastic traditions arise from agrarian societies. Seeking unity with God in a peaceful communal environment, surrendered to the rhythms of the community is a form that keeps arising in all cultures. Only in the last 50 years do we have the technology for a seeker to live in their own monastery with survival needs, comfort needs, and belonging needs taken care of without a traditional community. 

Only in the last 50 years can someone openly have their own spiritually charged cosmology in work and life and not get attacked by traditional religion or traditional sciences like psychology.

Is this a new form of monasticism? 

Ancient Hindu temples were built with a marketplace around the temple, into multiple deities having sex and parties depicted on the outer walls, into inner rooms with meditation cushions. These recapitulated the life stages of establishing material security, pursuing the pleasures of the flesh, and progressing to spiritual hunger for unity.

For example, in the third century CE. Vatsyayana went into a monastic lifestyle, renouncing sex (of which he was a famous enthusiast), to write the 5 volumes of the Kama Sutra. My personal monastery insists on practices, study, writing, fidelity to my values and disciplines, and teaching the Way.

Acolyte, to Warrior, to Man of Wisdom

Man of Wisdom has monk-like qualities—deep wisdom, integrity, and radical acceptance.

Traditional monks

• Loyal to a lineage 
• Accept a rigid hierarchical authority structure. Monasteries, spiritual communities, and guru yoga all involve surrender to rigid hierarchies.
• Live in a group collective monastery, a spiritual community with limits on sexuality. A study of 19^thcentury intentional communities found that the most enduring ones had spiritual orientations and required individual sacrifice of members.
• Spiritually charged obedience to the rules and hierarchy of the community.
• Absorbed in a coherent cosmology of faith and devotion. A focused surrender.
• Feel daily connections with the other world.
• Daily spiritual, physical, and social practices.
• Daily communal practices, based in sacred lineages.
• Lineage based dharma and ceremonies. All practices involving spiritual awe as an ordinary experience.
• Many sacred rules surrendered to from the lineage and the monastic hierarchy.
• Sacrifice for the common good. Conformity for the common good. Sacrifice for the lineage.
• Ritualized ordeals to support spiritual development. Fasting, praying, enduring discomfort, and demonstrating capacities (like Buddhist monks using fire meditations to dry out wet sheets on snowy grounds).
• Serve the world with love.

Individualistic monks:

• Monastery with a special lover.
• Living in and from a coherent cosmology that makes the most sense to us—feeling like an avatar of that cosmology like the abbot of a monastery might. Feeling part of multiple lineages but not surrendering agencyto any lineage. The Integral/evolutionary panentheism embraces all traditions, but blindly surrenders to none.
• Solitude.
• Ongoing connections with the other world.
• Satisfying social connections.
• Operate in fluid hierarchical authority structures (flex/flow), with personal moral standards the last word in decision making. 
• Daily spiritual, physical, and social practices.
• Personal disciplines/traditions/ceremonies—most done individually rather than communally.
• Many rules you follow gladly, chosen by you and your special lover, often accompanied by a sense of the sacred, a sense of spiritual awe that is an ordinary daily experience. My personal monastery insists on daily practices, study, writing, and teaching—sacred requirements I’ve surrendered to. Not as much vows as discoveries of deep soul’s purpose. I serve the evolution of consciousness. I see the Integral awakening happening all over the world and want to share the joy and hope.
• Not sacrificing or renouncing unnecessarily, though it happens naturally as we grow. Purification/renunciation, into surrender to the dharma and the teachers, into inner authority and liberation.
• Joyfully embracing the pleasures of life as transformative spiritual opportunities.
• The ordeals of life met as opportunities for spiritual growth.
• Serve the world with love.

George Gurjief said that monastic spirituality and secular spirituality were mutually exclusive ways of spirituality. He called his approach, “The Third Way,” because it combined both the monastic and the secular. I think 21^st century Integral monasticism is an expression of the Third Way.