In issue 88 of P2P News, I mentioned the discovery of a new Integral Spirituality site, which should have rejoiced me, yet didn’t. I then formuated a number of questions, to which John Heron responded in issue 89. Below a reprint of John Heron’s remarks, followed by the original questions.
“I’ve been having a look at the integrative spirituality site, about which you express your cautions in Issue 88.”” These cautions are, in my view, well considered. And I would like to build on them, if I may. The site is an intriguing undertaking: it took three years to construct, with 40,000 pages of material. And there is something deeply amiss about all this labour. The vast array of detailed topics conveys an unacknowledged anxiety  about the very thing the authors claim they are promoting, i.e. personal spirituality rooted in inner authority.  They want to provide controlling guidance on every aspect of how to develop this kind of autonomous spirituality and they do so to a degree that implies they really have very little faith in it. They affirm some  excellent autonomous and co-operative principles, then undermine them by framing them within an absolutist theology, and by telling everyone how to go about realizing them in an excessive number of prescriptive lists about everything they can think of under the spiritual sun. And they seem to want to go on doing this for everyone. So they come over as making a powerful bid to control the global spiritual commons in terms of their  own assiduous extensive categorizing. Thus they define all the categories in terms of which people are invited to make their `personal’ contribution to the commons. And of course the colour map of meme theory is presented in full and in an entirely uncritical way as a basic guideline for getting one’s spiritual autonomy on a sound track!  It is pretty obvious that they are trying to appropriate the notions of idiosyncratic personal spirituality, open source spirituality and the global spiritual commons, and make them subservient to their own commitment to a Wilberian mix of integral spirituality and spiral dynamics. Their claim to enhance the commons looks like a cover for their need to replace the risk-taking of true openness by the security of doctrinal conviction. If they spend their time telling everyone else how to use the commons, they are avoiding cultivating their own patch properly – for they are too busy prescribing how others might work the soil. To be bluntly frank, this comes across as the displacement-behaviour of people who have never faced up to the fact that their souls have been colonized by the spiritual dogmatisms of their own teachers. So all in all, a specious and contradictory undertaking. No wonder the authors prefer to remain nameless.
However, it does raise the very interesting question of how the internet can provide an authentic forum for personal spirituality, open source spirituality and the global spiritual commons. Â One answer, of course, is that the web, just as it is, is the emerging global integral-spiritual commons (GISC).
This is in line with your note in Issue 88 about Kevin Kelly on the birth of the One Machine of the internet as a spiritual event. In terms of this view, the GISC is actually the current entire worldwide web of internet users seeking to make sense, in terms of multitudinous categories, of every aspect of human existence, a vast forum
of chaos and emerging order within a common cyberspace. In which case, any attempt to locate the GISC in one website or some specific network of websites, simply misses the point, and is a deluded bid for hegemony – like King Canute wanting to extend his power over the ocean.  Within the GISC, a local group can share with the rest of us of how they have autonomously and co-operatively cultivated their patch of the commons. They can reveal fully and openly their principles and practices for inhabiting the commons, and invite other interested  people to participate freely in the development of them. But if they try to inflate their local cultivation to the  whole GISC itself, they simply create a little ghetto of collective delusion.”
My own remarks in issue 88 had been: Michel Bauwens:
Readers of my P2P manuscript or essays know that the development of participative spirituality is an important area where P2P processes are emerging. Amongst the pioneers are usually mention are John Heron (Sacred Science) and Jorge Ferrer (Revisioning Transpersonal Psychology), and Douglas Rushkoff’s Open Source Judaism project. It is therefore to be expected that I should rejoice in an initiative which claims to do precisely that, and offers a well thought out, technologically integrated platform to boot. Yet, my ‘gut feeling’ tells me to be cautious, so let me explain below (see bullet points) why I’m unsure about how to react to this new initiative. Bear in mind that it is just a first reaction, and that I’m open to revise this opinion. If you know more about this initiative, let me know.
1) you get a full already existing structure, and organisation, already precluding many bottom-up processes
2) you don’t know who is behind it and where the funding comes from. It pretty much sounds like a Wilber/Beck inspired initiative, which is fine, but why not say so
3) you have to register to even contact them, which is a classic marketing ploy usually associated with for-profit companies
4) it makes many spiritual assumptions, such as the ‘common’ nature of the ever present origin, the similarity of the god-buddha principles, etc… In this sense, the search is already oriented (probably to nondualism), not truly open. It avoids inter-spiritual conflict by positing an already common ground.
Conclusion: it may be ‘open source’ but does not sound like it also ‘peer to peer’ or ‘participative’.