As many of our readers perhaps already know, we have a lively and interesting discussion on ‘open source spirituality’ in our Ning P2P community forum, where we are very happy and proud to have seen John Heron join us.

He has made a formal critique of Lawrence Wolllerheim’s text, which is the basis of our discussion.

We are eagerly awaiting Lawrence’s response, whom we admire enormously for his work in assisting victims of spiritual authoritarianism, and whose thought has evolved beyond this presentation and the original conception of the website discussed here below.

I’m reproducing John’s commentary here:

A careful reading of the OSIS (Open Source Integrative Spirituality) website tells me the following:

1. OSIS has a hierarchy of source codes. Source Code 1 at the top of the hierarchy is the Wilberian integral spiral dynamics worldview. This is used to generate and structure Source Code 2 which is the assembled heritage of humankind’s spiritual wisdom with data supplied by OSIS and by all participants in the commons. And Source Code 2 in turn is used by each individual to generate Source Code 3 which is the code of their unique spiritual path.

2. This means that each individual Source Code 3 is framed within and subordinate to the premises built in to Source Code 1 as refracted through Source Code 2.

“If you believe that there are as many unique spiritual paths to the Divine Mystery as there are unique people, and, that every individual has the right to find and choose their own best path from the wisdom of all paths, then humankind’s combined spiritual wisdom heritage held within a new form of (r)evolutionary integral spirituality offers you unique advantages for enhancing your spiritual growth.”

3. OSIS intends to design and generate the global spiritual commons in terms of Source Codes 1 and 2.

“…the spiritual wisdom within the global spiritual commons will be designed and specifically personally tailored for delivery to individuals of every…consciousness meme level within any level, wave and stage of consciousness development.”

4. When OSIS writes about “open source” the openness clearly applies to Source Code 2 (spiritual wisdom heritage), at any rate with respect to providing spiritual wisdom data. It is not at all clear that full openness applies to Source Code 1 (Wilberian integralism). The website says that upgrading it is an “integrally-informed” collaborative process. This seems to imply that the revision is only open to OSIS insiders. If this is so, then the insiders would appear to be firmly running the ideological foundation of their global commons enterprise.

5. OSIS is nowhere – that I could find – explicit about precisely how spiral dynamics applies to its internal organization and processes, or about how precisely it intends to apply meme theory to assembling the wisdom heritage in Source Code 2, or about how the global spiritual commons exemplifies meme theory.

6. The OSIS website presentation is more overpowering than empowering: the sustained transcendental rhetoric filling many pages with long lists of principles and processes, of virtues for validation tests, of criteria for being spiritual autonomous, of a myriad names of the divine, of pathologies and anomalies, of courses and exercises, and of much more, plus the elaborate network of multiple cross-references – all this comes over by the sheer proliferation of overlapping intricacies as somewhat more self-justifying than other-regarding. It is as if the writers are trying to convince themselves that they are on the right track.

My critical commentary on the above:

We are, I believe, in the very earliest stage of an emerging global spiritual commons consisting of nodes of relatively emancipated spiritual belief and practice. OSIS with its own Source Code 1 is one such node in San Francisco. Our Centre here with its own Source Code 1 is another such node in New Zealand. And there are many others.

First point: If the OSIS node uses its own Source Codes 1 and 2 “to set up independent, open source integrative spirituality groups all over the world”, then it will simply create an OSIS empire, not an authentic global spiritual commons. The OSIS hierarchy of Codes 1 and 2 is so busy defining the basic parameters for the emergence of autonomous human spirituality that there is not much chance that such spirituality can arise in a really uncompromised form within those parameters, and OSIS will feed off the projected autonomy coming its way. It is as though OSIS is trying to second guess what the creativity of the ever-present origin (TEPO) will get up to, and then do its work for it. Get out of way I say and let TEPO get on co-creating the global spiritual commons in its own unpredictable way. The one thing that TEPO, with its love of innovation and variety, is least likely to do is to co-create the commons through Code 1 of just one node.

The challenge of the commons, it seems to me, is for the different Code 1s of the different nodes to learn to dialogue with each other. And this is a challenge not to be underestimated. The OSIS plan for the global spiritual commons is as if Linux code writers wanted to create a global operating system with Mac and Windows code writers but entirely in Linux terms.

Second point: One big problem with OSIS Source Code 1 is the inclusion of spiral dynamics. The theory is in considerable disarray.

Cowan no longer supports the existence of two tiers but claims the only thing now known about the Yellow and Turquoise systems is that they are more complex versions of Orange and Green. Ferrer has dismantled Wilber’s account of the green meme, pointing out that it presents the shadow side of pluralism, dialogue and consensus decision-making as if it is their essence. The yellow meme appears to be devoid of a place both for the Sacred Between of relational spirituality, and for advanced forms of decision-making that integrate hierarchy, co-operation and autonomy. And so on and so forth. Also the practice of applying evolutionary logic to the spiritual development of human culture is problematic.

I prefer to think of such development as rooted in degrees of relational, moral insight. Evolution as a concept seems best left to natural processes. Otherwise intellectual bids to know what evolution is up to and what is coming next culturally, rapidly convert into hegemonic attempts at social and intellectual control – and there is more than a hint of this in the grand plans of OSIS for the global spiritual commons.

The bottom line is that OSIS has an impossible task in showing how such an inadequate theory as spiral dynamics can throw any light on the global spiritual commons.

Third point: OSIS runs a radical contradiction. On the one hand it encourages people to enter into their own direct experience of TEPO, which means directly co-create with TEPO their own unique personal path. On the other hand it proposes that people choose their own unique path from the world’s spiritual wisdom as assembled within the OSIS Wilberian integral worldview, in which case people have an indirect experience of TEPO as mediated by OSIS: in short, OSIS usurps TEPO.