Lawrence continues his inquiry into the fundamental principles for a participative spirituality:

6.) On the Questioning of Faith Beliefs and Practices

We have come to a new point in humanity’s spiritual history where if individuals or religious organization’s assert to another that their own faith beliefs or practices should be believed or followed as fact and/or that specific behavior is dictated or ordered by those faith beliefs or practices, then those faith beliefs or practices should be open to a gracious public questioning and dialog on their factuality and/or usefulness in directing specific behaviors. Religious pathology, abuse, fundamentalism and religious terrorism are not just matters of history, but fill the pages of our daily media. The only way many of these issues will heal is by open, candid and gracious dialog concerning the faith beliefs or practices that may be instrumental to creating these situations.

This does not imply that private individuals who are not asserting to another that their own faith beliefs or practices should be believed or followed as fact and/or that specific behavior is dictated or ordered by those faith beliefs or practices should be questioned on their faith beliefs or practices. In this situation the individual is fully entitled to believe whatever they privately chose to believe much as a person is entitled to speak or hold their opinions and cannot be sued for libel or slander if they are just expressing opinions and not presenting their opinions as facts.

Many religions already encourage their members to sincerely examine and reality test the faith beliefs or practices being presented to them. An open source integral spirituality just extends and expands the sanction and healthy practice of a sincere and gracious questioning and reality testing of faith beliefs for the benefit of both society and religion itself.

Additionally, if we do not allow for gracious questioning of faith beliefs and faith practices it closes off the possibilities for addressing behaviors that perpetuate historic unfairness. Tolerance and diversity can be used quite well by the clever to perpetuate all types of injustice and cruelty in the name of religion.

7.) On Personalities in the Movement

The open source integral spirituality movement gladly accepts the co-creational assistance from anyone, but it gives no inappropriate or special attention, honor, position or consideration to any person or organization involved because they are personalities or organizations of wealth, fame, power, specialized influence, celebrity or pre-existing ecclesiastical authority in a religious or spiritual organization.

8.) On the Non-Equality of All Spiritual Wisdom

Not all spiritual wisdom is equal. The inclusive collection of all of mankind’s spiritual wisdom as part of any synthesis process will naturally involve both general categorization and then some pruning of this wisdom from our combined spiritual heritage.

Some spiritual wisdom will be more widely applicable, inclusive, universal, life affirming and even empirical. Some spiritual wisdom will be more useful than others in that it is more effective or efficient in producing the fruits of authentic spiritual growth in more people with various personality types, psychological developmental levels, learning styles, cultural backgrounds, etc. in a safe and balanced way.

The fruits and the time proven community validity tests of authentic spirituality and spiritual growth from humankind’s spiritual heritage are held in the open source movement to be the life results of the individual or organization that demonstrate the balanced application of the virtues. These time proven community validity tests are a principled focus for the movement to use for categorizing and evaluating the effectiveness or the partial usefulness of various pieces of spiritual wisdom.

Sincere spiritual inquiry, the sharing of all spiritual wisdom (without regard to culture or religious ism,) and the search for spiritual wisdom that is more universal, inclusive and life affirming inspires the open source spirituality movement toward the discovery of more useful and applicable spiritual wisdom, more universal statements of the nature and purposes of the Ever Present Origin and, of the evolving nature of life itself.

The continuous process of co-operation and collaboration for collecting and expanding humanity’s spiritual wisdom in the open source spirituality movement between the many individual or organizational efforts to know the Ever Present Origin, holds the promise of expanding humanity’s spiritual knowledge base, assembling spiritual wisdom of a complementary nature and, expanding the free and open spiritual commons for all humanity. This evolutionary process also does much to reveal a greater vision of the Ever Present Origin’s wholeness, truth, beauty, goodness, nature and purposes, which then has the potential of translating directly into better processes for direct spiritual experience of the Ever Present Origin for more individuals, for a better world.

9.) On the Process Itself

As in open source software, where software development is an unending process of continual upgrades, open source integral spirituality processes for expanding the global spiritual commons is also more of an ongoing evolving, integrally-informed collaborative process than any final result. It too will be constantly upgraded.

As more wisdom is included and synthesized in the expanding global spiritual commons new synchronicities and connections within this accumulating wisdom will point to, hint at or disclose additional new wisdom that sometimes will naturally transcend earlier spiritual wisdom. Co-creators should expect many pleasant and exciting surprises as new transcending spiritual wisdom is discovered or naturally emerges disclosing new perspectives and metaphors of the Divine.

It will always be a continuous, evolving process of expanding the spiritual wisdom knowledge base of humanity’s spiritual commons. One of the prime reasons for this unending quality of the process is that the collaborative assembling and search for new or more universal, inclusive and life affirming spiritual wisdom concerning the Ever Present Origin is itself an unending process. And, the Ever Present Origin can never be fully knowable in its entire infinite splendor.

All efforts to fully know or disclose the infiniteness of its nature and purposes will at best be partial maps or metaphors. No matter how much we can know about the Ever Present Origin it will always be a partial and incomplete representation of its infinite potentials and its infinite realized aspects.

Individuals and organizations within the open source integral spirituality movement always stand in openness, awe and humility to new surprises concerning the Infinite Spiritual Mystery continually unveiling itself to each individual personality and successive generation through any and all means, sources or circumstances regarding its ultimate and complete truth, beauty and goodness. From the above, it is reasonable to deduce that one religion or one religious perspective alone will not have all the answers and all current religions might be partial or complementary views of the infinite wholeness and unfathomable Mysteries, which will forever surround the infiniteness and absoluteness of God and/or the Buddha.

10.) On Polarization

Polarization in the global spiritual commons and the open source integral spirituality movement is avoided by the recognition that humanity’s vast heritage of spiritual wisdom is partial, evolving and, has its own appropriate time, way, place, and target audience for specific applications.

In this movement our combined heritage of spiritual wisdom is appreciated in the context of:

a. the age and scope of spiritual or social problems this wisdom was intended to solve,

b. the culture it came from and for what types of personalities, learning styles and psychological developmental levels it was intended to reach and serve, and

c. its effectiveness in a specific situation,

d. does it cause any consequent harm or conflicts,

e. does it create non-inclusive, unfair benefits for one individual/group over another group/individual or

f. how congruent is it with the body of other spiritual wisdom found on our “shrinking” planet and within the global spiritual commons.

Our evolving heritage of spiritual wisdom can be thought of as existing in an ever widening and ever deepening spiral of wisdom. Because of the perspective on wisdom appreciation (a–f above) open source integral spirituality participants can discuss, evaluate, classify, categorize and organize this heritage of spiritual wisdom while valuing any particular piece of spiritual wisdom for just for what is. Open source spirituality participants recognize that a particular piece of spiritual wisdom has an inalienable right to be exactly just what it is and to play only the specific role that it has played in humankind’s spiritual history. With this attitude and perspective of appreciation, the polarization of competing spiritual wisdom or spiritual wisdom systems within this movement and the global spiritual commons should be naturally minimal and easily defused.