Together, Andrew and Ken generate some of the most interesting, passionate, and leading-edge conversations on spirituality and evolution anywhere in the world. For this reason, we are pleased to announce that Integral Naked will be regularly posting new material from this dynamic pair for several months to come. If you haven’t profoundly entered into these dialogues, we sincerely invite you to do so. Whatever you think of Andrew or Ken, their conversations are out of this world!

Andrew and Ken begin the dialogue by inquiring into the relationship between the secularization of spirituality and the postmodern turn in human unfolding. The somewhat awkward situation, as they both note, is that humanity’s traditional source of ultimate freedom, meaning, and ecstatic release—spirituality—is paired with humanity’s definitive leveler of ultimates—postmodernity. In a postmodern context, no one is allowed to be closer to Spirit than anyone else—that would be marginalizing, hierarchical, insensitive, and so on—so the spiritual search for depth must be carried out in such a way that depth is avoided, or at least disguised.

However, Andrew continues, such “popular” spirituality actually seems to be doing many people an enormous amount of good! For example, many of these approaches invite people to establish a personal relationship with some kind of higher reality, and to embrace a higher identity of self. As Andrew and Ken agree, this is fantastic! Of course, that isn’t to say that there aren’t certain problems. With no conscious way to judge the depth of various experiences—ranking is a postmodern no-no—there’s no way of explicitly saying that an intense experience of Emptiness is more spiritual than an intense experience of self-pity. “Authenticity” replaces depth, and so if you simply feel your egoic contraction really hard, really authentically, then that’s spiritual. Well, if that’s the spirituality you want, that’s fine. But what you are not allowed to do is claim that a path that offers actual Liberation from the egoic contraction is therefore “wrong.”

One of the goals of a more Integral Spirituality is to show that there is no “wrong” form of spirituality and religion, but that there are many different levels of spirituality and religion (among other distinctions). There are archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, integral, and super-integral forms of spirituality, and since every human being must grow through the entire spiral of development starting at birth, there always will be! (Ken here also uses the example of the chakras for different levels of spirituality.)

One of the revolutionary suggestions of an Integral Spirituality is that religion is the sole human discipline that has the opportunity to be a conveyor belt of development through the stages. This is important because even though there is nothing “wrong” with, for example, mythic spirituality—it is a station in life that people have the right to stop at—the leading edge of evolution has moved on, and the tension between the mythic world and the modern/postmodern world is literally tearing both worlds apart.*

Andrew and Ken finish by discussing some of the further reaches of spiritual development, namely, an explicitly evolutionary spirituality, and the incredibly exciting possibilities therein.

This is truly a spectacular tour through some of the promise and peril of spirituality in today’s world. We hope you enjoy the dialogue....