Integral Consciousness fully accepts the critiques of the great traditions leveled by modernity and postmodernity. At the same time, Integral Consciousness returns to the great traditions to receive and evolve the dazzlingly subtle and profound frameworks of knowing that emerged from perhaps the greatest set of subtle and speculative, enlightened minds and hearts that ever lived. These hearts and minds collectively produced a context of meaning and frameworks for living the sacred fullness and depth of every dimension of life that desperately need to be both recovered and evolved for our time. (On the post-metaphysical nature of that evolution, we will devote a separate discussion in a future blog post. See Wilber, Integral Spirituality, Appendix Two to begin the conversation.)
These frameworks are the basis of the Second Simplicity. They are simple not in the sense of offering black-and-white, clear-cut answers to the great questions of meaning; rather, they are simple in their depth and profundity as frameworks of meaning, within which they disclose, invite, and even obligate the human being to live. It is our job today to transcend and include all of the complexity of modernity and postmodernity, all of its best understandings, even as we reach for a Second Simplicity.
In this column we will engage in one small but critical part of the reconstructive project, which seeks the evolutionary recovery of Second Simplicity. Stated clearly, The Second Simplicity of Integral Consciousness both emerges from the great traditions even as it includes the best insights of the new great forms of knowing disclosed by modernity and postmodernity in all four quadrants. This is the core intention in our commitment to the articulation of a World Spirituality based on Integral principles.
The Great Question
The topic I will engage here presses on every thinking feeling being who is even the slightest bit awake. The topic: how do we engage tragedy and human suffering, both of the manmade variety (Auschwitz and the Rwandan genocide) and of the ostensibly natural variety (the earthquake in Japan) without losing our hope, optimism, and what we might even call faith, in the essential loving and good nature of All-That-Is?
In engaging this topic I will seek to reclaim a highly subtle and evolved framework for re-entering the great question of suffering. It is a framework for Second Simplicity, which transcends and includes both the First Simplicity and the complexity.
Like many of us, I have been deep in thought on all of this once again because of the very recent and ongoing tragedy in Japan. It not only overwhelms us with the magnitude of the suffering going on there, but it brings us to a huge question, a question that demands deep contemplation and cries out not for an answer that ends the question but for a profound spiritual framework of interpretation in which the great question can be held.
The question is simple. And overwhelming. How do I live from a place of joy and goodness, believing in a universe that is not only friendly but loving, in the face of a world filled with both evil and suffering?
In Integral Consciousness, the consciousness of Second Simplicity, the answer does not nullify the question. In the old traditions, answers were given—by way of what is called "theodicy"—whose intent was to "explain" the realities of suffering based only on theological and spiritual perspectives. This was the consciousness of First Simplicity.
In much of modern and postmodern thought, from scientism to existentialism, the question was felt to be so impossible to answer, and the answers given in the name of God so often felt to be unsatisfactory in their limitations or reprehensible in their cruelty, that God was declared dead and the world reduced to a one-story flatland universe, ostensibly devoid of the pulsating love, intelligence, and love beauty of spirit. Humankind was said to live in the hopeless complexity of what Lewis Mumford called a dis-qualified universe. The eye of the spirit atrophied, and in its place the eyes of the flesh and the mind that produced modern science and mathematics dominated. In post-postmodern Integral Consciousness of Second Simplicity, we know that there is no answer that can ever nullify the pain of the great question of human suffering. At the same time, we have "trance-ended" the blindness of modern and postmodern scientism, and re-activated the great faculty of human knowing—the eye of the spirit.
From an Integral perspective of Second Simplicity, there is no simple answer to why people suffer, but there is a profound Response of Spirit to suffering. In this short conversation we will offer one part of that response.
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