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Saniel and Linda Bonder are the founding teachers of Waking Down in Mutuality, a spiritual path born of Saniel's awakening experience in 1992. Unique and gifted teachers in their own their right, they are particularly powerful as a team.
 Saniel, Linda, and Ken begin this dialogue by exploring some of the common barriers on the spiritual journey. Briefly, if "Waking Up" is becoming intimate with one’s ultimate Identity beyond time and space, and "Waking Down" is how one effectively integrates that realization with the messy, chaotic experience of everyday life, each of those “movements” present unique challenges for both students and teachers.
Ken takes a moment to explain how those broad movements not only appear in individual students, but are also reflected in humanity's collective spiritual evolution, growing from various forms of this-worldly, body-oriented paganism, to the great transcendental, other-worldly religions of the Axial period, to an integration of both in the non-dual impulses that started to appear around 200AD. Today we are continuing to refine our understanding of that mysterious integration of absolute and relative, and Saniel and Linda are brilliant examples of how that quest is unfolding in real-time.
As one veteran member of Integral Institute likes to say, "What's the most difficult test for enlightened awareness? Ask the spouse." As husband and wife living, working, and teaching together, Saniel and Linda are living testament to the profound effects of submitting one's understanding to the loving, critical gaze of another human soul, in trust, and in mutuality. Saniel and Linda go on to speak about their experience of teaching together, and the roles that they serve for their students as representatives of masculine and feminine forms of spiritual wisdom.
Saniel and Linda share that recently they have been engaging another form of spiritual wisdom: the wisdom of paying attention to exterior structures! As they relate, the interior contours of the Path of Mutuality have been consciously refined for many years, and now the organizational structure of the Waking Down community needs a corresponding amount of care and consideration. Ken heartily applauds these efforts, and comments that, strangely, many spiritual communities don’t pay much attention to the exterior structures that support their interior practices. Ultimately, this kind of neglect becomes a failure to engage in skillful means, because without adequate structures, a community's work-in-the-world will disintegrate. Saniel and Linda are keenly aware of just how true this is, and share how they are working with the entire Waking Down community—including over two dozen teachers—in building a bigger, stronger "house" in which they can gather to celebrate.
Saniel and Linda were present at Integral Spiritual Center's recent inaugural gathering in Denver, and were key contributors to the weekend's almost magical quality. That sparkle comes through in this intelligent, touching dialogue, and we invite you to listen in....
(For more dialogue with Saniel and Linda, be sure to check out Part 1 of this extraordinary conversation!) |
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transmission time: 37 minutes |
Waking Down in Mutuality, spirit/matter split, paganism, Theravada Buddhism, tantra, Nagarjuna, Plotinus, nirvikalpa, Integral Spiritual Center, nirvana, Human Sun Seminar, masculine/feminine principles, gazing transmission, second-birth phenomenon, satsang, Terry Patten, Dana Carmen, "What Is Integral?," The Marriage of Sense and Soul.
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most memorable moment: "This whole teaching that 'we're just human after all' in some very basic way, is really great until our humanness collides with what you don't like!" |
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