Who:  Deepak Chopra, one of the world’s great leaders in mind-body medicine and enormously successful popularizer of spiritual principles, and Ken Wilber, widely-acknowledged leader of the Integral movement and founder of Integral Institute.

Relevance:  In his latest book, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment, Deepak offers us his own creative vision for how it may have felt—from the inside, in first-person narrative—for Gautama Buddha during his search for, and realization of, spiritual Enlightenment.  But not everyone is thrilled about Deepak’s treatment of the founder of this great tradition.  Deepak and Ken discuss many perspectives related to this naturally sensitive subject, in search of a more comprehensive and integral view. 

Summary:  As Deepak is the first to admit, his new book Buddha is a fictionalized treatment of the life and awakening of Gautama Buddha—in fact, the subtitle to the book says as much up front: A Story of Enlightenment.  For that matter, Publisher’s Weekly wrote "Chopra scores a fiction winner."  Everyone seems pretty clear about the fact that Deepak took the creative liberties needed to describe a first-person account of what Gautama Buddha may have been thinking, feeling, and experiencing during various stages of his life and awakening.  And yet, certain traditional Buddhist scholars, teachers, and academics find the book offensive, mis-leading, and possibly even heretical. 

After discussing the presentation and criticism of Buddha in detail in Part 1 of the conversation, Deepak and Ken move on to explore some of the most central tenets of the Buddhist tradition, as well as Vedanta Hinduism.  Mentioned first is the trikaya or "three body" doctrine, whereby all sentient being are said to have a nirmanakaya (gross body), samboghakaya (subtle body), and dharmakaya (causal body).  These three bodies are said to literally support, respectively, gross-waking consciousness, subtle-dreaming consciousness, and causal-deep-sleep consciousness—all of which are states of consciousness, which everyone experiences every single day, because everyone wakes, dreams, and sleeps (it is through contemplative practice that these states reveal their deeper nature, and one can begin to Witness all states, and then find nondual Union with all states).  In addition to bodies and states, Ken reminds us that both Vajrayana Buddhism and Vedanta Hinduism posit sheaths—or koshas or structures or levels—of consciousness, such as  annamayakosha (material), pranamayakosha (emotional-sexual), manomayakosha (middle mind), vijnanamayakosha (higher mind), and anandamayakosha (bliss mind).  Together, states, bodies, and sheaths/structures paint a very sophisticated picture of what contemplative, trans-rational spirituality is all about (and to which we would add, in an AQAL and Integral Approach, quadrants, lines, and types—see "What Is Integral?" in keywords).

Ken goes on to express his appreciation for how Deepak uses the "three marks of existence" as a teaching tool, in the epilogue to Buddha.  These three marks of existence—duhhka (the awareness of pain), anicca (the awareness of the fleeting, momentary nature of experience), and anatta (the awareness that we are identified with a separate self, which is ultimately not real)—are in fact marks of relative, manifest experience, the deep contemplation of which can reveal the absolute, unmanifest Reality of this and every moment.
   
Why Integral?:  As time has shown again and again, for any discussion of spirituality and religion in the modern and postmodern world to get any real traction, there are several key ingredients that you simply must have, or the conversation goes nowhere, and often goes nowhere with great ferocity.  A truly Integral dialogue would include All Quadrants, Levels, Lines, States, and Types (AQAL for short), but the bare-bones framework you need to make any sense of spirituality at all is simply the distinction between states of consciousness and stages of consciousness.    

States of consciousness are ever-present possibilities, the five most common being gross (waking), subtle (dreaming), causal (deep sleep), witnessing (turiya), and nondual (turiyatita).  Each state can be penetrated with full wakefulness and clarity, whereupon, the great traditions say, one can contact deeper and deeper dimensions of reality, and ultimately awaken to the nondual Ground of All Being.  Stages of consciousness refer to the developmental structures in consciousness through which each of these profound states will necessarily be interpreted—and the first great explorers and theorists of structures of consciousness, referred to as sheaths above, were Vajrayana and Vedanta practitioners.  What the modern West has brought to the game is a much more thorough exploration of how developmental structures unfold in human beings (although not typically understood in a spiritual context, which is where a truly Integral Spirituality is useful in bringing these two worlds together).  Using Jean Gebser’s terms, these stages run from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral and super-integral—everyone starts at square one at birth, and stages can’t be skipped (that’s what makes them stages).  But here’s the fascinating thing: all five major states of consciousness can be experienced at nearly any stage of development!  Using five states and the seven stages mentioned here, that’s at least 35 distinct spiritual experiences, and the fact is, they are all real.  Without a framework that can take into account just how wide (states of consciousness), and how deep (structures of consciousness), the spiritual-religious terrain really is, any conversation about spirituality in today’s world is going to be sorely lacking.  

Finally, an Integral Approach is valuable in that it vigorously defends against the myth of the given, or the philosophy of consciousness, or the belief that there is one pre-given reality—from sensorimotor to metaphysical—and that all you have to do is "see it correctly."  To explore this topic, which is absolutely crucial for spirituality and religion to gain credibility in the modern and postmodern world, see Ken’s Integral Spirituality, and particularly appendix III. 

*****

(To listen to Part 1 of this dialogue, click here.  To check out all of Deepak’s prior appearances on Integral Naked, click here.)