Sunday Sermon [Stages of Moral Development]

¡Hola! Everybody... I had a great day yesterday again with close friends. We ate brunch and then walked around Lower Manhattan, hitting a few cafes. I laughed so much, my face hurts today... LOL I is good and a blessing to be with people you love and love you unconditionally and trust implicitly.

Hope everybody has had a great weekend!

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-=[ Stages of Development ]=-

“One can have a great degree of realization, very authentic, very deep, but not actually be or express that realization in one’s humanness. You can have great realization but a rotten embodiment.”

-- Adyashanti

Going to watch the excellent biopic, Milk, and listening to people who otherwise consider themselves compassionate religious individuals, made me think about the development of moral reasoning and how that development (or lack thereof) affects how we worship, how we love, and how we come to view and create our world. I follow a spiritual path that is not exclusive of psychological development. In fact, I don’t see a separation between psychological and spiritual development.

My perspective is that psychology and spirituality address a continuum of human development. One can have spiritual development at the expense of psychological growth and vice-versa. I see the development of human potential as a psycho-spiritual endeavor. That’s why I enjoy A Course in Miracles so much because I feel that that’s what Christianity would look like without the entrenched dogma.

I’ve been listening to quite a few Christians who use their dogma to adopt bigoted and intolerant attitudes against our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. The question begging to be asked is how could people who claim to embrace a religion based on compassion and tolerance be so intolerant to a group of human beings, in the process actively working to deny that group the human dignity of the same freedoms they enjoy.

I have asked that question many times and I think I know the answer. The answer lies in that many so-called religious people are stuck on a level of moral reasoning that’s not very evolved. They may know scripture and I don’t doubt their commitment to their religious beliefs, or that that they are good people, but I believe their psychological development has been arrested somewhere along the way.

We stand at the cusp of a major human evolutionary period. I think we will make leaps into the vast human potential or kill ourselves. There’s no turning back.

Abraham Maslow was one the first to investigate these higher stages of human potential. He found that in addition to the basic human needs -- physiological needs, safety needs, belonging needs, and self-esteem needs -- there are higher stages of self-actualization and self-transcendence needs. He called these latter stages, being needs, in contrast to deficiency needs. These higher stages represent an inherent potential all human beings possess, although not everyone lives up to them.

Before Maslow, Lawrence Kolhberg came up with stages of moral reasoning, which Carol Gilligan would later expand upon. (And this is the core of my position today, so pay close attention. LOL!) In her book, In a Different Voice, Gilligan outlined four major stages of female moral development, which she called selfish, care, universal care, and integrated. Another way of articulating these stages might be egocentric -- I care only for myself; ethnocentric -- I care only for my tribe, my country, my nation; worldcentric -- I care for all human beings, regardless of race, color, gender, sexual orientation, or creed; and finally what can be called kosmocentric -- where I integrate the masculine and feminine in myself, and, I would add, extend care to all sentient beings without exception.

Like all development, the evolution from egocentric to ethnocentric top worldcentric to kosmocentric is a movement of increasing consciousness, adopting and building on the previous stages. What the human potential movement has discovered is that this embrace goes all the way to infinity. The farther reaches of human nature people find themselves being one with a Ground of Being, one with Sprit, one with infinity, a radiant riot of the all-encompassing -- whatever you want to call it.

My point is that your can have powerful states of consciousness -- a powerful feeling of unity with Jesus Christ, for example. However, this is the thing states are temporary while stages of development are permanent. So you can have powerful altered states of consciousness or peak experiences and still not manage to grow or change. I think we’ve all experienced peak experiences of some type. I described several in my recent posts on recovery.

I learned personally that states alone don’t work. If you’re at an ethnocentric developmental stage, then having a peak experience will only make you more ethnocentric. Not a good thing.

The common example is that if you’re at an ethnocentric stage of development and you have peak experiences of being one with everything, you might interpret that as an experience of oneness with Jesus and therefore conclude that nobody can be saved unless they accept Jesus as their personal savior. In other words, a peak spiritual experience for an ethnocentric Christian will be interpreted as having to belong to this group in order to be saved. To further elaborate, if you’re at an egocentric stage of development and have the same experience, you might interpret that as a belief that you are Jesus Christ. Using the same reasoning, if you are at a kosmocentric or integral stage and have that same spiritual peak experience, you will likely conclude that you and all sentient beings without exception are one with Spirit in the eternal here and now.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

If you’re truly committed to the core tenets of your spiritual path, then you’re evolving and expanding to include all beings within your heart of hearts. In this world, dogma falls to the wayside and Love -- big “L” love -- takes precedence over your need to belong to an exclusive club.

How does love manifest itself in the life of someone at an egocentric stage of development versus someone who’s at the worldcentric level? How do different levels or stages of moral reasoning affect relationships?

What I see are too many Christians and people in general stuck in their ethnocentric cocoons. I refuse to believe that such a highly realized being as Jesus would have been as intolerant and unyielding... The greatest danger we face today is not from terrorists, it is from the fundamentalist mindset that sits rigid and immobile at the center of a reality whose nature is essentially always changing. Wake up people!

Love,

Eddie

Monday Madness (Moral Reasoning)

¡Hola! Everybody,
Happy St. Paddy’s day, people. great day to take advantage of a drunken lass! ::grin:: Today an mad prelude (really a poem) and a map!

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Nows [no. 2]

You’re fighting me I find,
and you will fight me all the way
to that painful
instant of surrender
we can both already sense.

You will fight
my instant messages
my postcards
my presents
and my desperate calls.

You will fight
the endless affections of my tongue
and I will ignore
your enormous eyes
and that unbearable smile.

I can buy you
jewelry,
airplane tickets,
roses,
dinners in San Juan,
and clothes you must learn to
love yourself to wear
and still you will fight me.

Because I have taken away
your practiced old
game of giving,
and made of you
an honest trader again.

-- Edward-Yemíl Rosario

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-=[ A Map ]=-

Not too long ago, I sat beside a woman on a panel. We were addressing college students, and what struck me about this particular woman was the level of her selfishness. I found it interesting because she sought me out before we spoke and mentioned that she too was a “practicing Buddhist.” Her version of Buddhism, it seemed to me, was simply meditation. I had a teacher who once joked that practicing Buddhism without ethics was like trying to row a boat without first untying it from the pier.

What struck me about this woman was that her whole existence centered on her and she was oblivious to how she was connected to her environment; how her actions reverberated and caused ripples. In her world, what mattered was the conscious cultivation of her ego. She could actually see the “logic” in the needless death of an infant. This is what happens when you mix Ayn Rand with meditation! LOL Nothing could be further from my vision of Buddhist practice.

Two people, two different worlds.

This got me to thinking and I have come to realization that “practicing meditation” or any set of practices isn’t enough. I have come to realize that we create our world according to what level we operate from. It’s the same with love. For some people love’s ultimate reason for existence is to satisfy the individual. Love is something that you go “out there” to get in order to satisfy your hunger for connection. similarly, religion and everything else is filtered -- distilled according to where you stand in terms of growth.

I’ll explain. Let’s look at moral development as a starting off point. Let’s say moral development has three distinct stages. An infant at birth hasn’t been socialized into the culture’s ethics, standards, and conventions; let’s call this the preconventional stage. It’s also known as egocentric, in that the infant’s awareness is largely consumed with self -- self-absorbed. but as the young child begins to learn its culture’s rules and norms, it grows into the conventional stage of morals. This stage is also known as ethnocentric, in that it’s focused on the child’s particular group, tribe, clan, or nation, and it therefore tends to exclude those not of its group. But at the next major stage of moral development, the post-conventional stage, the individual’s identity expands to include care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, sex, or creed, which is why this stage is also known as worldcentric.

If you’re still with me, you can see that moral development tends to move from “me” (egocentric) to “us” (ethnocentric) to “all of us” (worldcentric). This is an example of unfolding waves of consciousness.

Using this consciousness “map” one can see how religion (or love) will manifest itself differently in a person who’s at the egocentric stage than a person who’s at a worldcentric stage. Both people can be just as devout (or “in love”), but spiritual practice will evolve according to any one individual’s level of moral development.

So imagine love from an egocentric perspective. Love at this stage resembles a yearning -- something like a need for a fix -- an ego boost. Same thing with almost anything you look at in life: it changes according to what level you choose to engage the world. religion from an egocentric perspective probably resembles the scary wave of fundamentalism currently threatening our existence. And I mention fundamentalism in all its manifestations -- including our own home-grown Christian fundamentalism.

I find all this quite interesting because a lot of my work involves helping people move from one stage to another. But it’s also interesting because it helps me tease out the idiosyncrasies when someone says, “I love you.” Perhaps we need to know a little more about others and ourselves when we travel the terrain of the heart. For what may sound like “I love you” may in actuality mean “I love me.”

I would like to start using this “map” as a way to discuss different issues.

Love,

Eddie