John Dupuy on Religion and the Stages of Spiritual Development
Working from the integral level means something close to pastoral care. You sit with people at whatever stage they occupy and try to clear out the excesses, helping each level express its healthiest version of itself. Every one of these levels carries real goodness, and every one of them carries its own shadow. So you do the shadow work, you draw out what is best, and at the integral level you can finally assemble the whole thing in a way that was never open to human beings before this point. Erik asked whether that helped, and it did.
He then raised Christianity directly: the long history of conflict with the Catholic Church, and where things might be headed. A lot of people assume, with some justification, that religion simply stalls out at the blue or fundamentalist stage. That is the mythic register. Parting the Red Sea, virgin births, a God seated up in heaven, saints, a figure returning on horseback with a sword. At some point a person looks at all of it and decides it is nonsense, because that is not how the universe actually runs. They walk away from religion and into modernity.
What they miss is that spiritual intelligence is a line of development like any other, and it keeps evolving through every one of these stages. Reach orange and you begin reading the biblical texts the way a scholar would, through literature, history, archaeology. You learn, for instance, that the oldest copies of Mark lack chapter 16, so that ending was clearly tacked on afterward. One discovery leads to the next. You start asking what the evidence really tells us about who Jesus was, or whether he existed at all. You turn toward the brain and ask whether humans are wired for spiritual experience, for some sense of God. Researchers in that area, the neurotheology crowd and the scientists working alongside them, tend to say yes, we are. And then you have to sit with what that means.
Push on to the postmodern stage, to green, and religion opens up. It grows more compassionate, more willing to include. Back at blue, questions like gay marriage or whether women can be ordained as priests in the Catholic Church got one answer, repeated over and over: no, no, no. Wrong. Sinful. Green hears the word sinful and responds the opposite way. Wonderful, let us worship alongside our gay brothers and sisters, and of course a priest should be free to marry, a woman or whatever the pairing happens to be. That is simply the human family. Somewhere around ten percent of us fall on the gay side of the spectrum, and if God made it that way, the reasoning goes, refusing to accept and love it makes no sense. Say any of that to a blue Christian and watch the reaction. They lose it.