John Dupuy on Integral Recovery, Developmental Levels, and an Evolving Christianity
Erik asked John what a person might notice going through a conventional recovery program, one built without the integral approach. What would be absent? John's answer started with practice. The missing piece, he said, is the steady interior work. Mindfulness and meditation have gotten fashionable lately, and people are finally taking them seriously, but for years before brainwave entrainment tools existed John struggled to get anyone to meditate at all. That was doubly true for people fresh off drugs and alcohol. In an integral setting, someone would expect to do deep interior work. In a standard program, that part usually isn't there.
Instead of that inner practice, the conventional route tends to pile on groups, AA meetings, maybe some exercise. Exercise is at least starting to get the recognition it deserves. John pointed to the book 'The Spark' as a fine read for anyone who wants the scientific record on how physical movement helps with nearly any illness or disorder. The traditional program might touch all of this, but not with the same intensity or focus.
Then there's the developmental piece of the integral map, the idea of stages, which John knew Erik understood well as an integralist himself. Picture someone who began their addiction as a reasonably healthy, world-centric person. Before long the addiction drags them down the spiral, down into the basement, into a kind of sociopathic indifference to everyone around them. Getting out means climbing back up that moral ladder, rung by rung, back toward the highest level they once held.
With practice and real effort, John said, a person can keep climbing past where they started. The movement goes from egocentric, where it's only about me, to the level where it's about mine (my people, my gang, my family), then to the ethnocentric level of my country, and onward to world-centric, and eventually toward something Cosmo-centric. Why does any of that matter? Because the higher you go, the more skillfully you see. You understand more of what's actually happening, you carry more compassion, and you include more people in your circle of concern.
John thinks that climb matters especially now, at this moment on the planet, and that as many of us as possible should make it. It takes disciplined, difficult work. The difference today is that we're learning how to do the work: the tools, the techniques, the understanding that no earlier generation ever had access to. Given that, he feels it falls to us to use what we've been handed, for anyone who feels called to it.
Erik picked up the thread about stages and used it to turn toward Christianity, a personal practice John has drawn on and been inspired by. John doesn't press it on anyone, but for himself it's been a source of inspiration, and it keeps evolving. Christianity in the modern world is becoming something new, Erik noted, and he asked John to lay out what these levels are for listeners hearing about them for the first time, and to say a little about how Christianity might be changing as it moves through them.