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Happy Holidays from Integral Naked

Jan 30, 2007

Happy Holidays from Integral Naked! For this lovely holiday season we invite you to listen to the conclusion of Caroline's fascinating discussion with Ken Wilber, about her new book Entering the Castle and her personal experiences with St. Teresa of Avila. As always, be sure to get your first month of Integral Naked for free! To register, click here. You will not be charged for an entire month, and will have free access to everything on the site, including over 200 hours of audio and video material taken directly from the frothiest edges of evolutionary consciousness. Come join the integral revolution, and enjoy some of the most important and fascinating conversations taking place in today's world!

click here for a free mp3 sample!

Entering the Castle. Part 3. The Last Mansion, The Beginning of the Rest of Your Life.

Caroline Myss is a renowned medical intuitive and the author of Sacred Contracts, Invisible Acts of Power, and Entering the Castle (forthcoming, with a foreword by Ken), an in-depth guide and commentary on the stages of spiritual growth in St. Teresa of Avila's The Interior Castle.

After exploring the "perfect storm" leading to Caroline's transformative rediscovery of St. Teresa in Part 1, and the way that spiritual energy can move along the chakras in Part 2, Caroline and Ken take this opportunity to move their story towards completion. Ken asks: "How does Entering the Castle end?"

St. Teresa's The Interior Castle moves through seven stages or "mansions" of increasing intimacy, and finally union, with Spirit. Teresa takes one from preliminary gross-realm practices oriented to the waking state, to subtle-realm practices oriented to the visions, images, and archetypes that can be found in the dream state, and finally to the vast causal emptiness and openness that can be found in the formless state. Here, at the seventh mansion, Caroline relates, "We have no vocabulary for that which cannot be described." Whether known as Godhead, Atman, Shunyata, Ayin, or the Ground of Being, this is where the fundamental split of subject and object falls away, and God and soul have never been separate. The final chapter of Entering the Castle then explores how to live this realization in the world, a mystic outside of the monastery.

Caroline goes on to speak about the difference between living in a field of energy, and living in a field of grace. Grace, she emphasizes, is an inner understanding of ever-present spiritual reality—which has always been there—while a field of energy is the outer life energies or prana of manifestation. Ken points out that this fits perfectly with an Integral Approach, with interior grace falling in the Upper-Left Quadrant and exterior energies falling in the Upper-Right Quadrant (the Four Quadrants simply being the Inside and Outside of the Individual and Collective, or the four basic ways to look at any occasion).

In one of the funniest parts of the dialogue, Caroline and Ken discuss some of the many ways that we can wiggle out of being genuinely accountable for our actions. Popular among cultural creatives—e.g. Boomers—are the notions of "speaking my truth" and "owning" things. In the paradoxical move of apparently trying to be mature in a given situation, so long as I've "spoken my truth" and "owned" my not-so-nice aspects of self, I'm therefore entirely off the hook. In a postmodern pluralistic swamp where no truth can be better, higher, or more just than another, all truths are equal—which is to say, meaningless. As Caroline and Ken agree, spirituality, if it is anything, is the move towards deeper and deeper forms of meaning, and this must be reflected in how we relate to our actions and their consequences.

In closure, Caroline shares her excitement at holding "Entering the Castle" workshops actually in physical European castles, and Ken gives an update on his own various writing projects.

This is an extraordinarily sweet dialogue, and we invite you to join these two dear souls as they walk the halls of Spirit together….

(To read Ken's foreword to Entering the Castle, click here. It's really quite an amazing read, outlining the seven most central ideas of mysticism in a few short pages. To learn more about an Integral Approach to spirituality, click here. To check out Caroline's other terrific IN dialogues, click here.)