The Editors

Step into the Heart of World Spirituality Trans-lineage Practice…

Contact Dr. Marc Gafni at support@centerforintegralwisdom.org  for private study or to book a public teaching

The future of our world depends on the great realization of love: that which unites us is infinitely greater then that which divides us. For the first time in the history of the human race, we are able to rise beyond the place of our birth, our religion of origin, our family circle and choose to live our highest truth. This truth transcends and includes all of our personal history even as it invites us to our singular and unique evolutionary destiny.

The Spiritual teaching for this age must be drawn from all of the great traditions of Spirit, pre-modern, modern, and post-modern. These great understandings must be lovingly integrated into a space of open heart, community and insight that has the power and the compassion to guide us on the next stage of our personal and global journey.

The lineages are the great teachings of Spirit developed by the great communities and masters of all the ages, in all parts of the world. Translineage means that we are moving towards transcending and including the Great Heart, Mind, and Body truths of all these lineages into an evolutionary integral Spiritual teaching. This is a down to earth, elegant, gorgeous teaching which embraces* all facets of your Unique Life.

Until very recently, you, like many other people received the lineage transmission of the Spiritual system that was dominant in your place of birth. You may have received it consciously. More likely, like most people in modernity, you received it unconsciously.

By lineage transmission we mean the absorption into your being of the great ideas, insights, maps, heart and mind knowings of a great tradition of Spirit, by whose lights you could orient and guide your life.

Usually the Spiritual transmission that you received was confused and diluted at best. You did not know quite how to integrate the apparently contradictory insights of modernity and post- modernity with what you understood to be the great truths of the wisdom traditions.

Considerations

What are the lodestones that can guide your ethical, Spiritual, and psychological journey through life?

Or…

Are you tragically destined *to stumble around on your own, alienated and isolated from larger currents and contexts of meaning?

How do you integrate the deep knowing of your heart aflame with the sober detachment of third-person study such as Science?

How do you weave together your profound desire for the Eros of sacred community with the prized autonomy and vaunted pseudo-skepticism of Western education?

And if you are to find your way back to the space of inner insight held by the lineages, which lineage to choose?

Historically you have been limited to the particular truth of your lineage. The problem is that this particular truth all too often seemed to deny or contradict many of the intuitively important teachings you heard from other paths.

You responded to this conscious or unconscious confusion on one of three core ways.

1. Sometimes you abandoned Spirit altogether and turned to the brilliant- if flatland – guides * of third-person objective knowledge. You looked to psychology to guide your inner process and for relational love to illuminate your heart. You looked to science to provide order and implicit meaning in your life.

But it did not quite work.

You greatly honored the wisdom of science. You appreciated the dignities it afforded you. Yet it’s flatland limitation and exterior functional orientation could never address the deepest yearning of your heart. **Without a firm grounding in the depth of Spirit you expected too much from your “Special Relationship”. In fact you became addicted to your “Special Relationship” expecting it to be a panacea for all of your dis-ease. The result: Your Special Relationship collapsed under the weight of pressure it was never meant to bare.

2. Sometimes you abandoned the core insights of modernity and post-modernity and aligned yourself with the goods of an old religion.

Even though you knew that it did not quite all hang together…

In your calculus, the goods of community, ethical guidance and personal relationship with the source of all being outweighed the shadows of the religious system you chose.

So you compartmentalized your life with the modern and post-modern person showing up in the world and the pre-modern old time religionist showing up at home and in church.
More often then not you took the third way.

3. You became a dilettante consumer of Spirituality from wherever you could get it.  At the same time that  you absorbed the truth of modern science you imbibed  the post-modern critiques of all objective truth. You never really worked it out. Your heart sometimes opened, but most of the time remained closed. You had occasional wondrous experiences of community, but most of the time you were alone. You were not sure how to even begin to integrate your Spiritual knowing and beliefs into a coherent system by which to guide your life. So you latched on to some aphorisms, perhaps a practice here and there and started to try and navigate your way through life. (more…)