In Re/thinking Religion, a new Integral Stage series, John Vervaeke joins Bruce Alderman and Layman Pascal to explore possible points of contact and confluence between their respective approaches to religion and spirituality. For this inaugural episode, we feel into some of the commonalities and differences between Integral Postmetaphysical Spirituality and Integral Transformative Practice, and John’s “religion that is not a religion” and his work around developing an ecology of practices suitable for addressing the meaning crisis. We touch on a number of related themes: the creative deployment of mythic or literary figures, from Cthulhu and zombies, to the Centaur, the Minotaur, and the khora; the importance of wrestling with existential and epistemological limit conditions, and the role of ambiguity in higher forms of rationality; the relation of non-theism to classical theism and atheism; the history of integrative practices, and the ‘traps’ in conventional practice that can thwart balanced development; and much more.
