[Editor's Note from Chris: Br. Trevor and his bride to be Sarah are at the Integral Spiritual Experience 2: The Future of Love. Trevor will be sending in journal entries from the event and I will be posting them. Here is the first, enjoy...]
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Entry 1- 11:10 am, Dec. 29/2010
One hour left on the train before arriving in Salinas, California where I’ll shuttle to Asilomar from there. Listening to Future of Love teleseries preparing for the event ahead. Can already feel my heart opening. It started last night. Even in anticipation of what’s coming, my whole rib cage and sternum is feeling a robust tearing sensation, like it’s been pulled wide open by two big hands. There’s a fear and dread of the challenges ahead in the next five days, the openings, the pains of growing in my ability to love. A lifetime of hurt and fear, of a thousand reasons to withhold love have kicked into high alert. But so is the yearning, the desire to open to that and get blown away. To quote Springsteen, “gonna be a twister tonight, and I’m heading straight into the storm”.
Last year’s Integral Spiritual Experience (ISE) was an amazing event, hard to categorize really. On one level it’s tied to the Integral movement- the integral map guides the event- but it seemed much larger than that. It was a trans-lineage spiritual retreat where five hundred people from thirty-five countries came together to practice and be with one another. That’s why I prefer the simple term post-postmodern; it just signifies that something is coming next. Trying to tag what’s happening with any one descriptive term is dangerous; there is too much spillage for any one label to handle. Too much gets lost, goes unseen, is miscast. Sometimes emergence must go unnamed.
What I experienced last year was a deep and diverse global sangha of people truly interested, truly active, in creating the new stage of human being and society. This sounds grandiose, and I suppose it is; but Nietzsche was already calling for such a human- the overman, the new meaning of the earth, the new human of perpetual becoming- in the late 19th century. What struck me last year was how genuine everyone’s commitment to growth and transformation was. It all felt real, very real. People were grinding in, taking chances, opening up. On the final day I remember standing beside a guy I’d yet to meet at the event. We looked at each other with big open smiles, and then we both threw down a big bear hug. I don’t remember saying much if anything to the guy after. It was all just understood.
I don’t know what to expect at this year’s event, but expectations are killers, so I’ll just try and remain open. I am feeling a terror at what I might go through though, what transformations might be waiting, which I’m finding interesting. But that bastard Craig Hamilton tells me that if I’m not uncomfortable, I’m probably not growing, so I’ll drive on. And as I heard the Reverend Bruce Sanguin say recently, “life is the destiny waiting for you when you consent to die”. Well, I guess I best be fixin to die.
