Thursday, January 25, 2007
MONASTIC INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE
First, e-mail received a couple of weeks ago from Lee Penn:
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FYI
All the usual suspects are here, including Robert Muller.
Experiences of Interreligious Dialogue
http://www.centeringprayer.com/newsltrs/Summer06/TKInterview.htm
Lee
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Go to the website. After you've read the interview with Father Thomas Keating, take note of the website URL given at the very end of the last sentence:
Fr. Thomas Keating will present the practice of Centering Prayer and dialogue live with Ken Wilber. Other teachers will include David Frenette, who has worked with Fr. Thomas and Contemplative Outreach since 1983 (including as a trainer for long-time Centering Prayer practitioners) and Rollie Stanich, who is a teacher and director of the Integral Spiritual Center and a Centering Prayer practitioner. Integral Contemplative Christianity explores practice that includes and integrates spirit, body, mind, psyche and behavior in self, culture and nature. For more information, see the website: integraltraining.org
Notice that Ken Wilber is mentioned and also pictured in this interview, and that the interview is posted on a centering prayer website--or in other words this is the website of a Catholic organization of monks who promote centering prayer to Catholics as a spiritual exercise.
Now let's go to the Integral Training website cited in the interview--integraltraining.org.
For an overview of what's in the website, check out the site map. Lots of stuff. Did that Integral Naked (IN) link catch your eye? It will take you here where you will see a search window at the top.
If you put "tantra" into the search window, you will arrive here, but before you do that I should warn you that an image at the website is offensive. If you do go visit it, you will find Ken Wilbur and subjects such as:
Immortality and Enlightenment
Opening Your Integral Eyes
The Tantra of Job: "Through My Body I Vision God"
Sex, Identity, Spirituality: God in Gay Culture
A Natural History of Supernormal Powers
Transcendent Sex
And you will find the following presenters:
Andrew Cohen
Ken Wilber
Sally Kempton
Fred Kofman
Saniel Bonder
Linda Groves-Bonder
Julia Ormond
Rabbi Marc Gafni
Patrick McNamara
Elizabeth Lesser
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Suryas Das
Michael Murphy
Jenny Wade
Does any of this look even remotely Catholic?
Granted, I did not access any of the films or sound presentations. It looks pornographic. This is not my idea of Catholic spirituality and I'm not interested in looking at it or listening to it. One wonders what sort of Catholics are, and what sort of monks are dabbling in interreligious dialogue. But it is easy to see why we have a sexual scandal in the Church with such notions floating around. What is a healthy, young seminarian supposed to make of the graphic in this website alone? Near occasion of sin? And who exactly is the woman in the graphic embracing? Certainly doesn't appear to be a husband!
There is also material on the Kabbalah in the website, here.
The Integral movement is described at Integral Wiki as "a variously applied term for a diverse range of individuals, philosophies, teachings, and online communities and forums that follow integral thought or the integral paradigm in theory and practice." The Wiki also places in the Integral movement such philosophies as Theosophy, Anthroposophy, New Age, Fourth Way (Gurdjieff and Ouspensky), the psychology of Abraham Maslow. New Age has been rejected by the document "Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life", yet it is being taught as Catholic spirituality by the monks of Contemplative Outreach and Interreligious Dialogue. How is it that the bishops with oversight responsibility are not speaking out?
And what is our Holy Father going to do about them?
Integralism is mentioned in Vicomte Leon De Poncins book FREEMASONRY AND THE VATICAN, in the same appendix that discusses the communist French-Polish Movement Pax/Pax Christi and its relationship to the Sillon. De Poncins writes:
...the agents of Pax entrusted with assignments in France loudly proclaim the "persecutions" they allege they have suffered at the hands of the "retrograde" and "integralist" Polish Episcopate. This campaign of denigration is particularly aimed at Cardinal Wyszynski.
Same communist movement in both instances?
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
