DAILY EVOLVER LIVE PODCAST | Edited transcript | 1.13.

2015 | Boulder Colorado |

Jeff Salzman
AM I CHARLIE HEBDO?
An Integralist Considers the Events in Paris
Jeff Salzman: Good evening, folks, and welcome to The Daily Evolver Live. Im Jeff
Salzman. Its Tuesday, January 13th, 2015. I am coming to you as always from my
home in Boulder, Colorado. Im here tonight with Brett Walker who is managing the
call in the kitchen.
Thank you all for tuning in. I hope you are well tonight wherever you are. Its been an
eventful week. Tonight were going to look at the dramatic events that have been
transpiring in France, with the massacre at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo ...
which was just last Wednesday, less than a week ago. Also on Sunday the largest
mass public demonstration in modern French history over a million people on the
streets of Paris alone. Leaders from all over the world, arm in arm, and
Oops. I am going to have to give a very rare demerit to my superhero integral President
Barack Obama for not sending anybody to the Paris march. He screwed up, okay? Fox
News is right and Obama is wrong, okay? Okay then, lets just drop it.
Im pleased to have Amir Ahmad Nasr joining us live tonight. He has become one of the
leading voices in the integral community speaking on Muslim affairs.
He was raised a conservative Muslim himself in North Africa, in Middle East, and in
Malaysia. Hes the author of The Future of Islam in the Age of New Media and of My
Islam: How Fundamentalism Stole My Mind and Doubt Freed My Soul. Ive been having
a conversation with him by phone and email, and I find him to be just delightful, and
smart, and really insightful; and so Im happy to have him on. Amir will be joining us in
a little bit.
Before that I want to give a word to our sponsor. A shout out to IntegralLife.com who
hosts this podcast and where I originated the podcast four years ago. IntegralLife.com
is the main web portal for cutting-edge integral thinking. They feature Ken Wilbers
latest work part of which is a long conversation Ken had with Amir that is posted on
the site.

The podcast you are listening to, The Daily Evolver, is available also on iTunes and
Stitcher. Of course, it also appears, along with additional postings and commentary, on
my blog, DailyEvolver.com.
VALUE OF THE INTEGRAL LENS - DETAIL AND CONTEXT
I often recommend that if youre new to integral theory, or if you just want to follow
along with a couple of the more important maps, you can find them on a link that came
with the email that you received to remind you of this call.
Tonight were going to be talking particularly about levels of development, and thats
the integral lens that I want to bring to the events in France. Now, one of the great
things about integral theory is it encourages us to take multiple perspectives on things
and to resist our inclination to contract around any single perspective, the one thats
most familiar, or most comfortable, or makes the most sense to us.
I often compare integral theory to a Google map. We can click in to see more detail, to
see that what we thought was flat has mountains, and rivers, and texture; and we can
click out to see more context, to see how the territory were investigating relates to
ever larger circles of territories. This really just enables us to spot patterns and see the
territory more clearly ... so that we can think more clearly, and act more clearly, and
bring more wisdom, compassion, and skillful means to whatever it is were dealing
with. Thats our goal here tonight.
What our maps of reality reveal is that there is a clash between the pre-modern
Muslim world (and not all of the Muslim world is pre-modern). On our map of the
Altitudes of Development, pre-modern means the traditional, warrior and tribal levels.
The conflict between that world and the modern secular world of Western Europe,
France, the United States -- the developed world -- reveals the engagement of as wide
an array of developmental levels as virtually anything on the planet.
Most of them are what we call first tier memes, and that means that they basically
hate each other. They just dont get each other. The traditionalists, the modernists, the
post-modernists, theyre all struggling for the ascendancy of their own monoperspectives. Again, what come on line at the integral stage of development is really
just the capacity of consciousness to see and hold conflicting and even warring
perspectives at the same time. Lets walk through it.

AM I CHARLIE? HOW THE WARRIOR STAGE IS SHOWING UP

When we look at the events in France, we certainly will start with the warrior stage of
development, what we call the Red Stage of development. The warrior stage is
marked by many things, but one of them is magic. In the spiritual line of development
theres a sense of magic that originates in the archaic and tribal stages of development
that is maintained in the warrior stage. All of the early stages are really full of magic and
spirits, brother bear and sister moon, and that sort of thing. At the warrior stage, it
becomes more refined. You have power gods. Basically, superheroes; but still, the
world is infused with magic. Magic is really something that all religions seek to deal
with because it was the religion of most of humanity for most of history, and still
maintains a power and potency.
As I say, magic is the core and heart of religious experience. I think back on my own
development. Many of you may relate to this. I think back on when my religion was
magic, when I was 8, 9, 10, maybe 11, 12 years old. I remember back at church camp,
sitting in the evening with the full moon, a campfire, sitting on the edge of the river
bank, and were singing Kumbaya. Kumbaya, my Lord. Kumbaya. Come by here, my
Lord. Come by here. Its all of us kids, and theres this impossibly cute 17-year-old
camp counselor with shaggy blond hair playing the guitar and I digress.
But really, it was a beautiful religious experience, an experience of presence, and
magic, and the love of God. All religions work with it one way or the other because its
so powerful, and its what human beings want so deeply. We have the experience of
the numinous while singing at church. We have it at a Buddhist retreat where were
sitting in meditation or chanting together. After spending weeks together in meditation,
theres a wonderful sense of the world lighting up as if it was stage-lit, and it is
enchanted. And I realize that world, that enchanted world is my real home, and I am
safe there, and I am in the lap of God.
This is a very, very powerful stage of development, and you cant talk people out of it.
Its very, very difficult to talk people into a more secular view that really requires that
they let go of that enchantment and realize that they are actually just some accidental
result of the evolution of protoplasm and were hurtling together on a rock through a
meaningless void. Thats a tough sell to people who are living in an enchanted world.
For a lot of Islam, this is very strong, a fact Im learning about Islam more and more.
Everybody is, arent they?

I was talking to Amir a couple days ago, and he was talking about Amir, you may
want to expound upon this when we turn things over to you that this current is very
strong in Islam. This religious practice of being in a mosque and chanting, very melodic
chanting and swaying. Theres a big evocation of spirit such that when they walk out
the world is alive with the spirit of God; and when they hear the vocalists calling them
to prayer from the minarets five times a day, the world is alive with God.
As integralists, we want to feel into that and feel into how important and beautiful that
is, and vivid, and exciting, and sexy that is. So that we dont wonder why people would
still bother to believe it.
AM I CHARLIE? HOW THE TRADITIONALIST STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT IS
SHOWING UP
Then, we move to the next stage that we can see playing out very, very clearly in these
fault lines between the Muslim and secular world. And that is the level of
traditionalism. This is the level of myth, and this is where a new spiritual revelation
comes online that really wants to organize and civilize the magic realm, and organize it
does. This is the age of the axial religions: Buddhism, Christianity and Islam all came
online at this stage, about 2,000 to 2,500 years ago.
The traditionalist religions idea is that there is a transcendent world. In the Western
religions, its the realm of God, the heavenly realm. In Buddhism, its Nirvana. Its a
state of absolute liberation in contrast to this corrupted world. In the West, heaven is in
opposition to the sinful world. Heaven is where true truth resides. At this point in
history we get the 10 commandments. Its no longer okay to go steal your neighbors
wife. The idea of revenge, hexes and blood feuds -- rampant in Tribal and Warrior
culture -- is taken off the table. This is where God says, Vengeance is mine, and
youre not supposed to worry about it. Your job is to live a faithful life, be a good
Muslim, be a good Christian, a good Buddhist, a good citizen and God (or Reality)
will take care of the rewards and punishment in the next life.
That is really a very, very powerful organizing principle that enables humanity to move
forward. To create empires you cant have people running around having their own
individual spiritual realizations, or who are working their own magic. That has to be
distributed into larger systems, and civilized, and organized, and thats what
traditionalism does. We see this in the Muslim world where theres a mix of warrior
consciousness and traditional consciousness; this is the nature of evolution. People

may be at one stage in one line of development, and at another stage in another line of
development.
So we have people who have a power-god mentality, a warrior mentality, yet they are
fighting for a God in heaven. This is the holy warrior, the jihadist. At this stage,
especially as traditionalism becomes more and more entrenched, and more and more
successful, the idea is that you follow the rules. One of the rules is no blasphemy.
Plus, in Islam, theres a certain quirk: theres a prohibition against creating images of
Mohammed.
This is part of the traditionalists job: to wring out idol worship. We dont want any kind
of imagery or anything thats going to distract us or that were going to invest spiritual
powers in. This is what, of course, we did like crazy at the warrior stage: we
worshipped the golden calf all day. In traditionalism thats out. So no images of
Mohammed. No idol worship. This is also true in Christianity.
No idols in Christianity, yet plenty of images. Over here in Christendom were painting
the ceiling with God, and Jesus, and all of that; but theres still that vigilance that idols
and magic not infect the transcendent organization of traditional religion.
Now, at its best, traditionalism is about home and hearth. There are the grandparents,
there are the parents, there are the children. Everybody living together, supporting
each other. Everybody knows who they are, everybody knows what their role is. We
really dont get identity neurosis till later in modernity and postmodernity.
At its worst, traditionalism can be infected with red Warrior culture, so we get this
militant triumphalist religiosity, and the holy warrior.
Just as an aside we also notice this happening in North Korea. North Korea is at a
traditionalist stage of religious development. For them, the Kim family is divine. To see
their leader ridiculed as in the Seth Rogan movie, The Interview, would probably be
offensive to the vast majority of North Koreans, most of whom will never see it, of
course. But also strangely enough, the North Korean defectors said they dont like it
either. Theres a power to these images that really just run deep into the whole dignity
and honor of the country and the culture.

AM I CHARLIE? HOW THE MODERN STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT IS SHOWING UP

All right, then. Lets look at how The Charlie Hebdo killing is showing up in the modern
stage of development. First of all, its happening in a modern culture. What galvanized
the worlds attention about the killings is not that they were political, and it certainly
wasnt the number of people who were killed, which I think is 11, or 13 in the final
analysis. As Nick Kristof wrote in the New York Times, the Charlie Hebdo murders
werent even the most lethal terror attack on the planet last Wednesday. There was a
car bomb in Yemen the same day that killed 37 people.
The real story here is that the violence happened in a modern world space, in the
capital of a leading developed country. We modernists who live in this world space all
over the planet are aroused to our bones because were still human beings; were still
security machines. Thats what were hardwired to do, to be maximally safe. In this
regard the Charlie Hebdo killings point out a couple things that are actually
contradictory:
One of them is how vulnerable we are in the modern world. Our cities are free, anybody
can go anywhere, officially at least. We have millions of people coming and going,
infrastructures unguarded. Shopping malls, city squares, offices, all unguarded. And
yet modern technology, guns, bombs, pathogens, plus instructions on the internet on
how to use all of these things, can be deployed by anybody who gets their hands on it,
and that means sometimes the wrong hands. As they say, all we have really to fear in
this world is a mad man with a gun. Thats modern weaponry in pre-modern hands, I
talk about it all the time. So that is something were unguarded against.
On the other hand, this incident also shows how remarkably safe we are. The
percentage of violence of any kind really is at an all-time low worldwide and certainly in
the developed countries. Charlie Hebdo is really less a story about the crazy violent
elements in our society, but more a story about how small a part of our world the crazy
violent parts have become by any historic standard. Yet, that doesnt mean we dont
work night and day to drive it even lower. Thats why we got so worked up about it,
and thats why it galvanizes the attention of the world.
I think of it sometimes as the pain-versus-gain ratio. As we develop, it takes less and
less pain to give us more and more gain in terms of both cultural and individual
development. Last week, I talked about how Nazi Germany conducted an industrial
genocide of 6,000,000 people, one of the most horrific thing that ever happened on the
face of the earth. Today, Germany is one of the two or three most civilized, intelligent,
6

pacified, industrious nations on earth, as well as officially the most admired nation on
earth. 70 years later. Its astonishing.
Did the historic horror create the present peace and prosperity? Id say yes, that one of
the engines of evolution, one of the ways up the spiral of development, is the
realization of the horror of ones own actions. The realization that there is a better way
forward. That there is new insight, new wisdom, and an ever larger circle of
compassion available to us. This is built into our development.
We are one of the most open societies, but were also one of the most surveilled. There
are video cameras everywhere. We watched a lot of these in action during the Charlie
Hebdo events. The action on the street we could watch and thats true throughout our
modern cities. Not only because of official cameras from businesses and government,
but also because everybody is carrying one around in their pocket with their
smartphone. There are metadata on peoples phone records, travel, finance, emails,
internet searches. And all of these flow into computer programs that identify red flags.
Im for the surveillance. I think its working. I dont worry much about the downsides
because one of the things thats true about modernity is that once a culture reaches a
stable center of gravity of modernity, they no longer have any interests in subjugating
their citizens. Most people are willing to take the deal of being under surveillance if they
can continue to be safe against the no shortage of people who would be delighted to
do us harm. Its astonishing how few actually succeed.
All right. Lets see here, theres one more thing regarding what comes online in the
modern stage of development. It is the key thing in terms of the interior of
consciousness at modernity. There is a differentiation of the values spheres of
goodness, truth and beauty. Goodness, truth, and beauty in pre-modern cultures are
all fused together. The religion is the state. The art serves the state religion.
In modernity, we realize that these three domains of human reality can be separate,
and they can live in their own realms which cant be colonized by the other. This is a
huge achievement of interior modernity. Its really what the Reformation and the
Enlightenment were about. One of the great battle cries of the Enlightenment was
Remember the cruelties! This is a line from Voltaire reminding people to remember
the Inquisition, remember the cruelties of the church and the state before we teased
them apart and realized that actually sovereignty resides in each of us as individuals.
This differentiation of the values sphere is one the great, huge consciousness
achievements of modernity.

The right of art to offend is one of the things that Charlie Hebdo was really fighting
for. It was interesting this week to see the interview with one of the new editors [would
you want this job, running Charlie Hebdo?] where she was talking about how they will
continue to fight for the spirit of liberty and the spirit of blasphemy. She spoke of the
spirit of blasphemy as if it were a great, good thing. I really got chills from that. She
helped me realize that in the modern world, it is actually arts job to ridicule the power
structures. Just as science and religion fight their battles on whats true and what isnt.
AM I CHARLIE? AN INTEGRAL VIEW
At the integral stage of development, we want to have it all. We want to have the
passion and honor that comes with the red, warrior stage. We want the faithfulness
and obedience that comes with traditionalism. We want the creativity and selfexpression of modernity. And we want whats next, which is the sensitivity and
pluralism of post-modernity.
People talk as if theres something inherently defective about Islam that explains why
its embedded in many of the most backward cultures on earth, center of gravity-wise.
And I dont think I dont think so.
My take is that development trumps religion every time and that there are plenty of
ways for people to read the same book and just emphasize different things. There are
many teachings in the Quran or in Islamic doctrine about mercy, forgiveness, and
forbidding coercion of religion.
There are actually no laws against apostasy, or blasphemy, or making images of
Mohammed in the Quran. Theyre in other texts, but people will continue to read their
religions according to the stage of development that theyre at, and the stage of
development, again, trumps religion every time.
INTERVIEW WITH AMIR AHMAD NASR
Lots more to say, and well see what we get into; but at this point, I do want to
welcome online Amir Ahmad Nasr. Again, Amir was raised a Muslim in North Africa and
Malaysia. He is the author of My Islam: How Fundamentalism Stole My Mind and Doubt
Freed My Soul. The conservative backlash from his writing caused him to seek and
receive political asylum in Canada, where he has lived for the last year. Hes a student
of integral theory. He is altogether a delightful young man. Hes joining us tonight from
his home in Vancouver. Hello, Amir!
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Amir Ahmad Nasr: Hello, Jeff! Thank you for having me. Thats a good stuff that
youre getting into. I was listening for the past 15 minutes, and I got to say, I fully
agree. Great articulation.
Jeff Salzman: Thank you very much. Is there anything I got wrong or anything that
youd like to share?
Amir Ahmad Nasr: I think youre spot-on that there are many forms of post-modern
pluralistic Islam being practiced right now here in North America, even in some
communities in France. The trouble however is how Islam is practiced in the rest of the
world, outside of liberal democracies. Many countries are still very authoritarian and
have political systems that are very pathological which then, of course, influences how
religion is understood, and conceptualized, and internalized within those societies.
Religion ends up having a very authoritarian strain, and thats really where a lot of the
challenge lies.
Jeff Salzman: I agree. Weve talked a little bit about this before that this pull of the
spirit is very, very powerful in Islam. You actually told a story in a conversation you had
with Terry Patten on Sunday in his Beyond Awakening series. It was just wonderful; I
would encourage people to listen to it. You talked about the flavor of Islam and a
particular experience that you had, a real integral awakening I think, and an inflow of
spirit that happened to you in a mosque in Canada. I wonder if you would share a little
bit about that with us here tonight.
Amir Ahmad Nasr: Yeah. You see, the experience actually happened in a mosque in
Istanbul in Turkey.
Jeff Salzman: Sorry.
Amir Ahmad Nasr: Not here in Canada. Right. It was in Istanbul in Turkey. At that time,
this was back in 2009. It was actually May 2009 to be very specific. At that time, I
would say that I was more or less agnostic. I wouldnt say atheistic. Lets say agnostic
and very antitheist, very antitheist. I was extremely resentful towards religion and just
thought that the whole thing was an abomination. There I was on my way Turkey, and
for many, many months, many months, close to a year, I had just been feeling a lot of
pain and experiencing a lot of emptiness, and there was a call.

There was a certain sense of nostalgia to embrace that feeling of transcendence, but I
felt that if I ever stepped into a mosque or any kind of house of worship that I would
get in there, I will get lured, I will get seduced, and then my mind would be caged
within the documents, the doctrines, and all of that. So I was very, very, very resentful
towards those things, and I did not want anything to do with them. I felt that I just had
to toughen up.
Its like, Just toughen up. What the hell? You dont have to have all these warm fuzzy
feelings. Thats just garbage. Its nonsense. Thats how religion tries to seduce you.
Thats how it tries to bring you, and then it cages with all of its oppressive structures;
so no. No, no. Hell no. Then, I was on my way to Turkey, and it just so happened that
it was the first time on that flight that I was reading my first integral book.
I had read a few articles because two friends recommended some stuff by Ken Wilber,
some stuff even by Terry Patten that I had gotten a hold of at the time ... And even
Carter Phipps, by the way, whose work I really enjoy, and I know you know him. You
know each other quite well, but I never really read a book from start to finish. I was on
that flight, and I was reading The Marriage of Sense and Soul by Ken Wilber. By the
time I arrived in Istanbul, Turkey, something had just changed, and I felt this relief. It
was this feeling of relaxation, of calmness. Something had just shifted. I cant even
describe it and put it into words until this day. It was bizarre. Its almost like I smoked a
joint, but it was a book.
Jeff Salzman: I know, and thats something.
Amir Ahmad Nasr: Yeah. Its like for the first time, not in the way, What the hell just
happened? There I am. Im in Istanbul. As I mentioned to you, I was there to attend a
special workshop on how to overcome online censorship and how to use encryption
tools because as a virtual activist at the time, I was very engaged in online discourse.
We really needed to use these tools to avoid detection by authoritarian states in the
Middle East and so on.
At the end of that three-day workshop, the participants wanted to go to Blue Mosque,
the Sultan Ahmed Mosque which is about 400 years old in Istanbul. I was reluctant. I
wasnt sure if I wanted to go in, and those feelings came up. I was like, Whoa, whoa,
whoa, whoa, whoa. Here I am. Im going to get seduced again. Hell no. I said to
myself, You know what? Screw it. All youre doing is youre just going in as a tourist
with your camera, and thats it.

10

Thats it. Just a tourist, and youre going to wait for your friends. Youre going to snap
some pictures, theyre going to come, and youre going to get the hell out of there. I
told them, Im going to be waiting for you at that spot, and I sat down by the window
at the spot. Coincidentally, the prayer had just started. The imam in his voice. You
could tell he came from a very deep heartfelt place. He wasnt one of those ludicrous
religious leaders shouting at the top of his lungs down with America and quoting
verses about the infidels and so on and so forth.
If anything, it was just nothing but gratitude emanating from that man. You could tell he
had a very big heart. The dome above us, the mosques dome did the rest. It did the
rest. It amplified his voice. It amplified the voices of all the worshipers behind him as
they finished their prayers, and they engaged in praising the greatness of God with the
sense of deep love and gratifying appreciation.
However, theres also a certain kind of quality that I havent experienced in other
religions when I went to their houses of worship. That other additional quality is a
sense of awe as if youre sitting before Youre standing before a throne, and you
acknowledge the power that is there in front of you. Its not fear. Its not intimidation,
but its just a sense of awe of this huge massive great grandness that is before you. Its
mixed with love and devotion, and its all merged together. Its very different quality.
Theyre in there and theyre repeating it, so the [foreign language 00:35:36] and so on,
and so on, and so on over and over.
I couldnt help it. I just couldnt help it. I really wanted to resist. I wanted to get out of
there, and I was waiting for my friends, but I just couldnt help it. I got so lost into it, I
started swaying back and forth as I was sitting on the ground far away from them. I can
feel the reverb in my body, in my bones, and I got lost. I got lost in the moment. My
eyes were closed, and it just felt like I had gone to another place for a very long time.
Finally, when a friend tapped on my shoulder, I had tears streaming down my face, and
something had shifted. I had finally understood at that moment the word submission
which I was also resentful towards ... this idea of submission in Islam, submitting to
some grand supreme authoritarian power and being subservient to it. I just hated that
idea. I understood at that moment that it was submission in the form of surrender,
willful surrender, so that you just let go of ego, and you surrender your heart to the
grand mystery of life, and just trust.
Trust and let go, and have faith. Not faith in the doctrines, not faith that Jesus was born
in of a virgin, or that Mohammed flew on a magic horse through the seventh sky, then
11

went to heaven. Not faith in those ideas, but just faith. A sense of trust, and loving, and
grace. All infused together, and I was in awe.
The reason I was able to allow that, and internalize that, and experience that is
because of what I had read in the book The Marriage of Sense and Soul. I
understood that spiritual experience doesnt mean you have to be irrational. It doesnt
mean that youre going to be weak and pathetic or even that you have to toughen up.
No. These experiences are precious, and theyre important, and we should encourage
them and that they can experienced in a way that has a basis in reality and without any
restrictive doctrines.
Jeff Salzman: Yeah, and you didnt lose your rationality. This is a spiritual integration
that is really a marker for integral consciousness to have really all of it online. I love
how you transmit the spiritual state potency of Islam in the atmosphere of the mosque.
We know how powerful that is. And yet at the same time, were noticing and youve
talked about this a lot ... that theres also a pull to modernity. Particularly in the younger
people, which is the majority of Muslims. Anybody who has an internet really has
access to this whole other [modern] world as well, and that is causing a lot of
movement, particularly in the young people. I was astonished that when you were
telling me about t the popularity of people like Eckhart Tolle in the Muslim world. And
the book The Secret. So give us a little insight into whats really bubbling up from the
younger people.
Amir Ahmad Nasr: Yeah, absolutely. A huge, huge trend, and I think trend is the
word that minimizes it, but something big thats really emerging is just the change in
the media landscape that has happened over the past two decades, and that includes
satellite television. Im not just talking about the internet and social media. Im also
talking about satellite TV because thats how it started. Take for instance the series
Friends. Friends is extremely popular in the Arab world, and it came subtitled. It
was subtitled in Arabic, and so people can watch it, and they could read the subtitles.
It was really interesting.
You had certain episodes in which Russ and Monica would express their Jewish faith.
For some viewers, its like, Wait a second. Theyre Jewish characters, how
interesting; but then you just go along and laugh. What those things did, and its been
shows like the NBA and the Oprah Winfrey Show, American pop culture in general.
When that started being broadcast, and now we can actually accept it and receive this
at satellite TV, a lot of people started asking questions like, Wait a second. Why do

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they get to live like that? Why do they get to do these things? Oh, wait. Look at this
channel thats coming from this other country. Ooh, lets tune in.
People began to just understand the world differently. And people have a certain kind
of individuality that they can express and they want to express too. But then, of course,
the social media. Now, its a two-way conversation. Its not just information being
broadcasted at you. You can go and seek information. You can go and get it. Saudi
Arabia is where you will find the highest consumption of YouTube per capita in the
world. Highest consumption of YouTube per capita in the world is in Saudi Arabia.
Jeff Salzman: Interesting.
Amir Ahmad Nasr: These are facts that are online. You can go check them out, all
verified. The explosion in Twitter usage in Saudi Arabia after the Arab Spring, I think it
exploded by 3,000%. Its in the thousands, okay? I believe the figure is 3,000%,
somewhere around there. We can also go check it online. There is now a virtual public
fear that we just has not had before. The highest level of usage of YouTube is among
young Saudi women who view education videos. They love education videos, and
these are again, these are stats that are available.
As you mentioned, Eckhart Tolle, The Secret, and also especially, especially The
Alchemist by Paulo Coelho have been translated to Arabic, and these books are selling
like crazy to the extent that there has been some discussions about banning them.
Especially The Secret, it caused a lot of controversy as it did to an extent at the United
States, but there was discussion of potentially banning those books from being sold.
They are corrupting young peoples minds and theyre getting young people to worship
Gods creation, the universe, instead of worshiping God himself and so on and so
forth. They took that word, the universe, literally, so its fascinating.
All these things are happening. There is huge cultural change. There is huge social
change, but its beneath the surface. The reason we dont hear much about it is
because those things havent really permeated into the political sphere because the
If they do, then the risks are just major. We seen what happened after the initial phase
of the Arab Spring. The Islamist party attempted to go in because they could selforganize better than us, the youth.
We knew how to play protest, we knew how to mobilize, but we did not know how to
get together our act and actually self-organize into political parties with the platform
and so on; so we lost in that. The Islamists took over, and then they polarized society
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so much because they want to shove Islam down everybodys throat, and they wanted
to Islamize very aggressively, very quickly. And then the military came in the case of
Egypt and Tunisia. The Islamist party freaked out about what happened in Egypt, so
they retreat. Now, Tunisia is actually in a really good track. All of these things are taking
place.
Now, is this cultural change among the young, among young people who have access
to the internet, their smartphones and so on, is this cultural change going to translate
into liberal political institutions? That is a big question mark. I think whats really
missing right now is that we have succeeded in deconstructing whats going on. A lot
of young people now understand that we are getting a very bad deal. I was telling you
in our previous call that when I discovered the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
and I read it online, I was furious. I was angry. Im like, Why the hell didnt I get taught
about this? These are rights? Im actually getting robbed of my own rights. These
arent privileges that some people are just lucky to have like a nice Gucci bag, and I
dont have a Gucci bag? Wait, wait, wait. I was born with a Gucci bag, and somebody
freaking stole it from me? Like, Screw the whole world. Why didnt I get taught about
this? People understand that theyre getting a bad deal. That wasnt the case before,
especially for us young people. We know that, and we have deconstructed things.
The challenge is, how can we reconstruct thing in a way, so that we can indigenize our
own liberty, indigenize our own conceptions of freedom, so that we can then build
political institutions that accommodate the religious sensibilities of people and so on
and so forth? Because truth be told, Jeff, its not going to be the great political
institutions where blasphemy is a right. Certain things that are going to be different,
and that is the case even when you look at France and America. Frances conception
of secularism is aggressive. Its an active form of secularism that actively seeks to
secularize society, where the American model, which I prefer, is more neutral.
Then, look at democracy at Japan where even though you have democracy, and
institutions, and everything, culturally speaking, theres still a lot of reluctance to
question people in authority. We see that after the Fukushima Crisis. Each country,
each society has to figure how to indigenize liberty and conceptions of freedom, and
have their own forms of modernity. Thats really the next stage right now is the Islamic
world because the deconstruction has happened among the young, and we know
were getting a bad deal.
Jeff Salzman: That is an appropriate stage of development. As Ken points out, we
thought about modernity for a hundred years before the French revolution. People
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talked about it and wrote letters, and has secret societies. Its going to happen a lot
quicker now in the world of the internet and so forth. Also, every culture does it with
their own flavor. Its going to be fascinating to watch what is Arab modernity look like.
Theres a beautiful world where Arab-ness, and Persian-ness, and Islam is online as
well as Chinese-ness, and Russian-ness, and American-ness in ways that are vivid,
and free, and liberated. Thats a part of the sacred world to come, I think.
Amir Ahmad Nasr: Absolutely, absolutely.
Jeff Salzman: Amir, I really appreciate you coming on. So thank you. You can hear
Amir in far more depth in his conversation with Ken Wilber on Integral Life and an hourand-a-half call with Terry Patten on Sunday which covered some of the same ground
and more on his Beyond Awakening series. Ill link to both on this site. Again, Amir,
thank you so much.
Amir Ahmad Nasr: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me, Jeff. I really
appreciate it, and well stay in touch.
Jeff Salzman: Alright-y. Bye-bye.
Amir Ahmad Nasr: Thank you. Cheers. Bye-bye.
Conclusion:
Jeff Salzman: I really just want to hammer a little bit the opportunities that integral
consciousness and an integral view of things brings to the party. What the evolutionary
view sees is that every stage of development is supposed to be there. A 4-year-old is
not a defective 6-year-old, is not a defective 12-year-old and 18-year-old and so forth.
That every stage has its gifts. Traditionalism, warrior stage, they all have their gifts.
They all have their pains.
As individualists and cultures, we have to grow through each of them. We can be more
or less healthy at any given stage, and thats really what we want to support, is really
health at every stage of development. We see that in individuals. We see teenagers
who work out their teenage angst and impulses violently. We see those who work them
out with art or video games, or performance, or rap. We see people who work them out
in sports, or clubs, or different kinds of competitions. Thats healthy versus unhealthy.

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As parents of teenagers and children, we want to steer them and protect them from
themselves and do the best we can to help them be healthy at every stage. Thats what
were called to do collectively too. The more developed countries and cultures really
find themselves in a little bit of parenting role as we work with these earlier stages of
development.
-- Technical glitch -I was just talking about the idea of parenting and how developed cultures are more
responsible for undeveloped cultures than vice versa. I can feel the green flags fly as I
say something like that. How dare I assume that Western cultures are the parents and
Muslim cultures are the children! I appreciate green post-modernity which is so
aggressively anti-hierarchical, because green saw the horrors that were created by the
ethnocentric hierarchies that came before and they are very suspicious of this kind of
thinking and point out any regression into ethnocentrism or exclusionary anything.
Thats greens job, and I appreciate it. I think it ought to be online in this discussion, it
ought to be online in my own psyche.
[Here we had a few questions / comments from
listeners, which can be heard on the live podcast.]
So as integralists we ask ourselves the question, Am I Charlie Hebdo? The answer is
yes as long as we realize that were also the Muslims, and were also the police. And
were also the fundamentalist mothers who worry about honor and salvation when they
see their daughters wear bluejeans and take on Western ways. We are also the
daughters, young women learning about the world through internet videos. And the
alienated young men who find meaning in the romantic militarism of jihad. And all of
the people that are struggling in these ways. And to the degree that we can feel into
their worlds and see things through their eyes, then we evoke the larger space of
consciousness that can hold multiple perspectives. In that space there is a wisdom
and intelligence and a heart that is really new to the cosmos. So we are creating the
new kosmic grooves that are leading the way.
Thats my story, and Im sticking with it -- for another week at least. Again, thank you
for listening. Well see you again same time, same station next Tuesday night. This is
Jeff Salzman, signing off.

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