My friend Zacary Feder returns to NR with the speech that was spot lighted at the last Integral What Next conference this past New Years.
-AS, founder of NR

From: http://thedeathofspirituality.com (Preamble)
Like the technological singularity I believe that we’re approaching a second singularity; the first time in history when large groups of truly awakened individuals will not only come together and work in symphony, but ultimately raise an enlightened generation themselves from birth. So that just as the rate of technological development increases exponentially, so to will the rate at which a generation moves through stage and state structures.

Because unlike so many of us in the West who were born in the madness of the market place, in the existentially wanting world of form, and had to crawl on hands and knees, blindfolded towards an embodied, liberating experience of the absolute nature of existence – only too often – to lose ourselves within it for extended periods of time before ever finding our way back – the generation that becomes this second singularity; this integral, global, awakened generation will literally be the first raised in stable subtle, causal and perhaps even non-dual integrally informed households. And so they will not have to crawl on hands and knees blindfolded to find the absolute because it will be right there in the eyes of their mothers and fathers consciously from the very first day that they are born – something that I believe will result in a death of sorts for Spirituality.

A death because for a generation like that – cleaning up and preventing more karma will be as natural as taking out the garbage, or drawing a bath when you’re dirty, or brushing your teeth before bed time. And stepping out of the unconscious cycle of cause and effect, will be as much of an exercise in resistance training as going to the gym is, or running in the forest, or finding one’s balance on a bicycle. The very path of purification and evolutionary self-actualization will no longer be something to learn because it will have become not second nature, but first.

And so what I have come to realize is that I would in fact like to assist Spirituality, in this way, to die – by helping to remove everything that prevents it from being understood by the largest number, so that it can be liberated from the island upon which it sits outside of mainstream culture. So that it no longer is secret, or complicated, or even special. More than just it’s democratization I would like to see spiritualities “mundaneification” it’s “banalification”. Because I cannot see how paradise can ever exist on earth if it is special. I think it must become the most ordinary thing in the world.

And yet, there appears to be a third emergent phenomenon that is being birthed precisely at the intersection of both of these impending singularities of technology and consciousness that may be even more important than either one of them individually. A phenomenon that could very well be described as a coming Age of Transparency. A coming Integral age of Transparency.

Because if we look around, one of the defining themes of the first quarter of the 21st century is the fact that secrecy, not privacy, but secrecy is simply no longer tolerated. As if we are all finally too sensitive, too perceptive, too intuitive – combined with being too well connected, not to accept each others duplicity, no matter how feint, more clearly than ever before. So that whether you’re an individual in a relationship, a member of a community, a corporation, a nation state or an intergovernmental body – there is increasingly no where to hide. No matter where you are someone is watching, someone can see you. And because of technology the entire world is just a click away from seeing what they see in you too.

And so unbelievably that old religious notion that people might behave themselves and live pure and virtuous lives if they thought that a God was watching, is returning. Because now, we are all watching. And so in a way, we have become naked again. But naked not under the eyes of a God. But under the light of a god-like collective conscience that increasingly shines through our eyes.

As if post-modern history is curiously reiterating one of our great pre-modern allegories. An allegory of an original fall that took place because a woman followed her evolutionary impulse into further consciousness by eating an apple. A courageous step that over the past 50 years has been taken once again by a collective women who followed that impulse past the knowledge of good and evil to the integration of the principles of male and female.

So that we are now learning one of the key lessons of that original fall, perhaps for the very first time – that in a coming integral age of transparency that will inevitably expose our nakedness whether we like it or not – there remains only one way to emerge from the shadows safely and confidently – and that is to have nothing to hide. It is to be completely, unashamedly integrated. To have no part of us that separate.

And so to be here in an evolutionary, integral community, among some of the greatest spiritual midwives, and undertakers alive today, who are composing some of the greatest leitmotifs of this emerging global symphony, is a profound privilege.

But to burn with you, under the light of this increasingly blinding conscience, until only that which cannot be burned is left, is already extra-ordinary.

So thank you.

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http://thedeathofspirituality.com