Integral in Iran

A little background...

I resisted it at first.

I already have very meaningful work teaching and writing and coaching people in living a more conscious integral life, particularly helping them deepen in Integral Life Practice. I teach meditation, shadow work,  exercise, taking meta-perspectives, and understanding Integral theory. I work with truly amazing individuals in the process of doing this. It's not like I needed to find "relevance" in my work, after all....

Jeff Salzman, Huy Lam, Diane Hamilton, Fred Kofman, Sofia Diaz, me, and Ken Wilber (at Ken's loft in early 2006 for a planning meeting on a new Integral Life Practice seminar)

But I found myself feeling called to go to Iran. Why? I don't have special expertise in Middle Eastern languages, culture, politics, or religion. I'm not even a conventional political activist.

Why should I be going to Iran?

Iran is a very interesting place. It's the most highly educated populace in the Middle East; a place of tremendous intellectual and spiritual ferment, with 60%+ of its college students women; more bloggers per capita (some argue) than anywhere else in the world (Farsi is said to be the 3rd most used language on the web after English and Mandarin!); and the the political and spiritual center of the most mystical (and sometimes fanatical form) of Islam, Shia Islam—also home to many practicing Sufis. Persia also produced Rumi (who they call Molavi) and Hafez, two great mystical realizers and also two of my very favorite poets of all time. It has a unique form of government—part theocracy and part democratic republic, peopled by vigorous intellectual and political debate.  And many fear Iran and the US are currently on a collision course toward war.

But why should I go there?

Because I'm "called"? It seems like that, but it sounds a little odd to say so. It has just kept coming up, as if out of left field. I felt a little like the Richard Dreyfus character in the first half of "Close Encounters," piling my mashed potatoes into the shape of Devil's Mountain, gripped by a mysterious call to go on a rendezvous beyond his understanding.

The idea of visiting Iran somehow wouldn't go away. I kept trying to talk myself out of it (for many very good reasons!). But it didn't work. 

So in one more day, I fly to Tehran as a member of a civilian diplomacy delegation organized by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. We have been in touch with the government there. Our delegation's Iran representatives have requested meetings with President Ahmedinejad, former President Khatami, Grand Ayatollah Sanii, several parliamentarians, other Shia clergy, representatives of minority religions, and others.   

I made my commitment around New Year's day. Since then, tension and saber-rattling between the US and Iran (never absent) seems to have suddenly built to quite a crescendo.

Meanwhile, I've been devouring books and blogs and movies, learning whatever I can. First pass bottom line:

I'm a pretty well-informed guy, but from our media I had gotten only a stick-figure and distorted impression of Iranian culture, politics, and religion. Persia is way more diverse, alive, complex, and multidimensional than I dreamed! If you've got 90 minutes, check out a very interesting movie, "Rageh Inside Iran," by a BBC journalist who fell in love with the place, just released on Google Video.

I've also considered my purpose in going. My highest intention is to connect with some really awake Iranians and help support the emergence of Integral perspectives there, such that they can become influential. And to have any hope of doing that, I'm letting go of attachment to the results. To paraphrase Gail Hochachka's sage advice to me:

Once the choice is made, it's best to focus on planting the seeds you really want to plant. You can't know which ones will sprout, or whether they'll sprout in hours, days, weeks, decades, or never. Best to just relax, enjoy, and go plant the best seeds you can!

So I've written a letter to former President Khatami (a heroic figure in Iran today, and quite an Integral thinker and leader, at least on a good day) and a more general letter. I selected a few short documents that I think might be understandable and congenial to people there. And I found Al Eslami, a gracious Farsi translator, and with his help created a little library of Integral documents. If you're interested to see them, here's a list, with links to the files:

• Letter to former President Khatami from Terry Patten: Download khatami_letter.pdf  
• My general letter to people I will meet: Download general_letter_to_iranian_colleagues.pdf
• Four Quadrants at UNDP by Barrett Brown:
  Download quadrants_undp.pdf
• Summary of Robert Kegan's Subject Object Theory and Orders of Consciousness by Berger, Hasegawa, & Hammerman Download KeganEnglish.pdf
• The 3 Faces of Spirit by Terry Patten Download 3FacesofSpirit.pdf
• Four chapters from Not-Two is Peace by my root-Guru, the great, iconoclastic Adi Da Samraj. One of them is available here:Download NotTwoIsPeaceAnthroposphere.pdf Here's a link to a website for this book. And another to a website with a large selection of Adi Da's essays and writings.
• One of my very favorite introductory Integral items: Papa's Universe Story by my dear friend, Frank Marrero: Download papasuniversestory.pdf
• You can also find all of them, in English and Farsi on my Google Page.

If you want to read the rest of this blog, it's easiest to understand when read in order, which means reading from bottom to top, starting in February, and then going to March, then April, etc.

Rageh Inside Iran

Rageh Omaar gives a wonderful glimpse of the complexity of Tehran, a city of extremes of wealth and poverty, where some people survive on less than a dollar a day and others shop till they drop in glitzy shopping malls.

Iran bans women from riding motorcycles but 60 per cent of the student population is female. It is also a youthful place, with two thirds of Iran's 70 million population under the age of 30.

Follow this link for the BBC page about Rageh.

Some of what I've been reading and viewing

My trips to the bookstores, online and 3-D, began to give me a sense of Iran's color, multidimensionality, nuance ,and complexity.

Contradictions everywhere....

On the one hand, sources continually re-emphasize that Iran since the revolution is a police state, with strict censorship of the press, sometimes brutal suppression of dissidents, and absolute rule by a small (and to most Americans, scary) theocratic elite.

But their rule is hardly absolute. Power in Iran is clearly a constant churn of many players, and it cannot ignore the mood of the Iranian people.

Iranians themselves, clearly, are not entirely cowed or dominated by their arch-conservative government. This is a very stylish and sensual culture, more similar to our sense of India than to the images we see of its neighbors to the West (Iraq) and East (Afghanistan).

Key to understanding Iran—the unique character of Shia Islam. (Worth reading: The Shia Revival by Vali Nasr.) Shia Islam has rich and deep mystical currents, including many Sufi strains. This makes room for fanaticism, but also authentic spiritual experience. Historically scorned as heretics (not "real" Muslims) by the predominant Sunnis, they sometimes seem to be trying to prove that they're the "real thing."

Also key, the complexity of Iran's history and the currents of pragmatism and extremism and idealism within its political classes (see the excellent Hidden Iran by Ray Takeyh). There's so much more to Iran than meets the eye!

Other great books include, The Soul of Iran, The Iranians, and The Mantle of the Prophet. Mohammed Khatami's writings are also quite interesting. (On a good day, he's a true integral thinker and leader. He has been a remarkably important influence in Iran, despite his recent decline in influence.) So are the publications from his pet project, the Dialogue Among Civilizations.

I've browsed and/or read almost a dozen books during the past two months, and learned enough to learn this: my original perception of Iran was grossly oversimplified. Even as American understanding of Iran is clarifying, we're barely beginning to get in touch with its many streams, depths, richness and complexity.

Iranian cinema offers another glimpse. I really enjoyed checking out  Children of Heaven,  Leila, and The Color of Paradise. It's very interesting to watch the spicy undercurrents in one movie (about "the battle of the sexes" called Cease Fire, keeping in mind that it was a huge box-office hit in Iran.

This is a diverse and awakening culture, and a predominance of the people within it are not really willing to submit completely to rigid suppression.  It's okay to demonize the USA and Israel, yes. But  even right after chanting "Death to America!" at a public demonstration, almost all Iranians will profess their openness, appreciation, and even  affection for  American people and culture.

The bottom line:

Iran's got a whole lot goin' on—way more than any stereotype can capture. The more I've learned, the more interesting and elusive it has become. "Axis of evil" definitely ain't it.

Papa's Universe Story

At the end of my first post, A Little Background, I mention Papa's Universe Story by Frank Marrero (which you can download from this page!) Check it out—a truly wonderful telling of the story of evolution (to Frank's son, Salem) that is at once fully  comprehensible for kids and inspiringly alive for adults. I've arranged for it to be translated into Farsi. Although it isn't quite done yet, I hope to post it to the web for download after I return to California. Here's a peek:

CLICK HERE to download Papa's Universe Story (PDF).

Here I am with Frank this New Year's:

Saying goodbye

I just had my goodbye hugs and kisses with my son, Michael, and his girlfriend, Mollie. He just got his first college acceptance! (RIT, not his first choice, but a nice scholarship!) They're both so funny and deep and bright.

And then my wife, Deborah, called, and we said our goodbyes by phone. (Our in-person goodbyes were weeks ago!)  She was calling from a village on the coast near Chennai (Madras) where she's been doing trauma healing work with a group of 12 somatic psychotherapists, through a small nonprofit Trauma Vidya. The ironies of scheduling have us apart for weeks at a time, and for a little while, in India and Iran simultaneously.

Here she is, this past Christmas, back home in California:

And now to packing. I leave for the airport at 5:15 tomorrow AM!

Voices in my head

In transit NY to London...

Here are a few of the (mostly naysaying) inner voices that have surfaced as I first contemplated visiting Iran…

• It’s a hopeless green attempt: 
  • Dialog? Do you really think Ahmedinejad or Khameni will actually listen to anyone from the Great Satan? Won’t you and your idealistic peacenik companions risk a meaningless exercise that legitimizes this anti-Semitic theocratic police state that suppresses dissidents and sponsors terrorism?
  • Don’t underestimate the vast gulf between Americans and Iranians, or the huge differences between Western civic freedoms and Iranian censorship and regulation.
  • Don’t naïvely underestimate how strongly many streams within Shia and Sunni Islam’s historical narratives inherently validate and reinforce ethnocentrism and even violence.
• It’s a hopeless integral attempt:
  • What can Integral perspectives accomplish at a time when both the US and Iran are dominated by militant and polarizing leadership? Life conditions have to change first, don’t they?
  • Isn’t Integral theory still just going to function as a head-trip on the street in such a tough neighborhood?
  • There's an urgent crisis, and you're going there to plant Redwood seedlings (big trees, maybe, but they take a long time to grow!)
• Believing all the good reasons that everything’s hopeless before it begins is what really sucks:
  • Hey, all these naysaying voices reflect valid perspectives, but what’s most not okay is to be paralyzed by the quest to understand more and more adequately, responding to urgent crises only by continually taking meta-perspectives.
  • I can  surface more complex perspectives with my fellow delegates. I can ask questions and offer an awareness that include and transcend all the usual points of view. I can offer myself into whatever network unfolds.
  • I can get a few useful texts translated into Farsi and share them where I can. Maybe thereby I can even plant Integral seeds in the fertile ground of Iranian intellectual ferment.
  • Face it, it’s an action inquiry. You can’t know what you learn until you experiment. And then you'll learn the next thing that's there to learn.
    
  • Hey, I just couldn’t take in the daily news in California and keep shaking my head and clucking my tongue. So here I am…

Meeting the folks…

I met my fellow delegates today. We held our first meeting in the Protestant Chapel in Terminal 4 at JFK. Introductions. Logistics. Breaking into a “we-space.” A very interesting and diverse group of people – from a very young religiously pacifist (Amish/Mennonite?) woman from New Paltz NY to the president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, to an energetic young progressive journalist/intellectual (Habermas!) from Chicago, to many lifelong dedicated peace activists. 20s to 70s… A wide range of people who felt a call to pick up their bodies and go to the country we keep hearing we might go to war with. Not my usual companions, and yet I feel a different kind of kinship, affection and respect…

We closed with a meditation, and I shared one of my favorites from Iran's own Molavi (AKA Jelalludin Rumi):

Everything you see has its roots
In the unseen world.
The forms may change
Yet the essence remains the same. 

Every wondrous sight will vanish,
Every sweet word will fade,
But do not be disheartened,
The Source they come from is Eternal,
Growing, branching out,
Giving new life and new joy. 

Why do you weep?
That source is within you
And this whole world
Is springing up from it. 

The source is full,
Its waters are ever-flowing;
Do not grieve,
Drink your fill!
Don't think it will ever run dry,
This is the endless ocean. 

From the moment you came into this world
A ladder was placed in front of you
That you might escape
From earth you became plant,
From plant you became animal,
Afterwards you became a human being,
Endowed with knowledge, intellect and faith. 

Behold the body, born of dust,
How perfect it has become!
Why should you fear its end?
When were you ever made less by dying?
When you pass beyond this human form,
No doubt you will become an angel
And soar through the heavens! 

But don't stop there.
Even heavenly bodies grow old.
Pass again from the heavenly realm
And plunge into the vast ocean of consciousness.
Let the drop of water that is you
Become a hundred mighty seas. 

But do not think that the drop alone
Becomes the ocean,
The ocean, too, becomes the drop! 


My sangha for the next two weeks in Iran – may their inherent oceanic wetness keep glistening ever more brightly!

Restrictions and limitations

This is another post (I've still got a couple more!) describing a particular aspect of my pre-trip process.

This one's about the many disturbing restrictions and limitations that pertain to this trip -- the reasons I almost decided not to go...

My first hint of trouble came in my first phone conversation with the gracious, caring and lovely Leila Zand, who is leading our delegation. It was the uncertainty in her voice, the evident doubt, even as she reassured me about getting our visas from the Iranian government.

American citizens have a tough time getting approval to enter Iran. Essentially, you have to be traveling as a part of an organized and approved tour group, and there aren't all that many. Even then, the bureaucracy can be capricious.

My second clue was more like a 2x4 upside my head. Leila calmly explained (later) that all delegates were "agreeing" not to mention a whole string of things, including Bahais, Israel, women's and gay rights, human rights issues -- basically any of the key issues that Iranian leaders really ought to experience the discomfort of being asked about.

I had an impulse to cancel my trip, right on the spot.

But it didn't take me long to catch the deeper drift. Visiting Iran now is important precisely because dialog is complex, difficult and necessarily in some ways indirect. my opportunity is to show up and presence a complex and deep awareness that can and will show up in ways that don't cross the byzantine "red lines" that have been drawn by the regime. I started to get intrigued by the layers of the challenge...

Third, I discovered another tour (originally scheduled to leave just ten days before ours - more on Jerry Dekker, the group's leader, in a later post) which was canceled due to visa denials.

Meanwhile, Leila and others at the Fellowship of Reconciliation were emphasizing delegates'  responsibility to return home and influence US  policy towards Iran (away from war, essentially.) I may well do that, but certainly not in a simplistically kneejerk leftist pacifist way. I care and want to help prevent war and suffering. In fact such concerns are a big part of my reasons for going. But I had to enter into this whole undertaking without being blinkered by a preconceived agenda. I have to learn and act on the basis of what I actually discover.

But the reality is that our translator will be working for Ershad, the Iranian secret police, and reporting back to the government about us each day. There will be a lot of control exerted over what we do, perhaps even restricting who we can see. We'll mostly have to stay together as a group. Leila is very concerned that we don't get into conflicts with Iranians while we're there. 

Major restrictions, on many levels!!

And still I felt (and feel) called.

So I began to think of all these bizarre limitations as additional wrinkles in what is really a worthy, intriguing challenge. Somehow my call to do this isn't, ultimately, thrown into doubt by any of this.

Aboard Iran Air #710

As we lined up at Heathrow, my immersion in Iran began. Except for the other members of my delegation, pretty much everybody on the airplane seemed to be Iranian. These handsome people were all dressed in neutral colors, carrying a varying assortment of luggage, from plastic bags to leather attachés, and the women’s faces were all framed in scarves.

And there was something else…
The vibes… such a complex chord, I’m not sure if I even noticed all the tones in it…
•    a touch of earthy human warmth reminiscent of India or Pakistan…
•    a touch of irrepressible heart (exemplified by several irrepressible young children, obviously adored by their families)…
•    a dignified sobriety (partly Islamic moderation and self-restraint?)…
•    a heaviness, almost a resignation (foreshadowing the repressive strictures of the Islamic Republic?)…

And then we boarded the plane! We could see it outside, a big 767, 10 seats across. Yes, this was different. Signs were in Farsi (often with English subtitles) and the flight attendants spoke words my nascent Farsi couldn’t quite decode.

I found my way to my seat. A whole different crowd from my Virgin Atlantic flight from NY. We were still on the tarmac at Heathrow, but everything had suddenly shifted. Now were in a transition zone that felt, not exactly third world, but certainly not like the UK or Europe… this was Iranian territory.

My seatmate has been so gracious, caring, and genuinely considerate. Exhausted, I slept. The meals came (airplane food, but Iranian style.) I slept again. When I woke and went to the bathrooms I got a bit of a shock (yes, plural, I rejected the first one). Green bars of soap marinated in a few of the puddles on the stainless steel counter, cabinet doors hung half open, paper towels littered the floor. Oh. I reached for a paper towel and took a deep breath.

Hello goodbye from Tehran

I'm so delighted to have gotten online! Many technical and circumstantial glitches here, so I'm not sure if/when I'll be able to follow up this post.

Here's a quick update.... Big brother is watching. We're subject to much closer scrutiny and much more severe restriction than I expected. The Ershad (or "third" eye" in local parlance) has even been screening at least some of our email in and out of Iran. And making sure we know  who's boss.... I'll post more explicitly when I get back.