The Sometimes Impenetrable Wall of Western Medicine

by Gary Stamper 10/28/2019

There are some things that Western "heroic" medicine does really good. Integrating with proven "holistic" methods may not be one of them.

It's been 12 days since my total left hip replacement surgery. One of my goals going in was to be in the best possible physical health and shape I could be in given my age, knowing the impact that would have on my recovery. Since I have no previous surgeries, I have nothing to gauge my recovery, but my doctor tells me I'm recovering quickly.

One of my other goals was to get off opioid pain killers as quickly as possible, so I did a lot of research on holistic and natural pain relief and spoke to other holistic practitioners that I've known a long time and respect and wound up with several alternative possibilities, including my old staples of Arnica and Rescue Remedy, CBD oil, and something I'd not heard of before, "Ghost (or Indian) Pipe." Last, an old standby that I hadn't considered, THC, or marijuana.

Ghost Pipe

When I talked to my surgeon about these homeopathic and ancient remedies before the surgery, I wasn't surprised by his reaction. He had not heard of any of them except Arnica, and then only as a topical ointment. To his credit, he had his staff do a quick search on them all but then came back recommending that I stop all of them at once and discontinue for at least 4 weeks after the surgery.

Also to his credit, I received two types of pain killers: Oxycodone - Stronger and one of the most addictive opioid pain medications - and Tramadol - milder and not an opioid but acts in the same way, including an addiction risk.

When I woke after surgery, I felt fine and was immediately helped up to take a short "walk" with my new walker and my nurse. The next morning I was still feeling "fine," ate a good breakfast, spoke with several of the attendants who wanted to make sure I understood what I was going to be doing when I got home and familiarized me further about my prescribed medications. Nobody had really prepared me for the amount of pain I was going to have when the residual anesthesia from the surgery eventually wore off.

I immediately took the recommended doses of the Oxycodone, one in the early afternoon, and one before bed that night.

Upon rising (sort of) the next morning, I decided that the zombie state created by the Oxycodone was just not going to work for me, so I switched over to the Tramadol. That worked fine for the next couple of days and nights but I was just on the edge of being too knocked out by it, so I cut the doses back by half and added the Ghost Ship tincture in with it. Now, Ghost Ship tincture doesn't really mask the pain, but, rather, allowed me to set it aside and just notice that it's there as if I were an observer. I had noticed similar results from deep meditation, which seemed perfect to me, so I just added it to my medication practice. A couple of days later, I decided to try the same thing with THC and found exactly the same results.

As I continued to heal (So-o-o slowly, I thought), I eliminated the THC and just relied on the half doses of tramadol, and finally to where I am now, just taking the Tramadol when I need it as the pain comes and goes with the amount of inflammation I seem to be having.

I fully get that this is anecdotal and may not be the way anyone else experiences the way these substances interacted and don't recommend you try this, and were it not for my hip surgery, I surely wouldn't have experienced any of this.

Oh, and by the way, as soon as my hip has healed, I'll be going in for a partial knee replacement and we'll get to start this process all over again.

The Next Wave of Men’s Work: From Mythopoetic to The Transpersonal

As I’ve begun my book tour for Awakening the New Masculine: The Path of the Integral Warrior, one of the benefits I’m seeing for myself is to be once again immersed in integral community. I knew I was missing the “we” space of SeattleIntegral, the salon I helped found and moderated for five years, I just didn’t realize how much.

Over the last few weeks I’ve done a book talk with the combined  Atlanta and Roswell, Georgia Integral Salons, I’ve just returned from doing talks with DC Integral Emergence and Integral New York City Meetups, and I’m getting ready to head out to the west coast with a series of book talks for book stores, salons, meetups, and workshops  in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle.

It’s very different talking with integral groups as opposed to book stores and Mankind Project I-Groups. When I’m talking with a group  that hasn’t been exposed to Integral Theory or Spiral Dynamics, I have to give a different talk, and make vague references to “integral and developmental systems theory” as part of a larger picture of what I do in the Integral Warrior Men’s Process. There’s a learning curve around language that begins the first weekend of the workshop that sets the context around both these systems sometimes, if not presented in a way that minimizes the appearance of hierarchy that can turn men off.

Part of this is because my target audience of men are, in Spiral Dynamics terms, “green” emergent to “yellow,” and green level of consciousness generally rejects hierarchy, not yet understanding the difference between natural and dominator hierarchies.

But when I’m talking with an audience who already gets “integral” and Spiral Dynamics, there’s something that happens with everyone firing on all cylinders, mutual capacities, and a common language that just makes everything connected and we all get to fall in love. With men and the integral Warrior Process, one of the goals is to create that same kind of connection as quickly as possible so that a new awareness and consciousness can emerge within the group, and the way to get there as quickly as possible is to practice with individual and group meditations.

Integral groups ask really good questions and one of the questions I was recently asked at the DC Integral Emergence meetup was, "How is your work different from the men’s movement of the 80s?"

The first and obvious answer is that the mythopoetic men’s movement does not include integral and developmental systems theory. Nor does it include the Sacred Activist as described by Andrew Harvey in his book, The Hope.

The "men's movement" of the 80's was, and continues to this day, to be what I'm calling the first wave" of men’s work, which is, as Wilber says, “necessary, but not sufficient.” It relies heavily on the mythopoetic, using mythology and analytical psychology, and consists mostly of psychological self-help groups which tend to stay away from explicit stances around psychospiritual and sociopolitical issues, or Sacred Activism, which the Integral Warrior dives right in to, as would be necessitated by taking an integral approach.  This requires being able to take and hold multiple, bigger, and sometimes paradoxical perspectives. 

Another way to describe this is that the Integral Warrior requires the Monk to come out of his cave and to be involved in the world.  Simply retreating inward is not sufficient with the global problems we face today. The Integral Warrior workshop and the book allows men to transcend (and include) mythology into the transpersonal, and to then allow that to inform their Sacred Purpose. 

Transpersonal  development includes both rational and transrational faculties, as well as a sense of oneself as an individual organism, while simultaneously expanding to embrace all phenomena, including a larger “we.” 

It is, quite simply, the move from 2nd stage masculine to 3rd stage masculine: the shift from the mythopoetic to Integral, and Integral is the bridge to the next level of consciousness.

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See where Gary is appearing on his national book tour link

A New Integral Spirituality and Integral Religion

An Integral Religion? Heaven forbid (pun intended)! I can hear all the people wounded by religion in past lives and today saying, "no way".....Especially those at scientific rational and relativistic levels of consciousness.

But religion is not going away, and whatever claims we make around "Spiritual, not Religious," anyone else looking in is going to consider it religion. So what would the next step in the evolution of religion look like? It certainly won't be the gods of nature or tribalism. Nor will it be the wrathful power god of the old testament, the mythic god of an absolutist consciousness, a rejection of anything metaphysical  by the rational/scientific level of consciousness, or a sensitive new-age egalitarian deity that says we make everything up as we go, locked in a pre-trans fallacy of magic and myth.

I came across a very long article on the Integral World website called Integral Religion, Uniting Eros and Logos by Dan Araya, a graduate student in Toronto examining instructional technologies and values development within Education, and the Director and co-founder of The Institute of Integral Evolution, located in Toronto, Canada.

Araya's article points to where an Integral Religion must go in order to be considered integral, and in doing so sets up some parameters of that emerging religion. By definition, Integral Religion must marry east and west, Science and Religion, Eros (Ascent, Many to the One)  and Logos (Descent, One to the Many), and Eros (the masculine) and Agape (the feminine), and much, much more.

In the article he quotes Auribindo in the Ideal of Human Unity:

A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future… A religion of humanity means the growing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth. By its growth within us oneness with our fellow-men will become the leading principle of all our life, not merely a principle of cooperation but a deeper brotherhood, a real and an inner sense of unity and equality and a common life.
-Chapter XXXV, p. 307 (July 1918)

Araya concludes by saying:

"Whether we ascend to the Apex of Consciousness through meditative practice or serve Spirit's teleological drive towards emancipation, we are participants in a single spiritual evolution. Always we must remember that in integral religion it is wholeness that we seek: the integral embrace of immanence with transcendence, of Ascent with Descent, of humanity with God, and of enlightenment with the divine kingdom come."

My sense is that Integral Religion isn't something that we can decide to do or not do, validate or invalidate, it's something we must do if we are to lay claim to the term "integral," and it's already emerging. It is time for us to grow up. As Wilber points out, an integral religion must grounded in pluralism (SES), and [an] emerging religion must transcend and include religions of the past.