User:Davidc

File:Example.jpg Hello, I'm David Coward and I guess you are wondering what I am doing in this space. (In case you are questioning my spiritual credentials, here's a picture of me out for a walk with the dalai llama). I am here for two reasons, first as a contributor (sorry, no money, just an article in the Symposia) and secondly as a friend (almost 30 years now) of Rob, the Supreme Radiant Lord of this domain. Rob and I rose from similar humble beginnings to rise to where we are today--humble middle aged old men. Personally I started out with nothing and still have most of it left (stolen joke). I am originally from Birmingham, AL and currently live in the outback of rural Mississippi where I work as textbook buyer for Mississippi State University. I am married, no kids, and have a small zoo of llamas, cats, and a possum (that's Southern for "opussum").

My religious background is Protestant Christian. I have evolved over time from evangelical to liberal to mystical, and eventually began exploring Christian/Buddhist syncretisms such as represented by William Johnston or Thomas Merton. I have also been drawn to Celtic Christianity which I suspect may be more mythological than historical, but nevertheless provides a compelling if not fully integral spiritual model with its emanational concept of God and the presence of the sacred within the earthy.

My interest is in the integral spirituality and philosophy of Ken Wilber. I first began to lean toward integral thinking in high school and my academic track finally culminated with an MA in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Western Kentucky University, a program that was actually consciously integral (though that term was unknown to me at the time). Throughout college and beyond I had accumulated quite a personal library, and then one day I discovered Ken Wilber. What he had to say clicked with me in such a plausible manner that I found myself in the strange situation of finding that my entire library had been rendered obsolete by a samll handful of Wilber books. After that I literally sold off and donated almost all of my books. I'm sure there are some people out there who would react to Wilber by saying "What is this overrated garbage, anyway?" In my perception, however, Wilber had accomplished with elegance what I had struggled toward for years without ever coming close.