“A gripping, fascinating and illuminating story that takes the reader on a journey from the head to the heart.” – Anne Baring, Oxford scholar and international best-selling author of “The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul”

The following interview between “Dancing with Angels” author Nishad Cote and book reviewer, Carl Hays, took place on September 19^th, 2021.

Carl Hays:       First question: What was the inspiration for “Dancing with Angels”? What prompted you to write it?

Nishad Cote: Apart from an enormous lust for fame and money there are two main reasons: a personal reason, and a more global reason. The personal reason is my own story. When I was a teenager, I considered myself to be a Jehovah’s Witness because my best friend in school was a Jehovah’s Witness. So I had these very set, almost cultic beliefs pretty much from the age of seven until I was about 18. When I eventually told my parents about it at the age of 17, it caused enormous family conflicts and difficulties. When I went to college at the University of Warwick, under the influence of all the people I met, and the vast amount of reading I had access to–which I didn’t have at home–I very quickly questioned my Jehovah’s Witness beliefs, and within months I moved to a completely non-religious atheistic position. Then I slowly found that there was another way to be spiritual without having to believe in all these things that couldn’t be rationally justified. I discovered Eastern mysticism, including Hinduism and Buddhism. I also discovered Krishnamurti, and gradually into my twenties that led to the slow discovery of integral thinking with Ken Wilber, and serious Buddhist spiritual practices, which led much later to various awakening experiences. So I wanted to write a fictional account of a similar kind of journey, very different in some ways, but similar in terms of the structural development.

Okay. So that’s the first reason. The second reason is global, thinking about the world. My view is that if someone said to me, what do you think are the biggest problems that the world is facing, I would narrow it down to three major problems. The first would be religious fundamentalism and eventually terrorism; number two, huge wealth inequality between peoples and nations, which leads to exploitation as well, capitalist exploitation; and three, the destruction of the environment and climate change. So I wanted to address the first of those, which is the one that I know the most about, and talk about how religious fundamentalism could be countered somehow with the use of reason and with the development of a more mature spirituality. And I wanted to show that in a story form rather than just write about it academically. So those are the two reasons: to show my personal story, and to address religious fundamentalism, which I think is a major global problem.

Carl Hays:       Excellent. Can I just ask one thing that’s related to my previous question? You said you were a Jehovah’s Witness from seven years old to about 18. Were you really able to keep this from your parents?

Nishad Cote: Yeah, I kept it from my parents for 10 years.

Carl Hays:       I find that kind of astonishing

Nishad Cote: Yeah, I used to hide it because I would have been in incredible trouble if I didn’t. I actually did tell them once when I was seven that I was interested in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but their response was basically that this kind of nonsense is not allowed in our house. And so I kept it hidden for 10 years. I’d go to my friend’s house to study the Bible. I’d smuggle Jehovah’s Witness literature into the house and hide it in my bedroom and read it when my parents weren’t around or get up in the middle of the night to read it. I’d pray. And when I used to go and stay overnight, or on the weekends with my friend, I’d go with him and his family to Jehovah’s Witness meetings. So, yeah, it was an astonishing exercise in deception.

Carl Hays:       Good for you.

Nishad Cote: Yeah. I mean, I had to, otherwise as a child the trouble I would have been in would have been beyond comprehension.

Carl Hays:       Well, then that brings up another question. Why was it not allowed in your house? What did your parents believe?

Nishad Cote: Well, they opposed it for two different reasons. My father opposed it on rational grounds, saying that all religions are nonsense. So he wanted me to be like him, a rational humanist. It was only reason and science that could tell us the truth. Those were his grounds. My mother’s grounds were that we were Hindus, and we don’t want you to follow another religion. So you’re being disloyal to your family by converting to another religion. So these were two very different reasons

Carl Hays: Did your mom and dad have opposing beliefs? Meaning your dad wasn’t a Hindu, but your mom was?

Nishad Cote: Yes. Well, my dad was born into a Hindu family, so I suppose nominally, he was a Hindu. But he didn’t really believe in it or practice it in any way. Whereas my mother did believe in it and pray to the Hindu gods and so on, and they learned to live with each other’s differences. And when I revealed my own beliefs to them at 17, for a year there were a lot of conflicts between me and my parents until I left.

Carl Hays:       Well, I was going to bring up a second question, which was how much of your religious and spiritual background is interwoven into the “Dancing with Angels”, but I think you’ve already answered that. So, let’s go to the next question, which is what is your target audience for “Dancing with Angels”? Are you hoping some Christian evangelicals will read it? How about Christians who are feeling ambivalent about their beliefs? Or do you expect your readers will mostly be people who have already rejected fundamentalism and will enjoy the sound beating you give evangelicals in the book?

Nishad Cote: Yeah. Great question. I’ve identified three groups of people I think could be potential target audiences. Number one, religious people who are questioning their beliefs or who are sort of slightly sitting on the fence, or even religious people who are ready to move onto something else. The second group would be more rational thinkers like scientists and atheists with the hope that, instead of just having a militant dislike for religion, they might develop some kind of empathy for people who are religious and understand the psychological purpose religion can give to people, such as comfort and security and so forth. Also, it might give rationalists some insight into how religious beliefs can be gradually undone, and how they do often gradually come apart. And the third group, in my opinion, and probably the most important one, is people who are not religious, but who are feeling some kind of spiritual vacuum. For them the book points the way to how we can be spiritual, but not religious. So those would be my three groups of people.

Carl Hays:       Excellent. Let me ask you a question that is not on the list that I originally sent you: Do you identify with John Peters? I know you sort of answered this. But are there many ways in which you and John Peters are alike? Is he, in essence, an alter ego for you?

Nishad Cote: I suppose in a way I do identify with him. I mean what happened with my transformation from a Jehovah’s Witness to a spiritual practitioner was a long time ago. So I suppose I do identify with John historically, but the transformation that John went through is very distant now in my feeling and memory. So in that sense, I don’t identify with him as strongly as I might have 25 years ago, but I certainly would identify with a member of Eliahu’s community, because that’s the kind of approach to spirituality that I have now.

Carl Hays:       Next question. I’m guessing you’re already familiar with the mission of Integral Leadership Review to encourage integral approaches to leadership. Does the publication of DWA offer any support for this mission by presenting a vision of spirituality that is more open and integral?

Nishad Cote: Great question. I’ll answer that in two parts, the first part addressing whether my vision is open and the second part whether it is integral. So I do think it offers a vision of spirituality that is open in three ways. First, it embraces all races. I’ve deliberately done a juxtaposition from John’s initial all-white church to going to this new community and being taught by Eliahu and Angela who are black and the community is primarily black and Latino. In a way, I’m trying to show our spirituality has nothing to do with race in that sense. Spiritual development and awakening are open to everybody. So it’s open in that sense. The second way I’ve tried to be open is to show that there are many different paths and many different perspectives on awakening to the divine. Where John really gets this, I think, is during his time in prison, because it’s in prison where he meets all these very different characters across every segment of society. And he starts to realize that all of us are on our own journeys, and we can’t really pass judgment on other people’s journeys. All parts and all perspectives contribute something to the big picture, and no particular path or perspective is being privileged ultimately in this book. That’s the aim.

So even Mark, who’s the sort of villain of the story, and the narrow-minded church that he comes from–even they have a path and a perspective that we don’t condemn. They’re on their own journey. They might be a few steps behind, but they’re still on this journey, the same journey that we’re all on. So we embrace every path, including these more narrow-minded ones. And the third way that I’m trying to be open here is by being open to lots of different spiritual practices. So in Eliahu’s community there are five different practices that John participates in: meditation; the use of plants–sacred plants, dancing, sacred sex, and service to people who need help.

Secondly, does the novel provide an integral vision? So the integral model of Ken Wilber has five main components, which you’re probably familiar with as quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types. First, let me address lines. So in the integral model where you have different levels and lines, what it means is that some people can be much more highly developed in some aspects of their personality, but much lower developed in other aspects of their personality. Someone might be at a very high level cognitively but at a much lower level, emotionally, or vice versa. So it’s not as simple as just saying one person is more highly developed than somebody else since all of us have different levels of development in many different areas of our personality. So what I’ve tried to do is to contrast different characters in this way. John, for example, is very cognitively developed, but maybe he’s less emotionally developed. Angela is far more emotionally and interpersonally developed, but maybe she hasn’t put that much emphasis on cognitive development. Eliahu, on the other hand, is quite developed all round: he’s well-developed cognitively as well as emotionally. Pastor Mark has very low levels of development across the board. For Ruth there’s a high level of emotional and interpersonal intelligence, but her cognitive beliefs are still at a low level while she’s alive. So the different characters show how different people can be more skilled or less skilled in different aspects of their development.

Now, moving on to the next aspect of the integral model which are states. States are basically mystical experiences, of which there are at least four or five main types. I’ve tried to show at least three or four types of state experiences. In “Dancing with Angels” there’s nature mysticism, which John experiences by taking plants. He experiences a sense of oneness and union with everything going on around him, and he also experiences what we could call deity mysticism because he experiences the presence of God. When he’s making love to Angela, he experiences energy going down the front of his body and coming back up the back of his spine, which is a kind of psychic Kundalini experience, or another state experience. When he experiences the final dance, right at the end of the book, he is starting to move into a non-dual experience where absolutely everything begins to become both unity and multiplicity in perfect harmony.

The fifth aspect of the integral model is types. What Wilber means here is, for example, the Enneagram types, the 12 signs of the horoscope, or very simply just male and female. Different types evolve and manifest differently at different levels of development. So in DWA I’ve tried to show John as a quite typical male type who lives largely in his head and doesn’t really come into his heart and body too much. And you’ve got Angela as the female type who’s very much living in her body and in her heart and doesn’t worry too much about the intellectual side of things. And so the relationship between John and Angela is a good juxtaposition between these two types–of male and female in archetypical forms. So now I’ve covered three of the five aspects of the integral model: the lines, the states, and the types.

Carl Hays:       Your answers have been fantastic so far. So related to what we’ve talked about so far, let me read out the next question. Do you think any of the plot developments or characters in “Dancing with Angels” correspond to the four quadrants?

Nishad Cote: Okay, great question. I think this is the best question so far actually. So let me go through the quadrants one by one, and then talk about how developments in that quadrant are shown in the novel. So I’ll start with the upper left quadrant, which is the first person or the “I” quadrant representing self-consciousness. So if we look at Pastor Mark, he represents quite a low level of development of consciousness. His level of consciousness is at the lower end of what we might call concrete-operational thinking, combined with even some preoperational thinking, which gives him an inability to see things from another person’s point of view, and even a high degree of desire for egocentric power over others. At the start of the novel, John’s thinking is very concrete-operational, which essentially results in him believing everything that Pastor Mark is telling him, but without any real capacity to subject any of Pastor Mark’s teaching to any kind of critical thinking. He simply doesn’t have the capacity (or desire) to do that. He accepts the rules of the church and the roles of different people in the church, including his own and that of his wife. But after confronting the challenge and even transmission of Eliahu and Angela, a bit later in the story, he starts to question some of his beliefs, and starts to emerge from some of the superstition and myth that he has been taught.

He starts to engage in formal operational thinking, in logical thinking. At one point, Angela sends him to the library to get a lot of books that question things like Noah’s flood or the historicity of the Gospels. So that’s where he starts to develop and exercise his rational and formal mind. By the time he leaves and goes back to Pastor Mark, he has even started to appreciate that there are multiple perspectives that the mind can take, each quite valid in its own context. He has started to move into what we might call low vision-logic.

John finally starts to understand that there are many different paths to God. There are many different ways of looking at things and that’s the kind of vision that he wants to take back to Mark. Of course, he’s grossly mistaken that this will actually work, but he believes that the new pluralistic thinking in which he is now engaged is the key to finding the truth about things. And he wants to take that pluralistic thinking back to Mark. Obviously, that doesn’t work, and Mark has him thrown into prison and it’s when he’s in prison that he develops even further from simple pluralistic thinking to what we might call integral thinking. When he’s in prison he meets these very different people at very different levels of development and realizes that everybody has their own perspective and that these perspectives can interact in a dialectical way. Every perspective is partially correct. Every perspective is true at its own level and even his simple pluralistic thinking isn’t going to be right or appropriate for those who aren’t ready for it yet.

And that’s the essential difference between pluralistic cognition and integral cognition. Pluralistic cognition still sees its approach as something that can be applied or even imposed on everybody. Integral cognition, on the other hand, realizes that even pluralistic cognition is just another stage of development, and that everybody has to be allowed the freedom to be at whichever stage they are at, no matter how “high” or “low”. I think that John really starts to get this in prison because of the kind of people he meets. And when he finishes, when we’ve reached the end of the book, he’s really engaging in very strong holistic and unified thinking. He has integrated all of the perspectives that he has encountered, and experiences this integration, somewhat metaphorically, in the final dance on the final page in the final chapter. Whereas Eliahu and Angela, all the way through the book, already represent the sort of integral and holistic cognition that John eventually comes to embody. But John has to go through the whole journey as the book progresses.

Okay, now the lower left quadrant, which is the quadrant representing our shared values and culture. In the book, there’s a sharp contrast between two very different sets of values or cultures. You’ve got your traditional amber culture, which is represented by the community in Mark’s church where we all believe in the same myth, in the same transcendent God, and we all share the same socially conservative values. And there’s a very strong order in the church. You follow certain rules in a pecking order with somebody in charge whose authority you don’t question. And you also don’t question the holy book. So that’s the traditional mythic order of the church.

And then John slowly evolves and finds his place in a very different culture based on a very different set of values, which is Eliahu’s community, which I would call a pluralistic or even integral/holistic community, where things happen very differently. Everyone is allowed to find their own way. We accept people as they are. People are allowed to find their own beliefs, their own practices, but we still embrace everybody. We encourage everybody to evolve at their own pace. And there’s no authority in the usual sense and there are no set rules and no set beliefs. It’s a much more open, liberal, and even integral community. So that’s the lower left. There’s such a contrast between the church and Eliahu’s community, and how John makes the transition from one to the other, and how Mark responds when John comes back. Mark’s reaction to the community is one of violence. Whereas when Eliahu and Angela turn up at the church near the end of the book, their attitude towards the church is not one of violence; it’s one of compassion. They understand where Mark is coming from, but at the same time, they want to help John get out of there because he doesn’t belong there. So you see two very different ways in which communities react to one another. Mark’s church responds to the community with violence. Eliahu’s community responds to the church with a compassion transcending violence, but not excluding anyone.

So that’s the lower left. The upper right was the slightly more difficult one to map out because the upper right is the third person, which is the objective reality of the brain and the organism. So here what I think the book is doing is showing very body-based practices and experiences. You’ve got dancing, the taking of the sacred plants, and sacred sex. These are not just beliefs in the head. When John was in Mark’s church, it was more about John just holding onto these beliefs in his head and following rules. It wasn’t body-based whereas, in Eliahu’s community it’s far less about being in your head and more about being in your body and allowing the body to participate. When John takes the sacred plant for the first time, he has these experiences of subtle energies, that Kundalini experience down the front and up the back, what some esoteric practices call the circle of energy coming down the frontal line and then back up the spine. That’s a very upper right kind of phenomenon because although it’s not physical, these are subtle energies which John is experiencing. So I think that belongs in the upper right quadrant where subtle energies would go.

Okay. So that’s the upper right. Now finally the lower right. The lower right is our social systems and environment. So here we’re looking at how the social system is organized. Again, there’s a contrast between the church and the community. The church is run somewhat like a feudal empire. It’s run along the lines of the Roman Empire or the Mongolian Empire. You’ve got a very strong leader and you’re either in or you’re out. And if you’re out, there’s no mercy; you deserve to be shunned. Ideally you deserve to be destroyed, which God will do in due course. That’s very much the same mindset as somebody like Genghis Khan would have had. This is the attitude of the feudal empire. So there’s quite a low level of development in the lower right quadrant.

Again, we have the contrast with Eliahu whose community is very strong, and is a community based on holistic values, on a holistic view of the world, on (at least implicitly) an integral view of the world. This shows up in the way the whole community is organized and the practices the community includes in its circle. This is quite similar to what we talked about for the lower left. That was more about the culture and the worldview. We could contrast the worldview of the church with the worldview of the community in the lower left. Now we are contrasting the actual organization of the church with the organization of Eliahu’s community in the lower right. So that’s it for the four quadrants.

Carl Hays:       Awesome answer. You’re such a scholar. Okay next question: How hopeful are you that religious fundamentalism and the Christian evangelical movement will fade or evolve beyond their narrow belief systems as more open and integral spiritual philosophies become more widespread?

Nishad Cote: I have to say I’m reasonably hopeful. I think evolution does happen. And throughout history, you can see this gradual slow rise of the center of gravity around the world with respect to development. There does seem to be some kind of drive towards complexity within nature, a kind of Eros or evolutionary impulse. However evolution has to take place across all four quadrants. It can’t just take place in the upper left quadrant involving people’s beliefs. The other three quadrants have to support it. All of the quadrants have to evolve together. So for example, if I’m living among the Taliban in Afghanistan, and I develop integral beliefs, but the society around me is mostly about four or five levels lower than that, at the red egocentric power level, then society around me is not going to be able to support or give me the assistance I need to thrive in my beliefs. It’s also going to be very difficult to hold those beliefs in that kind of society. The way Taliban society is organized will exert a very strong, downward pressure on me to bring my beliefs down closer to their level. Whereas the opposite is also true if I’m living in Holland or in Norway in a very pluralistic society. If I’m holding onto the Taliban belief that women aren’t allowed to go to school, I’m going to have an upward pressure from the society around me to develop my beliefs or go somewhere else. So taking that into consideration, I’m hopeful that a development beyond fundamentalist beliefs will happen.

Actually, I’ve made a list of four other factors that I think development beyond fundamentalist beliefs would depend on that roughly correlate to the way development would be supported across all four quadrants. Number one, it would depend on the quality of education that people get. Children in school and university would have to learn or continue to learn rational, critical, independent thinking. And ideally, we would need to encourage more multicultural classes in schools so that children and young adults are constantly exposed to a variety of belief systems. Secondly, we would need reason and pluralism to be the dominant forces in culture rather than religion and conservatism. Also, we would want the people or the party in power to be holding rational, realistic beliefs. In this world a Barack Obama in power would be far more desirable than a Donald Trump if we wanted this kind of evolution to take place. Thirdly we would want a culture that’s reasonably prosperous and that prosperity to be appropriately spread around so that everybody has the kind of opportunities for education, for travel, and for the other kinds of things you need to develop and evolve, because there is a weak correlation between financial wellbeing and development. It’s a lot more difficult to develop if you’re struggling to make ends meet. Also, it’s a lot more difficult to hold on to low level beliefs if all of your needs have been lavishly met. So to facilitate evolution, we’d want to be living in a relatively prosperous society and the wealth would have to be spread around with some degree of equity.

The fourth factor would be easier information. For example, Internet access for everybody, because if people are going to question their beliefs, they need easy access to information and facts outside of their belief system. So people living in a tiny little town in the 1800s didn’t have very much choice about what to believe because they didn’t have access to anything else. In today’s world with the Internet, ease of information is far more prevalent, and I think that adds a lubrication to evolution, which is something that has to continue. So those are the four factors: quality of education, getting the right people in power, prosperity and the spread of wealth, and ease of information. If these four-quadrant factors can be facilitated, then I think we can be very hopeful that more and more people will develop out of fundamentalist beliefs and into more rational and pluralistic beliefs

Carl Hays:       Okay, I have one last question that I started formulating before we talked. At one point near the end of the book John has this idyllic vision of a future, a sort of utopia where spiritual evolution has reached its pinnacle.

Nishad Cote: Yes, it’s in chapter 30. It alternates between real time, what John’s actually doing in the present, and John’s vision of the future.

Carl Hays:       Yes, here it is. I’ll just read a snippet: “At long last, he came to the edge of his vision. As far as the psyche would allow him to stretch without pain. It was all beautiful light and sound and sensation, the flutes and drums and the sacred music crisscrossing the globe. The world all but hummed beneath the sheer rate of so many people in touch with their spirituality. We are divine, and the Divine is us. They all knew their place in the cosmos, knew that they belonged to the world and the world belonged to them.” That’s beautifully written by the way. But don’t you think that’s a tad idealistic?

Nishad Cote: Yes, oh, very much so. And that’s why it’s a version that’s not actually happening. As John is sort of settling in that final chapter, what we’re seeing in integral terms is that John is now fairly well established at the integral level of development and is also having non-dual spiritual experiences alongside that. And from that position, he’s able to see this as a possibility, but it’s not a certainty. What he is seeing is pure potential, and he sees that it’s his mission to be part of this community, to play a tiny role in making this vision actualize. Whereas if we go down several levels and look at someone like Mark and his church, he wouldn’t be able to see that potential. His only vision would be to see that lots of people get converted to Jesus and then God comes and kills everyone else. I think different people at different levels have different visions of what is possible. Each level has its own utopia that people at that level are working towards. So I think that what John is having is simply a vision of what’s possible. It’s not a literal seeing into the future because obviously it’s far from certain that anything like this will happen.

Carl Hays:       Excellent. So that’s your final answer?

Nishad Cote: Yes, that’s my final answer. I rest my case for the defense.

Carl Hays:       Excellent. Thanks Nish. This has been a great interview. The answers were beautifully articulated and intelligent and I think the ILR readership is going to be very pleased. Thanks again.

Nishad Cote: You’re welcome.