The Dark Side of the Sacred

The Dark Side of the Sacred

by Miriam Greenspan

Emotions live in the body. It is not enough simply to talk about them, to be a talking head. We need to focus our attention on emotions where they live. This willingness to be present allows the emotion to begin to shift of its own accord. An alchemy starts to happen — a process of transmutation from something hard and leaden to something precious and powerful, like gold.

This is a chaotic, nonlinear process, but I think it requires three basic skills: attending to, befriending, and surrendering to emotions in the body. Paying attention to or attending to our emotions is not the same as endless navel gazing and second-guessing ourselves. It is mindfulness of the body, an ability to listen to the body’s emotional language without judgment or suppression.

Befriending follows from focusing our attention and takes it a step further: it involves building our tolerance for distressing emotions. When I was giving birth to my first child, my midwife said something that has stood me in good stead ever since: “When you feel the contraction coming and you want to back away from it, move toward it instead.” The feeling in the body that we want to run away from — that’s precisely what we need to stay with. A simple way to do this is to locate the emotion in the body and breathe through it, without trying to change or end it.

The third skill, surrendering, is the spiritual part of this process. Surrendering to suffering is usually the last thing we want to do, but surrender is what brings the unexpected gifts of wisdom, compassion, and courage. Surrendering is about saying yes when we want to say no — the yes of acceptance. This is what really allows the alchemy to happen. We don’t “let go” of emotions; we let go of ego, and the emotions then let go themselves. This is “emotional flow.” When we let the dark emotions flow, something unexpected and unpredictable often occurs. Consciously experienced, the energy of these emotions flows toward healing and harmony. I’ve found that unimpeded grief transforms itself into heightened gratitude; that consciously experiencing fear expands our ability to feel joy; and that being mindful of despair — really entering into the dark night of the soul with the light of awareness — renews and deepens our faith.

MIRIAM GREENSPAN is the author of Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair. Miriam teaches on the alchemy of the dark emotions: a transformational process by which grief becomes gratitude, fear turns to joy, and despair opens a doorway to a more resilient life. Learn more about her work: Here – Also read a conversation between Miriam and a Jungian analyst here: Through A Glass Darkly .

The Power of Balance

The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Society and Scientific Inquiry

By William R. Tolbert

Since the dawn of the modern age, each intellectual and cultural arena has established its own criterion of success and has sought to maximize attainment of that ideal without reference to the other arenas of life. In politics, the ideal is power; in economics, utility; in art, beauty; in science, empirical truth. These ideals ignore one another, speak past one another, and sometimes clash. "Might makes right," "Profit maximization," "Art for art's sake," and "Knowledge for its own sake" or "pure science" are all slogans that are at once isolationist and imperialistic.

With such ideals, the different arenas of life may, at best, come into an accidental balance of power, or equilibrium, for a given person or culture at a given time or place. Such a balance of power is static, precarious, and necessarily temporary (if not altogether fictitious). As with the scales of justice, the slightest variation on any side can oscillate into radical imbalance.

By contrast, the ancients made the dynamic balance of the whole the ideal-whether the whole be the pantheon of gods, the whole person, or the city. Instead of a balance of power, these ancients sought the power of balance. Plato's Republic, for example, is about the search for the power of balance, both in the conduct of politics and in the education of leaders. Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian offers an intimate portrait of a Roman emperor seeking (and only occasionally discovering) the power of balance.

The power to create a whole without obliterating differences (whether that whole be a self, a family, a city, or a global community) and to balance wholes of different kinds is inherently integrative, mutual, inquiring, and ethical. The power by which parts seek to dominate other parts is inherently disintegrative, hierarchical, uninquiring, and corrupting.

Since Machiavelli and Hobbes and throughout the modem period, power has been treated, almost exclusively, as a necessary evil that restricts the freedom of those over whom it is exercised and that requires countervailing powers-a balance of powers-if it is not to become increasingly corrupt-perhaps absolutely evil-and squash all freedom.

By contrast, the theory of power presented in this book views such unilateral force as the lowest, least effective, and least legitimate form of power. Unilateral force is necessary in relation to those with whom we recognize no other type of power; and unilateral force can, if exercised with the artistry of the power of balance, set the stage for more effectual and more mutual power relations…

Read the Entire Book Online Here:

The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Society and Scientific Inquiry (1991)

Integral with the Planet

Brian Swimme on the Task of the Future:

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The Integrity of True Beauty

The Integrity of True Beauty

by John O'Donohue

Thought is an amazing thing: it can be a mirror, a lens, a bridge, a wall, a window, a ladder or a house. There is nothing in the world that has the cutting edge of a new thought. It is fascinating to watch the clearance it can make and the new life it can bring. Often, without knowing it, we are waiting for a new idea to come and cut us free from our entanglement. When the idea is true and the space is ready for it, the idea overtakes everything. With grace-like swiftness, it descends and claims recognition; it cannot be returned or reversed. It becomes more forceful than any single action could be. Indeed, it becomes the mother of a whole sequence of new feeling, thinking and action. Though we live mostly in the visible world and our personalities, roles and work distinguish and identify us externally, we dwell more forcefully elsewhere. A person can dwell inside a thought.

Yet each individual who thinks is limited and confined within his own mind. The poignancy of thought is that it can never bridge the distance between the self and the world. The medieval mind filled that interim distance with the interesting presence of the five Transcendentals -- Being, The One, the Good, the True and the Beautiful.

Being is the deepest reality, the substance of our world and all the things in it. The One claims that all things are somehow bound together in an all-embracing unity: despite all the differences in us, around us and between us, everything ultimately holds together as one; chaos does not have the final word. The True claims that reality is true and our experience is real and our actions endeavor to come into alignment with the truth. The Good suggests that in practicing goodness we participate in the soul of the world. The fifth is the Beautiful. Every act of thinking, mostly without our realizing it, is secretly grounded in these presences.

Integrity is the adequacy of a thing to itself. There is here a sense of achieved proportion between a thing and what it is called to be. Creation is always in the heave of growth; the integrity of beauty is that inner straining towards goodness and completion. There is a wonderful urgency within things to realize the dream of their individual fulfillment. Nothing is neutral, everything is on its way. Aquinas insisted that goodness, truth and integrity belonged essentially to beauty. In light of this we can see that much of the current cultural breakdown can be understood as failure of vision with regard to beauty.

Listen to the Audio version / Learn More About John’s work: Here

Krishnamurti - The Real Revolution

Jiddu Krishnamurti was a world renowned teacher, writer and public speaker on major philosophical and spiritual subjects. His subject matter included: the purpose of meditation, human relationships, the nature of the mind, and how to enact positive change in global society.

Krishnamurti constantly emphasized what he believed was the right place of thought in daily life. But he also pointed out the dangers of thought when it becomes knowledge that acts as a calcified projection of the past. According to Krishnamurti, such action distorts our perception and full understanding of the world we live in, and more specifically, the relationships that define it.

This 30 min documentary is from an original series of eight made for television in 1966. They were the earliest sound-films of Krishnamurti speaking to audiences.

Part One/

Part Two /

Krishnamurti taught that most problems in the world such as poverty, war, the nuclear threat, and other unfortunate circumstances, have their roots in nature of human though, knowledge and perception. In his view, as we live and behave according to our thinking so wars and governments are also a result of our thinking. We each have our own particular beliefs, conclusions, and experiences, to which we cling, thereby isolating ourselves from others. Self centered activity is expressed outwardly as nationalism and religious intolerance, creating a world divided, in which we are willing to kill for the sake of belief. Understanding our relationship with the world crisis is necessary to understand ourselves.

Along with the influence of our thinking on the world and the way society functions, there is also a reciprocal influence from society on our thinking. This mainly manifests itself as the process of our adapting to society. Independent thinking becomes almost impossible when one feels forced to adapt to society, but as such thinking is necessary for intelligence to operate, the resulting impasse creates a major paradox.

Learn More: Here and Here

Mapping the Integral Vision?

Integral Vision Mind Maps

By Eric Blue

Last year I picked up a copy of The Integral Vision by Ken Wilber. I recently decided to re-read the book, and created a comprehensive book summary highlighting the key pieces of information in the book. The book summary is presented in the form of mind maps for each chapter.

I first stumbled upon Integral Philosophy a couple years ago, and quite honestly became hooked. Since that time, I’ve read a wide variety of books and have engaged in the exciting and often daunting task of trying to build a comprehensive and well-informed worldview (or map). There are a number of good intro books that people recommend for first diving into Ken Wilber’s work (e.g. A Brief History of Everything). Regardless of which book you pick, the fact is for most people (myself included) this is a vast and complex topic. Distilling a philosophy/worldview/framework into a small but useful text is difficult to say the least.

I’ve personally found The Integral Vision to be the best intro into Integral. It’s a short, but powerfully-information packed book that definitely does justice to such an interesting and complex topic. My hope is that others who are just getting into Integral Theory/Philosophy will benefit from the mind map summaries. My advice would be to get the book, and use the maps as a study or reference guide to help the information sink in.

Read More: Here

Integral Recovery Revisited

In the following videos John Dupry explains his recent video introductions to Integral Recovery. Integral Recovery is an AQAL-based addictions recovery model and approach. From the website:

Integral Recovery is a bold and totally new approach to the treatment of alcoholism and addiction. We say “totally new” not because it breaks with other approaches past or present, but because it unites—or integrates—them, preserving what is best of existing modalities, while negating their weaknesses.

And here is John’s intro to AQAL as applied to Integral Recovery:

Watch all 16 videos about AQAL and Integral Recovery on the website: Here

Consciousness as Dance

From Edge.Org:

The Problem of Consciousness
A Talk with Alva Noë

The problem of consciousness is in understanding how this world is there for us. It hows up in our senses. It shows up in our thoughts. Our feelings and interests and concerns are directed to and embrace this world around us. We think, we feel, the world shows up for us. To me that's the problem of consciousness. That is a real problem that needs to be studied, and it's a special problem.

A useful analogy is life. What is life? We can point to all sorts of chemical processes, metabolic processes, reproductive processes that are present where there is life. But we ask, where is the life? You don't say life is a thing inside the organism. The life is this process that the organism is participating in, a process that involves an environmental niche and dynamic selectivity. If you want to find the life, look to the dynamic of the animal's engagement with its world. The life is there. The life is not inside the animal. The life is the way the animal is in the world.

Watch the Entire Video: Here

ALVA NOË is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He works principally on the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, with special interest in the theory of perception, and is also interested in the philosophy of art, the history of analytic philosophy, Phenomenology, and Wittgenstein.

Consciousness and its Place in Nature

Consciousness and its Place in Nature

By David Chalmers

Consciousness fits uneasily into our conception of the natural world. On the most common conception of nature, the natural world is the physical world. But on the most common conception of consciousness, it is not easy to see how it could be part of the physical world. So it seems that to find a place for consciousness within the natural order, we must either revise our conception of consciousness, or revise our conception of nature.

In twentieth-century philosophy, this dilemma is posed most acutely in C. D. Broad's The Mind and its Place in Nature. The phenomena of mind, for Broad, are the phenomena of consciousness. The central problem is that of locating mind with respect to the physical world. Broad's exhaustive discussion of the problem culminates in a taxonomy of seventeen different views of the mental-physical relation. On Broad's taxonomy, a view might see the mental as nonexistent ("delusive"), as reducible, as emergent, or as a basic property of a substance (a "differentiating" attribute). The physical might be seen in one of the same four ways. (The seventeenth entry arises from Broad's division of the substance/substance view according to whether one substance or two is involved.)

At the end, three views are left standing: those on which mentality is an emergent characteristic of either a physical substance or a neutral substance, where in the latter case, the physical might be either emergent or delusive.

Read More: Here

New Theses on Integral Micropolitics

Daniel Gustav Anderson is a cultural critic and integral theorist currently teaching literature and cultural history in Washington D.C.

Anderson has called for the development of a "critical Integral theory," which he conceives as a theory capable of doing Integral work while holding up to a rigorous ideological analysis. He has mapped this position in his essay, "Of Syntheses and Surprises: Toward a Critical Integral Theory".

His work is heavily influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Zizek, Ziporyn, and Tarthang Tulku among others. He has expressed the view that the aim of a critical integral theory must be radical democracy, on the hypothesis that enlightenment experiences and social revolution share a similar organizational pattern.

Below, in an outstanding new essay, Daniel further develops his project and provides resources towards a more critical and integrative social theory. Enjoy:

“Such a Body We Must Create”: New Theses on Integral Micropolitics

By Daniel Gustav Anderson

This essay proposes a rigorously postmetaphysical integral praxis, defines what this means and how such an intervention may be premised, and demonstrates throughout some methodological and practical advantages this approach may have over extant metaphysically-oriented integral theories.

Beginning with an interpretation of post-Hegelian historical and dialectical materialisms informed by the Buddhist dialectical tradition of Madhyamika, a series of coordinated and interrelated theses address problems proper to fields such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, semiotics, historiography, and subaltern studies.

The claimed purpose of this project is to coordinate subjective (psychological, spiritual) and objective (social, political, economic) transformational imperatives into a coherent, non-ontological “counterproject.” It takes as its aim the production of a radically democratized, responsible, and sane subjective and objective space, where responsibility is characterized as critical clarity, competence, creative consciousness, and compassion.

Read More (PDF): Here

Cultivating Postformal Adult Development

Cultivating Postformal Adult Development: Higher Stages and Contrasting Interventions

By William R. Torbert

As this chapter will discuss, the practice of action inquiry and the Vedic/TM method are the only two educational interventions that have empirically been shown to facilitate adult developmental transformation beyond formal operations. The primary concern of this chapter is to present experiential tastes, theoretical outlines, and empirical findings of the action inquiry approach to adult learning, adult development, and leadership.

The Vedic/TM approach and the empirical research relating to it is well discussed in Alexander's chapter in this volume and will be reviewed only briefly later in this chapter in order to compare its educational process and documented outcomes to the action inquiry approach.

The action inquiry approach to adult learning, development, and leadership is to integrate inquiry into action, rather than separating them into reflection, on the one hand, and action, on the other hand-into "ivory tower" vs. "real world." On a personal scale, this implies an attempt to widen and deepen one's awareness meditatively in the very midst of one's workaday action. On an interpersonal scale, integrating action and inquiry implies speaking in ways that simultaneously assert, illustrate, and inquire into others' responses.

On an organizational scale, integrating action with inquiry results in the creation and re-creation of liberating structures that simultaneously increase participants' awareness, empowerment, and productivity . On all three scales, the action inquiry approach is intended to invite reframing of assumptions and developmental transformation at appropriate moments.

Read More : Here

SOURCE: In Miller, M. & Cook-Greuter, S. (Ed.s), 1994. "Transcendence and Mature Thought in Adulthood", Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 181-203

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

On Human Rights Day, 10 December, 2007 the U.N Secretary-General launched a year-long campaign in which all parts of the United Nations family took part in the lead up to the 60th birthday of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) on Human Rights Day 2008.

With more than 360 language versions to help them, UN organizations around the globe used the year to focus on helping people everywhere to learn about their human rights. The UDHR was the first international recognition that all human beings have fundamental rights and freedoms and it continues to be a living and relevant document today.

The theme of the campaign, “Dignity and justice for all of us,” reinforces the vision of the Declaration as a commitment to universal dignity and justice and not something that should be viewed as a luxury or wishful thinking.

Words to Cherish:

The Guinness Book of Records describes the UDHR as the "Most Translated Document" in the world. The Declaration arose directly from the experience of the Second World War and represents the first global expression of rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled. It consists of 30 articles which have been elaborated in subsequent international treaties, regional human rights instruments, national constitutions and laws.

Learn More: Here or Download the Declaration: Here

Integral Review Vol 4, No. 2

The December 2008 issue of the Integral Review is now online! The Integral Review is an online, peer-reviewed journal published twice annually. IR publishes a range of transdisciplinary and transcultural works that, taken as a whole, model integral ways of perceiving, thinking, researching, and serving the world we live in.

Read the Latest Issue Here: Integral Review Vol 4, No.2

Meditation, Compassion and the Brain

From Scientific America Mind:

Meditate on This: You Can Learn to Be More Compassionate
A new study shows that meditation opens the gateway to compassion

By David Biello

Like athletes or musicians, people who practice meditation can enhance their ability to concentrate -- or even lower their blood pressure. They can also cultivate compassion, according to a new study. Specifically, concentrating on the loving kindness one feels toward one's family (and expanding that to include strangers) physically affects brain regions that play a role in empathy.

"There is such a thing as expertise when it comes to complex emotions or emotional skills, such as the one of cultivating benevolence," says Antoine Lutz, the neuroscientist who led the study. "That raises the possibility that you can train someone to cultivate this positive emotion."

Lutz and his colleagues, including neuroscientist Richard Davidson, director of the university's Waisman Center for Brain Imaging where the study was conducted, took fMRI scans of the brains of 16 veteran meditators as well as 16 others who had started with no meditation experience but received cursory training before they carried out a series of tests. During these tests, the researchers measured the flow of blood in the brains of both the veterans (some of them Tibetan monks) and the American novices as the subjects did or did not meditate on compassionate feelings while being subjected to various sounds with positive and negative connotations.

When engaged in compassionate meditation, the brain region known as the insula burst into action when the expert meditators heard the sound of a woman in distress. (The insula—a part of the limbic system—has been associated with the visceral feeling of emotion, a key part of empathizing with another's emotional state.)

And when these experts heard the female screams or the sound of a baby laughing, their brains showed more activity than the novices in areas like the right temporal-parietal juncture, which plays a role in understanding another's emotion.

Read More: Here

From the Psychology of Evil to the Psychology of Heroism

October 9, 2008 lecture by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. Why do good people turn evil? In what sense are evil and heroism comparable? How could the little old Stanford prison experiment reveal parallels and insights about the abuses by military guards at Abu Ghraib?

Philip Zimbardo, professor of psychology, emeritus, is internationally recognized as a leading "voice and face of contemporary psychology" through his widely seen PBS-TV series, Discovering Psychology, his media appearances, best-selling trade books on shyness, and his classic research, The Stanford Prison Experiment.

Spinbitz

Spinbitz: Interface Philosophy, Mathematics, and Nondual-Rational Empiricism

By Joel Morrison

SpinbitZ is a philosophy of vision-logic interfaces for the percept-based illumination of abstract concepts. In tracing a nondual thread of rationality to its pre-Socratic roots, we find the axis-mundi hidden within Zeno’s paradox, and within nondual rationality. With the help of a hundred illustrations, we trace this embryogenesis of rationality, as it reconnects to the alternative lineage of Deleuze, with a nondual fusion of Spinoza and Leibniz.

We also find that mathematics mirrors this embryogenesis and holarchical structure. Interface Mathematics transitions from the “oppositional forces” of dualism, ultimately again to the “intensive” truths of the nondual. In making mathematics visible and understandable, the two fundamental axes of conceptual thought are shown. Spinoza’s “three infinities” are then seen as the triune interface between these axes, for illuminating and reconciling the many paradoxes of infinity as they wind their way into the truths of modern mathematics.

SpinbitZ is an integral and thoroughly modern (e.g. post-metaphysical, post-foundational and post-coherentist) ontological and epistemological meta-paradigm which uses “vision-logic interfaces” for exploring and integrating the core concepts of - and the bleeding-edges between - mathematics, philosophy, science and art. It is a heavily illustrated and intuitively visual work based on an integration of the central trans-rational elements of Spinoza and Leibniz (hence SpinbitZ), catalyzed by the convergent thoughts of many others such as Gerald Lebau (author of Sorce Theory), Gilles Deleuze, Ken Wilber and R. Buckminster Fuller. It is further infused with the truths from many of the great wisdom traditions such as the concept of nonduality, Nagarjuna's "emptiness," the "Two Truths Doctrine," and an operationalized version the Taoist "identity of opposites,"all of which are invaluable for working with the crucial concept of polarity and expanding the project of rationalism beyond the distorting lens of the post-modern era.

The goal of SpinbitZ, with its "Nondual Rationalism," is to reconnect to the prematurely abandoned project of philosophical and mathematical rationalism, with its unrecognized roots and resonances in both Western empiricism and the nondual philosophies of the East, such as Taoism and Madhyamaka (middle-path) Buddhism. This critical project was aborted through the "modern" and "post-modern" historical misinterpretations (and in many cases, just plain ignorance) of the key embryonic insights and conceptual tools developed mainly by Spinoza and expanded (in a reactionary and somewhat confused way) through Leibniz (among others). These misinterpretations (of what is better termed “Nondual Rational-Empiricism”), incorporated wholesale into modern academia, were fostered by the reactionary anti-modern and anti-rational movements such as the "infinite representation" and negative dialectic of Hegelian “absolute idealism” and the absolutized relativism of deconstructive postmodernism.

SpinbitZ visually and viscerally reconnects to the positive understanding of infinity - the “secret of rationality” - previously explored by Deleuze and others. With exquisite visual detail, SpinbitZ reinvigorates and re-ignites the embryonic project of rationality, unearthing and greatly strengthening this lost thread. In the process it provides a detailed operational map; a "vision-logic coordinate system" and a "univocity framework" for unfolding the many hidden and conflated polarities and directionalities of thought. Through this it dissolves the many resulting confusions and paradoxes (such as the paradoxes of infinity and free-will) which have become incorporated and axiomatically encapsulated into modern academia and into any system of thought that unquestioningly accepts academic accounts of history (especially the history philosophy and mathematics). Correcting these errors and conceptual biases and significantly fleshing out the details and operational meta-paradigm tools of the aborted project of Nondual Rationalism, enables a fully resonant, highly detailed visual-synergy between the new rational and trans-rational ontologies (e.g. post-metaphysics), the emerging qualitative or causal aspect (IT quadrant) of physics in Sorce Theory (as well as Plasma and Fractal Cosmologies), and a new “trans-rational” or “holonic” interpretation of mathematics originated in SpinbitZ.

Learn More: Here / DownLoad for Free: Here

The Extended Mind

The Extended Mind

By Andy Clark & David Chalmers

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes...

While some mental states, such as experiences, may be determined internally, there are other cases in which external factors make a significant contribution. In particular, we will argue that beliefs can be constituted partly by features of the environment, when those features play the right sort of role in driving cognitive processes. If so, the mind extends into the world.

First, consider a normal case of belief embedded in memory. Inga hears from a friend that there is an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and decides to go see it. She thinks for a moment and recalls that the museum is on 53rd Street, so she walks to 53rd Street and goes into the museum. It seems clear that Inga believes that the museum is on 53rd Street, and that she believed this even before she consulted her memory. It was not previously an occurrent belief, but then neither are most of our beliefs. The belief was sitting somewhere in memory, waiting to be accessed.

Read More: Here