Good people,
It will soon be two years since I first stumbled into the Integral World, so I thought I would put together a piece on my exploration therein. The following is long and it is just the first half (more or less), the second should be posted within a week. Thanks in advance to those of you who will soldier through the whole thing.
Steven
Well Log: Integral
Depth: Two Years
State: Dry Hole
The exploration started for me in Tucson; the probe into the web-bound, piecemeal, Integral prospect for money and beautiful lovers. I took it to Santa Fe, then to my present position on a ridge in the tumbled down coastal tail end of the Andes about 40 km. south of the Caribbean in Venezuela. This is not the land of Integral, not even close. Beautiful lovers? Sure. Money? Forget it. Across the
quebrada before me a barrio in dense motley drapes the side-hill. Over there they would pronounce our pivotal term, ?een-t?-grawl.? It is the exact Spanish cognate of the bourgie-hype, gringo word. But one will hear automatic weapons fire in that venue more often than ?
Int?gral.? Then again, one will probably hear the word spoken more frequently than one will see the presence of police. I ?m thinking there might be something
int?grado about that fact as most things around here make for a cant-free, tangible cunning interlaced with a context comfortably down to the ground. Settling, though, in this town of Los Teques pushes the findings too far ahead of the log so recall it started in Tucson.
February, 2005: I was waiting for a latter-day druid priest and his partner, a larger than life-size, Guam-born, Cherokee grief counselor, to finalize design and budget approvals for a hand forged installation in a gargantuan planter by their pool, near their house into which they had just dropped a rumored $2.8 million for a remodel. A sparse fraction of that sum had kept me in commissions and chancy artistic licenses for 14 months. A little was still in the bank. I could wreck a week or two so I googled ?enlightenment? and pushed on into the field.
The first stops were in Andrew Cohen?s neighborhood. The abuse allegations were on special that month, plaintive and predictable. A link in that tangle dropped me off at the Integral Institute and a reintroduction to Ken Wilber, his latest autogamous edition. Some 15, 16 years before I had read with mild disinterest and zero retention a few of Wilber?s essays in a Theosophical magazine called
Quest. Then I began to overhear his name in the Transpersonal druggie circles. I recall getting word from a friend that a mutual acquaintance, a television journalist, had just come out as Wilber?s mistress. We both found an ineffable cause in that news to chuckle. Then a little later yet I was leaning against the shelves in the Ark Bookstore in Santa Fe sampling
Grace and Grit and happened across the passages where Wilber found that an impulse to suicide could be better served by lumping up on his sick wife, she who was apparently prior to the journalist. In those days I was a p.i. specializing in criminal defense. Wife beaters were common among the clientele and they seemed to be enough of a type to make shelving
G & G an ease. There are the singers and there are the songs and through the years? precedence I am listening
a fortiri for the singers. Good ones of character are hard to find while songs look a dime a dozen and too often any random selection will sound just like the one that follows. I paid no attention to this singer or his songs after that?until this Integral business came up.
?Integral,? the adjectival kin of ?Integration;? the latter was always a favored word with me, so I thought this could bear further study. I examined the I-I website, learned about the Integral University proposal, noted the slate of stars on Integral Naked looked and sounded pretty much as they did 20 years before on the new age, self-help workshop, road show hustle. I toured bookstores. In Tucson?s largest Wilber is found next to Mariann Williamson in ?New Age.? A clerk told me that no one around knew enough about him to put his books anywhere else. Because this was to be a crash course The
BTOE stood out as the perfect read. It raced right along for 20 pages or so but spun out at Wilber?s assertion that nobody believes Neo-Darwinian theory anymore. It crashed there and it burned all on its own. (An excellent technical critique by David Lane, PhD, of these passages can be found at the
Integral World site.) My house mate at that time had two degrees in evolutionary fields and kept me versed on the state of the science. I have no proficiency in the contents of the theory, but I knew enough of its currency to recognize in an instant that what I was reading in Wilber was (to be kind) unsound. If this had been the extent of evidence developed against a criminal defendant for whose lawyer I was snooping it out, I would have made book that the court would cut our man loose inside of a week. Wilber?s assertion read like words cooked for a purpose outside of Science or Philosophy; rendered, it seemed, with the technique and tone of an evangelist, an evangelist for what I did not know, but an evangelist nonetheless for such men have no need for standards of proof. The only professionals I know who can get away clean, truly clean, with a lie are preachers. Preachers can even get paid for them. This is not to write that Science and Philosophy are anywhere above corruption in this enticing, shifty vale of love and money. I have spent too many years in the legal rackets and on the margins of the law, and the eroding edges of politics to presume too much of any profession or creed or the capabilities of their personnel or the wisdom of investing in anything they might push. The Earth?s oeuvre of all that is certified to be Truth, from Buddha?s work to The Brights?, could be proven as witchcraft tomorrow and it would make the least of all difference to me and drop notably short of surprise.
BTOE followed
G & G up onto the shelf. I left it behind and took the exploration back online. I became reacquainted with Spiral Dynamics and perused data bases for history and anthropology journals to see it had been reviewed or validated by the only two disciplines credentialed to do so?found nothing. Finally I studied all of AQAL that the links could give me. It was in the examination of the quarter-sectioned square that my suspicion started to dawn: Wilber had partitioned a crisp taxonomy of his own psyche, projected this Beloved onto the universe as a one-size-fits-all fundamental postulate and flogged it to the Market of the Credulous as a map.
Freud wrote somewhere that writers don?t write out of any gripping psychological compulsion, but to make good money and attract beautiful lovers. Wilber?s formula couldn?t miss on those scores. I knew; I had worked that line once myself 30 years before.
And thus began my first online entry into the Integral Well Log. It was an essay, a ?how to? piece on vamping some carnal comforts by framing a Unified Field Theory of the Human Condition. I have since changed that to an Integrated Field Theory (IFTHC), but I remain solid on the notion that it is a comparatively easy enterprise. It might take a little courage at first and a little time throughout, but I believe that almost anyone who has the aptitudes to clear three or four years at a good liberal arts school should be able to make strong work of an IFTHC. About the only skill required that cannot easily be had from a higher education is the ability to write, but six months to a year as a sports reporter on any large suburban daily should teach the eager theorist all the tricks. Aside from that apply two rules: 1) seriously read and read aloud (at the minimum) Shakespeare, Yeats, Vidal, Orwell, Shaw, Dostoevsky, and 2) learn to think at least three paragraphs ahead. The latter is an aide to consistency. The former is aimed at cultivating a facility for a concrete style that will intimidate the majority of critics, most of whom will be academicians who write as if they are plowing their fields behind an ox; on and on for page upon page, chapter after chapter, without writing a single word that signifies something the reader can touch with their hands or do with their body.
There is one other thing to remember: the theory does not have to be right or true, though it helps if it is plausible. I suggest writing up this observation as a pungent aphorism and tacking it above the desk because it absorbs pressure, scurrilous attacks and stress. It keeps fresh the reminder that the overriding motivation for the IFTHC is to enjoy a few good pay days and some intensely sensual companionship. Conversely, it does not involve the proving, or even the suggesting, of a conclusive truth or reality. If a writer is wise those aspirations, like Marley, are dead from the very beginning.
I posted that essay on Integral Naked and no one got it. I spent considerable time over the next months following that forum, expanding the theme in other posts, tilting with the Wilber Word whenever the odor of its sanctity arose. There were a few older hands who got it right away. But most members stayed distant except for some opposition from a few earnest true believers and talented, young, argumentative Turks. Treachery and old age kept me alive and amused and a long time wondering why only those several veterans made for alliance. The answer should have soon been obvious but I believe I have a blind spot in the perseption of my past vis a vis that of others. It took me awhile to see that most had reached this place via a text, a teacher, a class or similar ritual, or all of the above, and they were here because none of those had actually fixed them yet. Somewhere along their line a jones had been opened and they kept coming back to be fixed from what looked to me like school. Experience on the ground was either invalid to them or sadly foreign to their being. They did not appear to know how to take a position on any essential information that had not come as a directed teaching from a certified linage. This demographic was not limited to the I-Naked forumites. I found it common across the Integral web-span; still do. I never had very much patience with school. At the age of eight I realized that it would not take me where I wanted to go, and so everything I learned of the Integrated Whole came from long sessions with non-enhanced, mystical ecstasy that were produced only from the wonders of living hard, staying at large and deep in the world. The ecstatic times began when I was 16 and culminated for the purpose of this present piece in a dream, an exceptionally special dream, nine years later.
Winter, 1969?I was a test subject in a sleep lab. A PhD candidate in psych was probing for dreams at the nadir of the sleep cycle, evidently a fairly barren source. It was a standard sleep lab gig; electrodes, glue in the hair, Salvation Army beds, intercoms, buzzers and spastic needles on creeping graph paper. When the needle showed the Lab Tech that we subjects had dropped to the deepest level of the cycle we were roused by a little buzz and a neutrally cheerful solicitation for a dream.
I awoke to the buzzer one night, the second buzzer of that night, almost delirious with ecstasy.
The vision was of a metal cube floating in darkness with subtle prismatic patterns across its surface like polished zinc, but not too polished, not too dull. It contained all knowledge, all comprehension, mentation, conclusions and concepts. It resolved all past, present and future contradictions without addressing any of them, including the one of its own manifest imminence and its own impossible existence. It was Absolute Whole Wisdom, the Mind of Tao. (I should note this was not The Non-Dual because it was conveyed in a vision of materiality and it was not negated into oblivion by an antithesis.) I mumbled something about seeing a cube that had an idea in it and returned to sleep in ecstasy.
In the days when that dream came down I was a New Left rabble rouser, organizer and pamphleteer; contradiction was my forte, conflict was my passion. Neither of those two had any distinct parallels with that dream, Nothing in my world could match the beguiling eternal immediacy of this vision and so it quickly rose to hegemony over political philosophy that, while radical enough and promising enough, could never grow past its airy, callow inability to fuel the revolution it promised. This is not to say I became a moderate; I would have died before such a decent. Instead I drifted closer than ever before toward full anarchy and became preoccupied with making the essence of that vision manifest in the world. In 1973 I started the rudimentary distillation of elements in my IFTHC. Though it would eventually become foremost in my mind the IFT project began as a derivative of yet another one of my crusades; the fight to disrupt the balance of power in the western U.S. by revolutionizing legal access to water, that scarce
sine qua non of all life in those dangerously dry states.
Civil law that rations water in the desert is at least as old as Hammurabi?s code. Almost 200 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court began articulating legal principles (founded in the medieval divine right doctrines) that, if applied, could justify and protect Native American appropriation of an extraordinary amount of water with rights that are prior to and paramount over the satisfaction of any other user?s needs. That non-Native money and politics are working double shift to keep the West As We Know It safe from Native Rights, is as assured as the nighttime following the day. There are ongoing true stories of non-Native, governmental duplicity, betrayal, fraud and venality, like the plots from
Chinatown, littering the arid landscapes from Montana to West Texas and thence to the Pacific. I hired out as a scout for the Native side of the issue and was investigating these stories and stockpiling them in essays, articles, commissioned reports, seminars and a legal textbook for laymen; ammunition for the always protracted, ferocious legal battles and the attendant political storms that Native vs. non-Native litigation generates.
I had never been a doctrinaire, sour, puritanical crusader and I went about this business with the romantic air of a cocky trouble maker who began each foray on the assumption that the fight was lost before it started. The laws of True Nature state that water flows uphill toward money and the people I was fighting for had none. But I wanted for little. There were funding foundations in New York, and ladies in the west and in D.C. where I was living part-time and the vision of perfect wisdom always there before me. It never ceased as a guiding, intoxicating generator of an exquisite compulsion to show to the world, through the vehicle of the Water War stories, the presence of a numinous, integrated, bedrock totality. There was no wanting for passion. Water wars are fought by a few exceptional soldiers, mostly men, hired, out of town, guns of genius and wondrous skills, the development of which can only be had through exceptional will, an obsession for heat and a style of recklessness that probably includes at some point selling the soul to an archetypal daemon of water. Water wars are crazy, water wars are fun.
But during those times there was one thing that denied me full satisfaction. My mind and my words kept failing The Vision. I lacked for something; the vocabulary, or the syntactical technique, the synthesizing powers perhaps, to arch across the void to infuse the essence of the Mind of Tao into the Water War chronicles that I knew (from experience and responses) were, otherwise reaching the minds and emotions of the readership, a woefully small collection of litigation junkies and assorted dissidents. I could see in my mind and apprehend in my body the seamless over-lay of total, flawless wisdom across the flow of living water and living law. But I could not say it in a manner that conveyed anything but pretension. I could find no method or technique: parable, allegory, Marxian analysis, personal observation, or internal dialogue that even hinted at how to transmit the numinous truths I could see were in the exhilarating, down to the bones material from which I was writing.
Over time I have wondered if I was, back then, failing the Mind of Tao, or if it was failing me. I was not the only one who had been troubled by the possibility that such a vision could betray. Goethe had evidently traveled through the territory at some point. Early in
Faust, when the ill-fated doctor has decided he can revitalize his disparaging spirit through the study of magic, he opens an alchemical text to a symbol of the Macrocosmos and proclaims:
?Ah! at this spectacle through every sense,
What sudden ecstasy of joy is flowing!
I feel new rapture, hallow'd and intense,
Through every nerve and vein with ardour glowing.
Was it a god who character'd this scroll,
The tumult in my spirit healing,
O'er my sad heart with rapture stealing,
And by a mystic impulse, to my soul,
The powers of nature all around revealing.
Am I a God? What light intense!
In these pure symbols do I see,
Nature exert her vital energy?.?
?How all things live and work, and ever blending,
Weave one vast whole from Being's ample range!
How powers celestial, rising and descending,
Their golden buckets ceaseless interchange!
Their flight on rapture-breathing pinions winging,
From heaven to earth their genial influence bringing,
Through the wild sphere their chimes melodious ringing!?
Although Faust shatters the sense of the macrocosmic wholeness with description of parts and dynamics, his speech, nevertheless, gets across to the reader (it is a closet drama, meant more to be read than performed) the universality of the inspiration. But then he reconsiders and realizes the possibility that this integrated perfection will actually bring him nothing:
?A wondrous show! but ah! a show alone!
Where shall I grasp thee, infinite nature, where?
Ye breasts, ye fountains of all life, whereon
Hang heaven and earth, from which the withered heart
For solace yearns, ye still impart
Your sweet and fostering tides--where are ye--where?
Ye gush, and must I languish in despair??
So Faust leafs impatiently through the pages until he finds a symbol of the Spirit of the Earth:
?How all unlike the influence of this sign!
Earth-spirit, thou to me art nigher,
E'en now my strength is rising higher,
E'en now I glow as with new wine;
Courage I feel, abroad the world to dare,
The woe of earth, the bliss of earth to bear,
With storms to wrestle, brave the lightning's glare,
And mid the crashing shipwreck not despair.?
Here was the ally with whom he could advance, consequences be damned. I made the same choice.
(More to Come.)
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