Hi all,
On the “Integral Perspective Taking” Meetup that got canceled last week because of the storms…
So I’ve been watching the “Essential Integral” DVD’s and I’m starting to have a whole new appreciation for how some people (who know what they are doing) introduce and present Integral.
The framework that Clint/Ken uses is “Theory, Application and Awareness”. These are separate learning paths that they use to introduce each of the 5 components of Integral which are Quadrants, Lines, Levels, States and Types. As anyone who has been around the Integral community for awhile and/or has read more than one Ken Wilber book you soon realize there is a whole lot of Theory, some Awareness and not a lot of Application in his books. I’m speaking in general here, of course there are exceptions…
The Application and Awareness paths are what really stand out and make this way of learning much deeper than just reading theory. Now I’m not saying you don’t need to learn the basics of the Theory in order to really get the Application and Awareness parts, you guys are plenty smart enough to understand that.
It’s a great paradigm for learning Integral and upon reflection of myself, a good antidote for my typical approach of throwing PDF and MP3 files at you guys and expecting you to have the inclination, time and resources to digest it all. Oh yeah and then come up with Applications and Awareness on your own and then share that with me… :)
And with something like “Integral Perspective Taking” we’ll need a lot of Application and Awareness to have it really stick in our consciousness. It’s actually a somewhat advanced subject and it wasn’t really fair of me to expect anyone to fully digest the PDF and MP3 files I sent out a few weeks ago and then show up to a Meetup prepared to talk about it, sorry about that! That’s why I emphasized I was in the same boat as anyone who would show up…
It seems to me that there are two sets of material concerning “Integral Perspective Taking”. The first is by Ken of course. Probably the best description he gives is in Chapter 1 of his book Integral Spirituality, one reason I shared that with you in a previous email. Also, an excellent application to spirituality of the main 3 perspectives can be found in the 4 CD set from Sounds True “The 1-2-3 of God”. Oh and the first CD of the 10 CD set “Kosmic Consciousness” also from Sounds True. The second set of material is by Clint Fuhs and is the material I sent out a few weeks ago, the PDF files and MP3 files. Clint bases his work off of Ken’s and further develops it.
So I’m in a quandary. I see that my typical approach probably won’t work and I actually risk turning people off to Integral by slinging all this advanced material around. And yet I still want to meet and talk about this topic which I still think is really interesting and powerful.
So shall we aim a little lower this time? Shall we ease into the topic instead of just diving in to the advanced stuff right off the bat?
So I’ll try this again this Thursday evening at 7:00. We’ll ease into this topic with a combination of dialog and some audio material mentioned above…
~Mark