Sat 30 Mar 2002 20:57
anias nin diarist
.

Sat 30 Mar 2002 12:50
George Leonard: the decline of the american male..??
from GL's book walking on the edge of the world: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." Proust.
kw's spectrum of consciousness published by the theosophical society in america
https://www.selfknowledge.org/inwardbound/people.html
(link on theosophichttp://www.theosophical.org/resources/links/index.html)
on sk.org, mariana caplan -- the way of failure: winning through losing.

https://www.selfknowledge.org/inwardbound/story.html

Welcome to the Self Knowledge Symposiumóan active exercise in remembering.

It started back in 1989 at North Carolina State University (NCSU) when a group of students heard the life story of August "Augie" Turak, an entrepreneur with 25 years experience of intense spiritual seeking. Enthralled by the lecture, the students asked Augie what they could do to get the most out of college and out of life. Augie replied, "Start a group that centers on the most universal questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose?"

a sociable god

from George Leonard's education and ecstasy
p177
The best free-learning school I have visited operates in a rather drab four-story building on West 15th St in NYC. It was conceived by actor Orson Bean as a Summerhill-type institution--but with a difference.
Me and the Orgone by Orson Bean

p216
3. Learning itself is life's ultimate purpose.

Tony Schwartz: what really matters 1995
p339
His [KW's] work is testament to the value of rigorous, discriminating thinking in the pursuit of a more complete life.

p340 No one I sought out for this book was harder to get to than Wilber.

p340 What Wilber brings to the search for wisdom is an extraordinarily penetrating, synthetic, and discriminating intellect; a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of psychology, philosophy, mysticism, anthropology, sociology, relition, and even physics; and vast personal experience with states of consciousness that can be accessed through meditation.

p340 Because he is not tied to any particular dogma, Wilber functions a sboth a theoretician about consciousness and a critic of the individual strengths, myths, pretensions, shortcomings, and outright falsehoods contained in any given approach to wisdom. At the same time, he makes his personal preferences clear. He is more passionately interested in the higher stages of consciousness than in the personal levels of ego development, and he is more drawn to the intellectual and spiritual realms than to thos of the heart and body. He spent several years in psychotherapy in his twenties and has read the literature exhaustively, but for the past two decades, by far his main practice has been meditation: at least two hours every day, along with dozens of longer retreats. Wilber counts many gains from meditation--a greater sense of freedom, equanimity, clarity, and inner quiet; a more focused yet spacious awareness; and an increased capacity for even-handed self-observation. But finally it is the spiritual dimension that has moved him most. "Meditation was invented as a way for the soul to venture inward, there ultimately to find a supreme identity with God-head," he has written. "Whatever else it does, and it does many beneficial things, meditation is first and foremost a search for the God within."

p341 While he lives a mostly solitary life built around the mind, he has many other dimensions.
p342 During the next six years, he gave up his routine of writing and meditating almost entirely in order to care for her.

p342 He leads, he says, with his strongist suit--the capacity to absorb, synthesize, categorize, and make sense of vast amounts of information from disparate fields. For twenty years, his central goal has been to objectively document the stages of consciousness development--the deep unvarying structures--including those beyond the ego levels described by Freud and Western psychology. The result is the most comprehensive cartography of consciousness yet produced--a map that spans the spectrum of human possibilities as they have been defined in both the East and the West.
R. D. Laing
Alan Watts.
Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi, D. T. Suzuki, Sri Aurobindo, the Buddha. Kohlberg, Gilligan. It is by integrating and elucidating these disparate thinkers that Wilber has come to be seen as the leading theoretician in a field known today as transpersonal psychology.

p342 The notion of psychology dealing with the issues that transcend one's ordinary sense of self originated with Anthony Sutich. Progressive rhematoid arthritis. Hospitalized and told he had only a few months to live, he found that the hospital nurses would stop by to talk with him, pouring out their woes and seeking his advice. Sutich went on to live an incredibly productive life for the next fifty years--even though he remained permanently confined to a gurney, largely unable to move.


p343 Despite these awkward physical circumstances, people continued to be drawn to Sutich's instinctive empathy and insight, much as the hospital nurses had been. At the age of thirty-one, he became a group counselor for the blind, and three years later, he opened a full-time private practice as a counselor. In addtion to his clinical work, he pursued a rich intellectual life.

p344 "The concept of self-actualization was no longer comprehensive enough," he wrote later. "I felt that something was lacking in the orientation, and that it did not adequately accomodate the depths of the cultural turn toward the 'inner-personal' world or give sufficient attention to the place of man in the universe or cosmos."

p344 Specifically, Maslow [The farther reaches of human nature 1967] argued for the need to evolve a psychology of transcendent experiences and transcendent values. "The fully developed (and very fortunate) human being, working under the best conditions tends to be motivated by values which transcend his self."

p344 This emerging fourth force, Sutich concluded, should be concerned with everything from ultimate values, self-transcendence, unitive consciousness, and mystical experiences, to peak experiences, ecstasy, awe, wonder, spirit, and ultimate meaning.

p344 Stanislav Grof [clin. lsd research] came up with the word transpersonal during a meeting with Maslow. Maslow: "This word says what we are all trying to say, that is, beyond individuality, beyond the development of the individual person into something which is more inclusive."

Grof, maslow, Alan Watts, Huston SMith, psychosynthesis founder Roberto Assagioli.

p345 Grof discovered that under the influence of LSD, patients typically first experience vivid regressions to childhood and infancy. After reliving and working through the conflicts from these periods, subjects frequently moved next to perinatal experiences, including birth itself.

p345 REliving the stages of birth, he went on to argue, often leads subjects directly into the transpersonal realm.

"In my experience, everyone who has reached these levels develops convincing insights into the utmost relevance of the spiritual and religious dimensions in the universal scheme of things."

"The common denominator of this otherwise rich and ramified group of phenomena is the feeling of the individual that consciousness expanded beyond the usual ego boundaries and limitations of time and space."

p346 Charles Tart has made it his mission to measure and document an array of nonordinary states of consciousness in which unique capacities emerge--among them psychic states, hypnotic trance states, out-of-body and near-death experiences, various forms of dreaming, psychedelic drug states, and a variety of meditative experiences. Cultivating voluntary access to more states of consciousness expands the range of human possibility and thus represents a key step on the road to a more complete life. _Altered states of consciousness_ 35 articles, hypnagogic or theta state, dreaming, meditation, hypnotic trance, and the psychedelic experience. Autogenic training, effects of meditation and biofeedback on brainwave activity.

p347 LIke Michael Murphy, Wilber began on a conventional road to success and established all-American credentials early in life. He was elected student body president at two different schools, captained the football team in junior high school, graduated at the top of his class, and gave the valedictory speech. Just to keep his bases covered, he also ran with the wilder jocks, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and making trouble. "I was very attuned to the outer world, very outgoing, and very eager to be liked,"

p347 Moving so frequently was painful (his father was a career officer in the Air Force and the family moved to a new town nearly every year)--Wilber still remembers sobbing almost continuously for several days when he had to leave one town--but it had its compensations. "I learned to get involved with people very quickly and intimately, but also to hold everything lightly. It was a real Buddhist education: to be open, and yet to know that everything comes and goes."

p347 "But what I really appreciated about both of my parents as I grew up was that they supported me, and they gave me intellectual freedom. They were proud of what I accomplished, but neither of them ever pushed me or even said, 'Do your homework.' The result was that I ended up following my own interests--and pushing myself very hard."

p348 Throughout high school, he'd been passionate about science, building chemistry laboratories in his basement and winning prizes at science fairs. "I fasioned a self that was build on logic, structured by physics, and moved by chemistry. My mental youth was an idyll of precitions and accuracy, a fortress of the clear and evident." [blech!]

p348 "I knew what science had to offer--objective knowledge--and it didn't interest me any more. I wanted knowledge about interior, psychological, spiritual questions, although I didn't yet formulate it that way. I just knew from the very first day that there was nothing the university was teaching that I wanted to know. It was a classic global existential crisis. I was looking for meaning--for God--and I'd run through all of the outer places you can find it."

p348 In search of other answers, Wilber happened one day to pick up a small classic work by the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu.
Truly, only he that rids himself forever of desire can see the secret Essences;
He that has never rid himself of desire can only see the Oucomes.
These two things issue from the same source,
but nevertheless are different in form.
This source we can but call the Mystery.
The doorway whence issue all secret essences.

p348 Here suddenly was an entirely different way of looking at the world: a focus not on external goals but on an exploration of deeper meaning beyond logic, beyond science, even beyond the ordinary definitions of self. Wilber began reading voraciously in the mystical literature. "It was as if my previous lifelong 'repression of the sublime' was now compelling me to redress the balance with an almost pathological seriousness,"

Bhagavad Gita, Kabblah, Aldous Huxley, Huston Smith, Gary Snyder, Sufism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Alan Watts -> Krishnamurti, Norman O. Brown -> Freud. Wilber devoured Freud's entire collected works.

p349 "How do all these people and ideas fit together? it was absolutely fascinating to me. Suddenly, I wasn't just tinkering with chemistry. I was on to something that had to do with my own happiness, my own salvation, what life was really about."

p349 Wilber quit Duke after his sophomore year and returned to nebraska. Still conventional enough to want a college degree--Wilber enrolled at UN. He decided to major in chemistry and physics simply because they came so easily to him...5,7,10hrs/day reading his own syllabus of Eastern philosophy and Western psychology. ordered books by mail, a dozen at a time, from Shambhala Bookstore in Berkeley, which specialized in esoteric texts. "I was not doing this for a college degree, a career, tenure, or even a apat on the head," "I was doing it because I felt I must; for me it was a Grail search."

p349 During this same period, wilber began therapy with Bob Young, an eclectically trained, intellectually wide-ranging psychologist. The main issue that wilber found himself struggling with was anger--more specifically, his difficulty in expressing it directly. "I was very angry, at everything and everyone, but it tended to come out in snideness and sarcasm--or simply as anxiety. I went into therapy to deal with all of that." Before long, the therapy focused on his relationship with his mother. "My biggest complaint was that I felt smothered by her, and oversheltered," "My father wasn't around a lot when I was growing up, and I became not only my mother's darling kid but almost a substitute husband. She did the best job she could have, but I still felt overwhelmed. I needed to establish my own space--without feeling that I'd be abandoned."

"bob became my mentor in the best sense. He was someone who asked the big questions. I talked over everything I was reading with him, and he encouraged me to explore other techniques--Perls' Gestalt____Ira Progoff's intensive journal work____ which was my experiential introduction to Jung; and eventually Zen and meditation."

http://www.intensivejournal.org/

Use an integrated system of writing exercises. It's much more than a diary.

Gain insights about many different areas including personal relationships, career and special interests, body and health, dreams and imagery, and meaning in life.

Apply fresh approaches to access your creative capacities and untapped possibilities.



Dr. Progoff stresses the value of silence:

"Growth takes place in a person by
working at a deep inner level in a
sustained atmosphere of silence."

_At a journal workshop: 616.8914p

_Life Study:

All of the participants in a workshop learn to proceed in a non-judgmental way recording their life data and then feeding it back into the other journal sections. In this way of working we experience the method at an inner level so as to answer the question: ìWhat is my life trying to become?î


The Intensive Journal method can help individuals gain insights and understandings into specific areas to: enhance personal relationships, make decisions about their career and projects of intense interest, release feelings about their body and health, and deal with various events and situations. For these purposes, we use various dialogue exercises that I will explain later.


Working with your dreams and other symbolic images such as feelings, intuitions, and hunches develops our intuitive capacities. Working with our inner process helps us to draw our life together and find meaning and direction. They are helpful in stimulating our creative strengths, by which I mean we can then realize new talents and possibilities. Our focus is upon the practical question of what these messages are seeking to become rather than what they mean intellectually.

The Intensive Journal method also focuses a good deal upon helping individuals find meaning in life, which I believe is necessary to make themselves whole and fulfilled. These exercises help people to clarify values and priorities, to develop experiences of connection with various aspects of society and to gain wisdom from those of the past or present who have the capacity to teach us important lessons about life.

Through the integrative techniques of the Intensive Journal method, persons can gain awareness and more readily determine whether or not the important aspects of their daily lives are consistent with their values and priorities. Individuals can then reevaluate their situation so as to develop more fulfilling lives.



After adding a number of sections to the Intensive Journal workbook (that now comprise the ìMeaning Dimensionî) I completed the companion text that described this material in The Practice of Process Meditation (1980). These two books were condensed into one volume in 1992 in the revised edition of At a Journal Workshop.

Currently, I am the director of Dialogue House in New York City and am working on various writing projects.


Dialogue House Associates
80 E. 11th Street Suite 519, New York, NY, 10003
Phone: 212-673-5880 Fax: 212-673-0582


p350 got master's degree in chemistry, and began working toward PhD. Tutored undergrads on side for money. Amy wagner--married 1972

p350 In time, Wilber realized that while he felt better about his life, he was now suffering from what he termed "a severe case of cognitive dissonance." On the one hand, his academic work was yielding fewer and fewer rewards. "I had spent my entire life studying science only to be met with the ... brutally limited and narrow in scope."

p351 "most of these thinkers were trying to dispore what everyone else had to say,"
"It slowly dawned on me that these people weren't all addressing the same level of consciousness." The question was no longer "Who is right and who is wrong?" but "how do all these truths fit together?"

p351 Wilber wrote _The spectrum of consciousness_ in longhand in three months, working twelve hours a day and rarely revising.
"When I was writing, I was expressing my own higher Self; I had no doubt about that at all. Two paragraphs into the writing ... I new I had come home, found myself, found my purpose, found my God. I have since never doubted it once." It took him more than three years to get it published, and was rejected by 20 publishers.

27 when it came out in 1978. It attracted immediate attention and extraordinary notices.

the most sensible and comprehensive book about consciousness since william james."

No boundary...

p352
At 6'4" he is tall, lean, and muscular from working out with free weights every day. He began shaving his head in his early twenties, during a period when he followed a strict ascetic Zen practice that included living on brown rice, working at a manual job, and sitting in meditation for long hours. Over the years, this practice gave way to a more worldly lifestyle, but by then his hairline had begun to recede and he'd grown used to a shaved head.

We didnt' spend much time in idle chatter. Instead, we began to talk about his work almost immediately. I never sensed a time limit, and wilber never seemed to tire. The only times we broke were to eat, and he turned out to be a solicitous host, having prepared quiches and pasta salads for us in advance. It soon became clear that whatever Wilber does, he brings to it an exceptionally engaged attention. During the 15 or 20 hrs we spent together over the next several days, I realized that I'd become the beneficiary of the singular focus that he ordinarily brings to his writing, reading, and meditation.

p361 sit in full lotus for 20-30 min at a time. 3-4 years before got first real rush.
writing- 6-10hrs a day 7 days/week 365 days /year.

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