Thu 28 Mar 2002 06:24
pxxi SES: smile when you say that mister
xxiii integral -- post-postmodern
p5 I will be telling the story as if it were simply the case (because
telling it that way makes for much better reading), but not a sentence
that follows is not open to confirmation or rejection by a community of
the adequate.
.
Wed 27 Mar 2002 19:44
Human Consciousness Project
variously gendered homonids
Colin is interrupting his regularly self-absorbed programming to bring you this public service announcement:
most integrated and complete knowledge system
if you wish to attempt to understand the entirety of human knowledge (all knowledge forms) this is the place to start.
post post modernists - wilber integrates the postmodernists with ease
recommend combining personal and popular with the more academic
He has already done it--whether you agree with him or not--and his work
is respected by many respected individuals in many different fields.
web sites:
a huge email list.
first, and most important to me:
he passes the test of "is he as successful in his personal life as he is in the world of ideas?"
there is no longer any reason to ignore the possibility of states of
consciousness different from those most commonly discussed and
experienced because of a lack of understanding of how to begin
attempting to understand such states of consciousness. Wilber addresses
these with the same clearness of presentation and richness with which
he addresses the entire historical process.
What motivates development?
find kw's Integral Psychology!!!!
p466 The collected works of Ken Wilber Vol 7 2000 Shambhala Boston The eye of spirit; Spectrum of Consciousness:
And so, as the self grows in awareness, it moves from unconscious Hell
to conscious Hell, and there it may spend its entire life, seeking
above all else the numbing consolations that will blunt its raw and
ragged feelings, blur its etchings of despair. Its life becomes a map
of morphine, and folding itself into the anesthetic glow of all its
compensations, it might even manage to convince itself, at least for an
endearing blush of rose-tinted time, that the dualistic world is an
altogether pretty thing.
p85 The essential Ken Wilber: an introductory reader Shambhala 1998 -- Selection/editing by Kendra Crossen Burroughs
Experiential, Intellectual, and Spiritual
[search tag: experience is]
Experience is basically just another word for
awareness. If I experience my body, it means I am aware of my body. You
can indeed be aware of your body, but you can also be aware of your
mind--you can right now notice all the thoughts and ideas and images
floating in front of the mind's inward eye. You can, in other words,
experience your mind, be aware of your mind. An it's
very important to be able to experience your mind directly, cleanly,
intensely, because only by bringing awareness to the mind can you begin
to transcend the mind and be free of its limitations. When that begins
to happen, usually in meditation or contemplation, you can have even
higher experiences, spiritual experiences, mystical
experiences--satori, kensho, samadhi, and so on. You
can, we might say, be aware of spirit, experience spirit, although in a
more nondual manner.
So you can experience body, mind, and spirit. All of
those are experiential. So perhaps you can begin to
understand why it is a catastrophe to reduce experiential to
just the body, to just bodily sensations, feelings,
emotions, impulses, and so on. This is a reductionistic nightmare. It
denies the higher experiential realities of the mind and spirit: it
denies intellect and buddhi, higher mental vision and imagery and
dreams, higher rational discrimination and perspectivism and moral
depth, higher formless awareness and deeply contemplative states--all
are denied or reduced.
The body, you see, is basically narcissistic and egocentric. Bodily
feelings are just about your body, period. The
body's sensations cannot take the role of the other--that's a mental
capacity, and therefore the body's sensory awareness cannot enter into
care and compassion and ethical discourse and I-thou spirituality--all
of those demand a cognitive, mental, intellectual awareness. To the
extent you "stay in your body" and are "anti-intellectual," then you
stay in the orbit of your own narcissism.
So that's the first mistake in the "experiential versus intellectual"
prejudice--all of the experiential modes are reduced to bodily
experiences only, which is the essence of egocentrism. The second
mistake is to then reduce spiritual experiences to bodily experiences.
The idea is that if you stay focused in your body, focused in your
feelings, that these are the direct door to spirituality, because they
transcend the mind. But bodily sensations and feelings and emotions are
not transrational, they are prerational. By staying only in the body,
your are not beyond the mind, you are beneath it. You are not
transcending, you are regressing--becoming more and more narcissistic
and egocentric, focusing on your own feelings. And this, if anything,
prevents actual spiritual experiences, because genuine spirituality is
"bodymind dropped"--that is, you cease identifying exclusively with
both the feelings of the body and the thoughts of the mind, and this
you cannot do if you merely "stay in the body."
So anytime you hear somebody tell you to be "experiential" instead of
"intellectual," you can almost be certain they are making these two
simple but crucial mistakes. They are taking all the experiences of
body, mind, and spirit and claiming that only the body experiences are
real--the lowest of the experiential domains!--and then they are
reducing spiritual experiences to bodily experiences. Both are a
nightmare, really.
But the thing is, it's even worse than that. Although we can accurately
speak of bodily, mental, and spiritual experiences, the fact is, the
highest spiritual states are not even experiences.
Experiences, by their very nature, are temporary; they come, stay a
bit, and pass. But the Witness is not an experience: it is aware of
experiences, but it is not itself experiential in the least. The
Witness is the vast openness and freedom in which experiences arise,
and through which experiences pass. But the Witness itself never enters
the stream of time--it is aware of time--and thus it never enters the
stream of experiences.
So even here, to say that Spirit is experiential (versus intellectual)
is still to completely distort Spirit, because Spirit is not a passing
experience but the formless Witness of all experience. To remain stuck
in experiences is to remain ignorant of Spirit. [One Taste:
August 12]
consciousnessartist.org????
consciousartist.org??
p.x The marriage of sense and soul: integrating science and religion kw Random House 1998
plopping a person on the moon.
talk with Joanna sunday
then
end of grace and grit
intense power emotion of reeligion/spiritualitee
then, experience essay, above
now?
What name?
What mission?
what org principle?
One Taste p248 sunday 0ct 5
depersonalization: detached, numb unable to feel passion for
anything--looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope.
depersonalization......................................
One Taste: p258-259
wilber on education. Ugly.
All we're really talking about here is the traditional liberal
education as an unfolding of one's deepest and highest potnetials. And
that means, in addition to self-esteem and accepting yourself the way
you are now, you also need to meet yourself with real challenges and
real demands-- with real wisdom and real compassion--and therefore vow
to grow, develop, and evolve into your own highest Estate. But we are
not going to do that in lower, middle, or higher education if we meet
ourselves with idiot compassion instead of real compassion.
p257 State has certain rights too.
p411- the eye of spirit coll works of kw a note to the reader: on god and politics.
discussion of liberals v conservatives, and good + bad aspects of both....
there is a shortcoming in his views in the political/educative area I feel, or it's my grandmother zen approach?
p260 tony what really matters
the life we are given integral transformative practice
p152 ot books who needs them
p160 transpersonal spiritual art
immersed in his being
feeling so much the presence of his mind surrounded by piles of her books. s/he is here.
.