Hey Everyone,

Okay a little break from the heady stuff to open an invitation to you all. 

I've recently started an online group of about twenty-three people from around the world (a few who are also zaadzsters), who are doing amazing integral and spiritual work in their respective areas.  The group is designed around a framework of weekly intentional practice of whatever form each individual chooses and is being set at a corresponding time so that the half hour of our practice is done together at many different locations. 

The intentional practice of your choice (tonglen, zazen meditation, centering prayer, ecstatic dance, mindful dishwashing etc) is directed each month around a specific conflict ridden region in the world. I send out a monthly email with a brief overview summary of the conflict with a map so that everyone is up to speed on the area.  

My intention is to create a sacred space through shared practice worldwide that can offer the ground for what i plan to develop in the future; a website or forum of some kind where I can post the conflicts and everyone with their respective areas of expertise can post ideas for integral solutions; from integral economics to integral politics, to integral feminist ideas to integral business to integral mediation to integral spirituality, and the list goes on. I want to bring in every possible area to create a true integral conflict resolution resource and hopefully the base for future projects.  

As of now it's very much in its baby stages as a shared practice with many amazing integral souls.  I wanted to open up the invitation to any of the zaadzsters who may be interested in being a part of this.  Feel free to email me and I can fill you in with all the details and include you on the once a month update with the others in the group.  

Through the beginnings of this idea I hope to one day create with all of you a more integral approach toward dealing with some of the most devastating conflicts around the world. 

I had a mysterious sadness arise as I was shelving books at the library today.  A kind of inexplicable yearning that was first caused by looking through a book on past Egyptian societies and art and then was amplified by a stranger who smiled at me as she passed by in silence.  

A profound well of sadness filled the air around me while a warm roll of laughter seemed to be cooling the pain somehow from within. It may seem strange, but the sadness came from a sudden awareness of all the people in the world that I would never get to know.  All the people who had lived in the past and those who will live in the future as well as all the strangers who live amongst me right now in my own lifetime whom I will never have the chance to know, to touch, or to share intimate connection with.  

As an individual caught in the relative equation of time-space it is true that I spend most of my waking life relatively focused on my own ideas, my own life and the unique way in which I see the world. But it is truly, for me, those continual moments when people meet you and poke through you that make it really worth being alive.  Those moments when the silence grabs me from behind someone else's eyes and once again demolishes everything I think I know about who they are.  When I come to that rush of being truly able to love someone because I choose to let them go.  In those daily reflections that stream past me as I take the crowded (and stinky) 45 bus to school everyday; each look, each face reminding me not to forget what this really is, who I really am. 

What is it about others that is so beautiful that it makes us want to annihilate ourselves over and over again?  The pain and joy of our own separation, both at once arising from the feeling of loss for what we will never get to touch, and yet the deepest knowing that we always already are.


Ah, kankodori,
Deepen thou
My loneliness.
   -Zen Haiku

             

I  was trying to think today about how self-identity forms and shifts in its movement from green to yellow and had some interesting thoughts around the limitations of green meme self-identity flexibility. 

First of all I start with a very existential basis in my analysis of how memes or value systems form and how they sustain themselves.  I'm a big fan of Ernest Becker's work and the subsequent work that has spun off of Becker's existential philosophy and is being practically tested and researched by a group of social psychologists called "Terror Management Theorists." Since I can't go into the complexity of the model here I'll try to give a brief overview for purpose of this discussion and if anyone wants to know more please feel free to ask me for references, its truly amazing research.

Okay, so the very simplistic premise of Becker's philosophy is that due to the human's ability to reflect on its own mortality it is driven by a need to repress this deep existential terror in some way in order to operate day to day with any sense of purpose.  This overwhelming terror is assuaged through the construction and continual maintenance of culture.  It is through culture that Becker believed we constructed our immortality.  What he called death-transcending devices or immortality projects used to create symbolic meaning that could extend beyond our physical existence. 

It was these cultural worldviews from which we derived not only our sense of meaning but also our self-esteem by prescribing to the social consensus and its values.  Because cultural worldviews are socially constructed rather than absolute mirrors of reality, the mere existence of other worldviews is threatening, not just as a matter of belief but as a real threat to ones immortality project.  We can see then that the need for us to defend our worldviews is due in part to a deep existential terror that would be unleashed if we had to face the ultimate "illusory" nature of our own partial worldview. It is not just a challenge to ones beliefs it is an attack on ones very feeling of mortality.

Now although the Terror Management theorists (TMT) don't use SDi theory they do have an intuitive sense of how the first tier systems hold themselves together in this way.  They call worldviews "terror management systems", designed with the sole purpose to control and minimize the existential terror that ultimately always sits at the base of the human psyche.  Rather than being "negative" they are essential systems needed to guide our daily lives and keep us from being overwhelmed by the terror and meaninglessness that the awareness of death would create if it was constantly in conscious awareness.  

Now thinking about the shift to second tier, there seems two important things to note: First is that Graves often described a dramatic drop in fear in the transition from green to yellow; and second I think I remember a diagram where Wilber placed the existential turning point at the edge right before integral.  

With these two points in mind it then seems to me that the green system is the starting point for the first real breakup of worldviews.  It's the first system that truly attempts to hold all perspectives, attempts to see through the others eyes and validate it as equally real to its own perspective.  This is huge if you think about it from the perspective of TMT theory because such an act is ultimately the willingness to undercut ones own immortality project. 

Now the self-identity is making a huge shift in green, a decentering that is both courageous and painful. But before we all applaud too loudly it is also clear that for the green system to truly follow its developmental trajectory it would have to then completely confront the existential terror that would be released from its confrontation with worldview/ terror management system destruction and then reorient itself and make its way to a truly flexible self-identity at the integral worldview.  A yellow self-identity is one that is ultimately not exclusively identified (due to the existential obliteration) with any worldview system and thus the leap to second tier completes the process that the green decentering has started.

But what I often see, and perhaps why the green meme (the second tier leap) is described as the hardest transition for consciousness to make, is due to the unwillingness to truly step into that existential arena.  I think green then uses any and all defense mechanisms possible to not have to totally touch into the terror of the existential chasm.  Thus it becomes just as stuck in worldview absolutism as the other first tier systems only it looks like it is inclusive and honoring of all systems.  But the Self-identity is ultimately inflexible and stuck.  A green meme system couldn't flexibly move through all the first tier systems and identify accordingly and appropriately depending on the shifting situations which is ultimately the gift of yellow consciousness.  

So my transitioning conclusion and ongoing investigation is around how much more complex these defenses and terror management mechanisms become at green than any other first tier system due to its close proximity to the existential confrontation.
 
Thoughts still brewing...

Just as a side note, due to the amount of emails and comments I've been recieving on my stepmother's artwork I've included a couple more of her pieces in my photo album as well as a couple of my father's new ones.  If anyone wants to see more of her work check out her website at www.barbarabickel.ca
Chow.
V.

I've just started playing with the art of slam poetry. I don't really know anything about it and I've basically just made it up here but wanted to post my first attempt to play with it. Its a great way to just let ideas free flow from the pen with no pauses or breaks. Of course this peice is somewhat edited to make it coherent, but as you will be able to tell, not really much sense to it either. It was a good release after weeks of not writing.



A young boy stole my hatred today. An obliterated fear found its reach over the thickets and smiled. It was a surprise to look to colors of red, the shades of his ruby bicycle wheels blurred into the dizziness of a disoriented mind. It was a strange moment, a pure heart that wanted to see my face. The young boy held eyes with no shame for forthcoming on pyramids of crystal reflection, a sacred selection for endangered souls and I realized this was home and yet home was never where we wanted to be. A blind heart wrapped in fear, a scream to ugliness, fights the sight of unending delusions, a corrupt flight of terror from a world that had abandoned its soul, a young boy found me here. He stills the silence spinning the sacred and filing away fear only to hold with love the tears of my careless grieving. The Buddha sits, Kali spits, to document quiet moments of our holy reception, Immaculate Conception, hurling thoughts into the dark abyss, our human scars bare witness to this distance from where we’ve fallen. His eyes held me there, the touch of regret rolled across my sacred skin, a rough pasture to tend within. When a broken projection is harder to accept than our own death it breeds a state, where the ground disintegrates and the body falls forward into the flame, and we sit naked to surrender to the universe our natural hospitality. Our bodies breathing the pain of this uncertainty and exposing the continuity of eternity, our puke and piss holding the world in unconditional bliss and forcing the art to stream from this…recognition. Laundromat inspirations caught in wildfire, cross piled with bedding sheets; blindness pulls and holds the feet, as we creep to this void that finds us in the deepest of sleep.