Integral Horizons, an interview with William Harryman
| Articles & Essays - Jeremy Johnson |
by Jeremy Johnson
William Harryman is the author of two blogs, Integral Options Cafe and The Masculine Heart, as well as an e-book, Essential10 Behaviors for Coping with a Crisis (Dealing with Change). The Integral Options Cafe has been covering a variety of topics including: psychology, evolution, philosophy, culture and spirituality. In this interview he discusses the current state of integral affairs, both online and offline.
What got you started with integral philosophy?
When I was an undergrad, back in the late 80s and early 90s, I was a psych major. Only one class wasn't cognitive-behaviorist or simply brain-based, and I was a big fan Jung, so I took it - Transpersonal Psychology - and one of the books was Ken Wilber's Up From Eden. At the time I was mostly interested in his ideas on shamanism, since at the time I was doing an honor's thesis on The Poet as Shaman, which was expanded to become my master's thesis.
A couple of years later, a friend gave me a copy of The Atman Project when he moved. Later on, I picked up a couple of other books, Eye of Spirit and No Boundary, if I remember correctly. Then in 2001 or so, a good independent bookstore in Seattle closed, and at the sale I bought Sex, Ecology, Spirituality and Integral Psychology, and a couple of other books. I was hooked as soon as I started SES. Integral Psychology was even better, since I am psych geek. Soon I had the Spiral Dynamics book by Beck and Cowan, had downloaded some papers by Jean Gebser (or on his work), I had picked up a Michael Washburn book, even though Wilber had a running feud with his work, and to his credit, Washburn took Wilber's criticisms and make his book better. There was also a three or four issue span of ReVision Magazine devoted to Wilber and his critics - this may have been later 90s or around 2000.
The Mountain Path, or New Evolutionary Landscapes
| Articles & Essays - Jeremy Johnson |
by Jeremy Johnson
I've noticed my thoughts of late have been following a particular trail or pattern. Here are a few others that I've written along this particular path:
It's difficult to summarize exactly where this path has taken me. My mind has been seeded with an idea (saw Inception yesterday) of the non-linear path. The Tao that is wild and rugged, that goes back and forth between order and chaos. The Way that travels in circles and cycles rather than arrows and ladders. It's this messier, organic path that I have always resonated with, and attempted to explore in one author or another.
It was my main contention with authors such as Ken Wilber, who utilize entirely masculine and rational pathways, rendering consciousness itself to appear more like the hard drive of my computer than a real living system, like a neural network or the ecosystem of a rain forest. I've always had the intuition that the intuitive itself, the imaginative and the feminine was an area that has been left misunderstood and abandoned. The realms of the messy are not approachable to a strictly rational mind, in which the wild appears wicked, the organic messy like weeds creeping up under strictly laid brick-pathways.
As the mindfulness teacher, Shinzen Young says, "subtle is significant." It is the subtle path of the Tao that has been overlooked. Glancing around the imaginative landscape of many evolutionary theorists and consciousness philosophers today, notions of chaos and non-linear dynamics is left as a foot-note rather than a chapter in a book. Put simply, there is an imbalance of the intellect and the intuition here.
80 QUESTIONS: A Spiritual SurveyIn memory of Algis UzdavinysMost of these 80 Questions on the nature of reality and the spiritual life were composed by Marty Glass; the rest are by Charles Upton. Our plan is to gather Wisdom from any and every source, in line with the realization that spiritual "authorities" are not always what they seem nowadays, and that spiritual knowledge and vision is now widely diffused (though still not terribly thick on the ground for all that) among people who may or may not have reliable ways of relating to each other, or even anybody to talk to about their insights; like it says in Numbers 11:29, "would that all the lord's people were prophets". We'll post the answers we like best on this website. As for our own perspective, we (Charles Upton and Marty Glass) are more partial to the traditional religions and wisdom traditions—especially the more esoteric aspects of them—than we are to the New Age or Neo-Paganism or this or that non-traditional form of "generic" metaphysics—but we'll accept answers from anywhere or anyone so long as they resonate with our sense of truth, or express the kind of musings, dilemmas, and conclusions that anyone who is serious about the spiritual life—or serious about life—is likely to express and/or respond to. You can answer one question, or several of them, or even all of them. You can answer briefly, or at length. You can include your name and contact information. Or, if you prefer, your email address will be kept confidential if you sign your response 'anonymous'. Answers should be sent to: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it We'll choose the responses that are most appropriate to the project and post them on this website. Once we obtain enough material, we'll submit it to Sophia Perennis Publications for possible publication in book form. |
The Nature of Consciousness: An Interview with Francis X. Charet
by Benton RooksDo you believe there is a way of apprehending trans-human laws and absolute truth outside of the conditions of time and mind? That the Soul may know the truth alone when it has become isolated from the default body-mind orientation?
This is a very complex question and involves the need to make clear what is meant by time, mind, and soul. On one level, these terms are ways of conceptualizing certain modes of perception and experience and are also subject to the conditions of particular historical contexts. In fact, these terms and what they represent of themselves have a history that reflects shifts and changes as well as a degree of continuity. The body/mind conception, Cartesian dualism etc. are influential ways that various persons in the West have attempted to understand the phenomenal world, sensation, and the correlation or not between the latter and the seemingly independent existence of consciousness. This dualism has, in the course of time, either collapsed into being reduced to "body" or "mind". There are Eastern parallels for this as well. |
A Gnostic Interpretation of Spiral Dynamics
|
by Jeremy Johnson
