THE iJOURNAL begins.....
So I've decided to track our progress in building an integral community...a place for psycho-spiritual geeks, psychic freaks, lovers of depth, transformational punks, seerers of the good the true the beautiful and of course us spiritually delusional--"God is in the rain on the rooftops", over-idealistic thinkin utopia's just around the corner, pre-trans screw-ups, differientiation without integration, spiralling down to beige individuals....

April 2, 2005
So the weather was fantastic...and got the glow of a hot-pink sunset upon leaving. Toby saw starry night by van gooh in a tree and had a good idea about putting SES in the drawers of all hotels in LA (in place of the Bible). Darius had progress on the emotional-relational line of development to speak of through his natural vitality. Brian had integral business seminar stuff to share and raised again the persistent question about where's the LOVE in Wilber's work---he's a fault-finder ;). Evonne is organizing her thoughts on integral embrace through many manifestations of love as the pure essence of being. I enjoyed being a listener...and a provider of multidimensional space, while wearing the four quadrants on my back....(my dork line is very developed---definitely more than my cognitive)....

Good times my iFOLK...

your GO (Group Organizer) and not STOP
jAnA

You sound like an interesting group, I'm looking forward to meeting you all. As I read your self-deprecatingly humorous intro to iJournal, I was struck by one lovely chorus of thought and emotion, "She's speaking GEEK! I speak Geek, TOO!" How wonderful to have a sense of community at somewhere above average mode consciousness, looking to raise ourselves up to our even higher potentials, yet keeping an ironically humorous sense of self-awareness close enough at hand to keep the subtly encroaching spectre of Mean Green Meme embeddedness and it's commensurate narcissistic self-reflexive rationalizations at bay.

Or, to translate into non-geek, "Hi! I'd like to play, too."

As to Brian's question, "Where's the LOVE in Wilber's work?", I found it quite thought-provoking. To me, it seems that love and spirituality are often loaded words, and we attach "meaning baggage" to them, from our perspective (self-system center of gravity, our own unique psychograph). When I asked myself that question, "Where is the love?" (Motown group background vocals notwithstanding), I thought of two lines/streams: 1.intellectual/cognitive, and 2.astral/emotional with nice mounds of intersubjectivity tossed in for good measure ("Boomeritis" reference, jk). Intellectually, I "feel" love and tenderness in the way Ken so carefully and delicately "teases apart the threads" of complex subject matter, grounding his perspective every step of the way, so as not to mislead, and candidly admitting the evolution of his perspective (i.e. "Wilber I through Wilber IV", and so on) where a more truly integral view has emerged. Emotionally, I resonate with the beautiful poetic verse he tosses in every once in a while, and three others: the passionate love(s) of his in "Boomeritis", and the way he speaks of his late wife, and the way he speaks of his ex-wife. His love shows in the care with which he makes his maps, but his true love is the actual territory itself, a wonderful example for us all, don't you think?

Every developmental line is, in a sense, it's own context, and so we perceive "love" contextually, from our embeddedness at whatever stage or state we happens to occupy along that particular line, when making that judgement/discernment (walks like a duck, talks like a duck, but is it love?). For example, we feel psycho-socially loved when our friends include us in group activities, value us and our input, pick us up, take us out and treat us, etc.

We humans are "cursed with meaning", and it's easy to see content externally, harder to see structure that supports content, far harder still to see all that within ourselves with anything resembling objectivity, but in this post-metaphysical age of co-enacted contexts within contexts and evolving subject-object relations, an adequate inquiry demands no less. I personally find it both beautiful and horrific. Kinda like life, huh? Why, it's my favorite hobby, at least for now.

Hobbyists, UNITE!

Wow Eliot....
post-irony integrated with spectrum-humor and an candid-poetic-eloquence holding so much of the Kosmos that takes my breath away....

thank-you!

You are so welcome to join us in the playground....fraught with pathological post-apocalyptic fears and yet a bewilderence at our ability to nestle within integral frameworks that allows our souls to sing in the sliding contexts as they emerge....

A unity at last without static metaphysics!!

you catch the subtle duality and teetering edge that resonates to a dark beauty...and a fundamental polarity that we can be ONE with...am I transcending...am I dissolving....I ask myself....is the world ending...is the world ready for a new species (post-sapiens!!) well....;)...both is the way...disintegrating always around the corner...

beautiful assessment of LOVE and Wilber....the integral feminine is definitely a focus of mine...so I tend to see love as one definition of spirituality (I think there are 4 so far)... the one about our openess and embrace of any level-or-line that we find ourselves embedded in....due to the shifting currents of life conditions and our coping mechanisms...

But yes, true love is definitely in the terriority as all facets of ourselves wrestle with the complexity, knowing our boxes, even concentric circles for that matter will always limit the radiance we can only discover through BEING....

but conscious map-making is definitely a cool hobby of mine...i might say myself...

Alright, our Heroic-Playful Hobbyist....look 4ward to meeting you and this dazzling energy of yours...

love&light

jAnA

Thank you so much, Jana, for your kind and thoughtful response. I really appreciate it, and enjoy this growing sense of community with you and the group. I'll make every effort to attend the next meetup.
Sincerely,
Eliot.