Will be keeping this nearby to play with soon…

“Part of integral activism is to be able to understand suffering in its proper context – so that we can make informed actions from a larger choice field. If I respond to my personal, human, ego-centric suffering without seeing it in a larger context-field – my actions will probably be ego-centric and tend to actually feed my own sufferings. If I respond to the suffering in my neighborhood without the context of power-privilege with respect to the larger community – then my actions will probably be self-serving, and actually add to the injustice. So yes, what is immediate, is that we acknowledge both suffering and injustice. In fact, each of us participates in suffering and injustice in various ways most of the time. What is needed, is the ability to see this in relation to larger and larger contexts. This is where integral understanding has a role to play.”

Love it Raul, and that critical yeast is weaving more fully into our masa! :)

Hey Artie…love this line above. Thanks for highlighting one of the potential (and frequent) downsides in the Integral community/wave…always striving for and valuing something Higher…in ways that often demean and devalue Lower stages/levels/waves. O, the quest for a truly integral embrace! :)

I like what Bonnie’s speaking to when she talks about it being about something “deeper and deeper”…and I strongly affirm Raul’s three-folding of depth, breadth, and height.

As is so widely the case with we modern humans, people are fairly successful at grasping ‘integral’ in a cognitive way, and yet it becomes a very different story with the questions of integral embodiment, integral being, integral practice, and integral maturity.

This touches on the more loose & open way I was trying to hold the word “integral” at our gathering…as a way of showing up fully and authentically in the world, a way of meeting the world, that arises from deep rooted interconnectedness, attunement to its/our systemic nature, and with a subversive love that softens, blurs, and gels…that clarifies, coheres, and connects.

Some quick thoughts…more to come!

p.s. non-warlike descriptors from Nature to replace “in the trenches of the front lines” – something about “engaging our growing edges” …others?

But, anyway, the “volume” or “mass” (by the way, dough in Spanish is “masa” which also means “mass”) as indicative of amount or degree of consciousness is problematic to me as it reminds me of those phrenologists founders of physical anthropology that equated skull size with brain mass with intelligence – the bigger skulls belonging to white Europeans. However, the image of neural connections in a brain of any size has more of an appeal.

So for me, the interesting thing, is that there is some kind of elemental “feeling” we have of “moving” in differnet directions. Curiously Aurobindo makes much of the same case. Your notino of “volume” means that a circle grows in volume in many aspects at the same time. This is what we might be trying to get at/ language.

good stuff

Arthur, you’re probably already aware of Wilber’s recent writings on IMP, integral methodological pluralism, which attempts to map out the variety/diversity of methodological approaches along the AQAL quadrants. Seems interesting, though I have no immediate use for it nor need to evaluate it. Bonnie, you might have some thoughts on this.

The conversation on “higher vs. deeper” (it did seem like an either/or proposition?) made me think of how I am tending to “view” development that might reconcile the polarity.

I think that by navigating the “depths” of our subjective experience (ideas, sensations, perceptions, emotions, identity, etc.) and connecting intersubjectively with “others” within the “breadth” of collective objective/material relationships (the plane in which life is lived and social power dynamics and injustice manifest), consciousness also “rises” or, rather, expands like a bubble or three-dimensional sphere encompassing height, depth and breadth. Perhaps, then integral consciousness is simultaneously higher, deeper and broader than fragmented, fixed and impermeably-boundaried selves, identities, consciousness.

Perhaps development, then, is measured (given the compulsion to measure things) not by levels of height or depth of the container of consciousness, but by its volume (size… warning: does size really matter?) or maybe by its capacity (potential and/or demonstrated) to make complex connections with the infinite number of elements within its field.

.. perfect! take the deeper intersubjectivity as the “measures” of the conceptual/complexity…. you might find that the “deeper” you are able to ground your own thinking, the more complex your ability to think…

but caveat here… Complexity theory does not mean that you can juggle more and more things– that means “complicated”. A jumbo jet is complicated. The theory of flight (dynamics of wind/ velocity) is complex.

good for you!

bonnie