My anger is enormous when I read through all the hideous posturing, ugliness, and fear/pride hanging out behind the obvious aggressiveness and anger of both Ray and Kelley, who should both be ashamed and apologetic to us all for wounding a group founded in LOVE and dedicated to our highest purposes. Amen.
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“Do not feel lonely [wounded] the entire universe is inside of you” - Rumi
The only person who allows you to have an emotion is you. How can a follower of Rumi not grasp this basic Rumi proverb?
I will continue to tweak the nose of Green pretending to be Teal as long as it is thrust toward me.
I am not ashamed and never will be. Shame is unhealthy Orange. Thats a tell of a level you have some work to do my friend, Rumi. Whenever I catch a glimpse of shame I have tools to root it out.
Perhaps find more tools for “cleaning up” is my message. Again, a lacking in Integral Practice I see very clearly.
It is very easy to not read any word I say. In this digital age with millions of offers of engagement, where to focus that engagement is solely the readers responsibility
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Well, I would say the only reason to play is to learn this. So I dont mind running this simulation / game for multiple people.
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I myself see some of discussions in here that I find to be pointless. I just dont engage them. I giggle, shrug my shoulders and move on.
What makes the topic of anger and outrage different for me is I see it as an opportunity to provoke substatial “Cleaning Up”. Its like opening someones locked hoarding closet lol.
TBCH I predominantly post here when Im procrastinating unpleasant tasks. Normally with my morning coffee before I dig into solid Orange work for the next 8 hours. Orange generally pays well, lol
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New to Ken Wilbur, very new to this IP concept new to this forum……. This email banter was, unfortunately, my introduction to the forum. Love this level of discussing ideas, saddened that even here, blinders rule the roost. Shoot. I just cannot find “my people” who profess to seek peace, yet remain unaware of the sin inside of themselves.
One item caught my attention. What appears to be a sincere question from one of you to an unbiased third party. Hi. I am unbiased.
I believe the answer to “where in my first response was I a bully” is this. (Before you respond, don’t. This is for your inner work: “ I hear a lot of cult like language in reference to Ken. People with a culty view of Ken”
You unintentionally (benefit of the doubt!) triggered a response, using the words “cult language” and “culty”.
If we are to work together to solve world peace, we better figure out how to desire peace above being right rather than fall further into the abuse of duality thinking. Sorry if this unintentionally (is unintentional, please don’t be triggered) triggers someone……. Give me grace, I am new.
Extend that grace to others and try to work hard to couch your messages to each other in a way that can be accepted, not triggering.
Cool……. I look forward to reading further about the topic, Ken and the ensuing discussions, hopefully free of emotional responses.
We’ll see. Love and peace.
Larry
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Kelly,
I can’t help but thinking of Socrates in the Apology. At one point he basically says, “when my soul ascends to the Good, I will find better people to converse with.” In other words, thank goodness I am leaving here for a better place because I am tired of you fools. This looks like an old post so maybe your feelings have changed but my hunch is what you are experiencing is exactly right for someone that is more refined and integrated–perhaps one or two integrations over from the bell shaped curve.
I have felt from time to time that it is time for me to die, there is nothing more to do or experience. Change is the only constant and I get tired. There is no fear in my thoughts and feelings about death, it is just a fact. On the other hand, as you pointed out in your own words, I find at least one thing a day that renews my soul and keeps me vibrant and attuned to my surroundings. When I was young, I vowed that I wasn’t going to be a grouchy old man because as a youth they seemed ugly to me. I can understand how that can happen now, but I still keep that vow. For me, the one thing that keeps me going is an instable curiosity about the soul. The more I learn, the less I know. Anyway, again, I guess this is a safe place to talk about personal experiences rather than what I mostly see which is theoretical discussions. Best wishes, Scott
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WOW, I don’t know either of you guys but I think Ken Wilber can take care of himself. At this point, I don’t think he needs people to defend hm and may even be bone weary of debate and criticism. One thing I have to say is that when I read all the entries both you guys made, I did have a good laugh. I know this is serious for both of you but didn’t someone say that everyone can’t be wrong 100% and that everyone holds a bit of the truth (albeit with the Animal Farm caveat “all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”). Sorry Kelly, I don’t know how to put raybennett’s address on this comment as well.
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KSV, I couldn’t agree with you more. At one time I did a deep dive on the work of the Leaky family, especially Richard, Stephen Jay Gould and other popularizers. I read The Origin of Species which, as you know, was written in a user friendly way. It sparked about three years of studying our ascent and the argument between complexity and depth versus random change. I definitely came down on the side of evolution having a telos, a final cause (but not necessarily through homo sapiens.) This was reinforced when I had a “kundalini bomb” explode within me over twenty years ago. Whatever the white light is in my body is conclusively intelligent, caring, and healing. I don’t take my energy to be a basic component of evolution but it is suprarational and is a sign-post to even greater bliss and awe.
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I read your comments. Ill read them again next week to see what i might have missed on a first reading.
I guess where i am at now is Ken wrote some books with some good ideas. Kind of like a theoretical “scaffolding”. Ive read some of those and have subsumed them.
Over the past few years ive posted in here mainly when procrastinating other tasks. Every so often some person or another doesnt like my opinions even to the point they get angry. When engaging these people, what i have practiced was looking at the roots of my own emotions when interacing with these people.
This isnt the only place i do this. I tend to pull the curtain quite often that everyone else prefers to keep shut. There are all kinds of bullying and disfunctional behavior people attempt when trying to keep things hidden from themselves.
All i do is state my opinion and observe my own emotional reactions to people when they become strongly emotional about my opinions.
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I hear you. As a newcomer I have definitely noticed a tendency to use technical jargon rather speaking from the heart and mind in a spontaneous manner. It’s as if you don’t contribute some kind of polished presentation to the group, you will not have responses. That’s OK. Like you, I see all of this as a heuristic device that once learned needs to be forgotten when I am in the world. I don’t won’t to evaluate people based on their psychological color scheme because that leads to labeling which leads to objectifying thoughts and feelings. AQAl is a great tool but it too has to become second nature and not used as a day to day conscious framing of people and places. That’s why I won’t say I am turquoise or green or orange or amber because on some days I can dip in and out of all of these modulates. For me, this is a fluid process. Thanks for engaging Ray.
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Not quite. Those at Integral World https://www.integralworld.net/ DON’T HATE Ken. They just passionately disagree with many aspects of Ken’s Integral theory. Then you have David Long.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwzVM2uIx7U&t=3s&ab_channel=IAM-DavidLong
Don’t let his appearance fool you. What he has to say about Ken Wilber not living up to his own standards regarding Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris simply cannot be denied. I lost my faith in Wilber years ago. Mainly because, for all that he knows about higher stages of conciousness and all the rest, he spends his time in seclusion all the while the world continues down a shit hole. None of his theories have made their way into our universities and much less into politics. Then you have the faithful. Those who see Wilber as the measure of all things Integral hence worship him. They study his theories like the gospel truth. While such endeavors has some merit, it’s become an end in itself, i.e. spiritual bypassing. I also wonder if Wilber has truly achieved non-dual awareness like Gangagi, Adyashanti, and Eckhart Tolle. For years, I’ve listened to these spiritual teachers, respectively, and you can tell they speak and use words in ways that genuinely reflect their spiritual awakening. I just don’t see it with Wilber. He comes across far more as a master theorist than an enlightened master that I thought he was- or it may be I’m misreading Wilber. At any rate, I actually feel a sense of mourning about Wilber and Integral Theory. Mainly because it’s so complicated, I found out about it too late in life, and the illusions I had of Wilber as being “all that” gradually died because his theories -as transformational as they may be- were not making their presence felt in this sick world we live in. I’m just sick and tired hearing and talking about Integral as everyone is doing here in this Integral Community site but nothing changes for the better. Nothing will in my lifetime. It’s rather depressing to say that but I’d rather know the truth than follow the herd mentality of the mases that life “life is good” when it’s not always so.
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I remember a lecture by a few professors I once had. The first one says, “find a hero and follow them!”, and the second one says, “kill your heros and go your own way!”
and of course they were both right.
Someone mentioned McGilchrist earlier in the thread and he also echoes the polarity thinking method featured on integral.
Except McGilchrist’s points are more about how thinking often has a “grasping” and inherent “the thought itself is correct” quality, wheras the other mode of perception is inherently non grasping and open to contradictions and unknowns.
Maybe as we become more sensitive we really do feel the world is becoming worse—a sentiment several people have expressed.
And maybe integral theories, having like any theory that quality of self assurance, “being right” (who buys a book where the cover says, this “theory is probably wrong”) have to inherently be an ego trip and delusional?
It’s a map; it’s not the territory.
But there is also one thing which does get mentioned and that’s that people arrive at new worldviews on their own. It’s one of the selling points in Wilber’s books, where he seems to compliment the reader by saying that, “you already knew this”.
The world has become so much more complicated and people develop new ways of dealing. It’s one of the wonders of life. We don’t need Wilber’s theory to save the world, it’s already growing, and with all the mess that entails, and your suffering is part of the growth, if your ego needs a reason to suffer. Maybe just suffer anyway.
Maybe integral theory and the various groups and streams around it are helpful to the growth of the world, and it’s probably a vast complicated mixture of successes and failures. Integral Nazis? Integral Inquisitions? Integral Satan Worship?
Online forums don’t help as there’s often lots of content to digest and lots of themes all packed into one thread.
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Indeed. While in Theory Growing Up, Waking Up, and Cleaning Up theoretically have the same importance, in Practice I see Growing Up is often conflated with Waking Up while Cleaning Up is all but ignored.
The amount and degree of emotional charge and projections people who believe themselves to be Teal throw around in here really is absurd. I tell you - any time I have any kind of emotion that even hints of fear, anger or frustration I try to root out the cause. I understand that no other person or people can cause me to have an emotion that I don’t want to have. That is very basic “cleaning up” and “waking up” that seems to be absent from discussions in here. Without this very basic “practice”, discussions inevitably fall into fear, anger and frustration.
Interestingly, it is not even possible to discuss “Integral Theory” without some basic practice in place. As soon as someone says anything that might remotely trigger someone, the rescuers come in and try to flip the script to allow them to become persecutors and saints.
I realized last week that Integral is a “Dead” Theory.
A Dead language is one that no one any longer uses and it does not transform or grow. For example, Latin is no longer used day to day. It is pretty much the same as it was 2,000 years ago and has not changed or adapted.
Integral as a Theory cannot "Grow’ or change. Those who have a stake in it have decided that whatever Ken Wilber said is all that can ever be. There cannot be any changes or improvements to what Ken said. It has become very much a book like the Bible, with various canonical works. Those who were close to the Prophet, much like Matthew and Mark can publish official canon themselves insofar as they only say what they heard Ken said.
There is no analysis allowed of what Ken said as far as I see. To even present an analysis of the value or lacking of anything in the Canon invites ad homenim attacks against the person presenting it. DENIAL, DISTRACTION and DEFLECTION are more the norm in dealing with even gentle unbiassed analysis of the Theory. If you then point out that these efforts to Deny, Distract and Deflect are what they are - at best Sophomoric and academically unrigorous - you then have to confront the Mean Green Meme that will assign you as someone who just wants to attack people and someone who hates Ken. It all devolves into a rather absurd display.
Yes.
The “truth” is that a community stuck in an unhealthy discussion about Theory will never put anything into practice. Anyone waiting for the higher ups to “do” anything will be holding their breath for a very long time. Integral Theory will never be applied to Government except by a few individuals who get tired of discussing and start doing without waiting for anyone else to come on board.
I myself have been posting less and less in here with that realization in my mind. I have other shit to do that is far more important than an endless theoretical circle jerk.
The exception is when I see people like you who are on a cusp - an the brink of making a descision. The only way out of your connumdrum is to realize that you are the one who has to do something - before you get stuck in this didactic quagmire. It doesn’t even matter if we call it Integral Theory or use another name. What is important is that we begin applying it on a small scale where we can.
Clean Up, Wake Up, Grow Up.
The details are irrelevant b/s. Follow Ekharte Tolle or Jesus or whomever. It doesn’t matter who really, but find someone who can model “wake up” and imitate their practice. Same with Cleaning Up. As long as you are progressing towards those daily, your part of the world will become better during your lifetime.
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All quite true Ray. Let’s try to help each other with our shadows. Also, I believe that as a community our focus should be on preparing for Open Contact beginning in 2027 and the new world that will follow. I’ve made a separate post about it. This is why Turquoise and higher was/is necessary, as there wasn’t going to be time for us to work on the whole planet by ourselves.
All great points, but we should to put a pause on all of this and focus on everyone centering at Turquoise to prepare for, in my opinion a credible possibility of Open Contact in 2026/2027.
@raybennett — When reading your last post, I recognise, yes, the “world” is my projection, and thus people should own their own feelings and reactions — and that’s probably a huge step forward for anyone to do, and for me to work on doing also. Any day of the week, I have a reaction or judgement about some person, group, or situation, and it’s really hard for me to work out what’s really going on.
And I get the impression in your comments about integral communities that, you notice there’s a lot of people lacking awareness of their own shadows and projections. And I guess that’s true of any community, probably, insofar as it contains people.
If we never criticised each other, that would be odd. If we always criticised each other, that would also be odd.
When someone says, “Ken says…”, are they quoting Ken because they’re projecting all that is true and wonderful and godly onto a guy called Ken, or is it because one has a rational mindset and notes Ken has extremely high intelligence in some ways and has done a great deal of work, and so is rationally someone to take notice of… just like any other person who has made a significant contribution, like Mozart, Martin Luther King, the great philosophers, and the people who developed antibiotics? Take notice of, and know they will get things wrong also, as there’s limits and errors.
And unless I really know that person well, the one who says, “Ken says…”, then it’s hard to judge that person, where are they coming from? I might be projecting “amber” onto them, or projecting onto them that they are projecting “god” onto Ken.
The other thing is that we live in a global network and this forum is a tiny little corner (no offence to anyone), and I don’t know how, in this world where everyone can hear about everyone else, we would even define the “integral community”.
Ken’s version of a meta theory may be spreading and have some influence more that we know, or less than we imagine, or whatever. That’s regardless of how many people project “god” onto Ken, or how many are just working through their own personal shadow issues, or whatever. In some ways, I’d be more worried if some top politician claimed they were adopting Integral as the new official education system for the nation, because that kind of bureaucratic move would corrupt it, maybe like how Christianity Corp. corrupted whatever was useful in the original teachings.
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Yes, great points. To this particular one;
Perhaps we can use the stages to roughly map the movement itself, so at Beige it would be Spirit Then at Magenta it was Spirit & Ken, then Jeff, Nomali, Sean etc at Red and so on and now the theory/site/company/movement…at Teal is at 5,000+ users plus the IAM Foundation & everything and everyone else. Everyone is at different active and passive participation levels. At Turquoise and up it will be all beings right because even if they’re not consciously aware of it/studying it we should include them in empathy and very possibly they might rush to the site soon.
Yes, I think that’s interesting way to look at it!
A social group might be based in purple kinship (values line) and then have some common interest in integral ideas (cognitive line), or have more of a red base and a strong power dynamic (value), with some interest in integral ideas (cognitive), and so on.
But overall, the extent of the group and its influence is coming from its values line.
It also suggests that there could be many people out there being influenced by integral ideas, without them having to magically snap into turquoise values and social structures.
That means there can be many people who we here don’t like, yet they like integral ideas anyway.
And that’s inherent if integral is to be a positive way to help align the spiral. The spiral doesn’t go away—never can, never will do—at best we hope for better alignment. We hope green doesn’t so destroy amber that we’re thrown back to red, except now with nukes.
Sometimes there are situations so intractable that, the old adage comes to mind, in a sobering, accepting way, that “people are who they are”.
The spiral is as it is. And people are free to be who they are.
If the cognitive line is the leading one for most people, then maybe integral ideas—just as ideas—can help align the spiral, even whilst everyone continues to be where they are for as long as they need to be there at those values levels.
I can still be my values and just be a little more aware cognitively of where I’m inadvertently at odd with other values—I don’t have to like them—people don’t have to like Ken—but just add a quantum of acceptance to my worldview. A bit lighter, a bit less grumpy old man, a bit less demonising the opponents.
Groan, who are they calling Hitler today?
In that sense, maybe integral can be at its best what it is already—a philosophy, which as all great thinking, becomes adopted as habits of thinking, by many.
I’m pretty sure most of us can’t say why, specifically, free speech is so important. I certainly haven’t read philosophy. Those books are too difficult for me. But in my thinking, I kinda just have it already seared into my cognition that there’s something very wrong if free speech is getting eroded. Yes there are regions in the world where we hope free speech will grow, but for it to get eroded, that’s a real concern. And there must be many great thinkers who could explain that in depth.
I’d much prefer if people in life started asking, how shall we address the I, the We, and the It of this dilemma we find ourselves in, this conversation, this meeting, than be sat around asking whether we feel like a square or a circle or some other pop psychology gimmick.
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