I am so grateful for this forum, as from it, multiple community connections have cropped up and self-organized. On top of our weekly Zoom chat groups (with another one coming soon), we have developed a WhatsApp group, as well as a Discord group that was mentioned by @jdj. These groups have allowed for a more direct form of communication directly into our phones, complete with live chat features, txt and audio. We have also begun to collaborate on various group projects, including a “Chicken Soup for the Integral Soul” anthology we are all planning on writing, as well as live retreats where we can get together and meet each other in person. Building this Integral community has brought a tremendous amount of joy, inspiration, and connection into my life, and I hope to share it with as many of you as possible.
And this is just the beginning. I want to ask you all: What is your most ideal form of community? Would you be content with this forum for the rest of your life? Or perhaps a text message group to directly share the more intimate features of your day to day? Or even a residential, co-housing community? A retreat 1x a year? Weekly video check ins? And what can we do to support you in building your ideal form of community?
Also: Is there a project, initiative, or idea that you would like more support with? In what way can an Integral community be of service to you in helping you to achieve your goals, personal or professional?
And out of curiosity, I would love to know why people don’t want to proceed further with building more Integral community: A lack of time? Or interest? Perhaps not feeling a strong pull, or perhaps all of your Integral community needs are already met?
Please let me know if you want to join/create a group or community initiative, and lets make it happen. Much love to all of you, and I look forward to reading your responses.
I am in the midst of an Integral project that will need some feedback from the Integral community at some point.
My modest ambition is to help take Integral mainstream by writing a novel with mass market appeal. (The first draft is about 4/5 done). The surface story is about the life of a stone-age priestess who ends up dying dramatically as a human sacrifice after helping her people with their transition from foraging to farming. I’m pitching it as “Clan of the Cave Bear” meets “Cloud Atlas” with some of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” thrown in. This is the surface structure, but the deep structure is Integral. I’ve been reading Ken Wilber’s books since 1983, one by one as he’s published them, and they’ve shaped my entire world view.
I’m hoping to find a corner of some Integral forum somewhere where a few folks would be willing to vet my presentation of Integral before it goes out to a wider public. I want to do this responsibly, in a way that meets the needs and standards of this community. Among other reasons, if I succeed in my moonshot, my formulation of Integral might be set in concrete in the public eye.
BTW my novel is, of course, “really” a parable about our own time of communal transition from First Tier to Integral. Yes, in the course of it I will be presenting my vision of a glorious Integral future for our planet.
And yes, there will be plenty of sex and violence. This was eleven thousand years ago. People had been Magenta for fifty millennia, and Red was just beginning to emerge as a cultural force.
Connection! Connection! Connection!
I need it! I realize how important it is for my well-being to be connected to others that seemed to resonate with all things Integral. It is absolutely absent in all popular conversation (at least in the dives I hang out in). I don’t want to feel alone. Since joining IL, meeting you, getting on Zoom, getting connected with Discord and I am finally feeling a balance. I love the support. I love to give support. We are all looking to belong to something larger than ourselves and I do believe in order for me to continue to grow I need others that are going through the same battle and can give me the feedback I need so I don’t grow stagnant.
I mean, how could that not be an instant best seller?
Really looking forward to your “pitch” – let me know when you are ready and we will make it happen. Happy in any way to help you blast it out to the larger Integral community, and eventually – the world!
@lxvythrs, I totally share your deep craving for connection with Integral peers and buddies! And, like @HawaiianRyan, I am so grateful to this platform for making it possible for us to connect with each other. I envision a mutually reinforcing “network of networks” (how very integral), beginning with this very IL platform, along with the array of zoom chat, WhatsApp, and Discord groups et. al. that have self-organized around it, specializing and exchanging, organically evolving more and more structure that supports greater and greater consciousness, transcending and including …
Okay, I’ll bring myself back down to earth. At this moment, among the projects @HawaiianRyan mentioned above I am particularly interested in moving forward with that “Chicken Soup for the Integral Soul” anthology. I see it more as a “stone soup” anthology. Each of those who choose to participate can share something about what they bringing to our emerging we-space. Those of us who are writers/editors can help those who’d like to participate but for whom sitting down to write a blurb would be a speed bump.
I still am trying to find the arc a chapter. I don’t know how we all fit in. It really hasn’t been discussed to much. Do you have an idea about your entry?
If you are referencing my “Stone Soup” idea, I haven’t given any shape to what my entry in particular would be. So far I’ve been musing more along the lines of a list of questions that might spark ideas & help get people started. Like, what interests you so much in integral that you are even reading this? What are you bringing to the table? What in your life has brought you here? If you could be a superhero, what would your want your superpower to be? What would your corresponding vulnerability be? If you could be a supervillain, ditto? Fun stuff like that.
Thats about as far as I’ve gotten with it. If others are interested, I’d cheerfully put more effort into this.
I’ve started with an experience I had as a child at Catholic school regarding a lesson I was taught about God. I then reflected on all these pivotal moments I sought out God in my life.
Awesome! This week I will decide on a topic for my contribution to our Stone Soup, and start writing it up next week. Maybe if you and I get the ball rolling on this, it will encourage others to join.
If anyone else reading this is interested in joining the fun, but finds sitting down to a blank screen for a project like this daunting, I’d be up for doing a recorded voice conversation in a friendly interview. Then I could type it up into a first draft and bounce it back to you for your further input. The more people who contribute to a stone soup, the tastier the result.
That sounds like a great idea Karen. Let me think of the best technological tool for this. I think the discord has a speech to text option. Is this accurate @jdj?
Okay, @lxvythrs, I have typed up a first draft of a possible Stone Soup offering: “How I Saved the Life of a Black Widow Spider and Was Given a Vision of the Universal Mind in the Fifth Dimension.” (This probably needs a shorter title, eventually).
Let’s encourage others to throw some stones of their own into this pot, shall we?
There is no plan for “Integral Stone Soup.” As yet it’s just a gleam in the eye of a few of us. But if more people get interested (like you?), we can certainly make some plans, and maybe even act on them.
“Stone Soup” is my own provisional idea for a name. “Chicken Soup for the Integral Soul” had been proposed, but in my mind I’ve translated it into S. Soup, because in the fable about stone soup the whole is more than the sum of the parts, and that’s the point. Something new is emerging through our community, at a higher level of complexity than ever before. I have no idea what new transcend-and-include holon might emerge out of a bunch of us collecting our stories about what draws us to integral. But I’d love to find out.
If some of us do go forward with this, it might end up with a very different name. It could end up being a very different project.
And in my mind it is most definitely intended as a community-building exercise – plus being fun.
Hey, if I tell a sound-bite version of my Black Widow Spider story here on this forum thread (like maybe 3 paragraphs), will you share your rattlesnake story here too?
While I would certainly enjoy hearing a bit of your spider story, the snake doesn’t want to be talked about right now; I fear I’ve already said too much
So a community-building exercise–within the current Integral community? for a larger community of us and could-be, might-be integralists? (i.e. as a way to interest others in integralism?).
