We Have Integral Cognition People

I am going to take a bit of a turn here and refrain from speaking about the family and child-rearing issues I have in the previous few entries collected here on this blog. I want to turn in another direction and finally zone in on what has been bothering me about the whole Integral Scene developed and fostered by Ken Wilber. I feel that I have finally come across a way of explaining what has completely 'turned me off' about the whole Integral Spiel as of late.

I'll begin by prefacing the remarks and comments that are to follow with an underlying appreciation for what Ken Wilber initially accomplished prior to the turn of the Millennium. In the years prior to about that of 2000 I was taken up with the promise of Ken Wilber's vision as formulated in his many books. I found Sex, Ecology, Spirituality especially powerful. What Ken poured into that work absorbed me for several years. From the moment of its release in 1995 until the year 2000 I was nothing short of being steeped in the comprehensive nature of what Ken Wilber was sharing with the world through his calling. That process culminated, for me, in the authouring of the works Framing The Postmodern: Language, Culture, Commerce, & Consciousness, as well as Naked Guide To Life & Death: Experts, Extremism, Evolution & Education.

It was the comprehensive nature of the philosophy that Ken Wilber espoused that resonated with me. It was as if in reading Ken Wilber's books I was listening to a voice that issued forth from my own Higher Self.

And yet... and yet... things do change.

Over time I began to resonate less and less with Ken Wilber's work. I stopped being interested in his books. I was actually unable to make it through many of his new releases (which as many of you may know were generally rehashes of earlier inspirations, like a song-writing trying to recreate the formula for an old Top Ten hit). I wasn't resonating with Ken Wilber anymore. I found myself being more and more critical of the populist direction he was taking with his work. The marketing and the hype, the hyperbole and the advertising exaggerations of 'changing the world' were abrasive to me. I was not jiving with Ken.

Yet, I was still taken up with the promise of what a comprehensive philosophy would look like. It wasn't Ken Wilber's vision that held me in thrall anymore. It was the underlying nature of a comprehensive philosophy--i.e., a non-reductionistic philosophy--that I sensed as being the original basis for my resonance with Ken Wilber's work and what I might now choose to call 'Integral Cognition.'

Others might glean that same sense from a Sri Aurobindo or a Jean Gebser, or a William Irwin Thompson. Others might recognize the comprehensive philosophy within the historical period of Renaissance Europe, where art and science, ethics and aesthetics were once again appreciated for their overlapping nature.

The Renaissance is now widely perceived as being a transition point between the Medieval Era and the Modern Era. It was a time when the overlapping, comprehensive nature of the Zeitgeist allowed an old age to pass away and a new age to be born. That new age was the Modern Epoch.

So, fast forward 500 years or so and land in the late 20th Century were a new form of comprehensive cognition is sprouting up amongst the human population and maybe you can begin to appreciate how the Integral Period (not unlike the period of the Renaissance) is itself going to be a bridge to a New Era.

Medieval. Modern. Postmodern?

Synthesis births new possibilities. Even in terms of what we now know about genetics it is oncreasingly obvious that cross-pollination and hybridization are essential for the creation of new life and novel forms. There could have been no Modern Era without or apart from the Renaissance. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada! So much of what we have come to appreciate about the Modern Era--the Age of Modernity--could not have been possible apart from the spirit of syncretism that marked the Renaissance as the Time in which it was. Art fed Science, Science nurtured Art. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty found themselves once again in each other and were not left to lie down in separate beds... distinct categories... alone on there islands of exile.

It was in the Heart-Mind of those like a DaVinci, a Michelangelo, and a Marsilo Ficino that the syncretism of the Renaissance first took root and began to emerge. The exiled Trio of Lovers---Goodness, Truth, and Beauty--where rescued from their solitary confinement and reunited in the consciousness of those lone souls and solitary individuals from whence whole Historical Movements--which inevitably sweep up the masses (planets and populations alike)--begin.

It as if the Fragmented World comes back together in us. It is as if the dissociative distress of a Culture is healed in our Heart first. It begins in the rare individuals who sense the diabolical nature of dissociation and what that dissociation breeds in the consciousness of individuals on the level of the particular and whole species and planets--if not universes--on a far grander scale. That dissociative distress becomes a pain: a form of suffering that demands redress. For the wounded are the world and the world seeks healing through the wounded. 

Thus, those who feel and sense the nature of the suffering present in their times are compelled towards Wholeness and Comprehension (provided, that is, that they don't seek to numb and anaesthetize themselves to the wound through everything from sex and romance--i.e., losing themsleves in others, even Integral Movements and Evolutionary Spiritualities!--to drugs and drink, or distracting forms of popular culture via entertainment and media). Where so many forces conspire to tear the Fabric of Creation and Existence apart it can become a process of increasing difficulty to be mindful of the overlapping nature of our many dimensionalities. For instance, where evolutionary biology may reduce you in your imagination to the collection of so many competing 'selfish genes' it can be hard to remain aware that you are not 'just that!' 

It is painful to be reduced to less than your Nature. It is also painful to be confined to less than your Potential. This is why we can state that suffering is often no less nor more than you denying you your Self. Deny you your Nature via Self and you suffer now. Deny you your Potential via Self and you suffer now. Both or either can result in the most chronic and debilitating forms of suffering imaginable. And the trick I am hoping to expose here is just how it is that the dissociative distress of denying both Nature and Potential are culturally-accepted and reinforced terms and conditions of our present existence.


...... to be continued.