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It is truly an extraordinary time—for the first time in history, all of the most important insights from all the world's cultures, spiritual traditions, arts, and sciences are available to just about anybody with an internet connection, or at the very least a library card. Still wading in the shallow end the information age, even now we can be said to be experiencing somewhat of "an embarrassment of riches," surrounded as we are by a stupefying quantity of data, spilling forth from as many perspectives and fields of inquiry as we can possibly imagine. It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by this ocean of information, as many in fact do—after all, without an adequate map to make sense of all the billions of shouting voices in the world and throughout history, how can we possibly navigate ourselves through the world, or even to make sense of our own lives?
Fortunately, just such a map is finally beginning to emerge. The Integral map is the very first of its kind that is able to successfully synthesize all of the maddening complexity of the world, to identify the patterns that connect all of the seemingly disparate attempts to understand ourselves and our world, and to put all of the pieces of the universe together into a single jigsaw effigy of the human condition.
Of course, this sort of visionary grandiosity is nothing without a genuine community to help embody the Integral approach, and to reflect its healing consciousness into the rest of this world. And that is exactly what Integral Life and Integral Institute aspire to cultivate, offering all of the tools the emerging Integral community needs to find each other—even while still finding ourselves—as well as exploring new and innovative ways to help the Integral vision to continue finding expression in today's hectic world.
* Note: In this clip, which was recorded several years ago, Ken mentions the launch of Integral University, which has since been subsumed by the soon-to-be-launched Integral Life web portal, currently under construction. Stay tuned in the next several weeks for exciting updates from Integral Life, including the imminent arrival of this new website, where many of these community tools will begin to come online for you all.
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States of consciousness are ever-present possibilities, the five most common being gross (waking), subtle (dreaming), causal (deep sleep), witnessing (turiya), and nondual (turiyatita). Each state can be penetrated with full wakefulness and clarity, whereupon, the great traditions say, one can contact deeper and deeper dimensions of reality, and ultimately awaken to the nondual Ground of All Being. Stages of consciousness refer to the developmental structures in consciousness through which each of these profound states will necessarily be interpreted. Using Gebser’s terms, these stages run from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral and super-integral—everyone starts at square one at birth, and stages can’t be skipped (that’s what makes them stages). But here’s the fascinating thing: all five major states of consciousness can be experienced at nearly any stage of development! Using five states and the seven stages mentioned here, that’s at least 35 distinct spiritual experiences, and the fact is, they are all real. Without a framework that can take into account just how wide (states of consciousness), and how deep (structures of consciousness), the spiritual-religious terrain really is, any conversation about spirituality in today’s world is going to be sorely lacking.
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Here Ken discusses some of the overlap between psychoanalysis and spiritual practice, most notably the shared commitment toward making subject into object, allowing greater and greater release from all that torments us—whether neurosis, addiction, or the world of form itself. He pays particular attention to a common mistranslation of Sigmund Freud, the famous quote "where id was, there shall ego be"—an unnecessary convolution of his original words: "where it was, there shall I become." |
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Here Ken discusses the inherent paradoxes contained within the perennial questions, "Who am I, and why am I here?" It is clear that these questions are eternally bound together, making it impossible to answer one without the other—if you want to know your place in the world, you need to wake up to who you really are, and vice versa. Simply asking the question "who am I" is enough to twist the hapless self into an existential knot, tumbling upwards through an endless cascade of addictions, immortality projects, and misplaced identities. Only by unasking the question we loosen the knot at the core of our souls—yet only by asking can we unask the question...! |
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