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I am integral.  I have integral consciousness, and with it, the ability to see, to embody and to use, the goodness, truth and beauty it increasingly discloses to me.  What a gift!  And one that I will carry for the rest of my life whether I like it or not.  What a journey I have been set upon!

I stand on the shoulder of giants, the warriors of my parent's generation who fought so passionately and resolutely to secure my right to be whatever kind of human I desire.  They have taken me and my young integral brothers and sisters up to, and through the gates of second tier; the Kosmic scratches in the sand are already well trodden paths; the fundamental slabs have already being laid.  The integral highway is underway.

And yet, as the integral project gathers pace, the impulse is shifting, changing, growing.  The torches are being handed over; the old boomers and hippies are getting closer to their twilight zone, the master is fading, the student is growing.  "Hey teacher, leave those kids alone!"  This is not a revolution, this is an evolution.

Fuck, what a kick!  I feel so alive; the world is so vibrant before these new eyes of mine.  The lights are that much brighter, the space that much deeper, my consciousness is that much wider.  And do you know what the most exciting aspect is?  It only gets bigger baby!!

I wasn't in this place a few years ago.  My journey had stopped at a very different point, one that is shared by so many of my generation.  The playground we're given is so huge it's overwhelming.  I see so many of my peers fall by the wayside, wasted through drink or drugs, giving up because the choices are too many.  We're given the most freedom of any culture in the history of the world, we're told we can do and be anything we desire, the shackles are off, and we've been given the keys to the whole damned castle.  But with no map to know where the hell to go; its chaos.  It is chaos.

Ken saved my life.  I was floundering; overwhelmed by choice, lost through freedom, wandering the endless halls of a relativistic maze.  I was ready, had been ready for some time, yearning for the lift up to the next floor, but with no map to find my way there; I was getting desperate.  As my frustrations took hold, I got meaner and meaner, stretching my crumbling worldview past any sense of decency or rationality.  Cue Ken....

Wow, this makes sense, this works!  I've been fumbling for these truths for so long, and here they are, honest and tangible; bigger and more beautiful than I would ever have imagined.  Here was someone with stature, integrity, and wisdom giving me not only more truth than I knew was possible, but the permission to embrace it and use it.  That's where the love affair begun...

My life is about integration: learning to live in a unity of mind and body; introducing my estranged shadows to my conscious self, drawing them in, being them; constructing better understanding of the world out there, and in here; living in relationship, giving myself to friendship and love. 

I love to learn: clarity of thought, rationality.  If I have a distorted understanding of the world, my relationship to it will be distorted.  If I have a partial understanding of the world, my relationship with it will be partial.  If I have a distorted and partial understanding of myself, then I will be distorted and partial.  For me, learning is about cognition in the best sense: widening my ability to see, to perceive.  A good map not only helps me navigate the territory, it helps me see more of the territory!

I sometimes see caution thrown over the cognitive, rational side of integral, "be careful not to live in your head too much"; an understandable fear indeed, but one I don't feel, or share.  Is rational cognitive experience the only way I interact with, and learn from the world?  Certainly not!  What a death that would be!  But do I find a rational reconstruction and unpacking of my experience crucial?  Yes.  Without it-without an accurate map- my ignorance and shadows can get lost in contradiction, sauntering off on tangents, withholding and distorting goodness truth and beauty.  I know, because I have tasted that dream world.

Rationality and feeling are not opposites, it is not an either/or choice.  They are lovers; the perfect marriage.  Without each other, they wilt, unable to embrace the fullness of life.  Without feeling we lose touch with the world, floating, disembodied, and dead on the inside.  Without rationality we drift with no guidance, no filter, naked to contradiction and narcissism. 

I love to feel, to touch life.  I flourish through the visceral caress of relationship, of loving.  This is part of my very nature, instilled by my parents and their own world.  Rationality does not negate or repress this, quite the opposite, it allows it to flow freely, chaperoned by context and integration. 

Where this river will lead, I'm uncertain.  But this time I'm not lost, I'm exploring.  So here I sit, surrounded by possibility, guided by perspective, driven by truth, nourished by beauty; this is how I live.

I really, really hate this 2-dimensional box of online society - I hate Zaadz with a furious passion.  It's like eating cardboard.  There's no juiciness, no succulent hunk of flesh, to dissolve and digest.  There's no chewy gristle of awkwardness that, like it or not, you've got to do something with; on Zaadz I can just turn the page and move onto something easier, something that is soft and easy to chew. 

I love sitting with people around a table, talking, feeling, sensing, reacting, resonating and growing.  I want to buy my friend a beer, I want to hug them when I greet them, smell their breath that's pushed through unbrushed teeth, see the curry stain on their shirt, breath in their emotion when they tell me about the pain and joy of their relationships, embody the feeling of what they say, even when I don't resonate with it.  I want to know who I'm talking to with my entire being.

I don't want to belittle the grandiosity of life's connection, by talking to someone through a bloody computer; I hate the materiality of it.  I can't enter into it fully; I find it hard to concentrate, to participate. 

My own person, my living, pulsing self, my sentient holonic form - compete with passion, shadow and  wisdom; with old jeans, an addiction to tobacco and a love of beer; with spots on my face and hair on my toes; with a nuanced ability to read peoples energy, to enter into their energy - to receive it; with my deep seated insecurities and neuroticisms; with my love and adoration of other human bodies - this chaotic mix of brilliance and  paradox creates an artifact; a thing, a holon with no inside - no interior, no feeling, no intersubjective mix of unconscious cultural conformity or trans cultural creativity; no intention, no emotion; no consciousness.  Welcome to the world of the online blog.  I have created this thing, it bears the makers mark from my soul, it reflects my genius and my shadow - but it is only a partiality - a snap-shot of my glorious complexity, the astounding quality of the human form.  It is my creation, but it is not me. 

This artifact, this blog, will be read, it will experienced by another glorious human being, a human being complete with four quadrants, insides, outsides, love and shit.  Do they experience me?  No.  They see a momentary photograph of my soul - a glimpse of the holonic me, now passed into the AQAL matrix of the past moment, they see the object, but never the subject.

How can this be integral?  How can this be the fullest expression of human ‘we space', the miracle of ‘we'?  How can we truly know ourselves and each other in the flowing currents of sangha if we communicate via objects? 

Shadows hide in this warehouse of objects, this archive of blogs and forums.  I cannot resonate with my community, I cannot vibrate with their bodily transmissions, I cannot fully see into their minds, see their beauty and their scars, I cannot hold their hand when the pain engulfs them, laugh when their radiance shines forth.  I cannot touch and feel my friends when our interobjective space - our LR quadrant - is a f*cking website.

I cannot seek out their Kosmic address, hold discernment without attachment, seek the blind spots of my perspective with my whole body, and their whole body.  I cannot enter into them, use every last inch and angle of my wonderfully integrated and partial lens to know them truly, as truly as I am capable.  In this temple of objects I am castrated, stripped of my full spiritual gift, imprisoned behind the bars of objective communication - never seeing, never feeling.

The problem is, I'm really, really hungry for Integral love and embrace, Integral pain and suffering, Integral relationship - the sharing of our 1^st persons in an exchange of emotion, projection, and understanding.  I yearn for this every morning when I wake up.  I'm famished, starved of this community of soul food.  And there simply isn't enough food to go around -the menu is too damned small, the spattering of vertically enlightened torch bearers is so tiny that this online graveyard is the biggest scrap we have been collectively thrown.  So I'm stuck with you all.  And although I hate this flat, 2-D cut-out of your enormity and beauty - I'd rather eat integral cardboard than let my teal self die of hunger.

I got into Ken’s work a couple of years ago (jeez how time flies). I got introduced to it via my dad, he was well in with the men’s movement back in the day: Robert Bly, James Hillman etc, but has transcended them now ;) It was pretty amazing to have him and another very close friend there to validate things and put it all into context.

I remember very vividly the summer between my 2nd and 3rd years at uni, when I really got hold of it, talk about an accelerated transformation, it was intense. I think I’d been ready for it for a while, but had just got really blocked in very mean green values. Once I grasped the AQAL model my preconceptions and stereotypes crumbled pretty darn fast. I was pretty obsessed for the first 6 months or so, read and listened to just about everything I could get my hands on.

At the end of my third year I wrote my final thesis using AQAL. I’m a musician, and my degree was in Community Arts, I don’t think its called that in the States, but its basically a green meme approach to art – trying to include as many people in artistic opportunity whoever they are – very relativistic and egalitarian! My supervising tutor was *very* green, an avid student of Derrida – so it was really fun as you can imagine. Quite an education in skilful means, as well as a real lesson in 1st tier lenses; didn’t matter what I said/did he simply could not see Integral, and definitely couldn’t trust it. Aside form the frustrations of it, it was a wonderful crucible for my Integral writing, a real test!

Currently securing myself a stable salary before saving up some pennies for further study. Not sure exactly what direction my mission will go next, musing with psychotherapy, maybe music theory…not sure, and enjoying not being sure! Would absolutely love to do the JFK masters in Integral Theory, but the cost is way out of my reach.

Have made contact with a number of the people here in the UK, and am part of the online presence of the London Integral Circle, though London is a bit of a trek to attend their actual meetings. A bit frustrated at the level of Integral activity here, am trying to build relationships and push for more groups/events when the time is right.

I’ve just read the appendices in Integral Spirituality, they absolutely blew my mind. Ken is pushing into some really new and exciting areas, laying down those Kosmic grooves! Also just started the extracts from Kosmos vol. 2, stunning, stunning stuff. I’m chomping at the bit to get writing about this stuff, just need to work out in which avenue I feel most excited about, and could contribute to.