Everyone Is Right

We all possess a unique constellation of traumas, enacted by your own unique kosmic address, and which can lead to your own unique wisdom. This is what we hope to help you uncover today.

As the star of Judge Judy, Judith Sheindlin presides over the #1 show in US daytime television, where she rules on small-claims disputes drawn from real-life litigants across the country. Now in its 23rd year, Judge Judy attracts 10 million viewers a day who are eager to watch the 76-year-old grandmother transform into a Valkyrie for Justice, laying waste to the mendacities of cheating lovers, thieving landlords, lying teenagers and meddling mothers-in-law. In this episode I examine her genius and her enormous contribution to the evolution of consciousness and culture. —Jeff Salzman

Many integralists are fans of Otto Scharmer, MIT professor and developer of “Theory U”, a brilliant tool for activating higher stages of consciousness that has gained wide acceptance in organizations. As a leading public intellectual Dr. Scharmer also writes about politics and culture. In this episode, integral psychotherapist Dr. Keith Witt and I discuss Scharmer’s political theory as presented in a popular and much-shared article, Axial Shift: The Decline of Trump, the Rise of the Greens, and the New Coordinates of Societal Change.

In this special Devil’s Night interview, our good friends Bruce Alderman and Layman Pascal talk to Hofman and Daemon, former members of The Satanic Temple in New York, and founding members of the Satanic organization LORE: The Satanic Collective of NYC, about the history of Satanism and the new Integral and Metamodern-ish forms that are currently emerging. These ain’t the baby-sacrificing satanists your mother was afraid of in the 1980s. They’re the sort of satanists who build statues of Baphomet outside of government courthouses in order to protect free speech and the separation of church and state from religious fundamentalists who are determined to legislate their own mythic morality. They are not anti-Christian, anti-spiritual, or even anti-religious — in fact they want to help integrate the apparent polarities between spirituality and sensuality, between masculine and feminine, and between light and shadow, pulling all of these together into a sort of “transcendent hedonism” that fully honors the dignity of the separate self even while plunging it into a far more expansive space of selfless awareness. Their approach is something we might call a “social tonglen” — becoming the darkness, playing the scapegoat, and consciously taking the hits, all in service of achieving greater social good. “Everybody kind of knows the Socratic ‘daemon’ — that there’s some kind of higher indwelling spirit that may have been unnecessarily excluded throughout history, and to which we might turn for real guidance in ourselves or as the essence of ourselves. But we also know what it means for a drug addict to go to a self-help program and says ‘he’s got a demon inside him’. So there’s a way for the darkness to draw you down, or to draw you up, and there’s an archetype or a figure that can represent either of those. And for most people they’re very conflated. People who are hyper-reactive against something like ‘satanism’ — even very sophisticated people can be weird about it — and one of the reasons is their own non-integrated shadow, but another reason is they’re aware that there’s a tangle between the evil they don’t want, and the evil they do want.” —Layman Pascal So join us as we take a short walk on the dark side, where demons and daemons alike dance to the throbbing rhythm of a living, breathing, ever-evolving universe.

The Integral Vision: Origins and Applications — 04 — The Architecture of Growth by Integral Life

The Integral Vision: Origins and Applications — 03 — Taking Perspectives on the Culture Wars by Integral Life

The Integral Vision: Origins and Applications — 02 — Communism, Postmodernism, Women's Leadership by Integral Life

The Integral Vision: Origins and Applications — 01 — The Origins of the Integral Vision by Integral Life

How do we better manage the inherent fractures and fragmentations of the digital world while bringing more embodied wisdom and compassion to our online interactions? One of the central dilemmas facing the integral generation is the fact that the integral project is largely taking place via the internet, using platforms like Facebook that are ill suited to healthy integral discourse — a sprawling flatland where misinformation spreads like wildfire, where the loudest voices dominate the discussion, and where narrow views receive more attention than nuanced arguments. Platforms like these are designed from the top down to provoke strong emotional reactions among its users, governed more by extractive social engineering algorithms than by the natural nexus-agency of the communities that convene there. It’s no wonder that we are seeing study after study about the deleterious effects social media is having upon our culture, our lives, and our own sense of happiness and belonging. Which is why Ryan and Corey wanted to take a closer look at this issue, and try to provide some fairly simple perspectives and practices that might help you inhabit and engage your digital life with more skillful authenticity, resilience, and kindness. Watch as they speak to the challenges many people experience around both managing and participating in today’s online communities, and how to overcome the seductive pull toward unhealthy polarization and disembodied reactions.

Need help shifting gears from mental map-making to actually inhabiting the spiritual territory? Watch as Ryan Oelke and Corey deVos explore what it means to truly inhabit and integrate our contemplative practice and our moment-to-moment experience of life. Perhaps you’ve experienced this for yourself — you are sitting on a meditation cushion, eyes closed, and you ask yourself, “am I meditating right now? Or am I only thinking about meditation?” This conversation helps bring bit more discernment around questions like these, as Ryan leads us in a practice to help us to shift from a predominantly mental or imaginal enactment of spirituality to an authentically lived spirituality that can respond to the various pains and pressures of existence with greater presence, empathy, and skillful action. Corey also shares how his daughter’s medical journey helped to fundamentally transform his own spiritual life, stripping away so many of the ornaments and embellishments of the “spiritual mind” and leaving him with a deeper and more intimate sense of what really matters. If you are also struggling to bring more embodiment, more grace, and more discernment to your own spiritual life, you don’t want to miss this wonderful conversation between Ryan Oelke and Corey deVos.