Everyone Is Right

Full episode here: integrallife.com/the-science-of-subtle-energy/ In this episode of The Ken Show we take a look at an essay by Ken Wilber titled “Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Subtle Energy” (available to download for free!) which offers an elegant summary of how these energies might be accounted for by integral metatheory and integrated with our scientific understanding of the universe. Throughout Ken’s career, he has been very careful to include only those dimensions of experience and reality that have a rigorous body of evidence behind them (and of course that evidence can come through any coherent methodology in any of the four quadrants/eight zones, and can be enacted by either the “eye of flesh”, the “eye of mind”, or the “eye of spirit”.) But when it comes to things like subtle energy, it’s much more difficult to find this sort of repeatable and rigorous evidence. We have tons of interior-based anecdotes from people throughout history about their experiences with subtle energies — however, because the field is also littered with all sorts of magical thinking, charlatans, and snake oil, we need to be that much more careful about how we go about collecting evidence. What’s more, because we are discussing exterior-quadrant realities here (we’re really talking about various forms of matter-energy) this means that we ultimately require exterior-quadrant methodologies in order to verify and/or falsify the existence of subtle energies. Which means that, until we are able to produce instruments capable of registering and measuring these phenomena in a clinical setting, the question of whether or not subtle energies exist seems to remain largely unverified and unfalsifiable. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use the evidence we do have in order to come up with some strong hypotheses about how these energies might work, as Ken does in this essay. Who knows, perhaps these hypotheses will help guide the future of subtle energy science — simply by telling us where to look, and what to look for. Full episode here: integrallife.com/the-science-of-subtle-energy/

What does it mean to be a bodhisattva in the 21st century? In the Buddhist tradition, a Bodhisattva is someone whose pursuit of enlightenment has become inseparable from the enlightenment of other beings, and have dedicated their lives (multiple lifetimes, in fact) to practicing compassion and helping others to wake up — even postponing their own “final” enlightenment until all other beings have become similarly awakened. In this episode Ryan and Corey are joined by our very good friend Vincent Horn, co-founder of Buddhist Geeks, in order to discuss Ryan and Vince’s decision to fully embrace the Bodhisattva Vow in their lives and in their spiritual practice. What unfolds is a fun and fascinating conversation about compassion, commitment, purpose, meaning, and skillful means — as well as some much-needed guidance to help us bring ourselves into deeper alignment with our own inner Bodhisattva, regardless of whatever spiritual tradition (or lack thereof!) that we find ourselves in.

Watch as Lisa and Corey preview the new season of Integral Life Practice Experiences now available on Integral Life, taking you deeper than ever before into your own growth, awakening, and life purpose. Lisa also discusses her exclusive new program, which she is calling Live Your Deepest Yes, a 12-week live group coaching series that will help you better align yourself with your innermost truth, your passion, and your own unique contribution to the world. What is your Deepest Yes? Deep within, at your very core, there is a voice. This voice is the guiding wisdom that we all have access to. When you clarify and attune to that place inside, you gain access to that voice – learning first how to listen and then speak and act from it. This is the source of right speech, right action and right livelihood. It is the ground from which your purpose, values and ethics arise organically across the various domains of your life. When your heart, body, mind and soul are aligned, you experience a profound sense of rightness all the way down. This is your truth. The truth about who you are, what you want and why you’re here. This truth is the very thing that has been guiding your quest for authenticity, purpose and meaning. When you touch this truth, you experience it like a tuning fork sounding from the core of your being that reverberates out to dynamically interact with life. I call this truth your Deepest Yes.

In this very special episode of The Ken Show we are joined by Aissatou Diallo, Zoe Tray, and Noah Delorme, students at Choate Rosemary Hall who have been studying Ken Wilber’s seminal book, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality for their senior year project. Watch as Ken, Aissatou, Zoe, and Noah unpack many of the core insights of SES and discuss the unique value Integral work holds for a new generation of thinkers, leaders, artists, and scholars. We were absolutely blown away by the depth, care, and curiosity that shone through these students’ questions, as well as the obvious enthusiasm they have for the integral project. We are always trying to find new ways to bring integral ideas to new generations, and presenting these ideas in a way that speaks more directly to the unique life conditions each generation is facing. Seeing these young faces light up behind their masks as they engaged with Ken was a pure delight, and offers a new source of hope for the ongoing unfolding of integral ideas, as well as for our shared future on this planet. Topics include: 0:00 – Ken’s writing process while working on SES 10:43 – Why is spirituality important to the integral model? 26:52 – How do we know how many people are at each stage? 42:09 – How important is community for spiritual awakening? 53:45 – How can Integral help people become better activists? 1:10:22 – How do we integrate relativity? 1:16:01 – Can Integral help people with poverty and substance abuse? 1:29:37 – How does emotion influence our development? 1:40:36 – How do we communicate integral spirituality to non-religious people? 1:43:24 – How does awakened love influence our relationships? 1:52:00 – How does Ken manage fear?

Listen to the full discussion here: https://integrallife.com/practice-the-wound-of-love/ “Real love hurts; real love makes you totally vulnerable and open; real love will take you far beyond yourself; and therefore real love will devastate you. I kept thinking, if love does not shatter you, you do not know love. We had both been practicing the wound of love, and I was shattered.” —Ken Wilber Watch as Ken and Corey explore the ongoing unfoldment of love along the paths of Waking Up, Growing Up, Opening Up, Cleaning Up, and Showing Up. What follows is one of the most powerful, transformative, and touching conversations that Ken Wilber has ever recorded. We begin this long discussion about the Integral path of conscious love with a heartfelt discussion of the Grace and Grit film that just released, as well as the underlying and undying love that Ken and Treya shared — bringing us right into the heart of this conversation and setting the tone for everything that follows. Part 1: The Timeless Love of Ken and Treya Part 2: Waking Up to Love: Spirit in 2nd-person Part 3: Growing Up to Love: The Unfolding Heart Part 4: Opening Up to Love: Multiple Intelligences Part 5: Cleaning Up Our Love: Obsession, Narcissism, Fear, Pain, and Resentment Part 6: Showing Up as Love: Inhabiting the Heart Listen to the full discussion here: https://integrallife.com/practice-the-wound-of-love/

Watch the video version here: https://integrallife.com/inhabit-your-perspective/ Most of us are already familiar with Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrant map, but this presentation goes one step deeper — we aren’t just looking at the quadrants themselves, but the “inner” and “outer” dimensions of each quadrant (i.e. looking at each quadrant from the 1st-person, and from the 3rd-person). Taken together, these eight zones refer to the most fundamental perspectives that we can take on any phenomenon, and are most often used to organize and situate all of the major methodologies and schools of thought that we use to generate and confirm our knowledge. But these aren’t just boxes on a piece of paper; they represent the fundamental perspectives that are available to you right now. We unconsciously slide through these perspectives all the time, and all we need to do is recognize what sorts of perspectives we are taking, so that we can use and inhabit them more consciously. Which is why we wanted to do this episode — to step beyond a mere cognitive understanding of these zones, and instead help find a way to feel into these perspectives and to experience them from the inside out. We want you to become more fluent in this sort of perspective-taking, without requiring a working knowledge of Foucault, Varela, Luhmann, etc. In other words, this isn’t another hyper-cognitive discussion of integral theory. This is more of a “perspectival yoga”, and we hope that by the time you have finished watching this episode you will be more familiar with these fundamental dimensions of your experience, right now in this very moment. One of the very best and most common applications of the eight zones is to art, as has been very thoroughly explored by minds like Ken Wilber, Michael Schwartz, and others. In this episode we are doing two things simultaneously — using these perspectives in order to more fully appreciate the art we love, while also using art in order to more fully understand and inhabit these perspectives. We do so by boiling these perspectival zones down to some very fundamental questions we can ask about any artwork or object we happen to be looking at. Listen as Bruce, Ryan, and Corey help make these perspectives a bit more intuitive by noticing how often we are already taking them in our daily lives, how to apply them to any of our experiences.

We invite you to meet the maker of the movie, Grace and Grit, Sebastian Siegel, in Q&A with Nomali Perera, followed by a session of Integral Life Practice. Inspired by one of Ken Wilber’s most beloved and acclaimed books, Sebastian Siegel set out on a decade-long journey of dedication and commitment, ultimately, to Love. In this conversation, Sebastian shares his brave decision-making process around committing to this project, what writing, producing, and directing this movie has meant to him, and how he steps into his work--no matter what that might be--as an Integral Life Practice. Sebastian also discusses several other themes of the movie such as the challenging aspects of how he attempted to include the many voices of Treya and Ken Wilber as subjects and authors, the meta-voice of the transpersonal, plus, Sebastian's own voice as the creator of the movie. We also heard from Sebastian--after having been in this project for a decade--what "grace" means to him, and who Treya has become to him, a beloved woman in the integral community that not many of us had the privilege of meeting. Once the interview ended, Nomali then led a short contemplative practice in exploring the topic of grace and grit as something we all need in order to live purposefully, face challenges and birth our dreams in the same way Sebastian did, and in how Ken and Treya exemplified in this profound story of transcendent love. Released on the 4th of June, 2021, starring Mena Suvari and Stuart Townsend, with Frances Fisher, Rebekah Graf, Nick Stahl, and Mariel Hemingway, the movie Grace and Grit is now available on Amazon Prime, Apple and other streaming services, as well as in select theaters.

Forgiveness — it is easy to say, but how many of us actually know how to do it? Forgiveness is a deceptively complex act, involving a complex calculus of developmental intelligences — including our cognitive intelligence and emotional intelligence, our spiritual intelligence and self-defenses, our intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences, our moral and ethical intelligences. All of these are being “lit up” in different ways by the act of forgiving, and each is exerting its own influence upon the depth, span, and quality of our forgiveness. What’s more, if we are not engaging in a consistent Cleaning Up practice, then genuine forgiveness is that much more difficult to find, as resentment has a funny way of wrapping itself around the hidden residues of our unexamined shadows. To authentically forgive — what Barbara describes as “the absolute refusal to hold ill will against someone for what they did or didn’t do” — can actually be tremendously challenging. Fortunately Barbara Hunt is with us to help make it simple. Watch as Barbara talks to Lisa and Corey about forgiveness as an integral “master practice” — a practice that scaffolds and supports the rest of our various waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up practices. We currently live in a culture that has taken a healthy Green-altitude ideal — “I am responsible for not offending other people” — and twisted it into a self-serving stance that says “you are responsible for not offending me”. This has resulted in a collective regression away from a healthy pluralism that can tolerate multiple discordant points of view, and toward something like the “grievance culture” (or “apology culture”) that we find today. But without an underlying “forgiveness culture” to support it, “grievance culture” can only end in more fragility, more tribalism, and perpetual resentment. Can we forgive ourselves and our own shadows in the Upper-Left quadrant, while still holding ourselves accountable to our own transformation? Can we forgive our shortsighted behaviors in the Upper-Right quadrant, while holding ourselves accountable to our own transformation? Can we forgive each other for our failings in the Lower-Left quadrant, while holding each other accountable to our mutual transformation? Can we forgive the historic currents and inertias of our society, as well as the flawed systems they have produced in the Lower-Right quadrant, while holding civilization itself accountable to transformation? Can we forgive a God who inflicts such terrible suffering and heartbreak upon our lives? In an era that is becoming increasingly fragile with every social media post, forgiveness has become the ultimate practice of anti-fragility. And it is exactly the panacea we need in order to liberate ourselves, to heal our cultural traumas, and to enact a more just society for all of us.

In this episode, Corey deVos and Ryan Oelke explore how to more fully inhabit our art and entertainment. We tend to think of “recreation” as a passive activity, but we actually share an active symbiotic relationship with our art and entertainment, both personally and culturally. We create art, which in turn re-creates us. We are constantly taking in the symbolism and themes and ideas from our surrounding cultural artifacts and reconstructing them as reference points for our own thinking, which then shapes the way we interpret and make sense of the world, whether consciously or unconsciously. We are re-creating ourselves time and time again every time we engage with our favorite films, music, books, television shows, etc. The goal here is to escape the cynically critical inertias of a culture that tends to define its tastes in negative space, and find a way to bring this ongoing cycle of re-creation into consciousness as much as we can — the art of conscious recreation. After all, who among us doesn’t have both an inner Tiger King and an inner Ted Lasso living somewhere inside us? Art is not inert, and our enjoyment of art is anything but passive. We have a deeply psychoactive relationship with our art and entertainment, often revealing territories within us that we never knew were there, and these psychoactive qualities largely depend on the kosmic address of both the artist and the observer. In this episode we hope to make some of these psychoactive properties a bit more noticeable, and demonstrate how integral perspectives can radically increase our enjoyment and appreciation of art and culture. It’s not just about enjoying integral art, but enjoying art integrally. Topics include: 0:00 — The Art of Conscious Re-creation 21:39 — Why Are We Talking About Entertainment? 29:31 — Grace and Grit: A Personal Appreciation 44:52 — Enacting Integral Art vs. Enacting Art Integrally 49:23 — Nine Inch Nails and the Path of Awakening 1:01:22 — Cutting Through Cynicism: Ted Lasso, Life Coach 1:05:50 — Looking Forward

Marxism, also known as “dialectical materialism”, continues to exert a tremendous influence in our society, both in terms of pro-Marxist ideas on the left and anti-Marxist positions on the right. One of the simplest ways to define Marxist epistemology is the following statement: “Examine any alleged state of affairs as related to and distinguished from a total environment, and you will know whether or not the sentence alleging that state of affairs is true.” What are the positive contributions of Marxism that we want to include in a more integral epistemology? What are the unhealthy or negative limitations that we want to avoid? This is a continuation of the previous episode of The Ken Show, where we walked through a dozen major schools of epistemology and took note of their strengths, limitations, and how they fit into a more comprehensive and Integral method of sense-making. If you haven’t watched that episode already, we highly recommend you do so! Why is this important? In an age where legacy media is on the decline and has being largely replaced by social media, we are currently experiencing a total epistemic collapse of historic proportions — resulting in a collective state of aperspectival madness that Ken has been warning us about for decades. The world is broken, and no one can quite agree how, which makes our most pressing social and planetary problems (particularly the truly wicked ones) almost impossible to solve. But don’t worry, this could actually be good news. Our present epistemic breakdown is one of the central life conditions of our time, and Integral metatheory is uniquely positioned to help us piece our fragmented and fallen world back together. While things will almost certainly get worse before they get better, these are precisely the sort of conditions that call integral solutions forward, and the sorts of conversations where those solutions will eventually emerge.