The Daily Evolver

In this episode of The Shrink & The Pundit, Dr. Keith reveals what he’s learned in over forty years as a psychotherapist about cultivating integral love relationships, what the shift to a 2nd tier “love operating system” looks and feels like, and how you go about teaching couples to love completely.    Everything is relationship. Only a small sliver of our brains has to do with our sense of individual self—we’re designed to be social, to interact. We’re designed to love. Our development depends upon it. And yet, it isn’t always easy. Lofty concepts aside, what is the most practical way to teach people how to love and be loved? In this conversation with Jeff Salzman, Dr. Keith Witt–our Doctor of Love himself–shares some of what he’s learned in over forty years as a psychologist and therapist, where, he says, “it’s always about teaching people how to love more completely.” So what does an integral view show us about love? In first tier structures of consciousness we tend to focus on what’s broken. The orienting question is how do I fix it? This extends to our relationships with our families, therapists, friends and lovers, and of course ourselves. We are biased towards looking for problems. There is a wisdom in that orientation, naturally—it will help you—but only up to a point. And then it will hold you back. On the other hand, if we enter into relationship with a bias towards showing up and seeing what arises, more often than not what arises are our strengths and virtues. The orientation here is not fixing what is broken, but asking instead what can we create? Dr. Keith calls this a positive, flex-flow approach. The bridge from a fear-based operating system to a love-based operating system is built by fostering a dialectic between these polarities. As aspiring integralists, growing into second tier structures of consciousness, we want to expand our natural curiosity into those places that keep us from loving completely and welcome the conversation between fear and love. “In higher stages of development you want to turn towards your pain, to deconstruct it until it turns into love,” says Dr. Keith, “and then you have to embody it. It takes courage, and usually a lot of help.” Freud’s seminal idea of the unconscious reveals a rich field of practice in intentional development. A hundred years ago people didn’t get that our psyches are influenced by forces outside of our awareness. But now most of us do, so much so that as Jeff says, “by the time we reach the postmodern stage we can’t stand the idea that there’s a place inside of ourselves that we can’t see.” So we get more and more interested in our shadows. The most difficult type of shadow is the kind that we resist. Defensive states cut us off from our sense of self-reflection and are the main impediment to investigating parts of ourselves that may be fragmented and unloved. Changing our defensive states into states of healthy response is one of the main areas that Dr. Keith covers in his teaching because it’s so crucial to loving completely. Check out Dr. Keith’s new web course: LOVING COMPLETELY: 5 Ways Relationships Work…or Don’t, with over 50 modules designed to help you and your partner improve your connection on every level: physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. To learn about defensive states, Dr. Keith suggests you write down the last time you felt threatened. “What was your amplified or numbed emotion, distorted perspective, destructive impulse? Where was your empathy and self-reflection?” As you write, you may notice the balance of emotions changing. Over time your mental and emotional states start to become objects in your awareness. A little bit of daylight is all you need in there to begin making adjustments from a defensive response to a healthy response. People bridging into 2nd tier structures of consciousness begin to do this instinctively—the noticing, the turning-towards. When we think about markers or qualities of 2nd tier consciousness, we think of a radical acceptance of the human condition and an affection for all of its craziness, including our own. Turning towards awareness of self and embodying a change will put your attention less on fixing yourself or a partner and more on appreciating and cultivating both of your strengths. Like the simple Buddhist practice of noticing, it can transmute your suffering into wisdom and love. Listen to this episode of The Shrink & The Pundit podcast below. Click here to find out more about Dr. Keith’s new self-directed web course, Loving Completely, 5 Ways Relationships Work…or Don’t.

I start this podcast with a nod to a movie that I think qualifies as a work of integral art: Interstellar. It’s director Christopher Nolan’s latest film, a big-budget science fiction epic starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. Most science fiction is bound by scientific materialism, or scientism, the belief that, in integral terms, the seemingly interior aspects of reality are just expressions of the exterior aspects. In this view, consciousness is seen as a throw-off of the synaptic activity of the brain, free will is a delusion that gets us out of bed in the morning, and love is a mélange of chemicals and emotions that tricks us into mating and forming pair bonds. This is the prevailing “religion” of modernism, taken on faith by most of academia, the media and the rising (and welcome) ranks of atheists. It is the philosophical basis for artificial intelligence and Ray Kurzweil’s singularity, which posits that sufficient material complexity will create consciousness. It is epitomized by the TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, created first by Carl Sagan in 1980 and reprised last year by Neil deGrasse Tyson, which we explored with Ken Wilber at the last Integral Living Room (you can listen to some of our discussions here). Integralists may be friendly to scientism, recognizing that it serves as a corrective to millennia of magic and myth where humanity was in the thrall of spirits, gods and God. But we also recognize that scientific materialism, like all religions, is itself limited by what it cannot or will not see: the domains of reality that feature novelty-out-of-nothing, enthusiasm, identity, mutuality and love. In other words, the dimensions of reality that are non-material but no less real than material reality. In this more integral view love is as real as a rock. I believe that we are today witnessing the crescendo of scientism in our culture and the beginning of a serious challenge to its supremacy, a theme I feature often in my work. Interstellar is an example of this trend. It is a story told from all four quadrants, where love is explicitly seen as force in the universe. As Anne Hathaway’s character Dr. Amelia Brand says in a voice Nolan clearly wants us to hear: Love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, powerful, it has to mean something… Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. David Brooks also writes appreciatively about Interstellar for the same reasons in his column, Love and Gravity, in the New York Times (11/20). As always, Brooks skates close to an integral understanding that love and intelligence are fundamental features of the universe and are present all the way down to the subatomic world. But this isn’t an explicitly religious movie. “Interstellar” is important because amid all the culture wars between science and faith and science and the humanities, the movie illustrates the real symbiosis between these realms. …in the era of quantum entanglement and relativity, everything looks emergent and interconnected. Life looks less like a machine and more like endlessly complex patterns of waves and particles. Vast social engineering projects look less promising, because of the complexity, but webs of loving and meaningful relationships can do amazing good. As the poet Christian Wiman wrote in his masterpiece, “My Bright Abyss,” “If quantum entanglement is true, if related particles react in similar or opposite ways even when separated by tremendous distances, then it is obvious that the whole world is alive and communicating in ways we do not fully understand. And we are part of that life, part of that communication. …” I suspect “Interstellar” will leave many people with a radical openness to strange truth just below and above the realm of the everyday. That makes it something of a cultural event. ALL IS CALM, ALL IS BRIGHT We just had a big winter storm here in Boulder, 24-hours of non-stop snow, which quieted the world by laying a thick white blanket over everything. My house and garden look like a Currier and Ives painting, calm and bright by day and sparkly with lights at night. The eaves are glistening with the kind of crystal clear icicles I used to suck on like popsicles as a kid. It is a scene that really evokes a holiday spirit. And yet…I notice as I appreciate the beauty of the winter wonderland that I am simultaneously alarmed. Icicles mean my gutters and downspouts aren’t working right, which means my wooden eaves and soffits are in danger of rotting. And how can the slew of perennials I recently planted ever survive the ten-below-zero (-23C) temperature plunge? And, good god, seven feet of snow has fallen in Buffalo — what the heck is is going on with the climate? This is the trouble with adult development: we know too damned much. And the more we know, the more we know about what’s going wrong. As a result it’s hard to completely enjoy anything. This is, of course, an unavoidable hazard of growing up, whether as an individual longing for the uncomplicated joy she felt as a child, or as a society, which at every stage of cultural development mourns the loss of its simpler past. Now would be a good time to share a great artistic expression of this dilemma, via a performance from fifty years ago of a 22-year old soon-to-be superstar. This longing for the experience of a more pure and simple time is heightened at the holidays, a time of year about which we postmodern people tend to be rather ambivalent. We resonate with the “peace on earth, goodwill to man” part (although we wish they’d change “man” to “all”), but we’re turned off by all the religious assertions put forth by the traditionalists. Further, we are appalled by the shop-till-you-drop materialism of the modernists. For many of us the holidays have become one more checklist, another skirmish in the culture war and an exhausting duty to be festive and giving. One of the hallmarks of integral thinking is that evolution moves forward by differentiating and integrating. Atoms differentiate into elements and integrate to create molecules. Cells differentiate into muscle, liver, blood, etc. and integrate to become an organism. So it is with culture and consciousness. Ambivalence arises as a muddled mess of knowing too much, and differentiates into its component ideas and feelings, often polar opposites, which are then integrated into a bigger, wiser more flexible view. As evolutionaries we notice that the holidays evoke a set of negative feelings that hold that religion and materialism are what’s wrong with the world; and they evoke a set of positive feelings that hold that love and generosity are what will save it. Rather than have to figure out which one is right and which one is wrong, or to live in the approach/aversion ambivalence of one view polluting the other, we realize that the way forward is to see the truth of both views fully in a bigger, more flexible space of awareness that can accommodate contradiction and paradox. “Out of the dimness, opposite equals advance”, wrote Whitman. The advance Whitman is talking about is into a new synthesis of the polarities, a new realization that takes into account the best of both views and acts accordingly. So that’s the theory. Here’s the practice, at least the one I’m using to make the holidays make more sense to me this year. As always I want to be part of the fun of giving and receiving gifts, but I don’t want to just buy things for people. I want to enjoy the spirit of love and peace, but I don’t want to be blind to people and critters throughout the world who have neither. So for many people on my shopping list, I am making a donation to an organization that is doing some good in the world. Each gift is selected with the recipient in mind and given in his or her name. I’ll deliver it with a note of appreciation for their passion: for my animal loving friend, a donation goes to the amazing Wild Animal Sanctuary east of Denver. To my lefty friends, a gift to Amnesty International. It’s easy to buy for my friend Maria, who is a big supporter of Women for Women International, which empowers women in developing countries with education and loans. There are endless choices, and some hazards to this process. Many “charities” provide little more than employment for their staffs. To guide me I turned to Consumer Reports, the well-respected, independent research lab, which sure enough has published a comparison of charity watchdog groups. In their article Make Sure Your Donation Counts they identified three organizations who they deemed worthy in evaluating charities: The easiest way to research national charities is with the three major charity watchdogs: Charity Navigator, CharityWatch, and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance. They rate charities based on how they spend their money, protect donor privacy, govern themselves, and more. Some have tools to sort and search for organizations and reviews. They use somewhat different criteria and don’t always agree, so check out a charity with all three groups. I’ve spent a couple hours on these sites and trust me, it’s way more fun, interesting and ultimately meaningful than the hours I normally spend this time of year on Amazon or at the mall. The next step in my evolution? To sit and fully enjoy the beauty of my icicles while they are here. And when the weather breaks, clean out my gutters and spouts so I will never have to see them again! **** I end the call — and this fall season of the Daily Evolver Live podcast — with a short recording of one of the great western spiritual masters of our time, the late Alan Watts. Like all realized teachers he is also a transmitter; he doesn’t just communicate ideas but he evokes a state of liberation and love in his listeners. So sit back, relax and let his transmission be the evocation of a beautiful holiday season for you and all the ones you love. There’s much more on all of these topics on the podcast of course, which you can play below. The Daily Evolver Live restarts with the 2015 season on Tuesday night, January 6th. In the meantime I will be posting regularly here on the Daily Evolver. Thank you for listening!            

I start the podcast by sharing the experience I had last weekend visiting the gay pride festival in Palm Springs, California. Palm Springs is a small city of about 45,000 people, just west of Los Angeles. Aside from its fame as a showcase for Mid-century Modern architecture, which overlays a cool calm on the blazing desert, it is known for its concentration of gays, estimated at 35-40% of the population. So gay pride is a big deal. This year they cordoned off ten blocks of the main downtown for shows, displays, and of course a big parade on Sunday morning. Twenty thousand visitors poured in to partake in three days of festivities. And it was all…so civilized. There wasn’t a bare butt or breast in sight. Three or four guys in speedos were handing out fliers, but they seemed a bit self-conscious in the presence of all the children and their gay and straight parents. The whole extended family was there, grandma and grandpa too. The displays and parade floats were sponsored not only by gay organizations but by Well Fargo, Whole Foods and the local car dealers. Nobody was tossing condoms into the crowd. The parade featured the local high school bands and drill teams. As a veteran of the gay pride happenings of the 70‘s and 80‘s, in the darker times of anti-gay legislation and the plague of AIDS, I must say I felt a certain loss. The spirit of being part of a tribe with a real fight on its hands has been subsumed by the reality of our victory and integration into the wider world. Back in the day, when my partner and I joined the Gay March on Washington we walked the streets proudly hand in hand — for the first time in public, tears streaming down our faces — with 500,000 other people who were bonded by the experience of having been shut out, frightened and often abused because of who they loved. The sense of stepping out of the shadows in all our glory was to experience a group identify and aliveness that I have not experienced since. The gay rights movement of the late 20th century has substantially won its two big fights: 1) AIDS, which while not cured is manageable, and 2) social acceptance, with gay marriage now legal in 32 states and a comprehensive Supreme Court ruling expected next summer. So last weekend was a bit of a lesson for me in the power of tribal identity and the pain of its loss. I have a better understanding of why people in today’s tribal cultures are not willing to give up their identity easily. Those of us who have do so are left with the sense that we have lost something precious. But I don’t wish to have it back any more than I wish to go back to childhood. There are bigger, higher battles to be fought, with comrades that are bound together more by creativity than necessity. At integral consciousness we begin to be able to create new tribal connections, but this time they are more more memetic than genetic, more organized around ideas than blood relations. We’re able to experience the juice of being deeply bonded to all kinds of people in ways that are not exclusive but expansive. HEALING RACISM BY POINTING OUT PRIVILEGE One of the key projects of the green altitude of development is to find and bring home those people who have been shut out of previous stages of development: the weak, the sinners, those who don’t have the opportunity to succeed. I often marvel that after millennia of cutthroat conflict and competition humanity’s next move is to become sensitive to the vulnerable and, like a fretful mother, we’re unable to rest until all of the family is at the table. In the last sixty years as the cutting edge of culture has moved into mature orange and green altitudes, we have seen in the developed world the arising of large social movements such as feminism, civil rights and gay rights. These have met with huge success, particularly in the legal area where protection against racial and sexual discrimination has been won and is in the process of being won for gays. But, as all good integralists know, laws represent only the exterior structures of society. Discrimination continues in the interiors, in attitudes and feelings. So the fight for full equality has now been taken into these interior domains, particularly in progressive subcultures such as academia, with its growing emphasis on the subtle role of privilege. There’s an important distinction between discrimination and privilege. Discrimination, such as racism, sexism and homophobia puts certain people at a disadvantage. Privilege puts certain people at an advantage, one that is often unseen and unacknowledged. In these progressive subcultures if you are white, male or heterosexual (or god forbid, all three) you are reminded to “check your privilege” before you speak or act. At best this is a simple mindfulness instruction: pause for a moment and pay attention to how you may be enjoying unearned benefits that others don’t. Like all meditations it reveals unseen dimensions of reality, in this case a world of cultural expectations that unfairly empowers some people and disempowers others, one that shows up everywhere, whether hailing a cab, getting a job or simply being fully seen and heard in a conversation. He dropped the “s” from his name and the job search experience changed. Critics from the right (and sometimes from the left, such as Bill Maher) complain that progressives are being overly sensitive, politically correct and intolerant. They have a point. Having been a white man in a progressive academic setting a few years ago, I know first hand that green often over-corrects. I sometimes felt intimidated and disregarded in discussions where the voice of people from traditionally victimized groups were themselves “unfairly” privileged. This bothered me until I realized that there is a lot more at work here than simple fairness. There is a more complex system of fairness that has to be considered, one that includes the karmas of history. This bigger view reveals that a process of restitution also wants to take place. One of the gifts of the integral view is that it shows us how contentious forces between groups of people can be understood by seeing how they arise between individual people. Think of a husband who after years of abusing his wife finally wakes up and changes his ways. Does a mere apology fix things? No. He cannot simply wipe the slate clean and expect to move on. He has to recover lost ground. And ultimately there’s only one way to do that: He has to show her that he sees and understands what he has put her through. No amount of apologies, excuses or explanations will bring the relationship back unless and until this happens. It takes place as he surrenders, when he is able to witness and listen to her pain with his heart as well as his head. When he is able to show her that he can allow some part of her experience into his psyche, utterly undefended, he has a chance. Thus it is with the healing of our present day cultural wounds, which are rooted in millennia of abuse. A form of restorative justice is required. Conservatives will retort that while this may make sense in personal relationships, no one should be held responsible for what their ancestors did to someone else’s ancestors. We may not be held responsible for the actions of our ancestors, but the effects of those actions are still infecting the body politic, and we are responsible for healing them. The laws of  karma – simple cause and effect – show us how the consciousness and culture of peoples are passed through the generations as surely as are their genes. Fortunately the cure is easy — and deeply rewarding. All people ultimately want from each other is to be seen, heard and received for the unique and precious creations that they are. So we do this whenever we can, with whoever we can, as an act of love. AT LEAST HE DIDN’T BLAME HIM FOR BENGHAZI I end the podcast by addressing a comment I received from a reader that is a perfect critique of Obama from the left. I’ll reprint it here: Jeff — an ‘Obamapologist’? Really? Of course, like the rest of us progressives, you like what he SAYS. But look at what he DOES, at his actual policy decisions. After accepting a Nobel Peace Prize (!), he’s become a serial killer who is ‘comfortable’ with selecting names from a weekly ‘kill list’ for so-called targeted drone attacks that have killed more than 2000 people so far, most of them civilians, including old men, women, children, brides, grooms, et al. in at least 6 countries. He reserves the right to assassinate American citizens and others without due process. He ramped up the illegal war in Afghanistan and now renews his commitment to aggressive war in Iraq, after earlier participating in the disastrous attack on Libya. He looks the other way as Israel systematically bombs and starves the citizens of Gaza, reducing them to the condition of junkyard dogs. He violates the Constitution by refusing to prosecute high crimes committed by top officials of the Bush administration. He’s a corporatist who lets the Justice Department pass on indicting ‘too big to jail’ CEO’s of the predatory Wall Street Banks that nearly destroyed the financial system. He leads no fight to raise taxes on corporations, nor to strengthen labor unions, nor to eliminate massive subsidies to agricultural, energy, and other industries. He does nothing about the world’s largest prison population, a huge percentage of which consist of black youth stuck there for petty crimes. He continues to deport record numbers of undocumented workers. He has persecuted and prosecuted record numbers of whistleblowers and journalists. He supports the horrendous TPP agreement. He has authorized billions to upgrade the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal. I could go on. That’s a lot that needs defending. As an Obamapologist you’ve got a heavy stone to roll. As an integralist, you shouldn’t even be trying. As Ken Wilber has written, every stage of development has its triumphs and disasters. Obama, I’m afraid, has become an agent of disaster, and no integralist should be afraid to say so. My short answer to this critique of President Obama can be summed up in eight words: President John McCain and Vice President Sarah Palin. If you’d like to know my longer answer, I invite you to listen to the podcast. Till next week, keep it integral!

I start this podcast with some observations about the big Republican win in the U.S. midterm elections. For an Obamapologist like me it is a sad day, marking the end of the Obama agenda. It is not necessarily the end of the Obama era, however. By soundly winning the Senate and bestriding Congress the Republicans have stopped Obama cold, so the question now becomes…will they offer an agenda of their own? If they do I’ll bet they find that Obama still has the bipartisan spirit that launched him into the Presidency in 2008. It’ll be in both their interests to accomplish something, because over the long haul in politics something will always beat nothing. But obstruction can be a good short-term strategy, and has been for the Republicans so far. Stay tuned… The liberal’s map of the US. MONEY, POWER AND JUSTICE In my main story I address the mother of all first world problems: global capitalism, by responding to a piece written by Joe Corbett entitled Jeff Salzman, Ken Wilber and the Missing Link between Integral Theory and Practice, in which he offers a critique of a conversation I had with Ken Wilber and posted a few weeks ago: The World According to Wilber. Corbett’s essay reveals a fruitful friction often found among integralists. First let me address his opening theoretical argument that when justice is not included on par with the primary human values of goodness, truth and beauty it is a “glaring omission of the L-R [lower right] quadrant”, and therefore the conversation Ken and I had is “entirely devoid of any structural analysis or acknowledgement of social institutions and the prevailing forms of justice within society.” This is nonsense of course; suffice it to say that Ken WIlber, author of AQAL Theory, didn’t just – ooops! – forget about the exterior collective dimension of reality. Indeed Ken and I both talk about the structures of society all the time, including in our conversation. I wouldn’t know how to discuss current events without doing so. Part of the confusion may come from a misreading of AQAL Theory where Ken relates the four quadrants that make up a human being to the three native perspectives a human being can take: first person (I and me), second person (you and we) and third person (it and they). So how do four quadrants flow into three perspectives? Ken situates both the upper right-hand quadrant (U-R) and lower right-hand quadrant (L-R) in the third person world of “its”. Quadrantly speaking, the individual human body (in the UR) and the power/economic systems of societies (in the LR) are respectively the individual and collective exterior dimensions of reality, and can be seen and measured by the senses. Thus third person. Ken goes on to associate the first, second and third person perspectives with what he calls the “big three” philosophical values of goodness, truth and beauty. First person is the domain of beauty (which is deeply subjective), second person is the domain of goodness (how we treat each other) and third person is the domain of truth (what is objectively verifiable). The philosophical relationship between the fundamental values of goodness, truth, beauty and those of justice is a discussion that’s been ongoing at least since Plato. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, check out Steve McIntosh’s terrific thesis on the subject, The Natural Theology of Beauty, Truth and Goodness. PRIMARY VALUES: MOVING TARGETS What Corbett is really saying in his critique is that Ken and I didn’t talk about the L-R quadrant in a way he agrees with, so let’s move on to Corbett’s argument that Ken and I give short shrift to the value of justice. Here are a few paragraphs that sum up his thesis: “In their talk, Wilber and Salzman speak as if the development and expression of consciousness takes place in a vacuum, without social and historical context and free of the distorting influences of power and money. No consideration is given in their analysis to how institutional structures of power and money (media, schools, religion, the corporate-military-police-state) systematically prevent and retard human development. “Wilber fails to mention that corporations are basically private tyrannies, and in western capitalism they constitute the vast majority of the economy. These private tyrannies also have overwhelming influence in the political process, thus making capitalist societies essentially corporate democracies, or ‘totalitarian societies with privatized characteristics’. “Cunning and force is the secret behind the “diffusion” of [modern] values, not demographics. As Karl Polanyi shows in “The Great Transformation”, modern orange values and discipline did not spontaneously diffuse but were coerced upon a resistant population of citizens, workers, and consumers who were ultimately bought and sold the paradigm of modern capitalism and representative democracy to replace their community-based systems of equity and reciprocity.” Note that for Corbett power and money are “distorting influences” that “prevent and retard” human development. This is a view that sees malevolent forces at work in the world, oppressing and corrupting an otherwise healthy society. Every first tier developmental altitude tells a version of this story. For traditionalists the evil force is the devil, for modernists it is the government, and for postmodernists it is the “corporate-military-police-state”. A more integral view is that institutional structures of power and money are features of human development. As we have established, they make up the L-R quadrant of a world that is arising in all four quadrants; economic/political structures are tetra-arising along with consciousness (in the U-L quadrant), culture (in the L-L quadrant), and probably also with brain development (in the U-R quadrant). At any rate, every stage of human development has characteristic ways of exercising power and economics. And all of them are oppressive — as well as creative. Our current political/economic system is the least oppressive and most creative so far. And it is becoming less oppressive and more creative as it continues to evolve. Conceptions of goodness, truth, and beauty change radically at each stage of cultural development, and each is functional for its stage of development. What’s good at the warrior stage of development is to behead your enemies. Holy warriors may even see that act as beautiful in a way that modern people could never understand. Slavery, as well, organizes more powerful systems of human resources, creating larger, more capable societies. Early industrialization outlaws slavery, but takes the embedded agrarian values of long workdays, child labor and peasantry from the fields and transplants them into mines and factories. The same evolutionary forces are at work in the realm of justice, which has historically been defined as “might is right”, “an eye for an eye”,  “the king’s edict” and “rule of law,” the last of which is the judicial innovation that co-arises with economic capitalism. The next stage of justice, social justice, which insists that “everyone’s basic needs be met”, is arising in cutting edge cultures. Each stage, however contaminated it is with the previous structures and however ragged its emergence, represents a major step forward in the human condition. The enormous — and ongoing — moral development of the contemporary world is demonstrated by the fact that each of the previous social systems is now regarded as obscene. And the beat goes on: the dark fruits of contemporary capitalism such as habitat loss, carbon pollution, mindless consumption and meat factories will undoubtedly be seen as obscene to our progeny. Indeed they are increasingly being seen as such by our contemporaries. WELCOME TO PROGRESS Today’s money and power structures are the latest and best of what humanity has created, co-created and been created by. They look bad when compared with a fantasy of a different history and a better world, but what aspect of real life doesn’t suffer in comparison with an ideal? I’m suspicious of arguments that want to remold the world according to a story of how history went wrong. It went the way it went. Reality was, and is, reality. Let’s learn the lessons and move on. Of course none of this is an argument for complacency. Evolution does not happen on its own. It is propelled by millions of daily acts, and sometimes revolutions, by passionate people who are guided by an emergent moral intuition that says “this isn’t good enough.” Corbett and I are in that process with our co-critiques, as you are by reading them and thinking about them (remember, thoughts are things!). What is not necessary, and in fact counterproductive, is to continue the first tier split of demonization of “the enemy”. This is more than just a matter of emotional tone. There’s a reason the postmodern critique of modernity is so politically weak in contemporary society. People realize — and Corbett’s essay is a perfect example — that it is an attack on the economic system that has created more wealth, decency and benefit to the human race than any other in history. We are far more powerful when we appreciate the current system at the same time we work to move it forward. So what are we in for? Well, more goodness, truth, beauty and justice! We will continue to evolve our economic and political structures, as well as all of reality in all four quadrants, to express the humane and egalitarian values of post-modernism and beyond.

Green Halloween is for adults, too I start the podcast by observing that in post-modern (green altitude) subcultures like Boulder, Halloween is as much a holiday for adults as it is for kids. I tell of walking downtown where I saw a woman in an oversized witch’s hat walking a black pug that was wearing a set of shiny black bat wings. At first glance there was no sense that this was a dog in a costume; he looked like a little fat flying creature. People on the sidewalk were laughing, pointing and joking with the woman and each other. It was great street life. This experience is indicative of what happens as we move into green, postmodern consciousness: as adults we want to express ourselves and be seen in our own mature uniqueness. We want to be able to be a little bit bad. We want to turn towards our shadow material (the parts of ourselves we can’t see and don’t know) and explore it in a way that is safe and fruitful. Halloween is a great excuse to do all of this publicly. As evolutionaries it’s also interesting to remember that in humanity’s earlier stages of development (all stages prior to modernity) evil spirits are real. This is true for individuals as well as for cultures at large. I have a friend who grew up in Thailand and lived as an adult for many years in the U.S. She tells me that when she goes back to Thailand she always closes the curtains at night because she was raised to believe that evil spirits look in at you from outside.  She’s surprised at how real this feeling is when she is in Thailand, but when she’s in the West she’s a perfectly modern woman and it doesn’t make any difference. One of the projects of modernity is to wring magic (seen as superstition) out of the system. One of the projects of integral consciousness is to re-enchant our lives by consciously reintegrating the magical stages of our own development. We get back in touch with our own magical childhood. We feel into the spirit-filled world of our early ancestors. As we begin to perceive that Spirit — even spirits — by whatever name are still here, we can relate to them in a way that does not poo-poo or deny them just because they are invisible to science (much of reality is), but we also relate to them in a way that is not limited or gripped by them. So, yes…in the sacred world to come adults dress up for Halloween! Ebola Jumps the shark The second leading story is about one of the nurses who was infected with Ebola in the Dallas hospital by the man who arrived there from Liberia. On Monday she was certified as cured and released from the hospital. In other words, people, it’s been a slow news week. Both of these stories have been dutifully hyped by the media. In fact, Fox News ran the second story with the headline: Dallas Nurse Infected with Ebola Discharged from Hospital, which misrepresents the actual point of the story — she is no longer infected! — by 180 degrees. Of course, the headline serves both Fox’s modernist corporate agenda, which is to keep viewers emotionally hooked and tuned in for advertisers, and also its traditionalist conservative agenda, which is to create a general sense of national chaos and incompetence that benefits the out-of-power party. But the hysteria is not just the right side of the political spectrum; Bill Maher is also wailing from the left, though at a different target. Visibly upset on his show Real Time, he said, “I’m not panicked. I’m pissed at the morons at the hospital in Dallas. In Texas, they hate regulation. They love their freedom, so they couldn’t be bothered to notice that this guy had Ebola.” Even Joe Scarborough on MSNBC, normally a pretty centrist, occasionally integral guy, was all worked up. He delivered a lengthy screed about how Americans are scared and disappointed, how they’ve been let down by the Center for Disease Control and all the experts in charge, and how they’ve lost confidence in the president and his ability to protect us. As I listen I’m amazed that people actually expect things to work well. It’s a characteristic of first tier altitudes of consciousness that they expect the world to operate according to the ideology of their altitude. If it would, they believe, everything would be alright. If it’s not, then something, and someone, is wrong and to be blamed. This is true in our individual lives as well. We all know it in our deep hearts that our life isn’t really working according to plan. We sort of muddle our way through if we’re lucky. To the degree that we cannot own this reality we project it onto the people who we think are in charge of us: our parents, spouse, boss, politicians and, of course, the alpha Rorschach is the President of the United States. I think one of the challenges of developing a post-ideological integral consciousness is to become more friendly with the truth of chaotic emergence, without becoming complacent and missing the lessons of failure. Anyway trust me, the next time we have a true national emergency, a 9/11, a dirty bomb or a truly out-of-control epidemic, we’re going to look back with a certain nostalgia to the week where the lead stories were about these two nurses. In the second half of the call I share some thoughts about a few stories that continue to illuminate how in the developed world (orange/green altitude) cultures are engaged in the relentless project to become more secure and sensitized. After long, bloody millennia we’re now free from the wars and plagues that have haunted humanity from our beginnings, and we’re turning our attention to the violence that has heretofore been hidden — in our homes, schools and various subcultures. Three examples and their evolutionary upshots: Pro football star Ray Rice was caught on video in an elevator punching his then-girlfriend (now wife) Janay Palmer, knocking her out and dragging her into the hallway.  Evolutionary upshot: they’re staying together and have become born again, baptized Christians. They vow to maintain their family and rebuild their lives together. This is an ideal evolutionary move and when it works, the chaos and brutality of the warrior altitude is civilized into the rules, vows and faith of amber traditionalism. Adrian Peterson, also an NFL star, is arrested for child abuse for hitting his 4-year-old son on the butt with a switch, breaking the skin. Evolutionary upshot:  He puts out a statement in which he says, “I want everyone to understand how sorry I feel about the hurt I brought to my child.” He goes on to say, “Deep in my heart, I have always believed I could have been one of those kids that was lost in the streets without the discipline instilled in me by my parents and other relatives. I’ve always believed that the way my parents disciplined me has a great deal to do with the success I have enjoyed as a man. I love my son and I will continue to become a better parent and learn from any mistakes I have made.” Sayreville War Memorial High School in New Jersey has cancelled its football season, and several senior players are in jeopardy of being prosecuted as sex offenders for hazing younger players. An investigation by the New York Times resulted in a two-page story that revealed that at worst there was some non-consensual grab-ass through football pants. Evolutionary Upshot: Are we witnessing an over-reaction here? Probably so, and I hope justice is not served too harshly. But the positive message is clear: physical boundaries must be respected by all people in all times and circumstances. After reading these three stories another question arises: jeez, what it is it about football? Football is an expression of a red warrior culture that is embedded in a more safe and civilized amber/orange system. On the field we have a sort of war (with rules instead of chaos) that attracts young warrior men. It’s a world of deep brotherhood, which is a delicious and powerful state that is achieved when warriors bond. Hazing and initiation rites are time-honored strategies for forging a unit of fighting warriors. The Sayreville Bombers Initiation is also central to the process of building effective military teams, which are also warrior units. I remember reading a beautiful essay written by a U.S. marine about his experience going through the notoriously tough Marine Corp boot camp. He wrote that at some point in the midst of the physical, mental and emotional stress he realized that it wasn’t about how much he could take from his fellows, it was about how much he could give: how much heart, how much disintegration of ego, how much transmutation of individual identity into group identity he could bring to his new band of brothers who he was going to count on to die for him and he for them. So we need to keep this in mind as we civilize young people who are appropriately going through red, warrior stages of development, male and female. I end by pointing out that the California state senate unanimously approved a “yes means yes” law requiring “affirmative consent” from both parties for sex to be considered consensual. I see a lot of eye-rolling among people who think this is political feminism going too far, but…is it really so ridiculous to raise the bar to the level of mutual consent? It’s not like any of this is going to slow people down from having sex. In fact, by making things safe we make them safe to explore.  Same goes with grab-ass: as long as I am in no danger of having it thrust upon me, if you’ll pardon the expression, I may just decide to give it a try. For most of human history the strong simply subjugated the weak. Women were sexual prey (which is why they are shrouded in certain red tribal cultures to this day), children were subject to their elders, and stronger men dominated weaker men. From an evolutionary perspective brutality and dominance maximizes human potential…until we realize that the way forward is to respect each other and cooperate. So welcome to the future, an ever more safe and humane world where we are ever freer to express ourselves and receive each other. I hope you enjoy the podcast!

Also: Depolarizing American politics with Steve McIntosh I got a kick out of the following posting on an atheist website: “‘I’ll pray for you’ is a line that religious people say to get credit for doing something, when in reality they’re doing absolutely nothing.” I’m not so sure, and I start the podcast by looking at how prayer and meditation may actually work to relieve other peoples’ suffering. If, as Ken Wilber says, “thoughts are things” – novel ontological objects in the kosmos that add to the evolving storehouse of consciousness – then prayer and meditation may be one thing we can do for those suffering in the ebola epidemic. Insight into the power of prayer is of course nothing new to pre-modern people. Historically all religions, both theistic and nontheistic, have provided methods for interceding with divine powers for human benefit. Modernity came along and debunked these practices as superstitious hocus-pocus, and of course the baby went out with the bathwater. Integral theory creates room to bring prayer back, and in the podcast I talk about some of the ways we can work with it, even without having to necessarily relate to God. Nontheistic Buddhist loving-kindness meditation, for instance, is designed to literally generate love and relief for other people. Integral theory suggests that the movement into second-tier human consciousness is a recapitulation of the original awakening into first tier, when human consciousness arose out of the animal mind. So at second-tier we are new babies again. And just as a newborn baby has to bite his foot a few times before he realize that it belongs to him, we are now waking up to new capacities that have been there all along. One of these capacities is the power of our mind. But it’s a little tricky because it’s not our mind anymore; it’s access to a bigger mind, a bigger heart and bigger creativity that we surrender into. These new territories are not “ours” in the sense of belonging to our individual selves, but are the product of our increased access to the ever-present loving intelligence that is part of the basic fabric of the universe. This has not been proved, as least not to the satisfaction of most scientists, but it is a good working hypothesis that can provide the basis for a trans-rational faith in the power of prayer and intercessory meditation. Praying for those affected by Ebola isn’t the end of what we can do to help of course. We can vote, inveigh, donate — even, if qualified, don our hazmat suit and fly to West Africa. (I’m so impressed with the heroic people who are called there to risk their own safety for the welfare of others.) But praying isn’t a cop-out either. And it’s something we can do right now. Chaos and politics We human beings are, and always have been, failing forward. ~Jeff Salzman I also address the shortcomings of the various institutions entrusted with responding to the crisis, including international medical organizations, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and the hospital in Dallas where an Ebola patient infected two other people. I see these failures less as an indictment of the incompetence of the institutions than as examples of the chaotic nature of life. Every first tier altitude of development has an idea of how the world should be, a steady-state of perfection where things are ordered according to, for example, the word of God (in the amber traditionalist altitude), or rationality (in the orange modern altitude), or the realization of oneness (in the green postmodern altitude). Actual reality always falls far short of the ideal and is subject to endless scapegoating and condemnation. At second tier consciousness we begin to realize that we are part of a moving, evolving world that serially disappoints us at the same time it relentlessly accumulates more intelligence and capacity. We human beings are, and always have been, failing forward. Does anyone think that the next time Ebola or another infectious disease rears its head that we will make the same mistakes again? We’ll make new ones, but that’s progress! The Colbert Report Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,The Colbert Report on Facebook,Video Archive   Which is no reason not to use the chaos of an epidemic as a political sledgehammer, which is what we’re seeing as we approach the mid-term elections in America. I end this segment by showing how the party out of power, the Republicans in this case, are invested in creating a climate where the Democrats, particularly President Obama, is seen as incompetent in the face of a world that is falling apart. And this leads to a surprisingly optimistic conversation about polarization in American politics… “There’s a real upside to polarization” A dialogue with Steve McIntosh of the Institute for Cultural Evolution In the second half  of the podcast I am joined by my friend and colleague, Steve McIntosh. Steve is one of the leading integral thinkers of our time, author of the seminal book Integral Consciousness, his latest book Evolution’s Purpose and his upcoming book The Presence of the Infinite. Here we talk about another of his projects, the Institute for Cultural Evolution, a think tank he has created to put a stake in the ground for a new kind of politics based not on green centrism, but on cultural evolution and integration. I’m happy to be on the ICE’s Board of Directors, along with a stellar group of evolutionary thinkers, including John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods. See past Daily Evolver posts with Steve McIntosh here, and find out more about ICE’s Indiegogo campaign here. Below are a couple of the best ideas that Steve explores in the podcast: “Some people believe Americans aren’t really divided deep down, and that we’ve just been sorted by the hyper-partisans in the different parties.  And then there are those that have a more evolutionary perspective that see that indeed there are at least three major world views in American culture, and they aren’t just differences of policy opinion. They are deep differences in identity dialectically separated by the structures of history.” “There’s a real upside to polarization. The way evolution occurs, both culturally and individually, is that first there’s a kind of a differentiation and that differentiation allows for a higher level of integration. So rather than try and glue the pieces of Left and Right together, or create some kind of centrist compromise, we’re advocating further evolution to overcome polarization.  We’re advocating for a kind of a Future Left and a Future Right that represent more evolved positions of this essential polarity.” – Steve McIntosh You can listen to the podcast below. Hope you enjoy!

Hi folks, welcome back for the fall season of the Daily Evolver podcast! I start this week with a quick report on an amazing new dog training technique I discovered: I talk to them in plain English. It may be too simple and obvious to be a real “technique” but it has also been shockingly effective. I have a French bulldog nephew, Roman, who stays with me a couple days a week. He’s a very noble boy and always aims to please, except for one problem behavior: he goes bonkers whenever I leave the house. He wants to come along and always causes a big commotion when he sees me get my coat or keys. He runs from room to room and leaps at the back door where I have to kick and shout “back Roman!” as I try to slip out without him charging between my feet. It always leaves me — and I think him, too —  feeling bad. So I’ve been thinking about how to change things. Those of you who check in here regularly know that I think a lot about animals, and often note the emerging research that reveals how humans and animals share deep structures of thought and emotion. In fact, the way humans — as individuals and cultures — relate to animals provides a handy marker for their level of development, which evolves according to this trajectory: In the archaic (magenta) altitude of development, before domestication, animals and humans were fused into a larger web of life, though humans with our bigger brains proved to be the lords of the jungle and all other animals developed a healthy fear of us. In the warrior (red) and traditional (amber) altitudes, animals were valued for being useful.  Humans, through animal husbandry (we selected mates), created a whole range of beasts of burden, from an ox pulling a plow to a poor lonely watchdog tied behind a garage. Animal happiness is not at the top of the list of concerns at this stage of the game. An old saying instructs us to not “beat a dead horse”, but at red and amber altitudes there is little compunction about beating a live one. In the modern age (orange altitude) animals become units of production and are bred, born, grown and harvested in factories producing meat, milk and eggs. While we may pay attention to the health of their bodies — that’s their value, after all — virtually no attention is paid to their interior world of emotion, affiliation, etc.  Animals are still largely outside the circle of moral consideration. At the postmodern (green) stage we get in touch with the interiors of animals. This brings on an upswing of animal rights awareness, pets as part of the family, and vegetarianism. In the integral worldview (teal and turquoise) we have the realization that every holon, from an atom to an ant to an elephant, has evolved not just in the 3rd person dimension of the physical body, but also in the 1st person dimension of awareness and the 2nd person dimension of love. Humans may have transcended animal consciousness, but we still contain it and can access it in ways that help us relate to creatures of all kinds. Hot daddy explains trust to little French Bulldog. Now of course I’ve been bringing this thinking to the problem of Roman, both consciously and unconsciously, and eventually it just stops making sense for me to continue shouting and scolding. It’s clearly futile and counter-productive. So one night a couple months ago, as I was getting ready to go out and Roman started his crazy behavior, I decided to do something different. I stopped, looked him in the eye…and explained the situation. I said, “Roman, tonight you can’t come with Uncle Jeff, but I need you for another job. I need you to guard the house and your little cousin Stella. You’re a very good watchdog, Roman, and I need you to keep an eye on things. Okay? I’m counting on you.”  And he looked up at me, and I swear to God he got it. From that moment on, the craziness was over. He sat and watched me get ready, and when I went to the back door he followed me and stood, ears up at attention as I walked out. And we haven’t had a problem since. Of course I don’t claim that Roman understood the words, and I can’t prove that he wasn’t simply responding to my change of attitude and tone. But I think he understood more than I would have previously given him credit for, and somewhere in the melding of language and tone there is a zone of communication that Roman and I have been engaging in ever since. HOW DEVELOPMENT HAPPENS What I’ve also learned on hiatus is that my experience with Roman exemplifies how development happens in general. I attended a workshop a couple weeks ago at The Integral Center put on by Terri O’Fallon, the developmental researcher associated with Pacific Integral in Seattle. One of the key principles of development she pointed out is: “you get it, then it gets you”. In other words, we “get” a new insight by thinking about it, talking about it, testing, prodding and mulling it over, until one day we realize that the insight is installed in our minds and bodies, calling forth whole new capacities in us. I think this is what’s happening with my communication with Roman. Ken Wilber also emphasized this principle in conversations I had with him over the break.  As Ken pointed out, a three-year old doesn’t have to work at becoming a five-year-old. Growth is built into the system. The inevitability of development is also true for cultures, though the process is obviously more complex and fraught with dangers and setbacks, as we can see in my next topic… BILL MAHER AND BEN AFFLECK HIT A LIBERAL FLASH POINT                   The kerfuffle that took place on Bill Maher’s show Real Time between Maher, Sam Harris and Ben Affleck got a lot of attention this week because it perfectly illuminates a conundrum among liberals: how to deal with Islamic violence without being Islamophobic. Bill Maher has made a career out of being politically incorrect and regularly challenges his fellow liberals to condemn Islam for its retrograde positions regarding freedom of speech, equality for women and acceptance for gays. The conversation polarized almost immediately between Maher and Harris on one side and Ben Affleck on the other. Harris started off by asserting that “we have been sold this meme of Islamophobia where any criticism of the doctrines of Islam gets conflated with bigotry of Muslims as people.” Affleck, as if proving Harris’s point on cue, responded, “So you’re saying that Islamophobia is not a real thing? That’s gross, it’s racist. It’s like calling someone a shifty Jew.” Harris retorted that we have to be able to criticize bad ideas, “and Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas,” at which point we were off to the races. You can watch it here. Integral theory provides a far more explanatory view of Islamic extremism, enabling us to see that a culture’s religious doctrines are interpreted at its stage of development. Every religion is violent in the red and amber altitudes, and every religion is pacified when its adherents become adequately modern. Millions of Muslims are modern in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, for instance, and millions of Christians are pre-modern in countries such as Eritrea and Ethiopia (where most girls are circumcised). Heck, we even have violent Buddhists marauding through the countryside in Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Integral teacher and scholar Dustin DiPerna, also inspired by the Maher/Harris/Affleck flap, wrote a terrific essay for Integral Life on how development trumps religion. As he says, “There is not one version of Islam that is either ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ but there are at least five versions of Islam, all dependent upon specific levels of interpretation. Each of these levels is not arbitrary. The levels are consistent across traditions and can be correlated with very specific stages of psychological development. “The point to all of this is that in the discourse between Affleck and Harris it’s not just a case of understanding the difference between extremist and moderates. That binary outlook no longer serves us. Rather, what is needed is the critical comprehension that individuals, with different levels of development, are enacting Islam (and all other religious traditions) according to their own worldviews and levels of development. And even more importantly, we must come to the understanding that there are paths that can be highlighted that can help individuals move along that developmental spectrum from magic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral versions of each tradition. As development unfolds, interpretations of faith move from being more restrictive, ego-centric and ethno-centric in view to orientations that more compassionate, open, and world-centric.” This of course begs the question as to why so many Muslim countries have not developed further. That’s a big question with lots of answers — oil, geopolitical position of the Middle East, Western domination — but the doctrines of Islam are not the crux of the problem. The Hebrew and Christian Bibles also contain plenty of doctrines that are now seen as violent, misogynistic, homophobic and morally repugnant. Countless holy wars and inquisitions have been carried out in the name of God. I just pray that it doesn’t occur to ISIS to up the ante on their YouTube executions and start burning journalists at the stake, as the Roman Catholic Church did to nearly a hundred thousand witches and heretics in the middle ages. But all is forgiven as we move into modernity. It’s astonishing really. We just drop the whole jihad project when we realize how much more interesting life is when we engage rather than conquer those evil “others.”                     As a florid example of this progress, the same Roman Catholic church that tortured and burned apostates in its red/amber phase just this week issued a report entitled Welcoming Homosexual Persons, which top Vatican watcher John Thavis called “an earthquake” in the Church’s evolution in accepting gays. Welcome to the orange/green church. All of which points to the sheer spiritual potency of development. The teachings of one’s religion are far less important than the structure of mind in which they operate. It is the evolutionary growth of consciousness, person by person and culture by culture, that is calling forth into the world new capacities of empathy, care and even holiness.

Human beings are memory machines, for better or for worse. There is an autobiographical narrative that is alive inside all of us, and just as individual memories seem to create me, memories in the morphogenetic field create the collective culture of my family, my society. You could say that the universe is essentially memory and we are each part of a long line that is re-membering our species anew. Our ancestors are alive within us, as is a great longing to re-member where we came from, in the kosmic sense. Dr. Keith says these morphogenetic fields of memory are sometimes evident in family constellation work, when a stranger will have “memories” of our relative while standing in the place of that person. The field of the family comes into that room. Then there are fields of knowing that pass on flashes of great insight. Einstein, Mozart, and so many others, often claimed to have captured something, fully formed. How does this work? Is information traveling at the speed of light into our nervous systems? Is the DNA double helix a perfect shape for the transmission of energy, as some believe? Keith wonders aloud with Jeff about the method of action, and it’s fascinating. When we anticipate the future we’re using the same brain circuitry as if we are remembering something from the past. If I anticipate having a good time tomorrow that actually becomes a “memory” of how I’m going to have a good time tomorrow. If I anticipate a bad time tomorrow then I now have that memory instead. The curse and the blessing of human consciousness is memory. The great apes can’t go more than about a half hour into the future. We can go forever. Each stage of development has a new, organizing principle around memories and trauma. The integral stage is about bringing a consciousness and an intentionality to the process because we realize that we are co-creators — with emergence itself — of our lives and of the kosmos. ~Jeff Salzman Most people are familiar with the effects that major trauma like car accidents, sexual abuse and so on, can have on a person. But our sense of self is also formed by what Dr. Shapiro, the founder of EMDR, calls the “little ‘t’ traumas”, the small humiliations. Dr. Keith explains that compassionate self-observation is necessary but not sufficient to deal with some of the very sticky issues in the psyche. The brain doesn’t give up anything that it associates with survival. As a psychotherapist, Keith’s job is to make his clients more oriented towards reality, discerning the true from the false, the healthy from the unhealthy, and continually choosing the healthy. “The deeper truth is always coherence,” says Dr. Keith, “the deeper truth is always unity, always love.” Memories from “capital ’T’ Traumas” resist re-consolidation (in therapy or over time) because during a traumatic experience, in extreme states of stress, two parts of the brain shut down and one has to do with time. “That’s why someone in a deep rage or depression has this sense that they’re going to be in it forever,” Dr. Keith says. So the therapist practices what’s called a dual focus: while therapist and client are connected in the present moment, in a safe and supportive environment, they make contact with the memory. During this process the therapist makes the client feel valued and worthwhile, while simultaneously being connected to the trauma. This gives the brain an opportunity to re-consolidate the experience, and the positive aspects of the self disconfirm the previous, traumatic memory. The main factor here is the relationship with the therapist. Relationships where there is an emphasis on self-soothing (and therefore emotional self-regulation) are important for this process to work. We can do this in our relationships with each other. Our past keeps coming up, good and bad, and we need to have protocols of dealing with the distress. Otherwise, we can dissociate from it, cutting us off from ourselves. When we lose wholeness and connectivity, we lose power. Dr. Keith and Jeff discuss the idea that integralists feel an obligation to grow out of self-loathing and into self-love, into truth, and to help others to do this too. In 2nd tier, Dr. Keith says “there’s this kind of organizing principle that says ‘I have a responsibility to work towards my own coherence and to connect with you in an authentic way, and to contribute to the evolutionary process.’” At the same time, we’re the sum total of all our memories and they’re never all perfectly integrated. Being healthy “involves radical acceptance of our imperfections as well as acceptance of our embodiment of Spirit in every moment,” says Dr. Keith. We hope you enjoy this episode of The Shrink & The Pundit.

Ken Wilber is my hero. I mean that quite literally because Ken rescued me – from a life of confusion, fear and frustration as I tried to make sense of our crazy, mixed up world. Ken’s insights, set forth in his nearly thirty books and hundreds of talks and teachings, has organized life on Planet Earth from a disjointed mess into an elegant and meaningful whole. He has created a “theory of everything” that is worthy of the name, and which is helping countless people around the world to lead more intelligent, effective and loving lives. Through his work Ken has revealed deeper dimensions of the prime force that powers the cosmos, evolution, by showing that evolution does not just explain the exterior forms of life, such as cells becoming sponges then fish then reptiles then mammals and ultimately human beings, but that evolution also powers the interior dimensions of the cosmos, and is behind the astonishing development of human consciousness and human culture. To bring this down to everyday terms, Ken has shown me something that I attempt to show in my blog posts and podcasts: that we are evolving creatures in an evolving world. And further that there is a teleology, a directionality, to our evolution such that we human beings are indeed developing into higher dimensions of goodness, truth and beauty. I realize that it doesn’t always look that way as we tune into the day’s news and see that for so many people (and creatures of all kinds), life is anything but good, true and beautiful. But this points to a deeper, paradoxical truth about evolution in general: while in its grand historical sweep evolution is beautiful, in daily application it is often not at all pretty. This realization is powerful, and calls all who realize it to enlist in the project of creating a more good, true and beautiful world. This is perhaps Ken’s greatest teaching to me: that in the final analysis we ourselves are evolution in action. As he as done for four decades now, Ken Wilber continues to illuminate the path forward. So I thought it fitting, as I mark my first hundred episodes of the Daily Evolver, to invite the great man himself onto the podcast. Last week we got together on the phone to take a look at the world as it is turning today, and to see if we can make some little bit of sense of it. We range through politics, religion and culture, from ISIS and Muslim extremism, to the situation in Russia and Ukraine, to political polarization and the future of government, to technology and trans-humanism, to the coming integral tipping point. I’ve had the amazing good fortune to work with Ken over the past ten years and I know him to be not only the smartest person I have ever met, but also one of the wisest and wittiest. He is still the best and most sparkling vehicle for his own teachings, as I think this conversation demonstrates. I hope you enjoy it. Here are some highlights from Ken to whet your appetite: “There’s a race going on now between disaster and enormous breakthroughs. Human beings are transcending and including, transcending and including, which means that as our own history gets thicker and thicker and thicker, there are more and more levels to us. There are also therefore more and more things that can break down, more and more things that can go wrong.” “Virtually all world conflict today is one ethnocentric group versus another ethnocentric group.” Integral values are radically different than any kind of values that we’ve ever seen at any stage of development in any of humanity’s history, ever. Yet integral consciousness hasn’t yet self-identified. Most people that are integral don’t know they’re integral. “My sense is that in twenty years we’re going to hit a second tier tipping point. It will be slow but as people start paying attention to interior degrees of development, they’ll see that it explains a whole lot of world circumstances that didn’t make sense before.” “At some point we are going to have brain-computer linkages. It may even get to the point where we can tell from brain-scanning what a person’s mindspace is. So we will be able to certifiably say that ‘this person is orange, this person is green, this person is turquoise.’ It would come with a certain amount of authority and people would trust it. We’ve had a century of looking at our educational system as producing higher levels of consciousness, and I think it will take a century for people to get used to that. But once that happens it’s just second nature that people will take into account the developmental altitude of another human being.” When you have these dimensions of reality that are so real and so significant, it just can’t keep happening that people overlook them.                       “In order for this moment to come into being, it has to feel the previous moment. In order for any creativity to happen at all it has to add a bit of novelty. I think that happens in all four quadrants.” “Wherever there is an ‘other’ there is fear – that’s the individual self. If you’re identified with the larger whole, pain still happens but suffering is lessened as you’re not identified with it.” “Democracy in its present form, one body/one vote, will be seen to future generations as primitive. Right now, Mother Teresa and Jack the Ripper would get the same say. What would happen if we stopped giving physical bodies a vote, but instead give a vote for each conscious perspective a person could take?”

1:50 EVOLUTION’S LATEST: TWEE… I start this week’s call by noting an article in last Sunday’s New York Times style section entitled: The Millennials are Generation Nice, a psychographic snapshot of the 50 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 29. This latest generation of adults, likely mirrored by those in other developed countries, are characterized by a declining interest in materialism and an increased dedication to social purpose, vegetarianism and optimism. The article concludes, “Taken together these habits and tastes look less like narcissism than communalism. And its highest value isn’t self-promotion, but its opposite, empathy — and open-minded and -hearted connection to others.” This view supports the thesis of a book I’ve been reading, Twee, The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion and Film, by Mark Spitz. Using the sometimes derogatory word “twee”, which means “excessively sweet or sentimental,” Spitz writes that “Twee can be similarly liberating from the pressure to be cool, swaggering, aggressively macho, and old at heart.” James Parker, in the Atlantic, describes it as “The strangely persistent modern sensibility that fructifies in the props departments of Wes Anderson movies, tapers into the waxed mustache-ends of young Brooklynites on bicycles, and detonates in a yeasty whiff every time someone pops open a microbrewed beer.” Spitz identifies several markers of the Twee aesthetic: Beauty over ugliness. A sharp, almost incapacitating awareness of darkness, death, and cruelty, which clashes with a steadfast focus on our essential goodness. A tether to childhood and its attendant innocence and lack of greed. The utter dispensing with of “cool” as it’s conventionally known, often in favor of a kind of fetishization of the nerd, the geek, the dork, the virgin. A healthy suspicion of adulthood. An interest in sex but a wariness and shyness when it comes to the deed. A lust for knowledge, whether it’s the sequence of an album, the supporting players in an old Hal Ashby or Robert Altman film, the lesser-known Judy Blume books, or how to grow the perfect purple, Italian, or Chinese eggplant or orange cauliflower. The cultivation of a passion project, whether it’s a band, a zine, an Indie film, a website, or a food or clothing company. Whatever it is, in the eye of the Twee it is a force of good and something to live for. To me these orientations suggest a consciousness that is differentiating itself from the cynicism, irony and malaise of the post-modern altitude of development. Are we seeing the first signs of a new integral aesthetic? I think so, especially in the emphasis on basic goodness, as well as the impulse to create a personal project that contributes to the world. 12:45 A GOOD WEEK FOR THE OBAMA DOCTRINE Despite pundits left and right decrying Obama’s handling of ISIS extremists in Iraq, we have seen an enormously positive development in the situation as a direct result of what Obama has done and not done. I’m talking about the peaceful and legal replacement of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki by the new Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi. Maliki did not go easily and for a few days it looked as if he may even resort to attempting a military coup to maintain power. But in the end he acquiesced and even stood by the new Prime Minister in a demonstration of a constitutional passing of power that is remarkable in that part of the world. In his disastrous last years in office Maliki presided over a Shiite domination of the country, precipitating a ratcheting down of Iraq from a fledgling modern altitude to a neo-tribal one, and creating rifts that enabled ISIS to gain a foothold in the Sunni sectors of the country.  Obama was criticized for “letting this happen”, criticism he pushed back on in his recent interview with Thomas Friedman: The reason that we did not just start taking a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as ISIL came in was because that would have taken the pressure off of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. That only would have encouraged, he said, Maliki and other Shiites to think: “We don’t actually have to make compromises. We don’t have to make any decisions. We don’t have to go through the difficult process of figuring out what we’ve done wrong in the past. All we have to do is let the Americans bail us out again. And we can go about business as usual.” So the Iraqi people and their representatives chose a different course, and a new leader who is far more equipped to create a pluralistic society that can protect itself from the impulses of its least civilized populations. Here’s how Ali Khedery, who served for seven years as advisor to the American ambassadors in Iraq, describes the new prime minister in last Sunday’s New York Times: If anyone has the potential to unite Iraq and hold it together in the face of ISIS terrorism and Arabian meddling, it is Mr. Abadi. In a society where name and upbringing count for a lot, he comes from a respected Baghdad family and was raised in an upscale neighborhood. He studied at one of the capital’s best high schools, earned a degree from one of its top universities and later received a doctorate in engineering in Britain. While Mr. Maliki [the deposed Prime Minister] spent his years in exile in Iran and Syria and earned degrees and Islamic studies and Arabic literature, Mr. Abadi, a fluent English speaker, worked his own way through his long and costly studies abroad. In meetings over the past decade, Mr. Abadi always impressed me and other American diplomats with his self-effacing humor, humility, willingness to listen and ability to compromise — extremely rare traits among the Iraqi political elite and precisely the characteristics that are needed to help heal the wounds Iraqis sustained under Saddam Hussein and Mr. Maliki. Indeed, for the first time since 2003, Iraq’s top three leaders, the Shiite Mr. Abadi, the Kurdish president, Mr. Masum, and the Parliament’s Sunni speaker, Mr. Jubouri, have all emerged from Iraq’s Parliament, where they cooperated over the past decade to pass legislation and defuse numerous crises. Societies (and individuals) need to solve their problems themselves. When America is there to exert our military force people begin to rely on it. They may resent us for it but they can also become comfortable with it, never getting to experience that “oh shit” moment where they realize, “okay, we really have to do this ourselves.” 27:28 FRACTURES IN FERGUSON The last story I address on the call is the civil strife that has been arising in the town of Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the shooting of a young 18-year-old, unarmed black man by white police officers. Despite the predictable emphasis by the left-leaning media on the racial and civil aspects of the tragedy, and the right-leading media’s emphasis on the law and order aspects, I notice three signs of a new, more integrated awareness arising in our cultural mind. I expand on them on the call. 1. America’s police are over-militarized. And their consciousness is not keeping up with the hardware, as we saw in the Ferguson police department’s disproportionate response to the initial protests. There is something that is deeply repulsive to the modern psyche about facing a lineup of masked and helmeted shock troops arrayed on top of an armed personnel carrier. Humanity has spent too many bloody centuries overcoming the tyranny of the king’s men and the dictator’s secret police. Yet we also want to use the latest technologies to keep people — including police people — safe.  One of the great evolutionary challenges of our time is to deal with the problem of modern weaponry in the hands of a pre-modern wielder. 2. There is still a heartbreaking and increasingly intolerable divide between large portions of the African-American population and mainstream society. We can be encouraged by the substantial strides African-Americans have made into mainstream society, including the rise of a large black middle class as well as the double election of an African-American president.  But fifty years after the civil rights act and despite decades of various wars on poverty we are still a long way off from true racial equality. This is a four quadrant affair that requires a four quadrant solution. 3. The struggle in Ferguson was not just racial but developmental. Yes, the igniting events, the shooting of Michael Brown and the subsequent demonstrations, exposed deep tensions between a white police structure and the majority black population. But it grew into a struggle that was more fundamental: between people at or above the traditionalist altitude of development (amber altitude) and those below (red altitude). One key difference between these two structures of development is that people above amber are law-abiding citizens and those below are not. In the days after the initial demonstrations in Ferguson many people flooded into the area to protest legally and peacefully, but some from both within and outside the community came just for the mayhem. Citizens of both races supported the former and called out the latter. One of my favorite scenes was of African-American people, organized by community churches, helping to clean up stores (owned by white people) that were damaged by looters the previous night’s riots. I suspect that we will learn a lot from the Ferguson drama that will motivate and inform a more rich, intelligent, loving and effective response to the stubborn problems of racial inequality in America. 40:25 QUESTIONS FROM LISTENERS For the last twenty minutes we talk about all kinds of stuff. Have a listen. Till next week, keep it integral!