• What “money” is today, and we got here
• Who creates money, and the implications of that regarding debt
• The core problems with current banking system, and why current reform proposals are inadequate
• Alternative proposals for reforming banking and the money system
• The very significant positive side-benefits from such banking reform

Time (and my ability to do the analysis) permitting, I will also try to explicitly relate this issue to integral ideas.

Alex Goodall

The Path Is The Goal by Chogyam Trungpa

Part 1 Ch2: Continuing your confusion (pp 14-18)

Part 2 Ch2: Recollecting the present (pp 69-70)

Free Play: Power Of Improvisation In Life And The Arts by  Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Heart Breakthrough” (pp 191 - 195)

Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman’s Guide to Reality Selection by Antero Alli

“Body Images” (p 38)

Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens and Michael E. Zimmerman

Excertps from Ch 7: “Ecological Selves: The Who That Is Examining”

The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle

“Finding The Life Underneath Your Life Situation” (pp 51-53)

“All Problems Are Illusions Of The Mind” (pp 53-55)

Occupy Integral by Tarry Patten and Marco Morelli.

This presented a challenge to shift “integral” into a more activists direction.

For details see:

http://integrallife.com/member/terry-patten/blog/occupyintegral

Enlightenment by Melvyn Wartella

Melvyn describes his experience of becoming Enlightened in a very down-to-earth, matter-of-fact way.

Here are some extracts:

“As I stood there, the same intuitive energy clearly said to smell the tree. I bent over and inhaled deeply the wonderful fragrance of moss and damp bark. Half way through the inhalation the mind just turned inside out and I knew without any doubt that I was one with the Universe, that I had never been anything other than this totality of life. It was not just an insight or feeling. It was a transformation of everything I had ever thought or felt about reality. It was also a state of complete joy and love. ”

“Enlightenment has no words. It is never an image of any kind. It is not in time, it has to be now. It is a direct seeing into Reality as Reality Itself. It can never be named or expressed in anyway. It is in a totally different category than anything the mind is used to. It is Pure Awareness, Pure Wisdom, Pure Simple Life, with out the shadow of the conditioned mind. It is not other than what you see before you, yet it goes beyond all objectivity and subjectivity. It is a clear seeing of how the mind has separated itself into fragments of images, ideas, concepts, beliefs, and dreams. That is what dies, that is ego.”

The full description is here:

 http://friendsofreality.org/ESSAYS/ENLIGHTENMENT/enlightenment.html

Our next meeting is on the 11 April.

The readings format has many attractive attributes:

•  No-one has to do a lot of preparation
• Everyone has to do some preparation
• We cover a diverse range of topics
• It is always interesting and enjoyable

On this occasion, we had the following readings, amongst others:

Integral Christianity - Spirit’s call to evolve  by Paul R Smith (extract)

Paul describes the Christian church in terms of developmental levels, from Tribal church (relating to Spiral Dynamics’ Purple) through Warrior Church (Red), Traditional (Blue), Modern (Orange) and post-modern (Green). The rest of the book is his understanding of what an Integral Church might be, using Wilber’s AQAL model

 Ordinary Ecstacy by John Rowan, edition 2001, Brunner-Routledge, UK. pp 212 - 214.

Sex, Ecology and Spirituality by Ken Wilber, Second Edition, 2000 Chapter 8 p. 287 - 290

This is about the Psychic level - the domain of the soul - the transpersonal. In this section, Ken quuotes extensively from Emerson.

From p.289:

“That which observers or witnesses the self, the person, is precisely to that degree free of the self, the person, and through that opening comes pouring the light and power of a Self, a Soul, that, as Emerson puts it ‘would make our knees bend’ “

http://www.interactivebuddha.com

His short, no-nonsene explanation on his home page says all you need to know to decide whether or not to spend time pursuing his ideas. I think it would be an injustice to him to say more here…

… except that you can download his extensive book (392 pages) “Mastering The Core Teachings Of the Buddha” in pdf form from the site. At the time of writing this post, I have read no more than the Forward and Warning - and I am hooked.

At the Oxford Integral Circle meeting on 18 Feb 09, Debby Hallett will give a brief demonstration of the kinds of sentence stems included on the LDP, including a high-level overview of how the scoring and profile creation is done, with group discussion to follow.

The LDF and LDP are best described on Harthill Consulting’s own site.

Jane Loevinger and Ruth Wessler’s 1970 book Measuring Ego Development, Construction and Use of a Sentence Completion Test (The Jossey-Bass Behavioral Science Series) (Hardcover) was the foundational work in this field, and the precursor to subsequent sentence completion tests. In 1996, modernisation and more empirical research underlay the 1996 publication of Measuring Ego Development (Jossey-Bass Behavioral Science Series) (Hardcover) by Le-Xuan Hy and Jane Loevinger.

Harhill have developed their own manual, which is unpublished, for use with the LDP. It’s based on the work and findings of Bill Torbert and David Rooke.

If you’d be interested in coming along to the OIC, please drop an email to this site moderator for directions to the meeting site.

All the best,

Debby

Gebser traces the evidence for the transformations of the structure of consciousness as they are concretized in historical artifacts. He sought to avoid calling this process “evolutionary”, since any such notion was illusory when applied to the “unfolding of consciousness.” Biological evolution, as Gebser noted at length, was an enclosing process, that particularized a species to a limited environment. The unfolding of awareness is by contrast an opening-up. Any attempt to give a direction or goal to the unfolding of awareness is illusory in that it is based upon a limited notion of time, the mental, which is linear and hence implies “progress.” To be sure, Gebser was fully aware that any notion of “human progress” was already played out. He notes that “to progress” is to move toward but is also a moving away from, and he knew that the question as to the fate of humanity is still open, that for it to become closed would be the ultimate tragedy, but that such a closure remains a possibility. Our fate is not assured by any notion of “an evolution toward” any kind of ideal way of being.

I like that insight. The whole entry for Gebser is worth reading (it’s not long). It highlights some fascinating ideas about consciousness transformation, such as how ways of understanding time and space change, and his influence on Wilber is very clear.

(Note to self: remember - avoid evolution of consciousness and substitute transformation of structures of consciouness, or unfolding of consciousness.)

Alex

At this meeting we will be discussing a chapter from Spiral Dynamics:

Spiral Alignment: Streaming Visions into Reality

If you would like to come along (all welcome - no fees!),  just make a comment to this post. You’ll be asked for your email address (which won’t be displayed) and we’ll then send you the details.

As an OIC member you are welcome (encouraged!) to post to this Blog. Simply Register yourself and then start posting!