*Special Event: Zaadz Symposium on Integrative Spirituality!*

what a brilliant idea!
right up there with the z-bate. anymore of those in the works?
i look forward to watching the experiment unfold.

This going to be great! I'm looking forward to it.

Hey, Julian! Thanks for getting this started.:-) If anything, it'll be fun!

This is a great idea, Julian.  There is a lot we can do with the tools that are available to us here, and you've come up with something that I think will be quite exciting.  I'm looking forward to participating…

Best,

B.

I’m am so going to kick all your asses from here to the friggin’ moon! “Grounded perspectives?” Damn straight – I’m going to pile-drive your perspectives right into the ground. I’ve been doing push-ups all day, and I’ve got a whole week to deconstruct everything you all have ever said about anything. I’ll transcend and include each one of your piddly perspectives like a killer whale snacking on sardines…

By all that, of course, I mean I am looking forward to a fruitful discussion…

:o)

Yeah, definitely a cool idea! I hope it's just the first of many 'cause it sounds like a great format. It is too bad about the testosterone imbalance, though. Guess we'll all have to flex our compassion muscles (so to speak) and not forget about the “all types” part of the AQAL equation.

~G

I've been doing dands and bethaks and bootstrappers and chinups all morning, knowing there will come a day when I'll put all that stamina to good use. I'm here for you, Bob! :-)) Hell, guys we need some balance here…. This is getting out of control.

Seriously though, this is an awesome idea. So many of us can find the energy to criticize and tear down others’ efforts to make sense of this whacky world, but when it comes time to offer an alternative vision we often shrivel up. I know this is true for me. That’s one refreshing thing about this blog, Jules - you have something to offer your readers: suggestions for further reading, the outline of your own vision, thoughtfully articulated arguments and, most of all, fire and passion to get at what’s true and real.

My hat’s off to you, bro.

–Bob

guys - really looking forward to seeing what new thinking comes out of this, and also what concensus can be reached without agreeing for the sake of niceness, or disagreeing for the sake of defensiveness.

a fine idea from you julian, and hats off for leading the charge on monday.

 i noticed the seven samurai line-up too - no women on this one. no bad thing in itself - anyone's free to get together as they wish. let's have an all women one next - that would be great, not to mention informative, inspiring, and probably sobering ; ) i think there should be more unisex cultural events and rituals in western culture anyway… let's hear it from the ladeeez in the house. i'm sure you'll appreciate that we guys have very important work to do over next week, so we may be a little less emotionally available than usual ; )

gentlemen… start your engines please… and mind your language !

this is a good opportunity to demonstrate how it can be done (not least to ourselves)!

cool! can't wait to check it out. in the meantime, i'll watch Spider Man 3 so i can see spidey's “shadow” at work.

and yeah, no women. i'm not surprised tho ;)

~C

p.s. my hair is strictly temporary. my head is evicting some as i speak… so i'll be able to join the club soon enough…

i was also thinking it might be nice if we all have a whip-round afterwards to help support irrationalists in recovery…  : O )

It pains me to report that I have very little to offer toward increasing the group's average hair density!

But there is another interesting metric I noticed – if I'm not mistaken, this group is substantially international, either by birth or through travel. We have several Europeans, Julian is from South Africa and I grew up nearby in Zimbabwe. Maybe there is a hidden cultural dimension to the reception of critical perspectives on New Age thinking, which is (mainly?) a US phenomenon?

i have a suggestion. why don't you peeps also cover what you think about this, just to balance things a bit :)

Is there such a thing as “the Mean Green Meme?”

anyway, Spider Man 3 is up, got to go before i miss the matinee…

~C

I do find it utterly revealing that there are no women on board of this symposium…

although us women are not quite represented, i look forward to seeing what you all have to say…thank you julian for sparking what seems to have the potential a nice bright fire to burn through the new age poo-poo and teach us all a little something…it might even be interesting to have it be all women next time…

Cool! I'm looking forward to moving in this direction.

P.S. The girls would definitely win the best hair contest!  : )

hi mushin

revealing of what?

a patriarchal conspiracy?
a recapitulation of japanese sexism in samurai days?
cowardice in the face of the obvious intellectual superiority of women?

or a statistical probability?

i'm not a fan of positive discrimination, although i don't think julian was even thinking about the sex of the invitees, probably more about the spread of perspectives relevant to the subject at hand. there's plenty of time for more symposia… in any case, i'm looking forward to the comments from zaadsterettes.

manpower + womanpower = peoplepower

bis dann

Julian, that's awesome! I was actually born in Switzerland, but my father was born in Chinoyi, and we moved to Harare when I was 3 years old. And then later on we spent a few years around joburg.

C4Chaos, I've never understood MGM to imply that Green was uniquely or extraordinarily mean. I haven't read Boomeritis, so maybe Wilber does. Wilber accepts the Jungian view of psychology, at least in part, and I think his modifications to SD come out of that. Do you reject Jung? Cowan appears to, and that seems to be part of his disagreement. That said, I haven't really ever encountered anyone I'd consider MGM, so its totally theoretical for me.

My money's on de la Hoya.
Represent.
¡Hasta la victoria!

Julian, this sounds good. I'll be paying attention.

As an aside, I notice on your blog the Yoga Groove Collective fundraiser at Exhale Santa Monica. I wish there weren't two importantish competing events for me in Ojai where I live. I'd love to be in the presence of your activities there. I work some with troubled kids so I'm interested. Another time, I'll make it down to your area.

Hey Jules, excellent timing on that photo change! You planning on channeling the energy of all those women when you write your blog on Monday?

~Grey

P.S. In my comment above I meant “flex our communion muscles”, but I guess “compassion” was close enough….

and in an all women symposium related to next week's topic, you can't have too many turtles

What it reveals, you ask Elektrogleiter?

The few Wilberian integralist circles I had the pleasure to visit were mostly men (3/4)
The videos I saw of KW teaching (panning around the room) around the same thing.

That I find revealing.
I don't even need to interpret anything here. The 'facts' speak for themselves.

I still don't see what you're saying it “reveals”. I agree that there's a tendency for the integral community to be male dominated (not just I-I, but Visser's Integral World, Spiral Dynamics, you name it…), but I don't think you can come to any conclusions based solely on those statistics. It's a common problem in all sorts of other fields, too, like philosophy and science generally. Where was it that I read (or heard) something about women being largely left out of the Nobel Prize nominations and awards?  Can't remember.

Discrimination? Maybe. Probably, at least to a certain extent. But I also have sort of a gut feeling that philosophizing is a more agentic, male sort of activity anyway, so I suspect that even if you were to remove all the discrimination factor, you'd still end up with more men being attracted to that kind of thing than women. Which has nothing to do with spiritual development or men being better at philosophizing than women, let me be clear; I'm just referring strictly to the average attraction to the activity of philosophizing.

Cheers,
Grey

BTW, speaking of Julian being surrounded by women, look at most yoga classes and you'll see the same sort of thing in reverse I suspect. Discrimination? Again, maybe, although the dynamics of the discrimination are probably different. But there, too, I get the feeling that yoga is just something that, on average, is more attractive to women (i.e. the female “type” in AQAL terms) than to men.

Just some thoughts,
Grey

Grey, my friend, you're too kind. I guess you're being of service to all those innocent souls who bump into this dark corner of Zaadz, so you try to explain how men are not neccesarily pigs if they hang out together and talk dirty about truth, goodness and beauty.:-) Thanks, it's refreshing to see patience at work.

Isn't it interesting that most New Age seminars and groups that Julian loves to bash - sorry for that term but at times it really looks like that to me - consist of (often) 3/4 women, and the Wilberian integral circles just the other way around?
What is not revealing about that? I might well ask.

I also find it quite interesting that immediatly the supposition is that what's revealing about this would be some type of sexism, genderism or discrimination.

It's like walking into a garden and seeing that there are a lot of lilies there or a lot of cactusses or whatever. It reveals something about the gardener, don't you think? And I'm not talking about cactussism or lilyism either…

Sorry, Mushin. I'm still not following you. If it's not sexism you're implying, then I don't know what it is you think it's revealing. Just the differences between the sexes maybe? Or how a person of one gender reacts to/interacts with the opposite sex? Can you be a bit more specific?

I also don't see how this applies specifically to “Wilberian integral circles”….

Still perplexed,
Grey

Isn't this about Integration?

I like to hear what these guys have to say.
But to call it a Symposium about Integrative Spirituality and missing out on at least some female voices… hmmmm?
Maybe call it the Male Integrative Symposium?

Fair enough, I suppose. But it is the first, hopefully, of a series. And of course even guys have access to the female type of the AQAL equation.

This recent series of debates surrounding Pavlina and LoA was seriously male dominated (both type and actual biological gender), but I think that had a lot to do with what exactly was being debated. I mean, Pavlina's obsession with effectiveness is a very agentic characteristic and so lended itself to an equally agentic “counterattack”, so to speak. “Boys will be boys” after all.

I have a feeling, though, that this symposium will be much more integral in the types it embraces. At least I hope it will be. And if it isn't, then we'll just have to wait for the all-girl symposium. ;-)

Cheers,
Grey

a blog?…shit, julian, i could write a f-in book…hehe…really, though…at the risk of totally ruining my voyeristic tendencies…sign me up…i would love to participate in all of this…

Happy to have pulled all of that out of you guys, Julian and Grey…

I'm in the middle of a seminar now - guess how many women ;-)
Have to be brief but will hopefully enter into the dialogue at some later time…  (I never to a stand for bashar and his ilk, I criticized your - in my eyes - overly 'rationalistic' approach; but let's not open that debate again)

And I do still have a critical eye on the whole Wilberian approach (being overly 'agentic' as you might call it, and actually not facing its own mythological character - I call it the AQAL-myth, by the way…)

So looking forward to a lively debate

It sure is pretty lively already! I presume all of you here have read the related and VERY lively  Zaadz Symposium thread on I-I posted by Julian.

Although I appreciate that you said, Julian, (on the I-I thread) “this is a particular group chosen because of a shared affinity on certain issues.”

But I can't help thinking of one of my favourite quotes from John Stuart Mill:


“It is hardly possible to overrate the value…of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar… Such communication has always been…one of the primary sources of progress.”

Love to all,
Sandra

cant wait to see how this unfolds…..very exciting

hi mushin

i intended no insult with my sarcasm above. i had considered numerous things that may have prompted your original comment above. in the end i chose an approach in response which a) most closely matched my interpretation of the tone of this sentence beginning: “I do find it utterly revealing that…” and b) was likely to produce explanation from you (it failed in that regard).

your statement i.m.o. communicates more implicitly than it does explicitly, with pejorative overtones indicating prior negative associations or disagreement with julian in some related areas. is that an accurate assessment?

in any case, i'm still unsure as to what was revealed to you. i might more usefully have asked you directly what it was, so it would be great if you could share it (since you chose to allude to it) when you have time, then we can decide whether there is merit in it.

regarding the ensuing discussion re women/lack of women on this particular microbubble of the milky way blogosphere, i happen to be male, but my thinking has been influenced as much by female writers on this site as much as by male ones (the same goes for non-virtual interaction), and will continue to be so, thanks to peeps such as siona, delia, turtle etc. i cannot give a female's perspective, but i can give a female perspective as i imagine it. i wouldn't do it however just to avoid criticism of lack of inclusiveness. i just think that women and women's perspectives don't really need to be defended here - especially before the symposium's even finished, and even then, criticism by creation always works. and if a meme or group which promotes dubious concepts and truth statements happens to be supported by a majority of women, and is attacked on rational grounds for reasons wholly unrelated to the sex composition of that group, so be it.

in any case, we are discussing as objectively as possible the nature of objective reality - what a grounded perspective of integrative spirituality actually is, could, or should be. that is gender independent of the sex of the commentator. it is desirable for us all to consider perspectives of all relevant types and groups since the accuracy of our models would necessarily be compromised. let's see how we do.

i am (sadly) only somewhat surprised that this symposium idea appears to have drawn as much criticism as encouragement, much of it centred on personal reactivity towards julian's character as perceived by some from his communications. i'm glad that i am not burdened by the illusion of my own or julian's perfection, and that despite our obvious failings and flaws, we - like many others - manage to enjoy the growth opportunities to be found on this site, and find things of value among the many voices working towards a more complete and accurate apprehension of reality.

none of which is intended to endorse or excuse personally attacking, snide, deliberately insulting, arrogant, reactive communication. i just see plenty of it going in all directions. we're all equal in the eyes of the law (myself included), and all equally entitled to learn from our mistakes.

i look forward to your elucidation in due course

mfg

p.s. mushin - i would be interested to hear more of your views on wilber criticism. julian asked me to contribute to this symposium knowing full well that i have numerous misgivings about some of his personal cultural prefences as evidenced in previous writings, an important one being the wilber culture. the differences in views between the invited writers are at least as great as might be seen by having writers of both sexes. i think type perspectives are sometimes seen as changing the nature of that which is being viewed, in other words seen as being fundamentally different. that is not a view that i share.