atmos sphere

The Air Aware | Orion Magazine

Indeed, whenever indigenous, tribal persons speak, often matter-of-factly, about “the spirits,” we moderns mistakenly assume, in keeping with our own impoverished sense of matter, that they’re alluding to a supernatural set of powers unrelated to the material world. We come much closer to the shadowed savvy of our indigenous sisters and brothers, however, when we recognize that the spirits they speak of have more in common with the myriad gusts, breezes, and winds that influence life in any locale—like the wind that barrels along the river at dusk, chattering the cottonwood leaves, or the mist-laden breeze that flows down from the foothills on certain mornings, and those multiple whirlwinds that swirl and rise the dust on hot summer days, and the gentle zephyr that lingers above the night grasses, and the various messenger-winds that bring us knowledge of what the neighbors are cooking this evening. Or even the small but significant gusts that slip in and out of our nostrils as we lie sleeping. We moderns pay little heed to these subtle invisibles, these elementals—indeed we tend not to notice them at all, convinced that a breeze is nothing other than a mindless jostling of molecules. Our breathing bodies know otherwise. But we will keep our bodies out of play; we will keep our thoughts aligned solely with what our complex instruments can measure. Until we have indisputable evidence to the contrary, we will assume that matter itself is utterly devoid of felt experience. In this manner we hoard and hold tight to our own awareness—like a frightened whirlwind spinning ever faster, trying to convince itself of its own autonomy, struggling to hold itself aloof from the ocean of air that surrounds it.

It has always been so...

integral praxis: Intersubjectivity and Interobjectivity in the Kosmos

In "An Integral Age at the Leading Edge", we summarized the evidence suggesting that a cultural elite, representing less that 2% of the adult population, was entering psychosocial waves of development that could best be described as integral, and that this 2% might very well be the harbinger of integral waves of consciousness to follow in the culture at large. It is a paradoxical situation, in a sense, in that this "elite" is the first to actually embrace a radical inclusiveness, an inclusive not shared by the other 98% of the population at this time (although they, too, might develop into this inclusive and integral orientation).

One of the nagging problems I've had with Wilber's Integral development model is the presumption that those of "lesser" development might one day claw their way up into the "elite" realms of Integral consciousness, if only they.... what? meditate more? buy more of Wilber's books? It's never terribly clear.

It seems to me there have been "radically inclusive" thinkers throughout history, as well as less inclusive masses (who aren't always terribly receptive to the thinkers' notions). There have been some changes in the "midpoint" of that mass, but that sort of change has always been very slow, with a long, thick trail (tail?), and tied to generational cycles much like paradigm shift. I would think the likelihood of creating some sudden large-scale developmental shift to activate Integral consciousness in more than a handful of people at any time is infinitesimal, so long as nothing else in the historic context of human consciousness is pushing or catalyzing that change.

There's quite a number of potentially catalyzing forces emerging at this moment in time, though: Climate change, the collapse of global capitalism in the wake of peak oil, hyperconnectivity, etc. so the possibility of sudden radical transformational shifts can't be ruled out completely, I suppose. However, it would seem much more pragmatic to contemplate how our societies might navigate these tricky waters of change with individuals spread across the "bell curve of consciousness." Should we focus on individual growth and development, a world of "I"s rising one by one? or on mass cultural change driven by systems-theory type interventions in the cognitive field-flow of mental existence, now being accelerated and hyper-networked by the spread of ubiquitous webtech?

I propose the Integral shaman would say both, neither, and something else.