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Saturday, June 18, 2011

Malcolm X: Criminal, Minister, Humanist, Martyr

It's interesting to me that the title of this review article on a book about Malcolm X traces his development (in Spiral Dynamics terms) from egocentric power drives (criminal) to authoritarian religious figure (Minister) to rational equal rights crusader (humanist) and, finally - with the awareness that he one day would be killed - to sacrifice his life for the future of his cause (martyr).

I wonder if the author of the review has any awareness of the developmental framework.

Malcolm X: Criminal, Minister, Humanist, Martyr

By TOURÉ

Published: June 17, 2011

“His aura was too bright,” the poet Maya Angelou said of her first meeting with Malcolm X. “His masculine force affected me physically. A hot desert storm eddied around him and rushed to me, making my skin contract, and my pores slam shut.” Malcolm X had that same sort of bone-deep, visceral impact on America. He got under everyone’s skin — either in the sense that he seeped into your pores and transformed you the way the great love of your life does, or in the sense that he annoyed or scared the living hell out of you. There is no middle ground with Malcolm. If you hate him or distrust him, you should consider giving him another try: officers assigned to monitor the wiretaps on his phones sometimes ended up being flipped, because close listening led them to believe that his programs and philosophies were sensible and righteous and that law enforcement agencies should not have been working against him at all. And while Malcolm’s ideas changed America, his life journey has captivated us even more. He went from a petty criminal and drug user to a long-term prisoner to an influential minister to a separatist political activist to a humanist to a martyr. Throughout his life he continually grew upward, unafraid to challenge or refute what he believed, giving hope that any of us can rise above even our deepest convictions to become better people.

Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos, Malcolm X in 1961.

MALCOLM X: A Life of Reinvention

By Manning Marable
Illustrated. 594 pp. Viking. $30.

Related

  • Excerpt: ‘Malcolm X’ (April 2, 2011)
  • Link by Link: A Digital Critique of a Famous Autobiography (May 9, 2011)
  • On Eve of Redefining Malcolm X, Biographer Dies (April 2, 2011)
  • Manning Marable, Historian and Social Critic, Dies at 60 (April 2, 2011)
  • Books of The Times: ‘Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention’ by Manning Marable (April 8, 2011)

The prime document that has kept Malcolm’s story alive over the dec­ades since his assassination in 1965 is “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” That book has changed countless lives and made Malcolm a central influence on generations of black men who admire his force, his courage, his brilliance, and his way of merging the protean trickster and the bold intellectual activist and the inspiring preacher. But all autobiographies are, in part, lies. They rely on memory, which is notoriously fallible, and are shaped by self-image. They don’t really tell us who you are but whom you want the world to see you as. Did Malcolm X consciously lie in his autobiography? In some cases, yes — he wanted us to believe he was a bigger criminal than he actually was, so that his growth into a Nation of Islam figure would seem a much more dramatic change. He also wanted us to think it was a friend who did sexual things with another man and not Malcolm himself. Sometimes he just left out details that didn’t fit his political agenda or the literary agenda of his co-author, Alex Haley. Some of those choices were right for what they were creating.

For a more complete and unvarnished — yet still inspiring — version of Malcolm’s life, there’s “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” by the late Columbia scholar Manning Marable. It’s the product of more than 10 years of work and draws on Malcolm’s letters and diaries; the results of surveillance conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department; and interviews with Malcolm’s contemporaries, including Minister Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, whom Marable talked to for nine hours. Farrakhan has said that Malcolm was like “the father I never had.”

The loudest rumor before the book’s release was that it would shed light on Malcolm’s secret homosexual past. When he’s a young hustler, we find him apparently being paid to do things with one rich, older white man, but this moment is brief and anticlimactic and does not convey the impression that Malcolm was bisexual. Besides, there are far more titillating things in this book, which dives deep into Malcolm’s sex life. Marable obtained a letter Malcolm wrote in 1959 to Elijah Muhammad, then the leader of the Nation of Islam, in which he complains about his wife, Betty Shabazz: “At a time when I was going all out to keep her satisfied (sexually), one day she told me that we were incompatible sexually because I had never given her any real satisfaction.” Marable describes Malcolm as a virulent misogynist and a horribly neglectful husband who repeatedly got his wife pregnant, perhaps to keep her from making good on threats to cuckold him, and also made a habit of leaving for days or months immediately after the birth of each child.

That’s a Malcolm we all haven’t seen before. Meanwhile, the Malcolm we do know starts coming into view far earlier than expected, given that he’s known for metamorphosis. Born in Omaha in 1925, Malcolm was drilled as a child in the principles of Marcus Garvey — nationalism, separatism, Pan-Africanism, black pride, self-reliance, economic self-­empowerment — by his parents, Earl and Louise Little. Malcolm’s father was a particularly powerful role model: a devoted Garveyite who in 1930s Michigan stood up for what was right for black people, even in the face of death threats, and then paid for his bravery with a gruesome end. The apple did not fall far at all. And as a young man working the streets of Harlem, Malcolm came to know most of the stars of ’40s jazz and absorbed their example, learning to use pace, tone and space in jazz­like ways and perhaps to become a sort of jazzman of the spoken word. “He lived the existence of an itinerant musician,” Marable writes, “traveling constantly from city to city, standing night after night on the stage, manipulating his melodic tenor voice as an instrument. He was consciously a performer, who presented himself as the vessel for conveying the anger and impatience the black masses felt.”

As Malcolm moved away from the insular religiosity of the Nation of Islam, which at the time counseled members not to vote, and into political issues, his relationship with Elijah Muhammad began to rupture. Many know that Muhammad’s womanizing — the married minister fathered children with several young women — was one cause of the break between them, but few know how close their sexual paths ran. Evelyn Williams, one of the most fascinating characters in the book, fell in love with Malcolm when he was a street hustler, then moved to Harlem and joined the Nation after he became a minister. Malcolm proposed to her but changed his mind days later. After he became engaged to Betty, Williams ran screaming from the mosque. She was soon sent to Chicago to work for Muhammad and later had his baby.

That must have been painful for Malcolm, but Marable does not cite Muhammad’s womanizing as the main reason Malcolm broke with the Nation. Instead, he points to an incident in Los Angeles in 1962, when police officers burst into a mosque and shot seven Nation members, killing one and paralyzing another. Malcolm moved to create a squad that would assassinate members of the Los Angeles Police Department, and when Muhammad vetoed that idea, Malcolm lost faith in him, wondering if he really cared about his people’s lives. Right there the bond was irreparably shattered. Later, Malcolm told Farrakhan, a protégé turned rival, about Muhammad’s affairs, a conversation Farrakhan said he would have to report to the minister. This set Malcolm’s death spiral in motion.

Malcolm saw the end coming months in advance. He said, “There are a lot of people after me. . . . They’re bound to get me.” He spoke of living like a man who was already dead. He survived narrowly several times and yet did nothing to insulate himself. He could’ve moved to Africa for a few years, could’ve used armed bodyguards, could’ve had the audiences at his rallies searched, could’ve carried a weapon. But he did nothing, even as his inner circle screamed that he needed protection. Some who were close to him wonder if Malcolm wanted to die or if he had embraced death as an inevitability. Marable names the men who killed Malcolm and describes his last moments in such excruciatingly visual detail that it could bring tears or cause nightmares. He makes it plain that Nation of Islam figures ordered the killing, planned it and carried it out, but he also speculates that both the man who ordered it and the man who fired the fatal shot may have been F.B.I. informants. Did the bureau have Malcolm killed? Did it stand by and knowingly let him be killed? Marable is unsure.

As the book reveals, the F.B.I. struggled with how to deal with Malcolm — i.e., how to discredit him — because he was so disciplined, so law-­abiding and too smart to actually create the violence that would allow him to be arrested. Marable shows us Malcolm in Africa, watched by the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and points out “the David-versus-Goliath dimension”: “Malcolm had few resources and was traveling without bodyguards, yet the attorney general and the F.B.I. director were so fearful of what he alone might accomplish that they searched for any plausible grounds to arrest and pros­ecute him upon his return.” Of course, they found nothing. Similarly, an exhaustive biographer combing through Malcolm’s days pulls away the curtain to show us the entirety of his life, and the emperor remains clothed. He has some failings, but Malcolm is still the empowering figure his autobiography showed us he was.

Touré’s new book, “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now,” will be published in September.


Tags: Malcolm X, Criminal, Minister, Humanist, Martyr, Toure, New York Times, books, reviews, race, culture, civil rights, history, Nationa of Islam, MALCOLM X: A Life of Reinvention, Manning Marable, separatism, political activist, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley, Betty Shabazz
Posted by william harryman at Saturday, June 18, 2011 0 comments
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Labels: books, civil rights, culture, history, race, reviews

Health@Google: Dr. Daniel Siegel, Taking Time In

http://commonreads.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/mindsight.jpg

Dr. Dan Siegel stopped by Google to talk about Mindsight and health. His talks are always interesting and informative. His book, from 2010, is Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation.

Dr. Daniel Siegel, Taking Time In

Health@Google Series May 26, 2011 Presented by Dr. Daniel Siegel. Studies of physical health, emotional well-being, longevity, happiness, and even wisdom suggest that our ability to be aware of our own internal world and feel deeply connected to others is at the heart of both resilience and mental health. This ability to see the mind or to have "mindsight" is a learnable skill that stabilizes the lens through which we come to sense our feelings, thoughts, and memories. Mindsight promotes more meaningful and empathetic relationships, an integrated and flexible brain, and a coherent and resilient mind.


Tags: Health@Google, Dr. Daniel Siegel, Taking Time In, Mindsight, New Science, Personal Transformation, Psychology, brain, Spirituality, meditation, mental, health, stress, physical health, emotional well-being, longevity, happiness, even wisdom, resilience
Posted by william harryman at Saturday, June 18, 2011 0 comments
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Labels: brain, meditation, Psychology, Spirituality

The Dalai Lama - States of Consciousness in Meditation


CONSCIOUSNESS AT THE CROSSROADS:
Conversations with the Dalai Lama
on Brain Science and Buddhism

edited by Zara Houshmand,
Robert B. Livingston, and B. Alan Wallace

more...

Dalai Lama Quote of the Week

[During sleep and waking states] there are physiological processes that correspond to different mental states, and these are associated with subjectively experienced energies in the body.

In the waking state, these energies tend to be drawn into a locus in the center of the head, at the level of the forehead. In the dreaming stage, these energies will be even more drawn to a point in the throat. In the deep sleep state, these energies are more drawn into the heart. The location is not the physical heart, the organ, but the heart center which is right in the center of the chest.

Certain events are experienced in meditation that seem to corroborate this theory. For example, in meditation, it is possible to bring your awareness into the heart cakra, and sometimes when this happens, the person will faint. On other occasions, the meditative awareness, finely concentrated, may be brought into the area of the navel. And at this juncture, it has been found experientially that heat is produced by such concentration. If you look at the anatomy of the body, you don't find these cakra points. (p.106)

[See also February 25 2010 and June 27 2009 archives for more of this discussion.]

--from Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism edited by Zara Houshmand, Robert B. Livingston, and B. Alan Wallace, published by Snow Lion Publications

Consciousness at the Crossroads • Now at 5O% off
(Good until June 24th).


Tags: Buddhism, books, consciousness, dharma, Consciousness at the Crossroads, Conversations, Dalai Lama, Brain Science, Zara Houshmand, Robert B. Livingston, B. Alan Wallace, Snow Lion Publications, States of Consciousness, Meditation
Posted by william harryman at Saturday, June 18, 2011 0 comments
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Labels: books, Buddhism, consciousness, dharma

Friday, June 17, 2011

RSA Animate - Choice w/ Professor Renata Salecl

A new RSA Animate is always a treat. Below the shorter animated talk, I have included the original full talk that runs a little more than half an hour.
RSA Animate - Choice

Uploaded by theRSAorg on Jun 16, 2011

In this new RSAnimate, Professor Renata Salecl explores the paralysing anxiety and dissatisfaction surrounding limitless choice. Does the freedom to be the architects of our own lives actually hinder rather than help us? Does our preoccupation with choosing and consuming actually obstruct social change?

Taken from the RSA's free public events programme www.thersa.org/events


Renata Salecl - The Paradox of Choice

Fusing sociology, psychoanalysis and philosophy, Professor Renata Salecl shows that individual choice is rarely based on a simple rational decision with a predictable outcome.


Tags: Renata Salecl, choice, choosing, individual, philosophy, individual choice, society, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, the rsa, royal society of arts, sociology, Psychology, Philosophy, choice, Paradox of Choice
Posted by william harryman at Friday, June 17, 2011 0 comments
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Labels: choice, Philosophy, Psychology, sociology

Mark Forman Interviewed on Integral Spirituality

http://pathstoknowledge.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/spiritual.jpg

This is a short (45 minutes total) interview with Mark Forman, PhD, on integral spirituality - John F. Kennedy University June 6, 2011.

This is a nice talk - good to hear Mark's perspectives, especially on shadow work in integral theory and spiritual traditions.



Tags: Mark Forman, Interview, Integral Spirituality, JFK University, Psychology, Integral, Spirituality, AQAL, Ken Wilber, Psychotherapy, Yoga, perspectives, framework, spiritual traditions, shadow work
Posted by william harryman at Friday, June 17, 2011 0 comments
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Labels: Integral, Psychology, shadow work, Spirituality

Bliss, clarity, and nonthought are the main qualities of concentration


THE BUDDHIST PATH
A Practical Guide from the
Nyingma Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism

by Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche
and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche

more...

Dharma Quote of the Week

When you meditate with concentration, there are three particular experiences that arise: bliss, clarity, and nonthought.

The experience of meditative bliss is greater than ordinary worldly happiness. Sometimes when you are meditating, a feeling of blissfulness suddenly arises from the subtle state of your mind and pervades your entire body. This bliss is healthy and brings out your inner qualities. Some people use drugs to induce blissfulness and visions, but drugs are external supports that cannot bring lasting happiness. The bliss experienced in meditation can last for many days, according to your ability to meditate. When you experience this kind of bliss, on the outside you might look very poor, but inside you remain very joyful.

The second main experience in meditation is clarity. Sometimes while meditating you can suddenly feel that your mind is very clear and bright. Even if you are meditating in the dark, you do not feel heavy or tired. Sometimes your body feels very light and your mind is very clear, and many kinds of reflections appear. Clarity brings great wisdom and the ability to read other people’s minds, as well as to see your own past and future lives.

The third main experience is nonthought, or a state of equanimity without distractions. Beginners can also experience this. Nonthought is more settled than the experiences of bliss and clarity. If you have thoughts, they suddenly dissolve and you can remain continuously in meditation. As your ability to meditate develops, your mind becomes more and more settled, so that you can meditate for one hour or one week or one month without being distracted by thoughts. You simply remain in the natural state for as long as you want.

Bliss, clarity, and nonthought are the main qualities of concentration. However, it is important not to be attached to them or concerned about whether they arise or not; one should simply continue to practice. (p.29)

--from The Buddhist Path: A Practical Guide from the Nyingma Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, by Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche, published by Snow Lion Publications

The Buddhist Path • Now at 5O% off
(Good until June 24th).


Tags: Bliss, clarity, nonthought, three qualities, concentration, Buddhism, books, dharma, The Buddhist Path, Practical Guide, Nyingma Tradition, Tibetan Buddhism, Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche, Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche, Snow Lion Publications
Posted by william harryman at Friday, June 17, 2011 0 comments
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Labels: books, Buddhism, dharma

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Happiness . . . .

One of the link groupings from Bookforum yesterday was titled Implications of the happiness agenda, and the variety of links was very interesting.

Implications of the happiness agenda

Jun 15 2011

Marek Hlavac (Harvard): Subjective Life Satisfaction in the European Union: Determinants and Policy Implications. Who's happier, Europeans or Americans? Americans really do love to work, it seems, while Europeans are much happier if they skip burning the midnight oil in favor of leisure. US doesn't make cut for happiest nations list: Feel good about yourself and your life? There's a chance you might be Danish. Razib Khan on “gross national happiness” in numbers. The economics of unhappiness: What level of affluence might fulfill us? Two European economists stir the debate. Is there a better measure of happiness than GDP? (and more) Andrew Oswald considers recent moves in economics, famously the most dismal of sciences, to take the happiness and psychological health of the population as seriously as a country's GDP. An interview with Geoff Mulgan, co-founder of Action for Happiness on the philosophy, politics and economic implications of the happiness agenda. Can money buy happiness? Evidence from industrial wage dispersion. Research suggests income disparity makes people unhappy. In a time of vicious budget debates on Capitol Hill, a new study finds that the path to happiness might be through big government. Thomas J. DiLorenzo on the Trojan Horse of "happiness research". William Davies on the uses and abuses of "happiness". Is happiness really possible in a time of ruin? John Zerzan on happiness. Can we become "happy citizens" in a climate of insecurity? A new study sheds light on "dark side of happiness". The poison of unhappiness: Friends and exercise make us happy, unhappy people drag us down. Can you search too hard for happiness? Sometimes the trick to finding joy is to stop obsessing over it (and more). Feeling happy? Don't be too smug as chances are you will die young.

One of the links is to a Psychology Today page filled with even more links on happiness:

Can You Search Too Hard for Happiness?


Sometimes the trick to finding joy is to stop obsessing over it.


Which is More Important: Truth or Contentment?

Reality can be a bitter pill.
by Raj Raghunathan, Ph.D.

Looking for Cheer in All the Wrong Places

Think deep satisfaction over superficial fixes
by Carlin Flora

Stop All That Smiling!

Being "on" all the time isn't always good.
by Christopher Peterson, Ph.D.

The Downside of the American Dream

We've achieved it all, so why aren't we happier?
by Lauren Sandler

The swinging pendulum of psychological wisdom

Bubbles, bubbles everywhere
by Sophia Moskalenko, Ph.D.

Happiness is a Pork By-Product

You won't reach it by heading there.
by Susan K. Perry, Ph.D.

Am I Happy Yet?

There's a difference between happiness and fulfillment
by Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D.

The brain needs downs to have ups

Happy neurochemicals can’t work if they’re on all the time.
by Loretta Graziano Breuning, Ph.D.

Why It's Hard To Find Your "Life Purpose" In Today's World

Looking for your life purpose in the wrong places?
by Douglas LaBier, Ph.D.

Graduation Blues

How to cope with your feelings on this special day
by F. Diane Barth, LCSW

The Enigma of Dr. Vaillant - George and Me

George Vaillant and the mystery of people's outgrowing alcoholism
by Stanton Peele

The Happiness Within

Why you must first develop your own Happiness.
by Jaime Booth Cundy

Waiting for Happiness

Is Happiness the new Godot?
by Jaime Booth Cundy

Boosting Others Boosts You

Volunteering really does help
by Gretchen Rubin

Nothing Is That Important

A Sunday afternoon with Daniel Kahneman.
by Christopher Peterson, Ph.D.

The Hidden Side of Happiness

Pleasure only gets you so far. A rich, rewarding life often requires a messy battle with adversity.
by Kathleen McGowan

Big Moments

Peak experiences are hard to predict—and that's part of their charm.
by Rebecca Webber

Happiness and the Quest for Wealth

The materialistic search for happiness is laden with paradox.
by Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D.

Why We Make a Fuss Over Happiness

Is that all there is?
by Jennifer Baker, Ph.D.
  • Suffer...for Fifteen Minutes

    Did it boost your happiness?
    by Gretchen Rubin
  • The Perils of Optimism

    Why pessimism shouldn't get the bad rap
    by Dr. Jeremy Sherman
  • A Credo for Living Sanely (What's True for Me)

    15 basic "truths" that work for me
    by Karl Albrecht, Ph.D.
  • Writing About Death Can Increase Happiness: Revisited

    Awareness we could die is intricately bound to happiness.
    by Nathan A. Heflick
  • Secrets of Happiness

    If pleasure is not what drives us, what does?
    by Steven Reiss
  • Sick and Stuck in a Small Town

    Finding happiness right outside my door.
    by Toni Bernhard, J.D.
  • Is Our Definition of "Happiness" Extrovert-centric?

    Do introverts and extroverts pursue different types of happiness?
    by Sophia Dembling
  • Happy Children Make Happy Adults

    Does being a happy kid guarantee a happy adulthood?
    by Dr. Stephanie Sarkis, PhD

Tags: Implications of the Happiness Agenda, Bookforum, Psychology Today, Psychology, happiness, culture, perspectives, link dump
Posted by william harryman at Thursday, June 16, 2011 0 comments
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Labels: culture, happiness, link dump, perspectives, Psychology

Russ Volckmann's Review of Jeff Meyerhoff's "Bald Ambition: A Critique of Ken Wilber’s Theory of Everything"

In the new issue of Integral Leadership Review, editor Russ Volckmann reviewed Jeff Meyerhoff's Bald Ambition: A Critique of Ken Wilber’s Theory of Everything. Russ offers an excellent review, fair and also critical of those areas where Meyerhoff misses the mark.

Book Review


Jeff Meyerhoff. Bald Ambition: A Critique of Ken Wilber’s Theory of Everything. LaVerne, Tennessee: Inside the Curtain Press. 2010.

Russ Volckmann


This book has been out only a year or so and I already feel like I am behind the curve. While Meyerhoff notes that there has been something of a wall, albeit one with gaps, of silence regarding this book, in an interview with Frank Visser (who wrote the forward and is author of Ken Wilber: Thought as passion, the book that outlined the stages of Wilber’s thought for the first time in my reading) Meyerhoff does outline several reviews/responses to his writing. Some of this may be related to the fact that much of this book was laid out on Frank Visser’s invaluable website, www.integralworld.net in the early part of the last decade. There, Meyerhoff has a chance to respond to criticisms, as well as share his own reflections since the book was published. I highly recommend the interview: http://www.integralworld.net/visser42.html. So there has been an ongoing dialogue about much of what has been written in the book, a dialogue that most notably has not truly engaged Wilber’s attention.

Straight off, I find I wanted to join those who have criticized the book for one chapter, in particular, “Psychological Analysis of Wilber’s Beliefs,” as an amateurish psychological intrusion, but Meyerhoff himself seems to have backed off from his interpretations in the interview with Visser. He calls it a psychology of belief in which he places loss at the heart of Wilber’s psychology: “The case for loss in Wilber is strong, but intuitively I just don’t feel it captures what’s central.” At this point I am not sure what is central. In any case, unless you want a quasi-Eriksonian analysis as an example of what not to do, this chapter can comfortably be ignored.

Having said that, however, this is the kind of book I wish I could write, particularly in the depth of research and clarity of critique. Clearly Meyerhoff invested a great deal in the scholarship of examining Wilber’s writing, particularly Sex, Ecology and Spirituality (SES). In the interview he admitted to reading “most of” Integral Spirituality and finds that Wilber has made some adjustments to earlier approaches that Meyerhoff critques very effectively from an “academic” point of view. His attention to primary and secondary sources in questioning Wilber’s academic credentials and theoretical positions, particularly around the notion of orienting generalizations, is quite effective. Wilber’s response to this criticism has been to shift to integral methodological pluralism and its eight methods. Meyerhoff sees this as sidestepping the issue, albeit he does appreciate in Wilber “a more radically perspectival understanding in which the arising developmental edge actually creates (enacts), in some way, a new reality.”

He does find Wilber’s approach to be a creative synthesis that offers a compelling life philosophy. But chapters on consciousness, vision-logic, mysticism, social evolution, western history, poststructuralism and postmodernism, methodology and philosophy provides example after example of the dialogical nature of learning and theory building that is a far cry from the weight of opinion suggested in Wilber’s writing in SES. A question this raises for those interested in the integral approach that has developed through the years is, “So What?” As Meyerhoff himself acknowledges the attraction of Wilber’s work is more in the application in one’s life and action than as a contribution to academic discourse.

Read the rest of the review.


Tags: books, Integral, criticism, Russ Volckmann, Review, Jeff Meyerhoff, Bald Ambition, Critique, Ken Wilber, Theory of Everything, Integral Leadership Review, integral theory, AQAL
Posted by william harryman at Thursday, June 16, 2011 0 comments
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Labels: books, criticism, Integral

Jason Silva - We are information experiencing information: An experimental essay in "Intertwingularity"

http://blogs.miis.edu/petershaw/files/2011/02/intertwingled1.jpg

Fascinating . . . . or curious . . . . or intriguing. This experimental article is a guest post by Jason Silva, it comes from Big Think.

We are information experiencing information: an experimental essay in "Intertwingularity"

Parag and Ayesha Khanna on June 4, 2011

Createreality

GUEST POST BY JASON SILVA

"Intertwingularity" is a term coined by Ted Nelson to express the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge.

He wrote:

"EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no "subjects" at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly..."

And on that note, here are a bunch of “cross connections among a myriad of topics” that are very much not divided up neatly.

The Noosphere and IDEA SEX:

This "all knowledge" that Nelson refers to, akin to an invisible compendium of our collective intelligence, was coined by Pierre Teilharrd de Chardin as "the noosphere", the 'thinking' layer of reality, sitting above the biosphere.

If you want to experience this Noosphere directly, this trippy, numinous, truth-composite of the human species, all you have to do is visit a typical museum: art is the mirror we hold up to ourselves: yet more so than ordinary mirrors that only reflect our physical anatomy, museums reflect our psychic mind, our extended selves, they are a physical aggregate of the human species talking to itself at the highest levels, in real time. Our minds come alive in the dance between the vast galleries of art which talk to us in paint or shape , graphics or words, scratching, probing, aching to affect us and engage us. "Wake up" they scream: 6 billions humans are engaged in an informational exchange at every moment: massively fascinating parallel patterns and connections are emerging: complexificaton is no longer limited to DNA and sexual reproduction: the thought-sphere now has "idea-sex" via "techno-social wormholes" that fold time and space and accelerate complexity! Magic exists. It has been engineered!

Chris Anderson, curator of The TED Conference, recently spoke about the human mind, the power of imagination and the life-form Teilhard called the "noosphere". Though he didn't use the word Noosphere directly, he did refer to the world of ideas as a "lifeform":

"I am talking about the talent which some would call... imagination or invention or innovation. It is the remarkable ability first of all to model some aspect of the external world inside our heads... and secondly to play with that mental model until suddenly... bingo... you find a a way to rearrange it so that it's actually better... This is the amazing engine that underpins both technology, the T of TED, and Design, the D of TED. It is this skill that has made possible the human progress of the last 50,000 years...

It's really astonishing that we can do this. For almost the entire period of life on earth, the appearance of design has been driven differently. By random trial and error. Like a drunkard lumbering through a dark maze of passages, life has lurched its way forward. For every evolutionary step forward there have been countless dead ends. In a single lifetime, change was not detectable. It happened slowly, painfully over millions of years. Yet somehow in our species the light came on. We actually found a way to model the future before lumbering into it. That... changed... everything.

Viewed from a different perspective, you could say our brains became the ecosystems for a new kind of life, a life that replicated and transformed itself at a rate hitherto unknown in our corner of the universe. The thrilling life of the world of ideas. TED is devoted to nurturing this life form."

HUMANS ARE AN ANTI-ENTROPIC PHENOMENON:

"The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is anti-entropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic."

- R. Buckminster Fuller

Humans are anti-entropic. We are an exception to the second law of thermodynamics, which is slowly simplifying almost everything in the universe. Life, conversely, is getting more complex, more organized, and more sophisticated.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit Priest and scientist, had an unrelenting desire to find common ground between his first rate scientific mind and his guttural urge to dance with the divine.

His central thesis is fundamentally that life is anti-entropic: that there is, in the evolutionary process, a direct progression from the simplest structures (for instance, atoms) to single-celled organisms, to multi-cellular organisms, to ever more complex organisms, until the stage of "evolutionary organization known as man" is reached. Accompanying this growing complexity of structure is an ever-increasing complexity of consciousness, crossing a critical threshold at the dawn of man. "Thinking, feeling, striving man is the cutting edge of biological synthesis," he said. The type of complex self-awareness and rich, symbolic inner world characterized by man, whether triggered by the synesthetic ecstasy of "mind-manifesting" mushrooms, or something else, is the point where we effectively switched from biological evolution, to self-directed, technological evolution.

An article in Wired said this: "Teilhard went on to argue that there have been three major phases in the evolutionary process. The first significant phase started when life was born from the development of the biosphere. The second began at the end of the Tertiary period, when humans emerged along with self-reflective thinking. And once thinking humans began communicating around the world, along came the third phase. This was Teilhard's "thinking layer" of the biosphere, called the noosphere (from the Greek noo, for mind). Though small and scattered at first, the noosphere has continued to grow over time, particularly during the age of electronics. Teilhard described the noosphere on Earth as a crystallization: "A glow rippled outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever-widening circles, he wrote, "till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence."

As futurist Ray Kurzweil has said, "this makes us very important” because, “...It turns out that we are central, after all. Our ability to create models--virtual realities--in our brains, combined with our modest-looking thumbs, has been sufficient to usher in another form of evolution: technology. That development enabled the persistence of the accelerating pace that started with biological evolution. It will continue until the entire universe is at our fingertips.”

Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired Magazine, goes even further back, referring to technological evolution as following the momentum begun at the big bang- he has stated: "...there is a continuum, a connection back all the way to the Big Bang with these self-organizing systems that make the galaxies, stars, and life, and now is producing technology in the same way."

He also points out the complementary relationship between this accelerating 'complexification' and the amount of energy harnessed:

"The energies flowing through these things are, interestingly, becoming more and more dense. If you take the amount of energy that flows through one gram per second in a galaxy, it is increased when it goes through a star, and it is actually increased in life...We don't realize this. We think of the sun as being a hugely immense amount of energy. Yet the amount of energy running through a sunflower per gram per second of the livelihood, is actually greater than in the sun... Animals have even higher energy usage than the plant, and a jet engine has even higher than an animal. The most energy-dense thing that we know about in the entire universe is the computer chip in your computer. It is sending more energy per gram per second through that than anything we know. In fact, if it was to send it through any faster, it would melt or explode. It is so energy-dense that it is actually at the edge of explosion.”...

AND, this anti-entropic complexification is accelerating exponentially, bootstrapping on its own progress. The computer in your pocket today is a million times smaller, a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful than a 60 million dollar supercomputer was 40 years ago.

Kelly continues, his interpretations increasingly poetic and beautiful:

"Look what is coming: Technology is stitching together all the minds of the living, wrapping the planet in a vibrating cloak of electronic nerves, entire continents of machines conversing with one another, the whole aggregation watching itself through a million cameras posted daily. How can this not stir that organ in us that is sensitive to something larger than ourselves?"

Ultimately, we can extrapolate a move towards infinity in all directions: infinite creativity, infinite consciousness, infinite intelligence.

I really love this summation by Kelly:

"The story and game begin at the beginning. As the undifferentiated energy at the big bang is cooled by the expanding space of the universe, it coalesces into measurable entities, and, over time, the particles condense into atoms. Further expansion and cooling allows complex molecules to form, which self-assemble into self-reproducing entities. With each tick of the clock, increasing complexity is added to these embryonic organisms, increasing the speed at which they change. As evolution evolves, it keeps piling on different ways to adapt and learn until eventually the minds of animals are caught in self-awareness. This self-awareness thinks up more minds, and together a universe of minds transcends all previous limits. The destiny of this collective mind is to expand imagination in all directions until it is no longer solitary but reflects the infinite."

REACTIONS TO ACCELERATING COMPLEXITY:

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh the urge to experience this type of freewheeling romantic insight wrapped in unfolding bliss and ecstatic awe is ever-present. I get SAD if I get distracted by anything less than this. I want god-head all the time, I want freedom from fear and freedom from death. Immortality-now: An Ecstatic continuity of self feeding on transcendent stimuli, an emergence of patterns and a ballooning, euphoric self-referenciality.

The fact that we can see this hypertechevolution taking shape should make us feel euphoric!

Albert Camus said life should be lived to the point of tears- Poet Roland Barthes says that 'fulfillment' is to overflow, to literally exceed totality, to spill over. We are told to suck the marrow out of life, to live each moment so intensely that we bleed awe.

It has been said that "art is the lie that reveals the truth"- I think I understand what this means: we are the directors and our life is a film, and like a director, we imbue life's precious moments with poetry by highlighting these moments and enhancing them with music and words and wine and most importantly our attention.

Using different elements, we combine our intention, auditory+ visual media, and diverse environments in order to radically engage our senses in a form of synesthetic ecstasy and emotional catharsis- Albert's Camus' tears of ecstasy, or Roland Barthe's overflowing fulfillment.

TUNING IN, TURNING ON, PLUGGING IN:

Today, with portable devices such as ipods we can create custom soundtracks resulting in what MoMa Curator Paola Antonelli calls "Existenz Maximum" - or perhaps what Ortega once described as "The beaming forth of a favorable atmosphere".

The more custom-engineered our reality becomes, the more we transcend all thoughts of helplessness and death. We are made closer to immortal as we are amplified by our technologically-extended minds.

We all long to experience the world through a lens untainted by bitterness or repetition, a lens not fogged by familiarity and exhaustion, not jaded by the mundane or ravaged by the passing of time.

We must step out of the familiar. An recent esquire magazine article used sailing as metaphor for our desire to transcend familiarity:

"Sailing lifts people out of their normal parameters of understanding; it makes them question their place in the world, because their feet and their brains need time to adjust to their new reality. For some people, the idea is too much to bear, and their sensory systems become overloaded and they throw up their lunch. For other people, the feeling becomes addictive. They learn to love the sensation of being just a little off-balance. It's as though they can find the truth about themselves only when they can't find their feet."

Marijuana, for others, is a way we might "find the truth" or sharpen our 'realitybubble'.

A former beat poet was once asked to describe the psychological merits of the marijuana experience. He answered in no ironic terms:

"You want to know what it is?

John: Chapter 9: verse 25: "Where as once I was blind, now I can see.."

In other words we need to practice side-stepping our reality tunnel. "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes."

Writer Alain de Botton, for one, gravitates towards the sublime and lifting power of technology and aeronautics to quench his thirst for lightness:

"With what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered, were we to walk down a corridor and on to a craft that in a few hours would land us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one knew our names. How pleasant to hold in mind, through the crevasses of our moods, at three in the afternoon when lassitude and despair threaten, that there is always a plane taking off for somewhere, Baudelaire's Anywhere! Anywhere!

But this begs the question: Are we willing to let go of the comforts of familiarity? Perhaps we must accept that in order to find our way, first we must get lost. Indeed in our search for this sense of elation and elevation one might be led to conclude that:

"One does not discover new continents without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."

****

JUMP-ROPING ACROSS REALITY TUNNELS:

Here’s the headspace I want to be in: a "reality tunnel" that sees rapture everywhere, the space of the divine wow, the vantage point of the uncompromising child-voyager who sees nothing but wonder and drinks nothing but awe.

The artist has a compulsive need to pay tribute to what he has experienced. The ecstatic surrender, the aesthetic arrest, the rapturous awe, is felt, and upon returning to ordinary consciousness, the residual feeling compels one to honor it in words.

This relentless urge becomes what fuels many of us: The Imaginary Foundation says that to "imbue our artistic work with even a twinkle of that reverence," (felt during the ecstatic moment), is enough to give our lives purpose.

I believe one must be willing to explore oneself while in the ecstatic state, to maintain enough executive function to describe vividly what is felt so deeply.

One must be willing to record oneself having idea sex in real time- we're talking about RECORDING the bursting forth of Aha.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote, "The living world is constituted by consciousness clothed in flesh and bone." He argued that the primary vehicle for increasing complexity consciousness among living organisms was the nervous system. It is our responsibility to put it to good use!

Jason Silva is a media personality and a Fellow at the Hybrid Reality Institute


Tags: Parag Khanna, Ayesha Khanna, We are information, experiencing information, experimental, essay, Intertwingularity, Jason Silva, information, experience, consciousness, interconnected, intertwingled, Ted Nelson, noosphere, R. Buckminster Fuller, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil, complexification, complexity, technology
Posted by william harryman at Thursday, June 16, 2011 0 comments
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Labels: complexity, consciousness, experience, information, interconnected

Liz Else - Thoughts within thoughts make us human

http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/recursivemind.png

This is an interesting article from the New Scientist Culture Lab blog. As is often the case these days, the article is based on a new book, The Recursive Mind: The origins of human language, thought, and civilization by Michael Corballis.

Corballis is trying to change the way we think about language and thought in human development and evolution. Rather than language making possible thought (the Chomsky view), this book suggests that the ability to think about the past and envision the future made possible our language, and more importantly our consciusness.

Thoughts within thoughts make us human

3 June 2011

Liz Else, associate editor

recursivemind.jpg

(Image: Ivo Berg (Crazy-Ivory)/Flickr/Getty)

Cogito ergo sum - I think, therefore I am - was coined by René Descartes in 1637. He was struggling to find a solid philosophical basis for how we know about reality and truth.

This is also turns out to be of the most famous examples of recursion, the process of embedding ideas within ideas that humans seem to do so effortlessly. So effortlessly and so skilfully, in fact, that it's beginning to look like the one true dividing line between animals and humans that may hold up to close scrutiny.

That's the hope of Michael Corballis, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His new book, The Recursive Mind: The origins of human language, thought, and civilization, is a fascinating and well-grounded exposition of the nature and power of recursion.

In its ultra-reasonable way, this is quite a revolutionary book because it attacks key notions about language and thought. Most notably, it disputes the idea, argued especially by linguist Noam Chomsky, that thought is fundamentally linguistic - in other words, you need language before you can have thoughts.

k9424.jpg

Chomsky's influential theory of universal grammar has been modified considerably since its origins in the 1960s, but it is still supported by many linguists. Its key idea is that the human mind has evolved an innate capacity for language and that all languages share some universal forms, constrained by the way we think. Corballis reckons instead that the thought processes that made language possible were non-linguistic, but had recursive properties to which language adapted: "Where Chomsky views thought through the lens of language, I prefer to view language though the lens of thought." From this, says Corballis, follows a better understanding of how humans actually think - and a very different perspective on language and its evolution.

So how did recursion help ancient humans pull themselves up by their cognitive bootstraps? It allowed us to engage in mental time travel, says Corballis, the recursive operation whereby we recall past episodes into present consciousness and imagine future ones, and sometimes even insert fictions into reality.

We are on our own with this degree of recursion. Chimps, bonobos and orangutans just don't tell stories, paint pictures, write music or make films - there are no great ape equivalents of Hamlet or Inception. Similarly, theory of mind is uniquely highly developed in humans: I may know not only what you are thinking, says Corballis, but also that you know what I am thinking. Most - but not all - language depends on this capability.

If he's right, Corballis's theories also help make sense of apparent anomalies such as linguist and anthropologist Daniel's Everett's work on the Pirahã, an Amazonian people who hit the headlines because of debates over whether their language has any words for colours, and, crucially, numbers. Corballis now thinks that the Pirahã language may not be that unusual, and cites the example of other languages from oral cultures, such as the Iatmul language of New Guinea, which is also said to lack recursion.

The emerging point is that recursion developed in the mind and need not be expressed in a language. But, as Corballis is at pains to point out, although recursion was critical to the evolution of the human mind, it is not one of those "modules" much beloved of evolutionary psychologists, many of which are said to have evolved in the Pleistocene. Nor did it depend on some genetic mutation or the emergence of some new neuron or brain structure. Instead, he suggests it came of progressive increases in short-term memory and capacity for hierarchical organisation - all dependent in turn on incremental increases in brain size.

But as Corballis admits, this brain size increase was especially rapid in the Pleistocene. These incremental changes can lead to sudden more substantial jumps - think water boiling or balloons popping. In mathematics these shifts are called catastrophes. So, notes Corballis, wryly, "we may perhaps conclude that the emergence of the human mind was catastrophic".

Let's hope that's not too prescient.

Book information
The Recursive Mind: The origins of human language, thought, and civilization by Michael Corballis
Princeton University Press
$29.95/£20.95

Tags: humans, language, linguistics, evolution, brain, The Recursive Mind, The origins of human language, thought, civilization, Michael Corballis, New Scientist, Culture Lab, Liz Else, Chomsky, theory of mind, consciousness
Posted by william harryman at Thursday, June 16, 2011 0 comments
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Labels: brain, evolution, humans, language, linguistics

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Duane Elgin - Simplicity Is Not Sacrifice!

http://simpleorganizedlife.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/voluntarysimplicity.jpg

Another good column from Duane Elgin on his Huffington Post/AOL blog - glad to see content like his getting a wider audience. I first read Voluntary Simplicity when I was working at Park Place Books in Kirkland, WA - across the lake from Seattle. Great book.

Simplicity Is Not Sacrifice!

Duane Elgin, Speaker, Author, Educator, Media Activist

There is a common misconception that living more simply requires a life of sacrifice. In fact, it is just the opposite: When we live more lightly on the material side of life, we create the conditions for greater satisfaction and meaning on the non-material side of life. Lifestyles emphasizing consumerism are the ones that require sacrifice:

• Sacrifice is a lifestyle that is overstressed, overbusy, and overworked.
• Sacrifice is investing long hours doing work that is neither meaningful nor satisfying.
• Sacrifice is being apart from family and community to earn a living.
• Sacrifice is the stress of commuting long distances and coping with traffic.
• Sacrifice is the white noise of civilization blotting out the subtle sounds of nature.
• Sacrifice is hiding nature's beauty behind a jumble of billboard advertisements.
• Sacrifice is the smell of the city stronger than the scent of the Earth.
• Sacrifice is carrying more than 200 toxic chemicals in our bodies.
• Sacrifice is the massive extinction of plants and animals and an impoverished biosphere.
• Sacrifice is being cut off from nature's wildness and wisdom.
• Sacrifice is global climate disruption, crop failure, famine, and forced migration.
• Sacrifice is the absence of feelings of neighborliness and community.
• Sacrifice is the lack of opportunity for soulful encounters with others.
• Sacrifice is feeling divided among the different parts of our lives.

Voluntary simplicity is not sacrifice:

• Simplicity fosters a more harmonious relationship with the Earth.
• Simplicity promotes fairness and equity among the people of the Earth.
• Simplicity cuts through needless busyness, clutter, and complications.
• Simplicity enhances living with balance--inner and outer, work and family, and more.
• Simplicity reveals the beauty and intelligence of nature's designs.
• Simplicity increases the resources available for future generations.
• Simplicity helps save animal and plant species from extinction.
• Simplicity responds to global shortages of oil, water, and other vital resources.
• Simplicity emphasizes our relationships with family, community, nature, and the universe.
• Simplicity yields lasting satisfactions that exceed the fleeting pleasures of consumerism.
• Simplicity fosters the sanity of self-discovery and an integrated approach to life.
• Simplicity blossoms in community and connects us to the world with a feeling of belonging.
• Simplicity is a lighter lifestyle that fits elegantly into the real world.

Contrary to media myths, consumerism offers lives of sacrifice while simplicity offers lives of opportunity. Simplicity creates the opportunity for greater fulfillment in work, meaningful connection with others, feelings of kinship with all life, and awe of a living universe. This is a rich way of life that offers a compelling alternative to the stress, busyness, and alienation of the modern era.

If the material consumption of a fraction of humanity is already harming the planet, is there an alternative path that enables all of humanity to live more lightly upon the Earth while experiencing a higher quality of life? The insights described above offer a resounding answer: "Yes, there is!"

This Blogger's Books:


The Living Universe: Where Are We? Who Are We? Where Are We Going?
The Living Universe: Where Are We? Who Are We? Where Are We Going?
by Duane Elgin

Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich
Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich
by Duane Elgin

Tags: culture, personal growth, simplicity, Spirituality, Duane Elgin, Simplicity Is Not Sacrifice, Huffington Post, AOL, Voluntary simplicity, sacrifice, sustainability, consumerism, attachments
Posted by william harryman at Wednesday, June 15, 2011 0 comments
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Labels: culture, personal growth, simplicity, Spirituality
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