INTEGRAL EPISTEMOLOGY - WHY DOES IT MATTER?
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From: Bruce S.
Date: Tuesday, February 26, 2008, 7:19 AM
Subject: Integral epistemology - Why does it matter?
ID: 259862

I recently received an email sent to me by "Humanity's Team" -- a network organized by writer/mystic Neale Donald Walsch, talking about some discussions he is having with philosopher Ken Wilber, and expressed in these terms:

Neale Donald Walsch and U.S. philosopher-psychologist-mystic Ken Wilber appear together for the first time in a broadcast conversation about Integral Consciousness.

Through the rich diversity of their dialogue, recorded for Wilber's "Integral Naked" Web portal, runs a single thread -- a fierce determination to connect the dots of fragmentation and, in Wilber's words, "begin to make sense of a world gone more than slightly mad."

"A fierce determination to connect the dots of fragmentation in a world gone slightly mad...."

I appreciate this effort and vision, and am interested to see where their conversation goes. I like those two guys, and I think they are on to something.

If we are interested in "oneness" -- if we are interested in bringing things and people together, into some kind of smooth harmonic relationship -- we need a new way to understand how "the pieces" fit together.

Now yes, it is true -- that most people barely even see this issue. Many people in "spirituality" tend to assume that some kind of "inner shift" of the spirit or soul is happening around the planet -- and that all that is really required is a shift in energy -- "consciousness", as they like to call it.

Well, I can be supportive of this view, and those who know me from other networks are aware that I am very supportive of this "convergent" process. But for me, it is simply not enough to talk about "energy shift". Energy shift alone is not going to get us there. In the old classic terms -- "the devil is in the details" -- and this big sweeping touchy/feeley thing, as sweet as it is, ignores the details. And hey, says Bruce -- everything actual IS details....

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This is one more subject we should approach in a systematic way -- maybe we can create an outline processor that runs in a collaborative wiki, so that, as a team, we could punch in "everything anybody has thought of" that is relevant to these questions.

Some of the themes that we might sweep together into one integral framework, that places everything in clear relationship to everything else --

• The fragmentation of knowledge
  Human knowledge is currently organized through an endless number of overlapping specialized sub-languages. These languages are often referring to the same things in slightly different terms, and the entire structure of human understanding becomes overwhelmingly fragmented and complex because of this "dimensional incommensurateness" between conceptual structures.

• Cultural fragmentation and tribalism
  In a world of incredible "diversity", people don't understand each other very well, and tend to be highly suspicious and accusing of people on the other side of the fence. In a world held together through a transcendental unity (or "resonance"), human diversity is a good thing -- it leads to powerful creativity, as the tensions and differences become highly illuminating, and the need to "create a world that works for everyone" drives a collaborative creative process. This is the essence of the emerging new politics.

• Maya, Babel, Illusion
  Just as the world is fragmented into cultures and languages and knowledge systems, human perception of reality is fragmented. The ancient Hindu term "maya" refers to this illusion (the actual root meaning of maya is the concept "measurement") -- and I would strongly argue that "awakening from maya" involves overcoming the conceptual limitations of a fragmented system of languages and knowledge.

Obviously, there is a lot to this. It's a huge undertaking. It's not a game for the faint-hearted or timid.

And, I would say -- it's going to take some "fierce determination to connect the dots".

As an initial framework, what we need to bring together is

• Everything the human community knows about spirituality and "oneness" and co-creativity
• Everything we have learned about the structure of language and meaning
• Powerful new networking concepts, that might be able to directly translate our emerging understanding into real-world network designs and systems. If Google can index a billion web pages, maybe those pages should be indexed under an integral interpretation.

A new kind of spiritual science is emerging -- a "synthetic" science that pulls the pieces together.

On our Global Resonance network, we now have listed 700 reference texts and 11,000 quotations that are pertinent to this inquiry. We know and can directly access what the greatest spirits in history have said and believed about these subjects.

And today, the power of computer science rolls forward like the Mississippi river, impacting and organizing everything it touches.

We need integral networks connecting everything and everybody. The price of fragmentation and blindness and tribalism is just too high.

We need a fierce determination to connect the dots.