Eric Blue's Blog

Ken Wilber's latest book was just released last Tuesday (August 14th). The Integral Vision appears to be Integral for the masses. This great book, a little over 200 pages, is filled with some great illustrations and covers almost all aspects of Integral Philosophy. I would probably recommend this as the first intro book for digging into Ken's work.

From the Publishers Weekly review:

Philosopher, psychologist and mystic Wilber (A Brief History of Everything) delivers on the subtitle's far-reaching promise. In a scant 200+ pages chock-full of handsome illustrations and spare, Zen-like diagrams and tables, he forges ahead on his established path, posing, What if we attempted to find the critically essential keys to human growth, based on the sum total of human knowledge now open to us? His answer is a kind of meta-structure of human experience and, more importantly, human potential. His Integral Map, or Integral Operating System (IOS), of quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types is drawn from developmental psychology, worldviews, multiple intelligences, gender studies, the nature of consciousness, etc. If this sounds heady and extremely ambitious, it is. Wilber asserts that the IOS approach to life permits all fields of endeavor at last to speak with one another in a common language. Clearly, however, spirituality dominates much of his thought. Not for the faint of brain, Wilber's work is still accessible and at times surprisingly practical. Some language spirals up majestically, recalling great Eastern texts. Reminiscent in spirit and watershed import of Ram Dass's Be Here Now, Wilber's work may well become a popular classic for explorers on the frontiers of humanity. (Aug. 14)
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I'd highly recommend checking this book out!

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Chuck Frey recently posted about an interesting application called WikiMindMap that represents Wikipedia entries in a mindmap format.

WikiMindMap is a tool to browse easily and efficiently in Wiki content, inspired by the mindmap technique. Wiki pages in large public wiki's, such as wikipedia, have become rich and complex documents. Thus, it is not allways straight forward to find the information you are really looking for. This tool aims to support users to get a good structured and easy understandable overview of the topic you are looking for.

Here's the result of a sample search for 'integral thought':

WikiMindMap reminds me of an application I reviewed a few months ago called Pathway (for Mac). The big difference, of course, is that WikiMindMap is entirely web-based. Very cool stuff!

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Integral musician Stuart Davis was recently feaured on Ken Wilber's blog. His post titled:

The Secret: The Spirituality of Narcissism

gives an interesting critique of the popular movie The Secret. Here are some key points:

1) The Secret is (partly) true

"Our thoughts and feelings are of consequence, and positive thinking and feeling can significantly characterize our experience of reality, even influence the way reality unfolds."

2) The Secret confuses the Self (true self; an unbounded, unlimited reality which transcends but includes all qualities) with the Ego (the frontal structure, personality).

3) Following the AQAL (All quadrants, All levels) model, The Secret only focuses on the interior of the individual (where thought occurs), not the other quadrants which comprise reality (according to this map).

Q1 (I) - The Interior of an Individual (where thought occurs, for instance)
Q2 (IT) - The Exterior of an Individual (the body, what can be measured and seen objectively)
Q3 (WE) - The Interior of the Collective (Culture, invisible features of mutuality, inter-subjective social)
Q4 (ITS) - The Exterior of The Collective (Biosphere, planet, infrastructure, the inter-objective realm)

In summary,

"Your thoughts and feelings are not the Source of Reality, but two of its features. You do not "create" your reality, you participate in it, and in certain circumstances, under particular conditions, you can influence it. And it is good and useful to cultivate that influence, to positively nurture those portions as much as possible, in the interest of love."

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Mind Update, a blog from Transparent Corporation recently posted an interesting video on illustrating the effects of transcendental mediation using an EEG.

This reminded me of a Ken Wilber video from a few months ago where he "stops his brain wave activity". According to the video post on YouTube:

That's right, Ken can stop his brainwaves on demand. Actually—and in a more serious vein—this is the famous EEG machine recording where Ken enters various meditative states, one of which is a type of "thoughtless," "image-less," or "formless" state, whose correlate is that his brainwaves come to an almost complete stop, as clearly recorded on this portable electroencephalograph (EEG) machine. (This video is discussed in One Taste, April 10 entry.)

Finally, a search on YouTube for "EEG mediation" turned up a few related videos. This particular video "Brain Coherence Measured with Dan Winter" yielded some additional results on Google.

Bliss Tuner
Heart Tuner

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I've spent the last few months digging deeper into the works of Ken Wilber. I really enjoyed Kosmic Consciousness, and figured the next logical progression in reading Ken's work would be to read "A Brief History of Everything".

While going through the book, I've also been referencing and reading various articles from IntegralWorld. I just discovered a great article on the history of holons at:

http://www.integralworld.net/index.html?edwards13x.html

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I discovered a comprehensive collection of diagrams related to Integral Philosophy
and Ken Wilber.

Flickr Integral Diagrams Set

Integral Diagrams Blog

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