Hi MM and interested others,

 

I am more than a bit troubled about some aspects of this conversation. Integral theory of course holds that there are broad plateaus in human development, and germane to this discussion two main ones can be thought of as first tier and second-tier.

 

Obviously most of the institutions, attitudes, customs, and conventional wisdoms that we have inherited are essentially first-tier phenomenon. And if we adopt Maslow's approach to these tiers our lens is to see them through needs, where first tier needs are generally described as centered on deficiencies, and second-tier needs through fullness of being. This latter phrase seems rather lofty and in order to get a handle on it perhaps we can see it through the lens of gifting.

 

It's been my experience that at the core of cutting edge one-to-one relationships that gifting is a central feature: he gives to she, she receives and acknowledges the gift, reversal takes place, she gives to he, he receives and acknowledges the gift, in a series of alternations. Ideally these alternations take on a sort of rhythm of their own, and beyond mere rhythm is a possible sense of crescendo. At some point the exchange is so fluid and speedy that the lines between he and she tend to blur, and possibly even disappear.

 

But as first-tier attitudes are tied to a sense of deficiency a consequence has been a corrupting of gifting; the feminine side of first-tier tends to turn gifting into an obligation, while the masculine side of first-tier tends to turn it into a tax. In the former case this can be seen as an exercise of the downside of the feminine mode which is to manipulate emotionally, while the downside of the masculine mode is the use of force.

 

Allow me to suggest that second-tier gifting attempts to avoid this corruption, in part by establishing certain parameters. An example of which may be, that whatever constitutes a gift, is always at the choice of the gifter, who gets final say over if, how much, and when it is offered. The giftee, of course, always gets final say over if, how much, and when it is accepted.

 

Contrast this with the corrupted first-tier notion of sacrifice, once thought to mean to make a thing or reveal a thing to be sacred, and has now degraded into a perverse notion of the deliberate giving up of a higher value for a lesser one. Crudely put this means if you have 10 and i have five, and we exchange, you're screwed out of five, and told that you've done something noble.

 

First-tier cultures have exploited this notion to an astounding extent. Consider Great Britain in World War I. It sent hundreds of thousands of its youth to die in the trenches of Europe, manipulated by a sense of duty, honor, and country. So strong was its sway that they went the entire time with a volunteer army. Yes, without a draft!

 

So when it comes to exploring the new territory of second tier relationships including marriage, i hold that it's wise to entertain these notions as a sort of cautionary tale. And keep our wits about us, as we attempt to rise above some of the dismal aspects of our collective past.

 

Warmly,

 

Charles

88W18'28" 41N58'02"

Charles:

Thanks for that excellent post!

This "donative" attitude in relationships is a beautiful thing to behold.

One point you made that I would like to address, and it is related to how you get to weddings in a sense:

You said: "First-tier cultures have exploited this notion to an astounding extent. Consider Great Britain in World War I. It sent hundreds of thousands of its youth to die in the trenches of Europe, manipulated by a sense of duty, honor, and country. So strong was its sway that they went the entire time with a volunteer army. Yes, without a draft!"

There is an odd phenomenon that happens when war brews. Healthy young men actually are thrilled about taking the field and challenging themselves. It is a test of their manhood, literally, in their minds. They are not being manipulated. They are not being exploited.

Tests and anecdotes and tales all confirm the same thing - for young men, the peer group is all important. How are they regarded among their peers? How will they look at themselves in the mirror if their peer takes the field and dies while they avoid battle?

It seems stupid and in a high 1st Tier sense it is stupid. But I suspect that the farther we go back in history, the more we find this notion of honor and shame and duty guiding men into battle.

It is not simply showing off or testing their mettle with their peers though. It is a matter of demonstrating to themselves and their peers that they are "Men" who are worthy of procreating and raising children.

This "right stuff" mentality is a deep, core driver for young men.  

I know a former Marine who has a tattoo that says "death before dishonor." This is important to him. Dishonor being - not standing by the side of his peers as they do their duty and take risks. He cannot live with himself if he does not validate his worth as a seed-bearer by showing his peers his courage and honor.

We have to remember - the vast majority of young men are still motivated by ancient drives to show that 1. their seed is worthy of regeneration and 2. they are capable of raising the off-spring.

I think a major challenge to us all is to persuade more and more people that there is something really important that is worthy living for, beyond the days when we create babies and raise them. This defies our evolutionary instincts of course. But we know it to be the case.

And when we come to understand that there is something very important worth living and surviving for, it becomes clearly idiotic to solve problems by demonstrating the worth of our seed on the battlefield.

But we ain't there yet, and those British soldiers you mention in WWI were not manipulated by anyone but the very drive that is still alive today in many of the Iraq generation.

Charles, Schalk, great posts as usual. I really appreciate your voices here. Charles in blue.

Allow me to suggest that second-tier gifting attempts to avoid this corruption, in part by establishing certain parameters. An example of which may be, that whatever constitutes a gift, is always at the choice of the gifter, who gets final say over if, how much, and when it is offered. The giftee, of course, always gets final say over if, how much, and when it is accepted.

Charles, I really appreciate your talk on this. It reminds me of a concept I once read about from a South American tradition--I believe the word they used was "ani," which meant the balance of give and take (I could be mistaken about the spelling; I have tried to look for it a few times but couldn't find it). Assuming it's the right word, there needs to be good "ani" in a relationship for it to work. If one person is all give and no take or one is all take and no give, it doesn't work very well. If one person is a an energy vampire, energy doesn't flow well. It gets bottled up. It's a big mistake to stop giving altogether if that happens, but in some situations one may need to give a little less than one could if the ani were really flowing.

So, I like your basic attitude about this, that one should be satisfied with what one is gettting, not be needy, egoically demanding, etc. However, I don't believe a second-tier attitude would be absolute about that. If someone were all take and no give, for example, it would eventually become authentic to talk about it a bit. Maybe the person isn't aware of it. Some people will also improve with a little encouragement. I understand the desire to create a culture where it's held that no one has the right to demand anything of the other and to call someone else on their energy vampiring or such, but I don't think it's evolutionary or realistic. But there is a very fine line there between egoic neediness and demand and authentic encouragement of greater ani. It can be really difficult to make that differentiation.

When I was talking about sacrifice, I was referring to the negate aspect of evolution, which is represented in the 5th tenet of Wilber's Twenty Tenets of Holons and which Ken and Andrew Cohen talk about here. When we move from Red egoism to Amber religion, we have to make a sacrifce: We have to sacrfice punching someone out or insulting someone when they insult us. We have to turn the other cheek. There is a price to paid there, a sacrifice. If we want to live in freedom in an Orange society, we have to sacrfice our impulse to steal that candy bar or else they will give us a hard time and eventually throw us in jail if we keep taking them. All the way up it is like this: There is a price we have to pay, a sacrifice, something to be negated, at each new level in each quadrant. We have to sacrifice the luxury of sitting on the couch sometimes and eating potato chips if we need to move on to the next level of fitness.

So, a man might decide after a few children that it would be easier to skip town and live on his own. It happens all the time. But if he wants to move to the next stage in relationship he is going to have to sacrifice the luxury of having no responsibility and living and working just for himself and take responsibility for his family. There needs to be a sacrifice, and so it goes all the way up. However, often it just seems like a sacrifice in the beginning, and later one sees that one hasn't given up anything important at all. Some of those sacrifices, however, such as the sacrifice of the impulse to lash back when insulted, will take years to stabilize.

Interesting, both your posts about war and such. I think government war propaganda (which isn't always a nefarious thing but sometimes a necessary thing) is probably more for the women and older men than the younger men, though the young men probably want everyone else to be with the program and thinking they are doing something necessary and to hear that they are doing the right thing themselves.

 

mm

I know a former Marine who has a tattoo that says "death before dishonor." This is important to him. Dishonor being - not standing by the side of his peers as they do their duty and take risks. He cannot live with himself if he does not validate his worth as a seed-bearer by showing his peers his courage and honor.


In his book The Myth of Male Power, Warren Farrell calls this the obligation to death, part of the patriarchal culture of male disposability. One of my favorite quotes that sums this whole thing up is "What any other group would call powerlessness, men have been taught to call power."

These kinds of attitudes negatively affect men's psychological health and even lower life expectancy, and there is a tremendous amount of covert and overt propaganda directed at children to adopt these beliefs, it's difficult to see how these are not essentially cultural manipulation and exploitation. Ken recently had a dialog with Farrell on this imporant issue, and he has a number of other clips on Integral naked.

Mr. Teacup, thank you for posting the link to that book. I haven't read it or listened to those IN dialogues, but I intend now to listen to some of the dialogues and perhaps read the book. The outline looks really cool (and it's a great idea to do that for a book, by the way: it makes me more interested in buying it), and it definitely has many important truths that really need to be heard. I am really glad that stuff is getting out there.

I think we need to look at this from a four-quadrant and also an evolutionary perspective. Families, bands, tribes, and nations have needed young men to go out and protect them against adversaries. That was important for their survival--and it still is. We still need young men to go out and fight wars occassionally. There are those who think the time of war has passed and now we can use diplomacy, sanctions, etc. Perhaps we can theoretically and in the future will be able to pull it off, but in practice so far it has not worked (for one thing, all relevant countries need to cooperate, which often isn't the case). So I don't think it's manipulation to raise at least some boys as potential soldiers--it's for their own good and the good of their family, tribe, country. We can move beyond that someday and can now do it consciously so as to minimize negative effects, but to an extent it is still necessary.

Of course an awful lot of that is also biologically programmed. The male lion will send the hyenas running when he comes charging in. Perhaps he learned it from his father also, but that is a good thing. The pride needs that since even together they can have a tough time with a group of hyenas. At any rate, the UR biological programming is just as important in this, and of course the other quadrants come into play as well as you've said earlier.

I think the idea of honor and duty in that context is appropriate to a certain worldspace, Amber probably. Of course there is a lot of stress put on boys, and we should do something about that, but some of those traditional male roles are still necessary. This sort of biological and cultural programming of course can be a detriment to men in Orange and Green situations and such. Aggression, especially on a physical level, will not take them far there. However, in a physical confrontation with other soldiers (or criminals, bullies, etc.) this sort of programming does give them power.

But I think it's great to bring awareness to all the negative effects of it (as well as the other equality issues) and begin winding it down. Some boys might be raised with less of that, though to an extent I believe it can still serve them.

 

mm

So I don't think it's manipulation to raise at least some boys as potential soldiers--it's for their own good and the good of their family, tribe, country.

I'm reluctant to do things to people without their consent "for their own good". I think the conclusion we are led to through an integral lens on gender is that the culture should allow the free expression of healthy masculine and feminine forms by all people. I've spent most of my life outside of the US, and in my experience, the types of expression that are available for men are even more dramatically reduced than in other countries, in part because of the culture wars. On one hand, a Red version of masculinity that is aggressive, competitive and animalistic is upheld as an impossible ideal, which if it doesn't lead directly to prison or death, is basically a performance. So immediately we have a culture which holds that you being alive at all is a sign of your basic worthlessness, lack of integrity and fraudulence; the ever-present question, "Are you a real man?" If you have breath to speak, then the answer can only be no. Women are placed into the morally-superior civilizing role, so as it turns out, the uncivilized Male ideal is completely prohibited and yet absolutely mandatory, and this paradoxical double negation can only be resolved in non-existence: the individual's sacrificial death.

Not being a pacifist, I agree with you on the necessity of an Amber masculinity for fighting wars and so on, I only add "If only such a man could exist!" In this cultural worldview, such a man only really exists posthumously, and we haven't even begun to address the Green perspective. Here I think we must paraphrase Lacan's famous formula and say "Man does not exist".

It is no surprise then, that the military's method for enforcing Amber conformance is through a symbolic rebirthing process where the recruit's head is shaved, he is stripped of all clothing to make him (nearly) naked, deprived of almost everything from the outside world and effectively infantilized by having all freedoms and autonomy restricted. "Boot camp is mostly a mind game. It's designed to take the civilian out of you and replace it with a top-notch military servicemember." In integral terms, boot camp regresses individuals to Magenta, stripping them of any higher developmental capacities and rebuilding them so that Amber is the only possibility. This is a psychologically violent, traumatic event that strips out all of your earlier conditioning, and some people can't withstand it all, perhaps because of early childhood abuse or other trauma. Even for individuals who survive this process, many find it difficult or impossible to reintegrate into Orange/Green mainstream society, much like some prisoners who have served long sentences.

I find it difficult to ignore or minimize the problems that this perspective reveals, though it is certainly understandable why some people, when faced with Green denial of masculinity, turn to Amber or Red versions of it, but in the end, I think the promise that these perspectives hold for authentic masculinity is ultimately a mirage.

Hi Schalk,

 

It looks like we're in essential agreement about how first-tier cultures tend to socialize men. I remember my late father telling of the time when he became 14 and was living in Manchester, England. (The Great War began one year earlier when he was 13.) Previous to his 14th birthday he'd been working in a mill, picking up threads and what not; but at age 14 he said, “I was old enough to do a man's work.” And he went down in the mines to dig coal. He ended up spending seven years in the bowels of the earth, until he reached age 21 when he finally felt old enough to leave home, and eventually emigrate.

 

While he was digging coal, young men slightly older, were being sent off to war. Many of whom turned out to be little more than cannon fodder in the stalemate of trench warfare. This terrible loss of life put tremendous pressure on those in the government of Great Britain charged with replacing the fallen, with fresh -if innocent- blood. Whether these folks in charge were aware of it or not, their calls to King and Country, were in effect a manipulation, an exploitation of the youth sent to die.

 

If being manipulated was an obvious thing, my guess is it would be much rarer. Consider if you will, how easy it is for even a young girl, to manipulate her male parent. There is even a phrase to describe it, “She had him wrapped around her little finger.” How much more so would a Minister of State be equipped, being already enmeshed in political machinations?

 

Warmly,

 

Charles

88W18'28" 41N58'02"

 

Charles:

Thanks for sharing the references.

Coal mining is tough business indeed. Every day can be your last day.

In western militaries, no one is executed for refusing to go to war. You may get bad paper or spend a couple months in the brig, but you do not have to go. You are free to walk off into the sunset.

I emphasize - we are free to not fight. Individually, we are free. And if not fighting is so important to us, then by all means we should not do it.

The King or the Prime Minister do not manipulate anyone. Every person is free to tell the King to fuck off.

And if my parents or my neighbors or my friends try to shame me or intimidate me, I have a duty to tell them to fuck off too.

This is how we change the world. By individuals taking action as individuals.

I asked awhile ago - what exactly is our new President going to do to make our lives wonderfully better where the same power is not in our hands right now?

Why have we given away our sovereignty as individuals with choice?

Remember Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war demonstrator. She stepped our courageously, assuming that others would follow, and she looked behind and saw ... nobody! Everyone who said they were against the war simply said they were against the war. But they weren't against it THAT MUCH! Not as much as Cindy who was willing to step out.

The same goes for marriage. If two people resent the government's intrusion in their private relationship, then they can tell the government to fuck off. It's easy. They can get married and live married. Of course, enjoying the collateral benefits conferred by the state on married persons is a different story. But when did marriage become an issue of collateral benefits?

We are defined by the choices we make - as is the depth of our commitment.

Schalk, it seems that you are sidestepping the the Lower Left quadrant just by saying it doesn't matter. As much as we do have some freedom, we are at the same time embedded in a culture. Western cultures instills in us individualistic values, so we find ourselves in a paradox where rejecting individualism is an individualistic stance, and repeating the standard individualistic assumptions that have been taught to us since birth is really conformity -- don't you agree?

Recall the famous scene in Monty Python's The Life of Brian, where Brian pleads with the crowd that "You're all individuals! You're all different!", and the crowd, in unison, repeats his words back to him -- "We are all individuals! We are all different!" -- except for one lone voice in the back who says, "I'm not!"

Happy Friday Schalk,

 

>>>“Why have we given away our sovereignty as individuals with choice?”<<<

 

The simple answer to this excellent question i suggests is that we as individuals are subject to the effects of unseen forces. One way to look at these forces is to see them as constituents in the shadow elements of psyche. Generally speaking they are of two similar forms; those that we are born with (our predispositions) and those that we acquire.

 

The dominant theme of the early stages of human development, usually called first-tier, is deficiency. An easy way to think about this deficiency syndrome is to see it as a gap in the psyche; it's the gap between how we perceive ourselves and how we think we should be. Awareness of possible deficiency is typically not seen as pleasant, so we tend to paper over or repress these bits of unpleasantness, and go about our business as if they did not exist. Evidence for this notion can be found in the phenomenon called embarrassment, which i suggest is the sudden revelation or exposure of what amounts to subterfuge.

 

With this as background human tendency, we can include the bit of integral theory advanced by Mr. Teacup earlier in this thread, suggesting the importance of the considerable influence of the collective on an individual.

 

Maybe a story will help illustrate this point. Once a friend and i were traveling by car, and camping our way southwest crossing the Rockies and stopping at the Grand Canyon. It was my first trip there, and at the visitor’s center i found these words literally cut into stone: 

 

“In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which, so far as I know, is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world.... Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American....should see.”

 

 -Theodore Roosevelt

 

The germane operative word in this quote, i suggest is should. It contains a powerful echo of the gap described above, one that is couched in terms of another first-tier phenomenon ethnocentricity.

 

Reading these words had a profound effect on me. It triggered a faint recall that i had perhaps heard them somewhere before. Then i realized that i had been had, which is not to say that the Grand Canyon itself his any sort of lack about it, but my culture had put forth the notion that without cognizance of this natural wonder i was somehow lacking. I wasn't too happy with myself for having substituted a collective judgment for my own.

 

But allow me to suggest that this is a widespread phenomenon; the story continues: at the rim of the canyon as sunset approaches visitors from all over the world and all walks of life gather, as the hour of the light show at the canyon nears. Alas, not being content to experience the wonder for its own sake, there was a widespread attempt to capture it, via a photographic image! As the sun set and the multi-colors blazed, a sound arose akin to a horde of locusts, a rising crescendo of camera shutters snapping away in frantic abandon to what i took to be a demonstration of a sense of collective deficiency.

 

Frankly i couldn't get away from there fast enough. And moved down the road a bit to the observatory where Pluto was discovered back in 1930. As a visitor i pretty much had the place to myself, where i could muse about Clive Tenbaugh, who did the grunt work of its discovery, and how this discovery can be seen in symbolic terms as the moment when the human collective was about to shift.

 

In my mind it's no accident, that the stuff of Pluto, seen in terms of elements is radioactive plutonium. This sort of radiation of course is completely invisible; it can't be seen or felt, but exposure to it can lead to great suffering, death, and catastrophe. The stuff of Pluto seen in terms of the psyche is shadow, which in extreme cases can manifest as obsession.

 

An early form of reaction to awareness of this situation is often protest; a saying of “no” rather than “yes”; but this is pretty much a horizontal movement of consciousness, it operates something akin to a pendulum where we go from one pole to the other. There is an alternative however, and that is to include the possibility of verticality; where we shift out of the play of the opposites, in the sense that they are no longer seen as adversaries but complements. The promise of these two movements joined, i suggest is exactly that offered by what is called second tier consciousness.

 

Where, as you have put it, the sovereignty of individuality is prized, celebrated, and not offered up as a sacrifice on the altar of an un-evolved collectivity.

 

Warmly,

 

Charles

88W18'28" 41N58'02"

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

Charles:

Thanks for that wonderful series of touchposts.

And thanks for reminding us of the fullness/deficiency poles.

I am not willing to concede that all first tier persons are manipulable by their altitude-nature.

For example: if we read a plaque containing words by Ted Roosevelt telling us what we "should" do, whether we are first tier or second tier, it is our duty to ourselves to ask: "who is Ted Roosevelt, what is he saying, to whom is or was he speaking, and does this have value for me."

We all are capable of taking ownership and not automatically assuming that "famous people" have the last word. We owe it to ourselves to always operate under the assumption that any person, and I mean any person, who is presenting a proposition could be entirely full of hogwash.

This is important to me - it's why I groan when I see fawning over any public figure, whether it's Ken Wilber or an actor or a politician or an athlete.

We need to stop giving away our lives.

If we are not allowing for this possibility, then we should be ... embarrassed. Embarrassed at having giving up the gift of autonomy that God (aka we) deserves.

We owe it to our children to develop the capacity to stand in front of a crowd and be open simultaneously to the possibility that the crowd knows something very important that we can learn from and ... that the crowd is one big fat herd of deluded idiots.

Let me tell you a story: the other day I was at a jazz festival. I walk into this auditorium and see what is clearly a big green group of fairly well off white people who have come to hear some jazz. A bunch of "stiffly-stiffersons" as Christopher Walken would say.

Cool. As I enter, the speaker is introducing the show on stage. He says: "I would like to thank all of our volunteers who blah blah some many hours of their time blah blah...." And I see these people who are wearing t-shirts with the festival logo and they are serving as ushers throughout the hall. And .... no one starts clapping .... not one person is ready to step out and do the right thing which is to give some applause at the moment in response to the speaker's evocation of the topic of the ... volunteers. That pregnant pause is passing, 2, 3, 4 seconds. WTF? So I think to myself, fuck it, and I start clapping, and all of these rich green consumers immediately follow my lead and start clapping and the ushers smile and nod their heads in recognition.

And I am thinking, what if I had decided to go take a piss or something? Would this entire auditorium of green boomers have failed to give applause to the usher/volunteers. And you know what ... I am pretty sure they would have!!!

It sickened me. And I thought of how many little choices in the collective life of this group that were similarly governed by .... cowardice?  

This big fat mob lacked one person who was willing or aware of the momentary rightness of simple giving a round of applause to the volunteers. They were all so self-conscious and concerned about not being the first person to start clapping and then have no one follow them.

The volunteers - if I lead the applause for them, I am stooping to their level and I shall be sniggered at. God forbid!

This was one big mob that did not deserve being followed at that moment.

I am not some great hero. I am simply an Integral dude who is willing to do what is right as I see it and to assume that everyone else may be collectively practicing a gutless form of self-coverage.

So, I don't have a lot of sympathy for this collective manipulation when I see a mass of highly evolved green boomers who collectively lack the guts to give it up for a bunch of volunteers.

Now I am thinking about my previous anecdote - where 250 were dying from heat exhaustion in a high school auditorium because not one person was willing to get up and open a door to let some air in the room. I mean, there was real auto-intoxication going on. No air!

So, I had to cross the room, grab a chair and prop the door open myself, thereby saving the lives or neurons of many people.

I guess I was the only one who did not give a damn what anyone thought of me. The only one who saw what the right thing was and was willing to simply do it. Trusting my instincts.

It is simple. It is like making up your mind to jump off the dock into the lake. You just do it. You don't piss around with putting your toe in the water, shivering, rubbing your elbows. Just jump in.

This is the attitude I think we are lacking in America. Trust your instincts on what is true and good and beautiful and take action in accordance. Fuck the masses.

I do not concur that there is something so inherently limiting by the deficiency nature of first-tier that one is incapable of doing this kind of thing.

Mr. Teacup, I learn from your posts, as usual. Mr. Teacup in Darjeeling brown.

 Even for individuals who survive this process, many find it difficult or impossible to reintegrate into Orange/Green mainstream society, much like some prisoners who have served long sentences.

You may be overstating this a bit. After a war, yes, it's common, but I don't know that just spending time in the service would have this effect. In fact, many people report that it was the best thing that happened to them. It is very appropriate for Red youngsters moving into Amber, or youngsters already into Amber a bit. And for those beyond it's sometimes a good thing, too, I gather, though we might hear from Schalk about this.

There is a really good article in the current edition of What Is Enlightenment?, "Constructing the New Man," about a guy named Nataniel Fick who gives a more positive spin on it. I am sure what you say is right for some people, but I saw a lot of people who seemed to be benefiting from it recently on the PBS show Carrier, which I would recommend seeing in its encore presentation. Maybe we could have a thread about it.

I find it difficult to ignore or minimize the problems that this perspective reveals, though it is certainly understandable why some people, when faced with Green denial of masculinity, turn to Amber or Red versions of it, but in the end, I think the promise that these perspectives hold for authentic masculinity is ultimately a mirage.

Yes, I agree that we need to move into more subtle, nuanced, authentic levels of masculinity. At the same time, we do need to include something of that Amber honor code.

 

mm

Happy Friday Schalk,

 

I salute your willingness to engage in this forum discussion, as from my view it’s a quality that has its roots in human aspiration; which in turn can be seen as an urge to live in a better world. It's an aim with which i am in substantial agreement if not outright sympathy. However it also appears to me that mixed in with this aspiration is a certain amount of what could be called perfectionism, occasionally manifesting as a form of absolutism. But this is just an observation on my part and you are free to do with it as you wish. After all everyone has a right to their own space.

 

But on a less personal note, i'm a bit troubled by a call to relying on instincts as a guide to behaviors. As my view of instincts is that they stem from a less evolved position in human development; by contrast it is also my view than intuitions have their roots in a more evolved position in human development.

 

As a practical matter reliance on instincts over intuition is likely to result in impulsiveness at the price of spontaneity.

 

Warmly,

 

Charles

88W18'28" 41N58'02"

 

 

   

Charles:

Instincts shminstincts!

I wasn't using the term as one of art. I really cringe when I go on a good jag, and a smart guy like yourself clotheslines me with a fine distinction without showing reverence for my point.  

What I am calling instincts is more properly "that inner sense of what is known to be right or proper." Trust that I say!

I am not an absolutist, by the way. I am a human sovereignist. I believe that every person has the inherent right to regain their dignity and to develop and grow and to use their own mind and access knowledge and express themselves without undue fear of the mob. ...

And I have seen way too many clever dicings of conceptual fare masquerade as care and attention to detail when in reality they are simply obscurantism run rampant.

OK, the last offering about human sovereignty was an absolute position. I had better stop while I am not too far behind the power curve here...

I think an Integral Wedding would be with two Integral parteners.   I like Scott Peck's definition of Love; The willingness to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spirtitual growth (or something like that).  The point is that if in fact you find someone that shares this purpose you would probably want to announce it to the world.  A wedding can be seen as such a way, but it's purpose might be less obvious.  Their would be no reason to have a contract that creates that union,  they would be expressing a union that they created.  Maybe the secret is realizing what Love really is, it is not for the faint of heart.  Love hurts but Love keeps on Loving.   So I guess I am saying that the wedding business is important but how often do you find someone that can make such a commitment.  The State did not and does not corrupt the marriage contract, We Do.