"Integral" Narcissism

Don't tell me -- I turn out to be your father?  

Separative gestures are ambiguous and fascinating.  They are at once the necessary form of moral clarity and (apparently) the exact opposite of the spiritually inclusive gesture of the integral heart.  We need both.  If we refuse without understanding our basic sameness then we are not integral.  But if we use essential commonality as a reason to tolerate everything then we are weak and ethically useless.

Genocide is the outgrowth of a powerful demonstration of separation.  We wish to separate from it without duplicating its traces in ourselves.  And it is within our power to accomplish this double success.  

And no, I don't get private messages on here but you could email me if you like.  The address is at the bottom of this post but I'm sometimes slow to reply owing to have several different addresses.

Thanks, I've been...

Layman Pascal

Integral community can mean many different things.  Up front it can mean the community which corresponds to those with relatively integral development OR the community which integrates the most other value systems.  

In this latter category, integrality needs not only inclusion but holarchical inclusion.  There has to be a vertical spectrum and not just a very wide net.  However, Facebook and other electro-social systems are showing us facets of the technological and popular infrastructure which will be needed to augment personal development and new social practices (such as enhanced democracy).  The necessary infrastructure has to be flexible enough to include everyone's value systems, enhance both autonomy & communion, encourage voluntary self-cultivation, and dramatically intensify the individual's ability to take advantage of personally relevant information and opportunities.  

Piece by piece this vision of the technological and cultural correlates of integral development is emerging.  We must see, intend & actualize the appropriate social matrix.  And we must understand it as both tentative and threatened AND as inevitably victorious.

Thanks, I've been...

Layman Pascal

In response to your powerful phrase "...stand up and say that we want our culture here to stand for something good," below are some thoughts (lifted from my book) about culture-creating. No reason we can't put these thoughts to good use here at IL: 

The Underestimated Power of Culture:

 The one thing which most systems that are designed to

improve the world have grossly underestimated is the power

of culture. Culture helps shape our minds and it inspires us

to work together in certain ways.

Culture cultivates. Culture can cultivate greed, impulsiveness,

lack of discipline, and selfishness. Culture can also

draw out charity, personal discipline, and meaningful relationships.

Like any vehicle, culture can deliver good things

or bad.

Intentionality and Culture: 

To Todd, it seemed that we tend to view culture as a strictly

natural event over which we have no control, as though it

were an accident that happened gradually over many years.

But culture is the result of specific human choices. A poet

chooses to write a poem that helps people explore personal

experiences and meanings. Her poem is a contribution to the

culture. Like it or not, the poet is a culture shaper. If she

writes a lot of poems that affect people and are widely read,

one could argue that the poet has progressed beyond a mere

shaping of culture. She has become a “cultural engineer”

who significantly impacts the way people see their lives and

how they live their lives.

Who Is in Charge of Culture? 

Todd believed that culture is always engineered, by someone.

We tend to leave it up to chance as to who are the engineers.

In the current mainstream culture, we seem to be

waiting around for someone to take the lead, while we simply

take our places on the back of the bus. Unfortunately,

the ones who tend to grab the buss’s steering wheel are often

operating more out of ambition or aggression, than out of

wisdom and social compassion. Todd thought that it’s more

honest, and much healthier, for us to take collective responsibility

for engineering an optimally healthy culture, and to

let everyone have a voice or a vote as regards the culture they

create.

Making a High-Trust Culture: 

Todd recalled how Stephen Covey, toward the beginning of

his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, used

the term “low trust climate.” Covey was describing an underlying

problem in businesses that use short-range and fairly

superficial interventions such as mergers or trendy training

programs to boost sales, productivity, or to improve effective

management, rather than gradually building up a trustworthy

workplace culture that is based on good character and that, in

turn, develops more character.

Is a larger low-trust climate that is devoid of good character

evolving in the marketplace? In our own homes via

TV commercials? In our minds as we either succumb to

the manipulation, or as we burn out from the overload and

confusion of an environment cluttered with manipulation

and too many meaningless choices?

A simple question with provocative implications came to

Todd’s mind. What if the market was transformed gradually

into something that, first and foremost, served, rather than

used its customers? Where things work for people, instead

of people working for things. The market could be used to

develop a genuinely high-trust culture that could emancipate

us from the intentional and/or unintentional enslavement of

our minds. The awareness of this possibility helps deliver

virtue.

Importance of Awareness of Human Gifts: 

Chapter 5 taps into the third vehicle for virtue, reason,

and the first, awareness. This chapter highlights reason via

the conceptualization of a new educational system called

“The Function of Matching and Personal Development.” It

addresses awareness because of the self-awareness effects

(upon the students) of this educational approach. The FMPD

emphasizes personal gift assessment and development, rather

than the traditional emphasis on putting information into the

heads of students, or of imposing generic skills that often fail

to match the individual student’s natural aptitudes (“gifts”),

unique intelligence, or learning style. The gift assessment

and development is followed up with individualized placement

into job training and into actual occupational niches.

Best Scale for Social Transformation: 

One objective characteristic of this book which might set

it apart from other writings or discussions about the topic of

culture-creating is the fact that Allsville Emerging devotes a

great deal of attention toward blueprinting a fictional model

community, at the level of a small town. This characteristic

appears to give the book an advantage over many of the

broader, more general, discourses about cultural transformation.

On the other hand, many other discussions have leaned

the opposite direction, toward the narrow focus of the individual,

with a “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin

with me” line of thought.

As compared to these more general or more narrow approaches,

the current offering seems like the bed in the Goldilocks

fable, in that it feels “just right” for investigating the

most effective means of implementing the envisioned social

changes; this, despite the fact that it is only a virtual community,

a drawing-board version of a model community.

During my blogging participations online, I rarely encounter

discussions geared toward making a scaled-down version

of the world or of a nation, in the form of a model town.

Yet, the hallmark of scientific investigation is to start small,

with simulated realities called “experiments,” and then see if

the observations on that smaller, artificially-controlled, scale

can be generalized to larger and/or more naturally occurring

circumstances. This is the reason I focussed on a model community.

The book is intended to be a plan for a sociocultural

experiment.

Darrell

In psychology, all they ever talked about in regards to the defense mechanism of projection is negative projection. I don't once recall any mention of the possibility of positive projection. I remedy that in my book. 

   Recall my mention in this overall discussion of 5 healthy community characteristics which we might use as items on a survey in which IL participants rate the IL community according to each of those 5 characteristics. Well, as the book evolved, I began to see different levels of abstraction which corresponded with these 5 characteristics. One level up, they could be seen as "core virtues" which can emanate both individually and collectively from human beings. Core virtues are concieved as being transpersonal, rather than only the traditional personal version of a virtue. In this sense, the "one body" of the community not only has the 5 characteristics in a passive sort of way, but these characteristics-viewed-as-core-virtues shine out like a light and actually form new creations. A community characteristic and a core virtue are about the same thing, but core virtue is a slightly more abstract and dynamic version of the characteristics. As of the time of writing the book, I did not really distinguish a difference in level between "core virtues" and community characteristics. I refered to them in a way that suggested they were interchangable or synonomous. Now, after completing the book, I see "core virtues" as being one level closer to an abstract, flexible, noncorporal, spiritual end of a continuum. 

     The next level up (or deeper, closer to the core of the continuously unfolding self) is what I call "spiritual principles." Each of the 5 original community characteristics (and/or "core virtues") are translated into the terms of a principle which can help activate the person's spiritual function corresponding to (or with?) that principle.

    Finally, on a totally transpersonal, abstract, or universal level, each of the 5 characteristics are translated into terms of laws. In Allsville Emerging, they are called The Five Laws of Spiritual Energy. Clearly the fictional citizens of Allsville, conceptualize the true nature of their being as energy-based. Hence, "spirit" is seen as related to characteristics of energy. Also, the laws are applicable to human beings. Human beings have the capacity to work with those "laws," rather than the laws being imposed top down upon them. Of course if you ignore an aspect of reality, such as a law, then you do end up spiting into the wind, and, at some point get spit on your face, as though the law was imposed on your will, or against your will. But this is an ego-dystonic, external locus of control way of looking at a law, and distorts the nature of the concept of a law as used in the book. Perhaps "self-forming format of energy" should be used in place of the word "law," since we tend to equate (incorrectly, as in "equivocate") law with external forces or externally imposed actions.

    The "law" of projection is not external. Its movement comes from the inside and goes outside from there. In fact, none of the laws are removed from the inner providence of self. We all have the capacity to do the laws.

    When looking at these laws as being but different aspects (or as Wayne Dyer says, "faces") of one Spirit, or God, then it is also true that we do God. I have been thinking of making a bumper sticker that states just that: "Do God." Not, of course, meaning "do" as in having intercourse with, before tossing aside ("I did her."). But meaning we do God in the same way we do good. God is a response which we are capable of having. Or, perhaps, more like a light switch that we can flip to the on position, at which point Presence and Light is. Godliness is up to us, not up in the sky. 

   Back to the law of projection. In bold is the part about positive projection. Most of our discussion here has been about negative projection of disowned red-level emotions and motives by certain IL participants upon others. But it is important for us to acknowledge and actually use positive projection as a means to summons up our (spiritual) healing powers. We can reclaim our odd words and then have the spiritual power to heal the IL community from its current infliction of direct and vieled hostilities. 

from pages 438-439 of Allsville Emerging: 

To the extent that the matter, or “flesh,” in which the spiritual

energy “dwells,” is neither transformed (see Law of Transformation)

nor destroyed (see Law of Anti-bondage), then

the spiritual energy is projected outward onto other matter

or processes. Projection takes two main forms: positive and

negative.

Positive projection manifests constructive energy patterns

outwardly because they have not been clearly seen, understood,

or embraced within the parameters of the matter in

which the spiritual energy is based (in human beings, “the

matter in which the spiritual energy is based” means the

self). Positive projection is a way to get the energy form “out

there,” so it may be seen and investigated. Once it has been

seen, then the energy form may be understood. Eventually it

may be embraced as something that is “true.”

Once the energy form is projected, it can be reclaimed (via

the Law of Attraction, see below) through one or more of

the five senses. The material aspect of self then has a chance

to be transformed (see Law of Transformation) into a state

which better serves the spiritual goal of becoming whole.

For example, seeing beauty around you can be a way of positively

projecting the beauty of your spirit, so the “flesh” can

comprehend your own inner beauty.

Negative projection gets the energy which is in a high

resistance format (High resistance energy tends to block

wholeness.) “out there,” into objective awareness/consciousness,

where it may be “grasped” (understood) mentally, and

may be addressed, worked on, processed, and corrected.

“May” is an important word. Unfortunately, when we negatively

project, we often become comfortable in distancing

ourselves from the negative quality. In that case, what we

may do with projection becomes what we don’t do. Instead

of processing the projection in a way that eventually “turns a

negative into a positive,” we end up mentally and behaviorally

trying the negate the negative quality. When we take this

course we usually end up making more problems than solutions.

Worse yet, we miss opportunities for personal transformation.

The merry, merry month of May can be the scary,

scary, month of May(be) Not!

Nonetheless, we nearly always have the potential to reclaim

the projection, and to process it in a productive manner.

For example, seeing evil or “ugliness” in the world can

be a way of eventually readdressing our own spirit’s contamination.

In the challenge of facing it out there, we sometimes

come to realize that “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”

The Law of Projection is related to the birthright, need,

and virtue of Challenge, because mental projections and human

projects create interactive learning opportunities which

hone our skills and test our understanding.

Darrell