Note: This piece was originally written to summarize a dialogue between Ken Wilber and Tami Simon (which you can download and listen to for free by clicking here.) But i wanted to share it with the general community, as it is my hope that it can help frame the difficult emotions that inevitably surround people’s disappointment with spiritual teachers. It should be noted that this piece is not intended to help people emotionally process this disappointment, but rather to find some sort of theoretical grounding for their emotions, so that they may better relate to their own emotional intensity in a somewhat energetically hygienic way. This is the only way we can possibly hope to invoke the tremendous clarity, compassion, and resolve that is required to make sense of the impossible heart-ache of our teachers’ failings, and even find a way to use the disappointment as yet another opportunity for growth for student and teacher alike. Read the rest of this entry
In this piece I will outline two concepts that lie at the core of the religious, spiritual, and mystical dialogue: the notion of “vertical development” through the major stages of consciousness studied by the world’s great developmental psychologists, and of “horizontal development” through the major states of consciousness that are found in virtually all the world’s religious traditions. States and stages, fullness and freedom, human and divine—these are the two axes of personal and spiritual development, two vectors of human potential that intersect deep in our hearts, tracing an outline of Christianity’s most sacred symbol with each and every breath.
In case you forgot your secret integral decoder ring:
Someone recently posted a blog in the Integral Life community titled “
Hurricanes, tsunamis, drought, global warming, melting icecaps, eradication of biodiversity—to many of us, these harbingers of our planet’s seemingly imminent environmental meltdown are becoming more and more apparent each year, while the need for effective and enforceable sustainability policies on a global scale are becoming more and more urgent. 
Power and powerlessness both lay at the heart of our ongoing cultural discussion of equality among the sexes. Too often we perceive this as a somewhat binary distinction—one group as the oppressor, the other as the oppressed—and thus one gender’s power tends to be defined by another group’s powerlessness. Typical of this line of thought is the claim that men have held the majority of the power for millennia, which has made women powerless by default. However, this oversimplification of sex and gender can be counterproductive in many important ways. Considering women to have been at the brunt end of oppression for all these years is actually both insulting and demeaning to the female gender. While there are certainly many genuine cases of both men and women being violently oppressed throughout history, we must avoid the temptation to think of either gender’s history as merely one of oppression. History is not a story of men oppressing women for thousands of years, and then collectively waking up to the folly of our ways. Men and women were both being oppressed—by each other, and more importantly, by the challenge of survival in a mysterious and hostile world. 
It is amazing to consider how much has changed in the past five decades in regard to sexual liberation and empowerment. The woman’s role in today’s society is almost unrecognizable compared to the early 20th century, and would be wholly unimaginable in the centuries prior. In America, attitudes toward sexuality and gender began to dramatically shift with the Boomer generation (and the newly emerging pluralistic values they brought with them), as birth control, free love, and several new schools of “second wave” feminism began to challenge the traditional attitudes that defined preceding generations. Since the early sixties, there has been a tremendous amount of movement toward redefining ourselves as men and women—some forward, some backward, and plenty of treadmills with no discernible movement at all. In the ensuing decades, we have witnessed the masculinization of women, the feminization of men, the neutralization of both genders, the roles of helpless victim set upon women, the witch hunts of fallacious prosecution set against men, genuine transformation of attitudes and behaviors of both sexes, the movement to procure equal rights for homosexuals, the advent of sex-change surgery, the rise of pornography as a multi-billion dollar industry, and the capitalization of just about every kink, fetish, and fixation imaginable. And through it all, not surprisingly, men and women in the 21st century still seem to look at each other with the same bewilderment they did 20,000 years ago. 
Since the dawn of civilization, sports have been an intrinsic part of human society. From the militaristic competitions of ancient China, Greece, and Egypt, to the enormous rise of spectator sports in the wake of the industrial revolution, athletics have long served society as a foundation of human triumph, camaraderie, and excellence, as well as a source of personal discipline, achievement, and improvement—not to mention a common language of stories and statistics that men have traditionally used when women aren’t around to fill the often-awkward spaces between them.
(Originally posted on