I have been looking forward to this week’s launch for a long time, eagerly awaiting the opportunity to invite you to check out a new monthly installment here on Integral Life: the debut of the Integral Life Art Gallery.  As many of you already know, art, creativity, and aesthetics have always been an essential part of an integrally-lived life. In fact, the very existence of a genuinely transformative Integral Art scene is one of the greatest indicators that we are indeed part of a bonafide cultural movement, as we have often looked to our greatest artists to scout out the unfamiliar territory ahead of us, blazing new paths through the wilderness of consciousness.

We have been working very hard to find a way to present the extraordinary talent shared by the Integral Art community here on Integral Life, and I believe we have achieved exactly this. I am very proud and excited to invite you all to check it out.

Our debut gallery features the work of Bryce Widom, an accomplished painter, designer, and illustrator as well as a beloved part of the Boulder/Denver integral community. His gallery is titled 1000 Views of God, and I am sure you will find it as breathtaking as I did.

“By painting 1000 Views of God, I’m consciously marrying my work as an artist with my spiritual path. Each painting becomes a meditation, a prayer, a moment of turning all my attention toward the divine with an open body, mind, and heart.

In this exploration, no subject is off-limits, for there is no limit to the domain of the divine. This includes both the “shadow” terrain of my inner landscape, as well as the brightest aspects of Spirit.” -Bryce Widom

And be sure to check out Bryce’s exclusive interview with Stuart Davis, The Life of an Artist: Fantasies, Realities, and a Thousand Views of God, in which you can find insight into his creative process and some of his own personal struggles eking out a living as an artist.

Of course, there is much more to the Integral Art experience than just sitting back and taking it all in. We are more than just idle consumers of art—we are also the enactors of art, co-conspirators in Beauty’s unveiling. Our interpretations of beauty are therefore at least as important as our actual perception of beauty, and certainly indivisible from the whole of our experience. As such, we want to give you the tools needed to help you more deeply perceive and interpret the beauty that surrounds you.

Which is why we are also excited to introduce you to our new Aesthetics Editor, Dr. Michael Schwartz, Professor of the Philosophy of Art at Augusta State University. Michael will offer some very special commentary for each of our monthly art galleries, as you will see in 1000 Views of God.

So you can get to know Michael a little better, we have also included an interview between he and Stuart Davis, The Complementary Dance of Art and Economics, originally recorded in 2005. Whether you’re an artist or not, we invite you to listen in on the ways we can all bring a more comprehensive, integral, balanced approach to life as a human being. And balanced doesn’t mean boring—you can rock the boat all the more wildly, because you’re aware of all the things keeping you afloat.

We have also included Ken Wilber’s masterful essay Integral Art and Literary Theory—a pièce de résistance in its own right—in which he walks us through his integral process of art interpretation and takes an in-depth look at a famous painting by Van Gogh of a pair of worn shoes.

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I titled this letter “The Rebirth of Cool” because that is exactly what this week’s offerings strive for. This is Integral Cool. These are the perspectives at the forefront of the new avant-garde, pushing deeper into new possibilities and new expressions of creative novelty, forging the sounds and visions of the Integral movement with every brushstroke, every melody, and every written word.

After all, an evolution without dancing (or painting, or acting, or writing, or performing) is an evolution not worth having.

Special thanks to Angie Hinickle for her exquisite work creating the new Integral Life Art Gallery.

Call For Submissions: If you would like your own art to be considered for a future Integral Life Art Gallery, please submit samples of your work as well as a brief description of how the Integral vision has informed your process to Angie at art@integrallife.com

Every now and again, pop culture is forced to reinvent itself. Like an epic drama among Hindu deities, our collective tastes are born, destroyed, and reborn again, swinging like a massive pendulum from one aesthetic extreme to the other. As a new cultural niche becomes more and more popularized, what typically begins as fierce artistic independence eventually devolves into reckless overindulgence, and creative novelty slowly bleeds away until all that is left is a formulaic husk used to manufacture tomorrow’s next fads. It is usually at this point, when a particular scene becomes so over-saturated that it can no longer support the weight of its own excess, that the entire scene will die an often-humiliating death, bloated and alone on an unflushed toilet.

In the 1980′s, the music scene in America was dominated by the glut and theatrics of “glam metal.” For nearly 10 years, most of popular music was defined by sex, drugs, and machismo-in-drag, and an entire generation of youth nearly lost themselves within a cloud of hairspray. There was a void in the cultural heart of the musical mainstream that was dying to be filled—an utter lack of artistic interiority, emotional depth, and authenticity. Untold millions were craving artistic substance, and were only offered artificial decadence. Read the rest of this entry

Our consciousness is inextricable from our environment.  Colors, angles, textures, and lights all conspire to sway our moods and shape our experiences; molding our conscious and unconscious minds according to the prevailing social norms and cultural trends of the time.  We can feel this every time we walk into a room, a very subtle but noticeable reaction to our surroundings—perhaps a sense of calm and spaciousness, or of creativity and energetic vibrancy, or of anxiety and claustrophobia.  You can feel this right now as you read this, your immediate habitat inescapably affecting the sound, feel, and meaning of every word.  There is no simple mathematical equation to make sense of the connection between consciousness and environment, as the same surroundings can elicit entirely different reactions from psyche to psyche, culture to culture.  Adding to the complexity, we often surprise ourselves by naturally surrounding ourselves with environs that dramatically contrast our interior states:

“Very often people think that people are like the environments that they choose to build or go to.  But it’s not so much that we are like them, it’s more that these things capture our aspirations.  So the person that lives in a minimalist New York loft probably isn’t a very calm person—that’s why they need the loft so badly!  The person who builds in a very gaudy and expensive way, it’s not so much that this person feels rich—in fact they feel very poor, that’s why they had to go in for all this conspicuous display.  So there’s kind of an element of opposites at play whenever you look at people’s tastes.” -Alain de Botton Read the rest of this entry

From indigenous shamans invoking the elements through rhythm and dance, to the ancient cult of Pythagoras seeking the ever-elusive “harmony of the spheres,” to Sufi dervishes whirling their way to enlightenment, to the hallowed tones of sacred hymns echoing through secluded monasteries—all throughout history, music has always been an important part of spiritual life. It has been used as an instrument of worship, appreciation, and fellowship; a channel for inspiration and illumination; and a gateway to both sensual embodiment as well as radical self-transcendence. Music has often been thought to mirror the elusive mysteries of creation itself: all melodies reflecting the mathematical patterns of the universe, all rhythms echoing the primordial heartbeat of God.

Such metaphors, however, seem to find little resonance in today’s world. Magical and mythical approaches to reality have been largely supplanted by the skeptical gaze of rationality, while purely metaphysical descriptions of existence have been almost entirely deconstructed by postmodern thought. A great many people have abandoned the myths of the past—exchanging blind faith for calculated reason, agrarian religion for industrial secularism, and the certitude of moral absolutism for the shifting sands of moral relativism. None of this is bad in itself—quite the contrary, it is an indication that the evolutionary engine continues to chug along in this corner of the universe, continuously adding new layers of depth and complexity to the spectra of consciousness, culture, and technology. Read the rest of this entry

Deconstructing Niggy

There is much talk in America these days around the issue of race. With Barack Hussein Obama as the elected President of the United States, we have begun to collectively reflect upon our relationship with race and racism—and the conversation seems to have polarized into two radically different positions. On one hand, Obama’s viability as a presidential candidate across a wide range of demographics prompts liberals to proudly declare that, finally, we live in a “post-racial” America, no longer tethered to the racial divisiveness that has infected our political systems since the country’s inception. On the other hand, a great number of people are still asking the question “are we ready for a black president?,” which itself seems to indicate that a genuine “post-racial” America is still on the horizon of human evolution. The truth, of course, lies somewhere between, or beyond, these two extremes—we have certainly made some tremendous strides in our collective attitudes toward race and racism, but we cannot confuse our accomplishments with outright victory. There can be no singular victory over racism, but like peace itself, it is a victory that must be won again and again, perpetually into the future. Read the rest of this entry