A couple of things came up in yesterday's opening ceremony:

• The new book Integral Life Practice will be available in the JFKU bookstore, a month before it shows up in stores!
  
  
• Robb will be talking about integrallife.com tonight - and probably demoing it? I got a chance to meet with Robb and see a demo, and I'm impressed with it. As a way of educating people about AQAL and Integral Theory, it's head and shoulders above IN and ISC. It is missing some of the deep community features that I know some people are hoping for, at least in it's initial release. It has some unique features to ecourage self-reflection and engagement with the material, and it will be interested in seeing how that plays out.
  
  
• Even if you couldn't make it to the conference, you'll be able to buy MP3 recordings, I think they said next Thursday. $150 for 130 hours of lectures, and they will be shipping them out in 4 weeks.
  
  
• That's good for me because I arrived late and I'm missing Terry Patten's Integral Life Practice: The Tantric Harmonics of the Four Core Modules :(. Instead, I'm sitting outside the room blogging, and waiting for Steve McIntosh's The Project for Integral World Government: Integral Politics and Democratic Global Law.
  

~MrTC

Reading "The Power of Coincidence" from Psychology Today:

One thing that always strikes me about claims of synchronicity is how content-free they are. From the article, Elizabeth Targ died at 11:11pm, 111 days after she was diagnosed. I have a friend who sees the sequence 0-1-2-3 everywhere she goes. Accepting for a moment that any of these examples are more than just coincidences, that they are meaningful: what, in the end, do they mean?

Jung believed the existence of synchronicity demonstrated the validity of the collective unconscious, but it could be used to support virtually any spiritual, religious, metaphysical or psychological theory - UFOs, law of attraction, I Ching, faith healing, etc. Since we still need other methods to validate our theories, its hard to see what synchronicity offers here.

On a more personal level, it's claimed that synchronicity is a signpost that indicates when one's actions are aligned with God's plan - a kind of cosmic seal of approval. If so, I would expect people who frequently experience synchronicity to be more successful, more effective, more creative, more world-changing and more spiritual (however you define that) than most people. A person like this might even be a modern-day prophet and I would think that these individuals would be able to make enormous strides in solving the many crises that our world faces today.

As far as I can tell, this is not the case. In the end, if synchronicity is real, the thing that's most extraordinary is how much like the rest of us its adherents are.

I always wondered what all those extra arms were for.

We build our churches on the holy sites of other cultures and install our own gods. Notre Dame sits on a holy Druid site. "Ours is the true God," we say by doing so. But this usurpation is also a kind of acknowledgement, a perverse honoring of the more ancient culture: a holy site is a holy site, just as a holy day is a holy day. In the same way, our scientific view of the origins of life overlies ancient creation myths. That is why I feel we must use the God word, for my hope is to honorably steal its aura to authorize the sacredness of the creativity in nature. May we find the creativity in nature sacred whether we are atheists or believers in a God who breathed life into this universe of ceaseless creativity.

- Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A new edition of Integral Review is out. Highlights:

• A reflection on a retreat with Adyashanti - the author has some critical things to say about Adyashanti, but the piece is positive overall. My favorite part is when Adyashanti says that his retreats tripled in size when he changed his name from Steven Gray!
  
  
• A review of the novel The Seeker Academy by L.D. Gussin. The story follows Grace Hudson, spiritual seeker, on her journey through various New Age retreats and workshops, encountering "narcissism, spiritual elitism and emotional dysfunction". Gussin also gets into some of the pre-rational beliefs, and advocates a return to reason and critical thinking in spirituality. This is not something you hear often enough, so it's going on my reading list. The book is not just a slam against New Age though: "despite these and other shortcomings, this seeking can be of value, that there is truth to be found."
  
  One thing about the book that is fascinating and also kind of sad is that the author sent review copies to a bunch of spiritual magazines and only one printed a review. The author addresses this on his blog in a three part series - yes, three parts complaining about a lack of reviews. On one hand, this seems excessive and a bit whiny - there's so many books out there now, it's hard to get noticed, it's not a conspiracy to supress your genius, etc. But on the other hand, it would not surprise me that this also speaks to an unwillingness on the part of spiritual leaders to accept this very valid critique.
  

In 1993, Michael Crichton predicted the death of the mass media. It looks like his prediction is coming true.

If you've ever wondered what people mean when they say reductionism, read this interview with Stuart Kauffman in New Scientist.

Perhaps the purest and simplest version of reductionism was voiced in the early 19th century by the mathematician Simon Pierre Laplace. He envisioned a "demon" - an intelligence which, if supplied with all the current positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe, could, using Newton's laws, compute the entire future and past of the universe.

Shame plays a huge role in our psyche, and it's a major area of concern in therapy. It seems like I'm constantly hearing about how our Western culture plays a huge role in making us feel shame and guilt, and I guess the unspoken suggestion is that Eastern cultures or Buddhist cultures don't have this, or at least not as much. There's an element of truth to this. Its true that some parts of our culture - the religious, traditional part - emphasizes sin and morality, guilt and shame. But we'd have to have an absurdly romanticized and distorted view of Buddhism to say that the same is not true in those cultures too.

In general, Buddhism seems to take a generally positive few of shame, seeing it as the basis for morality and right conduct. The sutras speak of Hiri (shame) and Ottappa (fear), and the Buddha says that these two states protect the world.

"Hiri has a direct connection one’s own virtues and integrity, while ottappa is also linked to the virtues and good name of one’s parents, teachers, relatives and friends."

This is a profoundly perspective than the modern, secular Western viewpoint, and has much more in common with traditional Christians such as Mormons and Southern Baptists. It's easy to whitewash Buddhist teachings and say "Well, they couldn't have meant the same thing as Christians!" But I think they did. Consider this:

The texts give the example of two iron balls. One is smeared with excrement and the other is red hot. A person offered these two iron balls refused the first because it is disgusting and rejects the second out of fear of being burned. Not taking the ball smeared with excrement is like the quality of hiri or shame in one’s mind. One finds immorality disgusting when one compares it with integrity. Not taking the hot ball is like ottappa, the fear of committing an unwholesome act out of fear of the kammic consequences. One knows that one might end up in hell or in states of misery. Thus one avoids the ten types of unwholesome behavior as if they were these two iron balls.

Of course, the Buddha did not think that all shame and guilt was good. He listed 4 areas where shame was not good: one should not feel shame in working at a job; in learning from a teacher; in eating food; or having sex with one's husband or wife. But the important point here is that these are considered "imitation shame", unlike the genuine article which is considered not only good, but absolutely essentially to the Noble Eightfold Path.

Out of these simple observations, we find a few important ideas:

1. We shouldn't whitewash traditional Buddhist teachings. Eastern cultures in general place an extremely high value on shame and guilt, and there is no doubt that many in Eastern cultures regard Western liberation from shame as obscene.
2. Perhaps they have a point. It may well be the case that shame for one's immoral actions is a good thing, and we are too quick to discard it. Truth, integrity, morality and character might be important parts of spiritual life.
3. On the other hand, the kind of shame that Buddhism recommends seems debilitating. In our individualistic culture, we only have our self-esteem to fall back on. We can't rely on family and community to give us a sense of identity and belonging; it is something we must create for ourselves.
4. Western Buddhism should be able to integrate the valid insights from traditional culture and modern psychotherapy. The middle way is a constantly evolving path, as new extremes become apparent, and new, more creative ways of resolving tensions present themselves.
   

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Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4