Reflections on The Integral Living Room 2013, Part 6 Odd things Ken Wilber said

Constructively-Critical Reflections on The Integral Living Room 2013, 

Part 6: 

Theme: Odd things Ken Wilber said

This is the sixth in a series of 6 blogposts, which are supplemental to the Notes from the Field report I wrote about the Integral Living Room event for the January 2014 issue of Integral Leadership Review online journal.
(http://integralleadershipreview.com/11117-integral-living-room-boulder-colorado-usa-october-31-november-3-2013/ ) 
These blogposts represent my more personal constructively-critical reflections and musings, and are not purposed for reporting, as the Notes report was. They'll make limited sense if you haven't read the Notes report, but, I hope, are of some general usefulness.

Note: This blog contains only a couple of my reflections as a member of the ILR Harvest Team; there is much more to be said, and that is a future blogpost, around our questions, our process, and our relationship to various elements of the Integral Living Room happening! These are dear to my heart and closer to my Divine Passions than some of the reflections and musings below, and more important to the world, IMO, than some of what is below, but these posts got written in the timeframe I had up until now. Stay tuned!

The blogposts are about various themes I’ve organized my reflections into:

Part 1. Theme: “To Harvest or Not to Harvest,” or

Purposeful Maximizing of Effects vs “Trust the Field, Luke!”

Part 2. Theme: Emergence/Self-Generativeness vs Leadership/Design/Structure

Part 3. Theme: Clarifying/distinguishing concepts around and about we-spaces

Part 4. Theme: Defining 2T/2TWS and Naming Injunctions for 2T/2TWS

Part 5. Theme: Designing-in Orders of Learning

Part 6. Theme Odd things Ken Wilber said

That's this post, read below. Find the others via the links to them.

Each theme section is independent, so you can skip around if you like!

Part 6. Theme: Odd things Ken Wilber said

Sub-theme A: If you are 2T

I understand that Ken was passionately urging us to “own” being 2T, but I didn’t hear him qualify that, along the lines of “IF you are, own it.” Or “most or many of us are 2T.” I guess I would have liked that precision.

Sub-theme B: Nothing in 1T works in 2T

I guess it was just a momentary “partial truth” when he said “Nothing about 1st Tier works in 2nd Tier….” To me that’s incompatible with “transcend and include” unless we interpret his statement to be simply an emphasis on how much of life is “new” when one Tier-jumps, not just stage-jumping. It also seemed incompatible with what he also said: Find a way each stage contributes service, find its emergent advantage, find ways to make it useful in world.

And it definitely seems incompatible with Jeff’s awesome nutshells of the positive carry-forwards from each First-Tier stage! This super-important recapping of the carry-upward gifts of healthy versions of 1T stages is something all-too-rare to hear in Integral circles, in my experience. I would give a lot for a rundown of that absolutely brilliant, lengthy, yet succinct list of the particular “gifts” from each First-Tier stage. That was a "Wow!" for me.

Sub-theme C: Inventing 2T as Defining 2T

Another “odd thing Ken said” was his insistence that life has to be completely re-invented after one transforms into 2T. A few of the many ways he expressed this include: Each has to rethink doing everything anew. A new world. We are experimenting, not repeating anything. We need to re-learn how to do everything: How to talk, care, relate, give and get feedback.... Now, how do I act here, what do I do? Now here, what?

I’m truly puzzled, as it seems to me that even though we don't automatically have all the skills available to a given stage immediately upon having it become our Center of Gravity, most of the mental, emotional, behavioral (indeed AQAL) characteristics of a stage must already be present in a person before we would say they inhabit it. So the
“re-inventing” is to me more a part of the transformation, and less a part of the translation. In other words, anyone asking the questions he mentioned is, to me, still early in arriving, not yet inhabiting.

On the other hand, and I suspect this is what he had in mind, many of the First-Tier stages are reasonably (but to widely varying extents) well-worn grooves for humanity, whereas Orange and beyond are still new with respect to the entire species, and are being ongoingly invented de novo by humanity itself, and the more mature the stage, the less we even know about how to identify it such that we could tell who is inhabiting it or not. Thus, in that sense, the defining and inhabiting are of a piece with the inventing; there is not something pre-defined that we can compare ourselves to! I appreciated that insight I ended up with upon reflection.

Sub-theme D: How old is humanity?

It must have been “casual-speak” for him to say “in a million years of humanity’s existence.” As far as I know, we are a mite older than that!

by Rev. Alia Aurami, Ph.D., Head Minister, Amplifying Divine Light in All Church

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