sunday after my talk, ken wilber hits the stage, and spends the afternoon asking the audience questions. we spend (when i say we, it's 98% ken) three hours talking about ITP, the reality of building an organization- much less a 2nd tier organization, and what it's like working in the trenches for the integral vision. ken gives a loving, brilliant, and very sober account of the difficulties and struggles involved in this emergent dimension of being. i find it synchronistic in a way, because before he got there i had been wondering if i was too sober in my talk saturday morning. it's been such a challenging year in so many ways, and i decided to be quite open with the reality of blood, sweat, and tears. for me, there was such a tremendous, euphoric hit of elation when i first came into the integral community, and before that, the dharma (1995 or so). but the honeymoon is over, and the work continues on. very often engaging the integral, really actually bringing it into the world of art, business, politics, or through an ITP, whatever way- actually feels like you're going to fucking DIS-integrate over and over and over. early in my career it was so easy (and narrow, and fractured). i just meditated, wrote songs, toured, and partied. in 1995 things began to change. i realized if i were to be an authentic practioner, my ridiculous occlusions, blocks, and blind spots were going to inhibit the Mystery. the ways in which i was blocked were going to limit my capacity to be of help in the work of Love. if we truly offer our lives to Love (not romantic love, or merely personal love, but the unknowable, ineffable ~?~ that is our true Self) than we have to work to become transparent to it, get out of its way, so it can move through us and we can move through it. the initial awakening is a gift, and the utter certainty accompanies it that surrunder (continuously) our only calling, that is a gift too, but the often ugly, messy work of transformation that follows is a lifelong endeavor. it's never over. we're never "there". there's no there anyway, all "there's" are here. let's say hypothetically, for sake of curiousity, we could somehow "perfect our self" and be the ultimate integrated, awakened body, mind, and spirit. there would still be culture, nature, the entire visible and invisible collective Kosmos unperfected (yet perfect), evolving, and swirling in a dynamic flux that will forever mystify and transport each of its constituents. and that is every bit as much "us" or "i" as any body mind is, and indeed more so. the ground of our being has no location, no qualities, but erupts in every place, every moment, as all qualities. heaven knows this is no theory, no abstract, but our direct, immediate experience. before but not apart from bodies, before but not apart from Mind, before but not apart from over-soul...

all the aspects are aspects of one Self. but the work of integration, in an individual or collective, in visible or invisible domains- that work can be a real motherfucker. becoming our natural selves can feel incredibly unnatural. lately i've been thinking of three reasons we do it, for instance why an artist might be into all this:

1, it makes one more conductive to the "stuff" of the Mystery- more transparent / open to transmit it
2, it makes one more receptive to the "stuff" of the Mystery- more perceptive / open to receive it
3, (the best one), it's our natural condition. the infinite magnet of Self pulls all lines / streams of our being, whether indvidual or collective INTO its always-already ever present IS. nothing is more natural to us than the No-thing that is everything. always deeper, wider, higher, including more and more in Love until there is no opposite, as its always been...