INTEGRAL REVIEW
A Transdisciplinary and
Transcultural Journal
for New Thought,
Research, and Praxis
Published by ARINA, Inc.
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IR’s
Occasional Newsletter
#1 February 2007
Welcome to IR’s first
newsletter! Our objective for these periodicals is to keep the growing IR
community abreast of what we are doing and thinking. In addition to IR news,
this first installment introduces a regular feature, IR Editors’ Voices. We
invite "Letters to the Editor" that might be posted in a Journal
issue or in a Newsletter (send to ireditors@integral-
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Starting this week: IR’s first online dialog forums are open. These are based on selected
articles in Issue #3. Three are open-to-the-public forums, two are invited
forums. The invited forums are viewable by others, as guests. We invite such
guests to join the meta-dialogs about the intended process of integral dialog
as they observe invited forums-in-progress. Discussion “umbrellas” are:
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Open forum:
Toward Integral Dialog (including but not
confined to Murray & Ross article, Toward
Integral Dialog: Provisional Guidelines for Online Forums)
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Open forum:
Anderson article (Of Syntheses and
Surprises: Toward a Critical Integral Theory)
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Open forum:
Laszlo article (Rationale for an Integral
Theory of Everything)
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Invited forum:
Anderson article
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Invited forum: Laszlo
article
Starting mid February: Invited and open forums on Roy’s
article, A Process Model of Integral
Theory.
Starting early March: Invited and open forums on Commons’ article, Measuring an Approximate g in Animals and
People.
Contact us at integral.review.forums@integral-review.org
if you want to be one of several more participants in these upcoming, invited
forums.
You’re warmly invited to
participate in any of the topics discussed within the open forums. Read our
dialog guidelines at http://integral-review.org/forums/guidelines.asp
so you have some ideas of what to expect—and of what we expect. Then come join
us via the login instructions on the forums webpage http://integral-review.org/forums/.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Sponsorship of the initial
IR forums is underwritten by
ARINA, IR’s publisher. We hope you find these to offer unique and hopefully
integral communications and knowledge-building opportunities. Part of our
experiment with online forums will be evaluating how much effort is required to
create and maintain them. We welcome offers of time and funds to help us
continue the forums! These IR forums are powered by iCohere.
Contributions earmarked
for Integral Review and its
programs are tax-deductible. Its publisher ARINA, Inc. is a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit
organization. Secure transactions via PayPal or credit/debit cards can be made
at http://www.global-
Have this kind of
experience? IR could benefit from
some additional volunteers with a keen sense of IR’s mission and the ability to
(a) review funder descriptions we provide from database searches, (b) compare
funders’ program interests to IR’s, and (c) draft components of funding proposals
to funders. If this may fit your ability and a bit of available time, please
write to us: ireditors@intergral-review.org.
Frequently Asked Questions about
IR forums are posted at http://integral-review.org/forums/faqs.asp.
Integral Review’s Issue #4
is coming out in early June
with a great lineup of works and
more coming in! Remember, we publish a variety of works in addition to peer-reviewed
articles. We welcome your submissions year-round.
IR’s statistics are
growing!
|
Month |
Unique Visitors |
Pages Visited |
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January 2007 |
598 |
2,239 |
|
December 2006 – Issue #3 |
887 |
4,582 |
|
November 2006 |
332 |
1,066 |
|
October 2006 |
265 |
848 |
|
September 2006 |
263 |
966 |
|
August 2006 |
231 |
752 |
|
July 2006 |
321 |
1,385 |
|
June 2006 – Issue #2 |
715 |
3,440 |
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Editors’ Voices
What's exciting lately
& why, and things to read
Jonathan Reams
My life is currently
undergoing a major transition, as I take up a position as an associate
professor in the Department of Education at the Norwegian University of Science
and Technology in Trondheim. It is a half teaching, half research position in a
Masters in Counseling program where I will focus on organizational counseling,
coaching and leadership issues. I was somewhat skeptical at first of my ability
to feel comfortable in a counseling program, but as I went through the
program’s core introductory textbook, I recognized that I have been immersed in
this world for much of my life already.
In addition, much to my
delight I found that as I went through this text, (Theories of Counseling and
Psychotherapy, a Multicultural Perspective. Ivey, D’Andrea, Ivey and
Simek-Morgan, 2007), I noticed a distinctly integral undercurrent of
contextualizing the main forces in psychotherapy. Their descriptions of the
development of each approach to counseling and psychotherapy situated them both
culturally and historically, as well as in relation to the other branches of
thought in the field. This was furthered by adding in sections on how the
continued use of such early theories has been modified and adapted into
multicultural situations. While all of this was good, near the end the authors
presented their own approach of developmental counseling and therapy. I was
further impressed by the skillful way they brought in the concept of
development using a Piagetian framework and situated the other theories
accordingly. What emerged was a framework for understanding how to assess where
a client is at developmentally as well as culturally and how to address their
issues using a combination of developmentally and culturally appropriate
therapeutic methods.
I came away feeling
refreshingly at home in the field knowing that the evolution of thinking there
has begun to move into a multi-perspectival approach to integrating the
strengths and contextualizing the weaknesses of all the various approaches to
helping relationships. Integrating this foundation with its application in
organizational and leadership issues will be a natural fit for me.
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Thomas Jordan
One
of the most fascinating things I do is coaching a leader with a considerable
capacity for integral awareness. She is leading a secretariat for crime
prevention and safety promotion in Gothenburg, Sweden's second largest city. As
an integral leader, you have an ability to perceive and understand how specific
problems and tasks are weaved into intricate and systemic interrelationships
between institutional structures, societal trends, different individual frames
of reference and cultural patterns of meaning, etc. You have a commitment to
work for the realization of fundamental existential values and what is good for
the whole. The ability to understand different people's actions and attitudes
as a consequence of their embeddedness in particular perspectives certainly
helps to use one's energies more efficiently, but it can also be really
exasperating to encounter resistance and inertia due to a widespread lack of
awareness of complexity. There is also an acute lack of fellow integralists
among which to distribute the responsibilities for working with system-wide
issues . . . It is great to see how a "natural" reasons, reacts,
strategizes and manages intricate transformative processes, taking care to
adapt communication to the meaning-making structures other actors have. This
person never read a book by Wilber or any other theorist in the field of
integral studies. She has simply found her own way into an "integral
worldspace." Our field of knowledge could be greatly enriched, I think, by
directing more attention to such people and how they make sense of what they
are doing.
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Tom Murray
Over the last couple decades
as I was engaged in R&D in educational software, I was also a casual but
earnest student of "the big questions" of life (truth, justice, beauty,
parenting, and dancing) which, regardless of the conundrum posed, always seemed
to lead me down two compatible roads. Along one road I was drawn to
perspectives that elegantly and graciously incorporate seemingly discordant
views, which, of course, lead me to an identification with integral
theories. Calling me down the other road was the strong impression that
so many of the complications, tragedies, and debacles that befall us (from
family life to work to international politics) are created or exacerbated by
flaws in the ways that people process information that conflicts with one's
beliefs or world view. So for years I have also dabbled and played in the
fields of contemplative practices and conflict resolution theories. And,
at a still deeper causal level, where movements of heart and movements of mind
intertwine, I can glimpse the critical importance of a set of skills that I
call "epistemic sophistication.
Of the authors whose works
have thrilled me as I try to tie all of this together (regarding the
psychology, ethics, sociology, and epistemology parts, not the technology
part), two stand out. First is philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who's texts can be
a bit dense, but who's brilliant works exude a warmth and hopefulness for the
human condition that is rare in critical theorists. I've been so inspired
by his explanations of how ethical constructs such as freedom, equality and
justice necessarily form the very foundation of communication, knowledge
building, and political-economic realities. I'm really enjoying reading
Postmetaphysical Thinking at the moment. The second author is George
Lakoff who's book Philosophy in the Flesh (co-authored with Mark Johnson) has
had a significant impact on my understanding of the mind/body/reality
relationship, and what it means to search for meaning (or truth or justice or
beauty).
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Sara Ross
One
of my perennial global interests was in the foreground of my attention the week
just before writing this. Given my commitment to developing healthy methods for
how people and institutions can
address troubling aspects of many
socio-cultural-political-economic-environmental realities, this week I
particularly wished we had time machines to move paradigmatic work forward and
bring back its tools to serve our present day. I was one of over 3,200
individuals who submitted comments to the World Bank on its proposal for
anti-corruption measures in developing countries. My small effort was to
outline why and how such policies need a systemically-developmental re-framing
and to supply and offer papers to explicate my points.
Concurrently,
I was in conversation with two people (strangers to each other but not for
long!) whose patented work I view as paradigmatic and exquisitely
complementary. Integrated with such analyses as I sketched to the World Bank
and with the power of the integral computer
modeling the inventions will support, methods for how to design wiser policies and conditions for healthier behaviors
on micro to meso to macro scales are within reach. When I wear my analyst hat,
I wish I were a computer modeler, because complex integral analyses need that
tool. Computer modeling to-date has not used integral, developmental, scalable
programming that can address the layers of human development’s complexity.
Crucial
foundations are showing up. In addition to his other work, John E. LaMuth’s U.S. Patent 6,587,846, dating from 2003, is a metaperspectival,
developmental system that is an “inductive inference affective language
analyzer simulating artificial intelligence [AI].” LaMuth currently has a
second patent for AI under examination. The 2003 patent elucidates how ethical behaviors dynamically
develop in interpersonal interactions. In December, Michael Lamport Commons (author
of Integral Review’s issue 3 article
“Measuring an Approximate g in Animals and People) and his colleague Mitzi
Sturgeon White were granted U.S. Patent 7,152,051, which uses the Model of Hierarchical
Complexity. Its formal theory elucidates how
structures of reasoning (and any other tasks) develop in increasing complexity.
Thus this newly patented work is a content-free metaperspectival system, using
the Model as foundation in the design of stacked neural networks. This results
in a new method for “intelligent control with hierarchical stacked neural
networks.” Why am I excited about the implications of such inventions? They can
underlie the development of ethical, complexly layered-and-integrated
developmental analyses and predictions at different social scales. In turn,
such tools can inform human endeavors at all scales, such as the World Bank’s
and the finally-catalyzed worldwide attention on climate change—without waiting
generations for enough humans to conceive, by themselves, genuinely integral
approaches. This future now is full
of potential for new methods—the hows—for
fostering healthier local, national, and global social change and development.
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Bonnitta Roy
I am an avid and eclectic
reader of philosophy, and so one of the roles I play in IR is giving the
initial feedback for the theoretical articles, and checking articles for
consistency of argument with respect to established philosophical theory. This
can be very abstract. However, when I
read an article, the most important thing for me is to try to get at the root
cause of it—what is generating the enthusiasm and energy in the author for this
work? I try to establish a connection with the author there, in the root cause,
in order to be a better partner in helping the author to improve the work.
Feedback of this sort often requires something more of the author—to reconnect
with one’s basic intuition, or re-examine one’s fundamental view.
This is also the focus on my
own work in Integral Theory—examining the basis or view from which the spectrum
of perspectives arise. I am currently reading the collected works of Chogyam
Trungpa alongside Sri Aurobindo’s, The
Life Divine—and it’s the same process for me, trying to establish
connections with these thinkers at the most basic level. Reading them through
thousands upon thousands of pages, there is a parallel process that goes on in
my mind—on the one hand I try to keep up with the complexity of their
meta-systemic understanding, on the other hand I try to cut through that
complexity to that place of clarity from which they have written.
Here are some examples of
what I see as cutting through to that place of clarity, both accessible at: http://www.noetic.org/publications/review/issue33/main.cfm?page=r33_WrenLewis.html:
I
Don’t Know: A Dialogue on Intuition, Interview with Rob Rabbin by Lourdes
Billingsley, and Tongued with Fire:
Personal Reflections on the Eternity Vision of T.S. Eliot, John Wren Kewis.
And, a visual expression, Spirit Growing
in the World, at http://www.patternlanguage.com/leveltwo/spiritframe.htm?/leveltwo/../personal/jungrep.htm
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Russ Volckmann
In preparation for a
forthcoming interview for the Integral Review, I have been reading articles by
Basarab Nicolescu (renowned physicist and leader of an international
transdisciplinarity movement; see Basarab Nicolescu, Manifesto of
Transdisciplinarity, Karen-Claire Voss, tr. Albany: State University Press,
2002). The relevance of his work for an integral theory, perspective and
approach seems bursting with possibility. He lays out the logic for multiple
levels of reality and the connections between them. He notes, “…no one level of Reality constitutes a
privileged place from which one is able to understand all the other levels of
Reality.” Consequently, he makes a cogent case for multiple ways of
knowing, multiple elements for making meaning. He shows the existence of levels
of perception and how the flow of consciousness occurs across different levels
of Reality. For now, I hope that this amount of information might stimulate
your appetite for more and I am sure the interview will be extraordinary, not
only for theory, but also for its implications in how we develop knowledge and
meaning as a society.
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