The Horns of Integral Pragmatics

What I propose and emphasize by constantly returning to integral pragmatics is the possibility for co-enacting a “new” mode of intimacy with the utterances we make.

The Walls of Jericho

I put the word new in the quotation marks because I believe that this mode is old enough to have seen the first geniuses of both a spoken word and a written word in the history of humankind. I, nevertheless, say “new” because it seems we either lost our connection with this mode or haven’t found it yet. For some reason we tend to distance ourselves from the embodiment of our Logos or Word; and yet we shall always remind ourselves: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

In the alchemical lab of our Imagination the seed of the Word manifests as God’s will and energy. Through becoming one with the Word we re-unite with the miracle of Oneness with the Spirit as it manifests inseparably from reality. The Word uttered always brings aliveness to our being; and instead of looking straight at things we stare into the abyss in front of us and our consciousness embarks on a journey through the realms of the living and the dead, following the footsteps of infinity, swimming in the clouds of timelessness, and reaching out to express as non-locality.

The sacred way of speaking the Word is totally different from the profane way of speaking words. Peter Kingsley explains the difference between “talking about” and “talking from” in the magnificent article “Raven’s Appearance”:

There is the profane way of talking, which is to talk about things. And if you care to notice, you will see that in the modern Western world we always talk about something. There is the word; then there is the point of reference for the word, which is always separate from the word itself. And this, of course, is the basis for nearly all modern linguistics.

But according to people such as Parmenides there is another way of talking. This other way is that instead of talking about, you talk from. If you sense oneness you talk from oneness; and that oneness is communicated through the magic of the word in a way that our minds may find incomprehensible but that, even so, fascinates and endlessly obsesses them. For these people were magicians. The founders of logic and science in the West were sorcerers. They knew what they were doing even if, now, no one knows what they did.

If we intuit the infinite, if we intuit the eternal, if we intuit the timeless, the transcendent, the Divine, we are bound to wake up in the echoing thunder of silence. This silence is the original face of our selfhood; and it quietly floats in our Hearts. The silence explodes with ecstasy, and when it does, the Word manifests. You see, the Word is inseparable from the silence, the Word is connected to the silence, the Word is silence revealed itself.

We can spend years and decades talking about words but unless we talk from the Word we never reach the realm of profound pragmatics. We can infinitely chase our own tail of signifiers and signifieds but no matter what we do unless we open our minds and hearts wide enough to courageously embody the Word, our talking will always remain talking about philosophy instead of being philosophy, talking about poetry instead of being poetry, talking about science instead of being science, talking about art instead of being art. Philosophy is the Love of Wisdom; in its pragmatics it’s the Word uttered itself to itself and echoed in the Hall of sentient Mirrors.

I have always intuitively sensed the appearance of the intimacy with the Word in the writings of Ken Wilber. The striking difference between him and his philosophy and those who talk about Wilber and his philosophy is in the embodiment of the Word—Logos. The seed of this vision of integral pragmatics that I want to convey to you has been sown by a little and seemingly evanescent utterance of profound importance, the utterance delineating Integral Semiotics in Wilber’s Integral Spirituality (pp. 286-287):

James was a genius and a pioneer in so many ways, and the fact that he took states of consciousness as seriously as he did was extraordinary; but monological is monological, and in that instance he merely extended the imperialism of the philosophy of the subject. Fortunately, James’s sheer genius pushes him beyond his own self-imposed limitations. His empiricism is always open to hermeneutics, the representational paradigm is supplemented with Peircean pragmatics, and—above all—his is a soul in which Truth and Goodness and Beauty are still a holy and unbreakable trinity.

But radical empiricism is still empiricism. That is, radical empiricism is radical monologicalism. Stages in zone #2 and the constitutive nature of zone #4 are alien to him. Had he availed himself of more of the work of his contemporary James Mark Baldwin, how different it all might have been. This imperialistic empiricism is the worm in the core of this otherwise extraordinary work.

It’s interesting to note that, in fact, Charles Peirce himself criticized James for exactly this central problem. James and Peirce were lifelong friends, despite their little tiff over James’s appropriation of the term “pragmatism” from Peirce, who coined it. (Peirce subsequently changed the name of his philosophy to “pragmaticism,” which was “a term,” he said, “so ugly as to discourage theft.”) Despite their friendship, Peirce felt James’s approach of “pure empiricism” was deeply flawed. Peirce—who, as noted, is generally regarded as America’s greatest philosophical genius—nailed James with a simple sentence: Perception is semiotic.

I want to pause here for a moment, take a deep breath and state that for the last two years I have been a semiotician to the marrow of my bones. Semiotics is a way to recognize the almost religious reverence for the Word that manifests as a movement of the unmoving, as a birth of the unborn. The entire universe after the Big Bang represents the Word extended through time and space. Now, having said so, I shall continue this magnificent quotation:

In other words, perception is always already an interpretation. At least in part. Failing to see this is the common mistake of naïve phenomenology and naïve empiricism in all their forms. Understanding this also let Peirce point out two further problems, which people simply will not understand if they don’t get the first problem with monological empiricism itself. Namely, it let Peirce say of James, “Of course, he is materialistic to the core.” And further: “He inclines toward Cartesian dualism.” Whenever I mention this to fans of James, they usually express shock, which tells me that they haven’t gotten the postmodern revolution, because otherwise it makes perfect sense. But for those who fail to understand this, James is even seen as somebody who overcame materialism and dualism, whereas he merely embodied their subtler monological forms. Peirce went on to humorously say of James’s implicit materialism that this is so “in a methodological sense, but not religiously, since he does not deny a separable soul nor a future life; for materialism is that form of philosophy which leaves the universe as incomprehensible as it finds it.” What Peirce means is, what monological delivers is incomprehensible; perception itself is actually semiotic.

Now we come closer to the part which is most important to our reasoning. Let’s take a look:

We can also see, further, why James—as well as virtually all meditation and phenomenology—is, as often noted, modernist in essence, and why Peirce was a great postmodernist about a century ahead of his time (who else could see natural laws as natural habits, without falling into magenta magic?). Peirce maintained that all perception is already an interpretation, and interpretation is triadic in structure: it demands a sign, an object (referent), and an interpretant. You can see the similarity with Ferdinand de Saussure, who maintained that the sign is composed of a signifier and signified in a system of interpreted differences. Peirce coined the term “semiotics”; Saussure called what he was doing “semiology.” AQAL has drawn on both of them: there is a sign (signifier plus signified), referent, semantic, syntax, and pragmatics.

Here we have to look at the bottom of the page to find a short footnote with the utterance that forever changed my relation to the Word as it is written or spoken or read or done:

To give a quadratic view: the sign is composed of UR-signifier and UL-signified (and yes, à la postmodernism, there are often huge gaps between them, resulting in deferral of meaning). Integral Theory defines a sign as “any aspect of reality that signifies another, to another.” Signs exist in systems of semantics (LL) and syntax (LR), held together by pragmatics (whose telos is to integrate the 4 quadrants of any semiotic occasion: and all occasions are semiotic, although only higher animals have linguistic forms of semiotics: the 4 quadrants go all the way down, taking semiotics with them). . . .

Ever since I have read this footnote my life has never been the same. As I was reading the words “signs exist in systems of semantics (LL) and syntax (LR), held together by pragmatics (whose telos is to integrate the 4 quadrants of any semiotic occasion . . .)” the subtle tingling in my body and the space of clarity in my mind signified that the treasure is found.

I have expressed elsewhere my point of view that the third tier of development and evolution of consciousness described in the Integral developmental theory is the first truly Pragmatic Tier. In a gesture of connecting the dots I have linked Wilber’s testimony that the AQAL framework itself is a product of the Indigo stage of consciousness (a third-tier stage) with the statement that pragmatics’ telos is to integrate the four quadrants of any semiotic occasion. This means that the true nature of the four quadrants, the true nature of these primordial perspectives reveals itself only as an embodiment of the Word coming through a third-tier structure of consciousness.

Indigo is the first stage of consciousness which in its utterances, the utterances that manifest not just as a verbal-linguistic activity but as a kosmocentric activity, is able to hold the four quadrants in a single gesture of integration. Before that stage, every utterance we make is bound to be a fragmented aspect of a text within text within text within the boundaries of one dimension of consciousness. To understand and grok and grasp the difficult transverbal reality beneath these words I want to extend my philosophical hand so as to reach Vasily Nalimov, a truly unsung hero of our time. Vasily Nalimov understood consciousness as essentially a text reading phenomenon. He intuited very well the power of Logos—the power of the Word—and spoke from the silence and timelessness. The grand narrative of our life is a holarchy of semiotic occasions that forms the scripture with the Holy text breathing within and without.

I emphasize integral pragmatics but my words sometimes are misinterpreted as utterances of an isolated theorizing mind—but I am not a Pharisee and not interested in a book knowledge and in talking about. When I reach the space of clarity through which I can reconnect with integral pragmatics I see that human beings are lost in massive textbooks of their own minds. The dissociation of the words and actions is being established. The intuition of the immediacy of the Spirit-in-action’s tetra-manifestation becomes forsaken. A seed of integral intentionality which has the potentiality to reach a luminous mindbody becomes lost in the swamps of smaller vortexes of karma. The Integral Word instead of being spoken is being stuck at the throat chakra level of incessant mumbling; and the energy never reaches the forehead and the crown chakras (and often lower chakras as well). The micro-orbit is never fully completed. The Beauty fades away. The hopes get broken. Alienation insists. The Word is forgotten. The Man isolates himself in the web of texts he created.

My task is to do my best to bring the message which reveals the possibility for a passionate embodiment of the Word—the Word that has the sound of the Horns of Jericho. It shakes your destiny and frees your throat and liberates your fate. The influx of authentic pragmatics results.

In defense of integral reading

“In Defense of Naïve Reading” by Robert Pippin is a pretty interesting integrative article on literary postmodernism published at the New York Times website. Reading it was as if the surfaces of the Red Postmodern Sea were parted and the depth of self-consciousness revealed itself. At least for a moment a silent green beam of hope shined. To quote,

“[L]iterature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or ‘researched’ by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of ‘first level,’ an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more ‘sideways on’ or third-person view. Indeed that is in a way the whole point of having the ‘arts.’”

For me, literature has always been a source of deep wisdom that fosters one’s greater maturity. As a brilliant Russian thinker Vasily Nalimov argues in his books, consciousness is a text-reading phenomenon (in the broadest sense of the word). In my opinion, narrative brings meaningful & very subtle structures to one’s personal development; and Ken Wilber has pointed out the importance of the world greatest religious narratives as developmental conveyor belts for preconventional & conventional worldspaces in his book Integral Spirituality.

To continue quoting this wonderful article,

“Likewise—and this is a much more controversial thesis—such works also can directly deliver a kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding not available from a third person or more general formulation of such knowledge. There is no reason to think that such knowledge—exemplified in what Aristotle said about the practically wise man (the [Phronēsis]) or in what Pascal meant by the difference between l’esprit géometrique and l’esprit de finesse—is any less knowledge because it cannot be so formalized or even taught as such. Call this a plea for a place for ‘naïve’ reading, teaching and writing—an appreciation and discussion not mediated by a theoretical research question recognizable as such by the modern academy.”

Definitely, aesthetically-built literary narratives seem to have the capacity of constructing experiential frameworks for conveying certain domains of tacit knowledge (necessary for action learning in the pragmatic sector). To additionally contribute to this statement about the importance of aesthetics in our narratives, I would quote the famous Russian writer Anton Chekhov who said, “The writer’s function is only to describe by whom, how, and under what conditions… The artist must be only an impartial witness of his characters and what they said, not their judge.” (I borrowed the quotation from another interesting article by Nina Schuyler.)

Here are some of the questions worth pondering. Why reading comprehensive literature is so important for our development? Why do I think that in order for us to contribute to humanity probably the best thing we can do is to calm our minds enough to be able to actually have read Dostoevsky’s passionate reflections on universal conscience and self-liberation? Why do stories and their archetypal images have played such an important role for our humanity’s evolution for millennia? Why good 1st-person storytelling is so important not just for narrow marketing and cheap sales pitches but for a wide range of dimensions of life that involve communication and knowledge sharing?

One of the many perspectives that I find increasingly important when contemplating the matrix of these questions is the mind-blowing neuroscientific discovery of mirror neurons: 

“In multiple reports published in the Sept. 19 issue of Current Biology, neuroscientists provide evidence that mirror neurons are multimodal—they are activated by not just by watching actions, but also by hearing and reading about them.

An effort led by Lisa Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, found that the brain’s premotor cortex shows the same activity when subjects observe an action as when they read words describing it.” (“Mirror Neurons Also Respond to Language and Sound,” September 21, 2006)

Hence, we are witnessing the capacity of comprehensive narratives to evoke altered states of consciousness and deeper modes of knowing and appreciating life which are important for the emergence of a more sophisticated pragmatics of our being-in-the-world. Science cannot replace art and morals—Habermas, Wilber and others have proved it convincingly; but if science, morals, and art are in a complementary relationship with each other their synergy will most definitely bring forth powerful results.

The sketches on contemporary biosociopsychoanalysis

I read daily news using the Internet; and sometimes I watch conventional TV news. Newsfeed often acts as a machine producing meaningful coincidences that would point to a recent trend in the emergence of creativity. Recently, there have been two news articles that were able to hold my attention for many hours. First article is about North Korea; and this year I have been following news about North Korea with an increasing interest. Something in my guts tells me it is very important to point my attention to the developments in this country. So, in this post I will start with the North Korea theme and then gradually move to the second topic.

Kim Jong-il seems to enjoy luxury.

The article about North Korea bears the title "Kim Jong-il's Label Addiction Revealed." It describes strange peculiarities that, according to a person who decided to escape from the Kim Jong-il's regime (who in a somewhat silly and disrespectful way is called a "defector"), the leaders of the long ago isolated country seem to have. It appears that Kim Jong-il (who, occasionally, was born in USSR) seems to be prone to the kind of very ordinary consumerism which can be observed among the elites and not-so-elites of the world, a consumerism that consists of the addiction to buy and wear expensive clothes, drive expensive cars, and attach oneself to expensive things in general (as we all tend to do at some point). 

If this is true—and it can be very true because it simply fits our present-day knowledge of the human nature and biosociopsychology—then the North Korean society could provide another example of the hypocritical splitting which reveals itself as discrepancies between the ideology that is being imposed by the government on the people and the ideology that is being followed by the very leaders of this government—inauthentic communication of one thing and engagement in another is the most ancient secret which is astonishing in its simplicity and yet so carefully guarded by the few! (The splitting which has been exposing itself, to a different extent, in Russia, USA, Europe and many other countries and places. In isolated countries such as North Korea it simply goes to its extreme.)

It becomes a sad and fascinating case study of how the rulers of the world often tend to use their enormous  social powers and influence to enforce entire civilizations' self-organization around satisfaction of the rulers' egocentric needs. Obviously, it's nothing personal between me and Kim Jong-il; and I believe that in the depths of his heart we can find remnants/seeds of a wonderful, if unformed, personality but in overall manifestations of his self-system—one shouldn't  let oneself be deceived—it's all repeating the same old pattern that we have seen in the Soviet Union and other totalitarian social systems where the few used the many for the benefit of their self-serving drives, the drives that they simply couldn't stop due to their socially-conditioned neurobiology (furthermore, they don't want to stop—and why would they, if all their basic egocentric needs are met at least for the moment and they can feel, if, again, for a fleeting moment, centers of the universe). 

It also demonstrates how a passion of the few for accessing a particular kind of states of consciousness (related to igniting the zones of pleasure associated with the areas around the limbic system in the brain) could virtually create entire civilizations centered around human suffering, misery and scarcity! This would be one simple case study that I would refer to if one asked me why I find the projects that articulate the importance of knowing thyself in terms of dynamics of your own states of consciousness to be crucial for our lives right here and now. (Incidentally, the altstates.net project that I am co-developing now will hopefully become one of such initiatives that would skillfully highlight the significant role consciousness and its states & structures have played in the human history.)

In some sense, we're all junkies for blissful states; and this is our "reaching the God state" project, so to say, as Ken Wilber has pointed out in his brilliant The Atman Project. Stan Grof, another pioneer of states of consciousness exploration and investigation, has emphasized that it is in the human nature to unconsciously, semiconsciously and consciously desire reaching a holotropic state, that is a state of the ultimate wholeness which has been historically associated with experiencing God states. In order to figure out today's markets and politics one simply has to master skillful biosociopsychoanalytical action inquiry that takes into account these complex dimensions in a coherent gesture.

Here we can make a discrete leap into the second, seemingly unrelated, news article which, as I mentioned in the beginning of this post, attracted my attention. The Daily Mail claims that "computers and TV take up half our lives as we spend seven hours a day using technology." This claim also seems to reflect something important; in particular I mean a very important notion that the technologies that we are using (and in which we are immersed) increasingly become essential parts of our personal ecosystems and consciousness. It is now a widely accepted reflection that the flow of information becomes so massive and multiplies so enormously that it poses multiple difficulties on societies today. (I should have said here, "it poses multiple difficulties on societies yesterday," for every word I have spoken right now in some sense reflects the past—but the past that influences each and every aspect of our present moment.) 

In order to cope with this informational stress we have to always be one step or even a few steps ahead in our creativity; and I would claim that this step would involve at least two parts: the first would be anchoring one's self in the ocean of timeless stillness (which can be achieved via advanced contemplative/meditative paradigms & technologies); and the second would consist of learning to communicate at multiple levels in one bit of information simultaneously (these levels would include the domains of body, emotions, mind, soul, and spirit, with the latter being described as a certain quality of all-pervading and compassionate meta-awareness that is built into the very fabric of the material substrate of our consciousness, that is the brain, the electromagnetic activity, and the entire material system that surrounds the space of our individual being and co-existence). For instance, this very blog should touch all these domains and contain a key for an easy-and-instant access to the holograph of experience it conveys with its limited words and textual canvas.

One possible future
of a human form.

It can easily be predicted that, since the computer and information-based technologies are conquering the human minds, there will be a growing need in brain-mind interfaces that would ensure the accessibility of simultaneous engagement with all the essential domains of being-in-the-world (by which I mean the aforementioned body, mind, soul, and spirit distributed across the interiors and exteriors of the individual and collective). For instance, in order to ensure exercising of the body in the operator of a computer in the conditions where the time is  increasingly limited and one cannot afford to exercise dissociatedly and separately from the work flow, the humanity would first attempt to create computers working on which would involve kinaesthetic "karate-like" movements. However, the advancement of consciousness/matter interfaces and technologies will quickly move to a different variation of being, the one that would involve working on a computer while exercising karate or strength training (or, better put, at the same moment with body exercises). The same goes for mind and soul and spirit. Each and every gesture would consciously and super-consciously include the involvement of all these domains simultaneously. I would walk in the street while meditating, praying, and doing tai chi exercises and enjoying this fine weather and that wonderful sunset. 

And when within a few decades humans will most likely be able to extend their life span indefinitely be prepared to include all the essential domains in your life—for death will become a luxury and if there is anything less than a fully-functioning body-mind-soul-spirit-powered cybernetic human being you are going to slide into an infinite loop of unnecessary suffering—and this is why we would need to establish psychosocioneuroethics commissions that would prevent such unfortunate cases for the greater good of humankind as soon as we are going to be ready to consciously do so.

Sounds like science fiction? Well, in this case I can only advice you to simply remember how it was 20 years ago and look around yourself now—and simply read the news, dammit! We are currently on the verge of living in the world of cybernetic ecosystems, whether we want it or not.

Notes

To demonstrate the heightened awareness in the choices I made around building the current blog post I claim that the placement of the first image in the article is done according to the recent fair use trends. The image was originally displayed in The Chosun Ilbo article. The second image is a work of art created by Richard Marchard and borrowed from here; it is used as an illustration to the ideas expressed in this essay (the picture itself, in my interpretation, points towards an artistic vision of how the future human form might look like); and my position—even though I am a human being and not a lawyer-android—is that the fair use rules are applicable here, too, and also that there should be an easier way to share reproductions of artistic pictures according to the leading-edge sense of basic moral intuition.

What about the day we stop slaughtering our finest impulses?

A beautiful quotation I read a few minutes ago in the blog of one of my favorite fiction writers and magicians Johnathan Carroll. Carroll quotes Henry Miller who said,

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.

In my observations we most certainly do slaughter our finest impulses on a day-to-day basis. It doesn't necessarily refer to writing a poem or painting something beautiful. The finest impulses that we suppress may include the things we want to say, the moves we want to perform, the feelings we want to express. In some cases it emerges as a blockage in the throat, as if you were about to say something but then started to clear your throat and remained silent. In many cases we don't claim the destiny for greatness that belongs to us and settle due to our damaged self-esteem, an attachment to a false self for a lesser path or a path that is alien to us.

I hope an occasion will emerge to write extensively about Jonathan Carroll's magical novels that  helped me to rediscover my soul and make my soul presence stronger. His books have been very influential in my life—and I'm speaking of the magnitude of influence that at some point equals to that which, for instance, Ken Wilber's ideas have had on me (which is huge). Incidentally, in one of the older blogs Carroll writes about Wilber the following:

I was listening to a lecture by Ken Wilber about consciousness. He mentioned something I had never thought about. Yet as soon as I heard it, my mind jumped on its horse and rode off in all sorts of interesting directions. Wilber said one of the profound differences between mankind centuries ago and today was that in the past because a person was born, raised and usually died in one community and rarely left, their exposure to religious/spiritual ideas was limited to what was taught or believed only in that community. In modern times, particularly now with the ubiquity, width and breadth of the internet, a child in a remote community in, say, Mali, can learn in an instant about Buddhism, Christian Science, or Zoroastrianism. Sure, in the past missionaries from the various religions were sent out to the four corners of the earth to try and convert the heathen. But they were only individuals here and there. Now all that's needed is a computer and a modem and huge numbers of people can have their most fundamental beliefs challenged or changed—in an instant. I have always been fascinated by the idea of what we might be or have been if we were simply exposed to it. We would have been firm Catholics if we'd learned about that belief when we were most receptive to religious teaching. Or a great chess player if someone had only taught us how to play as children. How about a world class baker if we hadn't had a Mom who hated to cook and anything to do with the kitchen. Wilber extends that idea way way out—to God. Never in a million years would I (says the person in Mali, for example) have thought God or religion could be conceived in ways that contrast so hugely with my own. But now that I have learned about some of them, my world view and life could change profoundly (June 28, 2009).

I remember how amused I was when I accidentally opened Carroll's blog and found this post. I even spontaneously wrote him an email expressing my gratitude for his books and a joy that he, too, is getting somehow influenced by integral ideas as expressed by Wilber. Don't know if the email ever reached him though for I haven't received a reply (probably, it got lost among the tons of other fan mail). Let me quote most parts of it here:

Dear Jonathan Carroll:

I'm clinical psychology student from Russia (if I manage not to drop out on my senior year, of course). But that's not the point of this letter. The point is rather different. I'm in love with your books. I read everything I could find translated in Russian… and I'm waiting for an opportunity to buy your English books and re-read everything once again. It also happens that I'm scholar of Ken Wilber's works. It also happens that my life, my dreams, my soul, and the fabric of whatever happens in my world seems to me as being closely interlinked with the things I read. And I still can't quite figure out whose works influenced my today's consciousness more -- yours, Ken's or Neil Gaiman's. (Sorry, but I gotta admit that I'm a big fan of Neil's works, too.)

Anyway, during these two weeks, among other things, I finished reading three books. Your Bones of the Moon, Neil's InterWorld (actually, finished reading it just an hour ago), and Ken's One Taste and The Marriage of Sense and Soul (it was the first time I read those in English [and I read the former some years ago in Russian]). Freaky enough, I find that the taste of all these books is somewhat similar. I have that bad habit of immersing into whatever I read and attempting to intuit the possibilities towards greater and deeper dimensions of psyche and consciousness in it. For instance, I always sense a lot of transpersonal and transrational stuff (which doesn't look prerational to me) going on in your books, not to mention the play of Jungian-like archetypes and so on; and when I read your books, Neil's books, and Ken's books there's that unmistakable state of deeper translucence that makes all the dimensions of dream-and-reality dialogically interpenetrate—at least in my worldspace. For me your stories are keyless gates to deeper, broader states of consciousness. Believe it or not, this unmistakable recognition of the great story narrative supportive towards awakening of one's own deeper potentials is what I have always found as striking features in both your, Neil's and Ken's books. And it's even that I have been wondering whether it is possible that the art you're all working on is essentially of the same transcendental and transformational nature, pointing towards deeper dimensions and depths of the soul.

I am pretty sure that what both you and Neil are doing as artists is what can be called a contemporary transcendental art, transcendental because it transcends and integrates fragments of realities, be it the realities of waking & dreaming or realities of persona & shadow or realities of ordinary and transordinary. Ken Wilber, when speaking of integral art (you can find an essay on art here and there; see also two beautiful chapters in his The Eye of Spirit), said an interesting formula: Bad Art Copies, Good Art Creates, Great Art Transcends. Alex Grey, a famous integral artist (whose paintings have been of guidance for me), writes:

Ken has stated numerous times, and I agree, that art is an essentialized worldview, or as Bachelard called it, "a metaphysics in a moment." Over the millenia, culture has embodied worldviews that both express and guide the attitudes of the people. As artists, we need to be conscious of and responsible for the views we transmit through our work. We need to use all the tools available to re-invent and invigorate our field, and to my mind, Ken provides the amazing tool of a worldview that makes peace between the quarrelsome territories of science, art and religion. After the dissociation and alienation of artists and their communities over the past 120 years, Wilber's integrative approach holds much promise. He has lead the way beyond current post-modern thinking toward an integral approach to art, toward an art of the soul.

I would say that your art has done exactly that to my injured Russian soul that wanders in the wastelands of a collapsed country which has been experiencing a cultural disaster for more than 100 years. Your stories have been very helpful in terms of healing my soul and awakening it towards the deepest potentialities of its individuality. I remember thinking: there's gotta be something in common among these guys, I feel it with my heart, now what I need is evidence that I'm not making this up... So it was quite a surprise to read your CarrollBlog 6.28, in which you mention "listening to a lecture by Ken Wilber about consciousness." I was very delighted, because synchronicities play a very profound role in my life stream. It was "an accident" that I decided to browse your website (which I usually don't do), after reading that Neil's book in the period where everything I do is closely intertwined with Ken Wilber's philosophy. This is no accident that Ken calls himself not a philosopher... but a storyteller, a Kosmic storyteller. And I think of the universes you unfold in your stories as of the Kosmic stories as well; for me, they are visionary stories that open doors to something which is ready to emerge but is not yet here. . . .

I hope this email reaches you; and you'll have time to read it and perhaps even to respond, if it touches you. As for myself, I'm relieved, for I knew that I'm not crazy in sensing that what you do isn't simply an art confined into its own boundaries, and what Ken does isn't simply a cognitive philosophy confined to its own boundaries... everything becomes fluid, dialectical, and translucent. Which is groovy, indeed! Whenever I get your book or Neil's book or Ken's book, they always and instantaneously become my top priority in reading list; and I basically stop doing everything else besides reading, because these stories always offer gems of a deeper awareness. This is why I'm very grateful for being able to enjoy the brilliance and writing genius of all of you.

Kind regards,
Eugene Pustoshkin

Now I'd like to come back to the first point about slaughtering our finest impulses. After I posted what you have hopefully read above I went on reading Carroll's blog. There is one post that he wrote that I find right on money, so I am going to quote it:

I was reading an issue of MEN'S JOURNAL magazine. The lead article was "100 Things To Do Before You Die." On the list were things like climb Mt. Everest, parachute from a plane, hand feed a shark, etcetera. I skimmed the other things they suggested should be on everyone's list. I had no desire to do even one of them. So then I thought is there anything I'd like to do before I die that I haven't done yet? Hypothetically if someone is living fully, they're doing what matters (or is important) to them whenever and however they can. There's something pathetic about having to make lists of tasks to do before you die so you can be sure that by doing them, you will have really "lived." The Japanese say "live every day as if your hair was on fire" and within realistic bounds, that sounds just about right. Most of the time we know almost as soon as a situation arises whether we will later regret not doing it. We also know most of the time that despite the many fearful, well behaved inner voices telling us not to do something, that we should ignore those voices and just go ahead and do it. Because when we do it and it works, it makes us bigger and life richer. If it fails, we hurt for a while but generally then heal and move on. You don't need to climb Mt. Everest to have led a fulfilled life. You only have to have the courage, and usually it is only small courage, to say yes. Say yes and do something when your first, second and third instincts may be to say no because that frightens me (March 18, 2010).

Indeed.

Psychopathology of everyday life

I have been writing a lot about many different ways pathologies exist in personality and society. This interest of mine in pathological states and conditions didn't emerge out of simple curiosity; these are the practical questions asked by life itself to figure out. Since there is a spectrum of consciousness (that is, our consciousness is multilevel and multidimensional) it appears that there is also a spectrum of pathologies that can emerge at any stage of development and then progress through our being-in-the-world. Any kind of behavior, including pathological (with corresponding interior states), seems to be in some way an adaptive response of the mind-body system to certain circumstances in life. Post-traumatic stress disorder, for instance, characterized by the dissociative defense mechanism seems to emerge in an attempt of psyche to chunk traumatic experiences in pieces so as to defend the structure of the conscious self from the experiences it can't digest yet.

In classical psychiatry there are "bigger" psychological pathologies that structure the entire life around them (psychotic to borderline) and there are "smaller" pathologies (neurotic) that, even though they affect the matrix of experience, allow one to live more or less adaptive social life to some point. Wilber and some other authors argue that the continuum of psychopathology isn't limited by the psychotic to borderline to neurotic sequence and there are also role/script pathologies, identity pathologies, existential pathologies, and various spiritual pathologies (each corresponding to the stage of development where it emerged). In fact, Wilber divides psychopathologies into three broad categories: prepersonal (psychotic to borderline to neurotic), personal (role/script to identity crisis to existential), and transpersonal (psychic to subtle to causal). The last category is still not well-studied in terms of its cohesive integration with the prepersonal and the personal which are more conventionally known levels of pathology; and Wilber's model of consciousness and its pathologies has been in its own development, so certain aspects of the transpersonal category must be revisited (to my knowledge, no official work has been published yet introducing the last installment of Wilber's view on spiritual pathologies; the world is still waiting for the revised edition of Transformations of Consciousness, a book that Wilber calls one of his most important works, to be published).

In order not to distract us from the simple point of this post (those of the readers who are not interested in a technical psychological talk can skip to the next paragraph), I will just briefly mention here that, since there has been a new understanding that we can speak of vertical and horizontal development, with the former being a structural (structure-stage) development towards higher altitudes of consciousness and the latter being a state (state-stage) development that is characterized by an increasing access to various spiritual states of consciousness that can be occurring to some extent at any altitude of consciousness, what Wilber previously saw as pathologies in the transpersonal structures of consciousness (which are very advanced stages of vertical development) now can be seen rather as pathologies in the ways individual consciousness (being at any level of development) embraces spiritual states of consciousness. To my opinion this is very important because it leads to the conclusion (in a form of hypothesis) that in the worst cases one person can combine both structural and state pathologies. For instance, if a neurotic person undertakes meditation practice (such as, e.g., vipassana or Transcendental Meditation), is stubborn enough, and doesn't receive care from a really qualified teacher, he or she can actually succeed in adding a spiritual state pathology to his already emerged structure pathology of neurosis; and those ought to be treated simultaneously. Not to mention that his neurotic self will be interpreting all state experience accordingly to the already pathological (i.e. incorrect, false, lying) view of the self and others. It doesn't necessarily take a conscious spiritual practice, there can be spontaneous awakenings towards deeper states dimensions.

Now, what's probably the most important is that if structural and states pathologies can emerge simultaneously in one psychological system then they will be naturally forming a kind of interpenetrated unity, something like a states-and-structures knot, and it can be very hard to untie this knot and to hermeneutically make sense of it. I know of one case when a probably borderline/narcissistic individual, let's call him S., had a series of spiritual experiences that led him into thinking that he, and he only, was Jesus Christ and others ought to listen to him and follow his commands for he, and he only, came to save the world. S. was already wanted by Interpol for crimes he committed in a different country (in Russia; the European country where he resided gave him asylum because he was a citizen of this country) but he thought that since he was Jesus Christ himself he will not be arrested. This led him to actually attempting to leave the asylum country and travel to Russia; and, as one would rightly guess, right on the border he was arrested and imprisoned (this is where my knowledge of the story ends). This JC experience (which may or may not be considered a some kind of false satori) wasn't initially a part of the pathological phenomenology of this individual; it was appropriated by his borderline "self" (actually, it can hardly be said that there is any self in a conventional sense in a person with the borderline psychopathologies) later on.

This case seems to present a person with a psychopathic personality disorder (Hare characterizes psychopaths as following: "Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse") who for several years was able to create a kind of predatory/criminal business in Moscow based on lies, manipulations, and so on; and for a few years he had been a millionaire until he lost everything and had to flee the country which led him into a crisis of personal insignificance and an idea that if he prayed to God enough his previous life would return to him. For his self-sense it has been absolutely okay to lie, manipulate, exploit, betray, show aggressive/destructive tendencies, etc. without any remorse for most of his life. The series of mystical experiences that emerged in his attempts to undertake a spiritual discipline to recover from the shock of losing everything was appropriated by his pathological self and led to emerging of what conventional psychiatrists would call a delusional idea ("I am [i.e., my ego] [virtually] Jesus Christ; and you must obey me"), which, if that person were under psychiatric care, could pose a serious problem for differential diagnostics (e.g., he could be treated as a schizophrenic psychotic rather than a borderline psychopath that he probably was which are different diagnoses requiring different treatment modalities—and without this delusional idea, thanks to his well-developed social mask, he could be misdiagnosed as borderline-to-neurotic or even neurotic).

I recall as one of the people who knew that individual personally and suffered from his actions for some years characterized S., "You could meet him and speak to him for some time and think that he is a nice person who is worth your friendship; and then he would suddenly hit you in the back with a knife by stealing from you or framing you or betraying you in any possible way—or even attempting to actually beat you or kill you." The most peculiar thing was that from the exterior point of view for long time this person seemed to have no problem adapting to his social environment; and he could have been that rich John Smith living in a private house that you pass by while driving into the city suburbs.

And yet encountering such a person in life and communicating with him/her is no game at all because in order to survive in the childhood such a person had to develop a ruthless psychopathic personality that subsequently became effective enough to betray and manipulate dozens of people and get a house in the most expensive place in Russia—which is incidentally one of the most expensive places in the world (the notorious Rublyovka district in Moscow, where all leaders and large businessmen dream to live; perhaps, this district can be called a psychopathic paradise, a place where the densest and the richest population of psychopaths in the world resides because most of the people living there earned their capital through 1990s in the times when there was no law, only brutal force and deception reigned). He could literally ruin your life; especially if you are a lay person not familiar with a complex compound individuality of a psychopath you will not be able to correctly recognize a psychopath as such. Survival drives such people to developing sometimes a very charismatic personae system (system of social masks) so as to hide the dark passenger beneath the social mask from the world. (Dark passenger is a term from the brilliant Dexter TV series which are based on novels about a charismatic serial killer written by Jeff Lindsay.)

I remember when I tried to convey these my insights about psychopaths and how deceitful they can be for the first time I encountered a blank stare or even an aggressive response; and I have pondered what would that mean. And then I realized that since there is that spectrum of consciousness and corresponding pathologies it is actually very easy for all people to develop a pathology of their own. So almost everybody has a skeleton hidden in his or her own closet. In many cases such a pathology isn't severe, it can be a common neurosis or a script pathology; but since most people are not familiar with classifications of psychopathology they irrationally fear that the little shadow monster that they have been trying to hide in the depths of their psyche is actually a big scary monster, the kind of monster that, if revealed to people, would destroy their lives.

At some point in life almost every individual has to go through a process of coming out (initially, coming out was the term for revealing one's own sexual orientation but I believe it to be a much broader process relating to any system of self-experience that one tries to hide from oneself and others; in the broadest sense it could mean coming to terms with one's identity and the way it is interrelated with the social world). We think of our "huge" monster as of something to hide from everybody; but in most cases it appears that if we actually have this "huge" monster to come out of the closet we encounter that it is a small, cute, and perhaps a little bit angry boy or girl who is not scary at all; and, in fact, no one actually cares about your little boy or girl because everybody is so much obsessed with their own closeted boys and girls (that they falsely perceive as monsters), some personal problems of their own that are common to everybody, that they simply don't see you and build excessive systems of defense just to avoid the pain of a small girl being left home alone or of a small boy being yelled at by a parent.

We experience this closeted and alienated chunk of experience of ours as something disturbing to us so we do our best to be blind about it and not to see it or hear it or feel it. So any time I attempt to speak about this psychopath issue openly there is a chance that another person would projectively identify with the psychopath in question (even though he or she probably has just a little and harmless neurotic subpersonality) and sense immediate danger of one's own coming out. This results in prematurely shutting down of any kind of such talk and triggering all kinds of avoidance mechanisms.

The difference between a psychopathic personality and a neurotic subpersonality within a more-or-less well-adapted self-system, however, is that while the latter senses its neurotic symptoms as egodystonic (something in my own existence that is dangerous or inappropriate for my sense of self) to the former it doesn't even occur that his or her psychopathy must be cured (the psychopathological—psychopathic—structure is so embedded into the personality system and self-sense that it is completely egosyntonic); and it is actually totally okay for a psychopathic manipulator to stay a psychopathic manipulator for the rest of the life; and for a psychopath there would be no compliance (willingness to be healed) in regard to the core features of his psychopathology. It's as if these individuals say, "My psychopathy is who I am, doctor, don't you even dare to touch it, and I want to stay the way I am; what I'm interested in is why I have this headache and also why I get divorced three times, please help me with that." (But, actually, since psychopaths are so identified with their psychopathology they can't even say that because they are that, the exploiting/manipulative maniacs, and it is what they do for a living; it's not observable for them.)

The mistake that we all do in communicating with psychopaths is that we are so blinded by our little closeted monsters that we do our best not to see somebody who is a real monster and a social predator; and it seems that psychopaths tend to be extremely dexterous at using this blind spot of ours that we so carefully sustain. They are experienced masters of exploiting our weaknesses. When meeting another person we usually think that he or she thinks and feels the same way we do or deny ourselves of doing instead of putting ourselves into his or her shoes and hermeneutically understanding that this other person that we meet is a microcosm of its own. Thus, we tend to simplify other person's behavior and personality while overemphasizing the complexity of our own. Why we do it? One of possible explanations that I can think of is that in order to actually recognize the complexity of other person (not necessarily a psychopath) we have to empathically understand him or her, dialogue with him or her, and cognitively reconstruct his or her experience in our mind-body system; in turn, this could lead to our meeting with some closeted aspects of our own self (the same principle works within Gestalt therapy; and initially there is always resistance to letting go of one's habitual responses, scripts, and patterns which manifests, for instance, as an anxious struggle against doing the Gestalt dialogue and fighting against the therapist or facilitator who offers you to explore such an opportunity).

This seems to be one of the complex reasons why it is so hard for us to address difficult problems openly and honestly and directly. It simply causes anxiety; and we tend to be too serious about our experience, so we resist feeling anxiety and the truth beneath it.

Last point I would like to emphasize about psychopathologies is that they seem to be cross-culturally widespread (even though in different kinds of societies they can take different forms). My examples are not limited just to Russia; the psychopathic S. that I described above actually grew up in a European country; furthermore, this post itself was inspired by a news article saying that Rodney Alcala, an American serial killer and rapist, was "sentenced to death as police fear he could be behind 130 murders." The news article goes on describing this person as extremely smart and charismatic and seemingly socially adapted:

The photographer, who is said to have a genius IQ of 160, often boasted of his winning an episode of the American version of Blind Date. However, the woman who chose him later canceled their date because she found him "too creepy."

I strongly encourage you to read about the crimes he committed and his behavior in the court. See below a footage of his participating in a famous American TV show after he was already a psychopathic serial killer. Look him in the face. It is not necessary for a person with a severe psychopathology to be a murderer, he or she may enjoy pathological lying, emotional or sexual abuse, spoiling or tempting an innocent, and so on.  There are different types of personality disorder. He or she can be more or less dangerous than this particular case (it can be a historical leader figure like Stalin or Hitler whose actions and narcissistic struggle resulted in deaths of millions and karmic consequences for the entire planet).

The striking thing is that they will show no remorse. This is not that rare and far from your life; this could be your neighbor. This is what the real monster in a human flesh looks like (and this is where non-judgmental relativism ends). I am convinced that we have no luxury to continue being blind about difficulties of life and avoiding to take the darkest sides of the Kosmos into the fullest consideration that is only possible. We have to come to terms with difficult aspects of reality and how we can be compassionate even towards these poor souls and yet always keeping in mind the whole picture, including all the evils they do to others.

My struggle towards integral life

As I was around turning 14 I realized I wanted to study psychology. Prior to that I was reading science fiction and fantasy literature extensively, hated school, and loved computer games. Around that age I encountered that there was this huge amount of serious literature called philosophy and psychology; and it dawned on me that I want to grow intellectually and socially rather than drinking vodka at disco parties as most teenagers do.

I wanted to choose my life, to make rational decisions about it, and not to delude myself—which, as I thought at that time, was what the most people did. I had an example of my family and many people around who made decisions according to their irrational biases and fears and eventually didn't win anything in the long term. I also started to write poetry and stories for myself because I found creativity to be the most important value at that time. I loved the flow state that tended to emerge during writing or drawing something I liked.

I naturally decided to embrace conscious atheism, for I saw and read how misleading and hypocritical herd mentality and conformists moral standards (associated, in some literature that I read, with fundamentalist religions) were. I looked for rational self-interest since I saw that most people around weren't actually following their own interests, they were playing mostly a passive role in their life; in fact, they seemed to be constantly acting stupid and making decisions that made their life only worse. And, of course, what I saw around myself at school was mostly ignorance, yelling teachers, drinking students—for whom to be called "smart" was considered an offense because it made them look different from the rest of the herd. I grew up in a low-income district where people live with few expectations from life and low self-esteem. It seems that most of my classmates from the first school where I studied have followed a path of studying at a poor college (or no college at all) and settling for a conventional altitude of life (one boy, who had been my best friend for a few years, now is something close to being a skinhead or at least ultranationalistic). 

In fact, for most students of the first school where I have studied during my early teens being accepted to a large university, such as St. Petersburg State University, seemed almost impossible. And yet I said to my parents that I wanted to study psychology at this university. I was lucky to embrace a rational framework that allowed me to envision my future life and set goals and achieve them. I was driven by my ambition and confidence in that I can achieve everything I want. Studying psychology at the university was my dream. I insisted on changing my school for a slightly better one. There I won an opportunity to study in USA for one academic year. A year that changed me because I saw a completely different life, the kind of life that was much more positive, much easier, made more sense than the constant struggle for survival that I witnessed in Russia.

By the time I was selected to go to America (I was 15) I already started to read different psychologies and philosophies. I attempted to read Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and so on. I found books on transpersonal psychology to be interesting, so I started to read a bit of Stan Grof. I started to attend introductory courses in psychology for the university. I decided that I have to pursue an academic career of clinical psychologist because this discipline seemed to provide the widest spectrum of knowledge, including both psychological and biological factors. It seemed like the most natural decision for me at that time, it came to me lightly, like a common sense.

Upon my return from the US I was devastated by seeing how dull life was in my home culture. I saw people doing meaningless actions in a meaningless state that doesn't care even a dime about its own citizens. I had to formally finish school, so I spent half a year re-adapting to the cruel reality of Russian hopelessness while pursuing my own studies and enjoying some private creative writing.

Second half of that academic year I devoted to preparing for the entrance exams to the university (in the Russian university system, if you pass the entrance exams with an excellent grade, you can get the full scholarship with a little stipend; and since my family wasn't able to pay for education, I had no choice but getting the scholarship). I was accepted by two universities, including, of course, St. Petersburg State University (the second university was just in case I wouldn't be accepted to the University so I wouldn't be drafted to serve in the Russian military which is notorious for breaking boys' lives and health); and I remember how surprised some of my relatives were who thought that I wouldn't be able to pass these exams.

At that time there was an experiment introducing new national examination system, something like American SAT, and in one subject I ended up scoring almost the highest grade, ending up being in the top 2 % nation-wide. My exams scores were much higher than it was necessary for getting a scholarship for studying the clinical psychology specialty at the University's Faculty of Psychology. I was 18 at that time; and it took me 4 years of life to achieve the dream that emerged in my life as I was becoming increasingly self-conscious. I was sure that I would find myself a good place in the academic system and would be able to have an excellent research career, most likely abroad, and I thought the university was connected enough with the world academic system for me to leave the country in two or three years and follow my individualistic enterprise and journey in the world.

Life turned out to flow in a different direction than my plans. The first thing that struck me as I started attending lectures and seminars at the university was indifference that permeated the system throughout. I was shocked to see a professor who obviously drinks a lot being rude to the first-year students (this professor was fired some years later). I was shocked to see a completely outdated curriculum with literature written around 1940s, clearly under the influence of Marxism-Leninism. Few of the teachers were actually interested in their interactions with students; and all of them received a salary that was (and still is) too small for them to bother about any quality or meaningfulness of education. There were some bright aspects, too, but the dark side was just too much to bear. I have quickly lost any interest in studying the university program. Instead of following the drive to fulfill my deepest dreams I felt that my ambitions get sucked into the Soviet swamp of "why would you care at all? Just do what we all do."

I was enraged, I was frustrated, I was depressed. Then, on my second year at the university, I had a series of profound mystical experiences that changed my life because from now on I knew what Stan Grof and other transpersonal psychologists were writing about in my own experience. I was buying all the books I could buy on the topic; and my friend told me about an integral psychology group in Finland that he was going to attend. I thought the very notion of the possibility of Integral Psychology (a kind of psychology, as I was explained, that integrates all the different schools of Eastern and Western psychology into one coherent system of knowledge and practice) was so splendid that I went to a bookstore and bought Russian translations of Ken Wilber's books, including Integral Psychology. I actually had some of his books on my book shelves before—but never read them—simply because I was purchasing everything that was related to transpersonal psychology; and the amount of books I bought quickly exceeded the amount of time I could have devoted to them. So I started reading Wilber and thought it was quite a challenge to grasp all these different concepts (different quadrants, stages and lines of development, states, spiritual traditions, psychological schools, philosophers and so on) that he mentions. Russian translations were hard to read, so I switched to articles and interviews published in English; and it was then when it dawned on me how clearly Wilber writes, how it all makes sense, and brings meaning that I lost somewhere during the first year of university back into my life.

On my third university year I already decided that Integral Theory and Practice was something that I want to connect my life with so I invested all the money that I had from the monthly stipend for subscribing to the Integral Naked website, a website where one can download lots of interviews and audio. I was listening and reading virtually everything I could have found on the Integral Approach; and it often happened that I was skipping boring university classes just to spend more time studying Wilber's works. By the end of my third academic year at the university I was so depressed by being increasingly aware of the gap between what I learned and knew and what I actually did and embodied in life that I provoked a conflict with a teacher (together with friends we wrote a complaint regarding extremely low quality of education at a specific course) and was seriously thinking about dropping out.

At the critical point, when I decided that I am going to follow an integral dream at any cost, I received an invitation to meet owners of one Russian company who expressed their interest in the integral approach. I don't want to announce publicly the name of the organization or its leaders because there are some serious private issues related to that whole situation that require a lot of sensitivity. Even though I had a creepy feeling during the first moment I saw one of the owners (the kind of a look in the eyes of the person that tells you how it all is going to end the very moment you see it; only some time later I read a book about rapid cognition that explained much of this creepiness), they stated their interest in the Integral vision and invited me to equally collaborate with them helping to transform the organization towards the Integral (there were some underlying reasons for their invitation because I had some previous contacts with them for a few months and previously declined their proposals for collaboration due to my university  schedule and a general disbelief in Russian businesses), and I found no rational reason not to explore whatever could emerge from this occasion. They were charismatic and interesting; and I was curious. I started to participate in that company's projects and offering my advice regarding the Integral framework.

After a few months of what evolved into a very close relationship, during which I got to know them better, I couldn't help but notice that one of the owners had a peculiar capacity to forget about any promise or agreement he made on the next day after making that promise or agreement. In fact, I got in such a deep ("friendly," as I thought) relationship with him that he started to tell me about some of the tricks instrumental in manipulating people into doing what he wants and eventually proclaimed that he wasn't actually interested in neither spirituality nor the Integral vision—which was in such a complete opposition to his public mask that I was shocked. (What I didn't understand until much later was that I was subject to his manipulations, too. This person has a gift to blind people and fool them into doing for free what they initially didn't want to do at all; and the long list of those who were fooled—in fact, were asking to be fooled due to any personal reasons—included me as well.) At first I thought it was a little subpersonality of his speaking the things that negated basic presuppositions for our collaboration but then I realized that it was actually the pathological core of his manipulative and exploiting self that guided his actions. (How can his interest in the Integral be explained? It's very simple:  the developmental model, such as Spiral Dynamics, that is incorporated into the Integral vision, if used inappropriately and improperly, especially by a non-specialist, allows one to "prove"—to rationalize and feed the illusion—that he or she is intrinsically better than the rest of the world and not a bad boy/girl—hence, the food for the superiority/inferiority complex. It can be very "nicely" used to label and pigeonhole people so as to prove one's own worthiness.) In any case, any projects we tried to do were stopped by constant quarrels among the owners; and they had no interest in actually doing what they were speaking about. Their words parted with their deeds significantly. No progress, running in circles, and profound frustration was the atmosphere.

But by the time I understood the total picture of this pathological environment our relationship went into a decline (later on I learned that the same situation with the same kind of broken relationships has been happening to that person for years—i.e. he keeps finding new partners/friends and then breaking agreements with them and making scape goats out of them). I still had a hope that the catastrophic situation can be changed and the pathology healed by integral care; but I was forced to leave the organization, mainly due to some tricky manipulations by that person; and I promised myself from now on to be more cautious, insightful, and wise at choosing partners in business and life. It was an important lesson on the necessity of coming to terms with the cruel reality and considering all the factors involved without ignoring anything, even the most sublime things. It was also a lesson that if one proclaims oneself spiritual/integral/etc. it is not necessarily true. Especially in Russia where everything that can go bad goes even worse. I realized how important it is for me to live my life as honestly as I can.

My collaboration with the company died prematurely nine months ago. Meanwhile my fourth year at the university successfully ended and the fifth year, the senior year, started. I am still considered a savvy and talented student with somewhat peculiar interests in the science of consciousness. It is three months before my graduation; and I am conducting my final empirical research assessing self-esteem in the structure of self-consciousness of patients with bipolar disorder and recurrent depressions. Next week, I will turn 23; and I don't want to spend my next five years fulfilling only half of my soul's deepest potential and wasting most of my life continuing to postpone the deepest visions I desperately want to embody. I enjoy talking with patients, I meditate daily, I have had profound spiritual and therapeutic insights, and my consciousness transforms rapidly; but my current Russian academic path is dissatisfying, for I always have to explain myself. How can I better manifest my inner abundance in the world? What can be the next chapter in my integral life? How can I live honestly and integrally and at the same time abundantly?

I don't know what my life is going to be in the following years. Sometimes I fear that I will never be able to realize my potential and follow my daemon, my soul purpose. Many things that I'm interested in I can't share with people around. Frequently, I feel like being lost, for what at the moment I want to do and what I can do to earn a living differ dramatically. It's a big challenge. But I'm happy to be increasingly embraced by the spaciousness of the World Soul. The treasures I have found on the path of the inner journey home are beyond any price. Without this Silence and Bliss anything else is meaningless.

The writer's block?

In the mandala of our consciousness we are all in a sense artists. This is something that Alex Grey has recognized in his famous "The Vast Expanse" psalm:

Create perfection wherever you go with your awareness. That is why this teaching is admired by artists—they sense the correctness of the response to life as creative. Life is infinite creative play. Enjoyment and participation in this creative play is the artists profound joy. We co-author every moment with universal creativity. . . .

Artistic response (rather than conditioned reaction) to life is at least one-third of what we are as human beings. Integral philosopher Ken Wilber points out that virtually every greatest thinker in the history of humankind (from Plato to Kant to Habermas) acknowledged the Big Three, the triumvirate of perspectives—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the philosophy of Plato, for instance—to be the essential dimensions of our being-in-the-world.

Yes, it is important to subject ourselves to the oughts and shoulds of what must be done by us so as to fulfill our destinies (moral). Yes, it is important to subject ourselves to the truths and facts of coming to terms with the cruel reality—and not escaping from it into the vertigo of fantasies and illusions and false hopes (knowledge). But, as Kant argues in his concluding Critique of Judgment, without a cornerstone dimension of aesthetic response to life these other dimensions remain detached from each other. To embody our life as a play of creativity (as a form of art), as I see it, is a foundational component of a healthy and integrated existence.

Playfully writing one's own narrative of life and transcending a writer's block, the blockage that leads to copy&pasting of an old habitual storyline that we learned at some point and that makes us non-existent to ourselves, always looking for new ways of self-expression in the seemingly limited context of our life's framework, constantly searching for new tools for transcending that frame and finding new perspectives to it seems to be a way to balance the Big Three in one's own life. If I deny myself of this courageous creative response to life, I deny myself of life itself.

It is important to embody the Spirit's creativity in a canvas of the individual levels of our being, including the Soul, the ego, the adaptive personae, and the body. It is important to trust one's own artistic feeling that arises in the depths of the Heart. It is important to learn in action how to be a better artist of life than the moment before, to keep searching for new curves and touches in life, to keep looking for novel ways of self-expressing perfection while always already being a manifestation of the ultimate Stillness.

Otherwise life becomes a dull and in/efficient affair of a robot-like human mechanism that keeps self-replicating old constellations of patterns and occasionally passes the Turing test strictly by an accident.

And, as Elizabeth Gilbert wonderfully points out, when undertaking any form of art it is crucial to recognize that one's own creativity is not a private property or a selfish achievement, it manifests rather like a gift of Spirit. Even if your art is your life story (and it always is) the same writer's block rule still works; and you can get stuck, as we all do. Your life as a work of art doesn't belong strictly to your individual being, most certainly not to your personae or ego or even Soul, even though the latter comes closer to the essential Source. You can't force it, you have to let it grow.

P.S. And if you are forgetting both the dignity of being an artist and the humility of being a work of art by falling, e.g., into the dominance of either shoulds or facts I ought to wake you up by asking a simple question, the question that highlights the importance of your qualia or subjective joy of being:

"Why so serious?"

(A still from a highly recommended movie on the topic, The Dark Knight.)

Architectonics of the Self

If the sky were to suddenly open up... there would be no law... there would be no rule. There would only be you and your memories... the choices you've made and the people you've touched. The life that has been carved out from your subconscious is the only evidence by which you will be judged... by which you must judge yourself. Because when this world ends, there will only be you and him... and no one else.
— Donnie Darko (2001)

Who am I? There are always many ways to be answering this question. Every moment in life I am this or that, such and such, that's me, that's not me, this is mine, and this is not. Everywhere I go the sense of self follows my footsteps closely and generates the I-ness and the me-ness and the mine-ness of my being-in-the-world. The sense of identity can be very concrete for some people and it can be quite fleeting for others, but even when that which I am identified with changes rapidly there is always an intimate self-sense present to the sacrament of life, however big or small, strong or fluid, convenient or unconvincing, conscious or unconscious, personal or depersonalized and so on. It can be very dynamic, flaky even, and yet it undeniably exists.

The overall pattern of the self's manifestation as it is seen by a witness looking from the outside can be called personality (in a somewhat narrow meaning of this term); the overall pattern of the self's manifestation as it is seen by a witness objectively looking inside can be called self-system. The total kaleidoscope of fluctuating identities and self-perspectives I would call architectonics of the self, and it is a penetrating look into the mystery of the architectonics of the self that could bring forth a first glimpse for a satisfying answer to the question of self-identity. This is even more evident if one encounters the complexity dilemma of simple, however experientially grounded, answer "there is no I" being as much unsatisfactory as defining the self-sense in a reductionistic static way as something concrete—indeed, as some thing at all.

When one attempts to speak of the architectonics of the self, it is absolutely crucial, in my opinion, to mention the name of Vasily Vasilyevich Nalimov (1910-1997), a truly unsung hero of our time. In his numerous works, published in Russian, English, and German, Nalimov was tackling different issues all related to the basic question of science, existence, personality, and consciousness. A member of a Moscow mystical anarchist circle back in 1920s, ex-prisoner of Stalin's concentration camps, the last and lonely knight of the Eastern wing of Templars; a renowned mainstream mathematician and a physicists who worked in the laboratory of A. Kolmogorov; an influential transpersonal philosopher, a gnostic, and a truth-seeker, he shined throughout his life with profound intelligence, adamant will, and a commitment to knowledge, honesty, and freedom. In 1970s and 1980s, many years before Soviet people were able to learn about the West and its recent cultural trends, he was writing about such transpersonal authors as C. Castaneda, S. Grof, Ch. Tart, and K. Wilber; in a thoroughly fundamentalistic-atheistic society he was openly asking the questions of meaning, life, God,  the universe, and the Ultimate Reality—something that had long been forbidden in the USSR and, probably, is still unprecedented in the Post-Soviet countries. (For more information on Nalimov see, e.g., Wikipedia article, Eugene Garfield's web page, and Thompson, 1993.)

In his book The Spontaneity of Consciousness (Спонтанность сознания [Spontannost' soznaniya], 1st Russian ed., 1989/2nd Russian ed., 2007), Nalimov attempted to draw what he called  architectonics of personality or self. Now, in the Russian language the word personality (личность [lichnost']) has many meanings; and it can be translated to English basically both as a personality and as Self (in its broadest sense). Most certainly, Nalimov's probabilistic vision of language would require taking into account the total variability of the word's semantics.

Nalimov writes the following about the intention of the book in question:

In this work we want to focus on the problem of architectonics of the Self with the hope that this way the nature of the Self will appear before us as an ultimately accessible manifestation of reality—the manifestation in which reality discloses itself through ourselves. First of all, we will consider the Self to be a carrier of meanings, thus exploring its linguistic (semantic) nature.

We fully recognize that any attempt to build such a model of the Self includes not only and mainly knowing but rather not-knowing. The deeper and clearer we are drawing an image of the Self, the clearer the patterns of that which we do not know appear. Not-knowing is always richer than our knowing. Not-knowing—the not-knowing contours of which we can delineate—provokes us, makes us seek, makes us look at the World and our own being with wonder. In this wonder life becomes full of meaning. That which modern psychiatrists tend to call existential emptiness disappears.

Before we continue I should note that it is always very hard to describe views of a thinker of such high altitude and magnitude as V. Nalimov in a short essay. He was a strong proponent of postformal thinking (which he called a probabilistic vision); he was a founding father of the field of scientometrics; he developed a probabilistic view of language that includes both discrete and continual aspects; he tried to create a postformal panoramic view of the universe and consciousness so as to find meaning in the fact that there is something rather than nothing. In his writings he was dialoguing through books with Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Buddha, Christ, St. Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Popper (with Sir Karl Popper he actually exchanged correspondence), early Ken Wilber, and so on. In an oppressive state of the Soviet Union he was a liberated thinker, a free soul whose transtemporal and transspatial flight couldn't be held by physical or social restrictions and boundaries.

In my opinion, the best of his approach that we can take may not be the concrete ideas themselves but the span and the depths of the questions and problems he inquires into. In The Spontaneity of Consciousness he quotes Maeterlinck: "The greatness of a human being is measured according to the greatness of mysteries that perplex him or that make him surrender." (I didn't find the quotation as it is translated in English, so I translated it from Russian; the phrase in original Maeterlinck's language and the way it is translated to English can differ significantly.)

When contemplating such complex subject as what the actual meaning and structure of the Self is, I believe, it is absolutely crucial to adopt the most panoramic and integral vision one can, otherwise the attempts of knowing would be childish and reductionistic. In the spirit of this approach facing reality means facing its ultimate mystery and pure silent not-knowing which is the ultimate knowledge itself. Immanuel Kant said: "Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." Gazing at the stars and contemplating the depth within can bring nothing else but the state of profound awe and not-knowing, not-knowing that is self-liberating. I resonate a lot with this stance of Nalimov and most mystics, the perspective that sees and feels the universe as a constant unfolding of the Mystery.

The first Mystery that we encounter is the mystery of our own existence. Most people in the world go on in their lives ritualistically thinking and perpetuating the thought that what they think is what they are. In fact, as long as they continue ritualistically doing whatever they are doing without asking this profound question of who am I and what does it all mean in some ways they don't even exist. By saying that they don't even exist of course I don't say that they are zombies without consciousness, what I am saying is that they are not fully aware of their existence. Most of our adult lives we are running away from the very fact that we are here, from the fact that there is the starry sky above us and the moral law within us, we are numbing ourselves to our being. We constantly dissolve ourselves in our personalized me on, which is Greek for non-being, by habitually pursuing the games we learned to play and telling each others limited stories we learned to narrate.

The most obvious example of this running from one's own authenticity can be encountered in a therapist office (and actually in any occasion where there is an opportunity for a field of intersubjective resonance to arise). Sigmund Freud was one of the first to show that we are not what we rationally think of ourselves or even how we feel about ourselves, that there is much more in our personalities, in our selves hidden beneath the iceberg of that which we are used to be aware of. Further advancements in the science of therapy and healing demonstrated that most of our lives we live according to a matrix of experience that has been forming during the early and not-so-early years of our lives. In fact, our life is grounded in the illusory feeling of knowing, in a feeling that we know what our life is about with all its upsides and downsides. We think that this—whatever this that happens to be entering our conscious awareness—is what life is about. We constantly run in circles in the self-built corridors of our "known life" and recreate on multiple levels the limited story that we learned about ourselves and the world; and there is no space for not-knowing in this story. The basic mystery of existence is something that shatters our house made of cards and brings terror to our life because in our selves we are used to identify with a limited range of possibilities and experiential realities.

And then suddenly it strikes us that we are getting divorced three times in a row, that we keep losing friends and alienating people, that our beloved children don't want to talk to us, that we have cancer, that we are going to die today—and then, at the moments like this, we look into the face in front of us with awe and not-knowing-ness: who is this person in front of me, whom I have always thought I have known? At whom does this face look? Who am I, really?

Something else can happen that will disclose this basic gap between our conscious self and the overall self, between the relationships that we picture in our minds and actual totality of processes happening around us, involving us as participants and transforming us constantly, every minute, every second, every moment of Kosmic existence. A policeman takes a gun and kills ten innocent people in a supermarket; a schoolboy does the same at school. Anomaly arises in our minds; something tells us that we are not seeing a crucial aspect of reality and it is killing us or makes us anxious and we desperately want to wake up. As we are gradually waking up we look in astonishment at the unconscious processes, scripts, stories, and scenarios we were so used to follow, the patterns that constantly recreate and magnify suffering in us and others. The emerging sense of amazement and wonder brings us closer to the determination to become truly liberated, truly conscious, truly wise so as to participate fully in the festival of life and co-creation.

Every human being has a profound depth hidden in his or her consciousness and self. An old homeless person taking care of her pushchair with bandboxes and empty bottles that for months has been her last resort. An imprisoned oligarch who declined to leave the country because of his pride and dignity. A president who looks sicker and sicker with every year he is in power. A young university teacher who keeps wondering about her life while living in a dry academic environment. A psychiatrist who suffers more than some of his patients. A schoolboy who passionately fell in love with the Goddess for the first time. A detective who ruins his career because he can't stand corruption anymore...

The architectonics of the Self that I am talking about includes not only what we think of ourselves in our minds. We ourselves are a mystery. We are what we eat, we are what we talk, we are what we think, we are what we see, we are how we move, we are what we feel, we are the scripts we play, we are the light we shine, we are the darkness we emit, we are everything that happens in this particular manifestation of our individual being-in-the-world. Our self includes everything, from the birth to the death; it goes through time and space; it weaves together aspects of  Kosmic being and experience like wind gathers together clouds in the sky. We are the Witness and the Witnessed in its many ways of manifestation and interconnectedness.