Integral Warriors: Embodying the New Masculine

Why would I start an Integral Men's Group when there are plenty of men's groups already around (Sex, Passion, and Enlightenment - The Mankind Project)? Because they don't take specifically take a 4-quadrant/AQAL approach. We'll approach this group apllying Ken Wilber and David Deida's model. Starting in September, I hope to bring 6-10 men together to help each other discover what it means to embody the New Masculine from a second tier perspective. I also believe that this is some of the most important work that can be done today as we watch Patriarchy die kicking and screaming (see my previous three blogs).

What is a Men's group?

A men’s group is a group of men who meet regularly and are committed to the goals of learning to serve each other to deeper spiritual growth, keeping each other true to their deepest life’s purpose, and practicing giving their unique gifts to each other and the world. The teachings for this group will be based on the David Deida book, The Way of the Superior Man.

What will happen at Meetings?

Each meeting will follow a structured agenda of exercises with time included for giving each other feedback and encouragement in their practices of deep living based on the book The Way of the Superior Man and other teachings by David Deida. This group will determine our own logistics of meeting frequency and time.

Why should I join a Men's group?

Many men know how hard it is to follow through with deep, spiritual teachings in their everyday lives without any kind of support. Many have experienced the so called "rubber band effect" after attending a profound workshop or intensive. "Rubber-banding" is when you get stretched open beyond your normal boundaries in a challenging, or ecstatic situation, but then "snap back" to your more habitual patterns of behavior when you return to your everyday life. A men’s group provides a conscious community to support men’s continued growth of deep understanding and practice.

What will it cost, and what kind of commitment will be required?

Each member of the Men's group will be asked for a small donation at the meetings to help cover the cost and time of putting the meetings together. The time commitment will depend on how often the group will want to meet, but I recommend twice a month, and a commitment to attend twelve meetings except in the case of an emergency for Part I, and the first 6 chapters and 12 lessons will take place over those 12 meetings. Part II will complete coverage of the "A Man's Way" of the Superior Man.

Five reasons for a man to join a Men's Group:
Taken from "Way of the Superior Man", by David Deida

1) BEING IN THE COMPANY OF OTHER MEN
"A man discovers and fine tunes his purpose in solitude, in challenging situations, and in the company of other men who won’t settle for his bullshit. A mans capacity to receive another mans direct criticism is a measure of his capacity to receive masculine energy." Chap. 10

2) HAVING MEN HOLD YOU ACCOUNTABLE FOR LIVING YOUR DEEPEST PURPOSE
"Your mission is your priority, unless you know your mission and have aligned your life to it, your core will feel empty. Your presence in the world will be weakened, as will your presence with your intimate partner." Chap 30

3) MEN WHO ARE DEDICATED WITH YOU
"Be in the company of other men who are dedicated their lives to integrity, truth, and the heart. Men who are dedicated to live with an open heart and give their deepest gifts of love, mission and presence. The way a man penetrates the world should be the same way he penetrates his woman: not merely for personal gain or pleasure, but to magnify love, openness, and depth." Chap 9

4) SUPPORT YOUR EDGE WITH OTHER MEN
"Choose men friends who themselves are living at their edge, facing their fears and living just beyond them. Men of this kind can love you without protecting you from necessary confrontation with reality that your life involves." Chap 10

5) CUT THROUGH YOUR BS
"At least once a week, get together with your men friends to serve one another. Cut through the bullshit and talk with each other straight. Welcome such criticisms from your friends. Suggest challenges for each other to take on, in order to bring each other through the fears which limit your surrender in gifting." Chap 50

A Challenge to Wake Up

So why am I writing about 9/11 conspiracy theories, not-so-secret plans for world domination by the military industrial complex, etc., etc.? All you have to do is look at history to thoroughly support "so what's new?" Things simply have not changed that much, and still the majority of us aren't conscious enough to know or care. We have our drugs of choice, happily supplied by those who would dominate us.

I left "religion" at twelve. I could not reconcile myth and science, and no one in my circle was talking about myth as allegory, only as fundamentalist truths with no room for questions, which I could not accept. I wandered for years as an atheist at first (my only option), and later as as agnostic. It wasn't until a few years ago that I became aware of something bigger than I. Call it "Spirit," the Universe, collective consciousness, or even God, as long as it isn't dualistic.

My own sense is that Spirit, The Universe (my preferred words of choice), is a collective consciousness that we're all connected to. Not just people, but a collective consciousness that encompasses the entire universe, which includes us. I believe (a belief that cannot be proven) that the entire Kosmos is conscious and that we're able to somehow tap into that with practice, attention, intention, and our own consciousness. If we're a part of the all, then that makes perfect sense.

We just have to learn to listen.

Believing that, I've been experimenting with Dialoging with Spirit: Conversations with God, if you will, different from petitionary prayer, and little irreverent. I think Spirit has a sense of humor. After all, could Spirit possibly embed a quality into creation that it didn't already posess? It's talking to Spirit, me, and everyone else at the same time. After all....how are we different?
I've had two recent experiences where I believe Spirit has directly spoken to me, something I would have laughed at years ago. One was when Anyaa and I were fretting about whether we'd get something we really wanted and it looked like it was going south on us. Through meditation and dialog, I asked the Universe (and me, and the collective unconscious) to give me a clue. That night I startled awake from a dream where I was told, "Gary, I only do the big things, not the little ones."

I immediately called and woke up Anyaa, 2700 miles away in North Carolina, to tell her of my dream. The message was clear to us both that if our desire did not pan out it was because there was a bigger picture yet to be revealed and that we should just relax into what was to be, and we did - and the worry was gone.

My second experience happened last Saturday, during a Shamanic Breathwork journey (see my earlier posts on this amazing process!), in the form of a vision. In that vision, my disembodied self flew into the Kosmos, hooked up with Spirit as light, and we danced across galaxies, solar systems, Magellan clouds, and universes....The Universe showed me an infinite number of worlds in an infinite universe, where conscious beings were struggling to survive. Some with consciousness just struggling out of the primordial mud, some far advanced from us, some at he same tipping point which determines our survival as a planet.

The Universe/Spirit explained to me that every planet that holds consciousness must go through exactly what we're going through, now. This time in every planet's development decides whether we are worthy of taking the next evolutionary step into a shared Universal Kosmic Consciousness, or whether we commit planetcide. It was further explained that many intelligences do not survive this time, and the planet is left to begin anew, because life, consciousness itself, always pushes on, always emerges, with, or without, us.

The choice is ours, and that's why I'm writing about this stuff. In good conscience (and good consciousness) I can stay silent no longer, I must speak out.

And I believe that if you're conscious, and not asleep, or drugged, that you must also speak out. We must create the disorienting dilemmas that cause people to question and wake up.

Hurry....there's not much time left.

image: www.es.com/.../digital_theater/shows/universe/

Zeitgeist: more.....

I watched the History Channel's debunking of the 911 conspiracy last night, mostly based on Popular Mechanic magazine's 14-page cover article which attacks skepticism about the government and media explanation of the 9/11/01 attack.

The primary method of the piece is to build and attack a straw man of myths it claims are "at the root of virtually every 9/11 alternative scenario" embraced by the "growing army of conspiracy theorists." PM selects a combination of 16 valid, erroneous, and inconsequential claims found on websites, implying that they are all endorsed by the "army" of skeptics.

Before anyone jumps down my throat for being a conspiracy "nut," they should read 911review.com's Mainstream Press Attacks page contains an expose' of connections between the Hearst Corporation -- owner of Popular Mechanics -- and the CIA. You should also check out the 911Research critique of the Popular Mechanics article, Popular Mechanics Attacks its '9/11 Lies' Straw Man, focuses on how the article avoids addressing the charges of 9/11 Truth activists, and the OilEmpire.us Bogus 9/11 websites page which has long debunked about half the 16 claims that PM dishonestly identifies with 9/11 Truth.

Check it out. Decide for your self.

What does this have to do with integral? Integral consciousness demands that we look at the truth as the authority rather than the authority as the truth.

"Zeitgeist" and Why We Need to Step It Up!

You think you're free? You might want to think again.

I've been aware for a couple of decades about some of the things talked about in this movie that threaten our freedom, and, yes, even our ability to publicly remain open conscious beings, but never have I seen it all brought together, including new information I didn't know, in such a powerful way. YouTube has apparently pulled it down once, so who knows how long it will remain up.

If only half of what is said here is true, it means that we "light warriors" need to really up our ante and our connections with each other, helping to spread the concept of "one" planet, one consciousness.

You can watch all five parts of this must-see movie for free on YouTube here

Don't take the film as the truth, but find out for yourselves, for truth is not told, it is realized.

More on the film.

Pass it around.

A Total Failure

By any accounting, the Bush Presidency is a total failure. Hoping to become the modern-day equivalency of the McKinley administration that ushered in years of Republican governance, it has, instead, turned into the Hoover administration, which was brought down by the 1929 stock market crash...only insert the Iraq war. Both were unnecessarily brought on by stupidity and greed.

Karl Rove's exit is the latest benchmark of the abject failure of this administration. Does anyone believe Rove, the last of the Texas home-grown contingency, would be leaving if their goal of creating a one-party super-majority dynasty had been successful?

Other failures:

• The War in Iraq: need I say more?
• The "war on terror" or whatever they're calling it this week: Feel safer?
• The privatization of Social Security
• The Valerie Plame scandal
• Numerous Republican convictions
• Loss of standing in the world community
• Record budget deficits
• Increasing political partisanship and divisiveness in Washington.
• Further erosion of the middle class, begun by Reagan, fostered by Clinton, and continuing today

The first clue to the public's awareness of abject failure was the loss of the House and the Senate to the Democrats in '06. It just gets worse, now with Congress beginning to issue subpoenas...that is, if they have the balls, or aren't complicit themselves.

The entire 6-1/2 years of this administration's reign has been a textbook ad about why politicians need to take a more integral and balanced approach to problem solving and politics: The politics of divisiveness, "us vs. them," and "either you're with us or you're against us" just does not work. Unfortunately, there aren't any stars on the left (or the right) who seem to get that concept, either. Maybe Obama and Edwards, but I have serious doubts about either of them being able to go all the way.

So, goodbye Karl Rove. Don't let the doorknob hit ya where the dog should have bit ya. Good riddance.

Oh, the decades it will take to repair the damage done by these fools.......and the damage they are still capable of....

Yes, the picture is a fake....just wishful thinking and what he deserves.

America's Falling apart...and For Sale

There can be no doubt that America is falling apart.

Witness what happened in the last few days in Minneapolis with collapse of a major bridge and a still rising death toll. It should be no surprise. The American Society of Civil Engineers warned in a report two years ago that between 2000 and 2003, more than 27 per cent of the nation's almost 600,000 bridges were rated as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. But that's not the only indication of an aging infrastructure. Consider the following:

• An underground steam pipe explosion in NYC on July 18th. "There is no reason to believe whatsoever that this is anything other than a failure of our infrastructure," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a news conference at the scene of the blast.
• The New York blackout of 2003. a massive collapse of electrical service over 240,o00 square kilometers of the US and Canada.
• Two years ago we saw the virtual destruction of a major American city, New Orleans, in Hurricane Katrina, and still remains as a monument to our inability to respond.
• The state of our roads, once the pride of world in post-war America, now crumbling, our transportation systems, including airlines and airports, our nation teetering under a crush of commuter traffic.
• Drinking water, the food supply, the air we breathe....

The irony here is that Minnesota Twins have postponed its groundbreaking for a new stadium -- being built with public dollars. According to Minnesota Public Radio, "...Twins owner Carl Pohlad will pay $130 million towards the stadium. But the plan also requires a Hennepin County sales tax of .15 percent. The tax finances the remaining three quarters of the ballpark's $522 million cost."

Maybe it's that infrastructure just isn't sexy. Who cares about bridges and roads and sewers. Ballparks are fun, power lines are dull.

But the fact is that these dull things are the things that we all rely on. And, if we keep up with this idiotic idea that tax cuts are always good, we're going to watch it all crumble around us. You've got to pay for this stuff and, at both the states and federal levels, we're not. You can't run a nation the size of the US on the cheap. Like everything else in the world, you get what you pay for. And if you pay jack, you get jack.

And you can't blame the government....we are the government, even when we forfeit our responsibility. You get what you pay for...in every way.

Maybe we should just have a garage sale......

Gratitude

On a cue taken from my friend Bill at Integral Options Cafe, I also like to express gratitude on a daily basis. When together, Anyaa and I almost always end the day falling asleep to the numerous things we're grateful about in our lives, especially each other and the many blessings of our relationship. I consider expresing gratitude part of my integral practices.

As a result of my move this weekend into a new house,

I'm also grateful for these views from my living room.