As I’ve begun my book tour for Awakening the New Masculine: The Path of the Integral Warrior, one
of the benefits I’m seeing for myself is to be once again immersed in integral
community. I knew I was missing the “we” space of SeattleIntegral, the salon I
helped found and moderated for five years, I just didn’t realize how much.
Over the last few weeks I’ve done a book talk with the
combined Atlanta and Roswell, Georgia
Integral Salons, I’ve just returned from doing talks with DC Integral Emergence
and Integral New York City Meetups, and I’m getting ready to head out to the
west coast with a series of book talks for book stores, salons, meetups, and
workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area
and Seattle.
It’s very different talking with integral groups as opposed
to book stores and Mankind Project I-Groups. When I’m talking with a group that hasn’t been exposed to Integral Theory
or Spiral Dynamics, I have to give a different talk, and make vague references
to “integral and developmental systems theory” as part of a larger picture of what
I do in the Integral Warrior Men’s Process. There’s a learning curve around
language that begins the first weekend of the workshop that sets the context
around both these systems sometimes, if not presented in a way that minimizes
the appearance of hierarchy that can turn men off.
Part of this is because my target audience of men are, in
Spiral Dynamics terms, “green” emergent to “yellow,” and green level of consciousness
generally rejects hierarchy, not yet understanding the difference between
natural and dominator hierarchies.
But when I’m talking with an audience who already gets “integral”
and Spiral Dynamics, there’s something that happens with everyone firing on all
cylinders, mutual capacities, and a common language that just makes everything connected
and we all get to fall in love. With men and the integral Warrior Process, one
of the goals is to create that same kind of connection as quickly as possible
so that a new awareness and consciousness can emerge within the group, and the
way to get there as quickly as possible is to practice with individual and
group meditations.
Integral groups ask really good questions and one of the
questions I was recently asked at the DC
Integral Emergence meetup was, "How is your work different from the
men’s movement of the 80s?"
The first and obvious answer is that the mythopoetic men’s
movement does not include integral and developmental systems theory. Nor does
it include the Sacred Activist as
described by Andrew Harvey in his book, The
Hope.
The "men's movement" of the 80's was, and
continues to this day, to be what I'm calling the first wave" of men’s
work, which is, as Wilber says, “necessary, but not sufficient.” It relies
heavily on the mythopoetic, using mythology and analytical psychology, and consists
mostly of psychological self-help groups which tend to stay away from explicit
stances around psychospiritual and sociopolitical issues, or Sacred Activism, which the Integral Warrior
dives right in to, as would be necessitated by taking an integral approach. This requires being able to take and hold
multiple, bigger, and sometimes paradoxical perspectives.
Another way to describe this is that the Integral Warrior
requires the Monk to come out of his cave and to be involved in the world. Simply retreating inward is not sufficient with
the global problems we face today. The Integral Warrior workshop and the book
allows men to transcend (and include) mythology into the transpersonal, and to
then allow that to inform their Sacred Purpose.
Transpersonal development includes both rational and
transrational faculties, as well as a sense of oneself as an individual organism,
while simultaneously expanding to embrace all phenomena, including a larger “we.”
It is, quite simply, the move from 2nd stage masculine to
3rd stage masculine: the shift from the mythopoetic to Integral, and Integral
is the bridge to the next level of consciousness.
See where Gary is appearing on his national book tour link
