The Next Wave of Men’s Work: From Mythopoetic to The Transpersonal

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.

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See where Gary is appearing on his national book tour link

The Lifting of the Veil

I have to admit I'm not a "feel good" kind of integralist. If you come to my part of the conversation for soft consoling words of comfort or pats on the back, you might as well stop reading now. I'm the kind of integral thinker that asks you to step into the abyss. Shaking things up is clearly part of my masculine purpose and the heavy warrior archetypes I carry.

It's interesting that--- more often than not---whenever I talk about what seems to happening in the realm of collapse, the conversation inevitably turns to the apocalyptic. When I talk collapse, people seem to hear "the end of the world." Andrew Harvey says it's rooted to a deep shadow fear of death that comes up for people. However, collapse is not necessarily the end of the world, although depending on which of several possibilities in this perfect storm of economics, ecology, and energy, it is one possibility. But rather than talk about what we can do about it, the conversations seem to usually go to the "end of the world" scenario. It's much easier for people to deny it when they frame it in that context.

My background with the Apocalypse was Southern Baptist, so I'm no stranger to the co-opted term used by mythic Christianity to scare the bejesus into us and to control us. I say co-opted because the original meaning is from the Greek (ironic, ain't it? See the next paragraph) meaning "lifting of the veil" or "revelation:" a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and perception, i.e., the veil is to be be lifted. This term has come to mean, in common usage, the end of the world, but originally meant the end of an age. The lifting of the veil is happening all around us. As I said before, everything is transparent: The patriarchal powers that want to dominate us, the greed of Wall Street and consumerism, the politics of the right and the left who are becoming indistinguishable because we've opened our eyes, the idea that what's important can be measured by GNP instead of happiness ratios, the loss of our indigenous souls who once loved the planet....the veil is lifting.

I agree there's no way to tell if an impending collapse will happen suddenly or over a long period of time, and, whether it's slow or fast, it appears to largely depend on who you're talking to. Ask the people of Greece whether their "collapse" was sudden and unexpected or a slow decline that everyone could see coming. Another irony is that even the people who caused it and could see it coming were powerless to stop it in their greed and quest for power and control. Hence, we once again see the lifting of the veil. While everyone can see the problems that caused the economy to crash in late 2008, nothing has been changed except to further exacerbate the problem by not fixing the obvious problems, the continuing loss of jobs, record foreclosures, and the continuation of the greatest transfer of wealth ever to the very people who caused it, and who are now losing control. The veil is lifting. #Occupy Wall Street, and the satellite Occupy groups around the world--including the local Occupy group I work with--see this for what it is, and are calling it out. We threaten the infinite growth monetary paradigm money machine at all levels and are being pounded into evolving from occupying locations into occupying hearts and minds and into what looks like one of the leading edges of consciousness. But we're not just sitting around talking about it. We have far to many Caesars who are willing to fiddle while Rome burns.The thing about collapse is that it can no longer be talked about in future tense. It's happening all around us: government, politics, nations, economics, populations, climate change, weather, earthquakes, water shortages, peak everything, health care, employment....You name it...some statistics:

• There are more hungry people in the world than the combined populations of the US, Canada, and the European Union
• Hunger kills more people than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined
• 925 million people do not have enough to eat  and 98 percent of them live in developing countries. (Source: FAO news release, 14 September 2010)
• Women make up a little over half of the world's population, but they account for over 60 percent of the world’s hungry.
  (Source:  Strengthening efforts to eradicate hunger..., ECOSOC, 2007)
• 10.9 million children under five die in developing countries each year. Malnutrition and hunger-related diseases cause 60 percent of the deaths;
  (Source: The State of the World's Children, UNICEF, 2007)
• 3.575 million people die each year from water-related disease

I believe, based on several years of study and observation, that we are coming to the end of an age, and by definition, the beginning of a new one. So, the question begs to be asked: The veil is lifting, and what are each of us doing about it?

.... and if I hear "things are perfect just as they are" one more time, I'm going to lose my cookies! What a new age load of spiritual bypass that allows one to disconnect from the suffering in the world. If things were perfect, why would we want to change anything, why would we value cognitive dissonance, why would we pick up a child who wanders into the street? Zen quotes:

• Don't wish for perfect health. In perfect health, there is greed and wanting. So an ancient said, " Make good medicine from the suffering of sickness."
• Don't hope for life without problems. An easy life results in a judgmental and lazy ind. So an ancient once said, "Accept the anxieties and difficulties of this life".
• Don't expect your practice to be clear of obstacles. Without hindrances the mind that seeks enlightenment may be burnt out. So an ancient once said, "Attain deliverance in disturbances". Zen Master Kyong Ho [ 1849-1912], in Thousand Peaks.

It's amazing that some of us continue to confuse the celestial realm with the manifest realm. While it's true that things are perfect just as there in the celestial realm, the manifest realm needs a lot of work!

Sometimes we're just too intellectual for our own good. It's time for us to stop talking and theorizing about integral and to be integral. To take what we've learned from the map and put into practice so we can see the rocks and trees, actually jumping in and seeing what's happening in our own interior and the exterior world. That we pay attention to what's happening in the physical world in front of us, what's happening in the breakdown of all of the systems in the LR quadrant, and the inevitable collapse of the LL cultures that comes with it. I'm among those who think we've already passed the tipping point, that we are in collapse, so for me, the question is now "how do we prepare the new systems to fill the void caused by the failure of the old systems?" And they are failing. It's one more reason why it's important for the integral community to move beyond competency of yellow's intellectualism into turquoise community, building new systems that support new ways of living our lives. And the first thing we must absolutely do is to get out of denial about what's happening, whether it's slow or fast.

The lifting of the veil is our opportunity to end 5,000 years of patriarchal rule and to be more fully human. The veil is lifting. Don't turn away.Occupy your heart.

Five Shadows Slowing Down the Great Shift

Anyaa and I just spent an amazing two days with mystic and spiritual teacher Andrew Harvey, author of The Hope, one of my favorite books this year. 

Andrew is one of those teachers who is not all light and love. Don't get me wrong, he is light and love, but he's also a no-bullshit kind of teacher who understands, like Ken Wilber, that true transformation doesn't happen through new age platitudes like The Secret, avoiding negative thoughts, and not facing one's fears. Andrew takes people apart so they can be put back together again with new perspectives and awareness by being "in your face, disturbing you, terrifying you, until you radically awaken to who and what you really are." David Deida is also one of those teachers. Andrew is simply one of the most authentic teachers around.

Wait for the video to load or visit  http://youtu.be/SgK_pywP-84

Andrew believes, and Anyaa and I agree with him, that everything is collapsing; That we have passed the point where what passes for civilization can be "fixed." It's too far gone. He also believes that the whole concept of collapse is a necessary event for the new human to be born, for humanity to move to the next level, a more evolved human. I've shared this belief for a long time, and history shows us how major shifts in consciousness take place, and it ain't by wishful thinking. It happens by getting down in the muck and doing the work, and we're about to see a lot of muck, in ways that we can't even begin to imagine.

Harvey talks about the Five Shadows of Collapse, shadows we need to face and come to terms with, or we're just spiritually masturbating to make ourselves feel good and dull us out through light polarization and Spiritual Puffery.

The first Shadow is disbelief of the immensity of what is happening on the planet and how bad it will be, perhaps even beyond our comprehension to understand. All true change comes from standing in the fire, not from feel-good pats on the back or the saccharin "sweet path of stress reduction and egoic comfort."

The second shadow is Denial: The more ugly things get, the more I deny what I see and feel can be real. My denial allows me to detach from the suffering of others because it's not touching me....yet.

That leads us the the third Shadow: Dread. Immense dread. You cannot believe in "the oneness of all" and ignore what is already happening to millions of others. Collapse isn't a future event for 4 billion people on the planet. it's already happening, and it reveals the true nature of humans: all of us. We've ignored the warnings of 50 years and we've chosen  to ignore them. It's all of our responsibility, and we've done it because of the dread we feel about losing our comfortable lifestyles.

The fourth shadow then becomes Radical Disillusion with human nature: The systemic explosion of horror on every level. We are profoundly paralyzed by our own lack of substance. We've almost run out of fantasy and our schizophrenia has turned into psychosis. A mysticism that doesn't embrace the darkside of God is not real, and it's not sustainable.

The fifth shadow is the Death Wish - collectively and individually. The desire not to be here at all. I've heard over and over from people that id things get as bad as I think they'll get, that they don't want to be here at all. They'll just kill themselves. Collectively, we're already committing suicide, and individually we've each contributed - by our lifestyles, our belief in infinite growth on a finite planet, and our total consumptive mindsets. We have to own that we are doing this.We don't realize how our inner suicide claims our lives, and that we need to befriend that inner suicide.

Once we face and own our shadows around collapse, there are five things we must do to navigate these times so that the new human can be birthed :

1) Get real. Get out of denial and do what you must to transform; 

2) Develop practices and shadow work to help you cope; 

3) Be of service to ALL sentient beings; 

4) Think Globally, act local; 

5) make your vote, your expenditures, and energy congruent with the new birth.

Don't wait. Start now, There's not a lot of time. 

Thank you, Andrew, for your powerful teachings.

See the rest of Andrew's videos in this series at http://www.andrewharvey.net/sa_videos3.php