Posts by Integral Living Room

One way to look at personal evolution is that it is the process of “seeing more.” Seeing more deeply into ourselves, each other and the world at large.

As we practice this we see that each of us has a deep gift, a gift that the world needs. On this call we explore how we get in touch with this gift, thereby helping our higher, better and next selves emerge. Together.

The practice of abiding in a faithful relationship with emergence, that which is not yet fully manifest, is mostly the practice of listening. Listening to each other. Listening to a whisper from the causal dimension with the ear of the heart. Noticing who is coming into our lives,  and what they really have to offer to us and receive from us.

The Integral perspective allows us to see each other in higher resolution, which helps us appreciate each other more. And this is why we get together in the Integral Living Room.  When we connect more deeply we actually activate the emergent parts of ourselves. It’s delicious to be able to appreciate each other as the geniuses we are, and it actually helps our genius manifest.

But how do we as unique individuals bring our gifts to form a community?

There is a proficiency in moving our attention from self to other, from the individual to the collective, and it can be practiced. This, too, is a goal of the Living Room.

On this call Diane leads all of us in a practice of checking in with our experience of our gifts, first from the perspective of the egoic self, and then from the perspective of the liberated self. These are both available to us at any time.

At the end of the call, Terry reminds us that even though the Living Room is happening at the end of May, we can prepare for it now. Tune into your soul. Take some time in your silent moments, gardening, washing dishes, waiting in line, to tune into your deeper dimensions. Be patient and abide in this receptive learning mode. The ways we’re ripening now will be present in the room when the event happens.

Gifting Your Genius
Recorded 3.6.2014

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On this last community call we played an excerpt — nearly an hour long — of a conversation we had with Ken a few days earlier. It wasn’t our initial plan but the call was so juicy and inspiring that we were eager to share it and hear your impressions. There are a lot of gems in there, like this exchange:

Jeff: There’s so much of this in the integral world: We’re tired of thinking about it and talking about it, we wanna DO something. Fine, but let’s keep thinking and talking about it too.

Ken: Oh absolutely. I mean, all major historical moments were preceded by usually hundreds of years of thinking about it. It was from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment before representative democracy came into action. That wasn’t something that someone just thought of and a year or two later they went out and had French and American revolutions. So we’re still at that phase, you know, and the demand for action is fine but it’s also, in many ways, premature.

And it also overlooks the storehouse of cosmic grooves that we are creating, the more we talk about it, the more we think about it. Just even conceiving issues in integral terms cuts a groove in the cosmos that will never go away, ever. And that’s an impact you are having every single time you think integrally. That’s a profound cut in the cosmos, an ontological reality. And that’s what’s so important. It’s certainly one of the things that we want to get across to people.

Or this:

Ken: What, in order to make a greater “we”,  has to be added to the previous  “we” in order to get a fuller, higher, more transformed, more virtuous, better, we-space? Nobody undertakes these we-space practices, that I’m aware of, to become less than they are. They’re all in it to become better than they are, to become greater in some degree, to answer questions that we don’t have answers for.

Diane:  And to honor our evolutionary communion. We have this huge communion we’ve inherited…

Ken: Exactly. Because we’ve become conscious of it, it has become a moral issue. Not only are we evolution become conscious of itself, we’ve become evolution that now has a moral obligation to be the best evolution that it can be.

Diane: Right, now that we’re involved.

Ken: Exactly. And now that it’s conscious and it’s in our awareness it’s not something that we can now turn away from, nor is it something that we can leave to happenstance. Because we’re intentional and because we care and because we’re aware now then we have to say, okay, what practices can I do to make the best possible ‘I’ that I can be, but also what practices would help the we-spaces that we’re in? And what practices are going to help convert those creative ideas into actual, material institutions, in the lower right for example. And we find of course that all these are mutual. If lower right institutions — changes in climate or terrorism or changes to help with economic meltdown and so on, if we don’t also have changes in the left hand quadrants, changes in consciousness and culture that will support those institutions, those institutions die. Something has to be done in all four quadrants in order to have these advances become a part of ongoing reality and ongoing evolution.

Go ahead and have a listen, and leave some comments if you feel moved to. Underneath the audio of this call is Warming Up with Ken — Getting Started, which is the entire one hour and forty minute conversation with Ken that we based this community call on. Feel free to check that out too.

We Need To Talk
Recorded 9.19.2013

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Warming Up With Ken – Getting Started
Recorded 9.17.2013

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