i saw this picture and i thought of a metaphor for life itself. we've gotta live on the edge, experience its true natural self and realize we are that Natural Self. Like a roller coaster, the circumstances of our lives takes us up and down or topsy turvey. It's a thrill and exciting but damn scary at the same time. Good times and bad times pass as quickly as the 1,000 foot drop and the loop that fllows it. It's like sitting on a razor's edge (like i read Chogyam Trungpa say in "Ordely Chaos"), a somewhat uncomfortable balancing act on raw reality. And the monks you ask? we must strive to be like them, feeling the thrill of every moment, the fear and ecstasy of every Now, yet completely natural and completely at peace with all of it, come what may. We can exist on the razor's edge, ride the roller coaster, simply because we've found our balance, we've found the space within ourselves that incoporates it all. And in this space we realize that "me" no longer exists and the razor, the roller coaster, and we are one and the same and simultaneously nothing at all.

here is a post i wrote for integral living pod. i thought it would be a good one to add to my blog. . . . . integral theory isn’t necessarily something one practices, like meditation or yoga, but rather, it is how you live your life, which includes meditation or yoga (as an example among countless). you would live integrally (if that’s a real word?) meaning that you would try to incorporate aspects of everything. let me explain what i mean. it is a buddhist saying that we should be always inquisitive towards our world. it’s something like that. we should cultivate our interior realm (like meditating, physcotherapy, or various other forms of interior work), we should further our physical being (like with excersize, eating well, etc.) we should engage our exterior world (like being interested in natural wonders, how the sun looks in the morning, etc.). also, we have to relate to other people, so we should be conscious in how we act towards others, and we have to relate to our culture, so there is awareness built in there as well. last but not least, we need to understand our place in things, like our history, personal and societal, why we are where we are and where are we going. this doesn’t mean we all have to experts in everything. but we should be aware of things going on within ourselves and around ourselves, in our world. bascially, it’s an attempt to be the best we can be, in all aspects of our reality. like if we were to plant a seed outside. we have to take into consideration what the soil mixture is like, what the climate is like for the plant, how much sun should it get, how much water, and how will it interact with the plants around it. we look all this up about the plant before we do anything so we make sure we are doing the right thing for it. it’s like that. we cultivate ourselves in the same way, with lovingkindness, so we can ensure our growth toward the sun in all aspects. integral theory has room for all other things, because it’s basically a framework for how all of those other things fit and work toegerther. so a physics theory of everything in only an aspect of reality. it takes into account the quantum working of reality, how our material (our own matter, what we are all made of physically) functions and it would tie all of the other theories together to that physical reality could all get along. this fits into the integral theory in the “it” realm, because it deals with physical matter. that is only one part of a whole, one part of the world and on part of the person. that is why integral theory stresses “integral” because we need many parts to create the whole! as to the question i am responding to, i have had many people say the exact same thing to me. this has been my personal response, not what i’ve read in any book or whatever, but what i feel to be true in this regard. ken wilber’s philosophy is in many ways that, philosophy. there is and has been and will always be a level of academia to philosophy simply because of the nature of the beast. many of his books are geared to strictly an academic look at his philosophy, relating it to other academic philosophies, critiques, etc. but, saying all this, in all of his writings, he lets the spritual intensity of his energy glimmer through. those passages are always the most beautiful in his books and are the most inspiring on that level. there are a lot of specifics, labeling of lines, levels, quadrants, etc. but the jist of the whole thing, the meaning within all of the terminology is quite simple in it’s complexity, beautiful in its message. it is a bit like life as we know it. we all have complexity in our lives, nature has tremendous complexity in her design, but there is always a simpicity to it, an ideal undercurrent that incorporates all and is it’s own energy.

this was my post to a discussion topic concerning values. i thought it might ba good add on here. . . . Values are a funny thing. we most definately learn them, adopt them and pick them up travelling down our road of life. they are what we govern our humanity, our humanness with. they are the ideals that we live by and strive for. yet, they somehow still are concerned with "me," the personality we create for ourselves moment to moment throughout our lives. values don't necessarily affect our primordial selves, the eternal consciousness, whatever you want to call it for it has many names. i have read through most of the posts in this discussion since it's beginning and i find that the values everyone has listed has some intrinsic quality. i see them as expressions of what comes naturally to the eternal consciousness, our true self. it is through a connection with that energy that these values manifest and thus become the interface with which we react to the world. as we open ourselves, open our hearts and then open our eyes, we begin to feel and see what is somehow fundamentally right deep down in our gut (intuition). we then give these things names and terms and call them our values. heart-felt honest values are really the radical blooming of the primordial source illuminating our lives in the human realm.

Everything dies and is reborn again just as the ocean tide advances and recedes on the shore. Things are created and destroyed, only to be created again in the great spiral of polarities that governs our Kosmos. White and black, day and night, contraction and expansion, life and death exist in a primordial dance, not where one force leads the other, but where each depends and feeds from the subtle interchanges between them. They do not oppose each other, but join together in harmonious completion of the ever-rolling wheel of time. Our own consciousness is like a river with many streams flowing into it as it winds and twists its way down stream towards the ocean of time. It expands and contracts with every breadth of the Kosmos, though most of us are too shut off to notice. As our river floods its banks, perhaps in meditation, a vision, a dream, or even in a blink of an eye, we reach into something beyond ourselves, even if for only a moment. During a flood we catch a glimpse of eternity, a peak experience into the nondual realm, into formless unity. No matter what cultural or personal veil one looks through, the essential, very basic core of that moment is the same. It is the Seed of the Everything and the None, the very germ of Enlightenment that is waiting within all of us to be showered with the spring rains of introspection and transcendence.

The Supreme Understanding is intuitive. We are just never really honest with ourselves. It is intuitive because it is our inner-most being, it is our true Self. There is some part of us that is aware of this, but most of our lives are spent on everything else imaginable and we have forgotten. Then we get to a point where we know what we are, we know we have an inner-most being, shit we might've even glanced at it once or twice, but our lives are still a mess. Why? Because there is still a part of us clinging to our habits, our comfortable well worn habits that seems to make up our personality. It's almost like being caught in a giant fishing net. We know we're in the net. We can see the water around us ut we are still definately in the net. Just because we become aware of the truth and we know it exists doesn't mean we've fully integrated and understood it. Similarly, just because we've had a glimpse of he water around us outside of our net doesn't mean we've seen the whole ocean.