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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