Answers For David

David,
 I am going to respond to your questions out of the order in which you wrote them so as to create a more coherent narrative flow.  Your second post eased the strictures on mentioning He Who Will Go Unmentioned, and set out additional parameters as to what you would like to read. This makes it easier and faster. Thank you for that. Many of your generalized questions will be answered by reading the links. I'll address the specific questions in the usual format.

Because it seems the definitions begin with this response I will start with:

David wrote: Steven, has it ever occurred to you that you might object to Wilber's characterization of cynical, flatland postmodernism because you haven't differentiated from it yet?

My major problem with how He Whose Name I Cannot Mention characterizes postmodernism is that I think, as I said before, he makes it into an overblown straw man. To me most of postmodernism is a superficial academic fashion show coming from people who have a particular political ax to grind, and as George Orwell once wrote, "...and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia." I don't really pay it as much attention as the fundamental Integralites do because I don't think the whole show is worth that much effort.  I will, however, speak and write the postmodern language to facilitate communication when I am working in those environments. Further I tend to be one of those who think that postmodernism is a misnomer because in its own self-definition this collection of various doctrines and theories are so contingent on modernism that it is just another fashion show under the modern umbrella. Plus, now it wanes.

Next, in dealing with the word "cynical" I'll refer you to a lengthy discussion of Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason, in which the author defines quite well, cynicism, cynic, etc. and puts them in conceptual opposition to kynicism, kynic, etc. The major difference is that the latter is fun loving and life affirming, and the former is miserable and life demeaning. (Diogenes was the original Kynic.) I tend to agree with Sloterdijk and suggest that you look the discussion over and it might provide material for even yet another thread, but the entire subject is much to complex to work into this one. I believe that if one reads my blogs, especially this post and this one,and this one (paying particular attention to its most recent comment) that it will be clear that my life is informed far more by joy and affirmation than misery and debasement so I lean heavily toward kynicism, but probably more toward aeluroicism.

Last, lets look at flatland. I missed the footnote you mention above where He covered both the nemesises with the single word flatland. I don't fit in with either crowd. While I can certainly see where a scientist studying the behavior of neurons, living, eating, sleeping, gaining tenure and book contracts and slots on the lecture circuits with the behavior of neurons would reduce all discussion about higher states down to the behavior of neurons because that is all she knows, has time to know and her career path will be best enhanced if she doesn't change her tune but becomes even more vehement on the matter. And of course He agrees with her that neuron behavior has a huge role in the play of higher states. I agree there too. But I agree with Him that higher states cannot be so reduced. While a higher state could not be attained if the human neural system had not evolved to provide the basic bio-electrical basis for them, this fact is totally beside the point when it comes to dealing with the content of all states or specific states. Neural behavior is a neccesary but insufficient factor in the analysis of the entire phenomenon. As an almost life-long cultivator of higher states, I realize that the neural vehicle is essential, but content is paramount.  (More information on mine (and other's) take on higher states can be found at this link to the "Privileged Access, the sequel" thread at the IPS pod.)

As for the other flatland category, the radical relativists, pluralists and constructivist: I partially grew up in the middle of a culturally conservative Native American reservation, was only white boy in my junior high class, and I have lived too long in too many strange places...currently in the Third World...so it would be literal insanity for me to say all cultural development had progressed at the same pace. I can can take a perspective  where that could be seen vertically and I can take another where that can be seen horizontally.  I can take a perspective where it is impossible to evaluate the values of another culture based on the values of one's own. I can take a perspective where it is not only possible but also advisable to do so. Every one of those perspectives is contingent on real time and real circumstances. And I have found that all sensitive and effective people who have lived in cross-cultural situations know all that to be true from observation and experience and need neither postmodernism nor Integral to inform them.

David: Apparently you have a broader idea of the “Integral Province” than I do.
 
I don't know about you, but within the boundries of the Integral Province are all the sites listed under "Integral Commons" on the main page of Integral Praxis. Many of these are commercial and I put them under the catagory Integral Mall. I pay particular attention to Integral World, Integral Review, various others from time to time. I post on Integral Archipelego, the II Gaia pod, the IMS pod, Heartmind and Open Source Integral. Of those only this pod and II are Wilber-centric. The others are neutral to overtly hostile.

David: So, are you to be counted as one of those who were with Wilber until A Theory of Everything and the color-code system?

No, I read a good portion of  Spiral Dynamics when Cowen and Beck first published their book. At one point in my life I seriously studied historiography and I disagreed with Graves, Cowen and Beck, that a sound historical theory and methodology can come out of psychological and value studies. The method is a little too reductionistic and relativistic. The fact that the color code system is ignored by social scientists, anthropologists and academic historians indicates to me that many others shared my doubts. If one needs a temporary, facile, broad-brush matrix into which one can slot the initial data coming into a study, SD or Gebser's framework will serve adequately. But if the researcher is honest and refuses t0 cook data to fit the theory, the data (at least in my experience) will start to eat away at the framework to create its own patterns and relationships.

I was never "with" Wilber any more than I "hate" him now. Briefly, I became acquainted with his work and general presence in the late 1980s through family and social circles that included a core group of prominant Transpersonal Psychologists and Psychiatrists, none of whom took him all that seriously, it was as if he was an interloper with no street creds. No one was upset when he went his own way. I would read his articles in Quest Magazine from time to time to past some time; never with great interest because his interests, mostly in Eastern contemplative traditions, rarely coincided with mine. They came together more when I read in Grace and Grit of his venture into domestic violence. At the time I was a private investigator specializing in criminal defense. I had any number of clients who had at one time or another gone down the same route. In criminal defense how one relates to a client who has confessed depends on how that client relates to his action.  One can deal easily with a stand-up expanation of motivation, consideration, consciousness at the highest l evel of which the man is capable. This was not present in Wilber's narrative. He provided his readers with a semi-dissociative state excuse, diminished capacity, which is not respected at all in criminal circles because 95 per cent of the time it is a lie. And even if it were true one ends up with a dissociative client. Either way the person cannot be trusted and since respect is based on trust...

David: It may seem as though I am simply defending a doctrine, but I am simply asking that criticism be .....  informed, when nearly all the time it isn't;  2) from an integral perspective, when most of the time it is just a matter of someone not seeing what Wilber is seeing...

The interesting thing here is that I spent most of the 1970s seeing exactly what Wilber was seeing but from a slightly different, highly secular perspectives and in many instances from unbelievably high states, substance-free states that I had cultivated all through the 1960s.  In early 1970 the visions and dreams began to take on a more directly "integral" cast that was giving me the sense of
a profound interrelatedness of not only the physical, but the cultural universe. I was not particularly interested in any spiritual aspect of these revelations though I could clearly see how man invented the concepts of God and Spirit from within those states. I had learned from experience that spiritual pursuits were the practice of lesser people than those I ran with. Because in that pivotal decade I was a professional writer, I of course sought to get to the bottom of the Wholeness Question. I was not a theorist, but a journalist of the kind that go into publication not just with ideas, and speculations but work deeply corroborated by facts that come off the multi-dimensional streets and not just out of single focus academic studies. There are two ways to travel from a vision of universal, interrelated wholeness. One is to go deeper and deeper into the nondual state until one loses effective consciousness in undifferentiated bliss. The other is to take that ever present sense of nonduality into solid materiality so as to be able to express, in the language of materiality, the clear apprehension that it is just as intermeshed and of a singular piece as the sensation of the unmanifest nondual vision. I worked at that for over 10 years and never succeeded. This is because any time I pursued a thread that suggested a likely uniformity through history, art, aspects of governance, language, etc., the thread immediately fell apart in a chaotic and constantly bifurcating patterns of actuality, events and humanity, all of which to me were just as exciting, compelling, numinous and overwhelmingly delicious as the nondual state. In fact, overall, samsara has provided me with more delight, wisdom, and significance than the nondual state. Eventually I took the quest to find Wholeness in the depths of the everyday world outside into an examination of my inside. That took about three years of intense dream work, long discussions with my transpersonal friends, an obsessive study of Carl Jung whose point of view, out of all psychological theory I had read, best matched my own. Eventually I came to the conclusion that a basically undifferentiated psyche, the never-not-unified bodymind complex was the source of the nondual vision...a holographic view of one's being, life and living. From one point of view...say that of the solar system...my life is but an almost instantaneous, minuscule sizzle of undifferentiated, energy; something that is absolutely whole and that makes me totally indistinguishable from everything in my immediate environment, i.e. the world...all integral. From this point of view gained by essentially 39 years of experience, I think that I was always already differentiated from postmodernism (if there is such a thing) and that I am free to criticize those Integral writers who I find to be superficial and intellectually dishonest.
Ciao,
Steven