90 Days of ILP

This is only for the hardcore AQAL geeks: #1 Wilber critic Mark Edwards has just posted a short, readable rebuttable to Meyerhoff's Bald Ambition, a book-length critique that's been making the rounds over the last year or two. A quote for total geeks:

With reference to the issue of postformal reasoning, nonexclusion means accepting the truth claims of those who are intimately involved in postformal research. It does not mean accepting the truth claims about postformal issues of those who belong to other research communities in developmental psychology or associated disciplines. We often see debate and disagreement in scientific communities and those debates often occur between communities which operate out of very different methodological and ontological paradigms. Developing orienting generalisations among such groups is probably not possible, definitely not desirable, not is it the goal of an integral methodology to try to do so. Again, Meyerhoff misunderstands this fundamental point and that he does so is evidenced in his treatment of the postformal reasoning topic.

Fine, readers, I'll keep blogging ;)

One thing I'm trying to do lately is to get up early every day, which, for a pathological night viper, is tough tough tough. So, as part of my Body Module, I'm going to give it a whirl, thanks in no small part to Pavlina's How to Become an Early Riser (which itself has reached Lazy Sunday-levels of viral memery).

The technique itself is fairly simple: you just get up at the same time every morning, no matter what. Sooner or later this will train your body to get tired when it knows it will get enough sleep between that moment and your standard waking hour (which for me will be 8 or 9am, which is early). The key is to get up at the same time, no sleeping in! This way you never oversleep, and only go to bed when you actually need to, which may vary depending on the day, meaning: you always get the exact amount of sleep you need! Or so the theory goes.

The real problem, for me, is motivation. Working until 4 or 5 in the morning has been a badge of honor for me over the past decade, and I am addicted to the silence, solitutude, and freedom that my nightly sojourns provides. When the rest of the world wakes up, I go to bed, proud of the fact that I have never been suckered into the 9-to-5 lifestyle.

And so, to keep me pumped up enough to attempt this massive shift in lifestyle, I've come up with three reasons:

1. Sense of well-being: What scant experience I've had in getting up early has taught me one thing: there's something magickal about being "aligned" with the circadian rhythms and the cycles of the sun. You feel more productive, restful, and you get to be wide awake for one the more aesthetically-pleasing parts of the day.

2. Solidarity with humanity: I had a similar reason for giving up veganism. In short, if I'm going to be a writer/artist with something of relevance to contribute to humanity, it might help to be awake when everyone else is awake, see them outside, breathe their car exhaust, and share space. It's isolating enough just to be an artist, but an artist who works the graveyard shift is tailor-made for ultra-elitism.

3. To have a routine: I'm less sold on this one, but nevertheless... I'm sure I'd benefit from some more structure. Being beholden to the whims of a certain bald philosopher makes it hard to establish any sort of routine, not to mention being enabled in my pathological use of "flex time", makes it a bit hard to have any sort of feeling of control over one's life. But, in the words of frog novel-writer Gustave Flaubert, "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

Anyways, that's where this new additional practice to my Body Module stands. Wish me luck. And, uh, no coffee.

Ok, check this out. Eric's done ten days so far, and he's much better at tracking what he does than I am. And he's got a software application to do it for him! The future is now emerging ya'll...

Folks, let's be honest: being sick for a week put certain things into perspective. One of them was the efficacy of spending my time working on this blog. Have you found it useful? Did it result in you purchasing an ILP kit? Has it inspired, deepened, or augmented your practice? Would you like it to continue?

Please note: I am not giving up on ILP. Or, more, specifically: I am not giving up on advancing my life through the use of transformational technologies. Specific practices -- the 1-2-3 of God, 3-2-1 Process, Big Mind (tm) -- may come and go, but I'll intend to keep doing everything I can to stay in shape, manage my shadows, take perspectives, and ground it all in the present moment. What I am toying with, however, is putting my blogging time into other, more effective writing-oriented areas. Your feedback in this regard would be most useful.

The 1-minute module offered by the kit for the Framework Module is something called "Get a Feel for AQAL", which is basically a guided meditation around the quadrants. The problem is, the importance of doing this doesn't really present itself until you are feeling stuck, pissed-off, downtrodden, or otherwise hung out to dry. Anyone can half-hazardly think about their subjectivity and their interobjectivity, but it takes a real "issue" to demonstrate why you'll get screwed if you don't take as many perspectives into account as possible.

Case in point: me (natch!). I am flipping out with stress right now, as usual. A quick tour around the AQAL matrix reveals why:

UR: Hot, heated, too many layers, back pains, neck cramps, desk chair too lumpy, lingering effects of flu still present.
UL: Unsure of my current priorities, wanting to do something other than my work today.
LL: Certain relational entanglements have been left unresolved, a loved one is sick, another one is too far away, a third is having problems.
LR: It's spring! Birds, bees, mud, and buds: why the hell would I want to coop up with a laptop on a day like this?

The trick to this whole thing is recognizing when you are having a problem in the first place. It doesn't do to just perform this routine during your alloted "practice time," otherwise it becomes only a little less meangingless than bedtime prayers or Hail Marys. No, you do it when you're in a jam, to show you why it needn't be so.

Let's kick things off with a David Byrne quote:

"It is assumed that I write lyrics (and the accompanying music) for songs because I have something I need to 'express.'.... I find that more often, on the contrary, it is the music and the lyric that trigger the emotion within me rather than the other way around." --From the liner notes My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

I realized the validity of this as it applies to broader life today when I logged onto to Google News to see what was going on the world I'd shut away for the last three days while sick. Despite my illness, life lately has seemed alright, until I peeped the day's headlines: Russian Spies Betraying the US in Iraq, Bird Flu Due on US Soil in a Few Months, Professor Killed in Chemistry School Blast, Increase in Super-Resistant TB, etc. after maddening etc. While a general malaise descends when taking these ominous signs in total, to tease them apart reveals different feelings they elicit in different areas of the body. Meaning: each headline highlights, points out, teases forth, or illuminates a different element of ourselves we may be unaware of, in other words, our shadows.

So how about this, for a One-Minute Module: each day, check out the news. But rather than react, panic, or blog about it, simply read it and be aware of the feelings it creates within you. Word.

And here I thought I wouldn't get sick again for another year after February's post-travel travails, but oh no: following our party last weekend, wherein yours truly participated in numerous Irish Car Bombs and other shots of suspicious composition, I succumbed to a full-body ache which later become the FLU. Needless to say I am still recovering from that painful reminder of my own corporality, and thereby beg your forgiveness in slagging off on my blogging and practice duties for the last few days. I'll be back, I promise.

Postscript: And if my verbiage above seems needlessly precious, it is only because I have been cooped up in bed for two days reading this.

This is just excellent. Someone get this guy on Integral Naked, quick! Key quote:

I think the general mindset of time management is far more important than any system. And the mindset of time management is simply that you value your time. It's really a self-esteem issue. If you see your life as valuable and meaningful, then you will value your time as well. If you find yourself wasting a lot of time, you probably don't have a strong enough reason to manage your time well. No system you use will make much difference until you address the underlying issue of self-respect. If your life has no meaningful purpose, then you don't have a compelling enough reason to improve your time management skills. You might get motivated every once in a while, but your motivation to improve just won't last.

And another:

I believe the most important thing I can do to manage my time is to strive to understand reality as accurately as possible. Above all, this means I cannot ignore data. Everything I've experienced -- everything I think I know -- must somehow be integrated into my approach to time management. There can be no incongruencies. My beliefs, thoughts, and actions must all be in alignment with reality itself.

[Post for yesterday]

Just saw this thread on the Integral Naked forum discussing reactions to the kit, and it seems, among other things, the 1-Minute Modules are a polarizing element. Here's user crystallake2:

I got mine. Haven't had time to get into it, I'm working. That's the bloody problem, no time for ILP. I'll have to do the 1 minute workouts. You're trying to tell me that 1 minute is really going to do that much? I don't want to be sceptical, but if you are training to be an athlete or to play the piano for example, 1 minute a day will do it? Wilber got where he was after years of day long, week long, month long full blown processes. This 1 minute thing is a small beginning...that's all.

Exactly, but at least it's something. I hope that once he starts adding 1MMs to his schedule, crystallake2 will discover for himself how the "power law" works, where 80% of one's growth is enacted by 20% of one's activities. In my own case, I'm found that even just doing one set of a strength exercise (push-ups, Hindu squats, etc) to exhaustion per day already carries enormous benefits. For Shadow, even just remembering to journal for a few minutes a day or a week is enough to clear out some undigested psychological "meat" from my ontological colon.

Thankfully, I think adastra understands the principle at work:

The one-minute module idea seems brilliant to me, because it can get people incorporating ILP practices in bits and pieces throughout their day. Any bit will help; and by doing it that way it seems more likely to become a habit which can be expanded later or at various times. Conversely, if the line was: spend 1-2 hours every day on your ILP or don't even bother, then most people would soon drop it.

Personally, I'm hoping we can hone these things down into even smaller, ultrapowerful 1-Second Modules. When your full ILP takes about 8 seconds, that leaves a lot more time for the Vice Module, am I right?

;)

Big ups to all my integral and other peeps who came out to our party last night. Live music! Along with Ballard the Ukele Demon (pictured), my brother and I got a chance to run with some tunes, as well as my local buddies The Stand Still, and Naropa folk-rock sensation Bucky Coe.

There's a certain pleasure to be had in playing music live for friends, and some important things relevant to practice. For one: there is the catharsis, working one's shadows out in a safe and appropriate environment (the sweat-dripping basement stage). Especially for someone like me, who spends the majority of his time pumping caffiene in his veins and prostrating before Apple hardware products, any chance I can get to reconnect with my body is a welcome one. But there's more than that.

In music we find an energetic compound -- a living substance -- unavailable anywhere else. In music, especially its live form, we find a group of individuals graced, blessed, or just plain cocky enough to get the torch of this mysterious etherium, and to transmit that sonic vision through tuned instruments and stretched drum skins and a very cheap plastic grammar school flutophone (uh, that would have been my band, you had to be there).

There's something wicked about these repeated movements, and the reactions they elicit in an expanding sphere starting with the performer and working its way out into the strings/keys/sticks/microphone, and into the amps, and into the audience ears, and into the audience bodies, and into the audience's collected lives. Like casting stones in an already rippling pond, we've a chance to add texture to an already textured world, to rip through the surface of genteel mediocrity with a stab made in the direction of excellence, art, and sheer excitement.

Does that sound a little to Bill and Ted's? So be it.

This weekend we Boulderites say goodbye to Ms. Meagen Clifford, the producer of the ILP kit's five DVDs and an all-around cool gal. Meagen might not be down with the way I sing, but she has definitely been an asset to the ILP kit's transmission of a more integral brand of consciousness, not to mention a boon to the integral movement in general. We will miss her professionalism and work ethic. Good luck MC Lifford, don't forget to 3-2-1 your time at I-I....

This morning (if you deem 2:45pm to be the morning) I woke up frustrated and pissed-off, feeling both overwhelmed by life and underwhelmed by my ability to succeed by its rules. Nothing new there. What was new was what I did about it. Instead of throwing on some clothes and trundling off to work to dick around online for an hour before hunkering down to assassinate members of my task list, I switched gears.

I sat. I meditated. I did a short 3-Body Workout. Then I tumbled down the basement steps to crank up Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary on the tiny speakers of the basement boom box and did two rounds of a 5-exericse Combat Conditioning mini-workout. Went from Hindu push-ups to Hindu squats to Atlas push-ups to V-ups to handstands, and back again. Then I got out my journal.

There's nothing like filling the space cleared by meditation with kick-ass RnR and balls-to-the-wall strength training. The energy it whips is stronger than even the most vile of Red Bull knock-offs, coffee, or even the dreaded Chai. And that energy can be used for something: clearing up your head problems.

My head problems (see above) weren't going to budge by burying them in work and tedium. In my workout clothes, still sweating, I attacked a legal pad with this week's issues, and basically wrote my way out them. I created action plans. Motivational phrases. Even random compliments to myself. Using the energy of the body to overcome the dreads-fears-frustrations of the mind: is that what we mean by integration?

Contra the ILP's workout advice, I did some aerobic work today, namely, running. I ran competitively for 7 years, in events ranging from the 800m to the 10k (with an occasional 15k to boot, 9.3 miles = happy!), and it has become an old habit, fit for mind-clearing and stress de-knotting. Plus you get to see shit.

Strength workouts may better for you, but all told they can be boring and solipsistic. Running puts you out into the world, navigating social systems and infrastructure, a direct means of ascertaining the "health" of our collective body of maps, roadways, forests, trails, sidewalks, parking lots, and mini-mall facades.

Besides, there are ways around the aerobic drain of the endless slow-jog. For one, Fartleks. These "speed plays" are 1-5 minute bursts of intensity buffeted by the slower jog of your normal running pace. Do a few of these, with 1-3 minute jog lulls in between, and you'll be huffing and puffing and feeling like crazy.

And what does it mean to "speed play" through the urban/semi-urban/rural terrain? How does it affect your understanding of the socius to see it at varying speeds? My feeling is that travel speed through the manifest world can range from the standstill, to the walk, the run, the bike, the drive, and plane (and the rocket, for the truly intrepid). The faster you go, the closer things seem, but the more details blur. Depth becomes span, contemplation becomes action, and back again. A holistic unity of these dynamic perspectives (how's that for vague integral-speak?) seems to be what's needed, a mode of Wandering through the world which shows how contingent our supposed understanding of "space" really is.

And don't even get me started about swimming.

So. One of the more profound "gold star" practices utilized in the Integral Life Practice Spirit Module is The 1-2-3 of God. Without giving away too much, suffice to say that it is a unique synthesis of the three main perspectives all traditions seem to take in regards to the divine: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.

In first person, we recognize our true self as the Godhead, Buddha, Christ consciousness, Hoo-Doo Supreme Rigga XXX, whatever. At its deepest base, our consciousness is "already enlightened", we're as omniconscious as we're going to get, and that's fine.

In third person, we see the world/manifest form in all its splendor, as the very face of the non-anthropomorphized Divine. Everything we touch, see, fuck, and dive into is absolutely coterminous with the Great That. This is what many traditions teach at least.

But what's truly cool (if anything involving the word "God" could be construed to be so, Kirk Cameron's fire-and-brimstone speeches nonwithstanding, ahem) is the practice of Second person, where the old guilt-inducing Christian notion of a personal, relational God comes in to play.

The problem is that we quickly associate this with -- gasp! -- petitional prayer to an Abstract Man (with beard), whereas this needn't be the case. The deep structural function of 2p devotion seems to be the cultivation of humility, the realization that a) yes, at your deepest root you and divinity are not-two, b) yes, the manifest realm of systems-shifting-within-systems is divinized stuff-matter itself, but also that c) you've got a long way to go when it comes to either realizing a) or being able to practice b). You're not enlightened, and you can't be everything, at least not little ol' you.

And so we practice devotion, declaration, oath-taking, silent conversation, and yesm petition, in order to decenter our selves in the face of the biggest relationship anyone could possibly ever concieve: the I-Thou with God/Spirit/Brahmin/Buddha/Sophia the Father/Mother/Supreme Architect/Ultra-Boss/Best Friend Space Buddy. And you know what's it's like being in a relationship: these motherfuckers tire you out, make unrealistic demands, and yet wow the shit out you with uncommon friendship and suprising twist-turns of compassion.

For me, my devotion is to the Supreme Ultra Oil-Coffee Deity, the dark energetic matter of the universe and atavistically propelling all spiraling forms through varying matter-mesh densities into the impenetrable Void of the Unknowable Noid.

But hey, God works too.

I just got put on these two today, check it out:

Transformative Tools and Technology

Kosmic Blogging 101

Blogging will continue on a more normal schedule soon, I'm between computers right now. The Blackalicious show was "just" aiight, by the way. The opening acts were much more entertaining. More on this later.

I am going to see Blackalicious tonight. This is their last chance to truly impress me. Otherwise I'm going to throw into permanent question the old integral scene saw that "Blackalicious is tier-two hip-hop". Meh.

They say "hell is other people", but what they really mean is "other people's task lists." I mean this in two senses: both the tasks they have for themselves, and the things they want you to do. That's why Ken Wilber's definition of karma makes so much sense to me: action that requires further action. If you let someone into your life, and you do something for them, they will expect you to do that same thing for them again and again and again. If not, the friendship is severed, and "bad" karma is the result. But pissing off a friend -- the act of telling someone "no" -- is not the problem: it's the initial "yes" that sucks.

And I mean that literally: every "yes" you say to the world is like a vacuum pump sucking you into a new obligation, a lamprey dragging you down to the ocean's bottom where the Menial Things reside, another vampire bat with an addiction to iCal. You have to learn to say "no". NO NO NO NO NO. They have a "project list" for you? You have a non-list for them. They want to foist their task management software on you? Tell them you have only one, ruthless meta-task: making your task list go away.

It's a question of plates. Menial Tasks, Mundane Things, the hauling of trash and chopping of wood and the cleaning of rooms and the cooking of food and the vacuuuuuuming: these are the plates you are taught to spin. Because we are nice, savvy, postmodern liberals, we're fine with this. We would never choose to put these tasks on someone else. Hire a maid? Hire a cook? Hire a gardener? Chase money so you can even afford to have servants? Feh. That's for conservatives, and, ick, CEOs.

But I argue that it's a fine aspiration to no longer want to Spin Plates and to instead seek to build a Plate-Spinning Machine. The question is how much of your daily time are you willing to devote to building the Plate-Spinning Machine? What's the proper ratio of Plate-Spinning and Machine-Building time you may spend per day? At what point do the Mundane Things start falling and toppling and shattering? When your bedroom is filled with mice? When your gas and electric back-bills enter the five-digit area? When your stomach bulges from a week's worth of starvation? Maybe so.

The point is: people will give you things to do, which in this age of scarce temporal resources, is akin to being robbed in the Capitalist era. In the Attention Economy, where you invest your precious daylights is a far more crucial decision than what you're spending on beer each month. People will beg and scream and plead, and it is a weak man who says YES YES YES to life, piling more plates on his already tip-spinning axis. But you are bigger than that: you've got an idea for a Plate-Spinning Machine, you know what Big Great Things you are capable of, and you know that your future lies in passing the Mundane Things on to someone else. Instead of saying YES to the mundane things of life, give this a whirl: say NO. Say NO to Life.

[For yesterday].

Two chairs, three modules. Last night I came up with a new "combo" (or "kata") synthesizing several modules/practices under common theme. In this case, cheap basement furniture.

1. Meditate in a chair.
10 minutes.

2. Combat Conditioning workout.
Matt Furey would be proud: I did two sets of handstands, push-ups, and jacknknife sit-ups. Following this, I made the chair face another, about 1.5' apart, and I used them to do Atlas push-ups, where the chest dips lower than the hands, thus working a vaster range of motion. To conclude, I spread them out to do bench dips, working the triceps.


3. 3-2-1 Pageant Play
Sometimes doing the 3-2-1 Shadow Process in a journal or in your head gets boring: that's what the chairs are for. Say, I don't know, you have a problem with a person you work with. Say you find this person rude and inattentive to your needs and "all about themself". Sit this person with your imagination in one of the chairs. Standing outside the circle of two chairs, begin to describe this person's activities and issues from an objective viewpoint. Then, sit in the chair opposite them and have a conversation. When you switch to speaking from their point of view, move your ass into their chair. And then back, and then back again. Act it all out. Finally, remove your chair and sit (and speak) as the person-with-the-problem from their chair, alone. See the 3-2-1 DVD for more on this (which features, amongst other things, ME SITTING IN A CHAIR). =)

It should be pointed out that I was blasting the classic Pixies album Doolittle during steps two and three of the above combo. I find it to be very effective in freeing up dead energy, getting oneself moving and dancing and ready to take on one's three bodies and Ultra-Shadow.

[Post for yest.] As part of my fanatical new devotion to "finding the lost inches" of my life (to misquote Al Pacino's famous "minutes" speech from Any Given Sunday), I've begun keeping a "time log" in a small memo notebook I keep in my back pocket. While it would hardly be possible to keep track of everything I do on any given day -- taking a shit, brushing my teeth, walking to the bus stop, putting on pants -- I've at least set the intention of tracking all major activities in the hopes of at least growing more efficient and responsible with my work. To demonstrate, here's my time log for today (uh, not counting the moments spent on this post itself). You'll note the pathetically "bohemian" nature of this schedule right away, and will provide me all leeway due in kind. Also note: while this doesn't include much in the line of ILP practices, that's ok. I'm working on it.

Wake up: 11:00am
Bus to work: 11:30-11:40am
Email: 11:42-:12:00pm
Lunch with Sounds True marketing team: 12:00-1:20pm
Miscellaneous office work: 1:20-4:53pm
Bus home: 4:56-5:02
Play with band: 5:15-6:15pm
Freelance project: 7-8:20pm
Play more music: 8:20-9:00pm
Call significant other: 9:10-9:20pm
Shopping: 10:00-10:45pm
Cooking: 10:40-10:55pm
Freelance project: 10:55-11:15pm
Eat: 11:15-11:37pm
Freelance project: 11:46-12:46am
Body module: 12:46-12:52am
Write record review: 12:52-1:16am
More music: 1:16-1:40am
I-I marketing work: 1:42-3:05am
Write this blog post: 3:05-3:20am
Eat and watch TV: 3:25am-4am
Bed: 4:05am


Now, of course, just doing this sort of activity adds a bit to my time every day, but that's ok: the amount of self-awareness and impatient with mediocrity it has created in my awareness is far more useful than what I had before. Try it fo' yo'self and see!!!!

I am continually amazed at the paucity of time management skills offered by esoteric traditionalists: it as if mystics of yore had all the time in the world, a life-long task list consisting of three things, and little incentive to be efficient. Well, fellow email swimmers, we do not. This is why Integral Valley's Integral Living project is so compelling: a web-based tool for managing and tracking practice. But while we wait for that, what can we do now, right now, to save time and devote more waking energy to things that truly matter?

Traditional meditation techniqued like Vipassana teach one to cultivate a "mindfulness" in every moment, which constantly seeks to notice -- and break free of -- those moments when we are acting or speaking out of delusion, attachment, fear, or myriad other normal human habits. But what if we are acting out of inefficiency? What if we are "mindfully" spending two more hours a week on laundry than we need to be?

Enter time yoga, my gimmicky name for a very simple thing: training oneself in each every moment to ask: "What am I doing right now? Is this the best use of my time?"

Theoretically, whatever you're doing at any given moment falls into 3 categories: Fundamental Tasks, Significant Tasks, and Neither.

Fundamental Tasks: those necessary tasks you need to sustain yourself and survive. These will insure your perpetuity, but fail to inspire or catalyze your evolution beyond the status quo's center-of-lame-gravity. Laundry, hygiene, food, relaxation, sleep: these are "fixed" costs you can't ignore for long. The idea here is to maximize the efficiency with which you perform these, reduce the number of things you have to do, group tasks together, and find others to do them for you.

Significant Tasks: this is the good stuff, those important projects, relationships, opportunities, and experiences you believe will catalyze your growth along multiple developmental tracks, whether financial, romantic, artistic, theoretical, etc. The lynchpin of this category is discerning your "20% spike", that activity for which you've been genetically blueprinted to perform. This is your high-leverage facility, that thing you do with more passion and skill than anyone else in the world. The idea is to become more efficient at doing it, doing it more, and hooking it in to your "economic engine", so as to have primary source of life-energy actively generating your future.

Neither: obvious wastes of time you'd do best to avoid. Excess masturbation, too-long walks, boring hikes, coffee with dumb people -- this is where you confront your own nihilism head-on. In the nihilist viewpoint, non of the aforementioned are to be avoided, they simply form another stratum in the "it's all good" meaningless flatland malaise. Here, being "nice" and staying mediocre are the ruling norm. In the "neither" category, you must dare to judge, to make decisions, cut through, and throw shit away. And learn to say no, even going so far as to practicing it in front of the mirror 5-10 times a day.

So again, each and every moment, ask yourself "what am I doing right now?" Then, run it through the filter: is it Fundamental? Significant? Neither? And act accordingly.

[post for yest.]

Big-ups to the members of the Zaadz crew -- including chief tech dude Aaron -- for making a surprise visit to the I-I office yesterday. Their entrance was most auspicious, as they were right on time for the push-ups my buddy Duff and I do every hour. Good to have you here guys!

[Post for yesterday:]

Oh, I had big plans for last evening after work. I was going to meditate, read, do some pull-ups, write a song, plan the next phase of my life. Instead? I watched Chappelle's Show: Season 2 for five hours. Not one, not two, five. I feel as though I have let you all (and myself) down big time, and am writing this post as part of a feeble act of penance.

The truth is, five hours is nothing. Last year, when I had cable, on certain weeks five was the average amount of time I spent watching per night. And I tried all sorts of tricks to try to "contemplatize" my way around the addictive burden: counting the number of "technical events" (screen wipes, cuts, graphic flashes, zooms) per session, feeling empathy fo each sentient being dancing across the screen, even a visualization exercise positing my True Self as a giant television pouring light into the world and entertaining teeming hordes of suffering billions, all to no avail.

The truth is, when it comes to TV, there's no winning. Even though I don't have cable now, just a set of compelling DVDs is enough to get me hooked hooked hooked. It's a case of the lowest common denominator: TV is the easiest use of our time, and its constant fluxuation and emotional triggers are enough to overwhelm our periphery and keep our attention affixed to that which we know, in our better instances, is contrary to our higher purpose in this ultra-participatory life.

Kill (or at least maim) your TV, before it kills you.

...could be an important part of one's ILP. Here's one reason why.

(For the Work module, whatever...) The idea is simple: write a fake magazine interview with yourself as you envision yourself to be 5, 10, 15+ years from now. The idea is develop some detailed clarity about what it's like to be the future you. It need not be set in stone, but it's a decent exercise to try, even revising every month or so as new desires and capacities become revealed. Here's the one I wrote today.

two to go! Where I'm at now:

CORE MODULES:

Body: Until I got sick last week, my body was feeling a lot better. I was doing at least one set of something to exhaustion a day, running a bit, doing a shortened 3-body workout, and eating and sleeping better. While lately I've fallen back into the 4 hours of sleep / caffiene binge / workaholic thing again, having tasted the fruits of a healthier body, I find myself being drawn more towards longevity. Again.

Mind: Dude, I don't know. I work for the guy: must I study Ken Wilber's theory even more? That's only one aspect though: the core of the path of mind is the capacity to take perspectives. A few times a week, I'm making a conscious effort to do this, by "feeling into" the various elements of AQAL in my own awareness.

Spirit: I now go to church every morning for three hours! Yeah right. But I do sit for (hold your breathe) 5 minutes a day (usually), which is 500% more than I was doing in January. Fo' reals.

Shadow: Here is where I'm lost. For one, this was originally entitled the psychodynamic module of which "shadow" was but a part (?). It seems as though it should encompass more than just the shittier aspects of my ego. Second, the 3-2-1 Process only seems to cover certain issues. But still, I'm moving towards doing it at least once per week (the "long form" version: lots o' journaling) with the most difficult issue of the week.

AUXILIARY MODULE:

Work: This is the one area I feel like I've made real progress in, at least in terms of my thinking. Through reading The 80/20 Individual, hanging out with people like Graham English, and perusing the want ads, I'm coming to a key insight: I don't value my time and work enough. What's clear is that I can no longer waste time working on things I'm not 100% brilliant at doing. Through a drunken decade of trial-n-error, I've come to a dense core of things I do best, and am now actively trying to figure out how to leverage these to best benefit my career and bank account. Whereas in my early twenties I spent a lot of time studying the mysterious, esoteric teachings of the mystics, in my latter twenties I'm exploring the even more mysterious, esoteric teachings of business gurus, marketing leaders, and organizational geniuses of all types. All hail the Work Module: may it be the dense core of the ILP of starving artists everywhere.

So that's where I'm at. If I've let you down by not becoming the next Dogen within this first 30-day run, I apologize. But this, I feel, is the true testament of ILP: it has to fit into one's life (which my nascent version does fairly well), while working towards longer-term growth. In two months time, I hope to at least reach the level Dogen was at at age 15.

Today marked day three of the second Integral Spiritual Center gathering here in the CO. This being the semi-public day (the first days two were "closed doors" so these world famous mystics could toss practices back and forth), they opened it up to some Q & A, led by the incredible Mr. G. While there were plenty of take home bon mots from this event, one of them particularly stuck with me (and this relates to my previous post). It's a question Gafni seems to ask himself each moment of every day: what are the unique needs of this moment?

Flashback to Denver, yesterday afternoon. I was riding the 16th Street shuttle, and it was packed. As more people got on, a black couple standing next to me accidentally shoved into an overweight woman seated on the opposite side from me. She seemed to have a bit of a mental handicap, for she cried out "get the fuck away from me!", to which the black man muttered something under his breathe. She continued shrieking, until the driver had to stop the tram, get out, come back, and put the combatants at ease.

Throughout this exchange, I asked myself something similar to Gafni's injunction: what should I be doing right now? Part of me wanted to step in and assure the overweight woman she was not under attack, that it was nothing personal, and that should be alright. In turn, I wanted to coax the standing couple away from continuing the conversation, which was getting out of hand. A third voice in me wanted to just stand by, arms at the ready, willing to jump in should it come sadly to blows (which it did not, at least while I was there). What was I to do?

My solution: nothing. Just wait, and the need (not the want) will arise with absolute assurance. And with that, I need to end this post.

...Are there enough? Would not a cornerstone of ILP be to "find" additional hours in which to practice per deim? Should we not invest some energy in "temporal extension" technology? One of things I take seriously about ILP is the "integration" aspect, that is, will this integrate with the way I live my life? Will it fall like sand into the free spaces and pockets of time I've allowed myself between the Undeniable Things I can't avoid? And how many of those things are deniable?

What develops is a consciousness of where one is constantly spending one's time. If you're spending more time waiting for the bus than writing poetry, you might be in trouble. If there's an inconsistency in the way you, say, lift weights, but an unrelenting quality to the way you get in fights with your lover every day, then guess what? It's time to put your stopwatch microscope onto that corner of your life.

As a partial solution to my own "time leak" problem, I'm going to start keeping a "time journal" by my side at all times, where I may record the beginning and ending times of each thing I do, and hopefully discern where all of my free practice space goes each day (because, let's face it, I wait for buses 500% more of the time than I sit and look at my breathes).

If any of you have tried a similar means of organizing time (and yes, I've read Getting Things Done... well, most of it), please drop me a line and share it: I promise I'll take a moment to read.

This is true nanotechnology. The world's most powerful esoteric behaviors, cut down and condensed, strung together like pixellated beads, poured like fuel into our daily existence. Practice is a misnomer, for to practice something means you're not quite playing in the big game: this is Integral Life Living, and it occurs in bits and gasps and shockingly effective micromodules of high-energy practice.

Take weight lifting: seriously, take it. With a world on fire, have we 2 extra hours to spare at the gym kissing our biceps? A haughty transpersonal laugh greets such an archaic notion. Instead, pick one exercise. Pick push-ups, or pull-ups or Hindu squats. Pick it, and do it to exhaustion. That's it. Now... back to work!

Consider the metaphor of our productivity aids: our desktop software, our Google, our (MS) Word. These were impossible memory-hogs but a decade ago, using A.I. and design solutions barely imagined. Yet now: crucial. The same goes for ILP practices: picture them as desktop icons, each triggering a powerful 21st-century application of integral theory, something impossible to even consider 10 years ago. The 3-2-1 Process: a power-cannon expression of pure Freudianism. Big Mind: voice dialogue x Zen pointing-out instructions = democratized satori. Focused Intensity Training: what demons do to get in shape for world domination.


Do you know what creates the complex-beautiful imagery dancing across your tv screen? I assure you it is not 6-day meditation retreats: it's modular pixels, tiny bits of meaningless info-matter which, when sequenced properly, can show you the biography of Mother Theresa, the impossible backflips of an Olympic freestyle skier, the heartbreaking dramaturgy of humanity's most gripping police stories. Simple squares, composed of three striped lights: red, blue, green. From these, infinite rainbows spring forth.

Put the "big punch" capacity of microelectronics onto your meditation cushion. Use the power-law principle, go 80/20, flip the Bell Curve and dare to be a behavioral elitist.

We simply don't have time for anything else.