|
|
|
|
I was first exposed to Ken Wilber's work about sixteen years ago. At that time I found him provocative, thoughtful, and not altogether pleasant, taking perhaps a bit too much pleasure in skewering other people's delusions (including mine). More recently, I encountered his work again (after spending years with A Course in Miracles) and found myself with an entirely different perspective. The breadth of his vision of an integral framework of all human consciousness and experience is staggering. His sense of humor I now find clever, inclusive, and refreshingly self-aware. Although much of my kw-reading lately has been from the web-based excerpts, endnotes, essays, etc. that constantly flow from the virtual desk of Leonard Jacobs at Shambhala Publications, I recently finished A Brief History of Everything, Grace and Grit and "One Taste", a journal/diary of 1997 from his perspective as a practicing philosopher-psychologist living in the hills above Boulder, Colorado. Here's an excerpt: Monumentally,
Gloriously, Divinely Big Egos
UPDATE 1/20/2003 Over the course of the holidays, on the beach in Mexico, I finished Boomeritis. Ken obviously had a lot of fun with this one. But it does present a lot of fundamentals in an easily digestible form (very important for beach reading). It was also heartening to see in Boomeritis references to another brand-new book I'd brought to the beach: Roger Walsh's Essential Spirituality. Having these two books in tow, plus Joan Borysenko's Fire in the Soul and David Deida's Finding God through Sex, finally got me off my butt to prepare the workshop series in TANTRIC TANGO that's been brewing for many moons now. The purpose of this workshop ("...make no little plans!...") is to create an "Integral Transformative Practice" (ITP) out of the rich cultural stew that is Argentine Tango, building on its worldwide acceptance as a powerfully intimate social dance experience, and to share the creation process with others.
UPDATE 2/24/2003 Deb Sclar (my wife & tango partner) and I attended the Integral Art meeting sponsored by Stuart Davis in Boulder on February 21-22. I'm still recovering from the buzz. I am awash in gratitude to Andy Acker for notifying me in time, and to everyone who allowed me the ten minutes to talk about "Tantric Tango". Working with (surprise!) David Deida for two hours added to the already over-the-top intensity of the encounter. Thanks to all the smiling faces pictured below for a memorable Sunday afternoon wrap-up session (not to mention Stuart's concert that night!).
UPDATE 5/23/2003 Back from Buenos Aires, where we presented the first prototype of the Tantric Tango workshop, Deb and I are working on "revising and expanding" the Tantric Tango workshop-in-progress, and sharing the concept with integral-thinking non-tango-dancers to test the waters. UPDATE 6/4/2003 Deb and I were very fortunate to get some feedback yesterday from Ken on the Tantric Tango idea. He introduced us to some Hindu Temple dancers, whose lineage goes back thousands of years. Finding parallels between the states of consciousness available in Hindu Temple dancing and in Argentine Tango was fascinating and inspiring. We heard about David Deida's "Wild Nights" and speculated about what place a Tantric Tango approach might have in his work. Ken's comment about the strength of the morphic field generated by the Hindu Temple dancers over thousands of years of recreating the same discipline got me to wondering what the relative strength of the Argentine Tango morphic field would be after the Golden Age of the '40's when a million or two Argentines were dancing intensely for a few decades. After the meeting, Mark Binet joined with Deb and me to create the first Tantric Tango ITP Support Group to further the implementation of Tantric Tango as an Integral Transformative Practice. Tallyho! UPDATE 9/6/2003 Well, we've had the first Tantric Tango workshop and are working on scheduling the second. Ken's thinking is a great guidance here: tango is a form of "intersubjective yoga", filling a largely unaddressed gap in worldwide spiritual practice. Many traditions focus on the subjective yogas which can be undertaken by an individual in relative isolation. ONly tango, it seems, offers this transcendence solely within the context of a partnership: "It takes two to tango." Why did this gap in spiritual practice arise during humanity's long slow climb up the spiral? It's certainly easier to focus on your own internal state without trying to mesh with the state of another. But tango serendipitously uses the "pheromone furnace" as one way to fuel the rise of kundalini, which can then be directed toward development. Besides, it's fun! Copyright © 2001 by Brian Dunn. All rights reserved.
|
