The Daily Evolver

Before I encountered the work of Ken Wilber, Joseph Campbell was lighting me up with his synthesis of the myths of all cultures.  Like Ken, Campbell had a gift for the meta-narrative, for seeing patterns in seemingly disparate times and systems of thought.

In this dialog with Dr. Keith Witt (who is also a huge Campbell fan), we discuss the gift of Campbell’s formulation of The Hero’s Journey, which is his name for the basic pattern of the great myths, and which turns out to be a guide for our own lives.

Although told in wildly different ways throughout the world, the basic story is the same. It begins with the “call”, which is often a big blunder or a disaster that leads you to what Campbell called the belly of the whale. If you say yes to the calling you find yourself on the threshold where you have to leave the old ways behind and venture into the unknown. Guides will appear to help you on your journey, and though some may betray you, if you make it through you will be the master of two worlds. Most of all, you’ll have a gift to bring back and share with your people.

When I first read about the hero’s journey in Campbell’s classic book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I remember feeling a tremendous amount of relief. I stopped blaming myself so much for my problems. Life is supposed to be like this. It is difficult but those difficulties have meaning. Like most of us in the modern world, I was taught the opposite: that hardship and travails are to be avoided. If things are too challenging then you are doing something wrong.

The hero’s journey is dangerous, but remaining where you are is no picnic either. Sometimes people just plain decline their “hero’s call”, which leads to a stunted life or even death. Even if you say yes there’s no guarantee that you’ll make it through. People get dismembered or find themselves in the land of the lotus eaters and decide they will never leave. But usually the transformation causes us to want to bring the gift back to our people, to share what we’ve learned. What a wonderful thing: your travails have meaning.

I was also deeply inspired to realize that I myself am the hero of my own story, and that I am daily encountering magic and guides, if only I pay attention. I also realized that I can sprinkle a little fairy dust on other people, and be a guide for them. One of the characteristics of Integral consciousness is that magic comes back online. Not the gripped, “domination magic” of the magenta stage of development, but a recognition, scientifically vetted, that we are riding the updraft of 13.8 billion years of emergence toward ever-unfolding goodness, truth and beauty. And that as we realize this we are able to consciously influence our story, our evolution, and co-create our own heroic journeys with a loving and intelligent kosmos.

Listen or download here:

In this installment of  The Shrink & the Pundit, Dr. Keith Witt  and I discuss the emotional constellations of shame. As a therapist who has worked with thousands of clients, Keith has seen the devastating effect shame can have on psychological health. “It can literally kill us,” he explains.

It can also save us. Because shame is so powerful and central to our psyches, it is a great leverage point for metabolizing our dysfunctions. Shame is a social emotion and first comes on line in small children as a response to the inevitable disapproval from authority figures. It is the prime engine behind the development of the defensive states and patterns that create amplified or numbed emotions, distorted perspectives, destructive impulses, reduced empathy and inability to self-reflect.

As we let ourselves see and feel into the textures of our own shame we can begin to witness the admonitions of our “inner critic,” as well as the subtle energy and somatic patterning that keep it anchored in our psyche. This awareness itself is curative (to paraphrase Fritz Perls) and is a key to the psychotherapeutic process. It is also a worthy form of integral practice. As usual, Brother Keith has thought it through beautifully, and you can listen to him explain (below)…

Dr. Keith Witt is an integral psychotherapist extraordinaire, and my conversation partner for The Shrink & the Pundit dialog series. Having practiced in Santa Barbara for nearly forty years, conducting over 50,000 therapeutic sessions, Keith knows the human animal up close and personal. Keith has written several integrally-informed books, including Waking Up: Psychotherapy as Art, Spirituality and Science, The Gift of Shame, and his latest: 100 Reasons Not to Have a Secret Affair.

This month my conversation with Brother Keith is on everybody’s favorite topic: sex.It turns out that Keith is indeed the Doctor of Love! Having counseled literally thousands of people on sexual functioning, as a psychotherapist for over 40 years, Keith brings a relaxed, cut-the-bull energy to the topic.

Our conversation ranged all over the place, including:

It’s always fun to hear Dr. Keith’s transmission, but this month it’s a real turn-on. Don’t listen alone!

Dr. Keith’s more detailed written notes are  posted here, and you can get his full teachings at his website, drkeithwitt.com.

My latest conversation with Dr. Keith Witt really gave me a lift!

In evolutionary circles we often hear how the human brain is wired for hypervigilance. Natural selection favors people who see a saber-toothed tiger behind every bush because occasionally one is actually there. And we experience the effect of this programming today within ourselves, showing up as anxiety, worry and a bias for seeing the negative in a situation.

Well it turns out that fear is not the only operating system in our brains; we humans are also programmed for love, empathy, cooperation and even spiritual growth. Yay!

Brother Keith has been a practicing psychotherapist for 40 years and is an avid student of the brain sciences (the upper right quadrant in integral theory). He points out that the past couple decades have seen great discoveries in neurobiology which reveal a more complete and positive picture of the human condition.

In this fun and high-energy conversation Keith and I bat around some of his key insights as to how neurobiology research is illuminating psychotherapy and spiritual practice. His more detailed written notes are also posted here.

I had another great conversation with Dr. Keith Witt last week. Brother Keith has been practicing psychotherapy in Santa Barbara for over 40 years, and is also a master martial artist and devoted spiritual practitioner with experience in many traditions. Who better to talk to about integrating these two approaches to human development, a topic that causes so much confusion and consternation among seekers of higher consciousness?

~Dr. Keith Witt

Spiritual teachers and psychotherapists are often as odds and people who participate in both modalities often reflect that conflict in their own minds. Which is the best way to go? Is it more fruitful to work with our personal history and iron out the stuck points in our lives (psychotherapy) or to work to transcend them by seeking enlightenment (spirituality)? Do we work with our story or drop our story?

Most spiritual traditions are rooted in pre-modern schemas that see dysfunction as a spiritual problem, whether possession by evil spirits or a separation from God. Even a non-theistic religion like Buddhism perceives the manifest world as a fallen and corrupt place that is to be transcended (and in more advanced Buddhist thought, re-embraced) through meditation.

Psychotherapy, on the other hand, works with the circumstances of our lives, and we are encouraged to look deeply into our own dramas and traumas, and even to re-experience them in the controlled psychotherapeutic container created with the therapist.

Anyone who has practiced both systems can see the value of each, yet their trusted guides, the spiritual teachers and psychotherapists, often deny the veracity of the other approach.

The integral solution, as you might expect, is to find the “piece of the truth” revealed by both spiritual practice and psychotherapy, to map the territories that each inhabit (and the territories they don’t), and to work with both in an integrated and harmonized way. That way the benefits are multiplied.

I know of no more qualified (and stimulating!) guide to this endeavor than Keith Witt. Check out our conversation below, as well as an essay Keith wrote on the topic.

For more from Keith, see his website drkeithwitt.com.

Dr. Keith Witt is one of my favorite conversation partners. He has been an integral enthusiast for decades, and a practicing psychotherapist in Santa Barbara for nearly 40 years, conducting over 50,000 therapeutic sessions. In other words he knows the human animal up close and personal.In this audio conversation, recorded earlier this morning, we talk about some of the textures and markers of integral consciousness. Get more of Keith’s expertise and insight at drkeithwitt.com.

JEFF: One technique you use as a therapist is simply to keep the conversation going. I love that. And two, to be in a dialectic with people. Describe that.

KEITH: In a dialectic, two people are pursuing truth, observing themselves observing truth, and interested in receiving influence and giving influence. This particular form of relationship generates wisdom.

I want everybody I work with to be abnormally loving, abnormally happy. I want them to be developing abnormally fast. My job is to accelerate those processes. To do that I start by inhabiting a second tier space and inviting them into it through a dialectic.

JEFF: Just keeping the conversation going. In this moment I’m just realizing the power of that…

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As I write this posting I can’t help but remember an incident that happened a couple decades ago when I was working with W. Scott Peck, the author of The Road Less Traveled, one of the most popular spiritual books of the era (13 years on the NYTimes best-seller list). We became good friends over time, and I remember him once asking me “what is the profession that you would most hate to be a member of?” My answer was easy: “TV preacher,” a group of cringe-inducing hucksters who I saw as the lowest of the low.

He looked back at me, took a drag on his ever-present cigarette and replied, “then that is what you shall become.”

And so I kinda have, albeit the internet variety, spreading the good news not of Jesus Christ (not exclusively at least), but of Emergence Itself, the upward draft of life, the procreant urge of the world, as Whitman wrote.

Here’s an audio of a sermon (oh God, really?) I presented for a group on a recent Sunday morning at the Integral Center here in Boulder. It’s a basic overview of how evolutionary theory is able to integrate essentially all human spiritual paths into a larger embrace where each can be appreciated for the gifts it brings. This is the theory behind a new, indigenous form of integral spiritual lineage. The actual practice of this lineage is currently under construction by path-breaking spiritual teachers all over the planet.

Interested in a little integral evangelism? Have a listen…

Fox News has itself been making news the last week or so. First was the report that their ratings have fallen, part of a two-year slide. Then a couple days ago Public Policy Polling released data showing that viewer trust in Fox News has fallen to an all-time low, down 8% in two years.

This slide has been no doubt exacerbated by Fox News’ “in-the-bubble” coverage of the presidential election (culminating in the surreal, and now infamous, election night scene of Karl Rove playing the role of Republican Baghdad Bob in his refusal to believe the results coming in from Ohio).

I recorded a few thoughts about Fox News and the evolving role they play in American tribal politics and culture wars. Audio is posted below…

How do we wrap our heads around the idea of progress when there is still so much suffering in the world and so much obviously wrong?  We look around and see the violence in the Middle East, the rising of the oceans, the precariousness of our economic systems, the hypocrisy of politics, not to mention extreme weather, epidemics and Honey Boo Boo — the list of things to worry about is long and scary.

This is progress?

My thesis, of course, is yes and it has stimulated many terrific conversations with evolutionary-minded people. One of them is Jeremy Johnson, a reader of the Daily Evolver out of new New York. As founder of the blog Evolutionary Landcapes, and having just finished up a degree in consciousness studies at Goddard College, Jeremy is a worthy conversation partner, so … we decided to tape a discussion we had on the topic of progress and share it with you here.

With everything in flux on multiple global fronts, including events in the Middle East, the budget debate in the US, and the frenzied antics of Charlie Sheen, the continuing nuclear crisis story in Japan seems to have been pushed off the front page. We wanted to be sure not to drop the ball on this tremendously important story, so David and I take a look at how an Integral perspective can help us make sense of the ongoing aftermath of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis.

Here we discuss:

So what do you think? How does an Integral perspective help you sort out your own reaction to and relationship with what we have been seeing in Japan over the past several weeks? Let us know in the comments below!