The Daily Evolver

This week, a gem from the archives: an early talk between Jeff and Dr. Keith Witt–part of a series that eventually became The Shrink and The Pundit. Dr. Keith Witt 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 psychotherapy and spirituality, the two major approaches to human development? It’s a topic that causes so much confusion and consternation among seekers of higher consciousness. Spiritual teachers and psychotherapists are often at 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. A lot of spiritual teachers, because they deal so much in metaphor, begin to think you can transcend biology, like giving up all critical judgment and stuff like that. No, we can’t give up all critical judgment, because human nervous systems are making critical judgments regularly. But we can alter the way we habitually process them, and that’s spiritual growth. ~Dr. Keith Witt 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 Dr. Keith Witt. Check out our conversation below, as well as an essay Keith wrote on the topic.

This week we’re bringing you an episode from the archives: Jeff’s conversation with Charles Eisenstein, visionary, activist, and author of the books Sacred Economics, The Ascent of Humanity, and The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible (love that title). Charles and Jeff agree on a lot, including that a sacred world is coming and that humanity is on an ascending path. They disagree on how we got here, and that disagreement captures the difference between even leading edge progressive thinking and an integral, evolutionary perspective. Did humanity go wrong, and do we have to fix it? Or are we just growing up?

In the following excerpt Jeff asks Ken Wilber a question about magical thinking vs real psychic phenomena. Whether we’re talking about near-death experiences, precognitive dreams, telepathic communication, bizarre synchronicities…they all defy materialistic explanation, and yet they also seem to communicate deep truth and meaning. What are we to make of this when science says no, but we intuit that something more is going on here? Listen to this clip of Ken Wilber as he clarifies the difference between pre-rational magic and trans-rational subtle energies, and what he refers to as “the realm of transformation.”

Elegance is the word that author and coach Rob McNamara uses to refer to the experience of higher, post-autonomous stages of development, or what we might call integral consciousness. Listen as he talks to Jeff about embodying elegance in life, love and leadership.   Rob stopped by a couple months ago to catch up with Jeff and tell Daily Evolver listeners about a leadership course he produced with Ten Directions called Commanding Influence. Full disclosure: Rob has alternately been my professor, trainer, therapist, sangha brother and friend over the years, and sometimes all of those things at once. I’ve experienced Rob’s loving guidance firsthand so I wasn’t surprised to find out that his conversation with Jeff went from interview to therapy session about halfway through! In Rob’s own words, the overarching purpose and trajectory of his life has been “inspiring and facilitating…and demanding more elegance in the world.” Elegance is his way of describing higher stages of development, such as Kegan’s “Self-transforming Mind” (which many of us loosely refer to as “integral” and roughly corresponds to teal/turquoise in Ken Wilber’s altitudes of development–yellow in Spiral Dynamics). Rob’s book, The Elegant Self, never explicitly defines elegance. It’s a finger pointing to the moon. That’s partly because elegance evades a fixed meaning in a developmental sense, and partly because research has demonstrated that purely conceptual narratives about development can erode happiness and well-being in the long term. So Rob shies away from conceptual teachings in favor of embodiment. Whether it’s a world-class athlete or a powerful executive, his coaching is meant to bring about a felt sense of these post-autonomous stages just beyond our habituated ways of constructing meaning. There’s a bouyancy and a vibrance that is always holding us if we can get outside of the steel trap of our more autonomous mind. ~Rob McNamara Rob is the coach’s coach. Listen as he explicates some of the core features that allow elegance to emerge in your life and relationships, and helps Jeff embrace life on the other side of laziness.

Theo Horesh is a Boulder social entrepreneur, philosopher and a familiar face in the integral community. Last year Theo published a series of insightful essays on the Middle East, inspired by his time spent with the Palestinians and the Yazidi refugees. I invited him over to talk about his travels, only to find out that he has also released a new book on a broader topic: Convergence: The Globalization of Mind. I enjoyed our conversation, and hope you do, too. Theo and I talked about his travels, and his heart-to-heart connections with people under siege, particularly with the youth in whom he finds much to admire. We talked about how these kinds of connections — in both real space and virtual space — can bring on a more worldcentric mind for all involved. Excerpt: If you see more you’ve got to be responsible for more There are many examples of how this is already happening—the internet, international agreements and cooperation, travel and communication. But in a world where entire cultures span multiple levels of development, gaining consensus about what we can create, and how, can be a tricky proposition. The feeling of being overwhelmed is prevalent, as first tier structures of consciousness are mostly motivated by fear. How does integral theory transcend this thinking, and help us think about these vastly complex systems? Listen as Theo discusses how each of us can call forth a worldcentric mind, so we can be a more awake and effective as we become more plugged-in and connected. Global consciousness did not simply arise from seeing the world from outer space or from some mass of the population attaining certain spiritual states. It has taken a long process of social evolution, which has been supported by a wide array of institutional and technological developments, to produce global consciousness. Like the nationalism of the 20th century, it is a consciousness suited to a new form of human organization. We are globally conscious because global consciousness is needed to comprehend the world in which we reside. Without it we would be lost in spaciousness. ~From “Convergence: The Globalization of Mind” by Theo Horesh

The willingness to look at the parts of ourselves that we can’t see -- or don’t want to see -- is a major milestone on the path of self-actualization. In this episode of The Shrink & The Pundit, Dr. Keith Witt tells us that the difference between a destructive shadow and a constructive shadow is our willingness to engage with it. So how do we do that?

Whether they’ve been closeted or out, oppressed or honored, Raymond Rigoglioso wants us to know that gay men are, and have always been, a powerful evolutionary force in society--with distinct gifts to offer the world. But with so much assimilation in recent decades, is there a future for gay male culture?

The Information Age is putting our evolution into overdrive, and you can see it throughout the ever-growing spectrum of worldwide popular culture. Free university classes, science blogs and TED Talks may represent the high end of what’s available, but this week Jeff looks in less obvious places.

In this podcast, Jeff looks at our relationship to the natural world and explores the significant new thinking around climate change and other environmental issues. He focuses on “An Ecomodernist Manifesto”, the newly released 25-page essay co-authored by 18 environmental scientists, activists, and scholars.

Jeff talks about integral activism with Justin Miles, founder of the Miles Center for Integral Living in Baltimore. Justin is a former member of the Black Panther party, Buddhist meditation teacher, and therapist. Jeff also looks at the role of cynicism in our political discourse, and takes a couple questions from listeners.