The Liminal Learning Portal

Now there is a way to not just think Integrally, but to embody an Integral worldview in your everyday life.

Integral Life Practice is not just a new approach to self-development and higher awareness, but a way of making sense of—and making best use of—the existing treasure trove of insights, methods, and practices for cultivating a more enlightened life. It offers a uniquely adaptive approach to awakened living that’s suitable for everyone: people with busy careers and families, college students, retirees, even hardcore athletes and yogis. It’s geared for devout—and irreverent—people of any religion, or no religion!

This highly flexible system will help you develop your physical health, spiritual awareness, emotional balance, mental clarity, relational joy, and energy level, within a framework that integrates all aspects of your life. Combining original exercises, vivid examples, cutting-edge theory, and illustrative graphics, Integral Life Practice is the ultimate handbook for realizing freedom and fullness in the 21st century.

For more information, visit www.Integral-Life-Practice.com.

The integral worldview represents the next crucial step in the development of our civilization. Through its enlarged understanding of the evolution of consciousness and culture, the emerging perspective known as integral consciousness provides realistic and pragmatic solutions to our growing global problems, both environmental and political. As McIntosh convincingly demonstrates, the integral worldview’s transformational potential provides a way to literally become the change we want to see in the world. This is really two books in one: the first half serves as an accessible and highly readable introduction to the power of integral consciousness, with the second half making a variety of original contributions to the integral perspective and breaking new ground in the application of integral philosophy to politics and spirituality. Moreover, McIntosh provides a much-needed contextualization and critique of the integral worldview’s leading author, Ken Wilber, which helps make integral philosophy relevant to a larger audience.

In the current era of increasing planetary interconnectedness, ecological theories and practices are called to become more inclusive, complex, and comprehensive. The diverse contributions to this book offer a range of integral approaches to ecology that cross the boundaries of the humanities and sciences and help us understand and respond to today’s ecological challenges. The contributors provide detailed analyses of assorted integral ecologies, drawing on such founding figures and precursors as Thomas Berry, Leonardo Boff, Holmes Rolston III, Ken Wilber, and Edgar Morin. Also included is research across the social sciences, biophysical sciences, and humanities discussing multiple worldviews and perspectives related to integral ecologies. The Variety of Integral Ecologies is both an accessible guide and an advanced supplement to the growing research for a more comprehensive understanding of ecological issues and the development of a peaceful, just, and sustainable planetary civilization.

With grand, inclusive theories of psychology such as Freud’s now largely discredited, psychological enquiry is focused more narrowly and empirically. This book aims to change the status quo and offer a new, redefining and unified theory of psychology.

From a review by Herb Gintis, Santa Fe Institute and Central European University:

“Like sociology and anthropology, psychology is defined by incompatible competing schools of thought and cannot be considered a mature science, because there is no sense in which each generation of researchers builds upon the core analytical insights of previous generations of researchers… This book is written for clinical and research psychologists, and hence avoids the sort of mathematical model building and axiomatization that is characteristic of mature sciences… Henriques notes that it is almost impossible to define contemporary psychology because many psychologists consider psychology to be a theory of the workings of the mind, while others deny the notion of “mind” altogether, and limit themselves to modelling observed behavior. For this reason, Henriques takes his first goal to be that of “locating” the field ontologically. He argues that there is a Tree of Knowledge with four segments. The first is “Matter,” which is studied by physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy. The second is “Life,” studied by biology. The third is “Mind,” which is the subject matter of psychology, and the fourth, and highest, is “Culture,” studied by the social sciences. “

From a review by Daniel B. Fishman, Professor, Rutgers University

“The field of psychology is known for its paradoxical combination of sweeping scope and impressive micro-theories, on the one hand, and fragmentation and internecine squabbling, on the other. To this state of affairs, any serious effort to provide integration and unity within psychological knowledge and understanding is heartily welcomed. And Henriques’ effort in this regard is not only serious, but one of the most cogent, scholarly, sophisticated, beautifully reasoned, clearly articulated, and accessibly written presentations of a unified theory in psychology that I have seen in my 50 years in the discipline.”

A pop-culture presentation of the Integral Approach from visionary genius Ken Wilber, designed as an easy introduction to his work.

What if we attempted to create an all-inclusive map that touches the most important factors from all of the world’s great traditions? Using all the known systems and models of human growth—from the ancient sages to the latest breakthroughs in cognitive science—Ken Wilber distills their major components into five simple elements, ones that readers can relate to their own experience right now. With clear explanations, practical exercises, and familiar examples, The Integral Vision invites readers to share in the innovative approach to spiritual growth, business success, and personal relationships.

This book has been adapted from the 2009 graphic edition

Publisher’s description:
A concise, comprehensive overview of Wilber’s revolutionary thought and its application in today’s world. In A Theory of Everything, Wilber uses clear, nontechnical language to present complex, cutting-edge theories that integrate the realms of body, mind, soul, and spirit. He then demonstrates how these theories and models can be applied to real-world problems in areas such as politics, medicine, business, education, and the environment. Wilber also discusses daily practises that readers take up in order to apply this integrative vision to their own everyday lives.

Social Justice and Educational Measurement addresses foundational concerns at the interface of standardized testing and social justice in American schools. Following John Rawls’s philosophical methods, Stein builds and justifies an ethical framework for guiding practises involving educational measurement. This framework demonstrates that educational measurement can both inhibit and ensure just educational arrangements. It also clarifies a principled distinction between efficiency-oriented testing and justice-oriented testing.

Through analysis of several historical case studies that exemplify ethical issues related to testing, this book explores and propounds speculative design principles and arguments in favour of radically democratic school reforms, which address how the future of testing might be shaped to ensure justice for all. These case studies cover the widespread use of IQ-style testing in schools during the early decades of the 20th century; the founding of the Educational Testing Service; and the recent history of test-based accountability associated with No Child Left Behind.

Social Justice and Educational Measurement will be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in education, testing and assessment, and the philosophy of education. It will also be of interest to policymakers and educational administrators.

Why is the gap so great between our hopes, our intentions, even our decisions-and what we are actually able to bring about? Even when we are able to make important changes-in our own lives or the groups we lead at work-why are the changes are so frequently short-lived and we are soon back to business as usual? What can we do to transform this troubling reality?

In this intensely practical book, Harvard psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey take us on a carefully guided journey designed to help us answer these very questions. And not just generally, or in the abstract. They help each of us arrive at our own particular answers that can solve the puzzling gap between what we intend and what we are able to accomplish. How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work provides you with the tools to create a powerful new build-it-yourself mental technology.

Transformational Weight Loss describes an alternative to the treadmill of self-denial, self-control, and dieting. It begins with the insight that if trying hard didn’t work, trying harder is doing more of what doesn’t work. There are very few guidelines about what to eat and not to eat in this book. Instead, it presents a whole new way of eating, a new way of seeing food, exercise, and the body. Revolutionary, it also strikes a deep chord of common sense. Among thousands of diet and nutrition books on the market today, this book is a profoundly new voice, especially for anyone ready to transform the condition of obesity and all the mental, emotional, and spiritual conditions that go along with it.

Underlying the vision behind democracy is the recognition that every individual has dignity, adequacy and worth. This democratic understanding of the worth and standing of the individual lies at the core of what the West calls enlightenment. The Western idea of enlightenment, rooted in the great vision of the Biblical prophets, is generally understood to have entered mainstream consciousness through the political democratic movements of the mid 18th century. Western enlightenment is primarily concerned with the democratization of political power. Classical enlightenment, sometimes called Eastern enlightenment because it was greatly emphasized in the East, is about the individual merging into the greater one. The appearance of a separate self is an illusion, which must be overcome as the individual realizes that one is really not separate at all but part of the one. The goal of Eastern enlightenment is moving beyond the grasping ego and desperately seeking separate self by attaining a state of consciousness in which the illusion of separateness was dissolved in the greater one. This path of classical enlightenment is seen as the path beyond suffering. Unique Self-enlightenment brings the Eastern and Western understandings about enlightenment together, into a higher Integral World Spirituality embrace. Unique Self-enlightenment is based on your commitment to transcend separate self into the one, even as you realize that that essence sees through your unique perspective. Unique Self opens the door to the potential democratization of enlightenment. To awaken to Your Unique Self is to be lived as God, which, in truth, means to be lived as love.

Using the designing and building of The Clock of the Long Now as a framework, this is a book about the practical use of long time perspective: how to get it, how to use it, how to keep it in and out of sight. Here are the central questions it inspires: How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare? Discipline in thought allows freedom. One needs the space and reliability to predict continuity to have the confidence not to be afraid of revolutions Taking the time to think of the future is more essential now than ever, as culture accelerates beyond its ability to be measured Probable things are vastly outnumbered by countless near-impossible eventualities. Reality is statistically forced to be extraordinary; fiction is not allowed this freedom This is a potent book that combines the chronicling of fantastic technology with equally visionary philosophical inquiry.

Two major works have been written within the framework of Integral Wisdom about the nature of Self and God. While they share important features, namely the evolutionary context of the conversation and a vision of Self beyond Ego, their interior visions of the quality of the Self beyond Ego are profoundly different. Both of these visions of Self-or key dimensions of the two versions-have been adopted, directly and indirectly by many spiritual teachers. In Self in Integral Evolutionary Mysticism – a clear and compelling work – Marc Gafni articulates the two models, their shared features, their differences and why-as we seek to articulate an Integral Wisdom-these differences matter so desperately.

None of the four old philosophies about sex is sufficient to inspire us or even hold us in our sexuality. Sex is not merely negative or positive. Sex is not just neutral, nor is it merely sacred because it creates babies.

Erotic Mystics from the hidden tradition of Solomon’s temple taught a secret doctrine. Sex is the source of all wisdom. Sex is an expression of the erotic impulse of existence itself alive in us-the yearning for contact, pleasure, and aliveness. The Sexual, however, is not the sum total of the erotic. Rather, the sexual models the Erotic. The sexual teaches us how to live an Erotic life in all dimension of our existence.

It is these secret doctrines that were later taught by Mary Magdalene and that sparked excitement around bestselling novels such as The Da Vinci Code.

Deep understanding of the sexual becomes the portal to accessing aliveness in every dimension of our reality. This realization demands that you live sexually without shame and shows you how to re-eroticize all areas of your life.

A Return to Eros reveals the radical secret tenets of relationship between the sexual, the erotic, and the holy. They reveal what Eros actually means and share the ten core qualities of the Erotic, which are modelled by the sexual. These include being on the inside, the fullness of presence, yearning, allurement, fantasy, surrender, creativity, pleasure, and more.

The debate over whether the Net is good or bad for us fills the airwaves and the blogosphere. But for all the heat of claim and counter-claim, the argument is essentially beside the point: It’s here; it’s everywhere. The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it? “Choose the former,” writes Rushkoff, “and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.”

In ten chapters, composed of ten “commands” accompanied by original illustrations from comic artist Leland Purvis, in Program or Be Programmed, Rushkoff provides cyber enthusiasts and technophobes alike with the guidelines to navigate this new universe.

In this spirited, accessible poetics of new media, Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off, helping readers come to recognize programming as the new literacy of the digital age––and as a template through which to see beyond social conventions and power structures that have vexed us for centuries. This is a friendly little book with a big and actionable message.

In most organizations nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for—namely, covering their weaknesses, trying to look their best, and managing other people’s impressions of them. There may be no greater waste of a company’s resources. The ultimate cost: neither the organization nor its people are able to realize their full potential.

What if a company did everything in its power to create a culture in which everyone—not just select “high potentials”—could overcome their own internal barriers to change and use errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth?

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey (and their collaborators) have found and studied such companies—Deliberately Developmental Organizations. A DDO is organized around the simple but radical conviction that organizations will best prosper when they are more deeply aligned with people’s strongest motive, which is to grow. This means going beyond consigning “people development” to high-potential programs, executive coaching, or once-a-year off-sites. It means fashioning an organizational culture in which support of people’s development is woven into the daily fabric of working life and the company’s regular operations, daily routines, and conversations.

Publisher’s Description:
In this tour de force of scholarship and vision, Ken Wilber traces the course of evolution from matter to life to mind and describes the common patterns that evolution takes in all three of these domains. From the emergence of mind, he traces the evolution of human consciousness through its major stages of growth and development. He particularly focuses on modernity and postmodernity: what they mean; how they impact gender issues, psychotherapy, ecological concerns, and various liberation movements; and how the modern and postmodern world conceives of Spirit. This second edition features forty pages of new material, new diagrams, and extensively revised notes.

With his first groundbreaking book Soul Prints, Dr. Marc Gafni taught readers how to tread a lifelong path of meaning by realizing their Unique Selves. Now, in The Mystery of Love, the profound philosopher and beloved spiritual teacher invites readers to the next step on the journey, addressing with passion, wisdom, and genuine humility the all-important issues of love, creativity, and our erotic connection to the universe. 

Everything Is Workable uses mindfulness to work with and resolve the inevitable interpersonal conflicts that arise in all areas of life.

Conflict is going to be part of your life—as long as you have relationships, hold down a job, or have dry cleaning to be picked up. Bracing yourself against it won’t make it go away, but if you approach it consciously, you can navigate it in a way that not only honors everyone involved but makes it a source of deep insight as well. Seasoned mediator Diane Hamilton provides the skill set you need to engage conflict with wisdom and compassion, and even—sometimes—to be grateful for it. She teaches how to:

• Cultivate the mirror-like quality of attention as your base
• Identify the three personal conflict styles and determine which one you fall into
• Recognize the three fundamental perspectives in any conflict situation and learn to inhabit each of them
• Turn conflicts in families, at work, and in every kind of interpersonal relationship into win-win situations

This is a collection of essays, reflections and poems by Nora Bateson, the noted research designer, film-maker, writer and lecturer. She is the daughter of Gregory Bateson and president of the International Bateson Institute (IBI). Building on Gregory Bateson’s famous book Towards an Ecology of Mind and her own film on the subject, Nora Bateson here updates our thinking on systems and ecosystems, applying her own insights and those of her team at IBI to education, organisations, complexity, academia, and the way that society organizes itself. She also introduces the term symmathesy to describe the contextual mutual learning through interaction that takes place in living entities at larger or smaller scales. While she retains her father’s rigorous attention to definition, observation and academic precision, she also moves well beyond that frame of reference to incorporate more embodied ways of knowing and understanding. These are reflected in her essays and poems on food, Christmas, love, honesty, environmentalism and leadership. [Subject: Systems thinking, education, social anthropology, environmentalism, Bateson, symmathesy]

Flipping the script on climate change, Eisenstein makes a case for a wholesale reimagining of the framing, tactics, and goals we employ in our journey to heal from ecological destruction.

With research and insight, Charles Eisenstein details how the quantification of the natural world leads to a lack of integration and our “fight” mentality. With an entire chapter unpacking the climate change denier’s point of view, he advocates for expanding our exclusive focus on carbon emissions to see the broader picture beyond our short-sighted and incomplete approach. The rivers, forests, and creatures of the natural and material world are sacred and valuable in their own right, not simply for carbon credits or preventing the extinction of one species versus another. After all, when you ask someone why they first became an environmentalist, they’re likely to point to the river they played in, the ocean they visited, the wild animals they observed, or the trees they climbed when they were a kid. This refocusing away from impending catastrophe and our inevitable doom cultivates meaningful emotional and psychological connections and provides real, actionable steps to caring for the earth. Freeing ourselves from a war mentality and seeing the bigger picture of how everything from prison reform to saving the whales can contribute to our planetary ecological health, we resist reflexive postures of solution and blame and reach toward the deep place where commitment lives.

Technological development, climate change and globalization are challenging the national institutions and modes of governance we created during the industrial era. Our old knowledge and general understanding of the world do not provide sufficient answers anymore. In order to maintain meaningful lives, social calm and liberal democracy, we need to upgrade our meaning-making to match the complexity of the world we are creating. Metamodernity is an alternative to both modernity and postmodernism, a cultural code that presents itself as an opportunity if we work deliberately towards it. Metamodernity provides us with a framework for understanding ourselves and our societies in a much more complex way. It contains both indigenous, premodern, modern, and postmodern cultural elements and thus provides social norms and a moral fabric for intimacy, spirituality, religion, science, and self-exploration, all at the same time. It is a way of strengthening local, national, continental, and global cultural heritage among all and thus has the potential to dismantle the fear of losing one’s culture as the economy as well as the internet and exponential technologies are disrupting our current modes of societal organization and governance. Metamodernity will thus allow us to be meaning-making at a deeper emotional level and a higher intellectual level compared to today; it will allow us more complex understanding, which may match the complexity of the problems we need to solve. Appropriate meaning-making is the best prevention against the frustrations that generally lead to authoritarian ideologies and societal instability. Using metamodernity as the filter through which we see the world and as a template, we can create, among other things, new and appropriate education, politics and institutions for our societies of the 21st century. A vision such as this may even give hope.

We are on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential transformation of human civilization in history, a transformation every bit as significant as the move from foraging to cities and agriculture 10,000 years ago. During the 2020s, key technologies will converge to completely disrupt the five foundational sectors that underpin the global economy, and with them every major industry in the world today. In information, energy, food, transportation, and materials, costs will fall by a 10x or more, while production processes an order of magnitude more efficient will use 90% fewer natural resources with 10x-100x less waste. The knock-on effects for society will be as profound as the extraordinary possibilities that emerge. For the first time in history, we could overcome poverty easily. Access to all our basic needs could become a fundamental human right. But this is just one future outcome. The alternative could see our civilization collapse into a new dark age. Which path we take depends on the choices we make, starting today. The stakes could not be higher.

In the 21st century we face innumerable material and existential challenges both now and in the future, from religious fanaticism, mass migration, unfettered corporate power, to inequality, big data and climate change. Ahead of these global threats and tragedies is a common barrier to their solution—it is the spirit that has defined the age we live in: competition. The Simultaneous Policy Solution, the ‘SIMPOL Solution’ shows us how we must all come to terms with the crippling effect of global competition. Only through simultaneous action, through cooperation, can we overcome these problems.