Listen to Arthur!

This week's dialogue on ISC is between Ken and our dear Arthur (adastra). Listen to them chat about Shadow and two kinds of fear. There might be coming more next week, so stay tuned!

For now, if you have any comments feel free to post them below….


peace
pelle

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

hi pelle,

for those of us who aren't logged in, could you give a brief overview?

thanks,

nicole

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Hi Nicole,

Arthur has let me know that he possibly might be posting a transcript, but that takes quite some time to do…

So hopefully something will appear here down the line….
If not, then I can do a brief summary in a few days.

peace
pelle

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

thanks! i know arthur's busy… and i'm sure you are too, so if/when you have time.

nicole

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Pelle: Arthur has let me know that he possibly might be posting a transcript, but that takes quite some time to do…

~~~~~

D'oh! - so much for the element of surprise!  :P  (I've been trying to avoid the syndrome of overpromising and underdelivering hehehe.)  In any case, yes, I am slowly working on a transcript.  Doing the Ken Wilber: Idiot Savant or Just an Idiot? and Integral Shamanism transcripts has given me an appreciation of how much time and effort goes into the process (and also of the art of massaging spoken discourse into a form that reads well).  However, it can be fun when the subject at hand is interesting - and what could be more interesting than listening to myself speak?  lol  Anyway, don't expect it to be finished in the doubleplus-ultra-near future; I've got rather a lot on my plate at the mo'.

spiral on, you qwazy diamonds,
arthur

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

I finally listened to both these calls. They were great -everything you guys siad they would be and more.

And nice to finally hear some authentic r.thor voice audio. My imagination will now be attempting the adjustment. :-)

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Actually, his voice in person is stronger and richer. It might be the fact that I was actually listening in on the other line, but his vice sounds very quiet.

My personal favorite is when Ken got kinda lost and Arthur reminded him of the original question. Pricelessly agentic of my sweet baboo. (Oops. Outside voice.)

Anyway, there was a lot of stuff in there, wasn't there? It bears listening to more than once.

Liz

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Liz:
Actually, his voice in person is stronger and richer. It might be the fact that I was actually listening in on the other line, but his vice sounds very quiet.

Ah, that makes sense. He sounds a bit timid in the recordings; this in contrast to how he appears through his posts :)

I listened to the first recording twice, will listen to the other one soon. Also patiently awaiting the transcript. Great stuff indeed!

Peter

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Glad you liked the talk, Tim.  :)

Here is a transcript the first part of my ISC talk with Ken on the conference call for Chapter Six of Integral Spirituality, lightly edited for clarity and flow.  I'm planning to do a transcript of the second part eventually, but I probably won't even start that project until July - so if you like this part I highly recommend you subscribe to ISC so you can hear part two.  :)  (Well, you should subscribe anyway because there's lots of other great stuff there.)

~~~~~

Ken Wilber: How are you, buddy?

Arthur Gillard: Good, good. How are you doing?

Ken: Yeah, good, good - we're bouncing right along here. So, well let's go into some of the “shadow stuff of the shadow stuff”. You want to maybe read your questions? Because they're all really good.

Arthur: OK. First question: Although it may be a good introductory process to work with the shadow, do you think that the 3-2-1 process might be too superficial - specifically too cognitive or intellectually focused to really do deep shadow work? In working with linguistic manipulations - for example saying or writing in words the different perspectives - we may not get to the problem in a very deep way. We may even think we have dealt with the shadow because we've talked about it or around it, but the shadow may remain in place or assume different forms.

Ken: Yeah, we covered some of this tangentially last time, and the two things you have to remember about the way we present the 3-2-1 shadow work process - and that is that it's just first grade, I mean it's just a very introductory piece. What we're actually trying to do is find a way - in a sense it's sort of like Big Mind process with Genpo; Genpo found a way that, really in about an hour you can have an authentic and very genuine satori experience, whereas normally that would take you about five years. And it's the same with 3-2-1 process; in about fifteen minutes to a half hour we can get people very much in touch with some of their shadow stuff - but that doesn't mean that therefore that's it. With Big Mind process, for example, you have to really get into it, you've got to plan on five years at least practicing it, and practicing it with a teacher like Genpo. It's the same thing with 3-2-1 work - it's meant to give a very authentic, very real, sometimes very profound experience of one's shadow, and certainly help one spot it. And I'm not sure which - there are many different teachers of it, and different ones give different emphasis to it - but the process is that you're supposed to find it, face it. “Talk to it” just means that's the way you start - it's to get you to actually confront the thing and start to take its perspective. But you're supposed to not just talk to it, you're supposed to feel it; and the depth of the shadow work, its effectiveness, is how deeply you feel it. Obviously if you're just sort of chatting about it, that can be of course used to defend against it. So basically I say that it's find it, face it, talk to it - means resonate with it - and then feel it, be it; you feel it by being it and you be it by feeling it. So that's the measure of whether it's succeeded or not.

And then as for it being introductory, yeah it's just first grade - and a lot of people blame first grade for not being college, and that's just kind of silly. I would say that for people shadow work, even if really effective stuff like 3-2-1 to get you started, you're really talking at least six months working with a teacher usually to really get into that, although you can do an enormous amount on your own if you are serious about it by using 3-2-1. But the whole point about repression and a blind spot is that you really can't see what you can't see; and repression is just dedicated to finding clever ways for you to continue not seeing it. That's sort of the whole point; if it was easy, nobody would have a shadow hardly. But really, really repressed material is really down there.

One of the things that's great about shadow work is it doesn't just have you say, feel into your feelings, get in touch with feelings, how do you feel about it, etc. It actually takes the opposite of how you feel and says “OK, feel that.” Because that's pretty much what your shadow is, is the opposite of what you're consciously aware of. So as I say, using the monster example again, if you are out of touch with your aggression, your anger - and, incidentally, for Buddhists to say, “well, you're never supposed to feel anger,” the point it, well, if you're unconsciously feeling it, you have to consciously feel it first, and then you can try to transcend it or transmute it - but for you to just go around saying, “I'm not going to feel anger now,” that just seals your repression. So the worst possible thing you can do if you have repressed negatives like anger or aggression is to get caught up in one of those practices that say that aggression is the root of all evil because your shadow loves that kind of stuff.

So what you do then is: the monster shows up in your dream, your projected anger shows up in your dream as this monster that's trying to attack you, and what you feel is fear; so we don't say get in touch with your fear - I mean you can if you want to, but it's an inauthentic emotion. [laughs] We say identify with the monster, feel the monster, now what does the monster want to say? The monster is not afraid of you, I assure you. [laughs] You're not going to feel fear, you're going to feel, “I hate you so much I want to kill you” or “I'm so angry at you I could rip your head off” or something like that. So that's the way that you can - to some degree, on your own, and at least as a sort of introduction/initiation into it - you can get a sense of your shadow, because it's really helping you feel almost the opposite of what you think you're feeling. Like I say, just feeling your feelings and getting in touch with your feelings and all that, that won't get you in touch with your shadow, because your shadow is the opposite of what you feel, and that's just a pretty good definition of what the shadow is - the opposite of what you're consciously feeling.

So for all those reasons it's just what it does and again, much like Big Mind, you can just do it initially and get in touch with it but you're going to need to deepen it. And what we do also is if we're really doing any sort of overall unconscious work, then we also recommend equivalent things, like psychodrama is one example where you really are extending your capacity to take roles of other feelings and perspectives and identify with those, and we really like bioenergetic work and that sort of accompanies this so there's a whole lot of stuff that we would do. But the amazing thing about the 3-2-1 process is that really in about 15 or 20 minutes you can nail parts of your shadow and really get that they're there and that's one of the reasons it can be very useful.

Arthur: Hmm. OK.

Ken: OK?

Arthur: It seems like it can be kind of hard, if you feel fear of something it can be difficult to tell what exactly it is you're feeling afraid of. You know what I mean? If it's a monster in a dream you can tell maybe what the characteristics of the monster are, but I've had this weird experience where it feels like I may be on the [verge] of some sort of spiritual, causal or nondual state, and I have a kind of undifferentiated dread and I recoil, and whatever it is I'm on the verge of going into, I push that away. So how would you…

Ken: Well, that's probably not your shadow - you're just getting in touch with the primary mood of the separate self, and the self-contraction just is a feeling of suffering and a feeling of fear, that's just sort of all it is; and so there's no specific shadow content to that. If you're just on the verge of entering a causal or a nondual state the fear is just fear of dying, it's just fear of death. It's with specific content elements that the shadow 3-2-1 process is meant to work, but there are all sorts of other negative emotions and so on that don't really have this specific type of shadow content, and so 3-2-1 wasn't meant to cover those and wouldn't cover that.

Arthur: Sure, OK. Well, just as an aside though, how would you recommend dealing with something like that?

Ken: Dealing with the fear?

Arthur: Yeah, that kind of fear.

Ken: A couple of things. One is - and it also just depends on whether you're working with a teacher or a therapeutic pal or whether you're kind of doing it on your own - but the standard rule for any of these negative feelings is to first give awareness to the resistance to feeling the negative feeling, and then give attention to the feeling. So if it is that you might start by just - do you have a meditation practice? Let me ask that first.

Arthur: Um… [nervous, self-deprecating laughter]

Ken: That's OK! I mean, just…

Arthur: Sometimes, yeah, I…it's something that sort of comes and goes. Lately what I've been doing is some counting breath meditation when I go to bed and when I wake up in the morning.

Ken: OK.

Arthur: But at various times, like I've done Vipassana for periods of time and I've done…

Ken: So you did do Vipassana?

Arthur: Yeah, I've done a couple of 10-day retreats and I've…

Ken: OK, well that's good because I think in this regard, in any event, I pretty strongly agree with the Nyingmapas that in the nine jnana system, the nine vehicle system, or the nine levels of practice or stages of practice, that the foundational one is really Vipassana/Shamatha, because it's just such a fundamental practice of training the mind; and you really do have to be able to concentrate, you have to be able to reach what's called “access concentration,” which more-or-less means being able to keep your mind on an object for 5 minutes without totally losing it. And so counting breaths is certainly one way to develop that, and if you've also done ten-day retreats in Vipassana then you've trained the capacity for simple awareness and that's a really foundational practice.

So the two things that you want to work with when you feel this sort of non-differentiated dread is first of all that's gold - it's not something that you want to get rid of, it's something that sort of holds the whole secret. So first there might be some resistance, so you want to just be aware of or just feel into the resistance you would have - and often if the negative emotion is fear, then it all just runs into the same thing: my resistance is fear and I'm afraid of fear, so that's what I'm afraid of. [both laugh] It just sort of gets circled around on itself. But you want to just breathe into and whole-bodily feel fear, and you might actually get a kind of a paradoxical intention going by saying I'm going to at least attempt to really, really increase this fear. And for the next five minutes or so I don't want to let go of this fear, and if at all possible I'm going to increase it. And actually try to do that. And that's another version of - if there [are] any shadow elements in it, paradoxical intentionality helps you get in touch with those because again your shadow is pretty much the opposite of what you're feeling. So a shadow element would be some part of you that is inducing fear and gets something out of it; but in any event you want to just try to increase it, because you are generating these feelings of fear but you don't know how you're doing it. Fritz Perls used to say it's like somebody coming in and they're pinching themselves, and you can see them pinching themselves, but all they tell you is, “I've got a pain here, it hurts.” And you say, “Well, stop pinching yourself!” “I'm not pinching myself!” [both laugh] And you go, “OK, try to make the pain worse.” In other words, if you can see that you're producing the pain of pinching, once you see that you're doing it, you won't ask how to stop. You'll just stop! Because it's a voluntary movement, it's like once you see that you've got your hand in the air, you can put it down.

Arthur: Sure. Well, that makes sense. I guess from what you're saying it's kind of an intrinsic thing that's there, this kind of fear. Because what I have felt in the past when that has happened is that I have to figure out some way of going into that state without being afraid.

Ken: Right.

Arthur: But you're saying that that's intrinsically going to be there because of the fear of the separate self that comes up?

Ken: Yeah, that's part of it, and also the idea that I'm going to go into it without being afraid - again, that makes a certain kind of sense, except that's actually in this case often what's causing the problem, because you want to say, “No, actually I'm going to try to feel afraid.” You're going to assume responsibility for your feeling and to say - if it's some other negative emotion, it's OK to say, well, I'm going to try to go into feeling anger or feeling sexual passion or something without fear, and that usually is OK, because it just helps you actually be open to feeling the anger, and you can just say I'm going to try to increase anger, I'm going to actually get into it - but with fear it doubles back on itself, and to say “I'm going to try not to be afraid of fear”, is already to - that's the problem, you're already trying not to be afraid, so what you want to do is try to increase it and actually feel “can I in any way increase this, can I actually assume responsibility for this, and just step into it, and feel this fear with a vengeance?” And sometimes you can only do it for a short amount of time.

But what tends to happen and different contemplative traditions have different ways to deal with negative emotions and what they transmute into, but most of them have some version - because it really doesn't matter exactly what the exact correlations are, but the point is that when you're working with these fundamental emotions of the separate self - and fear is just the primary mood of the separate self - and it's not that the separate self is feeling something called fear, it's that when you feel the separate self all you're really feeling is fear and the suffering that goes with that. So they're not two different things, the self-contraction itself is the process of pain and fear and suffering. But if you have anger, for example, in Vajranana to give one example, if you go into anger and you just really step right into it, try to increase it, certainly give awareness to it, then at some point when the separate self relaxes, then that anger dissolves into clarity, into nondual luminous clarity. And passion can dissolve into nondual compassion, and envy can dissolve into equality because in a sense now you have it all, so there's a great equalizing awareness that sort of tends to occur. And pride, one of the versions of that is that if you go into that it can be experienced as all-accomplishing because now when you're one with everything, then you're proud of everything, it's completely equalized in that sense. And with fear, then generally that tends to go into a kind of Emptiness itself, because basically that's what happens is when the separate self dissolves then there's nobody to feel the fear, there's just fear arising, and so there's nobody to be afraid, there's nothing outside of you that is going to crash into you and there's nothing outside of you that you can want. So when you're resting as all-pervading presence or Big Mind/Big Heart or whatever version you're used to working with, then as fear arises it's just actually energy of Openness because there's simply nothing there. As you say, fear doesn't usually have an object - you can be afraid of almost everything.

Arthur: [inaudible]

Ken: It is, and like you say, it's sort of like a non-specific dread - which I think is a really good definition of what the separate self is always feeling. And the only reason it doesn't feel that all the time is, it puts other objects in there quickly. So it puts desires in place or specific anxieties or specific anger or so on and so it doesn't feel this primary fear. But fear is the primary mood of the self, and it's something that in a sense when you move through that you've also moved through the self. So transcending your own self and transcending that fear are pretty much the same step.

Arthur: OK, a related sub-question is that - you know, most people seem to think that if you go into a non-dual state that everything is perfectly OK, but I've heard some people describe going to non-dual states and having horrific experiences even though there was no separate self to experience it.

Ken: Yeah. Well, both are true in a certain sense. Most nondual states can start anyway with, it's just whatever is arising is arising but there's no witness; and so that can start with - you can be in great states of fear or great anger or great pleasure and then all of a sudden it's just whoof! and you're no longer there, there's just whatever states that are arising. And sometimes that can be, indeed, because you're not resisting what's arising there are aspects of it that can be quite horrific; but as you stay in the nondual state more and more, then specifically the negative emotions generated by “pinching yourself”, or generated by the self-contraction, those tend to arise less and less, and so that's where the other side of the argument comes in: well, actually everything is hunky-dory and wonderful and everything - and that's not quite true, but that's where that comes from, is that there's a kind of “abiding OKness” underneath whatever surface stuff is arising. And the surface stuff can sometimes be pretty horrific, but that sort of “freedom from” any negative or positive just becomes increasingly palpable.

Arthur: Alright. So, yeah. [laughs] So there's no way to really avoid that fear, it's just going into it.

Ken: Yeah, at the beginning, yeah exactly. It might be that if you're doing something like Big Mind process, and I would certainly recommend trying that - if you haven't you can get CDs of it, you can download it from Integral Naked website, and Roshi's website and so on. Some people will actually get their first taste of Big Mind without really going into fear or anger or anything like that, because they just get an experience of it in Big Mind process. So you can go into it without necessarily exploring fear. But one of the things that will tend to happen is that you're in Big Mind and you're just resting in it, it's just completely obvious - not as an object, but as an atmosphere basically. You also realize it's something you've been aware of from the beginning - that there's only one constant feeling, if you will, and that's the feeling of presence, the simple feeling of being, or Big Mind and so on - and so once you sort of get an entryway that way, at some point you will also usually notice - although some people just sort of click into it fairly permanentlyish - but mostly people fall into it and then find they've fallen out of it. And if you look at what keeps you in and what keeps you out, the primary affective tone is fear, it's just flat-out that fear of dread, and when you are as the separate self, that's what you are, and it's fear of just letting go of that feeling of self; because that is a death experience.

You certainly hear zen masters say, people all the time they hear Emptiness and they're afraid of it because they think they're going to die, and they go “well, they are!” But it's not nearly as bad as you'd think - even though the state itself is without any qualities whatsoever, there are a lot of positive emotions right on the outside of it, so things like bliss or joy, that kind of thing, happiness, certainty - not in a fixed way, but just in the total obviousness of what your condition is; and even if certain really rotten things are happening on the surface, you're more open to those, because there's nothing really to repress them. So there's a whole past life, at the very least, of karma that in a sense you need to digest, and so that's going to be coming up and that's fine. It's better to experience that in Big Mind than it is as self.

This sort of free-floating dread, if people are honest it's a very common feeling because as I say, it's the primal mood of the separate self-sense, the self-contraction. And so you can even just sit down and using essentially techniques of Vipassana; or people that haven't done that, a capacity to just sit down and just, for the next five minutes either try to increase it or at the very least you agree that you don't want the fear to go away for at least five minutes, and that already switches the tone of what's happening. But it's serious, you really want it to not go away for five minutes, and then basically your job is to videotape it, and you're there to do a photo-essay on dread, and so you want [to see] how big is it, what size is it, what shape is it, how much does it weigh, where is it in my body exactly located, and it's just, you're there to do a photo-essay on it.

Arthur: OK. So you're taking a witnessing stance to it, in other words?

Ken: Basically.

Arthur: OK. So the feeling of free-floating dread is getting to something really important?

Ken: Yes. It's a Geiger-counter, and when the Geiger-counter goes off, you know if you're searching for uranium [and] the Geiger-counter goes off, most people turn around and run in the other direction when the Geiger-counter goes off because you found the gold!

Arthur: Right. Yeah, well that's been my reaction. The best I've done is to try to just be with it for periods of time, but my impulse is to run away. [laughs]

Ken: Yeah, I know. So basically in a sense what I'm saying is, because of fear, it's right there whichever way you turn. One of the things you start with is: OK, I'm going to really feel into running away, and what does that feel like? OK I'm really going to run from it, and what am I actually doing - what do I do when I run, what's my nature, am I just going to watch something else? I'm going to watch a movie, I'm going to go out, I'm going to get drunk, or what is it? What am I going to do?

Arthur: So look at what you do to avoid it as well?

Ken: Well, certainly if that's what's coming up, yes. You can choose to do them at different times and you can say, “well, this time I'm just going to be aware of the avoidance mechanism,” “this time, I'm going to try to be aware of what's under it” but again, one of the things that I'm trying to convey about fear is that the avoidance of the negative emotion is the same as the negative emotion - so, like I say, if it was anger, a lot of people are afraid of anger, and so you want to say, “well try to be with anger without fear” - but with fear you can't do that because the avoidance mechanism is also fear so fear is everywhere you look! But just see which different forms you have and if you're running, just see how fast you can run, what that feels like, and then when you sort of get centered down, then at some point [get] to feeling the dread itself, it's just that you really want to try to increase it on the one hand, or at the very least just do a photo-essay on it - and you really want to say “I am absolutely going to be able to describe this from ten different perspectives” and “where is it located in my body?” Start there.

Arthur: OK, that's great, that's really helpful.

Ken: Good!

Arthur: Just to finish the first question, in terms of going deeper you mentioned a number of different techniques like bioenergetics, etc. What are the ones that you find are most helpful for people in terms of going deeper into the shadow process?

Ken: I think there are two things, but again I sometimes hesitate to do this because there are a lot of really good things out there - and so if I'm not mentioning those it doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of really good things, because there are - but there's sort of two components that you want to look at at a minimum. One is preverbal stuff and one is verbal stuff. For a lot of the preverbal stuff, any of the bioenergetics is really pretty good work, and there's a lot of different schools of that, but one of the ones that started the movement was Alexander Lowen's work - and I think you can still get a lot of his books - but it's also developed into a lot of different forms. But one of the reasons it's good is it sort of associates both healthy emotions and unhealthy emotions with different areas and activities of the body, and it's a very good way to help people really ground and embody the shadow work using shadow in the general sense.

Another one that deals with the verbal components, which I think is really quite good is Transactional Analysis. Just even reading a few of Eric Berne's books on Games People Play - just because there's only a handful, people are still playing them, and they're usually games that were learned when the rule/role mind was being laid down. Emotional stuff is usually in ages three to five to seven, or earlier, and then the verbal stuff, the dysfunctional stuff, is usually laid down from ages seven to twelve. So those are good. And for just one, if you're just going to pick one therapy, Gestalt therapy probably does it as well as anybody.

Arthur: OK, great. Oh, and one other minor clarification question. When you're talking about, in terms of transforming emotions into their positive opposites, what is a good book to read about that?

Ken: Instead of just a particularly good book, I would recommend just using the Tibetan tradition, and you can go on amazon and start following up the leads, but there's one I believe - I don't know if it actually has the title - of “five dakinis,” “dakini energy” - and it's working with the five Buddha families. And Trungpa's written a lot of excellent stuff on that, and there are probably a dozen, at least, books that are really, really quite good with those. And I think Irini Rockwell, she actually has a school that focuses on the five Buddha families and the five energies that go with them, and the transmutations and the five wisdoms.

Arthur: OK. So do you know any particular thing that deals with it from a more Western perspective, because I find a lot of the particularly Buddhist stuff a little hard to relate to sometimes.

Ken: Yeah, I know what you mean. None that's gone into it as well, and a lot of the books, like Rockwell, you'll find are Americans and they've made it much more accessible. So that's where I would stop. And we're going to present actually an auxiliary ILP kit on transmuting emotions and so we'll be presenting all of our final recommendations on that when we do that kit, probably a year or so from now.

Arthur: Great, OK, looking forward to that!

Ken: Yeah.

~~~~~

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Wow, thanks for doing that. I'm not surewhich part I liked better -they were both very wonderful in different ways.

Of course, the most moving part of the first call was this:

Arthur: [inaudible]

:-P

I must say - I haven't listened to any of the current ISC call, or for that matter even much IN content lately, but both from this and after being on the art call with Ken last week - damn, no apologies, he is such a gift. Whatever you think you might understand he just has a way of Light-ening up in way you never thought possible. Or, at least that's my experience.

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Agreed, Tim. I definitely get some sort of transmission from him that is real and lasting. Ken, I mean.


hehe

Liz

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Liz: Agreed, Tim. I definitely get some sort of transmission from him that is real and lasting. Ken, I mean.

~~~~~

If I weren't so classy, I'd take this opportunity to insert some wordplay on transmission vs. emission…(or is that premission vs transmission?)…luckily for you that's so beneath me.  :P

arthur

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Good, I'm glad you brought that one up … thought of it m'self . . but then just decided to oh never mind it.

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Arthur, what a jewel.
Thanks for posting and sharing.
Ken is one mighty dude. Darn it, I have a crush on him again after reading your transcript.

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Very cool!  ISC Conference Call: Shadow/Disowned Self (TRANSCRIPT)
                    June 27, 2007 08:00

Great to see you at kenwilber.com!  Great to see you earlier this summer!

Blessings!
Portico

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Portico: Very cool!  ISC Conference Call: Shadow/Disowned Self (TRANSCRIPT)
                    June 27, 2007 08:00

Great to see you at kenwilber.com!  Great to see you earlier this summer!

~~~~

Yes, it has been gratifying to see my name popping up at the BBG's blog here and there; they've posted all the transcripts I've done. 

And it was very pleasant to meet you for some tea and awesome conversation; I always encourage people to meet up face to face, it's even better than forum interaction!  (Way more bandwidth for one thing.)

cheers
arthur

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Arthur, that dialogue between you and Ken is just excellent! You have a real talent for interviewing and drawing a wealth of information out of people. Great questions, answers, and clarifications in the conversation there … and several things that many folks have likely been wondering re: the 3-2-1 work, Big Mind, and separate-self “dread.” And thanks for getting this first half of the transcript out – I know that was a lot of work!

Wow,
Mary

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Here is the link to the second audio segment.


Pelle

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

I just listened to part II and I want to thank you Arthur for drawing all that great material out of Ken.

You should do the next 10-disc interview with Ken :)


Pelle

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Thanks, Maryw and Pelle.  :)  It was a lot of fun talking with the BBG, and I am pleased that I managed to extract all that info from his cranium.  Even more pleased that it was recorded!  There's no way I could remember all that without listening again a few times…writing (and subsequently having) a transcript is also very helpful for review purposes. 

Some of the best stuff (from a personal perspective) ended up on the cutting room floor - like when I told Ken about meeting my girlfriend on his forum.  I could tell he was quite touched by that.  :)  Anyway, all that fun introductory stuff when he was chatting with us at the very beginning of the call, none of that made it into the posted material.

I'm looking forward to hearing the call Liz was on; we're almost finished with the shadow chapter and then we'll be into the community chapter.  :)

spiral out,
arthur

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Hey Arthur

Listened to parts 2 and 3 of your call on the train this weekend.  Totally awesome mate, great to hear Ken talking about stuff I havn't really come accross before.  That stuff on the different types of unconscious material was awesome, I get really excited when he talks about an aspect of the model I don't know about.  Must go and read the Atman Project!

And it was great that he was so forthcoming about I-I staff and the culture there too.  Good interviewing Arthur!


Ewan

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

Thanks, Ewan.  :) 

BTW for another interesting piece on working with fear, see Robert Augustus Masters' essay Into the Heart of Fear.

spirals,
arthur

    print   send    permalink

Re: Listen to Arthur!

This is part two of my conversation with Ken (IS Call on Ch. 6 “Shadow/Disowned Self” - Part 6)

~~~

Arthur: In a question and answer series with integral therapist Robert Augustus Masters I hosted on Integral Naked a while back, Robert answered a question about the 3-2-1 shadow practice in integral relationships. In the course of his answer he made the following interesting comment: “Every practice has its shadow side; all you need do is open yourself to seeing it (without, however, [using] such insight to negate or prematurely discard the practice). And the [shadow of] 3-2-1 shadow-work? It might include: (1) the tendency to assume that a fuller integration has occurred than actually has; (2) the tendency to settle for less emotional opening, expression, and depth than is really needed; (3) the tendency not to put enough attention into seeing, feeling, and working with the origins and evolution of particular shadow elements; and (4) the tendency to underestimate the need for more in-depth shadow-work, such as is possible through integral psychotherapy.”

Could you comment on this?

Ken: Yeah, well as I said, none of these are original - we've been talking about these kinds of things for five years around here. I don't disagree with any of those, and I think there's a lot of other things you can mention. It's first grade for us, but the way he's worded these four - these are actually the strengths of the shadow work! [laughs] Let me see any body's way of getting in touch with a truly repressed shadow element in less than fifteen minutes. And what do you have to do? Well of course you have to ignore the origins of it. You can't do the whole psychoanalytic/psychodynamic thing of, “Well, when I was three years old mommy dropped me on my head” etc. etc. Do we think you should do that? Of course! And then, the tendency to assume a fuller integration has occurred than actually has? Well, of course [with] introductory stuff, you have to limit the degree of integration that can occur in the first fifteen minutes, by definition. [laughs] So he's given four of the things that we've managed to do, and that's the strengths of the 3-2-1 process.

As a first-grade process, though, it's just first grade! And my concern, more than any of these - although all of these are, I think, pretty obvious - is that there are these other types of work, not just more in-depth, but as I said there's pre-verbal shadow work, verbal shadow work and transverbal shadow work, and then there's an energetic component to all of those. And so the limitations of the 3-2-1 is just, again, by its nature, it doesn't go into a lot of bioenergetics, it doesn't go a lot into Games People Play, it doesn't go a lot into psychodrama and so on. If you're really serious about getting at both your repressed submergent unconscious and your repressed emergent unconscious you have to do all of that. But what's so great about the 3-2-1 process is, it wakes people up very quickly to how a lot of what they thought was going on “out there” is going on “in here” and really shows that for many people in a very palpable way - particularly if they follow the directions and feel it, and don't just think it. I have my own critique of shadow work, and it's just all of the things that's wrong with first grade.

Arthur: I think a lot of people see things like 3-2-1 shadow work etc. that are talked about in the Multiplex and miss the fact that it's supposed to be introductory stuff.

Ken: If so we certainly can mention it. I guess the reason I don't [make that assumption] is, my work - even Transformations of Consciousness, which is the one where I've written about pathology - has nine levels of psychopathology. And that anybody would assume that 3-2-1 does all of that, I just don't assume that anybody's making that assumption! But I guess people that aren't familiar with my work would make that assumption, and so I would say yes of course, we can certainly go over the fact that it's just introductory for sure.

Arthur: How do you feel that relationships or being in sangha feeds into shadow work? Because I find myself that it's quite useful. In terms of being in a relationship or being in a sangha - an integral sangha or whatever - a group of peers I find can be good for working with shadow because you get triggered a lot [laughs].

Ken: Yeah.

Arthur: And that's helpful, I find. If you stay with the process of being in a relationship or being in a community like that - that's dedicated to Awakening - it can [help], even if you're not using a specific technique always - just by looking at that and working with it.

Ken: Yes, most of the people I hang with, who've been my friends for most of my adult life, are therapists or teachers. And we're always basically on each other's case, because it's very hard to have much of a shadow that doesn't get spotted by one of these folks. Because they come at it from so many different angles and that's their profession. They're professional shadow spotters.

A lot of what people call my shadow I find is their projected shadow. I have my own stuff like everybody does, but but it's almost never what people think. People make an assumption that I live only in my head just because I'm so cognitive, and that's just categorically not true! [laughs] The idea that I'm out of touch with my feelings, that's projected, that's absolute projected shadow. That's just nonsense! So you have to be really careful about that. My three root teachers have told me - without even really talking about any intellectual performance - all three of them have said that the strongest strength that I had was Big Heart - and we haven't even talked about intellectual, that's not how they relate to me. So I'm obviously a bright boy, [laughs] but the idea that I'm just this complete dissociated professor who can't find his own car in a parking lot is silly.

Arthur: Well, I think people see that because that's what you're usually talking about - the way you talk about things is very cognitive.

Ken: Well in areas where I'm being asked theoretical questions! It's quite different if we're doing actual shadow work or we're doing bioenergetic work, or we're doing meditation or anything like that - then it's really quite different. The fact is I'm actually fairly good at a half-dozen multiple intelligences. So it might appear that I simply live in cognitive because I do that fairly well, but that is not how I work, and I spend so much time [laughs] in feeling-attention of meditation too - much more than I have thinking - so the mind is actually suspended there.

One of the things that was very interesting for me when I started doing Integral Naked - because you know for almost twenty-five years I was a Rorschach blot because people hadn't met me, they never heard me talk, had no idea what I was like - and then [I] started doing Integral Naked, and then Kosmic Consciousness with Sounds True, and a certain kind of criticism of me almost dropped out, because the idea that I spent [laughs] all of my time angry and had no sense of humor and all that stuff, it just stopped! [laughs] And people were embarrassingly left with their own projections.

There are entire papers written on the fact that I couldn't accept Whitehead because I was out of touch with my feelings, and therefore couldn't relate to prehension, and [laughs] I mean seriously! This was actually published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, if you can imagine! And first of all, I love Whitehead and have used him quite a lot. [laughs] And the idea that I'm out of my feelings is just nonsense. You couldn't live for a year in the house with Roger Walsh and Frances Vaughan and get away with that. [laughs] They would chew you up and spit you out! So I've been really fortunate both to be the teachers of and be the student of enormous numbers of therapists and teachers, and I think everybody pretty much keeps themselves fairly clean.

When you get to spiritual thinkers something happens there, because in some of them there's a sealing-off, and there's a certain shadow work that almost stops getting done. In part it's because the more you have the feelings of One Taste, the less self-motivation - motivation to change - you have, because you can find that part of yourself that is always already perfect. Hopefully you've done a fair amount of work before [laughs] you have a lot of satoris because that can be a trap.

Arthur: Sure - that whole “spiritual bypass” thing, right?

Ken: It is, basically.

Arthur: You mentioned transpersonal shadow work. Could you say something about that; how does that -

Ken: Yeah, you also had a question about turquoise shadow.

Arthur: Yes, maybe we'll save it until that [point].

Ken: Well, I can address both of them, because what you find [is that] there are two major types of developmental processes, and one involves structures of consciousness, because they grow, and one involves states of consciousness, because they grow - and both of those can go wrong. Most shadow elements go wrong because of developmental sequences, because there's usually some point that you first learned to either deny or displace, or reaction-formation or repress or dissociate and so on; so usually there's a developmental history to it. Also the types of symptoms and the types of defenses come from having originated at different altitudes. So there are two sequences, in particular the structures of consciousness and the self-fulcrums that it goes through. One then identifies and then disidentifies with the chakra. So there are types of problems that can occur there.

Then there are also states, and the four or five main states - and I'll use four here - which are gross, subtle, causal, and nondual. As the self moves through those - and it does, the center of gravity actually shifts through those, bringing a capacity for wakefulness or wakeful presence through all three states. That means waking, dreaming and deep sleep eventually become objects of wakeful presence, and so you begin to lucid dream, and then you begin to have tacit, very very tacit, very very subtle awareness even in formless deep sleep. And “dream state” and “deep sleep state” doesn't mean just when you're dreaming. The “subtle states” mean any subtle meditative state - so if you're in savikalpa samadhi, or mantra or visualization or any of those, that refers to a subtle state as well. And the center of gravity shifts through those; it starts in the gross, and then eventually will shift to the subtle, and then the causal and then the nondual.

So anything can go wrong at any of those four major switchpoints, and anything can go wrong at any of [the] - I generally use between ten and twelve - levels or structures of consciousness. And so what you're looking at when somebody says “spiritual” or “transpersonal” usually means anything that happens beyond centaur in terms of vertical growth (so anything that happens at indigo and violet, ultraviolet and clear light - or paramind, metamind, overmind and supermind) - and it also can mean anything that happens usually in subtle, causal or nondual states. There's a lot of discussion about whether you can talk about states being transpersonal and so on, and you can - all causal states are transpersonal because they're formless, so there's basically no self; and subtle states can be prepersonal, personal or transpersonal; and a dream can have prepersonal, personal or transpersonal elements in it. So there can be transpersonal subtle states. Even in gross states, depending on how you define it - technically a gross state just means consciousness that goes with the material level (so in that technical sense you wouldn't have a spiritual gross [experience]) - but as a matter of fact you can; if you just mean looking at the gross waking state, can you have a spiritual experience, the answer is of course! And you can have nondual peak experience and nondual causal experience.

But the pathologies occur when - if you're looking at moving from, let's say vertically from indigo or violet, which is what happens with metamind - you can think of that, if you're very careful, as sort of archetypal mind, but using that in the very strict sense of just the highest forms of development. So there's a “not pregiven” [aspect] and a child can not experience archetypes in that sense because they haven't developed yet; so there are other kinds [of archetypes] - Jungian archetypes for example, which are magic-mythic forms, are not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about forms that occur in third-tier, prior to overmind. Overmind essentially has access to pure, ongoing Emptiness as the Witness - but it's not just that, it also has access to, in a sense, all knowledge up to that point. What happens with any transpersonal states or structures is that there is either a fixation to personal desires or personal issues (and a fixation to an exclusively personal issue - that means an addiction, or an attachment to a merely personal state) - or there's an allergy, there's a dissociation - a pushing away, or repression. And they're actually quite common.

For example, if your center of gravity (using the seven chakras) is at the sixth chakra, because six is really the beginning of transpersonal, six and seven, and fifth chakra is sort of [the] source of highest mind, creative mind, vision-logic, and you can think of it as essentially second-tier mind. So what happens at [the] sixth chakra is, you can be fixated to looking at the world through vision-logic, or you can be still addicted to a merely personal approach to an issue. That's a very subtle kind of fixation but it's extremely common.

Also some spiritual teachers are moving into these higher structures. Some aren't, some spiritual teachers are just at green altitude, but they're very good at causal states. Byron Katie, for example, is pure green. She's done one approach to causal presence, but her altitude is very, very green. Under those circumstances, in a sense she has a case of arrested development at green. And I don't see any state pathology, necessarily, but structurally the center of gravity is arrested at that point; and then she might have some shadow elements, I don't know, I haven't looked at that. But you can still carry shadow elements, whether you're at third tier, or causal or nondual states. And so those are things that you have to look out for as well.

I'll give an example specifically of how this also applies to turquoise, and you can ask me any further questions you have. I'm giving you [a] very abstract overview right now. A lot of people think, “how can turquoise have a shadow?” I mean by definition it's the integral self, and it's integrated and so on, but there's sort of two ways you can think about what can go wrong at a level. One is, something goes wrong on the level itself, and the other is that the level is repressing or is attached to a previous level.

So what happens with somebody at turquoise, a very common one is that they have a green allergy. They have differentiated - and to some extent transcended - green, of course, but they are too heavy on the negation part; they actually have not really transcended and included it, in part because when they themselves were trying to develop to turquoise, they got slammed by every point from green, and so they developed a kind of bitterness towards green that really derails their own development to some degree.

One of the things I have to sort of watch out for in Integral Institute, one of the shadows that it's prone to is a lot of people come in with a green allergy. You can be severely critical of green - the question is, do you emotionally react to it? Does it really get to you? If it does, then it's because you have some element of green that you're still attached to; you haven't let go of it and so it's showing up as its own shadow; you have a green subpersonality, and you're projecting that onto the world at large - and so you develop a real, sometimes even hatred of it.

So that's typically what can go wrong. And in terms of repressing a lower level and attachment to a lower level, people can be at turquoise and have an attachment to orange or green, a sort of a secret attachment, and they're really out there doing orange things and calling it integral. And so we find both, on the one hand attachments, addictions or fixations - which is pathological preservation - or on the other hand, we find allergies and dissociations and repressions - and that's pathological transcendence. Both very common in turquoise.

Then at turquoise level itself, you can also split off - because turquoise, like all separate selves, has a threat zone and a fear zone, a fear boundary, and so there are things at turquoise that can frighten turquoise - so in a sense it will split off aspects of its own turquoise self. And so it can have not only green shadow, or orange shadow, or amber shadow, red shadow, and so on, a turquoise self can have a turquoise shadow, elements originating at that level that it can't come to terms with, that are causing it problems, and then it starts dissociating.

I think particularly people really relate to green allergy [laughs] and I don't think very many people (and I'm sort of treating teal and turquoise together as centaur/second-tier) but very few people get to second tier today without some degree of green allergy. And on the other hand there's a fair number of people that are still really attached to green and are calling that turquoise. So both attachments and allergies are addictions and allergy is quite common.

Arthur: I see both of those things in myself and in the forums as well, for sure. Well, actually can you have an attachment and/or repression to the same thing at different times, or do you tend to go on one [side] or the other?

Ken: Well, it depends entirely on what perspective you're taking. Usually you do one or the other, but from one angle, let's say you have an attachment or addiction to some red impulse. Then at the next levels, if that attachment is unconscious, you're repressing it. You're repressing your attachment to it, you're actually sealing it out. Buddhism spots attachment, it doesn't spot unconscious attachment, or the projection in other words. Often what we mean by attachment and repression is just the same thing from a different level - but on a given level, attachment and fixation are two different things, they're the opposite. And technically that's really what they are, but both can come into play in terms of what you subsequently do with something. So you can be attached to something and then repress that attachment, and you can repress something and then actually get attachment to that repression because of the secondary gain. But technically they are indeed different, and just keep in mind - looking at what happens on any given level - you're either attached to something or repressing it. Fixation and repression are the opposite ends of that spectrum of not being in touch with it authentically.

Arthur: So in practice, say someone had an unconscious attachment to red impulses. Then if they're operating at a higher level, you would see that operate as a repression, but if they temporarily regressed to a red level you would see them act it out, and then it would be an attachment? Is that how you would actually -

Ken: Well, that's certainly one way to do it. But also keep in mind that when you get down to the real technicalities of things; let's say if we look at the psychoanalytic hierarchy of defenses - George Vaillant's work, for example, which I substantially agree with. I think there's a lot of other types of defense mechanisms, but you can be for example attached to red, and it just shows up, it's just fixation and you're aware of it, and you're aware of the fixation. You might have for example a sexual addiction, and it's just flat-out, you're aware: I'm fixated, I can't help it, I can't stop - and it's just that, you're not repressing that fixation, it's just if you project it you are [repressing it]. There's a second level of defense mechanism that comes into play; you become attached to something, and then that attachment can itself just be repressed interiorly. And then you're not even aware that it's a fixation, it probably won't show up as a direct fixation to something, it'll be displaced onto something else.

There's all sorts of fixation, denial, reaction-formation, introjection, projection, and so on. The fact of the matter is you can - using dissociation to cover all of them - you can dissociate an impulse, and then dissociate the fact that you dissociated it, and you can then displace it onto something, and then dissociate the fact that you did that; defenses can be like a hall of mirrors, you can have fear, then fear of fear and at some point you're afraid of dark tunnels, and it's five repressions of what happened during the birth trauma or something. It can get pretty complex! But often you become fixated to something and at a subsequent higher level, it does appear [that] you repress it and then it shows up projected. And you don't really think of yourself then as fixated, you think of somebody else as awfully interested in sex, but I don't seem to be! [laughs]

But keep in mind the last thing to say about it is, depending on whether you take the perspective of the shadow or yourself - your proximate self - the shadow is by definition attached to the thing that you are detached from. So you're repressing the shadow, the shadow is attached to what you are repressing. So you can think of it that way too. Every time you change a perspective it looks like it's almost the opposite of what it is. As I said in No Boundary…if you really want to get a good idea of what your unconscious is feeling or thinking right now, just take any person or any thing or any event and get a good sense about what you think about them, and then assume exactly the opposite of that, and that's how your shadow feels. So if you think you love your mother, your shadow hates her. If you think you hate somebody, your shadow's got a secret hard-on for them. And so on and so on and so on, I mean it's pretty straightforward.

Arthur: But you could just have one type of feeling towards someone and not the opposite, couldn't you? Are you saying that if I have a certain feeling towards anyone or anything I also in my greater self have the opposite?

Ken: Well, in the total self the answer is almost always. If you're madly in love with your girlfriend, if you don't have a little bit of orneriness about it, you go, “You know, I love you, you old bat!” you're going to get in trouble. You're caught in romantic love, and there's a shadow out there that's going to knock you silly sooner or later. So yes, the answer is almost always, and the simple reason that I gave in No Boundary and I still think is true, is that all opposites are really secretly nondual; and so on the manifest plane you should always be aware of “black hyphen and hyphen white”- and if you're only aware of white, you repress black, and if you're only aware of black, white's hiding someplace. So it's just a really good way to keep a kind of even balance in the manifest realm is: in your witness/turiya, in Emptiness, you are neither black nor white; on the manifest side of the street you should be black and white.

Arthur: Another clarification question: you said that you can split things off at turquoise; could you give some examples of qualities that people may split off at turquoise?

Ken: Sure. A lot of people, particularly coming out of green - this is in a green culture - can't acknowledge their own greatness. Jonah complex, which is Maslow's term for people that deny their own greatness or can't acknowledge their own greatness, is actually very common. It's the opposite of what green thought it instilled. Green thought it instilled self-esteem for everybody, but it was largely a kind of inauthentic self-esteem - it wasn't self-esteem because I've done good work, self-esteem because I've accomplished something, it's self-esteem because I pat myself on the back and give myself a gold star. That's fine, but if you don't also connect that with actually doing something of worth, then you're lying to yourself in a certain way. That catches up with people! Turquoise has an enormous capacity for greatness…[but] often the self has a hard time stepping into the turquoise mind, because it can't even really take an objective view about its own greatness.

The net effect of green is, it actually beats everybody down equally, with really good intentions. There are wonderful things about healthy green, but unfortunately we have a lot of unhealthy green out there, and the mean green meme just beats everybody down - we're all equal because we're all equally worthless. And all values are the same, which means we're all valueless, and that's why nihilism and narcissism reign - of course narcissism is the opposite of actual self-esteem. A very common thing we find in turquoise shadows are people [un]willing to stand up and talk about how great they are; and you know if you are doing that - whether it's narcissistic or not - [based] on whether you also can see greatness in others. And it's not just projection; somebody who still has a narcissistic flavor at turquoise - although it's very hard, it's increasingly hard to do that - but any remnants of narcissism at turquoise, you can tell because they'll talk about how great they are, but they hardly ever talk about how great others are, and somebody who really has that has a whole list of heroes, but they're also one of their own heroes; and a lot of people come in with turquoise and they've got - ironically, paradoxically - really horrid self-esteem because of what green has done to them. I think I find that as often as almost anything. That's one of the positives, in other words it's a greatness, and so that tends to be something that is not integrated very well.

In terms of one of the negatives [here Ken takes a long, informative digression into terminology] the scheme I use is “first, second and third tier” - and tiers, remember, are arbitrary. Stages are real, tiers are [arbitrary]. Psychologists every now and then find that [in] the movement from one stage to another stage, there's such a huge leap in various variables that they say, “well I'm going to call everything up to here 'first tier,' I'm going to call this stage the beginning of 'second tier'” - and some have third tier and fourth tier even. Remember that [in] what Spiral Dynamics calls first tier, I actually include at least three tiers - preconventional, conventional and postconventional - those are huge leaps, and those all occur within first tier. But I tend to use first and second tier just to, frankly, really emphasize the importance of getting integral right now - so moving to second tier gives it a particular importance.

And then third tier - the way I use it - although, again, if I actually counted all the tiers that I think are super-important, third tier would be fifth tier. There'd be: first, second and third tier gets you up to green, and then fourth tier is what we call second tier, and fifth tier is what I'm going to now call third tier - and what I call generally third tier right now for just looser purposes. It's what I call “indigo” and I used to call the psychic level, and I call the next level subtle, and the next level causal, and the next level nondual. And the reason is that those levels do have some resemblance to gross, subtle, causal, and nondual states - and the reason they do is that at those four levels those states are, respectively, completely objectified. So by the time you get to what I used to call psychic, and now call just the paramind or indigo, you have permanently objectified all gross phenomena; there's no way to go any higher structurally. So that's why people often have an experience of nature mysticism - oneness with the entire gross realm can occur at what I used to call psychic, and now call just the paramind; that's because all of the gross objects have now been disidentified with. There's nothing left, unless you have an attachment or fixation. Then when you move to the next level, which I used to call [the] subtle level but now just call the metamind it does look a little bit like the subtle because at that level all of the subtle objects have been objectified now, and that's why at that level you will tend to start to lucid dream and so on. But unlike the dream state, this is experienced in the waking state.

Also one of the big differences about these higher levels or structures is that all structures are inclusive; all states are exclusive. And that's real