Terry Patten & Deborah Boyar at One Spirit Learning Alliance
by Lynne Feldman and Joanne Rubin

While a blizzard raged to our south, it was cold and clear outside in New York City. Inside the airy room at One Spirit Learning Alliance about 40 people had gathered to welcome Terry and Deborah present on Embodied Spirituality: Exploring the 3 Faces of God. They are both part-time New Yorkers, although Deborah visits more frequently and is an important part of the Integral community here. Terry is a co-author with Ken Wilber of Integral Life Practice and presents to audiences around the world on Integral spirituality and its practices.

Lynne Feldman and Joanne Rubin, serious students of all things Integral, scribed this report and integrated our impressions. We wish to address the caveat that our report contains our in-the-moment interpretations and personal insights into this two-day event, and does not wholly represent the verbatim words spoken by either Deborah or Terry.

February 6, 2010 – Saturday morning, Day One:

Addressing the seeming contradiction at the higher levels of spiritual awareness, Terry began by acknowledging both the concept that there is nothing missing, and also that there is an evolutionary call for new ways of spiritual engagement. He believes that the Integral spiritual movement represents a way of holding these seeming polarities and that Integral spirituality is the “something new” that is coming into expression.

Yet with all the newness that has been stretching the human spirit, there is also the humility of experiencing the wisdom of the ancient traditions in addition to honoring what is happening here and now, the immanent as well as the transcendent. We need to invite them all, he explained.

The audience consisted of some individuals (like the authors of this article) who have been doing Integral research and presenting at Integral theory conferences, as well as members of the One Spirit community who are interested in learning about multi-faith and interfaith approaches to their chosen religious or spiritual paths. For this reason, Terry began by explaining what Integral is, and what Ken Wilber’s work has made possible.

He introduced the audience to an overview of the evolutionary path of consciousness, from pre-modern to modern to post-modern. From the 19th and 20th Century paradigm that science knows all, that there is one “definitive knowledge” that calls forth rational materialism and competition, there evolved a post-modern paradigm that saw the co-constructed nature of all knowledge, and exposed and attacked Invisible agendas about how we were treating women, races, and religions.

One of Wilber’s contributions, Terry said, has been to write of a new emergent structure of consciousness we’re calling “Integral,” which is a higher wave detected as a zeitgeist just edging into cultural consciousness.

“It’s a structure of values”, Terry observed, “and Integral spirituality is a practice, a way of living, a presence, an aliveness, and an embodiment” of this emerging structure of values.

He then led the group through the 3-Body Workout from Integral Life Practice (and taught on video in the Integral Life Practice Starter Kit) that called forth gross, subtle, and causal awareness all at once, while noticing that the field in which it is happening is that which never changes, even in deep sleep, where content ceases, with nothing that needs to be done to–or by—you. His meditation pointed to the reality of who we really are, which is the Witness, or that which exists beyond time, thus liberating our body/minds to dissolve all fears and threats.

Terry proceeded to lead the group in some physical stretches that helped open up subtle awareness while remaining in Witness consciousness. This concluded by having us wake our bodies with qigong body-slapping, and we (pleasantly!) slapped one another on the back and then concluded by shaking our entire bodies. He next turned our awareness to our breath, and had us notice that each time we breathe in, we receive and when we breathe out, we surrender.

“Feel yourself being breathed”, he offered. “Feel downward into earth’s energy coming up from the center of the earth…Feel upward into the cosmic energy coming down from the light above the head. The human body is a terminal connecting earth and heaven. And we breathe and experience it all from the heart, where we encounter all our relations. At the heart, the vertical axis meets the horizontal axis of the total body-mind.”

The focus on love would become stronger as his presentation continued. The context of a subjective awakening as consciousness is what connects most of us to a spiritual awareness and our desire to engage spiritual practice from a first-person perspective. This first-person dimension has been at the forefront of practice for a generation, he noted, and suggested that it is the foundation even for emerging second-person spirituality. He then modeled an example of his own practice of second-person Integral prayer, founded in a perception of God as non-dual suchness, which for most of us is grounded in first-person spiritual experience.

He pointed out that deepening into a second-person perspective of an “I-Thou” relationship with the Divine/ the Ground of Being/God has been far more difficult to embody, which he also modeled for us:

“You, who are being us, you who are being all that is experienced through us…thank you, please give me the feeling-awareness and humility to thank You. Please help each body/mind in this space to drop below surfaces and distractions, so that we may be open and deep. Let this room fill with You…You are the I-amness of each of us, non-separate, and you are That which awakens us again and again, for a brief moment, and then again in the next and the next, into the vast spacious Silence, who is You.”

After this intense and personal invocation of an I/Thou exchange, Terry took questions and comments.

He explained that when he called us to be the Witness, there is an active as well as a passive component. The witnessing of which Terry had spoken is relatively passive in that it ‘allows’ everything in a radically inclusive sense that is aware that we are doing it in this way.

Terry described his personal spiritual perspective as panentheistic. From this perspective, there is only God, immanent and transcendent. Nothing is not God; nothing at all is excluded, everything is included, such as all the painful things that happen. And all perspectives on God are true and partial. In the largest picture, everything, whole and part, is evolving, awakening. The question is to how to really be with everything, with the All. That’s panentheism, engaging with all particularity and the All.

In the midst of that panentheistic Integral spiritual perspective, we are also awakening to an evolutionary view. After 14 billion years, in our particular historical and evolutionary moment we seem to be approaching a chaos point, Science is recognizing through chaos theory that out of chaos, a higher order sometimes seems to magically appear. Open, non-linear dynamic physical systems, (often in chemical reactions) get more and more chaotic and unpredictable, and then, marvelously, make a leap to a “higher order”. The principle that allows a mathematical explanation of how the system reorganizes its chaos to make the transition between the old and new order is called the “strange attractor”. The discoverer of this principle, Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, believed the same principles that govern chaotic chemical and physical systems may apply to open systems like a person, human culture, our biosphere, or our universe. The introduction of the concept of a strange attractor struck us as quite powerful. It calls our attention to attune, as best we can, to the pull that finds a way to Itself through us.

Terry continued with this metaphor by calling us to be attuned to the influence of this strange attractor, to live as if in the presence of a not-yet emergent higher order, this pull to a positive, sustainable evolutionary future. And the ground of that practice is to connect with the Is-ness, the Divine Ground, or however we personally language this understanding.

Another important distinction Terry called us to notice was that once we taste nonduality, that’s not the end of the process, or the whole point of our spiritual path; it’s the beginning!

We awaken over and over. It took 13.7 billion years to get here. What human potential is possible? What remarkable evolutionary future wants to potentiate itself into manifestation through your body-mind? We are ennobled by taking a big view, but it has a downside too; we can get overinflated. We have to take that into account and also practice by grounding ourselves. Our practice is also humble and simple, to be a decent human being, to act out our authentic care and concern.

We have an opportunity to grow way beyond the present. We may have a vision we can’t altogether fulfill, to not hide and seem cool, but to be alive and engaged in something that serves what is greater than ourselves…That’s evolutionary spirituality, to serve the objective world by giving ourselves completely to showing up as awakening in both the We-space and I-space. And the foundation of that is to do Integral Life Practices in body, mind, spirit, and shadow work, If you don’t do Shadow work you won’t relate authentically to others in present time; you’ll be projecting past images of your parents or other unresolved psychological relations. Then your practice must express itself in service to others—but in the largest sense. Social engagement is an essentially important first step, but there’s potential for more, because we can take an Integral view. When we serve, we can attempt to serve not only individuals or systems, but we can also look at the largest systems in a meta-systematic way, and attempt to serve in a way that contributes metasystemically. We can attempt not simply to “give a fish” but to “teach fishing” as the saying goes.

This passionate presentation provoked a sustained stream of questions that we wished we had the hours to fully discuss. And Terry expanded the discussion with rhetorical questions of his own.

“Do we have to save the world from itself?” “What’s the essence of reality? E-MC2?” “But science is evidence based”.

Terry joined participants in accounting for the physical dimension of reality, and he linked them to the noetic dimensions, pointing out that we live in a psychophysical reality, not one in which mind and matter are split.

Today we witness the wonder of consciousness becoming self-aware, an awareness that we’re evolving. And evolution itself has become conscious through our awareness of it and our potentially conscious, technologically-empowered choices as to how we will go forward as an entire planetary human organism.

What struck us powerfully was his statement that CONSCIOUSLY KNOWING ABOUT EVOLUTION AND OUR ROLE WITHIN IT (in light of humanity’s remarkable technological powers) CHANGES EVOLUTION. This huge alteration in evolution’s dynamic is a “phase shift” like earlier emergences, such as when heavy elements came into being, then the first biological life, then eukaryotes became prokaryotes, then intelligent life.

“Conscious evolution is as big a phase change as these others. That’s a story line that lends tremendous meaning to our lives now.” He explained.

Another fascinating observation that he shared with us is that the pre-trans fallacy applies to the felt urgency to move culture forward in a progressive direction. An urge that comes from an unillumined anxiety for change is not at all the same thing as the illumined urgency to manifest change that appears on the basis of illumination. We may well agree that we are excited to evolve, but is the push or urge we feel anxiety-based? If so, it can lead us toward lower consequences. If it expresses illumined, free, transcendent urgency, then it can lead toward higher evolutionary destinies, and it can function in an entirely new way.

Reluctantly the group headed off to lunch, with conversations and questions pooling up around us. Joanne and Lynne engaged One Spirit Board member Kurt Johnson in conversation about how One Spirit might take the energy unleashed thus far and continue it as a series of workshops. We will have more discussions with both One Spirit and Terry to serve the community by continuing work on Integral spirituality.

Upon settling back into our seats, Deborah Boyar, Terry’s wife and presenter in her own right, led us in a variation of voice dialogue influenced by the work of Andrew Cohen and Craig Hamilton. We would not wish future attendees to be robbed of the in-the-moment beauty of this exercise, so we will not divulge its particulars. What we can report on is the beneficial manner in which Deborah patiently and carefully led us to blend the selves addressed by Terry’s presentation. She had us work with the voices of the self, Consciousness, evolution, and the Kosmos in an integrated manner. She concluded by asking us gently what aspect of our Self/self were we operating from when attempting to make ourselves feel better as we live in the moment.

Terry continued his explanation of Integral spirituality by pointing out how anything and everything is to be considered part of our practice. Each of us who cares to grow in our awareness, care and presence, is already a practitioner, even if we don’t realize it. And we need to attend to the paradox that there are important truths expressed by both the “sudden” and “gradual” paths. The sudden path emphasizes the immediate truth that we can only be awakened now, directly in the present moment, never later, and so it asks us, right now, to wake up! The gradual path emphasizes the functional reality that without regular practice over time, affirmations of the truths of the sudden school can easily become empty affirmations, “the talking school.” He recapped the four core modules of ILP and called us to move beyond the belief that we areiving as separate beings from one another.

The religious and spiritual traditions that formed during a much earlier phase of human cultural evolution are not adept at addressing the fast pace of modern life or the complex interiors of contemporary people—let alone at handling the emergent sense of unity consciousness that so many have opened into today. An ILP serves as a bridge between the traditions and a deeply lived contemporary spiritual practice, which he contrasted with a more superficial new age spirituality that is practiced as more of a hobby.

This new awareness is reflected in the first person spiritual practices as enacted in Advaita and can be seen in the work of Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle. This transcendent first person awareness, this new spirituality, can even transcend its own presumptions, as when Consciousness opens to experience the Witness and the witnessed as One.

Third-person spirituality has been present in cultures from antiquity, in the sensate nature mysticism of “I looking at IT.” We also find third-person spirituality in our theology and philosophy. But it is second-person spirituality that appears to pose the most difficulty for us. It expresses Love in relationship to every arising moment.

It was at this point that some in the audience apparently felt triggered, and although we do not wish to quote their individual discomfitures, we found their reactions to Terry to be helpfully thought provoking. Indeed, after the conclusion of this first day, a number of us from the Integral community gathered to understand what led to the anxiety and energy that was unleashed. Those individuals who were vocally adamant that Terry had been flat-out “wrong” in his statements that included them as if they had outgrown pre-rational beliefs, were members of the interfaith community and students of diverse spiritualractices.

Terry had been speaking to the fact that the mythic conception of God had to be overthrown. When this occurs, the earlier conception of a personally involved God is released, and the individual goes through an existential crisis that can plunge them into atheism. This is an essential and major part of the trans-rational spiritual journey. Accepting the overarching evidence of science, we move to discharge mythic beliefs from our lives and to relate to actual reality as we perceive it on the ground. And this skepticism persists as aealthy balancing influence. Terry referred to it as “our Inner Atheist”.

During this time of reckoning, we must encounter and resolve the following challenges:

• If the mythic God doesn’t exist, is there anyone to pray to?
• Does God act with intentionality?
• If existence is an essential oneness, how real is our selfhood?
• What are the implications of all this?

These are difficult issues to resolve, and from within this cauldron emerges a new second-person spirituality from which we can realize a living relationship with the very Mystery of existence.

The ecstatic view of spirituality is one that so many of us have already experienced. We are seasoned meditators and have created body/mind disciplines such as contemplative neuroscience that describe their interaction within our singular selves. But that does not speak to being in an existential condition of open-hearted, loving relationship with the Mystery of each moment of existence.

Those of us who have cultivated a non-dual orientation may need to grow into a sensibility of surrender, of contact with grace, of being loved by existence, of being born out of this oneness and being received back into this oneness.

Terry did not mean to dismiss continued work on our first person spiritual practices; indeed, he commented, that is the very foundation of an Integral spirituality. He wanted us to honor the stream of clarity that comes through our rational, skeptical minds, but to allow that it can then transform into ecstasy. God IS evolution, he concluded. But we need to experience humility and our need for grace, as well as the call of evolution. It is a teleological necessity that our spirituality open beyond our own happiness and freedom into this type of spiritual activism that joins with the call of evolution.

On this heightened call for us to join with evolution and with the Beloved, we ended the first day. The discussions quickly began among the audience, with some lasting over an hour and spilling into dinner.

Sunday morning commenced with another 3 body workout which was followed by a few moments of silence.

Deborah led us off by asking for us to reflect on a question that arises out of yesterday’s session which related to what might constitute the leading question of our lives. People responded from the whole group, not from within small breakout groups. What she heard was that almost all of the questions revolved around how to grow, embody, and unfold, individually and together; how to get from the theory into the practical; how to live in the unknown; and, for one person, ‘why am I even interested in this?”

Being human, hurts happen often to us all. We may do our Integral Life Practices but then lose momentum, or get sick of “doing”. We may feel the need to just “be”, or to feel unconditional embrace. This brings out the notion that we must attend to more than just inquiring “what can I do about my self and my life now?” By being receptive to our “self” we can beget a healthier and more satisfying integration of both agency and receptivity. Deborah spoke to us about the quality of “just being with” our selves.

Yesterday Terry spoke about the evolutionary imperative to evolve and to move ahead. Culturally and as a species, in the present, we think we’re developed because we can indeed act on the world. Even in the contemplatively oriented Eastern cultures, there exists an exhortation to change our consciousness through the masculine notion of “efforting.” This masculine orientation extends to the belief that we get up after being knocked down without giving any time or attention to feeling wounded.

“Just being with” gets marginalized, and both Terry and Deborah challenged this hypermasculine perspective with a small group exercise for presencing self and each other, through speaking and listening. “When listening”, they advised, “really be with the body/mind of the speaker. Hold the field by inviting the person to be with you more fully. Have the speaker should really show up, as deeply as possible”.

Deborah posed several questions to each group of five, where each speaker had 45 seconds to answer the question with as much authenticity as possible. The others were instructed to listen, to receive in sacred space, rather than having them engage in “therapy talk”. When the chime sounded, the next individual answered the same question. Her two sentence stems for us to answer were:

1. “What I’m feeling right now is…”
2. “One of the ways I hurt is:…”
3. “The ways my pain is and is not healed by my relationship to Spirit, that is, the ways my relationship to Spirit does and does not heal my hurt are…”
4. Closure: “What I want to say to you before we close the circle is:…”

Terry reminded us that this is tender work. To open up to the way/s it hurts to be a human being, what we’re afraid to let ourselves feel, to let the self be seen in life, actually does open up a space within us. We’re such feeling beings, and pain is a part of us. Sometimes we’re given comfort and other times we are not given comfort. But it is Spirituality that holds the potential to heal hurt and pain.

His reminder was helpful to us during this experiential exercise. Our particular group demonstrated cohered, trusting rawness as we opened up, very honestly and with great tenderness. The experience felt so intimate. This last question in closure seemed extremely helpful and necessary. When we came back to the larger group, there was a different feeling among us. It reminded us of the increased depth of relating that we experienced while at Integral Institute seminars in Boulder.

While within the I-I environment, many of us reported experiencing this kind of openness. We had the belief that we had accessed second tier right then, as we fell into depth and breadth, as well as our ability to observe what states of consciousness were occurring both individually and in the “we-space”.

It made one of the participants wish for an exercise that would have expanded our self-reflection about process. We would have been curious to look inside even in a playful mode, and imagine what it might be like if we possessed this consciousness every minute of every day. How might we then deal with others who seem all tightened up in a pretzel, and how to presence that, and to presence one’s self if re-entering our own contracted state.

One participant today did report experiencing what many would call a heart opening. As he described it in the group, there was tremendous resonance and gratitude. This person had to leave at 2 p.m., and so there were many hugs as he left, right at break time.

At this time we took a break. {Terry and Deborah, As we returned, there was a short musical interlude, the name of which we would appreciate knowing!}

Upon our return, we began a discussion about this being heart work. It was pointed out that we had moved from spacious presencing and witnessing to the passive, receptive witnessing. The spacious and more active presencing is a blend of discerning witnessing which keeps out distractions, and the passive, receptive witnessing does not need to do more than just hold the speaker. In an Integral Life Practice, we include heart work via a community service module whereby we love, serve, and engage with others.

There is also a mind, or cognitive, piece in the ILP, as well as an active and critically necessary shadow work. Mind work may include reading books and exposing ourselves to cognitive things, but we must not let the cognitive module become too heady and abstract that it does not contribute to the blending of the modules so that “cross training” is achieved. Ken Wilber used to present his theory at ILP five-day workshops in Boulder in a way that people described as “psychoactive”. We can learn the theory, the Integral operating system, or IOS, as he calls it, and it creates something like a Cartesian graph. The understanding of reality’s “wholeness” comes into view from the totality of the integral model, it is true, but the mind or cognitive module opens us to the ability to take nuanced perspectives.

MOVING INTO THE “1-2-3 OF GOD”

The human holon, or whole/part, is built to relate. On the primitive level, we exist as either prey or predator, depending on the circumstances. As we moved into living within groups, a power hierarchy was needed for its strength and protection. It was important for us to read others’ facial nuances, so that we might know what was of value to our tribe. Otherwise, an individual could be killed or sent into exile, which resulted in death. People may need alone time, but the nervous system is built for stimulation and relationship.

The 1st and 3rd person relationships with God are not about relating. As explained yesterday, the 1st person perspective involves internal contemplation/meditation/centering prayer; the 3rd person perspective involves our relationship with the Diety/the Ground of Being. These are understood and have been readily available to us, but today we need a better way of relating to God, in a manner fit for our time. That would involve having God be in a relationship with us that rests on a nondual ground.

A 1st person experience of God is so rich, a kind of bridge to awareness that is beyond perspectives. From a 3rd person perspective, the numinous is seen in the simultaneity as all co-arising, an emergence, a suchness itself, so that there is no difference between Witness and witnessed, e.g., in Buddhism, Vedanta, Tolle, Adyashanti, and Byron Katie.

But in 2nd person, all the activation, the push to meet others and to be met, that relational energy, “I” (Terry used first person, using himself as an example for us) get that via a love relationship with God, who’s been there all along. We can notice a profound drama of relatedness, what is it to face the One who’s been there all along. This is profoundly important from the perspective of the person who has taken science as Truth, with pluralism added, but who also feels that God is dead.

The question asked at this juncture, when the person goes from complete trust in his particular holy book or word to doubt about this Truth, is existential in nature: What is it like to be alive without this belief in a mythic god? It seems individualistic and separate. The wholehearted belief in a Scientific reality is very dry, an “I-it” relationship.

If you continue with the depth of heart-mind presencing, if you can go deeper and deeper inside, that there’s a soul, a story along with all the matter in the world, an enchantment, which “I” need to engage. This new world view or story recognizes aliveness in the other, and in the Other. In this recognizing, we dare to have an encounter with Mystery, the Absolute, Ground of Being, this feeling of there being a godhead, a Consciousness, that we can relate to. Feeling deeply into it, it feels like a Beloved, when we come into full relatedness with God, a yoga of conducting our life force. It’s not an idea in our heads. There’s a psychophysical process of beginning to engage with a living God in every moment. If I feel You here, do I feel small? Do I need to behave differently? You witness/see/presence me, and I witness/see/presence You.

In the great world wisdom traditions, there is an intimacy with God. One travels from “I-It” to “I-She” to “I-You” to “I-Thou”. This progression is deepening and transfiguring. The whole body/mind is implicated, so what one means by nature brings new possibilities for a deep, trans-rational relationship with the universal Beloved. I return more and more of who I am, more engaged, and what I’d previously cut off.

Terry had read that a reporter had interviewed Mother Theresa and asked, ‘What do you say to God when you pray?” Mother Theresa answered, “I don’t say much. I mostly listen”. The reporter next asked, “What does God say to you?” to which Mother Teresa answered, “God mostly listens”.

Some of us might consider that petitionary prayer is something for children, something that it is time for us to outgrow. Perhaps we shouldn’t. We don’t want to pray to God for a new Cadillac. But we can speak to Mystery from the deepest of our depths. And I can be closer than I can be now, and go deeper and deeper. We can certainly engage in prayer with more and more personal authenticity.

I have to notice what’s between me and God/Being/Power/mysterium tremendum….
I have to deliver myself from the rationalist’s existential isolation to the living company of God.

It becomes a surrender of self. I drop more and more deeply, and as I do so, I clear cobwebs out of the field…I go more deeply still…deep, in the moment into the presence of God, while allowing myself to become more aware, with more profound clarity.

God is my intimate, my Self, the Ground of all manifest being.

I wipe the mud from my eyes and I gain inspiration and insight. I am willing to lose face, to meet the personal challenges of my life, and to deliver myself to something real.

The above sounded more like a sermon, which served to help us access our own 2nd person.

This extraordinary portion was followed by free dialog among the larger group, but we were directed to speak from a 1st person perspective. Someone mentioned how few “infused mystics” were able to get to this level, such as Thomas Merton, St. John, and St. Theresa. Perhaps, said another, Ken’s trying to create a common language for all of this.

Terry said at this point that he’s checking in with us to see if we all seem receptive, not critical and skeptical, before he takes a personal risk and gives one person’s example by praying as he does, aloud. He said that he’s spent 30 years finding and spending time with the most advanced mystics he could find, and he’s found several, been with them, and felt their profound depth of experience and manifestation including Ken, who sees himself as a pandit, someone who has had realizations but chooses to be a scholar and write about it.

With the saints and sages, it’s a force so great, a transmission of what can be felt and known, the most powerful transformational of moments. These are the openings. The mystery of Being is absolutely overwhelming, it is raw awe. That’s what real prayer is, to enter it…At this very moment, one of the authors had a profound opening…..

Terry then invited us to watch him nakedly pray, as much as he knew how. “Spontaneous utterance in the presence of God, find a way to make it real, potent…” One of the authors felt like crying at this point, and the room was very still.

We would not invade Terry’s shared intimacy in this article. It was, indeed, too private, too raw….

After he finished his I-Thou heart opening, there was group silence for a few minutes, followed by an open space for whatever anyone wanted to say. People were right with him in an atmosphere of what could be described as still presencing. There was a palpable sense of “we”, with no sense of fusion, but a we made up of individuals, probably because people said different things, with the
We were then broken into triads with instructions to witness each other, see each other, join the articulation of another, and we’ll each speak, I-Thou, to God: we will pray aloud, 3 ½ minutes for each of us. We’ll have a chance to hang out on the edge and not feel sure. We shall speak with depth and sincerity, unsure of ourselves but with expectancy, with a sense that what is there is immanent, like diving into a space, to drop into more and more of your self/Self…a spontaneous practice, dropping past the habitual mind, so that the experience is original, new, authentic, now.

“It’s daring, showing of the heart and vulnerability. We’ll go around and pray, and after that, we’ll go around and each offer words of appreciation to each other. Speak into the sacred space of the threesome….”

After this exercise, we were near the end of the day. Terry thanked us for entering sacred space together as threes and invited us into the space of the whole group circle, as we were now sitting. Each person had 45 seconds to say whatever we wanted. Finally, we had 3 minutes to dissolve our we-space. One participant, who is involved with musical improv, asked and got permission to lead the group in a chant. We chanted “ahhh”, while the musical improv lady sang some words of appreciation.

About the Authors

Lynne D. Feldman, M.A., J.D., is an attorney and educator who has been active in creating and sharing Integral applications to education, parenting, law, mediation, transformational change, leadership, and spirituality. She worked closely with Ken Wilber and Integral Institute and was to serve as Vice-Chancellor of the planned Integral University. She is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, and is an Integral Scholar. Her writings have been published in the AQAL Journal, Kosmos Journal, New York Times letters. and legal publications. She created the Center for Integral Education, Integral Education Consultants, and New York Integral, which presents workshops and services in the NY metropolitan area. She presents workshops on Integral spirituality, leadership, Life Practice, and the AQAL map at the One Spirit Learning Alliance as well as the New York Open Center, Rutgers University, Maezumi Institute, Eagleton Institute, the Integral Theory Conference, and Integral education seminars. Her work with adolescents has won her praise and honors from the White House, “Dateline” on NBC, Peter Jennings, Teen People magazine, Eagleton Institute, the New Jersey State Legislature, and board of education. The governor named her to his Character Education Commission, and she headed the action team of the NJ Character Education Network. She is a member of the Marie Garibaldi Inn of Court for Alternative Dispute Resolution, is a N.J. certified civil and matrimonial mediator along with many associations that relate to mindfulness, cognition, education reform, attachment parenting and alternative dispute resolution. She lives in New Jersey.

Joanne Rubin is a psychologist who lives outside of New York City. She works with individuals, couples, and families, in person and via phone and webcam. She presented a paper at the 2008 Integral theory Conference defining the emotional line of development and describing pre-, con-, and postconventional levels. Her article is in press in the Jl. of Integral Theory and Practice. At the 2010 ITC conference, she’ll present ego development from a psychodynamic perspective, but which continues beyond conventional adult levels. She has a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology (Grad. Sch. of Ed.) at Univ. of Pennsylvania (1980), and an M.A. in Consciousness Studies from Univ. of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles (2004).