Online Zoom Forum: Ken Wilber: The Spiritual Vision in his Life and Work.
Date: Wednesday 17 July 2024.
Time: 7pm-9pm (UK time).
Event Description:
Format: There will be five talks, each of 12 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of discussion among the speakers and the chair, followed by Q & A.
Chair:
Ian Wight PhD FCIP GTB:
Dr Ian Wight has followed Ken Wilber’s work for 25 years, the formative initial influences being A Brief History of Everything, The Marriage of Sense and Soul, and One Taste. He has deployed an integral framing on most of his scholarship since, especially in the areas of placemaking and professing. A professional planning practitioner for two decades, and an educator of planning professionals in-the-making for another two decades, he is now a pracademic, in his refirement.
Involved in the founding of the Integral Institute in the early 2000s he was fortunate to spend time with Ken Wilber in person, first at his ridge-ranch home near Boulder, and then at his warehouse condo in LoDo, in downtown Denver, mainly through his affiliation with Integral Ecology and Integral Education. He also participated in the early Integral Theory Conferences, organized though JFK University in San Francisco, and the Integral Spiritual Experiences at Asilomar.
He recently contributed a chapter to the Routledge Handbook on Placemaking, entitled: Integral Placemaking - A Poiesis of Sophrosynes? which charts key phases in his integral journey, interpreting relevant aspects of Wilber’s spiritual vision. Another example of Wilber’s influence on his work is Ethos-Making - A Place We Can All Call Home? a contribution to the Thriveable Cities issue in the IntegralMentor Urban Hub Graphic Book series.
Speakers:
Brad Reynolds:
Title: Ken Wilber Is a Finger Pointing Us to the Moon.
Description: Brad Reynolds discusses how Ken Wilber articulated his spiritual vision and integral project on the first page of his first published paper, two years before his first book was released.
By accessing the Perennial Wisdom Tradition and combining it with Western psychology, Wilber pointed us to our highest developmental potential: Enlightenment or God-Realization.
He used a Spectrum of Consciousness to point us to our Ultimate Consciousness.
Thus, from the very beginning up to today, Wilber is like "the finger pointing us to the moon," as the Zen simile explains it; a pandit sharing an integral path for our own possible moon landing.
Bio: Brad Reynolds did graduate work at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) before leaving to study under Ken Wilber for nearly a decade (1995-2004), and published two books reviewing Wilber’s work: Embracing Reality: The Integral Vision of Ken Wilber (Tarcher, 2004) and Where's Wilber At?: Ken Wilber's Integral Vision in the New Millennium (Paragon House, 2006).
He recently published a book reviewing the world’s wisdom traditions called God’s Great Tradition of Global Wisdom: Guru Yoga-Satsang in the Integral Age (Bright Alliance, 2021).
Brad is also a graphic artist, laying out books and designing a wide variety of graphics for publication, as well as continuing his work in Integral Philosophy and the study of world religions.
Brad Reynolds: www.IntegralArtAndStudies.com
Brooke Teisui McNamara Sensei:
Title: Illumined Heart-Mind: The Living Poetry of Wilber's Vision.
Description: Ken Wilber's spiritual vision, as applied to the creation, expression, and reception of Integral Art, offers its own flavors of living poetry.
In this talk, Brooke Teisui McNamara Sensei will guide an exploration and experience of Wilber's awakened Dharma Eye in relation to art, including guided tastes of the mind of meditation, readings of original poetry, and a personal response from Wilber about "what poetry at its best is meant to evoke."
Bio: Brooke Teisui McNamara Sensei is a Zen teacher, lineage holder, and poet. She has practiced as a student of Diane Musho Hamilton Roshi since 2010, receiving monk ordination in 2012 and Dharma Transmission in 2023.
Brooke has published two books of poems: Bury the Seed and Feed Your Vow, and received the Charles B. Palmer prize through the Academy of American Poets.
She has taught at Naropa University in Yoga Studies and CU Boulder in Dance.
Brooke holds an MFA, and teaches in-person and online courses and retreats to facilitate the awakening of innate wisdom, compassion, artistry, and play.
She is the president and a founding teacher at Dragon Lake Zen, and lives with her husband and two sons in Boulder, CO.
www.BrookeMcNamara.com, www.DragonLakeZen.org
Dr Marilyn Hamilton:
Title: Ken Wilber: The Spiritual Light Opening an Integral Paradigm for Human Settlements.
Description: I was captured by the spiritual vision of Ken Wilber when I returned to school as a mature student in 1997. I found myself signed up for Margaret Wheatley’s Berkana Online Community of Conversations, which quickly became a case study for my PhD dissertation. I set out to study learning and leadership in self-organizing online community systems. I needed a methodology that embraced wholism, human individuals and collectives and that bridged our bio-psycho-cultural-social realties. This was the same year that Ken Wilber published Sex, Ecology and Spirituality (SES) and it became my guide for developing what Ken later called an Integral Methodological Pluralism.
In this session I will re-visit the spiritual discovery process that SES set me on through 25 years of exploring a whole new integral paradigm of human settlements with Ken Wilber as guide, provocateur and generous coach.
Bio: Dr Marilyn Hamilton is Co-Founder of Living Cities.Earth and Founder of Integral City Meshworks.
She is the author of the Integral City Book Series and Tales of the CROFT Regenerators Novella series.
She is co-designer of the course Cities Rising for Regenerative World and curator of Urban Hub 20, City Change in a VUCA World (English and Spanish).
Marilyn serves cities and ecoregions as Gaia’s Reflective Organs. Inspired by the Gaia Code of Care for Self, Others, Place and Planet, Marilyn designs, delivers and supervises “pracademic” courses. These build capacity for the wellbeing of 4 archetypal Voices of the City: Citizens, City Managers, Business/Innovators, 3rd Sector/Civil Society.
An international keynote speaker, and faculty of Ubiquity University and Royal Roads University, plus several other Universities, Marilyn is or was CEO, COO, CFO and CIO in the private & Not-for-Profit sectors.
She is an Evolutionary Leader, a researcher and a member of the Integral Europe Academic Consortium and Global Accreditation Council and is a Findhorn Fellow.
She has served as Fellow for Urban Arena Europe and Ambassador for World Unity Week.
Currently Marilyn is really passionate co-creating initiatives with the international consortium Living Cities.Earth aiming to ignite aliveness in 10,000 Cities for Love and Peace.
Marilyn lives in Findhorn Ecovillage Scotland (where she returned to the land of her ancestors from British Columbia, Canada in 2018). www.integralcity.com livingcities.earth
Indra Adnan:
Description: After 15 years a Buddhist I welcomed Ken Wilber into my life to ground my spiritual practice as a socio-economic-political system.
I hosted the London Integral Circle with Matthew Kalman for 10 years welcoming such luminaries as Terry Patten and Susanne Cooke Greuter into our intense discussion group.
After six years however, the women split off, wishing to move on from the often competitive engagement with Wilber’s texts to a more applied approach: from the map to the territory.
Soon after the men established a men’s group and the wider community moved to the pub.
In the years since then I’ve experienced this divide persisting. While I founded a political platform and am co-initiating a new democratic system arising directly out of Ken’s 4 quadrant model and use of spiral dynamics, my male peers have gone to found metamodern think-tanks (Perspectiva and Rebel Wisdom).
In this presentation I’ll share my socio-political work and how Wilber continues to shape its structure and vision.
Bio: Indra Adnan is Founder and Co-initiator of The Alternative Global political platform.
They publish a Daily Alternative media and run community collaboratories around the UK, building Citizen Action Networks (CANs) to reconnect people to the local eco-systems of solutions available.
Central to the vision of an Alternative politics is the interdependency of the complex individual, the community and the planet: I, We, World.
Indra is concurrently a psycho-social therapist, Director of Poiesis at Perspectiva and Adviser to the Realisation Festival.
She has consulted to the World Economic Forum, Indian, Finnish and Danish governments, NATO, the Scottish Executive and the Institute of Contemporary Arts amongst others.
Her book The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age was a TLS Book of the Year in 2021.
Jonathan Dover:
Title: Ken Wilber in my Life and Work: The Development of Care Farming in the UK.
Description: In 2003 I chose to leave managing a large City Centre fashion store in Birmingham to spend time working on the horticultural unit at the Findhorn Foundation in Northern Scotland.
I experienced a transformation of how I saw the world, but had no idea how this had occurred.
Whilst retraining on a subsequent Masters in Sustainable Development I sought to discover what had happened to me and my Professor gave me a book called A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber and a book on Spiral Dynamics by Beck and Cowan. She said she thought I would enjoy them and I certainly did! Wilber’s work went on to provide insight that guided my following work, creating a project that developed over 45 new social enterprise care farms in the West Midlands.
This provided an autonomous and distributed rural healthcare service for some of the most vulnerable groups of people in society.
This presentation will cover some of the many ways Wilber’s vision was put into practical action both during and at the end of that journey.
Bio: Jonathan works as an integral coach and business developer, having spent the last two years turning the community shop at The Park Ecovillage at Findhorn from loss to profit.
He is an integral theory and spiral dynamics educator and is particularly interested in the integration of values required to support emergence beyond first tier.
Jonathan is a certified coach with Integral Coaching Canada, a certified Spiral Dynamics Assessor with ValueMatch from the Netherlands and holds an MA (hons) with Distinction in Sustainable Development Advocacy.
An archive recording will be made for the EICSP archive.
NB: There will be no refund if you cancel your booking.
There seems to be a new issue with Paypal and hopefully it will be resolved.
If you are having a difficulty paying by Paypal, then you can pay by bank transfer instead.
NB: you must also email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. so we can send you the Zoom sign-in details.
Here are the bank transfer details:
Account Name: Edinburgh International Centre for Spirituality and Peace
Bank Address: Edinburgh Royal Mile Branch
Account Number: 06131159
Sort Code: 802000
Some international transfers also ask for an IBAN number:
The IBAN number is as follows:
GB70 BOFS 8020 0006 1311 59
Cost: By Donation.
Contact: Neill Walker, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
(for late inquiries on the day, then email, do not phone.
If you book on the day of the event you will be emailed the Zoom sign-in details 1-2 hours before the event).