Most Recent Blog-Posts

• Approbations for Radical Kabbalah – by Ken Wilber

  
  

  Approbations for Radical Kabbalah

  
  

  By Ken Wilber

  
  

  “This is a great work of inspired and audacious scholarship. Professor Moshe Idel’s letter of recommendation to Oxford University, and Professor Richard Mann’s words (comparing Marc’s work on Kabbalah to Elaine Pagels’ work on the Gnostic gospels), which introduce these volumes, speak for themselves. Similarly, the statements by Michael Zimmerman from the perspective of a chief justice of an American supreme court and by Sally Kempton, Dr. Gabriel Cousens, and Rabbi Winkler as scholars and teachers of enlightenment show something of the broad relevance of the volumes, as do the remarks by Sean Esbjörn-Hargens and Zachary Stein.

  I read Dr. Gafni’s masterwork on Radical Kabbalah in its first drafts almost seven years ago. It was then over a thousand pages long, and I read it over two or three days with great excitement. I sent Marc a series delighted emails, after reading every few chapters. The breadth, depth and the sheer importance of the work moved me. I immediately recognized it as a semi- nal work, identifying a critical lineage of enlightenment from the tradition of Kabbalah, which needed to be incorporated into the Integral model.

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• Foreword by Howard Bloom – The Intimate Universe

  
  

  Foreword by Howard Bloom

  Forthcoming book: “The Intimate Universe” by Barbara Marx Hubbard and Dr. Marc Gafni

  
  

  “To understand the book you hold in your hands, you have to understand two people: Barbara Marx Hubbard and Marc Gafni. Both of them are magic.

  To reveal that magic, let me first tell you the tale of how I met Barbara Marx Hubbard, who was later to introduce me to Marc. It was 2005, and I was at a space conference at the Airport Sheraton in Los Angeles. This was not a conference I’d wanted to attend. I’d been pressured into showing up by people from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Space Society. Why had I refused to go? At first, I had been too embarrassed to explain.  The fact was that I only attend conferences where I’m speaking. There’s a reason. If I am just  another face in the crowd, that fact depresses me.

  I told that to Feng Hsu, the senior risk analyst from NASA who had made himself part of the pressuring team. Feng volunteered to fly up from Houston to keep me company. And he made a promise. He would assign another babysitter to me, David Livingston, the host of the Space Show. Livingston, he assured me, had heard every one of my broadcasts on the highest rated overnight talk radio show in North America, Coast to Coast, was a huge fan, and knew everyone in the space community. Feng was not kidding around. Not only did he team up with me when we attended lectures and peppered the lecturers with questions or criticism, but David Livingston was a genius at important introductions.

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• Introduction to ‘Your Unique Self’ – by Ken Wilber

  
  
  

  Introduction to ‘Your Unique Self – the Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment’

  
  

  by Ken Wilber

  
  

  “We live in extraordinary times. In the history of all humanity, there have only been five or six major world transformations: somewhere around 500,000 years ago, humans began to emerge as a distinct species, with an archaic worldview which separated us from the great apes.  Around 50,000 years ago, the archaic worldview gave way to a magical worldview, anchored in foraging, hunting, and gathering.  Then, around 10,000 years ago, farming was discovered.  Simple farming, with a hand-held hoe, called horticulture.  Concurrently, the worldview of simple magic gave way mythic-magic–more complex, and more sophisticated.

  

  
  

  Around 4,000 B.C.E., the animal-drawn plow was discovered, and horticultural gave way to agrarian, while mythic-magic gave way to fully-developed mythic, with its traditional fundamentalistic values.  The mythic world ruled until right around the Renaissance in the West, where myth began to give way to reason, which exploded during the Enlightenment.  The rational worldview, along with its scientific materialism, and with its modern values, became in many ways the official worldview of the modern West.  Until, that is, the 1960’s, which saw the last major world transformation–this time from modern to postmodern, from monolithic reason to postmodern pluralism and the “cultural creatives”.

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