Well, I thought my next post was going to be about the adventures of a an internet marketing consultant and entrepreneur… but life tends to deliver unexpected things. I found these amazing free audios from the The Great Integral Awakening series:
http://www.integralenlightenment.com/pages/giaaudios/index.php
Including interviews with Ken Wilber, Andrew Cohen, Genpo Roshi, Don Beck, Marc Gafni, and others.. all the luminaries of the integral theory / evolutionary spirituality movement.. FOR FREE. I have been devouring them and I haven’t yet found one that doesn’t speak to me.
I have been so inspired by these audios (that have propelled me out of a 3-4 month funk about my own development – see below), I went ahead and created a whole new site (http://integralevolutionary.com/). So this site (Lifestyle Design School) is now returning, after multiple meanderings, to its original purpose as “Marc’s life and travels”. My developmental ideas are moving to the Integral evolutionary blog, and what follows is just my story.
I first came across the ideas of evolutionary spirituality through spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen and EnlightenNext. I fell madly in love with these ideas, which I wrote about in the article What is Evolutionary Spirituality. After a brief time, however, I found allegations of serious integrity problems and personality issues in Andrew’s Cohen’s teachings, which I resolved, after a rather lengthy investigation, to be true. I gave up on EnlightenNext (not without considerable grief), but continued my research, connecting shortly with Saniel Bonder and Waking Down in Mutuality. This was a very significant experience and it fulfilled my search for a path with integrity, with heart, and which was reported to be extremely rapid in achieving “awakening”. However, I was still unclear what it meant exactly to be “awakened”, what relevance it had to the everyday concerns of a “working-class bloke” – as in, how to earn a living, get along with other people, and make a contribution. The conversation was very exciting but a bit theoretical. I felt my own development was stalling. How did I know? I wasn’t making any money, and I was behaving neurotically (with caffeine and procrastination, for example).
A few very recent events have resolved this question (of the appropriate place of “awakening” in my everyday life).
First was to see that interest in integral development and evolutionary spirituality is currently “exploding”, with integral groups forming in major cities everywhere, a large Facebook community, etc. This gave me a lot of hope for creating meaningful connections around these issues, which I know both instinctually and theoretically to be necessary for growth to happen. It’s been clear to me for a long time that my life purpose lies in exploring and facilitating human development, especially from a practical “in-the-trenches” perspective.
And secondly something that came out of a day-long workshop with Ted Strauss and Hillary Davis yesterday, senior Waking Down teachers. What I got is that achieving “awakening” or “awakened consciousness” is not like another project. Rather, it is the background or context from which my life happens, such as my struggles around making money and building community. In other words, my daily struggles – including all the neurotic manifestations, procrastination (whose root cause is attachment to “idealized self”), addiction, etc, is actually the same things as my awakening. There is something very freeing in this, ending the guilt-trip at any rate.
Ok then, stay tuned for the next issue which is really going to be about the adventures of an integrally-minded internet marketing consultant, and how such a person struggles with neurotic tendencies and makes his money 
.
