Nuts and Bolts Blog

Female Friendships and Rivalries Are Truly, Truly, Truly Outrageous

Written by TJ Dawe

Jem and the Holograms When girls are in groups, they form coalitions of best friends, two against two, or two in edgy harmony with two. A girl in a group of girls who doesn’t feel that she has a specific ally feels at risk, threatened, frightened. - Woman: An Intimate Geography, Natalie Angier

I recently spent a couple of hours watching Saturday morning cartoons from the 70s and 80s with a bunch of strangers. A local group (in Vancouver) puts on cartoon parties every few months. They show period commercials and PSAs in between cartoons, and have trivia contests. They sell plastic bowls of sugary cereal (one dollar discount if you bring your own bowl). The emphasis is on fun and nostalgia. But watching a program when you’re not part of the target audience - even if you once were - is hugely educational. Any work of art that finds an audience says something about that audience - their priorities, their values. And the episode of Jem they showed that day slid quite neatly into a few things I’ve been reading about feminine psychology.

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Six Perspectives On- The 2010 Integral Theory Conference

Written by Juma Wood

integral-theory-conference Earlier this month Integral Institute and JFK University co-sponsored the second bi-annual Integral Theory Conference in San Francisco. As one of the only people in my immediate universe who didn’t attend this event, I thought it would be interesting to get a couple of perspectives on what happened there, and where the future of this emerging culture is heading.

Having worked with the integral framework for several years in both my personal and professional life, I’ve been most interested in what our Beams & Struts colleague Olen Gunnlaugson (quoted below) calls the ‘second wave’ of integral theory. Unlike, for example, the second wave of feminism, this second wave refers to the observations, experiences and adjustments people have and make working with the integral map on the ground. Since the basic framework makes such intuitive sense and has an ease and elegance the hard world can lack, there is tendency for people to remain locked in the construct of the theory, detached from the difficult choices and crooked timber of manifest reality.

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2010 Integral Theory Conference

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How Good Were the Good Old Days?

Written by TJ Dawe

dentistry in the days of yore In general, life is better than it ever has been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word: “dentistry” - PJ O'Rourke, All the Trouble in the World

This article is a sort of round-up of passages from various writers to the effect that things are better now - at least in some important ways - than they used to be.

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The Post-Postmodern Heroics of Robert Harrison- Or, How to Put Girth in Your Quadrants

Written by Juma Wood

In the first few months since the birth of this site, we've been carefully driving stakes into the ground while consciously tending the soil for our next iteration of growth into the larger world. Our aim is to organize a diverse community from various segments of society, people with talent, sincerity and grit. People also who have an intuition of a larger purpose and through whom we can leverage intelligence from various fields of study and action to better serve the needs of the world.

As you may have noticed, many of us draw inspiration from the philosopher Ken Wilber. By extension, we have loose affiliation with the community of practitioners that have emerged around his work. There are several bright lights in this widening circle.

But recently a colleague made an important general point about those drawn to Ken’s work. She observed how the community tends to be heady, interested in maps and big pictures, but somewhat lacking in the rigorous study of other fields. She evoked the big brain image of a ‘T’. We liked that image because it reflects a single body. In this case, a skinny body with a wide head. In this community, there is a tendency for over-generalizing based on the maps of integral theory. There is not enough ‘girth’: knowledge about and practice in the diverse fields that comprise societies. The poetry of the world, if you will.