POWER OF THE POSSE PART 3: Nerd Fights as Intellectual Hedonism

Any lengthy discussion of the chaotic conviviality of one-time "apartment festivals" begs a subsequent exploration of its opposite: formal, long-term intellectual discussion groups. Given that this is the primary form that integral salons have taken thus far, it warrants our further examination here.

Curiously, meeting in meatspace to discuss ideas seems an antiquated use of our increasingly rare time together. Cyberspace is far more efficient for the trading and comparison of data-food, with its foundation of hyperlinked text and boundless library access. In countless forums, bulletin boards, discussion groups, and group blogs, statements and responses can be carefully weighed and considered, propositions given a cool 3rd-person consideration before blurting them out. In-person nerd-fights are far more awkward, given the gangly bodies, misread emotions, and obscure manners blocking the efficient flow of conceptual categories.

Yet this disembodiedness can be overcome, and certain small rituals and practices engaged in (i.e. opening up each discussion with five minutes of silence, or qi-gong, or boxing), in order to frame an excited brain-fight in the proper context of a universe which includes more. The unknowledged aspects of being -- bodies, altered states, emotions -- can be paid homage to before we nerds get to the things which really excite us: maps, gadgets, ranks, systems, disciplines, diagrams, and diametrically-opposed dictates on the Nature of Life.

And so we bow: bow to our bodies, bow to our feelings, bow to the atoms and molecules in the room, bow to the clothes we wear, to the loved ones back home, to the whole great vast earth stretching out in all directions, dripping in juice and bile and texture and warmth and refreshment and color and taste... and then we leave it all behind to dance in the semi-arid plains of the Life of the Mind.

To the Intellectual Hedonist, a sole focus on the work of Wilber will quickly grow tiring. Far from THE meta-perspective, Wilber's intellectual superstructure, while epic in scale and thorough in its attention to detail, doesn't include EVERYTHING, and just as the Gross-Realm Pleasure Seeker will eschew a devotion to one form of wine and one type of sexual position, the Noospheric Me-Firster is going to need to roam free to taste the fruits of other nerd-minds.

This is not a tendency to be resisted. While Wilber may serve as the locus around which soul-nerds aggregate, wild swings into the eddies of dead philosophies and the treasure-caves of unknown authorings provides the Brain-Bacchanalia with much needed energy. What is held on to, like a maypole or staff in the midst of this tornado of ideas, is the integral INTENT.

Far from just batting around misread theories on perspectives, stages of development, transpersonal states, gender typologies, multiple intelligences, socioeconomic tendencies, cultural worldviews and the like for the hell of it, the integral nerd-fest exists as a service -- like an automotive garage, a gardening supply store, or an anatomical book shop -- to the rest of the world, a klatch of specialists (or "specialist generalists", as our friend Sean Saiter is fond of calling us) looking at maps of the world in an attempt to synthesize a more useful tool for navigating the 21st-century noosphere.

Of course, to actualize this service capacity would require slightly more than caffiene-addled quotations from The Eye of Spirit. It would require: 1) an attempt to touch the real world, and 2) an attempt to FIX the world (as those of a more masculine orientation are wont to do). For the first requirement, we recommend an awareness, if not a mastery of, current events. One certain game the nerd-fight might play is "running the AQAL gauntlet", meaning a practice wherein current events are run through a checklist of "undeniable categories" (those fundamental aspects of the world which any true integral approach should consider, i.e. perspectives, and states of consciousness) in an effort to shed new light on them not being shed by the traditional, non-integral punditry. While this might merely generate a laundry list of increasing complexification, it might also cohere as an arrow pointing at a more holographic moon: a perviously invisible "chaotic attractor" which may serve a more radical (int its truest sense: "of the root") explanation of today's dignities and ever-escalating disasters.

Hurricane Katrina, for instance. Instead of descending into the typical "my opinion right or wrong" half-informed foodfight which typically inflames the noosphere following a particularly painful and mismanaged mishap, Integral Salon South Dakota could take a deep breathe, set up a white board at the local coffee shop, and ask itself: "what new light might a more integral perspective shed on this situation?"

Quadrants: how was the culture of New Orleans effected? The behavior of its citizens? What intentions were apparent behind the clean-up effort? What social systems came online (or failed to come online) to meet the needs of those in loss?

Levels: what was the pre-rational/egoic media's response to the event? What were more conventional opinions saying? Where was the worldcentric voice?

Lines: What multiple intelligences might (former) FEMA empresario Mike Brown have needed to work on?

States: Would onsite meditation training done a single thing to calm apeshit looters and police officers down?

Types: If George Bush was a woman, might the clean-up been a little smoother? Rougher? Pinker? Nicer?

Such an activity could occur once a month or more, with a note-taker in attendance to synthesize the data thus generated and present it to the wider local community, i.e. "Integral Salon South Dakota's statement on the events in New Orleans is thus...". And with that, macho-nerds redeem their alienating info-rages with the creation of useful meme-clusters reinjected into the social body which generated their raw elements in the first place

So let us celebrate the Cognitive Reveler as much as we do his/her cousins in the Fiesta-sphere, for man does not live on garlic bread, Sun Chips, and Bacardi 151 alone.

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