A lot has been happening this summer, but I havent been posting much. I've been trying to write an essay about my trip to Crestone, Colorado, where I attended lectures by William Irwin Thompson. That trip has led to renewed interest in Bateson, Rudolf Steiner, Aurobindo, Gebser, and chaos theory. and to a decrease in my interest in Wilber, which had been waning since I discovered Thompson in October 2005. The whole "Wyatt Earp" fiasco only increased the velocity of my descending opinion of Wilber.

Then Alan Kazlev published his critique of Ken Wilber, which underscored the differences between Aurobindo's system and Ken Wilber's Advaito-Mahayana-Daist conception. (Wilber, of course, paints his own system as congruous to Aurobindo's.) This led to a renewed interest in the post-Wilberian integral movement.

Then I saw Morris Berman on CSPAN-2's BookTV plugging his new book Dark Age America. Somehow I have remained unaware of Berman until now, so I started reading his The Re-enchantment of the World which is about Batesonian holism and the scientistic turn Western Civ has taken since the Renaissance.

The thing about Berman's talk that really resonated with me was his view of the West as in a crisis that is primarily spiritual, rather than one that is primarily environmental, strategic, or economic.

Then there is the congressional race in my district, which could be one of the hottest in the country. Tammy Duckworth, a heavily wounded Iraq War vet is running against Peter Roskam, an ultra-conservative Republican whose allies include Dick Cheney and soon-to-be-convicted criminal Tom DeLay. I'm helping Tammy out in my own little way.

Anyway, what occurred to me during Quaker meeting yesterday was that one problem with Democrats is their embrace of secular scientism. This has allowed Republicans to (falsely) paint themselves as the party of traditional values and, by default, of spirituality. That's why Barack Obama's embrace of religious language is such a profound and important step.

In addition, I've been reading Jean Gebser's Ever-present Origin, Jeffrey Kripal's Kali's Child, Rudolf Steiner's Knowledge of Higher Worlds, and Bill Thompson's The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light. And I've been engaging in various debates on Wikipedia on Peter Roskam, Pseudoscience, Nietzsche, Ramakrishna, etc. Great films that I have seen this summer include V for Vendetta and Deepa Mehta's Water.