Get Integral with Julian Walker and Ken Wilber!
Posted on Mar 20th, 2007
by 
Julian
Julian
It was quite a thrill to wake up to the above message in my inbox yesterday morning!
I had a really fun, intense and humorous 2 hour dialog with Ken Wilber this past Saturday afternoon. It seems several people at the Integral Institute had found my blogging pertinent to the debate about The Secret and pointed Ken in my direction...
This turned out to be a rather theoretical conversation about:
* Personal and collective psychological development
*The Pre/Trans Fallacy
* The Culture of Narcissism
*The Importance of Shadow Work
* Critical Thinking as in invaluable spiritual tool
* The importance of the three-strands-of-science approach to genuine spiritual practices.
Part One of this live audio dialog is up at the uber-hip Integral Naked site right now. It's called Exploring the Secret: The Tricky Business of Creating Your Own Reality.
Yes, this is a paysite - it has an extraordinary archive of original material that you won't find anywhere else and the first month is free.....after that it's $10 per month and you can cancel at any time.
Listen if you are interested in hearing me participate with master-theorist and Integral genius Ken Wilber in a deconstruction of why ideas like the so-called Law of Attraction hold such appeal for folks at the altitude of Green New Age spirituality, and why these ideas are not only incorrect philosophicallly, psychologically, scientifically and spiritually, but why they are so problematic and potentiallly damaging.
The dialog also explores the partial and distorted truths that wishful-thinking ideas like The Secret's Law of Attraction express and attempts to interpret those in a more clear and, we think, useful way.
For some this material will be obvious, others will be familiar with the ideas we are expressing but may not have fully understood their implications yet, while still others will find this a stimulating ride through a new and provocative landscape - I hope this is both enjoyable and illuminating! It was for me.....
~Julian
Access: Public
dialog
August 2008 
SO happy you made it on, dude. And so happy Zaadz could play a role :) Thank you for everything you do, Julian!
yeah, kudos to you bro.
speaking of The Secret… and the race to differentiate (and cash in) begins :)
via Secrets of “The Secret” Pod
Dude! You must be so stoked! It’ll be interesting to see if the dynamics on the discussion boards shift any, now that your name has been “up in lights.”
Projections, shadows, tabloid-style exposés…
“Yeah, Julian and I go way back…”
“I heard that Ken taught Julian how to control his brainwaves, and now they can communicate telepathically…”
:0) –Bob
You deserve all the credit you receive from your calm insights on this topic that you shared with Ken. It was terrific to read your thoughts PRIOR to your conversation through I-I, and then see how well it integrated with ken's thoughts.
Yay for debunkers !!!
Julian,
What a bright discovery your blog site is! Found it thru Integral Naked. Bob above says it well when he describes your input with Wilber in the Integral Naked interview as “calm insights.” And that same calmness is mirrored in your finely tactuful responses to this testy topic of The Secret.
I had begun to think Wilber had overly stated his case for Boomeritis, that pesky narcissism haunting so many peoples' relationship to “ultimate matters,” until I read your site one day, and then attended a Religious Science program the next. Among all the details of errant thinking you so expertly identify and articulate, I'd like to throw in the following:
The simple way I like to put what I'm seeing in the resistance to criticism of The Secret is the confusion between the right to have an opinion versus the whether the opinion is right. Instead of taking on your arguments against the “rightness” of the material in The Secret, so many have accused you of denying others their right to have an opinion. Not only is this (as you so well expressed) a performative contradiction (aka hyprocrisy), these folks go there because they are so attached to their beliefs that to invalidate their beliefs is to invalidate them. That fusion of self with thought goes to the lack of differentiation that makes the case for their arrested development at primary narcissism. This explains, in part, what makes your job so difficult here. Wilber has put it this way: “…many arguments are not really a matter of the better objective evidence, but of the subjective level of those arguing,” which means you're shouldering at least two burdens here: 1) clarifying for those mature enough some confusions in their thinking, and 2) attempting to raise the awareness of those for whom their level of understanding is developmentally limited at magical thinking to begin with. Being limited to print media here, your ability to move the second group will be eternally frustrating even though your service to the first is so admirable.
In any case, I wanted to toss in a few cents of acknowledgment for your incisive explanations for what is so over-blown about this insidious movie and for your immense capacity to wield integral thought so capably. Your obvious intelligence reveals its wisdom basis as you so patiently but forthrightly respond to your readers. I salute you with a full bow and look forward to your certain gifts of discriminating clarity to come.