Personal Introduction: Coming Out "Integral"
Seeing as my "E-blogger" profile needs to be contained to 1200 characters or less, I thought I would indulge myself by posting the expanded form as a blog.
I am the owner/manager of a Kitchener based recording studio and media replication house called Studio A-Mirador. I am also a new host a community radio program on CKMS FM 100.3 in Waterloo called "Stumbling Upon Moksha". For me, it's become an exciting extension of something I have always loved to do: share the music I love and celebrate its powers to inspire and transform people's lives. It never ceases to amaze me how many people use music to dislodge themselves from the patterns of their workaday mind and surrender to something deeper, something personal, but also transpersonal; and therein, lies music's real power, I feel anyway.
In the mid eighties, I began my undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo and was lucky enough to be able to study music within a context of other arts disciplines, including my other passions: philosophy, psychology and religious studies. In my final year I was introduced to music expression theory and later went on to study it more deeply through a graduate program in Music Criticism at McMaster. My thesis topic was-- get this-- was "A Critical Examination of Expressive Content in Mahler's Ninth Symphony." Yes... I was one of those intense sorts that would groove to Mahler for hours at a time, searching for ways to explain how profound his music was to me, especially his ninth symphony. To me it pointed to a reconciliation of life amidst the inevitably death, not surprising words about a composer described in the 20th Century as the first musical existentialist. (A-hem.... Did I mention I was intense?)
Unfortunately, the longer I chased my understanding of these truths academically, the more the magic began to allude me. I mean, the mere fact that I had to propose an actual defense of expressive content points to how deprived the Humanities in the early 90s were of a way to inter-relate the inner and outer dimensions of any discipline. Music was just one of them.
Fortunately, about a decade later, I stumbled upon the work of Ken Wilber whose "Integral" model does just that: it proposes a way to reconcile the interior dimensions of being with their exterior or manifest counterparts. It also addresses other seemingly opposing perspectives (like singular versus plural), along with the often neglected perspectives of first, second and third person. In a nutshell, Wilber provides us with the first truly integral model of reality-- in other words, a really good map of the manifest world. And think about it: if you want to explore reality, or escape from its prison, what you first need is a really good map.
So I encourage everyone to explore his work and his Integral model as deeply as they can. But don't worry; the pursuit need not remain purely theoretical. In fact, things get particularly exciting when Integral thinking is applied to expressive and practical disciplines, like culture and politics. There's no limit to where an intelligent, purposeful study of reality will take us. All I know is you don't have to believe anything. Just check it out and try it on first hand. You'll know the truth when you feel it and your beliefs will be little more than temporary containers for your fading doubts.
~Katie
Awareness brings choice; choice brings Freedom
