Among the current onslaught of info on the web about scientific studies on meditation, I found this interesting post by Greg Downey about the late anthropologist Felicitas Goodman and her studies on altered states:

“Some readers may have thought I was doing my little anthropologist’s quibble with the research on gene expression in meditation in Relax your genes, when I wrote, ‘I’d be surprised if variations in these techniques (such as those that use chanting or movement, for example) had no effect at all on the resulting neural, cellular, and perhaps even genetic processes.’ Some of you might have thought to yourselves, ‘Sure, Greg, you always say stuff like that — you’re paid to say stuff like that as an anthropologist.’ But one of the things I was thinking about was the work of the late anthropologist, Felicitas Goodman, which I hadn’t really discussed at all on Neuroanthorpology.

I stumbled across the webpages for the Felicitas Goodman Institut (the page is in German), and the English discussion of her work, Ritual Body Postures and Ecstatic Trance, by Nana Nauwald, and the webpage for The Cuyamungue Institute, which Goodman founded, this morning. A bit of searching turned up an interview with Prof. Goodman at Conversations for Exploration.

Goodman’s own biography is pretty fascinating; she didn’t do her PhD in anthropology until she was in her 50s, already a veteran German professor at Ohio State where she emigrated after leaving Germany with an American husband (Glenn). She went on to teach anthropology at Denison University (Ohio), and is best known for her contributions to the study of ecstatic states, including trance and glossalalia (speaking in tongues). She wrote a number of works, including Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences and Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-Cultural Study of Glossolalia (now out in a new edition, according to Amazon). After falling in love with the area around Santa Fe, Goodman helped to found The Cuyamungue Institute in New Mexico, which, according to the institute’s website, ‘continues her research into altered states of consciousness and holds workshops about the postures which she admits are but one door to alternate reality.’”

(via Neuroanthropology)

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“Researchers say they’ve taken a significant stride forward in understanding how relaxation techniques such as meditation, prayer and yoga improve health: by changing patterns of gene activity that affect how the body responds to stress. The changes were seen both in long-term practitioners and in newer recruits, the scientists said.

“It’s not all in your head,” said Dr. Herbert Benson, president emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind/Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “What we have found is that when you evoke the relaxation response, the very genes that are turned on or off by stress are turned the other way. The mind can actively turn on and turn off genes. The mind is not separated from the body.”

One outside expert agreed. “It’s sort of like reverse thinking: If you can wreak havoc on yourself with lifestyle choices, for example, [in a way that] causes expression of latent genetic manifestations in the negative, then the reverse should hold true,” said Dr. Gerry Leisman, director of the F.R. Carrick Institute for Clinical Ergonomics, Rehabilitation and Applied Neuroscience at Leeds Metropolitan University in the U.K.”

(via The Washington Post)

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“In a fascinating review of the cognitive neuroscience of attention, authors Raz and Buhle note that most research on attention focuses on defining situations in which it is no longer required to perform a task - in other words, the automatization of thought and behavior. Yet relatively few studies focus on whether thought and behavior can be de-automatized - or, as I might call it if I were asking for trouble, deprogrammed.

What would count as deprogramming? For example, consider the Stroop task, where subjects must name the ink color of each word in a list of color words (e.g., “red” might be written in blue ink, and the task is to say “blue” while suppressing the urge to automatically read the word “red”). Reaction time is reliably increased when subjects name the ink color of incongruent words (”red” written in blue ink) relative to congruent words (”red” written in red ink), presumably because the subjects need to inhibit their prepotent tendency to read the words. But is it possible to regain control over our automatized processes - in this case, reading - and hence name the ink color of incongruent words as quickly as we would name the ink color of congruent or even non-words?

Some meditative practices purport to reverse automatization of thought and behavior, such as transcendental or mindfulness meditation, and indeed there is some evidence that these techniques can reduce interference on the Stroop task. For example, in a study by Alexander, Langer, Newman, Chandler, and Davies from the Journal of Personality and Social psychology, 73 elderly participants were randomly assigned to either no treatment, a transcendental meditation program, mindfulness training, or relaxation training. Note that transcendental and mindfulness techniques are frequently described as inducing a state of “pure consciousness” during which the mind is “silent,” and yet not empty: in this state, meditators claim to be intensely aware only of awareness itself. Less cryptically, this state is also referred to as “restful alertness.”

(via Developing Intelligence. See also: “Attention Training” via Meditation Influences the Ventral and Dorsal Attentional Networks Differently)

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“Dr. Reginald “Reggie” Ray brings us four decades of study and intensive meditation practice within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as well as a special gift for applying it to the unique problems, inspirations, and spiritual imperatives of modern people. He currently resides in Crestone, Colorado, where he is President and Spiritual Director of the Dharma Ocean Foundation, founded with his wife Lee who is Vice-President, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to the practice, study and preservation of the teachings of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the practice lineage he embodied.”

“A senior teacher in the lineage of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Reggie talks Dharma, controversy and guides the audience through a weird form of meditation.”

(via Elephant Journal)

(Related: “I Am So Over This Buddhism Shit” by Brad Warner via Suicide Girls)

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From: Joy of Tech

(via Dark Roasted Blend)

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“The patient sat with his eyes closed, submerged in the rhythm of his own breathing, and after a while noticed that he was thinking about his troubled relationship with his father. “I was able to be there, present for the pain,” he said, when the meditation session ended. “To just let it be what it was, without thinking it through.” The therapist nodded. “Acceptance is what it was,” he continued. “Just letting it be. Not trying to change anything.” “That’s it,” the therapist said. “That’s it, and that’s big.”

This exercise in focused awareness and mental catch-and-release of emotions has become perhaps the most popular new psychotherapy technique of the past decade. Mindfulness meditation, as it is called, is rooted in the teachings of a fifth-century BC Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha. It is catching the attention of talk therapists of all stripes, including academic researchers, Freudian analysts in private practice and skeptics who see all the hallmarks of another fad.

For years, psychotherapists have worked to relieve suffering by reframing the content of patients’ thoughts, directly altering behavior or helping people gain insight into the subconscious sources of their despair and anxiety. The promise of mindfulness meditation is that it can help patients endure flash floods of emotion during the therapeutic process — and ultimately alter reactions to daily experience at a level that words cannot reach. “The interest in this has just taken off,” said Zindel Segal, a psychologist at the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, where the above group therapy session was taped. “And I think a big part of it is that more and more therapists are practicing some form of contemplation themselves and want to bring that into therapy.”

(via The International Herald Tribune)

(Related: “Sit down, shut up, breathe:Can meditation make you a calmer, more compassionate person?” via The SF Gate)

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Julian Walker is doing an interesting series on his blog called Simply Put which is based on his “21st Century Spirituality model”:

“My 21st Century Spirituality model is an attempt to offer a contemporary alternative to old world religious metaphysics and new age magical thinking. As such the model asserts three key principles:

* critical thinking (and cognitive/intellectual self-development)

* inquiry-based (as opposed to faith-based) practice

* shadow-work (depth-oriented psychological honesty).

Simply Put is a distilled statement of critical thinking based truths that have inquiry-based practice application in conjunction with shadow-work. The first three installments will be a re-run from earlier this year and thereafter I plan to add more installments to this series. This time around I will add an extended commentary in the comments section below and video blogs offering elaboration and meditation instruction - this is just the beginning.”

(Simply Put #1. First Commentary on Simply Put. Simply Put #1: Meditation Video)

(Julian Walker’s Blog)

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“Ken Wilber may be the most important living philosopher you’ve never heard of. He’s written dozens of books but you’d be hard-pressed to find his name in a mainstream magazine. Still, Wilber has a passionate — almost cultlike — following in certain circles, as well as some famous fans. Bill Clinton and Al Gore have praised Wilber’s books. Deepak Chopra calls him “one of the most important pioneers in the field of consciousness.” And the Wachowski brothers asked Wilber, along with Cornel West, to record the commentary for the DVDs of their “Matrix” movies.

A remarkable autodidact, Wilber’s books range across entire fields of knowledge, from quantum physics to developmental psychology to the history of religion. He’s steeped in the world’s esoteric traditions, such as Mahayana Buddhism, Vedantic Hinduism, Sufism and Christian mysticism. Wilber also practices what he preaches, sometimes meditating for hours at a stretch. His “integral philosophy,” along with the Integral Institute he’s founded, hold out the promise that we can understand mystical experience without lapsing into New Age mush.”

(via Salon. h/t Julian Walker’s Blog)

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Another one for today. Can’t get much better than this! xo
Kudos to agency 72andSunny and creative director Glenn Cole for this inspirational piece of advertising.

Amazing what a power a positive note can have on one’s day. When’s the last time you made a stranger feel this way?

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Research into the health claims made for meditation has limitations and few conclusions can be reached, partly because meditation is rarely isolated - it is often practised alongside other lifestyle changes such as diet, or exercise, or as part of group therapy.

So should we dismiss it as quackery? Studies from the field of neuroscience suggest not.

It is a new area of research, but indications are intriguing and suggest that meditation may have a measurable impact on the brain.

In Boston, Massachusetts, Dr Sara Lazar has used a technique called MRI scanning to analyse the brains of people who have been meditating for several years.

She compared the brains of these experienced practitioners with people who had never meditated and found that there were differences in the thickness of certain areas of the brain’s cortex, including areas involved in the processing of emotion.

She is continuing research, but she believes that meditation had caused the brain to change physical shape.

Full Story: BBC News.

(via Plutonica)

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Neil Gaiman quote illustrated by the always-wonderful xkcd.

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I’ve been studying Reiki under two local Reiki masters here, and it’s been good so far. I’ll write more about it once I’ve progressed farther. I’ve completed my Level I and some friends and I begin Level II in a couple weeks. I’ll be studying straight through the year until the Master class.

The teachers aren’t your traditional New Age fruits. They’re more like existential yogis, but the Reiki they practise is phenomenal. As an added bonus, they begin sessions with a Kirlian camera. Now, don’t read too much into these. But interesting to see the results as I progress through sessions with them and my own studies.

The image (click image for larger size) is mirrored, so the pinky finger is associated with your connection to one’s intuition, the ring finger with one’s emotional state, middle finger with one’s physical state, and index finger with one’s mental state.

The first row of finger tips is captured as they have you in your normal state, then they ask you to embody happiness, then frustration, and then to feel as if you’re the most comfortable state with yourself as possible. They capture these four sets onto one film and voilà!

The broken lines represent a lack of connection or awareness of that aspect of your being. Beyond language and labels, just being. And as the rings grow in brightness, I believe they come to represent one’s comfort with just being a part of existence — letting the whole of the life experience wash over oneself.

I went today, and as you can see from the bottom-right image, my way of living is beginning to more wholly encompass all facets of being. It was a good session and the past year’s been good.

Might be worth looking into for those unaware of Reiki. As Saul Williams says in his song "Raised to Be Lowered":

To find the balance between all you sense and all you see
To find the patience and the strength it takes to let it be
To stand amongst the crowd and have the strength to hold your own
To throw away the pen and pad and simply be the poem
To rise above hatred to love through seeming contradiction
To seldom take a side and learn to compliment the friction.

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“It is undeniable that human beings in all times and cultures have been hardwired for spiritual experiences – some of course more than others. But is this proof of any of the multiple metaphysical belief systems that we tend, I would suggest, to superimpose onto the experience? The central difficulty here is that the altered state of a spiritual experience is so convincing (and so important, beautiful and meaningful in its own right) and we are so suggestible during and afterward, that it is almost ubiquitous to be convinced that the experience is undeniable (or at the very least strong) proof of whatever belief system the ensuing interpretation is coming from - when in actuality it is nothing of the sort!

Humans love to go into altered states. There is not a culture in the history of the planet that has not come up with some way of fermenting, drinking, eating, fasting, dancing, sweating, drumming, smoking, snorting, chanting, breathing, meditating, stretching, sensory depriving or sensory overloading its way into altered states of consciousness. In addition some people have more labile neurophysiology than others – be they epileptic, hypo-glycemic, bipolar, schizophrenic or merely garden-variety creative, empathic types with thin ego-boundaries.

Thankfully we have developed an ever-deepening understanding of some of the more extreme dysfunctions of the brain and have ways of diagnosing and treating these problems that are more effective than ever before. One cannot help but be curious about the similarities between say religious and schizophrenic statements about reality and wonder how much of the difference is one of degree, and to what extent the vocabulary of experience being used is coming from the same part of the brain.

It is undeniable that to both the person in the grips of an ardent religious conversion and the clinically insane the novel and metaphysical revelations being described are not only convincing but are held as extremely important, often not only for the individual in the grip of the experience, but for all of humanity. I want to suggest that this is an extreme form of an activity of our physiology and its related interior - the psyche, that at its best can be positively transformational, healing and creative and at its worse can be fundamentalist, violent and crazy.”

(via Julian Walker’s Blog)

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I love this topic…

“What happens if you are left alone in the dark in solitary confinement for days on end? The result is called sensory deprivation and the human mind struggles to cope with it.”

Sensory deprivation is a controversial subject, with allegations the technique has been used at Guantanamo Bay as an interrogation strategy. And thousands of prisoners around the world are kept in solitary confinement, often with a significant degree of sensory deprivation.

The tests are exploring the theory that sensory deprivation makes subjects much more suggestible.

Some of the first research on this subject was carried out after the Korean War in the 1950s. The Canadian military wanted to investigate what had happened to POWs who appeared at international press conferences confessing that they were war criminals. It was thought they had been brainwashed following solitary confinement.

Whole article via BBC News

Hehe and this is funny, too:

Mickey, a postman is seeing mosquitoes and fighter planes buzzing around his head and it’s frightening him.

Claire a psychology student doesn’t mind the little cars, snakes and zebras. But she gets scared when she suddenly feels somebody is in the room.

“In the dark room there is nothing to focus on,” says Prof Robbins as he monitors their behaviour. “In the absence of information the human brain carries on working and processing information even if there is no information to process and after a while it starts to create that information itself.”

No wonder when I teach people to do their visualisations most of them freak out and never pursue it.

Horizon: Total Isolation is on BBC Two at 2100GMT on Tuesday 22 January.

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“In it’s healthy form, Postmodern spirituality deconstructs the cultural baggage and prerational superstitions of Magic and Mythic and expands Rational natural-world, sensual spirituality into a deeper valuing ofboth the inner world of the psyche and the universal truths and states of consciousness made available through the still valid perennial
practices at the heart of those traditions.

Instead we have what I call spiritual kitsch - a kind of lowest common denominator combining of angels, aliens, karma, positive thinking, narcissistic fantasies about manifestation and how the universe works, extra-dimensional spirit guides, astrology, psychics and everything happening for some cosmic reason - all supported by an imaginary new
science that is really just a self-referential reflection of the marketing material that keeps this segment of the economy chugging along at ever greater profits.”

(via Zaadz)

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If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works.

Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain’s emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to “let them go.”

Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don’t know why it works.

Full Story: Yahoo! News.

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This looks like a good program of study - basically a condensed version of Hyatt’s “energized meditation” (itself based on Reichian therapy). I’d recommend doing this in tandum with some streneous excercise (doing this every day along with marial arts seems ideal, but I haven’t tried it).

Nearly every tradition agrees that mastery over the body and mind precede effective spiritual development and advanced will-working. However even the most committed occultists have trouble sitting down for regular daily meditation. While intellectually magic!ians recognize the benefits of such mundane work few seem to understand the rich benefits and absolute necessity of daily body-mind work. The work is often seen as boring or lacking in purpose and worth. It is clearly time to provide fresh insights on the most basic of esoteric techniques, to demystify them and in the process make the benefits offered by basic meditation more accessible.

Full Story: Key 23.

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The passionate, sometimes rhythmic, language-like patter that pours forth from religious people who “speak in tongues” reflects a state of mental possession, many of them say. Now they have some neuroscience to back them up.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania took brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues and found that their frontal lobes — the thinking, willful part of the brain through which people control what they do — were relatively quiet, as were the language centers. The regions involved in maintaining self-consciousness were active. The women were not in blind trances, and it was unclear which region was driving the behavior.

The images, appearing in the current issue of the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, pinpoint the most active areas of the brain. The images are the first of their kind taken during this spoken religious practice, which has roots in the Old and New Testaments and in charismatic churches established in the United States around the turn of the 19th century. The women in the study were healthy, active churchgoers.

“The amazing thing was how the images supported people’s interpretation of what was happening,” said Dr. Andrew B. Newberg, leader of the study team, which included Donna Morgan, Nancy Wintering and Mark Waldman. “The way they describe it, and what they believe, is that God is talking through them,” he said.

continue reading via the New York Times

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Meditation is often credited with helping people feel more focused and energetic, but are the benefits measurable?

A new study suggests that they are. When researchers tested the alertness of volunteers, they found that the practice proved more effective than naps, exercise or caffeine. The results were presented at a recent conference of the Society for Neuroscience.

Full Story: New York Times.

(via Danny Chaoflux)

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Authorities in Nepal urged religious groups and scientists on Sunday to help solve the mystery of a meditating teenaged boy who some believe is an incarnation of Buddha.

At least 100,000 devotees from Nepal and neighbouring India have flocked in recent weeks to a dense forest in southeastern Nepal to see 15-year-old Ram Bahadur Bamjon, who, his associates say, has been meditating without food or water for six months.

Full story: Reuters.

He’s not the first persont to claim to not need food or water.

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Meditation is known to alter resting brain patterns, suggesting long lasting brain changes, but a new study by researchers from Yale, Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows meditation also is associated with increased cortical thickness.

The structural changes were found in areas of the brain that are important for sensory, cognitive and emotional processing, the researchers report in the November issue of NeuroReport.

Although the study included only 20 participants, all with extensive training in Buddhist Insight meditation, the results are significant, said Jeremy Gray, assistant professor of psychology at Yale and co-author of the study led by Sara Lazar, assistant in psychology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

EurekAlert!

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Metachor’s overview of two new studies, one on meditation and the other on non-local consciousness:

Hypothetically, clusters of individuals with similar EM shifts result in ionic feedback, that is, individuals’ EM dynamics come to resonate with each other through similar patterns of ionized molecules surrounding the group. When this process occurs on the order of thousands or millions of individuals, perhaps the EM vibration resonates with the ionosphere, carrying the signal across the globe near instantly.

Vortex Egg.

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Got some Circlesquare lulling away in the headphones� evening pleasure reading on ol’ Mmothra’s blog led me to this interesting piece (via Wired). Dealing with the little known Princeton Engineering Anomolies Reasearch (PEAR) program, they’ve been studying the affects of human consciousness over mechanical equipment.

Using random event generators — computers that spew random output — they have participants focus their intent on controlling the machines’ output. Out of several million trials, they’ve detected small but “statistically significant” signs that minds may be able to interact with machines. However, researchers are careful not to claim that minds cause an effect or that they know the nature of the communication.

This is obviously interesting, but moreso because I’ve had a few discussions here and there dealing with the “occult” nature of our genders. It’s been my personal observation that, of those that have come unto me and learned anything that may be considered magical, females are more akin to subtle sensitivies, whereas males must work harder but lack the overwhelming lashback of fear that accompanies women’s foray into esoteric practices.

Here, the Wired article comments on this in a manner relative to my thoughts:�

Gender matters as well. Men tend to get results that match their intent, although the degree of the effect is often small. Women tend to get a bigger effect, but not necessarily the one they intend. For example, they might intend to direct balls in the random cascade machine to fall to the left, but they fall to the right instead.

Results are also greater if a male and female work together, but same-sex pairs produce no significant results. Pairs of the opposite sex who are romantically involved produce the best results � often seven times greater than when the same individuals are tested alone. Brenda Dunne, a developmental psychologist and the lab’s manager, said the results in such cases often reflect the two gender styles. The effects are bigger, in keeping with what the female alone would tend to produce, but more on target, in keeping with what the male alone would produce.

“It’s almost as if there were two styles or two variables and they are complementary,” Dunne said. “(The masculine style) is associated with intentionality. The (feminine style) seems to be associated more with resonance.”

It’s been my experience that guys, when interested in matters of mysticism and magic, pursue it in a diligent, critical way. Developing skills, step by step, they slowly conquer their initial disbelief in the results that, over time, become commonplace � yet occult to those inexperienced with magic. With the women, many who are aware and interested to partake in some trials (most of those I know are in their twenties), and they can easily accomplish these so-called psychic phenomenon much more quickly and with less stress than the men. However, they are afflicted by an emotional lashback, fear that muddies their experience and, more often than not, dissuades them from moving forth with their experiences. This is unfortunate because they need to deal with this fear to really embrace the potential powers that lie ahead of them. And because of this, men seem to have an upper-hand in that those with piqued curiosities move ahead and, at a slower rate, come to deal with the upsets and emotional turmoils that are thrown their way, rather than a tumultous experience all up-front as in many women’s cases.

Dunno if anyone out there has any comments or observations of their own regarding any of this?

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This entry has nothing particularly stringent to do with the occult, but more with beauty. I just spent the past two days north, past Athabasca (where Nightbreed, the movie based on Clive Barker’s Cabal, has its city of monsters, Midian, located somewhere nearby � we’ve never found it) at a small lake called Baptiste, and all last night � between drinking and fireworks mishaps (no injuries, though a few would’ve been funnier in retrospect) � the aurora borealis were out, aka “northern lights.”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/spacehutobservatory/sets/210704/

Because I’ve spent little time in the U.S. outside of my experiences staying in Seattle (and being attacked by what I swear was a leper, while attempting to purchase a tasty croissant), I have no clue whether as many people have the opportunity to witness this amazing fucking phenomenon first-hand? Two things to living this far north are that a) the sun is up till like 23:00 in the middle of summer, allowing for much more bare-clad women and drinking without stumbling over what you can’t see, and b) in the dead of winter we get maybe seven hours of daylight, if that, and it’s hard to explain how far my penis shrinks back inside of body when the temperature drops to -30�C on a regular basis (I don’t know what that is in Fahrenheit, but it’s freakin’ cold). Benefits, year-round I think, are that we do happen to get northern lights.

And it’s just impossible to explain how insanely cool it is to sit beneath a sky aflame in green and red plasma. It’s kind of like Star Trek or something. Some years ago, I was driving down a major road in Edmonton and traffic just stopped. The whole of the sky, literally a good 80 per cent of the sky had erupted into brilliant pink and deep reds. They light up everything, the city, forests, mountains, lakes, et cetera. The whole city stopped to watch, it seemed like.

We are all surrounded by beauty, and while I don’t have the fortune of aurora every night, I tend to personally lose myself in the cloud formations we get during summer here. I love the skies.

Perhaps next time you’re outside (or wherever) consciously see if you can actually find something you like to just lose yourself to. It’s a god-given gift to be able to see beauty, and I think so many of us forget that or take it for granted.

Aurora folklore, via Wikipedia:�

It is believed that during the first millennium AD, auroral activity was low. This might be the explanation as to why northern lights are never mentioned in the Eddas of Norse mythology. The first Old Norse account of nor�rlj�s is found in the Norwegian chronicle Konungs Skuggsj� from 1250 AD.

An old Scandinavian name for northern lights translates as herring flash. It was believed that northern lights were the reflections cast by large swarms of herring onto the sky.

The Finnish name for northern lights is revontulet, fox fires. According to legend, foxes made of fire lived in Lapland, and revontulet were the sparks they whisked up into the atmosphere with their tails.

The Sami people believed that one should be particularly careful and quiet when observed by the guovssahasat.

In Inuit folklore, northern lights were the spirits of the dead playing football with a walrus skull over the sky.

Other older theories speculated in that aurora borealis were the fires of the purgatory mountain on the reverse side of the globe; that the sun flares could reach around the world to its night side, or that glaciers could store energy so that they eventually became fluorescent (because of the midnight sun, northern lights can only be observed during winter in the polar regions).

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Integral philosopher Ken Wilber has launched a new venture hot on the heels of Integral Naked, this one dedicated to promoting and exploring his “post-metaphysical” approach to mysticism. Participants in the Integral Spiritual Center include noted Kabbalists Reb. Marc Gafni and Reb. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Patrick Sweeney (heir to the controversial Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche), Putting on the Mind of Christ author Jim Marion, Father Thomas Keating, Omega founder Elizabeth Lesser, and many others.

To mark the occasion, the characteristically prolific Wilber has penned a 118-page paper introducing the post-metaphysical approach, which includes a critique of Spiral Dynamics and a theoretical preview of the sequel to his admittedly lame “postmodern” novel Boomeritis. Wilber does all of this amidst growing concerns of the perceived cult-like nature of his organization and deficiencies of his four-quadrant model.

One thing is for certain, you’ll be hearing a lot more from Wilber later this year.

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