Dream-Art Science a 21st Century Reality?
I’m finishing up work on my Integral Certificate from Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute in conjunction with Fielding Graduate University. I’m in the first cohort to graduate next month, and it’s been an incredible year-long experience. I’ve been studying Ken’s work for over ten years now, and can clearly see how it lays a solid foundation for what Seth called Dream-Art Science in The “Unknown” Reality, Vol. 1. I continue to be amazed at how close Wilber’s integral vision is to what Seth laid out as a potential new science that incorporated inner senses and intellect, or what Seth called high intellect (Kris incorporates this term as well).
As many of you may remember, there was a Dream-Art Science forum on NewWorldView for over five years that I moderated, but closed down last September when we upgraded to our new software. While those topics are archived and available for anyone interested, I chose not to continue with the DAS forum because I didn’t have time and was knee deep in my certificate studies. However, I managed to port all of my key insights into various articles that now live in the Library (they are in the Integral, Conscious Creation, and Science sections).
Seth’s DAS contains three very important words, each one complements the others. Dream hints at the subtle realm, state, and bodies. For example, Seth pointed out three main forms of the subtle or astral body in Seth, Dreams, and Projections of Consciousness. Art hints at the spontaneous nature of creativity within All-That-Is, as well as how beauty and aesthetics inform everything we do. And science hints at a method or way of doing that uses the very best capacities of reason and intellect, all within their limits, which have been pointed out since Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in the West, and Nagarjuna’s nondual teachings in the East, but also includes inner and physical senses.
Dream-Art Science, then, combines all three of these concepts into a very powerful emerging science that allows for use of physical senses, mental senses (intellect), and inner senses. The key is that we need all three to get more complete view of anything we wish to study. Wilber calls these the three “eyes of knowing”—modes of knowing that when taken together provide a more balanced and inclusive perspective: the eyes of flesh, mind, and spirit.
Learning to discern the limits and uses of these three eyes is a key to moving toward a dream-art science. For instance, when we use the wrong “eye” we can produce what philosophers call category errors, where we use our intellect (eye of mind) to produce a rational “proof” of God’s existence (which is transrational), or inner senses (eye of spirit) to explain quantum mechanics (which is rational). As such, people produce gross distortions and bizarre beliefs about the nature of reality that don’t hold up to further investigation.
Of course, there’s a lot more to Seth’s dream-art science than can be covered in a short article. But for those interested, I’d like to point out a resource in our Library called The Dream-Art Science Sessions (700-704), Abridged. It provides an integral overview of how Seth’s DAS fits into Wilber’s integral theory.
I’d also like to point out a great new book that Ken just published that is a very accessible introduction to integral theory. It’s taken Wilber thirty years to cover adequate ground and write a concise outline of the essentials of his Integral Vision. The good news is there’s none of those long, nuanced endnotes. In fact, that’s the name of the book, though its subtitle is a mouthful: A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, the Universe, and Everything.
I like the fact that it honors English humorist Douglas Adams who many will recall from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where I learned “the secret” to God, life, the universe and everything is simply “forty-two” (take that Rhonda Byrne! J).
But seriously, the bare essentials are now available that should make Wilber’s integral vision easier to understand, and Seth’s dream-art science in the process. We know from visionaries like H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke that science fiction is a prelude to science fact. If Seth’s DAS is a kind of science fiction, because honestly, we’re nowhere near the level of collective expertise outlined by Seth, then Wilber’s Integral Vision is the closest thing to dream-art science fact that integrates premodern, modern, and postmodern knowledge and wisdom into a tightly knit system.
In short, Ken’s new book focuses on the five essential elements in our awareness and how they work in concert to create our reality:
- Basic perspectives (I, We, It) found in natural language and perception.
- Developmental intelligences (why we’re better at some things than others like music, language, relationships, sports, and science).
- Stages of development (seedling, sapling, tree).
- States (waking, dreaming, deep dreamless, meditation, altered).
- Types (male/female, families of consciousness, orientations). Taken together, these five elements create a rich matrix of possibilities.
Finally, he also includes Integral Life Practice, which includes a set of modules that serve as a kind of spiritual cross-training that may help to produce the first generations of dream-art scientists. As such, we have organized all of Seth, Elias, Kris, and Rose’s practices into the ICC Toolbox so that anyone interested may begin to build their own practice and show us all a thing or two about DAS down the road. In the mean time, the rest of us can experiment as we please, go at our own pace, and customize our own integral practices to suit our intents. Joanne, Rose, and I feel this is so important that we’ve made the ICC Toolbox its own category on the NWV website. And best of all, it’s free! So do take advantage of these wonderful resources and share what you learn in the forums.
Enjoy!