Recently learned of the wonderfully spirited and talented group from Venezuela, the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra conducted by Gustavo Dudamel.  They recently performed in NYC's Carnegie Hall some pretty impressive pieces including Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra and Shostakovitch's 10th Symphony... and for the evening's encore, they played the Mambo from Bernstein's West Side Story.  Here's the photo from the NYTimes of that electrifying encore, "MAMBO!":


To get a feel of how tight and talented these players are, check out this different performance of Berstein's Mambo:

What a party!  It's beautiful to see young people having so much fun with the classical music genre and beoming recognized for the untold hours they've no doubt put into practicing. 
Dudamel is a fine leader for the orchestra, here interviewed at intermission at an international youth orchestra event somewhere in Europe:


In this last video, the Orchestra plays the Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera's Malambo from the Estancia Suite, this performance in Lucerne, Switzerland:

May these lively and talented young musicians inspire more youth of the world to take up serious music study - LONG LIVE THE CLASSICS!

Integral is a narrative of reality.  Like every story it falls short of the Absolute.  By making distinctions, it carves up what is fundamentally seamless, simultaneously revealing and veiling the Kosmos.  It bounds what is boundless, it limits what is limitless.  How can integral-AQAL be seen to commit violence against the Kosmos?  How do you use integral-AQAL to violate the Kosmos? 

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As I rest in the tension between the desecration of God and embrace of God that is AQAL, I first feel a deep sorrow that God must be violated and despoiled at all, pained to know that what is utterly Perfect—in fact beyond perfect/imperfect—must be carved up, trapped, arrested, contained, limited, and bound into maps, theories, philosophies, and stories that are themselves pale reflections of what is most certainly unspeakable and singular Beauty-Truth-Goodness. I recognize this sadness to be none other than my longing: for wholeness, for intimacy, and for the resolution of all duality once and for all—not only for MY full self-realization but for the liberation of all sentient beings. This longing-sadness is perhaps the effect of Eros within me, the Spirit-in-Action that pushes me towards greater embrace but which also reminds me of the measure of my continuing self-contraction. AQAL is part of that measure of how I continue to be contracted in the face of this unthinkable Suchness.

But AQAL both liberates me and limits me.

In one sense, AQAL represents a more subtle and cunning form of distraction from One Taste, a masking of the Great Perfection. The AQAL system with its terminology and conceptual tool-chest tells me an integral bedtime story of the Kosmos which acts as a sedative in samsara, lulling me to sleep with dreams of postmetaphysics, quadrants, holonic addresses, and developmental lines. It’s a fantastically beautiful dream that reveals so much, but it is also slumber which nonetheless conceals so much. I feel the struggle with my love for this dream—as I bathe in its exquisite beauty I also know at the same time how it continues to breathe life into my self-contraction and, in its own subtle ways, still gets in the way of full intimacy and the perfection of bodhicitta (loving-kindness). In this sense AQAL tears my soul in two.

In another sense, AQAL creates an unprecedented vista of the Kosmos, lifting my small self ever closer to my big Self, connecting a sea of dots that had for so long been floating disjointedly in my awareness. AQAL is my new gestalt, a higher integration that crystallized out of the “World Problematique” (a concept created by the Club of Rome to describe the set of the crucial problems—political, social, economic, technological, environmental, psychological and cultural—facing humanity). Wearing these new AQAL lenses I have the felt-sense of elation, lightness, release, possibility, clarity, depth, and vision that comes only from deep appreciation of the both the world’s great suffering and its great beauty, truth, and goodness. For me AQAL deeply embraces samsara, revealing its finer gradations of ignorance, self-centeredness, and bondage and the story of their gradual emancipation and growth into complexity. Although AQAL is itself a manifestation of samsara, it is the invitation that opens my soul to the deeper beauty and suffering that is the relative self and world.

But in this tension of liberation and limitation I also feel a deep equanimity because I understand that AQAL-freedom (Nirvana) and AQAL-bondage (Samsara) are not-two. I can hold AQAL but also let go of AQAL. I find it both totally meaningless and totally meaningful. It both lifts me up and holds me back. It both reveals and conceals. It allows me to not only commit violence against the Kosmos but also lovingly embrace the Kosmos.

For me there is AQAL and there is Nondual Practice. Both are essential. AQAL is my (current) system of meaning-making, Nondual Practice (Buddhism and Taoism in my case) is my system of unraveling, uncertainty, and unknowing. AQAL is a process of building form, Nondual Practice is a process of demolishing form and letting go into pure emptiness. One is learning more, accumulation, the other is learning less, emptying. One helps me to navigate through form, the other helps me to abide in emptiness.  Both act in concert to exercise my soul.

But with regard to AQAL as violence, as we approach more subtle levels of intimacy with the Kosmos through structure building, especially after building the structure that is AQAL, that the word violence becomes less and less useful to describe the relationship.  With each true increment of structure or altitude, ethnocentric becomes worldcentric becomes kosmocentric and the amount of violence recedes as the level of loving embrace and consciousness increases. AQAL not only explains it all, it also explains it all away. It gives me a net to capture everything but with the same net I can just as easily toss it away.  AQAL is a forgiving net, a light net, a subtle net, a compassionate net, not a violent net.  But also in its capture of everything, doesn’t AQAL soothe or quiet the violence of the Kosmos? Doesn’t it dampen the absolutisms, curb the dogmas, and turn down the volume of righteousness? Isn’t asserting AQAL, fortifying AQAL, deepening the Kosmic groove of AQAL, the most compassionate thing we can do for the Kosmos at large? And who of us is stopping at AQAL?

Where would beauty reside if there were no self-contractions? Where would truth be revealed if there wasn’t the finite and the imperfect? Where could goodness be done if gross violations didn’t exist? Would God characterize her Kosmic game of Hide-and-Seek as violence on herself? Or would she characterize it in some other way, as a dance, a play, or a diversion? Inasmuch as we have bodies, hearts, and souls were are willy-nilly part of the stream of samsara and therefore are in violation of, and doing violence on, Absolute Suchness. But then, isn’t it our own decision to play this Kosmic game or not?

I'd like to summarize an important point made by Ken Wilber in one of his many interviews relating to the false dichotomy of theory and practice. 

Let us keep in mind the general view held by postmodernism which is that everything is embodied practice--everything you do is practice, including thinking, analyzing, intellectualizing, speaking, reading, running, taichi-ing, cooikng, cleaning, and so on... practice is in fact what generates theory, not the reverse.  That reversal--that practice makes theory, not theory makes practices--is one of the fundamental differences between the postmodern and modern views, respectively.  The postmodernist sees everything situated in contexts, bodies, environments, and cultures.  Transcendent thoughts or ideals are not created out of context, then applied in the world; rather, some kind of cultural-embodied practice is engaged which then produces such ideals, thoughts, and theories.  Wilber of course would say that the thought, ideal, or theory is "tetra-enacted" or brought forth in the four-fold act of an individual holon represented in the four quadrants.  

Thus, the integral AQAL framework, integral theory, is only seen as or after one engages integral practices which include, among other things, complete dedication to comprehensive-inclusive thought and behavior.  The territory of engaging integral practices produces the map of integral theory.  So everytime you read Wilber or other integrally-minded people, you're practicing.  Everytime you enact the spirit of radical inclusiveness in your work, thought, contemplation, reading, or writing, you're engaging an integral practice.  This distinction is the essence of one of the great contributions of postmodernism which should, but hasn't yet, put to rest the incessant dualism of mind/nature, theory/practice, body/mind, feeling/intellect.  

Just an observation about conscious efforts to create 2^nd tier communities or organizations: my experience is that unless there is a core of people who are already stabilized in 2^nd tier capacities, no amount of effort will create such an organization.  Like Wilber says, someone whose center of gravity is at amber/blue meme can study the principles of second tier (zone 2) then take a test, and could get a perfect score.  But if the same person were asked to write an essay from a 2^nd tier perspective (zone 1), to actually produce 2^nd tier consciousness, he’d get a failing grade.  I mean, not to pigeon-hole anybody but any 1^st tier-Joe can conceptualize 2^nd tier principles, but only 2^nd tier can produce itself.  

I think it’s a little of the same with regard to setting up a 2^nd tier organization.  There’s still so much about any given group of integral enthusiasts that is still in 1^st tier—I mean, if you were to take all the developmental lines of all the people who want to form the 2^nd tier group, you’d probably find a majority of the lines still in green or below.  I mean we all want to think we’re no longer acting in 1^st tier but my experience is that whenever integral-interested people get together, especially if a majority of them are boomers, there’s still a lot of 1^st tier going around—a lot.  I suspect the integral-20-somethings have a much better chance at creating a 2^nd tier we-space.    

Anyway, I’m not saying it can’t be done by us boomers but I know that it’s nearly impossible to NOT do pluralistic green when gathering with my cultural peers not to mention the many GenX/Y/Zers whose development has also come to a stop in pomo-romantic green. But, alas, we must continue to try to create 2^nd tier.  In my view creating authentic, intentional spiritual communities that transcend and include both the rational and pluralistic (i.e. modern and postmodern) is a great way to start.