Integralism: Totally Fucking Corkscrewed!

What Is Enspiralment? It's A ConSPIRALcy OR SUPERFICIAL Dynamics minus UEICI = SPIRAL Dynamics!

What's the deal with Integral? Spiral Dynamics-Integral to be precise...Why do we worship a...well, a fucking Corkscrew? (if you are reading this, you are in this "We space" and you know it)

Christians worship the Cross. Jews, the Star-of-David. Muslims, the Crescent Moon and Star. Homosexual Yogis, the Hard and Palpating Lingum.

...and Integralists? What esoteric symbol do we worship?

A GAUDY RAINBOW CORKSCREW! (Spiral is as corkscrew does!)...the metaphoric action of which is captured quite nicely by the classic RonCo Potato Peeler(TM). There's a 'spiral dynamic' for you - potato peeling!...by hand, over the sink, with a shitty knife and non-constant progress around a damned mishapen tuber! 'Hash-Brownian Motion' anyone? Actually, 'Stochastic bowel movements' is more like it...)

The Integral scene's popularization of Spiral Dynamics' essentialism has left me feeling rather vertiginous of late, with the non-stop oversaturation and overbranding of Enspiralment-as-mystical-escalation-process; it's all become more resentfully familiar than I-Pod casing-schematics are to a poor, provincial, adolescent Chinese boy's thumbs-and-fore-fingers. (Forget "Brand America," this is just plain old-BrandHead worship. "...Beyond the Self-Self there is only BRANDHEAD!")

And now the handwringing's on the desktop wallpaper...it's all over the "special literature" in the form of website iconography, t-shirts, shorn-heads, Cafepressed onto mugs and mousepads, tattoos (including unbeknownst to most, Stuart Davis' perineum - don't ask me how I know...but let's just say t'aint nothin' wrong with that!), bumper stickers, special edition Dreidel tchotchkies (Dreidel's are ITP-kid friendly!) , overblown magazine ad rhetoric up the Entry-Beigehole!, but still, worst of all:

The SD-I brochures and marketing materials!

All this utterly useless, self-referential, paper-wasting eye-candy only serves to generate that same collective smarm a national flag does: cultic, pagan identification with symbol for symbol's sake. (Six Stages Over America, anyone?)

...Well now.

Yes, you know them well...these four-color process abominations sit in large piles in the corner of the room at the Integral Salon, the Integral Bookclub, Integral Team Kabasket-Ballah, the Integral Meetups, the Integral Knitting 3-2-1 Group, Integral Kata Breakdance Practice (aka AQAL Boogaloo), the Integral Yoga class, the Integral Pro Billiards and Qi-Gong Workshop, in Cool Mel's PDF collections, The Integral-BDSM night at the Redhill House or any of the other garden variety designated Integral culty-queue dogpiles.

And everypage has at least one of them: Early '90s-era CGI-treatments of the Corkscrew as if 3-D graphics make it any more true!

Pop-cultural note: Didn't Tron's Master Control Program (1981) finally crash-and-burn in a rather vivid filmic display of ascending rainbow corkscrew dissolution? Or am I thinking of the original junk-plastic gameboards for Trivial Pursuit? Ohhh...Yes, there you have it...I suggested it: 'Screw fetishism' of any kind, in any context amounts to trivial pursuits. Please stop and think about this for just one moment, I beg of you all (puhlease). Regardless of how smart you are, you do unfaillingly possess a mind that's vulnerable and rather easily distracted by florid displays of mythic, whirling dervishry, especially when in the form of rainbow hanging garden kites that promise Supra-redemptive pots of gold at the end of, well, a rainbow hanging garden kite!

Where's your clydesdale unicorn now, huh, Gandolf, you fucking Spiral Wizard?

Ken himself writes in his forthcoming Integral Spirituality that "Spiral Dynamics is itself an unremarkable work of structuralist thinking...[adding that] no matter how much you meditate you'll never see the colors of Spiral Dynamics."

So then why are we all agog over a rainbow Curly-Q in ascent to heaven?

Afterall, don't we become 'that which we meditate upon'? Should we not avoid all false idols? Wasn't Foucault rather apropos of something when he warned of the dangers of signification over taxonomic cross-correlation?

Yes, he was. He was indeed.

Folks, therein' lies the danger of this out-of-control corkscrew idolatry: we're fast creating a Turquoise Babylon of blogarrhea and color-projecting madness that'd have Willy Wonka running for a sensory deprivation tank! Not since Dianetics' needless subjecting of modern peoples to bloated, real-time volcanic CG-depictions of the power symbol of the ancients' has robust, august self-help iconography been so OVERWROUGHT (as overwrought as that very last sentence).

Something's rotten at the Center  for Human Emergence in the Netherlands..!

What if the actual story behind the involves Don Beck and Chris Cowan doing some serious LSD together in '92 while Ken was plugging away at SES, and, following their erotic rapture, they came intensely to a conclusion that is, that Chutes and fucking Ladders(TM) would make the ultimate, metaphoric visual poetry to accompany Clare Graves and Abraham Maslow's pioneering work (and in case you are wondering, yes, Dark Side of the Moon was indeed playing on the 8-Track). And so the two finally ended up penning a titularly, eponymously obvious, poorly written, terribly typset tome to spell all the uncorroborated essentialism out:

Spiral Dynamics (originally entitled, The Corkscrew Monologues: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The 'Screw).

Wait, wait...I know what happened. Beck and Cowan created spiral dynamics after they lost a bet daring them to create a totally new religio-spiritual belief system out-of-scratch based solely on the proton-dispersing, charge-coupling technics of early '90s VGA monitors (HINT: RGB...). Descartes' metaphorical inspirations behind his theorizing, after all, were the hydraulic mechanics that were the state of the art during his lifetime.

Ladies and gentlemen, I fear they have succeeded, though I do leave the ultimate weighing of the evidence of corkscrewy fetishiness of SD-I up to you:

• (From Publisher's Weekly) "...Librarians everywhere rejoice over at the color-coding systematicity of Spiral Dynamics."
• Sid and Marty Kroft actually claim they had the idea first.
• In 2004 Crayola, Inc. sent Don Beck a tidy royalty check just because.
• General Mills, the makers of Fruit Loops cereal, sought out a seasonal product tie-in.
• Even the fashionistas at Cosmo-Girl are saying that rainbows are very 'in' right now.

As per this values-line typological taxonomy disaster, one might even note the intrincism around sacred geometry of pig-flagellate and the practice of kosherism that one can only deduce as de rigeur Transpath spiritual endeavoring...vis a vis, one can only conclude, an ineffable 'Pubicness' inherent to the Human Potential Movement as construed by Integralism (Wavy-Gravy's thatch was more profound than you would have ever realized!) has become an exotericly-fixated, abstract symbol manipulation system seeking Guinness-entry and in hopes of joining rank with The Cross, The Garbage Pail Kids, the Sacred Muslim Temples of Qom, All_Your_Base, Stonehenge, pet rocks, The Official 1983 Edition of the Mr. T Lunchbox, the Star Wars Kid, Hitler's swastika, Prometheus' Fire, Snakes On A Plane and New Coke.

Mediocrity not only rules my children, it abides.

Dress it up however you like...condescending, multi-hued rainbow convolutions - it makes no difference, as Integralists - we're all stuck with fucking corkscrews on the brain ever since Wilber descended the spiral staircase while reading The Screw Tape Letters (hey, totally unrelated question here, but doesn't "SD-I" just sound like a teledrama about sexy forensic pathologists on CBS? - "this week on SD-I...")!

Admit it!

You've been struggling with this this as well!

And you don't exactly know what to do about it.

So you keep reading this piece...hoping to find some liberation, right?

Well, you ain't gonna find it...

I said it before, Spiral is as Corkscrew does...we have, at this stage, my friends, been totally 'Screwed over! And waiting for the next book to be published ain't gonna change anything. The rainbow abuse has, simply put, never been so rampant! Even the cultural singularity that was the Muppets taking of Manhattan at least resulted in the building of a goddamned rainbow connection (hello...?! the lovers + the dreamers + me). Really, never before has my mental imaginary been so laden with an esthetic suffering that conscripts one to mind's-eyefuls of a very long-and-slow gay pride parade marching up San Francisco's Lombard St.

Yet herein lies my real dismay...I just had this secret wish that the ultimate cross-training routine of all known wisdom and knowledge evereverever might yield, something, well, more profound than evocations of Toucan Sam's probiscus or even his fully-erect, most probably Lifesaver-esque bird-cock; something less sordidly unpleasant than of one of Bob Marley and Carrot Top's forbidden love-child's shorn dreadlocks (speaking of Rainbow abuse, there's also an easy joke in here about the Care Bears gang-raping Rainbow Brite, right? But I won't make it...I promise).

Was this, uh, movement was ever meant to be literally paint-by-numbers?!

Now I know what you're thinking. I'm dropping context. It's not a corkscrew we worship, you say, it's a Cross - it is THE AQAL CROSS of the Knights of the Four-Quadrants (praise be to them), right?  And that is only a visual suggestion of multiple approaches to the representation of truth, after all, right? It's really more like a flying-guillotine, or a four-pronged X-boomerang...hurdling through space-time, every axis spinning together in a blurred whirl of over-depicted enspiralment of the many Right Pathways to Enlightenment, right? Have I've mistaken AQALmotion(TM) for corkscrew idolatry?

Lest you think that I'm being superficial, bear in mind, it's your very mind and soul that I'm concerned about here (seriously). Bad marriages of substance and style kills, people! I mean, just consider the price Kurt Cobain's paid for getting hitched to Courtney Love.



Maybe so, yet...

TO BE CONTINUED (including, but not limited to, Psychoanalytic Perspectives On The Suppressed Desire to Be Corkscrewed by a Pandit, How to Unscrew Yourself, Conversations with Gallagher, Rainbow Brite's a squirter, cloudy days for the Rainbow Coalition, Rainbow Gathering screw-fest festivals, Vomiting a box of crayons, 3rd-Tier Color-blindness, more on Wavy-Gravy's short ones; how corks make good butt-plugs, and thus corkscrews butt -plug removal devices...)