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     This Excerpt is the fourth in a series of excerpts from the first draft of volume 2 of the Kosmos trilogy, Kosmic Karma and Creativity (whose first volume was Sex, Ecology, Spirituality). Those responding to the call to have the word "sex" appear in the title have voted for Sex, Karma, and Creativity (whaddya think?).

     Because much of this material represents a radical departure from any known form of philosophy, psychology, or spirituality (ancient or modern), I will continue to offer summaries and overviews along with the excerpts themselves. Part I of this excerpt is such a summary, which is divide into "post-metaphysics" and "event horizons." If you are familiar with the material, please feel free to skim or skip it; Part II begins the excerpt proper.

Integral Post-Metaphysics

      In Excerpt A, "An Integral Age at the Leading Edge," we saw evidence for the fact that, at this time, less than 2% of the adult population is at any stage, wave, or state of consciousness that could be called "integral." However, the same evidence suggests that percentage is significantly increasing and may in fact reach 10% or more within a decade. Since much of that increase is concentrated in academia, the percentage of cultural thought leaders who are poised for integral consciousness may reach 20% or more. If so, this would constitute a profound shift in the capacity for integral thinking, feeling, and perception, which could be expected to have extensive social and cultural reverberations. We called this "An Integral Age at the Leading Edge."

      Accordingly, we might expect a significant increase in the demand for Integral models of virtually everything (integral psychology, integral art and literary theory, integral business, integral medicine, integral ecology, etc.). One such Integral model is AQAL (short for "all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types"), which is founded on a social practice of integral methodological pluralism (IMP), both of which are the focus of these Excerpts.

      In Excerpt B, "The Many Ways We Touch," we saw that any integral metatheory might best be guided by three heuristic principles: nonexclusion, enactment, enfoldment.

     Nonexclusion means that "Everybody is right"—or more technically, that the experiences brought forth by one paradigm cannot legitimately be used to criticize, negate, or exclude the experiences brought forth by other paradigms. The reason that "everybody is right" is called enactment, which means that no experience is innocent and pregiven, but rather is brought forth or enacted in part by the activity of the subject doing the experiencing. Thus, one activity (or paradigm) will bring forth a particular set of experiences—experiences that are not themselves innocent reflections of the one, true, real, and pregiven world, but rather are co-created and co-enacted by the paradigm or activity itself, and, accordingly, one paradigm does not give "the correct view" of the world and therefore it cannot be used (as if it did) in order to negate, criticize, or exclude other experiences brought forth by other paradigms.

     However, if one practice or paradigm includes the essentials of another and then adds further practices—such that it "enfolds" or includes the other—then that paradigm can legitimately be claimed to be more integral, which is the enfoldment principle. Together, these guiding principles give us an Integral Methodological Pluralism that is the warrant for AQAL metatheory.

      In Excerpt C, we focused the urgent necessity to create an Integral Post-Metaphysics, which possesses the explanatory power of the great metaphysical systems but without their ontological baggage (which cannot be sustained in modern and postmodern awareness—not philosophically, not critically, not phenomenologically, not scientifically). Instead of attacking the paucity of the modern and postmodern worldviews—which is the standard move by spiritual and new-paradigm advocates—it is perhaps more adept to reformulate and reconstruct the premodern interpretations of Spirit in light of modern and postmodern developments, such that the enduring fundamentals of the premodern, modern, and postmodern forms of Spirit's own display can all be honored by trimming their absolutisms and acknowledging their true but partial natures (which is surely what Spirit does as it moves through its own manifestations in the premodern, modern, and postmodern world: just who did you think was authoring all that?).

      Although the premodern experiences of Spirit—by the great shamans, saints, and sages—were as authentic as authentic can get, the interpretations they gave those experiences were of necessity clothed in the fabric of their own time. And that fabric, in light of Spirit's own subsequent displays, is now a bit worn and threadbare. The premodern interpretative frameworks all tended to be to be mythic, metaphysical, substance-oriented, and postulated a pantheon of pre-existing ontological structures (whether in the form of a Great Chain of Being or the form of a Great Web of Life)—which, ironically, is an interpretive framework that amounted to a type of higher, spiritual, transpersonal myth of the given—exactly the epistemology so effectively deconstructed by postmodernism—so that the typical new-paradigm approaches exalting such frameworks are actually advancing an epistemological prejudice no longer capable of generating respect.

     But my whole point is that you don't need those metaphysical interpretations anyway (whether of a Great Chain or a pre-existing Great Web). By creating an Integral Post-Metaphysics, we can let the modern and postmodern world judge the merits of a spiritually integrative approach without their recoiling in ridicule at the package—the metaphysical package—in which the gift arrives. Same gift (the Great Perfection), but a different package (which is Spirit's own skin today).

      One of the first and most important suggested changes in the development of postmetaphysics is that the idea of perception be replaced by perspective. The great wisdom traditions and philosopher-sages (from Plotinus to Shankara to Gautama Buddha to Hegel to Aurobindo to Whitehead) built much of their interpretive frameworks with the concept of perception (as awareness/consciousness): the nature of this moment perceives, grasps, or prehends various phenomena; these perceptions or moments of bare attention are the "building blocks" of a sentient, panpsychic world; the resultant network of perceptions is an Indra's Net of mutually perceiving and interdependent relationships. The power, beauty, and goodness of those great metaphysical systems are, I believe, undeniable.

      But there are no perceptions anywhere in the real world; there are only perspectives. A subject perceiving an object is always already in a relationship of first-person, second-person, and third-person when it comes to the perceived occasions. If the manifest world is indeed panpsychic—or built of sentient beings (all the way up, all the way down)—then the manifest world is built of perspectives, not perceptions. Moving from perceptions to perspectives is the first radical step in the move from metaphysics to post-metaphysics. Subjects don't prehend objects anywhere in the universe; rather, first persons prehend second persons or third persons: perceptions are always within actual perspectives. "Subject perceiving object" (or "bare attention to dharmas") is not a raw given but a low-order abstraction that already tears the fabric of the Kosmos in ways that cannot easily be repaired.

      ("First person" perspective means the perspective of the person speaking—I, singular, or we, plural. "Second person" means the person spoken to—you or thou. "Third person" means the person or thing spoken of—he, she, they, them, it, its. More generally, first person is any holon with agency or intentionality; second person is any holon to whom agency is directed; third person is any holon referred to. We will see examples of these perspectives as we proceed.)

      Even if we say, with the materialist, that the world is composed of nothing but physical atoms, nonetheless "atom" is already a third-person symbol being perceived by a first-person sentient being. And if we try to picture an actual atom, that too is a third-person entity prehended by a first person. In other words, even "atom" is not an entity, or even a perception, but a perspective, within which a perception occurs (i.e., all perceptions and feelings are always already within the space of an actual perspective). But surely, the critic would say, we can still imagine a time that there were only atoms, not humans, and therefore atoms existed without arising in a human perspective. (That again is still a third-person image held by a first-person awareness; but let's imagine that we can imagine a time without human perspectives.) It is true there was a time before humans emerged. But if the world is actually panpsychic, then each atom had a rudimentary awareness or proto-experience of other atoms, and hence a first atom aware of a second atom is already and actually a first person in touch with a second person. In other words, these perspectives are indigenous to all sentient beings; if sentient beings go all the way down, so do perspectives. Thus, sentient beings and perspectives, not consciousness and phenomena, are the "stuff" of the Kosmos.

      A perception, as we were saying, is not really an experience but an abstraction, and this is one of the reasons that the old metaphysical systems fall apart when scrutinized. Perception secretly privileges abstract objects; perspective privileges sentient beings.

      In short, a world containing sentient beings is a world composed of perspectives—not feelings, not consciousness, not awareness, not processes, not events—for all of those are perspectives before they are anything else. The panpsychic approaches are headed in the right direction but stop short of the embodied mark. As just noted, if an atom actually has proto-experience, prehension, or rudimentary feeling, and it registers another atom, then the first atom is not a first atom but a first person, and the second atom is not a second atom but a second person; and they do not stand in the relation of subject prehending object but of first person feeling second person ("person," of course, does not mean self-reflective awareness, but simple sentience or proto-sentience.) "Feeling" by itself is an abstraction away from what is actually happening, which is that two sentient occasions always stand in relationships such as first-person, second-person, and third-person to each other, and thus every first person's feeling is actually a feeling of a second or third person, who in turn are first person to that sentient occasion, and so on.

     (Think of something—a tree, for example. You are a sentient holon, the tree is a sentient holon, although you are not communing with it at the moment, and thus you are a first person holding the image of a third person. If you believe there is a level of organic vitality that you and the tree have in common, then you are a first person holding the image of a second person. Likewise, if the tree has any sentience at all, then if you actually approach it, it is a first person registering your second person existence. And so on. If all holons are sentient beings, then all perceptions are actually embedded in perspectives of, from, and between sentient beings, simplified as first-person, second-person, and third-person perspectives. Whenever the agency or intentionality of any holon—cell to ant to ape—is directed anywhere—and it is always directed somewhere—it is directed toward or within a world of other sentient holons, and this is why, if one atom bumps into another atom, then, from the point of view of that atom, a first person just encountered a second person, who in turn responded as first person to the second person of the first; if they influence each other in any way, that is a type of communication, and that communication is not merely a dynamic web but a third person, and so on. If the Kosmos contains sentient beings all the way down, then the Kosmos is composed not of feelings nor perceptions but perspectives, all the way down.)¹

     On the other hand, if we do try to say that the world is composed of feelings, or awareness, or prehension, or dynamic webs of mutual interaction, or consciousness, dharmas, things, events, processes, and so on—as if those existed apart from the relations of sentient beings—then that is already a series of low-order abstractions that violate the richness of indigenous perspectives and, having abstracted away from their embodied being, flatten the Kosmos into the cosmos, a pervasive series of low-order abstractions which are then subconsciously mistaken for pregiven realities.

     (Even the postmodernists are caught in this prior low-order abstraction that hands them a violated cosmos that they then attempt to repair with an emphasis on pluralism and interpretation, which only further hides, and exacerbates, the prior problem. Postmodernism emphasizes that perceptions are always interpreted, but both perceptions and interpretations are actually perspectives before any of that happens. Postmodernism has caught only a glimmer of a much deeper secret. That is, even postmodernism is caught in low-order metaphysics, a metaphysics that it has otherwise labored nobly to move beyond, as we saw in Excerpt C. The "crime" of metaphysics is not that it postulates non-material levels of reality, which may or may not exist, but that it postulates levels that are not always already perspectives, and thus are abstract in all the wrong ways.)

      But whether metaphysics appears in its premodern, modern, or postmodern forms, its old ontological baggage—which was actually created by the secretly abstract, unreal, and metaphysical nature of "feeling" or "perception" acting as its building blocks—is almost certainly destined to go the way of phlogiston (or the "substance" that, to the medieval mind, carried fire). Fire is real, Spirit is real, but those interpretive frameworks are simply not necessary.

      And so we begin again: the first quark is not a first particle but a first person, the second quark is a second person, their communication is a third person, and so on. We build a Kosmos out of sentient beings and their perspectives, not out of subjects and objects, not out of feeler and feelings, not bare attention and dharmas, not consciousness and phenomena, not events and processes, none of which exist in themselves, which is to say, none of them actually exist.

      Sentient holons and their perspectives: so fundamental are some of these indigenous perspectives that by the time human sentient holons evolved, they were embedded in major natural languages as variants on first-, second-, and third-person perspectives, languages which themselves evolved over the years and inherently embodied and expressed these native dispositions. Some of these native perspectives are schematically represented in figure 1.

Figure 1. 8 Major Native Perspectives

     In human languages, these perspectives are often embedded as pronouns, such as I, you, we, her, me, they, it, he, them, their, our, us, she, him: all the rich variety of perspectives that sentient beings possess by virtue of existing only in a world of other sentient beings. Figure 1 represents four of the most basic perspectives of being-in-the-world (I, we, it, and its), which we call the four quadrants, along with an inside and outside in each of the quadrants (which we will explain in a moment), giving us 8 major native perspectives of being-in-the-world. These are by no means the only major perspectives, just some worth highlighting.

      When humans take up various modes of inquiry, they disclose, highlight, bring forth, illumine, and express the various types of phenomena enacted by-and-from various perspectives. In these excepts, we are focusing on 8 of the major indigenous perspectives and the methodologies they support. Of course, by the time we get to humans, these 8 indigenous stances of being-in-the-world begin to complexify enormously. But the litmus test of any integral post-metaphysics is whether these indigenous perspectives can and do generate the well-known modes of inquiry that have already been adopted by human beings. The answer, I believe, is yes. These methodologies are suggested in figure 2, showing these 8 indigenous perspectives and 8 of the major methodologies or paradigms they have engendered. (A Kuhnian "paradigm," of course, is not a theory but a praxis, exemplar, injunction, or methodology, and here is used in that correct

Figure 2. 8 Major Paradigms or Methodologies

      The point is simple: in order to deny the legitimacy any of those methodologies, you have to violate their native perspectives and the sentient beings holding them. Integral Methodological Pluralism refuses such violence. Rather—following the integrative guidelines of nonexclusion, enactment, and enfoldment—Integral Methodological Pluralism attempts to construct a framework, after the fact, of that which sentient beings are already doing anyway, with the hope that such a framework, in making room for what the Kosmos already allows, will help us find our way more generously in such a roomy world.

     Some Major Event Horizons or Zones

      There are (at least) 4 major perspectives of being-in-the-world, which we are calling the four quadrants—I, we, it, its—each of which can be looked at from its own inside or outside, giving us 8 primordial or indigenous perspectives available to sentient beings (see fig. 1). Each of those perspectives has an inherent methodology or mode of inquiry, or ways that sentient beings touch other sentient beings (see fig. 2).

      These 8 native or primordial perspectives are the inside and outside of interiors and exteriors in singular and plural—a bit of a mouthful that nonetheless simply means that we can look at the inside and the outside of an "I," a "we," an "it," and an "its." In Excerpt C, we looked at the inside of an "I" and the inside of a "we"; in this except we will be looking at the outside of an "I" and the outside of a "we" (and in the next excerpts, the insides and outsides of an "it" and an "its").

Figure 3. 4 Major Zones

     Each of those 8 views is in effect an "event horizon," or a phenomenological world enacted and brought forth within that perspective. We called these event horizons, or hori-zones, or simply zones. All 8 perspectives engender phenomenological zones or event horizons, but we will be looking at four of the most important, which are numbered in figure 3. These four zones are not the same as the four quadrants, but simply represent another useful way to group the 8 indigenous perspectives (namely, the inside and outside of interiors and exteriors). These zones are as follows (which are stated in abstract form and thus can be mind-numbingly boring; succeeding examples will be more friendly, I trust, but the following gives the technical details for reference):

      Zone #1: interior holons (an "I" or "we") looked at from inside their own boundaries. This means a first-person approach to first-person realities (1p x 1p), in both singular and plural forms. The singular form is the inside of an "I" (classic paradigms or injunctions that bring forth, enact, and disclose these first-person singular dimensions of being-in-the-world include phenomenology, introspection, meditation). The plural form is the inside of a "we" (which can be brought forth, enacted, and disclosed with methodologies such as hermeneutics, collaborative inquiry, participatory epistemology).

      Zone #2: interior holons (an "I" or "we") looked at from outside their own boundaries. This means a third-person approach to first-person realities (3p x 1p), in both singular and plural forms. The singular form is the outside of an "I" (which can be approached with methodologies such as developmental structuralism). The plural form is the outside of a "we" (which can be approached with methodologies such as cultural anthropology, neostructuralism, archaeology, genealogy).

      Zone #3: exterior holons (an "it" or "its") looked at from inside their own boundaries. This means a first-person approach to third-person realities (1p x 3p), in both singular and plural forms.² The singular form is the inside of an "it" (which can be approached with methodologies such as biological phenomenology and autopoiesis). The plural form is the inside of an "its" (which can be approached with methodologies such as social autopoiesis).

      Zone #4: exterior holons (an "it" or "its") looked at from outside their own boundaries. This means a third-person approach to third-person realities (3p x 3p), in both singular and plural forms. The singular form is the outside of an "it" (which can be approached with methodologies such as behaviorism, positivism, empiricism). The plural form is the outside of a "its" (which can be approached with methodologies such as systems theory, component systems theory, chaos and complexity theory).

      Excerpt C dealt with zone #1; this Excerpt focuses on zone #2. The next two excerpts focus on zones #3 and #4.

      What, then, is zone #2, and what is the "outside of an interior" reality? And why do we call that the look of a feeling?