#nw-s3

An update on recent research, including a study group on Nicos Poulantzas, continuing inquiries into online intellectual communities, and the development of a connected research library. It discusses the revision of the Metapattern Institute's bilingual website and the development of erikhaines.org as an independent home for writing, podcast conversations and scholarship. Updated following the October 30 publication of 34 historical articles, it also reflects on the use of AI in research and technical development, and on the continuing importance of judgment, reliability and continuity in knowledge management.

Prompted by reading in contextual behavioral science, this essay asks what kind of Western Buddhism is emerging as practice is translated into therapeutic, economic, political and religious settings. Purser's critique of McMindfulness is set beside Arthur Wright's history of Buddhism in China, which complicates the opposition between preservation and corruption. Drawing on Albert Low's reading of Hakuin, the essay distinguishes kensho from absorptive experience and psychological development, and with FAP, Buber and Levinas describes 'Big Heart' as awakening's return to relationship. Closing with Cohen and Dallmayr, it asks that integration remain open to interruption.

This reflection on Philosophy Portal's Portalpalooza conference continues the argument that Cadell Last's Hegelian-Lacanian work needs dialogue with Wilber and Habermas to answer Postmodern Conservatism. It reports Dylan Shaul's 'post-post-metaphysics', with its critique of Badiou's and Žižek's reliance on negativity, and describes Michael Downs and Bryce Nance's Sci-Fi Marxism and Faultline Theory as a critique of AI-driven technocapitalism. Responding to Michel Bauwens's call to 'resurrect' the Integral Left, the author argues for its 'evolution' instead, joining these currents with commons governance and Dallmayr's integral pluralism.

Prompted by Marsha Linehan's memoir Building a Life Worth Living, this essay reads Dialectical Behavior Therapy's Wise Mind alongside Genpo Roshi's Big Mind process, Ken Wilber's developmental schema and Karl Rahner's theology. It traces Linehan's Catholic formation and Zen training and argues that DBT translates an experience of non-dual grace into the language of radical behaviorism. The essay proposes that Wise Mind builds the stable self that Big Mind seeks to dissolve, distinguishes three pathologies arising when awakening is split from development, and closes by outlining IACT.

Prompted by correspondence with Michel Bauwens, this essay traces the brief emergence of an integral left around Michael Brooks, presented as repurposing developmental thought toward cosmopolitan socialism. A comparative taxonomy then distinguishes North American, European and Indian uses of 'integral' and pairs each with closed deformations such as developmental chauvinism, Catholic integralism and Hindu nationalism. Fred Dallmayr's integral pluralism is proposed as the criterion separating open from closed wholes. The conclusion presents a second renaissance as a possibility requiring construction rather than a guaranteed stage.

This summer research reflection brings contextual behavioral science, transcendental Thomism and the commons into exploratory conversation. Dialogues with Holman introduce a return to RFT, ACT and Functional Analytic Psychotherapy, while Kearns's theological intervention leads toward Maréchal, Lonergan and Rahner and the question of whether a functional account of self-as-context exhausts its meaning. Exchanges with Bauwens and an encounter with Pollock's pragmatic utopianism connect individual practice with cooperative institutions. The conclusion proposes a programme of inquiry rather than a completed scientific-theological synthesis.

This review essay addresses the 'Truth of Christianity' section of Cadell Last and Daniel L. Garner's anthology Rosy Cross. It argues that Žižek's Christian atheism, Rollins's pyrotheology and Mark C. Taylor's postmodern theology grasp the form of the Cross but not Christianity's revealed content. Using Kierkegaard's Religiousness A and B, and drawing on the nouvelle théologie, Canadian critical theology and Sean McGrath, it proposes an integral-humanist and integral-pluralist horizon. Leonard Cohen appears as exemplar before the essay concedes that every position, including its own, falls short of the post-metaphysical challenge.

Beginning from the author's contribution to the Rosy Cross anthology, this essay offers a divided assessment of Iain McGilchrist. The Master and His Emissary is valued as an account of attention and embodiment, but the extension of the hemispheric hypothesis into cultural history and panentheistic metaphysics is criticized as 'enchanted flatland'. Watts's romantic liberalism, Carrette and King, and Bellah's lifestyle enclave situate the reception without assigning it a single politics. The distinction between restoration and reconstruction leads to a proposed 'new integral humanism' drawing on Habermas, Gramsci, Dallmayr, Maritain, Wilber and Bauwens.

A sequel to 'Philosophy & Religion after Habermas', this essay applies Georg Lukács's concept of indirect apologetics, detached from the Stalinist framework of The Destruction of Reason, to American imperial pressure on Canada. John Ralston Saul's account of continental integration supplies the political ground. The diagnostic is applied to two genealogies: Catholic theology through Radical Orthodoxy to integralism, and a vitalist-process lineage ending in CIIS and Wilber. The essay argues that these converge structurally, not intentionally, in exempting contemplative depth from democratic accountability, and proposes a Canadian alternative.

Written days after Jürgen Habermas's death, this essay argues that liberal-left, Lacanian-Marxist and conservative tributes reduced Habermas to a political proceduralist and neglected the philosophical and theological core of the work. It reads post-metaphysical thinking as a refusal of grounding political authority in a depth beneath argument, while crediting religion with cognitive content. The author's Zen formation and the Kyoto School provide a parallel case. After mapping Milbank, McGrath, Marion and Caputo against post-liberalism, the essay asks, without deciding, whether Wilber's integral theory repeats that move.

Responding to Matthew D. Segall's criticism of earlier essays, this review examines Physics of the World-Soul, Crossing the Threshold and Segall's process-theological chapter on Carl Schmitt. It credits Segall with overcoming the bifurcation of nature and grounding democracy in a persuasive Whiteheadian God, then asks whether an 'enchanted flatland' can address political polarization. Drawing on Haidt's moral foundations, it describes an 'addiction/allergy pattern' in left politics and proposes Habermas, Wilber and IACT as complementary resources. It states that the synthesis of process cosmology and integral political praxis is not yet built.

Distinguishing Ken Wilber's public personas from his philosophical work, this essay argues that its post-metaphysical architecture deserves sustained engagement. It reconstructs the early epistemological project through The Spectrum of Consciousness and A Sociable God, emphasizing the latter's dialogue with Habermas and Bellah and the Pre/Trans Fallacy. Jorge Ferrer's participatory critique is treated as a genuine contribution lacking a developmental vocabulary. Drawing on Zachary Stein and Dancing with Sophia, the essay places the 8 Zones within a pragmatist genealogy, proposes a parallel with ACT's psychological flexibility model through IACT, and accepts Matt Segall's institutional correction.

Revisiting a 2022 podcast conversation with Matt Segall and responding to Segall's defence of speculative metaphysics, this essay asks whether process-relational cosmology sufficiently differentiates the perspectives through which reality is known. Reading Segall's dialogue with Graham Harman, it names the resulting difficulty 'enchanted flatland', with Wilber's 8 Zones and Pre/Trans Fallacy as diagnostics. It distinguishes the Aurobindonian and process lineage of CIIS from a Canadian Catholic and speculative formation, contrasts Žižek's kenotic account of absolute freedom with Segall's re-enchanted cosmos, and closes with an invitation to reciprocal inquiry.

Written as a companion to the author's essay on Sean McGrath's The Lost Road, this essay argues that Canada possesses an original speculative philosophical tradition adequate to the pressures of American annexationism. It centres on Leslie Armour's 'philosophic federalism', bridging Anglophone idealism and Francophone Catholic personalism, and reconstructs a lineage through Watson, Innis, Grant, Saul and Taylor. The essay attributes the tradition's institutional erasure to market capture and possessive individualism, then proposes the IACT framework as a lens for mobilizing this inheritance, concluding with a call for collective psychological flexibility.

This review essay engages Sean McGrath's The Lost Road (2025) and argues that its recovery of the Western contemplative tradition, though genuine, cannot by itself become communicable across a post-metaphysical, pluralist public sphere. Placing McGrath in a Canadian philosophical lineage, it reads the Peterson–Žižek debate and the 2004 Habermas–Ratzinger dialogue as exposing an unresolved problem of translating religious resources. It then proposes a 'new integral humanism' combining contemplative depth, Habermasian procedure, Haidt's moral psychology bridged through Hayes's ACT, and Wilber's developmental distinctions.

Responding to Dylan Shaul's reading of Hegel's Nature–Spirit transition, this essay reconstructs what Pippin, Žižek, Johnston and Shaul each contribute and argues that the debate lacks both a meta-theoretical architecture and a functional praxis. It proposes Integral Epistemological Pluralism, reframing Žižek's parallax gap through Wilber's quadrants and zones and Habermas's fallibilism. A distinction between freedom and fullness, illustrated through Tōzan's Five Ranks, addresses contemplative 'Waking Up'. The essay presents the ACT hexaflex as Integral Awareness and Commitment Training, treating transformation as repeated, revisable praxis rather than a single break.

This essay asks how commitments, identities and institutions can remain open to correction without becoming politically empty. It distinguishes Lacan's structural account of the Master Signifier from Relational Frame Theory's functional account of verbal control, with ACT supplying practices for loosening fusion without escaping language. Haidt's moral psychology shows that Habermasian communicative rationality presupposes psychological capacities, and the Hexaflex is read as a practical psychology of fallibilism. Integral facticity, enactive fallibilism, Dallmayr's integral pluralism and IACT frame a praxis transforming persons and institutions together, leaving open how such capacities are institutionalized.

A discussion between Schoendorff and Tutt introduces the difference between interpreting symbolic capture and changing its behavioral effects. Lacanian psychoanalysis and Relational Frame Theory illuminate that problem through distinct structural and functional accounts, and ACT's practices of defusion and psychological flexibility raise a further question about the direction of action. Awareness, Courage and Love provide a provisional language of virtue, while Prosocial and Ostrom's work bring institutions into view. The conclusion locates post-metaphysical virtue ethics in revisable practices that change both persons and their circumstances.

This preliminary commentary on Cadell Last's Real Speculations argues that Last's work is a crucial development in left-wing thought, continuing the discourse shaped by Michael Brooks. It discusses the book's dialectical treatment of New Atheism, its argument that Hegel's Phenomenology is not a theory of everything, against which the author finds more common ground between Last and Wilber, and its chapter on the 'revenge of philosophy'. The essay proposes dialogue among Žižekian, Wilberian and Habermasian frameworks and defers Last's treatment of Christian atheism to later engagement.

Prompted by the omission of Michael Brooks from Flowers for Marx and returning to a 2023 conversation with Daniel Tutt, this rejoinder reconstructs Brooks's synthesis of integral theory and Marxism. It traces an indirect route to pragmatism through Wilber, opposes Lukácsian irrationalism with the author's integral facticity, and contrasts Žižek's diagnostic critique with the prescriptive resources of Habermas, Wilber and Guy Du Plessis. Brooks's new-media work is read as a 'worker's counterpublic', following Tutt's foreword. The conclusion argues for a left able to build as well as critique.

This essay takes the absence of Michael Brooks from Flowers for Marx as its point of departure and argues that Brooks's integral vision could have enriched the collection's debates on the left's future. It presents that framework as an attempt to bridge disciplines and overcome left fragmentation, links its validity claims and psychological flexibility to the ideal of adversarial debate without antagonism, and extends Matthew McManus's case for normative commitments in Marxism through Brooks's engagement with religion and virtue. It judges the omission a missed opportunity.

Written after the death of Pope Francis and prompted by a conversation between Larry Chapp and Sarah Shortall, this essay offers an initial interpretation of Francis's legacy. It distinguishes integral human development from Catholic integralism as a political ideology. Drawing on Shortall's Soldiers of God in a Secular World, it reads the pontificate as the mature outgrowth of the nouvelle théologie's anthropological turn. Laudato Si' and Fratelli Tutti are presented as linking integral ecology with social fraternity, and the legacy as joining universal commitments with local discernment.

Jens Zimmermann's retrieval of Christian humanism offers a response to modern dualisms and cultural amnesia, yet raises questions about how a tradition addresses those outside it. This essay appreciates the theological depth of Incarnational Humanism and Humanism and Religion while examining the risks of hermeneutical closure and narratives of decline. Catholic social teaching and integral human development introduce a stronger emphasis on institutions, economic justice and public reasoning. The conclusion proposes a fallibilist, embodied and pluralist humanism accountable to experience, dialogue and the demands of love and justice.

Prompted by Matt McManus's engagement with Habermas, this essay elaborates the author's account of integral facticity and enactive fallibilism. It contrasts Ken Wilber's spectrum-of-consciousness account of religious liberation with Habermas's theory of communicative action, presenting them as complementary. A reading of Browning and Fiorenza's Habermas, Modernity and Public Theology highlights Fred Dallmayr's critique of proceduralism and Charles Davis's defence of revelation. The final sections offer integral facticity as a response to the limits of objectivism and relativism, and outline an expanded integral humanism committed to interdisciplinary dialogue.

Continuing the author's essay on George Grant, this reflection revisits a relationship with a first Zen teacher, Albert Low. Drawing on Mauro Peressini's research, it sketches Low's path to founding the Montreal Zen Centre. It then recounts how Brian Victoria's Zen at War and Robert Sharf's analyses of the Sanbo Kyodan lineage unsettled an idealized image of Low and the lineage. The essay concludes that critical scholarship need not negate valued contemplative experience, and describes a parallel movement in the author's Catholicism toward a faith incorporating inquiry, uncertainty and discernment.

This essay revisits the debate between Charles Davis and Gregory Baum as a case in the struggle between intellectual integrity and institutional tradition in twentieth-century Catholicism. It contrasts Davis's 1966 departure from the Church with Baum's commitment to reinterpreting tradition through sociology and emancipatory praxis. Drawing on Sarah Shortall and Tracey Rowland, it reads the dispute as a Canadian culmination of a crisis within the Nouvelle Théologie, then extends the conflict into the Concilium-Communio rivalry and Pope Francis's pontificate, concluding that the tension remains unresolved.

This reflective essay traces the place of George Grant's thought in the author's intellectual development. It presents the 2008 financial crisis and the 2012 Quebec student protests as occasions for questioning liberal capitalism, and reads Lament for a Nation as a religious critique of modernity and of American influence on Canadian sovereignty. The essay applies this reading to postmodern conservatism and Trump's return to office, drawing on Michael Brooks and Matt McManus, and concludes that Grant's critique of nationalism and technology remains a call to ethical responsibility.

Continuing an unfinished conversation with Marc Lalonde, this essay asks whether critical theology can sustain the seriousness of revelation without exempting religious institutions from criticism. It reads Charles Davis's primacy of conscience as responsibility to discern truth, and follows Davis's later engagement with Marxist social criticism, the Frankfurt School and Habermas. Objections from Larry Chapp and Tracey Rowland are taken seriously, while the essay argues that identifying revelation with inherited Church forms produces its own reduction. It proposes a more explicitly developmental integral humanism.

Prompted by tensions between the communities around Ken Wilber and Slavoj Žižek, this exploratory essay applies Robert Bellah's concepts of Sheilaism and lifestyle enclaves to the reception of integral theory. It characterizes the Integral Life community as an elective, largely digital and consumer-oriented association, reinforced by demand for AQAL as a totalizing 'theory of everything'. Together, it proposes, these features generate academic aversion to Wilber's work. The essay separates that aversion from the work's intellectual merit and suggests AQAL may serve better as a flexible heuristic than as a completed system.

This programme statement describes Integral Awareness & Commitment Training (IACT), combining Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the twelve-step movement and the writings of Ken Wilber, Jacques Maritain and Louis-Joseph Lebret. Its architecture comprises two branches (training and therapy), three practical principles (awareness, acceptance and action) and four dimensions of the self (body, mind, soul and spirit). Acceptance is distinguished from resignation, and action from the elimination of difficulty. The conclusion presents psychological flexibility, resilience and spiritual awakening as the programme's intended outcomes.

Framed as a tribute to Fred Dallmayr, this essay proposes renewing Jacques Maritain's integral humanism for conditions of deep pluralism. It defines integral facticity as a four-dimensional framework derived from Ken Wilber's AQAL and argues that Dallmayr's integral pluralism opens its cultural dimension beyond a single theological source. The proposal is distinguished from Catholic political integralism, and Jordan Peterson's cultural conservatism is criticized for neglecting economic and systemic structures. A final section maps human dignity, solidarity and the common good onto the four quadrants.

This programme essay presents Integral Awareness & Commitment Training (IACT) as a synthesis of integral facticity, enactive fallibilism and integral humanism with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and recovery advocacy. It traces facticity from Heidegger and Sartre, uses Wilber's quadrants to extend the concept into four domains of 'givens', and applies both concepts to contextual behavioral science and psychological flexibility. Drawing on White, Kurtz and Du Plessis, it outlines IACT's use in addiction recovery and spiritual care, and ends with plans for research, education and partnerships. Its effectiveness claims are the programme's own.

This essay recounts the sources of two concepts the author proposes, moving from Ken Wilber's AQAL framework through Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Maritain, Martha Nussbaum, Fred Dallmayr and Richard J. Bernstein. Integral facticity holds that knowledge is always embedded in historical, cultural and social context while objective insight remains possible. Enactive fallibilism extends this into a process-oriented account of understanding as participatory, provisional and revisable through dialogue. Both are presented as guiding principles for the Metapattern Institute.

This November 2024 statement introduces the Metapattern Institute in Montréal, described as interdisciplinary research on digital humanities through the lens of integral humanism. It grounds the project in Jacques Maritain's integral humanism, extended through Ken Wilber, Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, Jürgen Habermas, Fred Dallmayr and Steven C. Hayes. It defines integral facticity and enactive fallibilism, outlines five research areas, lists the Integral Facticity Podcast episodes to October 2023, and describes Integral Awareness & Commitment Training, then under development. It closes with an institutional vision and an invitation to participate.