The Integral Salon is a Post post-modern gathering of people who enjoy sharing conversation, camaraderie and “out-of-the-box” thinking. Through the setting of the salon, we are continuing a tradition at least as old as BCE Athens and that has evolved in the past five hundred years to present forms through the experiences and experiments of numerous European urban “gatherings”. Salons have been recently revived in various independent forums around the world. For an excellent summary of the history of salons, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(gathering) The Integral Salon was originally an offshoot of Poetry Science Talks (PST) in Manhattan, founded in 2000 by Neal Goldsmith and Ed Rosenfeld. 

Through the millennia, each emergent medium increased the distance between and the objectification of the communicants. That is, as we added to our media repertoire, from the oral to iconography, the written, typed, and the various electronic media, information has been communicated in a decreasingly intimate and increasingly formal manner and has become – at least from the receiver’s point of view - an increasingly solitary experience. Salons are helping to revive the intimacy, immediacy, and spontaneity inherent to social gatherings. And they do so with a late 20th century, early 21st century twist: focusing the intention of the participants through a common topic of the night; wedding parallel and competing paradigms, by, for example, simultaneously respecting Science and spiritual traditions; thereby engendering an atmosphere that accepts the harmony of paradox; center-staging all participants, so that both the presenter-audience dichotomy and the hierarchy of perspective is dissolved during the process; and lastly and as importantly, giving voice to perspectives considered perhaps fringe, radical, inclusive, and/or alternative, perspectives that often do not have access to mainstream media.  

The name Integral Salon is rooted in fertile philosophical ground. Ed Rosenfeld, curator of a sibling salon in Woodstock, New York, illuminates this connection in his introduction to the Poetry Science Talks East: “Our interest with PST is in a broader understanding of reality than can be attained through either creativity, intuition, and spirituality, on the one hand, or science, matter, and logic on the other. This third, transcendent view of reality might be labeled "integral" science and philosophy - a "poetry science" if you will - a world view that can accommodate and integrate seeming opposites: of science and art, mind and body, matter and energy, spirit and flesh.”

The name Integral Salon further derives its inspiration from some of the major 20th Western philosophical and artistic movements. A defining feature of early 20th century Modernism was its impassioned interest in epistemology, the study of knowledge, questioning particularly its limits and validity. Mid-to-late 20th century Postmodernism recognized the great diversity in worldviews across cultures and the consequent loss of absolute certainty that could be claimed by any one perspective. Although this was not a problem for nihilists, relativists, monists, mystics, and other brave and peaceful souls, a universe without the promise of absolute truth has been difficult for many with less mature worldviews. A common reaction has been retrenchment and violence — against others and against the whole of the biosphere. Given the scale, intensity, and unprecedented nature of Civilization’s present circumstances, these are not idle concerns. 

One particularly promising Post post-modern perspective has been that of integrating the “truths” of the various cultures and worldviews, of finding perennial commonalities among them, and of transcending the apparent paradoxes. Given the twinned global crises of environmental sustainability and of Civilization’s resilience, it becomes ever more imperative that we (meaning collective humanity) forgo limited paradigms – indeed, the very paradigms that led us into the global mess – and delve into the roots of the problems so that we can enact true solutions. To this end, airing the voices of mainstream ideas seems counterproductive. Rather, as in previous shifts of cultural consciousness, what is required is the access to the megaphone by fringe, radical, inclusive, alternative, and otherwise “progressive” voices.