Corey W. deVos

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Rocky Mountain National ParkI am the Writer, Content Producer, and Webmaster of Integral Life and Integral Naked, as well as Managing Editor of KenWilber.com. I have worked for I-I since Spring of 2003, and have been a student of integral theory and practice for over a decade.

In a nutshell, my job is to transform audio interviews from their raw unedited state into what you see on the site—editing them down and often breaking them into multiple pieces, finding or creating interesting imagery that somehow captures the essence of the dialogue, and wrapping some sort of meaningful language around them.  I am also responsible for most of the writing and imagery for our videos as well, which are produced by our wonderful media department.  I then slap everything up onto the site, assemble the weekly content mailer, and deliver the week’s offerings to your mailbox.

Born in Pittsfield, MA, I initially went to Northeastern University in Boston to study small business management. Two years later, while sitting in my college apartment, a spontaneous spiritual awakening violently seized my entire being, and for the first time the living intelligence of the universe dramatically made itself known. In a single moment, everything I had ever thought I had known about my identity and about the world completely fell apart–one night the Kosmic Etch-A-Sketch was violently shaken, and all the lines were wiped clean–and was replaced with something profoundly more real, yet much more elusive—something which was undeniably always already present, but could not be directly seen—at least not at first. Needless to say, this experience radically altered the course of my entire life.

Having no precedent for such an intimate experience with my own Suchness, and no religious or spiritual background to help translate the new Reality I had so suddenly become immersed in, I felt trapped in the claustrophobia of a tattered identity that I knew was slowly dying. I was utterly alone in the world, alone in a room full of my closest friends, alone with a beautiful Self I could not begin to share. It was a very long and dark night. After a year of futile attempts to reenter my old life, I made the decision to drop out of college and move to Eugene, OR. There I would begin putting all the shattered pieces of my identity back together, reconstructing myself in the image of all I felt churning and unfolding within me.

Fortunately, I stumbled across A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber just a few months after my initial taste of the divine, and before long I was voraciously consuming everything Ken had ever written. Almost immediately I had fallen in love with the integral world. Through Ken’s work, I was able to slowly wrap words around those most ineffable parts of my soul, and to hold all the staggering complexity of my self and the world in a single simple vision. After a few years in Oregon, where I practiced intensive reading, writing, meditation, and contemplation, I decided to move to Boulder, CO with the singular intention of becoming directly involved with the integral movement—which by that point had become the only thing in the world that mattered to me.

After two years in Boulder, while following the same synchronistic path that consciously began that fateful night in my college apartment six years earlier, I miraculously found myself at ground zero of the integral movement. A new formation of Integral Institute had just begun, and I was blessed enough to be able witness its birth from its very beginning.

While in Boulder, a lifetime obsession with all forms of music culminated in the birth of my alter-ego, dj rekluse, whose “trans-genre hip hop beats” can be heard pulsing in the background of the Rocky Mountain integral scene.

  1. David McCoy
    July 21, 2009 at 8:06 pm

    Was your opening drug induced?
    Nice blog…interesting content…always enjoy your Tweets…Ken’s work has also had a very deep and profound effect on me as well.
    Be Well
    Dave

  2. July 21, 2009 at 8:53 pm

    Hey Dave, thanks for dropping by, and for being my first official commenter ^_^

    Actually, the experience i described above came before my various ethneogenic explorations–a fact i always felt grateful for, as the raw spontaneity of it seemed to help me more easily trust the underlying reality i was being exposed to. I think i may have not have tried to internalize it as passionately and (hopefully) as deeply as i did, if some part of me could always doubt it as some sort of chemically-induced epiphenomenon.

    Not that i think using psychoactive drugs in a responsible and purposeful way is not a perfectly valid means of having experiences like these–in fact all my most significant experiences in the following years always echoed, unpacked, and reenacted this initial spontaneous awakening in some way. But in my own case, i am grateful that my initial tour through the Hallways of Always was due to my own home-brewed chemical soup, before i ever began to fraternize with strange molecules =)

    • David McCoy
      July 22, 2009 at 8:06 pm

      Well I’m honored to be the first of the many that I’m sure you will receive….

      I asked if your opening was chemically induced because of the surroundings you mentioned…I have had some really enlightening LSD trips…but the meaning full was while in prison after 3 days in isolation …I had the most blissful and heart wrenching experience…I was left sobbing tears of joy…and never felt so free….even while locked up in a prison cell…that was almost 30 years ago…and I remember it like it was yesterday.

      looking forward to reading your new post…
      Dave

  3. Katherine Konner
    July 23, 2009 at 3:12 pm

    I was just fooling around with a website name. Seems the platform automatically pulls any name into a dia-picture, even without the dot something or other. Ryan’s access is to the facebook sign-in page only.

    You can delete this message once read….

  4. September 10, 2009 at 6:23 pm

    hey corey

    i need to contact you in person regarding some integral music projects,
    im based in denver now

    please mail me at above mentioned adress

    thanx

    zac laurent

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