Joe Perez is the author of books including Soulfully Gay, one of the first memoirs in the tradition of World Spirituality based on Integral principles. He is Director of Communications, Scholar-in-Residence, and Executive Editor of Spirit’s Next Move at the Center for World Spirituality. He is also a blogger and Facebook Page curator exploring and advocating emerging ways of being an awakened human being by consciously evolving a better world and brighter future for all sentient beings.
Earlier in his career, he was a communications manager, Internet advertising entrepreneur, and technical writer/editor, working independently and for companies such as Microsoft, Microsoft Press, and Siebel Systems (now part of Oracle). He is also a former résumé writer, career coach, newspaper columnist, and the author of two published books including Soulfully Gay. He began blogging in 2003 and his blogs have undergone over 10 different experimental iterations.
Regarding his published spiritual chronicle, the philosopher Ken Wilber said it is “perhaps the most astonishing, brilliant, and courageous look at the interface between individual belief and cultural values that has been written in our times. By a homosexual, or a heterosexual, or any other sexual I am aware of.” Wilber also selected Soulfully Gay to be the second book published through the Integral Books imprint (in partnership with Shambhala Publications), following closely behind his own seminal Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World.
Perez is sometimes regarded as a pioneer in applying Integral principles to spiritual autobiography and weblog journalism. AQAL-based Integral philosophy suggests that the most adequate perspectives are generally those which include insights from “all four quadrants”—interior individual (psyche), objective individual (body), interior collective (culture), and exterior collective (society and nature)— and which situate their discourse within developmentally aware coordinates. Thus, his early blogs and book Rising Up analyzed topics in religion, politics, and culture from a lens advocating more comprehensive and visionary views inclusive of trans-rational spiritual states and stages of realization.
Beginning with his blog Awake, Aware, & Alive (Aug. 2011 – April 2012), he began to situate the Integral perspective itself within World Spirituality, a school of thought and practice pioneered by Dr. Marc Gafni. He takes Gafni’s book Your Unique Self (2012, forthcoming) as giving an exemplary vision of a new, vitally important, and urgently needed way of being spiritual in the world today which honors the best insights of pre-modernity, modernity, and post-modernity. Regarding his own autobiography, Perez has said that it is not a conventional memoir, but a chronicle of spiritual emergence into an Integrally-informed realization which culminates in the book’s surprising final chapter with a description of a Unique Self experience.
In April 2012, Joe suspended Awake, Aware, & Alive in order to focus his energy on a new collaborative blog with Marc Gafni and others called Spirit’s Next Move. The blog at Joe-Perez.com continues with regular updates, now eponymously titled.
Raised Roman Catholic, Perez left the Roman Church in 2003, as described in his autobiography, in favor of what is for him a more catholic spirituality. He later began to focus his energies in building a global movement to create a “trans-path spiritual path” for people like himself multiply alienated from what they see as rigid traditional religion, vacuous liberal religion, reactionary modern skepticism, postmodern nihilism, and/or intellectually unrigorous spiritual eclecticism. In 2012, he joined the Board of Directors of the Center for World Spirituality. His works in progress include a non-fiction book called The Rise of World Spirituality (2013) and an epic poem called Kalen O’Tolán. Perez’s poetry is partially inspired by the T’ai Hsuan Ching, an ancient Chinese oracle called the “Canon of Supreme Mystery.”
Perez is an Honors graduate of Harvard University in The Comparative Study of Religion with Philosophy as Allied Field. As an undergraduate, he wrote his Honors thesis on the relationship between human nature and social ethics in the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr and liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez. He also studied the psychology and sociology of religion at The Divinity School at The University of Chicago, where he wrote his Master’s paper on the topic of symbolism in the thought of John Dewey and Émile Durkheim (his M.A. in Divinity is pending a language exam). In 2010, he completed Generating Transformative Change at Pacific Integral, a graduate-level program in Integral Leadership. His final project for the program was a prototype for a post-metaphysical philosophically-derived international auxiliary language based on subtle energy, which he calls Lingua-U.
Perez was born and raised in Washington State, the youngest child of second-generation Mexican-American parents. He lives in Seattle.
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This blog and all of its contents are my own responsibility and don’t necessarily represent the views of my employer, the Center for World Spirituality, or any other organization with which I may be affiliated. The buck stops with me. In fact, the contents may not reflect my own views today, since my views have undergone continual evolution from 2005 to 2012. I claim copyright and reserve some rights. You may reproduce brief excerpts, summaries, and up to one blog post without notifying me so long as you give me credit and link back to this website, but if you want to reproduce more than one article you must first get my written permission. It’s possible that I may write about for-profit businesses or products associated with my friends, clients, acquaintances, or organizations to which I belong. These posts are always written for informational purposes only, never advertising. I reserve the right to call out possible conflicts of interest as I see fit. Occasionally some content is edited after the date and time of original publication. Correspondence with the author will be assumed to be publishable publicly unless you specifically request otherwise. All information is provided for educational purposes, and does not constitute mental health or medical advice. ~ JP
