Integral [+] Facticity

About

Welcome to Integral [+] Facticity — my personal and professional website on the development of the Metapattern Institute and my ongoing work as an independent researcher.

The title carries over from the Integral Facticity Podcast, which I launched in 2022 in memory of Michael Brooks. Michael’s death in 2020 left a real absence in the kind of public intellectual conversation he made possible — holding left politics, religion, and philosophy together with an intellectual rigour and humour few others could match. The podcast was my attempt to keep some part of that conversation alive. Over 21 episodes, I was fortunate to think alongside a remarkable range of scholars across Canadian intellectual history, integral philosophy, critical theory, and political theology. This publication is where I’ve taken that project forward — into written essays, longer-form research, and the personal work the podcast couldn’t fully carry.

The Metapattern Institute is a digital humanities research and knowledge mobilization organization based in Montreal, operating at the intersection of health informatics and integral human development. My work there draws on Canadian philosophy, integral humanism, and contextual behavioral science, and examines how digital tools and information systems shape human development and meaning-making. The applied research focuses on health informatics, and includes the development of the Integral Awareness & Commitment Training (IACT) program.

I hold a B.A. from Concordia University in Applied Human Sciences and Religious Studies, and bring over fifteen years of professional experience in information technology, knowledge management, and financial services.

This website sits alongside that research. It’s where I write more personally, and where I work through ideas in progress as the research develops.

Beneath all of this is a more personal story. I was born and raised in Montreal, and the city sits at the root of everything I write here. The subtitle — “Listen to the hummingbird, don’t listen to me” — is a line from Leonard Cohen’s “Listen to the Hummingbird,” on his posthumous album Thanks for the Dance. Cohen is one of Montreal’s own, and he runs through the deeper story of how I came to this work: my father, who shared Cohen’s music with me, and my first Zen teacher Albert Low, with whom Cohen was a shared bond. I’ve written about some of this in “Albert Low & Zen at War: On Suffering, Kensho, & Catholicism in Quebec.” The tagline holds a nostalgic and spiritual thread that sits underneath the work.

The writing moves between two registers that have become hard to separate. On one side, personal essays on my upbringing, family, spiritual life, and the teachers and thinkers who've shaped how I see the world — my father, Cohen, Low, Grant, Habermas, Wilber. On the other, reflections on the research as it develops: methodological questions, theoretical work in progress, the Canadian philosophical and Catholic Integral Humanism tradition I'm working in and through, and the contextual behavioral science that grounds it all.

If this work resonates with you, I hope you'll follow along and get involved.

Warm regards,

Erik