Allan Combs

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Biographical Information

"Allan Combs is a Professor of Transformative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His background is in consciousness studies, neuropsychology, and systems science. He also holds appointments at the Saybrook Graduate School and the Assisi Conferences, and is Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina-Asheville as well as past Director of the Integral Studies program leading to an MA in Conscious Evolution at the Graduate Institute of Connecticut. Allan is author of over fifty articles, chapters, and books on consciousness and the brain, including The Radiance of Being (2ed): Understanding the Grand Integral Vision; Living the Integral Live, winner of the best-book award of the Scientific and Medical Network of the UK, with a foreword by Ken Wilber; Changing Visions: Human Cognitive Maps Past, Present, and Future, with Ervin Laszlo, Vilmos Csanyi, and Robert Artigiani; Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences, edited with Robin Robertson; Nonlinear Dynamics in Human Behavior, edited with William Sulis; Synchronicity: Through the Eyes of Science, Myth, and the Trickster with Mark Holland; and Mind in Time: The Dynamics of Thought, Reality, and Consciousness, with Mark Germine and Ben Geortzel.

"Professor Combs collaborated with Ken Wilber, to create the "Wilber-Combs Matrix." Described by Combs as a "periodic table of consciousness," it melds the sheaths of traditional Vedanta (physical, pranic, mental, subtle, causal) together with Gebser's five structures of consciousness and the "value memes" of Don Beck's Spiral Dynamics, to represent how different "states" of consciousness are experienced and interpreted according to the developmental structure or "stage" through which they are perceived.

"Combs is a Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the Integral University, co-founder of the Integral Foundation and The Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences, a member of The General Evolution Research Group, the Integral Institute, the Forge Guild and the one-hundred member Club of Budapest. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of Conscious Evolution, Associate Editor of Dynamical Psychology, and serves on the Editorial Board of Science & Consciousness Review.

"Allan Combs is the winner of the 2002-2003 National Teaching Award of the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs, and in the same year the held the UNCA Honorary Ruth and Leon Feldman Professorship."

Affiliations

• Advisory Board, Universal Awakening
• Associate Book Review Editor, World Futures: The Journal of Global Education