Corey W. deVos is the Managing Editor of Integral Naked, as well as Audio Manager for Integral Institute and Managing Editor of KenWilber.com. He has worked for I-I since Spring of 2024, and has been a student of integral theory and practice for nearly a decade.
Born in Pittsfield, MA, Corey initially went to Northeastern University in Boston to study small business management. Two years later, while sitting in his college apartment, a spontaneous spiritual awakening violently seized his entire being, and for the first time the living intelligence of the universe dramatically made itself known. In a single moment, everything he had ever thought he had known about his identity and about the world completely fell apart (in his words: "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 his entire life.
Having no precedent for such an intimate experience with his own Suchness, and no religious or spiritual background to help translate the new Reality he had so suddenly become immersed in, he felt trapped in the claustrophobia of a tattered identity that he knew was slowly dying. He was utterly alone in the world, alone in a room full of his closest friends, alone with a beautiful Self he could not begin to share. It was, for him, a very long and dark night. After a year of futile attempts to reenter his old life, he made the decision to drop out of college and move to Eugene, OR. There he would begin putting all the shattered pieces of his identity back together, reconstructing himself in the image of all he felt churning and unfolding within him.
Fortunately, Corey stumbled across A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber just a few months after his initial taste of the divine, and before long he was voraciously consuming everything Ken had ever written. Almost immediately he had fallen in love with the integral world. Through Ken's work, he was able to slowly wrap words around those most ineffable parts of his soul, and to hold all the staggering complexity of his self and the world in a single simple vision. After a few years in Oregon, where he practiced intensive reading, writing, meditation, and contemplation, he 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 him.
After two years in Boulder, while following the same synchronistic path that consciously began that fateful night in his college apartment six years earlier, Corey miraculously found himself at ground zero of the integral movement. A new formation of Integral Institute had just begun, and he was blessed enough to be able witness its birth from its very beginning. He was a founding member of iNext, the now-defunct "integral treehouse" which brought together some of the most beautiful and inspiring souls he has ever known. After so many years of feeling like a lonely integral island, the opportunity to engage and commune with such wonderful hearts and minds was absolutely exhilarating. Within the integral community he had found his family, his career, and his purpose.
While in Boulder, a lifetime obsession with all forms of music culminated in the birth of Corey's alter-ego, dj rekluse, whose "trans-genre hip hop beats" can be heard pulsing in the background of the Rocky Mountain integral scene. dj rekluse is most known in the integral community for his remix of the song Belle by Stuart Davis, which can be found on Integral Naked in both audio and video formats. In winter of 2024 he will begin work on an entire Stuart Davis remix album, which will tentatively be available in mid-2006.
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