Integral Theorists Say It’s So, But Not Everyone Agrees
The topic of cultural development is one of the most important and controversial in integral theory, and one of the easiest to misuse. What’s more, miscommunications about sociocultural evolution can easily create defensive reactions, harmed human relations, and invite rejection of all aspects of integrative philosophy.
The Institute for Cultural Evolution makes a valiant effort at talking about this topic, offering an explanation in only 700 words. They try hard to avoid pushing buttons. Instead of speaking about levels of consciousness, they speak of “cultural intelligence.” Instead of altitudes, they speak of “worldviews.” Instead of speaking about some levels being further along developmentally, they speak of their “mutual interdependence,” or of the values of all levels having “legitimacy” and an “ongoing necessity.”
Is this deception or sleight of hand? Not really. I think it’s actually an example of skillful communication performed from a metamodern, or “second-tier” (teal+) perspective, one which is broad enough to include multiple and seemingly contradictory levels of meaning. An evolved worldview recognizes that “first-tier” (amber, orange, green) thinking uses words as instruments of rhetorical warfare, assertions of their own values as superior to every one of their opponents’ words. Hence, the integralist uses rhetoric to make peace as a prelude to social goods. They try to find words that can be understood and embraced by a wide spectrum of developmental positions with a minimum of unnecessary anger.
Once this task is done, the integralist’s work of applying wisdom is just beginning. The theorist of cultural intelligence must get on with building bridges in a world where there is virtually no common ground left to be found. To do this, the ICE attempts to trace polarized political views to their fundamental value structures, where potential opportunities for evolving them could arise. They make the bed for odd bedfellows.
How cultural development is handled in a political think tank is fascinating, but it’s just one example. Although the front part of the ICE website uses this concept, it doesn’t dig deeper to defend the proposition that societies and cultures evolve.
One example of an integral theorist making the case for development is Ken Wilber’s Chapter 12 of Integral Psychology. In short order, he defines some integral models of sociocultural development and explains how they can be applied. This exposition entails carefully distinguishing these models from psychological and other models such as the perennial philosophy. His four-quadrant model of reality helps in this respect because he can situate them in the Lower-Right (social) and Lower-Left (cultural) boxes.
Wilber assembles an impressive array of twentieth-century thinkers who have advanced sophisticated theories of sociocultural evolution such as Jean Gebser and Jurgen Hambermas, criticizes their shortcomings while embracing their overall paradigm. Borrowing from Gebser, he claims that social history can be seen as a progression from archaic to magic to mythic to mental to integral experiences; and he adds psychic, causal, and nondual on top of those. Wilber agrees with Hambermas that universal pragmatics and communicative action constitute an advance in modern developmental theory, but he faults it for inadequately understanding both pre-rational and trans-rational developments.
Although existing models of sociocultural evolution exist, Wilber does not feel that these are adequate to overcoming a host of objections from postmodern theorists and liberal thinkers. Therefore, he offers five understandings that a truly adequate theory should follow:
That progress unfolds dialectically with dignities and disasters;
That evolution involves both differentiation and dissociation;
That evolution includes both transcendence and repression;
That evolution includes both natural hierarchies and pathological hierarchies; and
That higher evolutionary structures can be sabotaged by lower drives.
Finally, Wilber points to his book Up From Eden as an example of how such a sophisticated integral model might look when more fully fleshed out.
In Wilber’s view, an integral theory of cultural development is a nuanced and multi-faceted one that incorporates pioneering thinkers such as Gebser and Habermas, includes Wilber’s five suggestions, and delves deep into making careful distinctions for the benefit of helping society to evolve out of its present conflicts.
It may be the case that every integral theorist has their own version of a developmental model, one that may or may not look like Wilber’s. Some well-known theories have been written about and partially actualized in recent decades within the evolutionary community, from Spiral Dynamics to Integral Politics to metamodern social criticism. The merits of an evolutionary approach to sociocultural thinking can be judged by such fruits, and by endeavors yet to come.
Of course, none of this has stopped ferocious criticism of stage theories from postmodern academia and the progressive left. They have raised powerful objections that are compelling to a great many people. They have complained about alleged arrogance, Western colonialism, oversimplification of history, neglect of the creative and experimental structures of pre-Enlightenment cultures, and many more issues. Many of these criticisms attack strawmen that don’t reflect Wilber’s nuanced, reconstructed theory of sociocultural evolution, but some (I think) strike a chord.
What’s more, some thinkers have even argued that even if integral developmental models are true, they shouldn’t be widely used because most people aren’t ready to embrace them. This point of view probably comes closest to representing the dominant chord in my own thinking on the subject. I am not too much impressed by the postmodern pluralist (green) critique of stage theory, but they’re right on the money to warn us against arrogance.
One of the biggest shortcomings of developmental thinking is that people inevitably imagine a stairway to heaven; and having done so, highly developed people tend to see themselves at the top of the ladder (or second-to-top), and this harms their self-worth by inflating it; and lesser developed people tend to see themselves at the bottom, and this harms their self-worth by depreciating it.
These tendencies also apply when it comes to forming judgments about entire cultures and social groups, so that self-esteem is potentially harmed all around. The prospect of people using integral theory to go around attacking the faith or culture or values of another group as “less than” their own is an ugly one. Having said that, it doesn’t mean that developmental theory is wrong or useless, only that it’s dangerous in the wrong hands.
Philosophical theories involving hierarchies of worldviews aren’t new, but in centuries past they were often shared only secretly. In a way, Integral theory is aiming to bring a treasure trove of deep esoteric wisdom concerning spiritual development from the Great Traditions into conversation with psychology, philosophy, and cultural studies. But if talking openly about development is a non-starter because people aren’t ready to hear it, then it may be best used primarily among the already convinced or to persons highly open to new ideas, and spoken “in code” in some other contexts.
Perhaps most of the public isn’t ready today to receive insights from developmental studies, but this could be changing. If projects like the Institute for Cultural Evolution (among many other integral endeavors) succeed at making developmental theory relevant for everyday conversations, then we may be witnessing the dawn of a major cultural novelty: enhanced cultural awareness of social evolution, acceptance of its relevance, and willingness to look within the self and at culture to find worlds in need of growth.
It is becoming increasingly common to hear the name of Hiroshi Motoyama mentioned alongside of Ken Wilber and Sri Aurobindo as a progenitor of Integrative Spirituality, and to regard his independently developed work as on par with the intellectual edifices of Wilber, Aurobindo, Morin, and Bhaskar.
This tendency came to my attention earlier this year when I began to investigate graduate programs in which I would be able to pursue an Integrally-informed education and meet teachers who could at least understand and engage with the theory, if not actually embody integral spiritual ideals. In this process, I learned that Motoyama founded the California Institute for Human Science (CIHS) in 1992, and since then it has become a hotbed of integral thinking and doing.
But who is Hiroshi Motoyama, and what are his major contributions to the tradition of Integrative Spirituality? As a new student at CIHS, I am reading my first books and hearing my first lectures about his life and work. Don’t look to me for deep expertise on this subject, but I am happy to share my first impressions of his biography and at least one key idea in his work.
Notes on the Biography of Hiroshi Motoyama
Apart from founding CIHS and another organization to study the intersection of science and spirituality, Motoyama (1925 – 2015) was a scholar, mystic, yogi, parapsychologist, Shinto priest, and leader of a Shinto-originated new religion, Tamamitsu Jinja. Motoyama’s background in Shinto—an indigenous Japanese religion and one of the world’s major religions—strongly influenced the way his philosophy includes spirits (and spirit-based beliefs and practices) in a holistic embrace. Wikipedia lists sixteen of his books that have been translated into English, so clearly there’s a lot to be learned from this impressive figure.
Motoyama may be most famous for his enormous contribution to the field of research into subtle energies, including theories of the chakras, and his invention of the AMI, a machine for meridian identification using measurements of physiological responses to electrical currents. The AMI has been used by scholars at CIHS for building up a body of rigorous research into subtle energies based on his theory that the AMI is measuring a correlate of subtle energy and Motoyama’s conclusion that they “prove” the existence of spirits and chakras, among other things.
It’s interesting to note that Motoyama’s life was steeped in unusual and possibly supernatural events and phenomena. These events began with a spiritual awakening early in life and continued through his studies in psychology and philosophy at Tokyo Bunri University.
According to the Encyclopedia of Shinto, Motoyama was adopted as the son of spirit medium Motoyama Kinue in 1950 and developed the Tamamitsu Jinja religion with her. They were led by the heavenly deity (kami) who sent them on a mission of redemption to the world, and Kinue frequently received transmissions from ancestors and spirits. Together they built the Tamamitsu Jinja shrine and Motoyama taught studies in religion and yoga to students.
Although I haven’t yet seen a detailed description of the beliefs of Tamamitsu Jinja, I surmise that it blends Shinto and Buddhist traditions while maintaining adherence to the special divine revelations given to its founder. The Encyclopedia of Shinto summarizes its philosophy like this: “Through religious activities at its shrine and research and practice at its institute, the movement aims at the establishment of a new world religion concerned with the realization of a healthy body and mind.”
In Being and the Logic of Interactive Function(2009), Motoyama (and his translators) supply several remarkable stories in support of Motoyama’s contention that his long years of meditation produced a superconsciousness in him. For a decade, he says, he spent about eight hours a day in an immovable meditation posture which caused excruciating pain and required phenomenal mental discipline, but in this way, he overcame his egoic mind and made room for the descent of higher spiritual consciousness.
As a result of his yogic work, he became known as a mystic capable of producing parapsychological feats such as mind-reading, spiritual healing, and influencing natural disasters and world affairs. Although it is unclear to me to what extent he ever subjected these claims of paranormal feats to the scrutiny of skeptics, it is clear that he gained a remarkable reputation as a seer over decades of his life.
For example, he once toured a factory that made gems through advanced fabrication techniques, and he described the feelings he had while holding the gems. Some gave off hot energies, some gave off cold energies, and one—a diamond—gave off unique energy that separated it from the others. The factory owners were astonished because he accurately described the process by which the stones had been fabricated (or not fabricated), despite the fact that he had no ordinary means of knowing what he knew.
One Key Idea in the Work of Hiroshi Motoyama
The concept of “spirits” in religious experience (deriving from Shinto’s kami) is just one of the preeminent ideas that I’ve encountered so far, among other elements of an elaborate conceptual framework for which he is famous, such as “basho-being”, “interactive function”, “metaphysical logic”, “absolute Nothing”, and “global religion”.
But first, a word about methodology. Connected to these and other ideas of Motoyama’s is his use of what we might call autobiographical hermeneutics. In Being and the Logic of Interactive Function, he addresses the reader as a scholar who is offering his best interpretation of his own paranormal and religious experiences, and those of his mother. It seems to me that he does not (in this book) address the skeptics or provide the sort of elaborate detail that a critical mind might want to have. Nor does he offer clear definitions of some of his chosen terminology, an omission that I hope to see rectified as I encounter more of his writings.
Bringing Motoyama in line with thinkers such as Ken Wilber and Sri Aurobindo (among many mystics from past to present) is his argument that religious experience proceeds in “horizontal” and “vertical” dimensions, thus creating a hierarchy of potential religious experiences. In Motoyama’s terminology, the hierarchical evolution of a human being is a direct ontological relationship between the human’s “spirit” and the “god-spirit or God” (kami). In other words, there is a very real and meaning-creative spirit world alongside our world, and spirituality involves sharing being with this metaphysical order and growing into harmonious relationship with it.
The activity of this relationship is one of “self-negation” in which the lower-level spirit rises up by negating the self and the higher-level spirit enters more fully into the material world through “determination”. Such union isn’t always a positive experience because it can include sharing being with daemonic spirits who are in a conflicted relationship to the God-spirit.
While Christian thinkers tend to speak of a soul’s direct relationship to God, this Shinto philosopher sees the relationship as distinguished according to about seven major levels, each level bringing into play a relationship with a “higher order” spirit. That relationship is one of non-exclusive identity. A (slightly heretical) Christian mystic might say that the human soul achieves divine God-consciousness by first reaching identity with a succession of angels in a hierarchy from the lowest angels to the highest archangels (while hopefully surviving encounters with the nasty devil and demons), until finally realizing unity with God/Christ.
Spirits in Integral Thought
The existence of spirits and a spirit world gets enfolded into Wilber’s theory as the seldom-discussed “para-mind (formerly psychic stage)” and other aspects of “third-tier” consciousness, where it may seem disconnected from the rest of his philosophy. The existence of spirits also gets mentioned in Aurobindo’s hierarchy of divine life, as phenomena of an “intermediate zone”, which he cautions his readers to avoid lingering in because of its many dangers. One wonders if Aurobindo’s cautionary words are wise counsel or an early form of spiritual bypassing.
Finally, it’s worth saying that the question of the existence of spirits also gets mentioned by some other metamodern/integrative thinkers… as silly pre-rational superstitious beliefs that have to be jettisoned as one’s philosophy grows more adult. These thinkers take the spirit out of spirituality. They reject metaphysics entirely and may even claim to have an entirely post-metaphysical worldview. That’s something that I think takes the genuinely Integral impulse towards a “light, flexible metaphysics” to an unrealistic and self-contradictory extreme.
The beauty of Motoyama’s approach to kami is its ability to integrate the enormous volume of spiritual experience in many religions concerning the reality of the spirit world, especially non-Western religions, and indigenous spirituality. I don’t think his is the only valid way of integrating these experiences into an integrative philosophy, but it’s at least worth a serious investigation.
Speaking for myself as someone whose life experiences have given him strong conviction of the reality of paranormal phenomena and a history of actual relationships with paranormal entities, Motoyama’s approach to these topics feels validating. Being and the Logic of Interactive Function is a breath of fresh air and a welcome addition to the literature of Integral wisdom.
In Integral Psychology(2000), Ken Wilber develops a concept of the self as a “self system” with multiple related waves, streams, or structures. Into this notion he enfolds the separate systems from various psychological disciplines including behaviorism, psychoanalysis, ego psychology, psychology of morality, life stage psychology, and more.
The self system of Wilber’s design is a machine with five major moving parts: the vertical stages/waves of development, the lines upon which those streams travel, states of consciousness occurring along those stage/lines, quadrants delineating fundamental distinctions of subject/object and individual/collective, and the horizontal typologies in which discrete personalities manifest. Combined and pointed like a microscope on a person’s life, the result is a sort of integral psychograph.
It is worth noting, I think, that this system accommodates a seemingly comprehensive variety of theoretical positions within itself. This is made possible by Wilber’s definition of psychology: “Psychology is the study of human consciousness and its manifestations in behavior.” (Wilber, 2000). Because psychology is consciousness and philosophers and spiritual thinkers also look at consciousness, Wilber defines the topic broadly enough to allow for a lively discussion that makes some interesting and unusual claims about topics as various as the dissolution of apartheid in South Africa and the tragedy of postmodern relativism.
Wilber can address each of the different schools of thought on the self in turn and say, “You are only looking at this part of the self. Look around you, there are other students of consciousness looking at another part.” He also has a way of citing authorities in the field to bolster his claims in a way that suggests that all the smartest people might agree with him more than they disagree. In this way, he makes a seemingly compelling case for a more expansive and open-minded psychology than most others have contemplated.
While this approach isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I find it satisfying because everyone needs to look up from their narrowly focused specialties once in a while and get a glimpse of majestic mountains of knowledge under a wide blue sky of conceptual clarity. Who can argue with the merits of linking the subject of psychology to wisdom, meaning “the best that any era has to offer” (p. 9). Who doesn’t want to see the outcome of research linking the proximate self (a sense of “I” near to the subject) to the perennial philosophy (Wilber: “For it is the proximate self that is the navigator through the basic waves in the Great Nest of Being.” (p. 35))
Integral psychology is a shade brighter and bolder than the average psychology, but it loses something for the effort. Lessened, if not exactly lost, in the 36,000-foot view is the exactness and technical precision with which theorists like Piaget and Kohlberg formulated their ideas. Even developmental thinkers such as Gilligan and Kegan are treated with extraordinary brevity. One can argue that this isn’t a full-fledged book so much as an outline that has not been filled in.
As a result, any student of Wilber who has not spent years amassing in-depth field expertise must struggle with questions about the fairness and accuracy of Wilber’s descriptions of them. As much of Ken wants to show us the forest lost from looking at the trees, to what extent is he showing us a green-colored blur and telling us to trust him, that he’s visited there and it’s definitely a forest? I’m not saying Ken took any undue liberties, I’m just saying that I haven’t read all that he’s read and can’t vouch for it all personally.
In my own life, I’ve pointed the integral psychograph at my life many times and, as a member of a cohort of students of Dr. Terri O’Fallon, have been the subject of psychological research. The first time I took an integral assessment exam (one administered by Dr. Cook-Greuter in 2010), I was terrified that it was going to reveal that I was red or amber and all my writings about integral philosophy were therefore a massive self-delusion.
Whew! I wasn’t amber. I tested turquoise with strong notes of green and teal, which helped to frame my life story in a particular way. The merely theoretical stage descriptions in the textbooks were no longer theoretical. I could own them as one way of looking at myself. After getting some external validation for what I already knew intimately and had written about publicly, I could proceed without so many self-doubts and get on with the messy business of being a “turquoise person in an amber/orange world”.
The television ads say that democracy in the USA is on the ballot on Tuesday. But what they don’t say is that these ads are futile because about 40% of Americans don’t vote based on civil or moral issues. Let’s take a minute to think about the implications.
Four in ten Americans vote based on their wallets: are they richer and more financially confident than they were a few years ago? And they don’t decide the answer to this question based on rational analysis of policy. They vote based merely on tribal allegiance (partisans) or on throwing the out-of-power party out (independents).
These sorry facts now have now walked the USA to the edge of a perilous cliff. Voters are more likely than not to reward the GOP and neuter the President’s agenda. This is a unique, unprecedented problem because the GOP has transformed itself in recent years into an amoral bunch of cowardly leaders who coddle election deniers, embrace conspiracy theories, and are willing to seize power by nearly any means necessary (with a few notable exceptions like Liz Cheney).
If you’re paying attention, you know this already. You also are (hopefully) voting for the Democratic candidate who will strike a blow against this aggression against democracy. If you aren’t voting for a Democrat because they’ve swerved too far to the left, I’ll have a few words for you in a moment.
What I hope you will realize is that–regardless of what the election brings–America is not almost certainly going to veer from the see-saw of a power play of two dominant parties. Until that changes, the only way to save democracy is to ensure that the country has the healthiest, most rational, most culturally intelligent two parties that are possible.
So, since the Democrats are already pretty sane, rational, and enlightened relative to the Republicans, the focus of democracy-lovers may very well need to be on straightening out the party that most needs reformation. Our nation’s cultural intelligence needs to integrate the valid values and true arguments of conservatives in order to progress forward. Healthy, rational, and intelligent voters exist on both side of the aisle, and the future of democracy depends on them finding each other and cooperating for the sake of good governance.
The anger and hostility of blue voter towards the red voter needs to be transmuted into passion and compassion to hear out the voters who feel left behind and who are so desperate they are willing to throw democracy into the ditch. We can’t give up on making a decisive difference. Vote like democracy depends on it.
Perhaps you, like substack conservative Andrew Sullivan, have voted for Democrats in the past, but you’re afraid they’re too far left these days. Sullivan wrote two days ago:
I’m going to vote for the Republican and the most conservative Independent I can find next Tuesday. And I can’t be the only Biden and Clinton and Obama voter who’s feeling something like this, after the past two years.
There was no choice in 2020, given Trump. I understand that. If he runs again, we’ll have no choice one more time. And, more than most, I am aware of the profound threat to democratic legitimacy that the election-denying GOP core now represents. But that’s precisely why we need to send the Dems a message this week, before it really is too late.
I’ve counted on Andrew for years as two scoops of raisins in my cereal bowl (with an occasional rock in the spoonful). So what he says doesn’t surprise me too much, despite the fact that he has been one of the foremost journalists to warn of the dangers of creeping totalitarianism arriving with this bunch of Republican elected officials.
However, I can’t figure out how he doesn’t understand that he’s not only sending the Dems a message by voting in the semi-fascists, he’s sending the Repubs a message, too. He’s telling them to keep getting stupider, more extreme, and bolder in their worshipful obsequiousness to Donald Trump. That is a helluva wrong-headed message.
Perhaps I would vote as he will if I thought, as he seems to, that the progressives have been too successful so far in realizing a far left agenda. In fact, the vast majority of the policies implemented during the Biden agenda have been watered-down, moderate policies (or, in the case of COVID relief, somewhat excessive spending measures which had a bit of bipartisan support). Crime has gone up, but mostly (I say) because of the pandemic and the unaffordability of living, not because the Dems want to lower mandatory sentences for certain crimes or experiment with a few new ideas in addiction treatment.
I could go on about the myriad ways that the Dems aren’t as bad as Sullivan seems to think they are, but I won’t. The truth is, I think his basic premise is correct. The Dems have overreached with the progressivism in many ways. They have sided with the most extreme progressive activists when they should have been paying attention to the center-left politicians who kept warning them that they were losing credibility. They made economic mistakes that made inflation worse.
And, despite what I said a moment ago, they aren’t totally blameless when it comes to the increase in crime and illegal border crossings. They coddled the defund-the-police progressives and allowed neighborhoods like Capitol Hill in Seattle to become autonomous zones by anarchists. They hugged the most left wing voices on immigration when they should have hewed to the center. They let crisis upon crisis pile up and often didn’t look like the competent, good governance, adults-in-the-room politicians we thought we elected.
Whether you vote for the Repubs to send a message of repudiation to the Dems or vote for the Dems to send a message of repudiation to the Reps (as I will do), stop and think. Third party choices, from where I stand, are unelectable and typically abysmal. Let it sink in that the red and the blue choices are the best we can hope for in 2022, which is a terrible state.
Unless we co-create a healthier democratic system and two healthier frontrunning red and blue parties, then the cycle continues. Don’t think mundane purple moderation. Think an up-leveled violet and ultraviolet radiance on the Spiral of Cultural Intelligence. An integral approach to politics, one that respects different voices and finds common ground based on What’s Best for Everyone, might do better.
To whom should I address this article, one of the first published on my new Integral Ministry blog and the recently overhauled The Integralist Newsletter? There are three different audiences I want to speak to over time:
Today, I am addressing a group that I call the Post-Progressives, people who are finding themselves having outgrown their progressive religious organization and/or groups devoted to interfaith dialogue.
On December 30, I will speak to Evolutionaries who include “spiritual but not religious” people who are finding themselves on a personal path of growth in consciousness which has put them out of step with the New Age community.
And on January 6, I will welcome Metamodernists, who tend to be more secular-minded people who are concerned about overcoming the detriments of postmodernism.
The Post-Progressive Religionist
If you are a Post-Progressive religionist, then you have recently been involved with or committed to a progressive church, sangha, temple, or other spiritual organization. Whether you were a progressive Christian fighting for your theological life in a conservative church or a Unitarian Universalist (where the progressivism is already baked into the cake), you had at least one thing in common: you took a progressive or postmodern approach to faith.
Let’s use some of Steve McIntosh’s broad terminology for stages of consciousness. Superseded were religious justifications for war or jihad of Warrior religions. Superseded were the stale doctrines and orthodoxies of Traditional religions. Superseded were the cold rationalism or prosperity Gospels of Modernist religions. And superseded — just barely — was your faith in the Gospel of liberation politics which had so infused your Postmodern or Progressive religion that perhaps it became all-important. Liberation theology with its focus on feminism and racial justice (among other things) colored your interpretations of scripture, your church services, and your spirituality.
Progressive religion was good for you while it lasted, you suppose, but you hungered for a fuller truth. Like politics, religion came with theological differences along a spectrum of left, right, and center. It came with a yellow as glorious as the midday sun or a teal seemingly as wide and spacious as the ocean. You were ready for a leap of faith that somehow you could still work for justice, peace, and love… but still embrace a Bigger Picture. And so now you felt your spirituality was “none of the above”: it had landed on a higher ground.
The Post-Progressive Post defines some of the Post-Progressive position in politics like this:
Our perspective is post-progressive, which transcends progressivism’s downsides, while carrying forward its important upsides.
We advocate cultural intelligence, which integrates values from across the political spectrum.
Our strategy is to foster cultural evolution by showing how America can grow into a better version of itself.
Something very similar can be said about post-progressive religion. There is a “spiritual intelligence” which is one part of what McIntosh calls “cultural intelligence” and something we might call “social intelligence” as well. This intelligence is an active one which guides you to become a better version of yourself and thereby serve as a model for the Church or Spiritual Communion.
Just as the Post-Progressive Alliance is working to pave a new path forward for American politics, an as-of-yet unnamed group of people are working to create a New Path Forward in religion. I will usually call them Integral Metamodern (IM) folks in this newsletter and in my blogs. We’re not exactly a new religion, we’re some sort of “religion that’s not a religion”.
I do not want to unintentionally convey the impression that Post-Progressives such as yourself are primarily concerned about politics over religion, which isn’t necessarily the case at all. Your outgrowing of a synagogue’s or sangha’s politics is typically an outgrowth of your outgrowing the group’s spiritual teachings.
This is how the eminent developmental psychologist Dr. James Fowler saw the faith of people who are at a Post-Progressive stage:
The emergence of Stage 5 is something like:
Realizing that the behavior of light requires that it be understood both as a wave phenomenon and in particles of energy.
Discovering that the rational solution or “explanation” of a problem that seemed so elegant is but a painted canvas covering an intricate, endlessly intriguing cavern of surprising depth.
Looking at a field of flowers simultaneously through a microscope and a wide-angle lens…
I think what these examples suggest is that people such as yourself who are growing into advanced (Stage 5 and beyond) stages of faith are beginning to see paradoxes in your ordinary life, gaining insight into contexts and construct for things that previously eluded them, and even gaining the ability to zoom in and zoom out of particular contexts and constructs. (For more information on stages of faith, see my “Who is the God of the Integralists?” or Corey DeVos and Ryan Oelke’s “Inhabit: Your Inner Theatre.”)
In this newsletter or in my blog posts, I may sometimes speak of you as Post-Progressives. As I see it, at least at this point in your life, you are religionists who are working to move beyond liberation theology’s limitations while carrying forward everything progressivism speaks that is Good, True, and Beautiful.
You are the first audience that I want to address in my ministry. Let me officially announce that Post-Progressives are embraced and welcomed and affirmed in all aspects of my ministry. When you think that your church or spiritual community refuses to allow you to grow into who you are meant to become, I hope that you can always find a refuge in the Integral Metamodern community.
Why Do I Wear Minister’s Robes?
Henry David Thoreau famously said, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”
Perhaps Thoreau would have not have approved of something I feel that I must do. I am going to acquire new clothing specifically designed for clergy, and then establish rules for myself about how, when, and where to wear them.
It’s a big small step, an outward manifestation of my decision to become an ordained Integral Minister. It puts me in the line of Christian ministers at least from 1215, when the Fourth Lateran Council required clergy to wear dress that sets them apart from the laity. And many other traditions in every world religion. There is an implicit ecclesiology, however subtle, in my decision.
Clothing has a sort of magical ability to change the wearer’s attitude and the perceptions of the people they interact with. Doctors wear scrubs for hygiene and other good reasons. Police officers wear blue uniforms so people recognize their authority. Studies have shown that lab techs in scientific laboratories make fewer mistakes if they wear a white coat. There is an implicit magical talisman, however subtle, in my decision.
So, when I choose to don ministerial garments, I’m not merely motivated by many pragmatic reasons. I haven’t worn them yet. I’ve just shopped for them and placed a couple of orders tonight.
I haven’t needed a minister’s uniform before now, but then again I haven’t taken ministry as seriously as I ought to have. There’s no Catholic abott to bade me, no Zen shike to enforce a code. I have to internalize the authority that isn’t there. There is a real Integral Metamodern community, but it is somewhat inchoate and not well-organized.
I’m not sure how exactly to go about this, but I feel that I must do what I can. Making internal spiritual transformation happen is hard, and changing ingrained habits that have set in over decades is hard. All I have to do is put on a piece of cloth, right? Should be a piece of cake.
Shopping for the minister’s garments was interesting. I was not limited in my search by Christian denomination nor even by religion. I knew of no precedents among Integral Ministers that I felt obligated to follow. And I knew that I didn’t want to spend a lot of money unless that was the only way to get the right uniform.
I decided to purchase two uniforms. One is a unisex Daoist Cheongsam suit advertised as a martial arts uniform. When worn with rolled cuffs, it looks sporty and can be worn during my Tai Chi.
The second uniform is called a Plymouth clergy robe. It’s sorta a generic pleated robe with a black matte finish, basically a typical Protestant minister’s garment. I think it might look good for a stroll out on the city streets, but at this point in time I’m concerned of what people will think.
I don’t know if these uniforms will look as sharp when I open the package as they do on the internet site, but they are my choices. Maybe I’ll keep both or perhaps I’ll send one back. The purchases are an experiment, and I anticipate needing to see if they fit well (emotionally as well as physically). I’ll try them out in different situations and see how they help me to adjust my state of mind and exude my inner state of being.
I wonder if Thoreau was right to warn us against risky enterprises. Maybe all this fuss is futile. Maybe it’s all just a mind game. Maybe I should send both the purchases back and give the money to charity.
Or maybe I’m right, and the enterprise that we really need to beware of is the enterprise we’re already doing that was once risky but has now grown so established in our nature that we’re not even aware of the risks we’re taking by not taking new risks.
Deep Conversations: What’s the Ecology of Institutions in “The Religion That’s Not a Religion”?
The Integralist Newsletter comes to you with podcasts that we’ve found that might be of interest to you. We don’t sponsor or endorse the podcast, but we have transcribed some of the dialogue.
Note: The following transcript starts at 47:45 and runs for about 10 minutes.
Layman Pascal: I think we should come back to coherence and artistry and the things that might make a person stay “turned on” in a particular framing of the wisdom practices in order to get benefits from it. Two things that are coming up for me while you guys were talking. First, pluralizing the training and explaining problem is an interesting way to go because you have different practices that would be appropriate for different groups and differently amenable to them, and you have all types of different translations that have to go on when explaining. Explaining is relative to who’s hearing it and what the niche is. Maybe you want a very technical mechanical explanation, maybe you want a very poetic explanation. You obviously need some kind of elite which can manage plural trainings and plural explanations and the space between those things will hopefully be able to hold itself open and remain stable over time.
The other part of it is the problematic elements in a broader usage of the terms is that there needs to be some kind of verification process. Our bodies are constantly taking in things good for us and bad for us. We have an immune system, we have a verification and vetting process. How did the old world really handle the problem of doing this? Because it’s not problematic necessarily that people are believing things that aren’t technically correct. It’s problematic if those things lead down the wrong pathways. Adjudicating between that, what did they use? Zen has this tradition of interviews where the master has to establish peer resonance with you and also to problematize your state change experiences for you. They have a lot of practices of social isolation, transgression, of situations that sort of took a person outside their normal social framing of reality. Many of those might have been obviously too ascetic in certain ways, they might have been damaging and unhealthy. If we go much farther back, we find a pattern of the ritual humiliation of political and religious leaders where there were things done to make fun of or take them outside of their context so we don’t mistake what’s going on in the local practical structure for some kind of reified status. And we could take all of those things and more because we could add a bigger list and we could add to them a temporary notion of a therapeutic adjunct to training.
John Vervaeke: That’s very good. The topic of elites and the practices by which they did not become reified and deified. I think that’s important. So, a connection I want to make to that is to deepen the problem: We had three interlocking institutions: the university, the monastery, and the church. And they were all trying to manage the training and explaining, and the elite versus the laity relationship. One of the functions of the Church was to presumably manage between the elites and the laity. The monastery concentrated a lot on training for wisdom and the university concentrated much more for explaining for knowledge in general. So you had knowledge, wisdom, and something maybe called a social integration, social cohesion thing. I’m wondering is that just happenstance. You can see similar things, even in the Zen monastery, the Zen temple, and then you have things like the Kyoto school where Zen is taken up in an academic setting and developed in powerful ways… Is that happenstance? Or have institutions to some degree somehow worked out an ecology of institutions in order to address the pedagogical pluralism problem, and the con/conveyor belt, and the explaining/training problem.
And does that mean that the “religion that’s not a religion” would need something like that? Layman that’s important because it means that we actually have kinds of elites, if I can put it that way, and they have… This sounds ridiculously American, but they have “checks and balances” relationships with one another as a way of managing some of the issues. Monasteries tend to hone people who are much more mystically oriented. The church was people who were much more missionary oriented. The university is much more people who were philosophically oriented. And they are all sort of acting as checks and balances on each other. They put terrific strain in the history of Christianity on the institution, but it seems to me that it’s one of the ways that the old world religions … addressed this problem. I’m trying to get back to Brendan’s question: how do we structure this? And is it that each one of these things is doing different things? Maybe the church concentrates on narrative and maybe the monastery concentrates on something like transcendence and the university of course concentrates on theory…
Brendan Graham Dempsey: One of the things that’s interesting about the American experiment historically is the way that the checks and balances system that you’re talking about was implicit in the old world becomes explicit and made an object of awareness to be intentionally built-in. One of the things that does is a release valve, a built-in self-correcting mechanism. I wonder if, on the topic of whatever sorts of institutions, or institutional translations of this “religion that’s not a religion”, whatever those might be, one of the things that could be vital in how they do what they do, is if there’s an understanding that these things are amenable to self-correction and transformation. Say, the difference between the American Constitution and a Hobbesian monarchical theory is the awareness that this is a construct. We put this together and there are built-in mechanisms to reinforce its self-preservation through adaptation and in the process it’s really hard to take the President as seriously as the monarch because of this whole infrastructure built into it, self-aware that this isn’t the whole thing. So, I wonder if similarly there’s a way of both articulating narratologically or these ecologies of practices built into that maybe probably on the explanation side, which is where this caveat should lie, the map isn’t the territory, the training isn’t the reality, a notion that this is something that is constructed in order to do these things. If that is there, it kind of precludes or makes it less likely that people will reify these things as being objectively the case.
John Vervaeke: There could be a deep continuity between ecologies of practice and ecologies of institutions. The whole idea of ecologies of practice is to try to explicate something that I’ve seen in wisdom traditions where they set up a point of processing and complementary practices, so you get this self-complexification, a self-correcting ability. Making it explicit that we want an ecology of institutions to best implement ecologies of practices. Yeah, that strikes me as a plausible proposal.
These three thinkers offer a proposal to the Integral Metamodern community that we should recognize three distinct forms of practice (contemplation, knowledge, and social/missionary) and three distinct institutions for implementing them (monasteries, universities, and church). And these are what’s called “ecologies of practice” and “ecologies of institutions” which complement each other.
I think this is an excellent way to talk about the complex problems of religious (or perhaps “quasi-religious”) community in our spiritual spaces. It’s a simple and useful taxonomy for seeing ourselves more clearly (where do I fit? what is my mission?) and helping us to connect with others (where should I fulfill my mission? with whom should I collaborate?).
Quote/Unquote
“There’s a collective sense that the world is ending, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s the rapture, the return of Jesus, wealth inequality, Satanic worship, or whether people’s ‘vibrations are too low’. It’s the only nonpartisan issue.” – Abbie Richards, a 25-year-old disinformation researcher who studies TikTok.
“To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.” – bell hooks
“Letting the multiracial culture of America churn and evolve is the right side of history — focusing more on 2119 than 1619, and aligning us to a future, and not to a past. The woke give the appearance of newness. But their politics is steeped in the poisonous racial categories and foul attitudes of a fast-eroding past. Instead of desperately shoring it up, why can we not finally let it go?” – Andrew Sullivan
“The integral claim is that no methodology is ‘evil’, that the majority of these [critical] methodologies have value and disclose some important aspect or dimension or zone of reality that other methodologies cannot disclose — but also that each of these methodologies is also essentially limited to one or two particular zones of reality, and get in trouble when they overreach into other zones they are not equipped to disclose. Which is why integral says things like ‘everyone is right’ and ‘everything in its right place’, while simultaneously saying ‘but stay in your damn zone…’ – Corey DeVos
“Values are expressed in styles of behavior which are often worlds apart from what people say is important. People are not typically very good self-observers, self-articulators and they have many personal, habitual and ideological incentives to assert beliefs, facts & value-claims which serve a purpose rather than present the authentic understanding and feelings of their body-mind-heart. It is hard to get a man to understand something if his paycheck depends upon him not understanding it.” – Layman Pascal
“True conservatism’s great virtue is that it teaches us to be humble about what we think we know; it gets human nature right, and understands that we are primarily a collection of unconscious processes, deep emotions, and clashing desires. Conservatism’s profound insight is that it’s impossible to build a healthy society strictly on the principle of self-interest.” – David Brooks
On Integralists, Mark B. says, “One of my greatest heroes, and one of my favorite songs… ‘Wake up and live your life, wake up and live!’
IM Spirituality in Real Life: An Apology
I posted this statement on my Facebook page:
Hi,
Over the past 11 or so years there have been some times when I criticized other people too harshly, pushed someone’s buttons too hard, or failed to listen and support. Now that I am embarking on a new phase of my career as a minister, I am sad about that and hope that bridges haven’t been permanently burned.
I apologize for all the words that I have said that did not give you space to be truly yourself. I apologize for words that I have said that failed to see the Big Picture, that postured in a rigid position instead of flexing into a flowing position. And of course there were times when I could have said things smarter, kinder, or more skillfully.
I’m not perfect and therefore can’t promise that I will always be able to get the right words out in the future. But you have my word that if I screw up and realize that I did, then I will come to you to apologize. Please hold me to it, and if you have it in your hearts, perhaps forgive me too.
Blessings and peace to you,
Joseph
P.S.: If I’ve blocked you in the past it is because I feel you have wronged me in some way, such as stalking or bullying. I forgive you for the wrongs that you have done to me, and I have unblocked you. To be clear, today I have unblocked everyone. And you will stay unblocked unless you compromise my safety or give me another reason for doing so.
Nobody’s perfect; we make mistakes and get triggered by others. It’s bad enough in our intimate relationships, but then these flaws get put on display in social media within our spiritual community. And when that happens, exchanging love and forgiveness with each other seems like a tall order.
I want to risk being more loving in my relationships. It starts by saying that I’m sorry.
A Look at “Sacred Economics” by Charles Eisenstein
(Photo: Ben White on Unsplash)
An economics based on Integral Theory is distant, says Christian Arnsperger in “Integral Economics: A Manifesto” (2007), neither being resonant with the materialistic dogma of unlimited economic growth nor sounding sufficiently like “science”, which to economists is a thoroughly positivistic and reductionistic affair. If modern economics is stripped of the interiors within individual and cultural whole/parts (holons), the rising of a more Integral economics instead would put humanity back into the economic discipline.
By including such interiority, Arnsperger theorizes, economics would be populated with people who are real subjects with desires, fears, states of consciousness, stages of consciousness, irrational drives, shadows, etc. Economics could include disciplines like psychoanalysis and social history … even existentialism and critical theory. What Christian is envisioning is a science with living subjects and literary modes and meaningful facts in all major perspectives (quadrants) and all levels of consciousness.
To get closer to this ideal, Integral thinkers need to start by taking seriously economic data and interpretations that have been widely overlooked by positivist economists. This includes the realm of spirituality. In this regard, it is worth quoting Arnsperger at length:
Today’s real capitalist agents—as opposed to the abstract, disincarnated homo economicus of evolutionary game theory and of complex-systems modeling—have deep-seated fears, desires, instincts, cultural preconceptions, and so on, which account both for the high performance and for the awful effects of global capitalism. On the normative side, work on a Buddhist economics, on a Christian economics, or on an “Enlightenment” economics would be extremely helpful to delineate paradigmatic ideals of economic organization and economic agency towards which conscious evolution might be geared in a liberation-oriented economy. These would be ‘paradigmatic’ in Wilber’s extended sense, i.e., they would be based on actual evidence that being a Buddhist, Christian or generally enlightened agent is possible, and that building a caring, compassionate economy is feasible, because such things has happened in actual fact and because there are accounts of such individuals and systems throughout human history. It’s about time we reached for such paradigms in order to consciously evolve toward our highest potentials.
Arnsperger’s vision is an example of a more evolved style of economics, one that can pave the way towards an economics of the Global-Mind (turquoise). Global-Mind, i.e., mature Integral consciousness, has the potential to attend to all aspects of life and work for individuals, neighborhoods, nations, and global holons. It would know the human being as having a holistic spiritual intelligence — an understanding of human nature that is truly beyond the selfish egos of modern economics and the tribalistic collectives of postmodern economics.
Reconnecting Money to Spirit and Matter
It is from something very close to Christian’s integral economics manifesto that I think we need to appreciate and critique Charles Eisenstein’s important book Sacred Economics(2011). Eisenstein is an author, speaker, and “de-growth activist” who has written an illuminative, sustained, and thoughtful attempt to apply postmodern (green) wisdom and approaches to baffling and critical problems in the world. Unfortunately, it leaves the Integral reader sometimes frustrated and concerned with regard to its potential use in the real world.
“Postmodernism” in my usage today is basically a worldview which emerged in the late modern era in opposition to many of modernity’s disasters: its crony capitalism, its coarse materialism, its cultural imperialism, its exploitation of the environment, and so on. Eisenstein’s postmodernism includes many of postmodernism’s most prominent dignities: a high level of responsiveness to human needs, an affiliative sensibility based on organizing a new gift economy, and a somewhat relativistic approach to values (situational and pragmatic, not absolutistic).
More problematically, Charles’s philosophy also features an openness to Romantic ideals such as a thoroughly optimistic view of human nature and an unrealistic idealization of indigenous spirituality based on caricatures. By inappropriately idealizing his sources of inspiration, he runs the risk of offering unrealistic solutions in his own right.
Sacred Economics contains a multi-faceted program defined in reflections on not paying debt, a critique of usury, wealth redistribution, economic “de-growth”, plus smart critiques of both socialism and New Age notions of “money as energy”. The task ahead for humankind may be best summed up in Eisenstein’s formula for describing the new money system he wants to create:
Sharing instead of greed, equality instead of polarization, enrichment of the commons instead of its stripping, and sustainability instead of growth. As well, this new kind of money system will embody an even deeper shift that we see happening today, a shift in human identity toward a connected self, bound to all being in the circle of the gift.
From an Integral perspective, Eisenstein is basically describing the evolution of money from a modern (orange) perspective to a postmodern (green) perspective. He pictures a critical mass of the population growing up in consciousness from a modern to postmodern self-sense, replacing the Cartesian-defined self with a “connected self” common at more developed stages.
When Eisenstein’s book was first published (2011), there was more optimism in America for believing in a progress out of materialistic modern capitalism to a gift-based postmodern communitarian vision. Alas, Donald Trump’s presidency brought a devolution or “evolutionary self-correction” (as Wilber puts it). Therefore, we must remember that evolutionary progress is not guaranteed, it is only a possibility to be obtained through striving and destiny.
The Prophet and the Systems Integrator
Normative, spiritual ideas based on postmodern mysticism are not the usual fodder for economics, but there’s a place for them as part of an Integral synthesis. Sacred Economics doesn’t really provide complete answers or even roadmaps for getting to the promised land, but its ideas can help to model experimental, non-totalizing prototypes for revisioning a wide variety of aspects of our economic life, bringing our materialistic desires and spiritual ideals into greater harmony.
However, it is difficult to see many of these ideas actually getting off the page and into real life. One important reason for this is that as a postmodernist, Eisenstein is talking largely to others who share postmodernism’s values and he doesn’t offer a compelling way to persuade readers at other value memes (e.g., traditionalist and modernist) to climb on board the train.
For example, Charles wants to see “equality rather than polarization” in the new order, but is this equality of opportunity or equality of results? Does prioritizing the value of equality mean rejecting ideas of merit or bulldozing value hierarchies? Traditionalists, modernists, and many others would probably have many reasons to balk at the economic program.
The progressive postmodernist’s values are not everybody else’s values. Perhaps there is a way to for thought leaders to harmonize notions of equality enough across value memes so that they could be useful for shared economic programs among traditionalists, modernists, postmodernists, and others, but Charles does not seem interested in that, except to lift the spirituality of premodern religions out of context for appropriation.
Eisenstein is best seen as a prophet of systemicdoom of the old economic systems (and the fires are indeed burning!), not as a meta-systemic integrator of new economic and spiritual dimensions. Generally speaking, postmodernists think systemically; Integral thinkers think meta-systemically. Integralists can’t just say “To hell with capitalism!” and demand that all systems in existence need to be shut down, they have to attempt to show how multiple intertwined socio-economic and cultural systems can interoperate and segue.
Like elite I.T. systems integrators, Integralists must concern themselves with the health of many different systems running on many different operating systems, and somehow get them all to talk to each other because the older systems must continue to be viable and operable for many decades to come. All have to be operating in good working order for the whole system to function (at least until finally, much longer than anyone ever anticipated, the legacy mainframes can finally be retired).
Note that because Integralists see the value of preserving a whole tier of co-existing systems, postmodernists often paint them as “conservatives” on this account. Though the greens would say it as a smear against the teals and the turquoises, such conservation is nothing to be ashamed of. All the value memes across the whole spectrum of consciousness have dignities of their own which must be respected and defended.
Conclusion
Even if Eisenstein’s economic program could be tested, I’m afraid that the key ideas would be doomed in execution. Postmodernism fails to understand the depth of the grip of other value memes on human civilization, especially aggressive self-interested economic activity, the sort known as Warrior Culture (red). Its failure stems also from a conception of human nature without sufficient regard for evil or sinfulness.
A question: Wouldn’t an economy based on sharing be defeated militarily by an alternative empire based on Warrior/Pirate values that sought to exploit its peaceful nature? Don’t look to Eisenstein for an answer to this simple question; it doesn’t seem to concern him.
Like others who bring postmodern values to the forefront of economics, he hasn’t fully grappled with the propensity of human beings to value self-interest over communal values until they have already reached a relatively high level of ethical development. What is the beautiful gift economy with its glorious economic commons to do when it is overrun by freeloaders, grifters, trolls, vandals, and unethical hackers? Surrender, apparently.
Postmodern thinkers usually insist on anti-capitalism and some sort of collectivism. This gets some things right and other things wrong. There are elements of postmodern economics that can be lifted up and incorporated into an Integral economics that is methodologically plural, one that allows roles for all sorts of actors (local, national, global) at all levels (orange capitalists, green communitarians, etc.) while we work, sometimes seemingly at cross-purposes, for new systems to emerge beyond the old models (teal/turquoise).
Integral economics not as anti-capitalism or anti-socialism, but as post-capitalism and post-socialism.
At the end of the day, there is no conveyor belt to such a higher-level consciousness contained in Sacred Economics, only a mélange of well-intended ideas that may offer a mirage rather than an exit from our most vexing problems. Latching onto Eisenstein’s new economic ethos of “de-growth” is no complete remedy for our maladies. Not because it is too extreme a measure, but because it may be too weak a response to the complexities of our current situation.
Our most fundamental problem isn’t that there is too much wealth being created through industry; it is the lack of an operational Global-Mind (turquoise) with institutional authority and a market-based and regulation-tempered program for alleviating the quagmires posed by unchecked economic development. Perhaps this is a distant pipe-dream, or perhaps the next great and indispensable step towards its realization is as near as your next act of surrender, acceptance, and synergistic way of being in the world.
We stand in need of a new Integral economics which brings the interiors of individuals and collectives, including sacred matters, into the analysis of social goods. Our hope ought to lie not merely in shifting a Cartesian self into a “connected self” but in the rising up of the Global-Mind, a mature post-postmodern consciousness, one that has learned to apply its evolutionary awareness and holistic spiritual intelligence to the solving of urgent global problems through collective action.
Plenty Integral (That Is, If We’re Not Talking About Stages), and Here’s Why
(Photo: Official 2013 White House photo by David Lienemann)
Joe Biden is not a scholar or a deep philosophical thinker. He is not the son of scientists or doctors or executives. He is a father and grandfather from humble blue-collar roots who has survived tragic losses. He is a professional politician with a natural talent for relationship-building that has served him well doing Senate negotiations, international relations, and retail politics on the street.
He would neither recognize the term “Integralist” nor use it for himself (he is a devout Roman Catholic). But an Integralist might reasonably ask: how do we look at the U.S. president-elect from an Integral level of consciousness? and: How “Integral” is Joe Biden?
By “Integral”, I am speaking of a certain way of looking at and being in the world that is developmentally-aware. And when developmentalists look at the sphere of American politics, they tell us that there are certain undeniable patterns that emerge, worldviews, or basic units of culture that inform our values and political orientations.
In Developmental Politics, Steve McIntosh distinguishes between several different major worldviews in American culture: the traditional worldview with “Heritage Values” such as patriotism and religious faith; the fiscally conservative modern worldview with “Liberty Values” such as individual rights and limited government; the liberal modern worldview with “Fairness Values” such as protecting minority rights and an activist government; and the progressive worldview with “Caring Values” such as protecting the environment, championing multiculturalism, and expanding social justice.
McIntosh explains that conflicts among these four major worldviews are the basis of the “culture wars” that have played such a large role in American politics in recent decades. He also holds that the culture wars are not interminable because they can be resolved by a higher consciousness:
Unlike the standard modernist approach of making tactical compromises to try to get most of what our side wants, developmental [Integral] politics seeks to include the values of each camp into the mix from the beginning because it actually affirms these values and wants to see them forwarded. At the level of conventional political issues we’re often faced with a win-lose proposition. But at the level of bedrock values it becomes possible to discover something closer to a win-win solution, even if such a solution does not completely satisfy all parties. Simply put, a developmental approach to politics seeks to accommodate the concerns of all sides, not just to get its way, but to make authentic progress for all sides by creating new value agreements.
In McIntosh’s conception, which I think is a valid and important approach to an Integral Politics, the work of forging compromises between differing political factions can be an expression of a transformation in values from one level of development to another. This value transformation is key to what we might call an “Integral method” of doing politics, or simply, the creation of “Integral dignities”.
Three Bidenesque Integral Dignities
Even though Joe Biden has probably never studied interdisciplinary metatheory or any similar esoteric intellectual domain, he nevertheless walks in the world in a manner that is rich with Integral dignities. In other words, his basic approach to politics is that of one who reconciles conflicting value systems through the hard work of getting agreement on tough issues, forging a new level of coherence.
I will flesh out this understanding of Biden’s politics in a moment by talking about three specific Integral dignities, but even if I convince you that Biden practices one sort of Integral Politics, it’s important to stress that this isn’t the only valid and important way of walking in the world with an Integral Politics.
There are fluid positions for Integral politicians on the right, center, left, and other stations (but there should be no rigid, ideologically-fixed identities). There are persons with an “Integral consciousness” who may identify predominantly with one or more of McIntosh’s key values: Heritage Values, Liberty Values, Fairness Values, or Caring Values.
And there are Integral people working within every political party and trans-partisan endeavors. As for me, I’m an Integral Democrat (but I would happily vote outside my party if there’s a viable candidate who is a better fit for the role).
The Evolver-in-Chief: The First Integral Dignity
Some of you Integralists reading this are possibly having coughing fits at the notion of Biden as an Integral politician. You might be thinking: how could he be? He has never quoted an Integral thinker or used an evolutionary theoretical framework in his speeches?
I think this is a big confusion when looking at development, the idea that one must trace one’s biography in a philosophically coherent framework for development to be real. The truth is that on at least one hugely important developmental line – emotional intelligence – Biden’s life story has given him a constantly expansive and evolving capacity for worldcentric love and care.
Depth psychologists understand that one of the biggest movers of human consciousness from one level to another is the capacity to overcome grief. Mourning breaks down certainties and symbols of coherence into new capacities for meaning-making. In Biden’s life, he has overcome losses in his personal life without losing his open-heartedness and has expanded that concern to members of his political tribe, to his country, and even to the world.
At a time of a global pandemic with all the suffering it entails, Americans have selected a “healer in chief” as our president-elect partly because we rightly sense that he is the man for the occasion. Biden can be the emotional physician for healing a sick nation—and Integralists understand that this is so because of his advanced emotional intelligence, one that has expanded the scope of its empathy beyond egocentric concerns until it embraced the whole world (and beyond into the spiritual realm).
The Scientific Spiritualist: The Second Integral Dignity
Biden campaigned for president as a spiritual person (notably, by attending Mass on election day) and as a man with reverence for science (notably, by wearing masks to comply with scientific public health recommendations). So, it is worth noting that the ability to do both of these things is one of the hallmarks of the Integral worldview.
McIntosh defines “cultural transcendence”, a key concept of Integral consciousness, as
a new collective higher purpose for American society that finds its truth in the intersection of science and spirituality.
He says that cultural transcendence, or values transformation, is a sort of “technology of agreement”.
So far as Integral “super-powers” go, “cultural transcendence” is basically the ability to depolarize a polarized country. The superhero rescues a nation bitterly divided into warring factions by getting them to see beyond their cultural prejudices, even those in his own party and ideology.
It makes sense that Joe stands a good chance at reconciling the conflicts abounding between the modern scientific worldview and the traditional religious worldview because these worldviews are reconciled in himself. He can draw on his personal journey of self-integration when he works on issues involving human rights, religious freedom, the role of science in government, and so on.
In short, Biden is more likely than other politicians to see ways of reconciling apparent polarities in modern and traditional worldviews because the same opposing forces have become complementary energies within himself like yin and yang.
The Pragmatic Uniter: The Third Integral Dignity
Another Integral dignity relates to the ability to reconcile pragmatism with idealism. Like Barack Obama before him who spoke of “No Red States and Blue States”, and walking in the footsteps of George W. Bush who said he was a “Uniter, Not a Divider”, Joe Biden delivered an acceptance address tonight which was a message of unity. His message was a response to a political climate that is widely acknowledged as extremely polarized and toxic, filled with demonization and hostility.
Now, in certain times and places, a political message of unity would not be appropriate. Some historical conditions call for a radical or revolutionary spirit (i.e., the spirit of Eros) and others call for a radical conservative spirit (i.e., the spirit of Agape). But the wise Integralist understands that political theory needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the moment, conserving what needs to be conserved and reforming what needs to be reformed, or even supporting extreme measures in extreme situations.
Biden’s pragmatic spirit is obvious, but couldn’t this be seen not as a dignity but as a disaster, an unprincipled accommodation to a corrupt political system? Indeed, it could, if the pragmatism becomes divorced from the idealism. Likewise, if idealism becomes unmoored from pragmatism, it becomes a disaster in its own right, or “the perfect becoming the enemy of the good” as we say.
Conclusion
I have suggested that the question of Joe Biden’s “Integral-ness” ought to be framed as a matter of the extent to which he seems to embody characteristic norms of an Integral philosophy of life—namely, an evolutionary orientation, emotional intelligence, scientific spirit, spirituality, idealistic pragmatism, and a unifying orientation. There are many other qualities or norms of an Integral nature that we could talk about.
Obviously, not everyone who has some of these dignities would consider themselves an Integralist. And certainly not all Integralists have these dignities. But most Integralists will recognize these dignities as present in their own value systems. They will welcome these qualities in Biden because they have them in themselves.
You might be thinking: “There’s no way that Joe Biden is Integral. He’s boring!”
But I would say: “Don’t demand that Integral Politics always be exciting! That would be very immature of you. There’s a face of Integral Politics that is integrative rather than revolutionary, empathetic rather than lively, effective rather than astonishing, useful rather than avant garde. Biden’s face is not the only face worn by Integral Politics, but you’ve got to appreciate the authentic Integral dignities that he has or you’re leaving a lot out of the picture.”
In my view, Joe Biden’s election is a new day for America, one made all the more hopeful by virtue of his Integral dignities. These dignities endow him with the potential capacity for “cultural transcendence” necessary for solving our national polarization crisis, and he deserves the support of Integralists in his efforts to do so.
The Integral philosophy has enormous implications for politics, but not in a simplistic way of pointing to specific governmental structures, political parties, or politicians to support. Instead, it provides insights and methodologies useful for checking on the validity or completeness of other political philosophies. For this reason, you can expect that there is no one “orthodox” response to the 2020 US presidential election, and no one correct way of voting.
It is sometimes even said that Integral philosophy is merely a “meta-” picture of world affairs and is itself “content-free” about how it forms opinions. While I think this is the wrong way to put it, I readily agree that Integralists ought to be careful about announcing that their own preferred political approach is the only correct way of enacting views with “meta-aware” complexity.
Truly, Integralists are not merely empty vessels capable of processing political opinions with equanimity. We are active players in politics, as in all realms of life. We are actors in a play of partiality, owning our biases and preferences even as we seek to creatively include viewpoints that make us uncomfortable.
The goal isn’t 50/50 balance, but even-handed wisdom and transforming a broken world to greater wholeness. Politics is a sort of lending our own individual realizations of wholeness to the communities we inhabit. Integralists have our own partisan and ideological tendencies, but we also seek to step into the frameworks of other persons so that we can learn from them and perhaps try to make them better.
Now let me make clear my own stance in partiality, put succinctly.
I believe that Donald Trump is the worst president in U.S. history and the most dangerous leader in the world. I believe he is horrifically unfit and incompetent to lead. He is an abusive spouse, a mad king, and a despotic tin-cup tyrant.
I also believe that there are basically FOUR important issues that are of dominant importance for today’s world:
ONE, the global climate crisis, along with ecosystem loss and enormous species extinction;
TWO, the global (and US) income inequality and wealth disparity crisis;
THREE, the threat to democracy posed by right-wing autocracies (including Trump’s own threat to the US system); and
FOUR, the crisis concerning the lack of world governance and human consciousness structures that are capable of finding solutions to enormously complex problems affecting the entire planet.
On some of these crises, I do not know where the candidates stand exactly because no one has asked them the right questions. But I have taken educated guesses.
On all FOUR of these issues, Trump is, as he would say, a total disaster, the most horrible in history, unlike anything anyone has ever seen before, sad!
On all FOUR of these issues (and others), Joe Biden is preferable, though he is not always a great choice. At least, he is a bridge to the possibility of a better future.
If You Are Still Unpersuaded to Reject Trump…
There is something that puzzles me as an Integralist. I have asked myself: could Integralists disagree after considering the facts in “all levels” (e.g., traditional, modern, postmodern, integral)? Could Integralists accurately assess Trump and Biden themselves at radically different “levels” of ego-maturity or cognition and yet support the man with the lower level of maturity?
In my estimation, fewer than 1 in 10 Integralists who have made their views known in our social media forums support Trump. So apparently, the answer is yes. How is it that there are fellow Integralists or Evolutionaries or Metamodernists who have such sharply contrasting viewpoints? So now let us speak to these Integralists for a moment.
Some Integral Trumpists have tried to explain their views, but I have yet to read a single Integralist’s argument for supporting Trump that was convincing. Honestly, I have even found that there were profound misunderstandings not only of politics but of Integral philosophy. But let us proceed in good faith.
Beyond the four issues already noted, there are additional reasons that I believe make it virtually impossible for Integralists to support Trump’s re-election.
Simply put, Donald Trump is not a well man. So far as I know, he has never had a real psychological evaluation (something, which, by the way, should be as commonly performed for US presidents as physical exams). But independent experts with impeccable credentials have told us that (a) they have enough information, based on Trump’s enormous public profile, to make an assessment, and (b) he is seriously mentally ill.
Specifically, Trump has been assessed as a pathological narcissist bordering on sociopathy. He is said to be totally devoid of human empathy and a pathological liar. Even his own niece, a psychologist, has confirmed these assessments based on her close knowledge of Trump’s family dynamics over a lifetime of observation.
What’s more, given Trump’s 22,000+ lies and deceptions since he assumed the presidency, it is very well-established that his inability to tell the truth constitutes a mental health issue reaching crisis proportions. When the president for all US citizens speaks lies at a rate approaching 50 per day, this is a disgusting and dangerous example for others, one that is degrading the moral fabric of our nation and even our ability to function as a democracy.
Trump’s personal morality is of concern in other ways: his admitted and degrading – and criminal – behavior towards women, the dozen accusations of sexual assault, the vanity, the racism and emboldening white supremacists, the xenophobia, and more. Tom Nichols, a conservative and Republican put it well:
Trump is the most morally defective human being ever to hold the office of the presidency, worse by every measure than any of the rascals, satyrs or racists who have sat in the Oval Office. This is vastly more important than marginal tax rates or federal judges.
There is also the matter of Trump’s physical health making him a poor match for a role as demanding as the presidency. He is known to have morbid obesity and to be in recovery from COVID (which can have long-term effects on the heart, brain, and other organs). The risks to brain health include early onset dementia and even psychosis-like effects.
Trump has repeatedly shown many peculiar symptoms (slurred speech, unsteadiness, etc.) and may have a mystery illness. Trump’s refusal of transparency raises serious questions of competency. While other presidents have served in office while having serious health problems, that was in a different era. In modern times, one should want for higher standards for physical competency.
The Mind of Trump
Respected Integralists who have informally weighed in on Trump’s overall developmental level have all said that he is either at a center of gravity of red (egocentric), amber (ethnocentric), or orange (achiever-oriented). Probably his psychograph would show evidence of all three of these, but I would say he seems to me like he is firmly arrested at red (in other words, the maturity of a bratty child), one who is expert at fitting into amber and orange worldspaces through lies and pretending to be more accomplished and talented than he really is. His supposed nationalism and patriotism, for instance, is little more than a sick joke, a con job he does to win the votes of others. His business sense is more that of a Mafia boss than a typical corporate executive.
And then there is Trump’s apparent low IQ. He refuses to release his college transcripts, and no wonder. Linguists tell us that he uses language at grade school level. He thinks at grade school level too (it isn’t a rhetorical strategy). Trump’s niece has said that he is known to have paid someone to take his SATs. He thinks in conspiracy theories and mocks scientists. He ignores his White House briefings and gets his news from tabloid TV and Twitter.
I am saying all this not to pick on him (that poor man!), or because of so-called Trump Derangement Syndrome, but because his inability to handle cognitively complex operations should be a disqualifier for anyone aspiring to world leadership in our day. This is true from an Integral perspective, and should be true from any well-formed perspective.
No one should vote to elect a person with such serious mental and physical defects as Trump has, regardless of any other concerns they may have, policy or otherwise. Trump would never be hired by a corporation for a critical executive role given these shortcomings, and he simply does not even come close to meeting the bar for re-employment.
By any measure, Trump just isn’t a good person.
And a nation which elevates a bad man as its leader, well … one doesn’t have to be a Confucian to see that that nation deserves the calamities that will surely follow.
Some will say with good justification that Trump is not only a bad man, but a very evil man, one of the worst world leaders the planet has ever seen. They will point to his record of aiding genocide, his nuclear footsie with North Korea, his forfeiting the world’s best chance at averting catastrophic climate change, his inaction leading to tens of thousands of needless deaths from a pandemic, his stoking a potential second U.S. civil war, his demolishing America’s democratic institutions and standing in the world, and even his recent responsibility for 700 deaths of his rally attendees. They have some good points. Perhaps Trump is truly evil.
I have briefly noted the FOUR big issues in our day and then expanded on Trump’s individual failings for those who were not yet convinced, but there are many other issues that I haven’t discussed: the pros and cons of deregulation, health care reform, infrastructure spending, deficit spending versus economic stimulus, the merits of lockdowns versus herd immunity in responding to Covid-19, immigration reform, racial inequities, LGBTQ and women’s rights, and the problem of wokeness on college campuses and elsewhere. I tend to agree with liberals on some of these issues and agree with conservatives on some others, but that’s not so important. Trump is already so far disqualified on the grounds on which I have spoken that we may ignore all the rest.
I hope you will vote for Joe Biden on Tuesday if you have not already done so. Biden is a good and decent man who is well-qualified to begin to repair the damage done by an abominable president, and he deserves to be given the chance to do so. I say this as an Integralist whose judgment in these matters has been informed by the values and perspectives of my own philosophy, and I hope other Integralists especially will consider what I have to say.
To paraphrase something the Integral philosopher Steve McIntosh said some years ago: there’s no more important work for an Integralist than building the Integral worldview itself.
But how do we do this when so many of us disagree amongst ourselves?
There are staunch critics among us who hang out in our social media circles. You may hear from them that Integral philosophy is not practical enough, that it’s not relevant enough, or is not popular enough to warrant adherence. Some of these people have wrestled with the philosophy and found it lacking, and others have rejected the best views and taken to promoting weird, sectarian views instead.
I have spent many hours tussling with these folks in social media forums filled with huge disagreements and controversy. Let it not be said that there is not a healthy spectrum of legitimate philosophical leanings within the Integral movement. (And let it not be denied that there’s a bit of lunacy, too.)
Perhaps the biggest rift among Integralists concerns the proper role of spirituality. Opposed to the view of sectarian thinkers who would separate Ken Wilber’s nondual spirituality from his scaffolding of evolutionary metatheory, I would invite others to put such deep spirituality at the center of our purpose, as I try to do.
The Atman project: the attempt to find Spirit in ways that prevent it and force substitute gratifications. And, as you will see in the following pages, the entire structure of the manifest universe is driven by the Atman project, a project that continues until we — until you and I — awaken to the Spirit whose substitutes we seek in the world of space and time and grasping and despair. the nightmare of history is the nightmare of the Atman project, the fruitless search in time for that which is finally timeless, a search that inherently generates terror and torment, a self ravaged by repression, paralyzed by guilt, beset with the frost and fever of wretched alienation — a torture that is only undone in the radiant Heart when the great search itself uncoils, when the self-contraction relaxes its attempt to find God, real or substitute: the movement in time is undone by the great Unborn, the great Uncreate, the great Emptiness in the Heart of the Kosmos itself.
I hear this today as a reminder to the Integral movement — the loosely-defined group of individuals who are inspired by Wilber’s philosophy, his many contemporaries such as Carter Phipps and Lana Wachowski, and predecessors such as Sri Aurobindo and Clare Graves.
We are a community of evolutionaries, persons whose spirit is always under renovation.
As I see it, Ken’s writing is a call to think of the Integral movement not as a force of grasping and despair but of REMEMBRANCE.
Our remembrance ought to begin with Ken’s words — articulated in dozens of books and hundreds, if not thousands, of videos and blog posts — and the words of all his contemporaries who have walked alongside him (or just down the road on an aligned path) in his Integral vision. From there, it ought to stretch out to Teilhard de Chardin, Jean Gebser, and other luminaries who have helped to build the Integral worldview.
Such remembrance is not veneration of these persons or their books or teachings, though we may be passionate; it is appreciation of the distinctive and original ways that they have each invited us to set aside our individual Atman projects in favor of an unqualified Spirit.
It is this remembrance that awakens us to our own realization.
It is this remembrance that embodies the disembodied Integral philosophy into a renaissance tradition of Integralism and a community of Integralists.
It is this remembrance that builds something Integralists desperately need: a healthy amber layer (e.g., tradition, a source of norms, a commons) and a stronger LR quadrant (e.g., a well-formed collective presence).
And remembrance can bring us an awakening that allows us to engage actively in the world of politics, morality, sexuality, art, and so on, freed from narcissistic attachments and nihilistic doom-seeking.
Hence, the Integral movement has a choice before it today:
(A) to become a community of remembrance and awakening to Spirit, or
(B) to become a substitute for such an authentic awakening, offering instead shallow visions, truncated theories, and rejections of nondual spirituality.
Today I am probably a lot like many of you, striving for consciousness and clarity, looking for inspiration from wisdom and holism, and still seeking connection to others who are walking a similar path.
Not everyone shares my enthusiasm for seeing Integralism as essentially a spiritual movement, and that’s okay. Let us agree on what we can agree on, and then move on so that we are better able to serve the world through an Integral vision.
I believe that spirituality should be updated and made more relevant and rigorous, not abandoned. Through The Integralist newsletter, I am hoping to speak to all Integralists, but especially those who are choosing path A.
An earlier version of this article was published on Joe-Perez.com on 9/20/2020.
Spirit is Everything, Nothing is Separate from God
(Photo: liyavihola via BigStock.com)
I imagine that most Integralists probably have roughly similar ideas about God, and a valued place in our lives for God or Goddess or Allah or Spirit, by whatever name. One might also say, if one has belief, that God gives us a valued place in God’s world, and God reveals God’s self to us in its essential nature through evolving ways.
The Roman Catholic theologian Teilhard de Chardin, one of the major influencers of the Integral worldview, says in Hymn of the Universe:
So, far from light emerging gradually out of the womb of our darkness, it is the Light, existing before all else was made which, patiently, surely, eliminates our darkness. As for us creatures, of ourselves we are but emptiness and obscurity. But you, my God, are the inmost depths, the stability of that eternal milieu, without duration or space, in which our cosmos emerges gradually into being and grows gradually to its final completeness, as it loses those boundaries which to our eyes seem so immense. Everything is being; everywhere there is being and nothing but being, save in the fragmentation of creatures and the clash of their atoms.
In a similar observation, the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo wrote:
In the spiritual experience, we see God as the supreme Self or Spirit, or as the Being from whom we come and in whom we live and move. We see Nature as his Power or God as Power, Spirit in Power acting in ourselves and the world.
These renowned thinkers are suggesting that God or Self or Spirit is everywhere, from the farthest reaches of the cosmos to the most interior depths of the human heart. Where did Integralists come by this idea?
I would guess that significantly fewer than half of Integralists are regular churchgoers or active members of any formal religious community. Therefore, most of us have derived our understanding of God from a variety of loosely-defined places, including the “canon” of popular Ken Wilber books and Integral community trainings and the “tradition” of evolutionary spiritual thinkers from generations past (e.g., de Chardin and Aurobindo).
Beyond de Chardin and Aurobindo, other Integralists share some roughly similar ideas about the way things are in the grand scheme of things, but they do not use terminology with a religious-sounding origin. Some call themselves atheists or agnostics. They prefer to use terms such as Universe or Kosmos or Nature or All-That-Is or Sprit to speak of how we relate to all things. Also, they prefer to use terms like “I AMness” or Self to refer to the spiritual perception of all things with an emphasis on the inner being.
The Divine Spirit
Spirit, you may have noticed, is a term used by both religious and irreligious Integralists, so it is very useful for speaking to the entire community. I feel that it invokes the Holy Spirit of Christian faith to my ears (which suits me), but it also resonates with a variety of other perspectives from German Idealism to New Age to scientific panpsychism.
Perhaps most people who are comfortable describing their relationship to all things as a walk with Spirit would probably feel comfortable describing themselves as panentheistic. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, panentheism “considers God and the world to be inter-related with the world being in God and God being in the world.”
How these two faces of God are related is a matter of ongoing discussion among Integralists. For one view, the Integral/Metamodern thinker Layman Pascalsays:
The God who is in the world (as participation in the dynamic interdependent co-arising) supercedes the God who supercedes the world.
Don’t confuse panentheism, which is belief in a transcendent reality and nature, with pantheism, which believes that all that exists is only nature, and God is nothing but nature. Why is this important? Partly, because a lot of Integralists prefer inclusion to exclusion. While the cosmos and its mysterious forces inspire many sublime feelings, few of us would say that they point to nothing beyond themselves, and we want to include everything (after all, evolution is all about bringing in a transcendent future).
One perspective that is rare among Integralists is that of atheistic scientific materialism, which is widely understood as a reductive philosophy that has no worthy view of science’s limits. Basically, we generally believe that we live in a world that we actively participate in, and the boundaries between the world “out there” and the world “in here” are ultimately illusory.
There are a few folks among us of a strong secular bent who express themselves much like scientific materialists do, but even they are usually forced to reject the materialistic doctrine along with (hopefully) the smug, arrogant stance of many modern scientific writers. Although few Integralists think that Integralism and militant atheism are compatible, many Integralists enjoyed the writings of the New Atheists when they were popular because they enjoy good spirited debates.
And then let’s not forget about the Metamodernists like “Hanzi Freinacht” who believe that the more evolved you become, the more secular you get. You might not be surprised to learn that Hanzi’s Metamodernism seems to be foremost a European phenomenon, which might explain their worship of secularism and their lack of serious interest in religion or spirituality as anything but an obsolete artifact.
If you ask me, it’s simply not true that a person’s evolution in worldview necessarily produces increasing secularization, though I suppose it depends on how terms like “secular” and “spiritual” and “religious” are defined. My opinion is that evolution produces more sophisticated, more inclusive, and more comprehensive consciousness, which may be interpreted in secular or spiritual or religious ways (with the advantage going to spiritualists or religionists with well-formed outlooks, because these views are nearly always less reductionist).
The Six Major Levels of God
One thing just about all Integralists can agree upon is that evolution in one’s view of God is real. There are all sorts of complexities, caveats, and nuances that ought to be spelled out, but today let’s just keep it short and sweet.
Put bluntly, there is an archaic God, a magic God, a mythic God, a mental God, and an integral God. Which God do you believe in?
Let us imagine a hypothetical person who has a spiritual journey along 6 major stations similar to the 5 mentioned by Wilber (who is simplifying 100+ different models of human development). I’ll call this person “Joe” or “Joey” because some details come from my own life experience.
IMPORTANT: The following short descriptions suggest just one possible way of passing through these stages. Your mileage will vary, but you can probably recognize some of these stages in your own story.
Level 0: Archaic
Baby Joey’s ability to see God is very different than ours because it is totally dominated by his survival needs. These needs appear as instinctual forces, e.g., drives for food, water, comfort, bonding, and safety. In a manner of speaking, these drives themselves are divinities. When Joey’s hunger demands food or pain demands comfort, these forces dominate his entire world.
The baby sees God in raw impulses and basic emotions. Worship of the archaic God is the satisfaction of drives and relief from fear. Faith is the cry of a needy infant, hoping for survival. Theology is inchoate primordial sensing.
Level 1: Magic
Little Joey, seated on his high-chair throne, sees God in his own ego and its ability to change a world of supernatural beings. He recognizes the divine power of relationships because the trusted bonds of family and ancestors are essential for living. His sense of right and wrong are not yet well developed, so he tends to obey his superiors without thinking about it. Rituals and traditions connect Joey to God because they generate miracles or ask God for intervention.
The magic God is the one where belonging to the tribe or clan is a source of power and magic. This God is known through belief in fairy-tales (e.g., sunshine is God’s smile and the rain is God’s tears). Faith is joining in the rite of passage that bonds people together in a community. Theology is feeling and folklore.
Level 2: Mythic
Joey is now old enough to receive instruction in prayers, listen to stories about Jesus Christ, and even serve as an altar boy in church services. God is a lot like his parents, but visible nowhere on Earth. God is in heaven, the place that people speak of when they look up into the blue sky. And you want very much to go to heaven when you die, because it is the reward for behaving according to God’s rules and moral teachings while you live, and much better than the hell that awaits sinners.
The child sees God mainly through the prism of stories about the divine. These stories give his life purpose, order, and steadiness. The mythic God is known by accepting guidance from a Higher Power other than one’s self, gaining membership in a supportive community, and atoning for the guilt caused by one’s immoral actions. Faith is enacted through communal acts of honoring and sacrifice. Theology is defending the source of ultimate authority for the community.
Level 3: Mental
Now in his college years, Joe has been educated by studying many modern thinkers. His religiosity has been challenged by historicist criticism of the Bible, the history of dogma, scientific theories, and the history of philosophy. God is a figure embattled with modernity, one who is constantly denied, attacked, and demythologized. Although Joe is no longer able to easily affirm the God of his religious upbringing, he nevertheless finds God as the infinite in the finite, the unconditioned in the conditioned, and the ground of being.
The mental God is the object of rational theorizing and philosophical debate, a new role for God that allows Joe to feel greater autonomy and independence. His mental concept of God as a ground of being gives him a way of combining a scientific, materialist understanding of the way the world works with a logical approach to religion. Faith is the optimism that bestows Joe with confidence in the progress of democracy over authority, science over superstition, and technology over backwardness. Theology is a way of thinking about God by thinking about human nature and destiny.
Level 4: Pluralistic
As Joe continues his studies into graduate school, he grows increasingly disenchanted with modernity. Although he maintains the same essential view of religion as problematic, he now begins to look down on rationality itself along with its truth-claims. Just as he once saw the manufactured nature of religious dogma as an impediment to faith, now he sees the history of science as full of arbitrary paradigm shifts, culturally relative claims, and oppressive power grabs. Joe begins to seek out marginalized experiences within his own life experience and that of the pluralistic multitude of suffering beings, and thereby come to a more sensitive, caring, and compassionate relationship to all things.
The pluralistic God is the divine presence in the lived experience and perspectives of the poor, oppressed, and marginalized persons. This praxis of God gives Joe a postmodern philosophy suitable for escaping the narrow worldview of materialistic, capitalistic, nature-raping modernity to find salvation in interdependence, consensus, respect for feelings, and working for the common good. Faith is finding God through the gospel of multiculturalism and wokeness. The cutting edge of thought is neo-Marxist, feminist, and liberation theology.
Level 5: Integral
Amidst a life complete with breathtaking highs and devastating lows, Joe arrives at a new order of meta-awareness, an opening to the wholeness of reality. He usually speaks of this totality as Spirit or Universe or Spiral of Existence, one that is not separate from the world, but the all-pervading force of evolution itself within self, culture, and nature. His temperament is warmly accepting of people from all stations of life and he strives to find ways to serve the ongoing well-being and development of others. He sees Spirit as a transpersonal force that embraces all of his past spiritual outlooks, enjoining the pluralistic God, enfolding the mental God, embracing the mythic God, incorporating the magic God, and adding the archaic God.
The integral God is the one that develops through a whole spectrum, including and transcending a variety of prior processes, but without excluding any of them. As God emerges in this post-postmodern consciousness, God appears as one who can relate flexibly to individuals at all different stations of life, overcoming irreducible pluralism in favor of pluralism-within-unity. Faith is growing in consciousness along with a struggle against unconsciousness. Theology is seeking to understand the ineffable and the manifest co-arising in the Spirit of Evolution.
