ArchiveJune 2018

Lots of People Are Already Swimming in an Integral Sea. Are You One of Them?

When spirituality is based on an “Integral” spirit, it opens the door wide for expanding human potential for rich inner development, cultural progress, artistic creativity, and spiritual renewal. In fact, you might have an “Integral” spiritual sensibility or tendency without even knowing it. Here are the Top 10 signs to look for that will tell you if your temperament and worldview might already be on the way to becoming “Integral”:

10. You don’t find yourself easily offended by slights to your ego, subculture, or group identification; therefore “political correctness” has little appeal to you.

At the same time, you intuitively tend to avoid causing others unnecessary pain through your words or deeds. You don’t try to silence or shout down those who disagree with you. Compassion towards the disadvantaged and marginalized is your priority, not remaining comfortable in your preconceptions about being right. But everyone is marginalized about something! Everyone suffers in some ways and is privileged in other ways.

You understand that freedom of expression is an important value for universities to teach, but colleges ought also be cauldrons of pushing the envelope forward in terms of what is possible for social justice; accordingly, these interests must be balanced through both/and solutions, not either/or thinking.

You realize that there are more ways to work for justice than complaining that people are being insensitive. You also realize that there are many levels of justice that look different depending on your particular perch in life, and ultimately all human efforts at justice will fall short of our ideals.

9. You have come to a compassionate stance with regard to religious fundamentalists and traditionalist zealots because you recognize that their own stage of evolution may be less than your own.

You know that everyone has a part of the truth. You know that many of the worst problems in the world are caused by people who think they have the full truth when they only have a part.

You believe sacred texts such as the Bible are a source of wisdom, even if they contain many teachings which aren’t useful today.

You pick your battles for justice carefully and strategically, not by reacting out of anger or fear.

Belief in spiritual evolution means you run the risk of looking like an elitist to others, but you have to just shrug it off. You don’t pick your beliefs because they are convenient or fit in with the expectations of your social group, but because they seem to best represent the True, Good, and Beautiful. Because fundamentalists and ideological conservatives are trying their best to do the same, you can identify with a part of their own station of life.

Fundamentalists have myths that they take as literal, absolute truths, and you know that this is a path that you’ve outgrown. At the same time, you’ve noticed that hardcore atheists also have a fundamentalist orientation of their own!

Wherever you look, whether it’s in New Age spirituality books or the coffee social of your twelve-step social or the biased headlines on Huffington Post or The Drudge Report you see people spout beliefs about reality naively as if they were merely “a given”. But you realize that reality is constructed of many complex, interlocking systems and paradigms without which we cannot see things clearly.

8. You don’t think spirituality and religion are antithetical.

Whether or not you have found a spiritual community, you know that being fully human is not strictly an individual affair. Everything people know about spirituality comes from religious experience, passed down from generation to generation through lineages dedicated to following practices of spiritual development. Although spirituality can be extracted from religion like chicken broth from the carcass of a chicken, it isn’t necessarily going to be as tasty or nourishing (but you’re definitely less likely to choke!)

You know no person is an island. You may even admire the strong bonds of commitment and devotion shown by the religiously orthodox or traditional, and you long for deeper relations with people in your community and — through virtual communities and/or travel — around the world. When someone asks if you believe in God, before you say yes or no, part of you wonders what they mean by “God” and questions whether you are both talking about the same thing. Perhaps as Integral philosophers say there are various “levels of God”, and you could be talking about the same reality but using different words that fit into adjacent worldviews.

Perhaps once you were allergic to religion, but now you find yourself with a more ambivalent feeling. There are some religious communities you could consider joining, or at least spiritual organization dedicated to common practices for holistic well-being. When you hear religious friends calling “none of the above” people narcissists or fluffy, or you hear spiritual friends calling religious people “nuts” and “fundamentalists”, you cringe at the either/or thinking. You are called to see a larger picture that can bring both things together.

7. You don’t look for “explanations” of religion but seek comprehensive approaches that include individual and collective dimensions of spiritual experience in subjective and objective perspectives.

Religion isn’t merely a subject of interest to biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, social historians, or theologians. It’s not merely an objective thing that you can toss aside. You see it as much more complex: there are the institutions and organizations that collectively transmit historical teachings and lineages of practice; there are communities and cultures that put the teachings into practice through ethical and moral behavior, community service, activism, philanthropy, and so on; there are individual beliefs and behaviors that are the result of religious adherence or spiritual work; and then there’s the whole realm of “inner work”, the spirituality that aligns an individual to stages of maturation in the self and mind, plus many different states of consciousness.

Of course, you believe scientific study of religion in comparative perspective is a valuable angle to take… but you see how it only asks specific questions and doesn’t address any questions other than the ones that it’s asking about. Therefore, it is silent on many of the important dimensions of spirituality and religion that you recognize to exist.

You don’t think science and spirituality are opposed. You don’t want to stay “stuck in your head” all the time; however, at the same time, you want your spirituality to be intellectually solid, not anti-intellectual.

6. You are non-judgmental when appropriate and exercise mature capacities for judgment when appropriate.

Once upon a time, you never judged anyone for anything because you wanted others to like you or because you sought to avoid being judged by others. Perhaps your ego was so sensitive that even the slightest criticism could send you into a tailspin of self-doubt. Back then, you gravitated to spiritual groups where there was no “cross-talk” so nobody could say anything that might be at all shame-inducing or moralistic, and you sought out therapists or counselors who would just listen to you and give you the acceptance you thought you needed.

But now, you realize that you can’t avoid judgement regarding values, ranking of opinions, ascertaining the merit of relative truths, calling foul when you see something amiss, and so on. You realize that judgment is a skill that can be honed and sharpened so that it can be more conscious, useful, and wise. So now you’re getting bored hanging around people with whom you can never say what’s really on your mind.

At the same time, you have come to recognize a piece of your own shadow in everything you judge. Sometimes you find yourself judging others for some truth about yourself that you would rather not look at. It’s not easy to face up to, but you do so courageously and seek to grow from self-awareness.

You don’t think spiritual people have to be nice all the time. You know that anger — even rudeness — can have a healthy place in the spiritual life. You are skeptical when you hear of spiritual people blaming sick people for causing their own illnesses. You want to be free of shame, but still take responsibility for mistakes and shortcomings without blaming every problem on other individuals or classes of people.

5. You reject beliefs that insist on classifying people rigidly into victims and perpetrators.

You know that morality is very often an ambiguous and complex affair with aspects in self, nature, culture, and society at many different levels of understanding. Naturally, when you hear people wielding a rigid ideology that divides the world into two categories, one of which is good and the other of which is evil, you just know it is far too simplistic.

So, when an act of violence or violation is alleged to have occurred, you know that it’s important not to rush to judgment. Instead, you seek to gather a combination of subjective experiences and objective facts that together illuminate what happened and allow you to offer a mature discernment.

Ultimately, Spirit knows no absolute distinctions between “good” and “evil” or “victim” and “perpetrator”; every person has light and dark within themselves, and sometimes “victims” are wolves in sheep’s clothing and sometimes “perpetrators” are acting for a higher purpose you didn’t even know was possible.

You understand that many –isms such as classism, sexism, racism, and so forth, are wrong and need to be addressed; at the same time, you know that these terms are abstractions that obscure as well as reveal truths about a complex world. They are socio-cultural conventions which emerged in the context of a world evolving in greater degrees of Spirit and reflect the concerns of earlier stages in religious and cultural development. You believe strongly in human liberation, but think the ways that most people think of liberation are too limiting.

4. You reject overly simplistic answers to complex questions.

You further realize that our beliefs about ultimate reality should not seek to diminish, sentimentalize, or rationalize the mysterious and awe-inspiring nature of life. Likewise you try to avoid supposedly certain answers for understanding the mystery of death. Whether you believe in heaven and hell, reincarnation, or are agnostic about the afterlife, you know that human life is purposeful and our actions make a difference in this world.

You understand that denial of death is the hallmark of an ego that doesn’t understand its true nature, its higher Self. Perhaps you understand “Self” as your own Higher Power. Perhaps it is a statement about what is really real (i.e., your metaphysics). Or perhaps it is “post-metaphysical”, meaning that it a statement that could be true if enacted within a framework of constructed meaning-making.

Looking back on your life so far, you see many different ways you’ve believed — in the magical spirituality of early childhood, in the rational rebelliousness of your adolescence, in the pluralistic relativism of your college days, and now it’s something different from all of those. It’s inclusive. It’s holistic (or tries to be). It cares deeply about saving the world for future generations, but it is aware of the ways that revolutionary ideals can easily go astray and cause harm. In short, you’re wiser now than you have been in earlier days, but you might be lacking a label to put on your way of being in the world.

3. You are concerned about ecology, justice, and development not only in your community, but for all people around the world.

You are concerned to alleviate the suffering and contribute to the holistic development of all sentient beings. You may have evolved beyond thinking only about people in your community or ethnic group or nation.

You may have discovered a “world-centric worldview”, one which realizes that in the 21st century it isn’t good enough to only think locally but also to think globally. You are deeply concerned by environmental concerns and protecting the natural world for future generations, but you know that technology isn’t the root of all evils; it can sometimes be the solution.

Thinking locally deepens your vision. Thinking globally expands your vision. And thinking in terms of holistic development — growth in consciousness and cultural evolution as well as wealth and ecological sustainability — means that you are bringing depth (vertical) and expansion (horizontal) dimensions together.

Now, you listen to other people talk and you sometimes wonder how it is that they only see one part of the picture and decry the other parts as foul, whereas you are coming to see how all the parts fit together, almost as if they were different parts of the same organism. (And perhaps, you think, they are!)

2. You realize the importance of having maps of human nature and evolutionary potential that are capable of integrating vastly different ideas and methods.

In the past, when you were uncertain and didn’t know where to turn, you looked to the counsel of a trusted adult. You had teachers or parents or coaches you guided you until you were ready to get by on your own. And of course, you had books and school to teach you the guide-posts for living. But these were not enough!

You had to develop an independent streak that questioned everything and everyone. You didn’t want to just receive established wisdom, you demanded to know why it was true and look at the evidence for yourself. In this manner, you began to think for yourself and felt the wisdom of Plotinus to Hamlet: “To thine one self be true!”

Eventually, your independent streak discovered something remarkable about reality: it was far too diverse and complex for any one person to figure out everything for themselves! You were discovering that other people who also had independent streaks had been studying the hidden mysteries, esoteric wisdom, hidden connections, systemic processes, meta-systemic interrelationships, paradigmatic models, and cross-paradigmatic interoperations for some time! These were marvelous thinkers whose ways of thinking were different than anything you had previously encountered. They were thinking at a “higher level” and pulling your mind along with them. The more you studied their maps of human nature and potential, the more you began to sift through all the parts within yourself that were fragmented in order to come closer to a greater whole.

1. You aren’t afraid to see your own divinity married to your own humanity, inside and out, in self, nature, culture, and social perspectives.

You know what “divinity” means even if you can’t fully put it into words. Divinity is the Source and Spirit and their ultimate unity, the Alpha and Omega and their ultimate reconciliation, the Creator and Creation and Redemeer, the Dao. You know what “divinity” means, and you are sure that it includes you — in your uniqueness and in everything you are — but it also is something greater than you, or at least the “you” that you have taken yourself to be.

Once you were a “seeker”, but now you see that That for which you sought is “always already” present, and was never gone. Paradoxically, it is always That Which Is Arising, so you find yourself drawn deeper into mysteries and stories and hidden aspects of reality and evolutionary emergents. Even though you have the answers you once sought, life continues to be interesting. In fact, you’ve never felt yourself more creative and alive.

Now you’re finding ways to celebrate erotic energy as well as spiritual energy because they are ultimately one. This means that you give sex a unique role for encountering beauty, expressing blissful play, exercising ethical behavior, and for giving and receiving love. You aren’t afraid to talk about subtle energies or core principles of reality: perhaps yin and yang and yung or masculine and feminine and transgender (or two-spirit). You know that our gender and sexual roles are biologically, culturally, and sociologically conditioned; at the same time you recognize that there are meaningful cross-cultural patterns and universals that we can benefit from understanding.

You may worry about arrogance sometimes, but you don’t think pride is the worst sin. You know that having self-esteem is important and that it is only genuine when it is based on recognition of your intrinsic worth, gorgeous uniqueness, and inner divinity. You know it’s safe to “come out of the closet” about both your shadows and your light, and doing so is central to your spiritual journey.  You strive to overcome all limited conceptions of who you are into a fully authentic sense that accepts everything that arises in an integral embrace as not distinct from your own highest Self.

Now score yourself. Did you get at least 5 out of 10?

Congratulations, if this story about spirituality rings more true than false to you, then you’re on your way to discovering an Integral Spirituality for yourself!

Three Ways of Looking at Appreciation and Criticism

(Photo Credit: fizkes/BigStock.com)

Here are three ways of looking at appreciation including my latest understanding of appreciation as “the unifying force of mature integral interiority”. The first comes from the late, great Dick Bolles and the others are both mine, at different points in my writing career.

Dick Bolles: “There’s a Meanness Abroad in the Land”

Richard Nelson Bolles (March 19, 1927 – March 31, 2017) was an Episcopal clergyman and the author of the best-selling job-hunting book, What Color is Your Parachute?

From the John Hunters’ Bible (“There’s A Meanness Abroad in the Land”)

This is a criticism of critics. Just a tiny bit of irony, in that!

I was reading Newsweek today, and found a review of war films, written by Caryn James. She is a well-known movie critic. I don’t want to pick on her, she’s probably a very nice woman, but she does serve up food for thought about all critics. She was reviewing the new series about World War II, by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. And she had nothing good to say about it. She also had little good to say about The Hurt Locker, the film which just cleaned up at the Oscars. She said that Kathryn Bigelow’s dazzling filmmaking “doesn’t pause to let you realize that suspense and bravery are everything here.” I thought the film was about nothing else but. I went to watch it twice, because I was so entranced with her examination of the virtues and defects of such bravery. (“War is a drug.”)

In many of the reviews I read daily, on a whole range of subjects besides filmmaking, I am so struck with the underlying view the critics seem to have about intelligence. Review after review bespeaks the idea of “look how intelligent I am, I can see – more than most – everything that’s wrong with this.” (Whatever the this may be.) I was raised with a very different view of intelligence: it valued “look how intelligent I am, I can see – more than most – all the things there are to appreciate, about this.”

In our day, and perhaps in other days as well, it is a far rarer soul who makes appreciation the defining motif of his or her life, than those who make criticism their defining goal. Criticism is easy; it takes no brains to say what’s wrong with something. Appreciation however, is difficult; you sometimes have to fight to see things to appreciate, digging for example beneath ugly surface impressions, to see some shining beauty underneath. That’s why prejudice flourishes. It takes brains to see what there is to appreciate in every man and woman who was ever born. Which should be the goal of every intelligent man or woman. Civilization never decays or vanishes because of a lack of criticism in a society; it decays or vanishes because of a lack of appreciation in that society. As a direct consequence of this, that society tends to preserve the commonplace, while it casually throws away treasures. And criticism causes more meanness to be abroad, in the land.

Every critic begins with assumptions, usually unexamined, that they use to justify their hammering the thing they are examining. For example, Caryn James’ assumption here, in reviewing historical war films like The Hurt Locker, is that such films must have “a cultural resonance today,” and feel “relevant.” She has no patience with “outdated ideas” that were dear, she says in the past, like “justice is on our side,” or “warfare was about turf,” or “platitudes about heroism.” She criticizes The Hurt Locker for “ignoring the urgent question of whether the war should be fought at all.” In other words, if she had been making that film, she would have been sure it dealt with that question. Fortunately, no such obligation was laid upon Kathryn Bigelow. She was free to make her own film, not Caryn James’es.

In critics’ articles or blogs, there’s always just a little bit of “Ah, if I were king….(or queen) this is what I would have done.” The one notable exception to this is Roger Ebert, whom I read devotedly, just because he looks for things to appreciate in films that other critics dismiss out of hand.

Now, about history: just because the past was different from the present, with different values and assumptions, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be depicted. Our history is what defines people, and nations. Show me only a man’s present circumstances, and I may be bewildered by his actions. But tell me that man’s history and I will understand him much more completely, and find much to appreciate in him. Our past is important, and so are nations’ pasts. We didn’t just come into this world fully-hatched, and fully-born. We came into a context, a family, a community, a country, with traditions and values that were important to them, then; and therefore important to us now. In a word, show us our past, and make us really feel our history vividly, and then we will find much more to appreciate about the present. That is what the producers of The Pacific have done, and that is what Kathryn’s The Hurt Locker has done, magnificently.

There’s no way around it: we need more “appreciators” in our society: men and women who, from the beginning, set out to make their lives all about appreciating others, even if it requires some hard thinking. And who think it takes more brains to appreciate than it does to criticize. We need more men and women to make appreciation the goal of their whole career. These are men and women to admire.

As the great composer of beautiful music, Jean Sibelius, famously said, “No one ever erected a statue to a critic.”

Must we choose between being systematic and original in our thought and deeds?

Joe Perez’s Rising Up (2006)

Here’s a reader’s comment related to my post on defining integral:

Joe, I applaud your independent STEAM streak .. Orienting consciousness maps are a good thing… and – but 🙂 I think following any ‘leaders’ methodology to a ‘t’ restricts one’s own flow of creative juices…

Ah, that’s the rub, isn’t it? In a modern, American culture that places a high premium on having an “independent streak,” and being “leaders (not followers),” and above all not restricting the flow of “one’s own creative juices,” then how the hell do you become a truly systematic thinker? Are we so tied to narcissistic notions of creativity and independence that we are incapable of merging into a more encompassing and ego-shattering whole? Is “that sounds like group think” or “he’s just another Ken Wilber ditto-head” the worst insult we can hurl at something new? Must originality be limited to how we resist something greater than ourselves, and never describe how we surrender?

I think it is possible to be both integral and original, independent and systematic. One way is to latch on to the broad movement called integral and claim that your version of integral is the most correct version, or at least a better version, and point out how other versions leave something important out. If you’re right and persuasive, then perhaps your ideas will have an influence in shaping what counts as truly integral. And then you have demonstrated that you’re both an independent thinker and a systematic thinker. You haven’t erected a new system or demolished the old system; you’ve strengthened the value of the system by correcting its shortcomings.

I imagine that pretty much all good internal criticism of integral would have to look something like that. (By distinguishing between internal and external criticism, I am talking about criticism launched from within a second-tier stage versus criticism launched from a lower stage. An example of second-tier critique is: “This model of reality leaves something important out, obscures valuable distinctions, or fails to incorporate the ideal number of contexts to be truly useful.”) In contrast are criticisms such as “It doesn’t make central to its paradigm the act of listening to marginalized or oppressed minority voices,” or “There’s no rational proof for the supposedly trans-rational benefits of meditation,” which are perfectly valid concerns derived from a first-tier level of analysis. However, even if all first-tier criticisms are granted, a second-tier system remains standing.)

As useful as it is to think about criticism in helping one to develop a sense of distance, originality, and independence of thought, it’s not the only valid approach to life. That would be like saying that the only way to be a creative, integral thinker is to continually search for weaknesses and faults in the foundation of one’s own consciousness. I suspect that such a sentiment is more a holdover from first-tier rationalistic philosophy than truly a second-tier mode of being. Transcending rationalism means finding ways of being appropriately critical in the right time, for the right reasons, and to the right degree, without spending inordinate, unnatural amounts of one’s time and energy in the smashing idols and gods. In other words, as we ascend in stages of consciousness and incorporate more angles in our life-maps, we become more fully rational, not rationalists.

So I think the sentiment that “following any ‘leaders’ methodology to a ‘t’ restricts one’s own flow of creative juices” is a perfectly understandable and ordinary sort of view. And it may be right or it may be wrong, but it’s a recipe for narcissistic abandonment to the self. There’s nothing wrong with a little first-tier “I want what I want and damn anyone who says they’re a leader worth following, this is my life, I’m doing it my way” sort of thinking. I’ve got a healthy “red streak” myself, even as it doesn’t define me. The challenge with STEAM-powered living [a.k.a. AQAL or Integral], as I see it, is to think about the world in a comprehensive and systematic way that defines the proper place and relation of self, other, world, and the Divine, in the context of an evolving world… and to live from that vision as deeply and graciously as possible. If that isn’t being original in this culture and age, then what is?

Appreciation: The Unifying Force of Mature Integral Interiority

Joe Perez’s Experimental Reflections Inspired by the Integral Konstruct of Lingua-U (2018)

Mature Integral consciousness — in technical terms, I’m talking about early Turquoise, a station after the maturation of Second-Tier awareness past Green and Teal called §5.1 in Lingua-U — is the yin of 𝌪 Appreciation to the yang of 𝌒 Philia (Friendship) and the yung of 𝍅 Willing. Whereas Philia (at Formal-Mind) tethers the mind to an object external to itself in order to support or protect the self from frightening realities of “otherness” and “foes” and come to an inner freedom from the vicissitudes of life, Appreciation lifts up an object in order to gain insight in how to Usher it into a more comprehensive worldview and how to Understand it more fully as it is in its own uniqueness and dignity. Furthermore, when Philia and Appreciation are combined, they describe the powerful potentialities available in a community of friends, mutually uplifted in support and appreciation, their individual Wills subsumed into a world-centric Mission.

Furthermore, to fully Appreciate something is to befriend it in a way that enlarges you and it into a larger whole, grounded in a healthy worldview in which all stations of life are given a place of dignity and ordered in a manner that sustains a healthy Gaia (planetary soul). True and good Appreciation does not easily veer off into idolatry or possessiveness, though addiction is a temptation if the appreciation is incorporated too deeply. It is not a stance of taking a good for use or consumption or an idea or dogma for the purpose of making it exclusive and superior to all others. Appreciation requires situating the object into a relatively comprehensive worldview, one that can find a place for something where it can be most useful for the entire realm.

Appreciation is a 𝌮𝌁 Kingly function, psychologically speaking, in consideration of a universal Archetype gendered yin-yin-yin-yin-yung. Speaking intuitively, we may say that the King’s first yin sees its place in the whole order of things; the second yin sees its place relative to other objects in the realm; the third yin sees its place relative to the King himself; the fourth yin perceives what the object is not; and the yung grasps its usefulness. The inner King is able to offer his blessing to the object even when others cannot because he is powerful enough to situate the object, create movement through influence, or even quarantine a potentially harmful object (as a last resort).

If one doesn’t have a healthy and strong relationship to the inner King archetype, one may find it difficult go bless others or offer a full appreciation, mature and wise. Forgive me for the heresy of combining Jung and Wilber, but it is unavoidable! Growing in one’s relationship to the King Archetype is a good thing for development into mature Integral consciousness. (The inner Queen is also essential, though she “comes online” later in the maturity of Integral development when it becomes necessary to Qualify candidates for selection.)

Another way of looking at the role of Appreciation in the emergence of mature Integral consciousness is to note its stabilizing and conservative function in the individual and collective. A psyche in which all the sub-parts or micro-personalities or inner archetypes are appreciated and given a valuable place is a healthier, more integrated inner life. A society of appreciators is much more harmonious than a society of acrimonious critics or rebels. A culture based on the exchange of mutual self-esteem and appreciation is happier and a fuller expression of the Goodness of Existence.

Let me add that within the interiority of the Integral mind there is a three-station dynamic. In the yang or initiatory station, there is noticing “the given” (𝌪⚍). The object is grasped as it is in itself, not as we want it to be, and not as we would expect it to fit into reality based on our preconceived notions and theories. It must be seen in four modalities: its Pitifulness or compassion-inducing partiality, its Figurativeness or way of representing the Image of God, its Distinctiveness including its contribution to diversity, and its Symbolic role. In the yin or responsive station, there is a “giga-sizing” (𝌪⚏) of the object. It must be given an active function relative to every other object in the emerging Global-Mind — thus, maps of human nature, developmental stations, narratives of holonic tenets, and so on, are extremely important now.

Finally, at the yung or unifying station, there is the triple function of “appraisal” (𝌪𝌃) and “appreciation” (𝌪𝌃) and “approval” (𝌪𝌃). Appraisal is the yang-yang move: it looks unflinchingly at how the spaciousness of our own Mind meets resistance in the object. Appreciation is the yin-yin move: it brings the object into the Kitchen of our spirit (which is another way of talking about incorporating it into a mature, healthy, well-functioning ego). Finally, Approval is the yung-yang move. It allows the object to exist within the King’s realm in its own way, circumscribed by its nature and the whole scope of Existence’s requirements. Disapproval does not come easily for early mature Integral consciousness, so this stage of interiority will frequently find itself “collapsing” into earlier modes of reactivity (especially the “polarizing” of objects at Protective-Mind or the “foeing” of objects at Formal-Mind/Amber or the “disapproval/destruction” of objects at Diligent-Mind/Orange or the “shunning” of objects at Systemic-Mind/Green).