ArchiveNovember 2022

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:

1. That progress unfolds dialectically with dignities and disasters;

2. That evolution involves both differentiation and dissociation;

3. That evolution includes both transcendence and repression;

4. That evolution includes both natural hierarchies and pathological hierarchies; and

5. 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.

What Role Do Spirits Have in Spiritual 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.

The 36,000-Foot View of Modern Psychology

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”.