- Integral begins with a recognition that we are evolving through growth stages in individual consciousness and culture.
- Each of these stages has something important to offer: a dignity, insight and capacity, which shines most brightly when combined, or integrated, with the dignity, insights and capacities of other stages.
- This integration creates more than the sum if its parts, giving rise to new emergent capabilities.
- These capabilities include the ability to harmonize previously conflicting perspectives and worldviews and to see and enact solutions that have not been seen or tried before.
The Integral worldview is an emerging public philosophical agreement, and a new way of being human. Integral is used by individuals who can see and appreciate all other worldviews. These people find ways to take the best of these views and harmonize them into coherent social structures that point the way to what is worth doing in fields as diverse as religion, politics, business and personal transformation. Integralists are keen on the development of strategies to effect change in people, institutions and culture. Integral adherents believe that an emerging combination of theory and skillful means will have far- ranging effects similar to those experienced by humankind through the philosophy of the western enlightenment, which emerged as pubic philosophical agreement about 300 years ago. The Enlightenment provided an intellectual foundation which changed the world forever, out of which arose fundamental pillars of our current world including Democracy, individual rights, liberal arts education, religious freedoms, and free enterprise just to name a few. Integralists believe that Integral philosophy, theory and practice is poised to create a similar shift in the evolution of human consciousness, which will provide better solutions to many of the most pressing problems confronted by humanity today.
Some Core Values of the Integral Worldview.
- Supporting the ongoing evolution of all human beings.
- Confidence in the potential of evolutionary and developmental philosophy.
- Appreciation of natural growth hierarchies.
- Low antibodies to change and willingness to engage in the process of change.
- Realization that truth is fixed only at a given state and stage of human development.
- Harmonization of previously conflicting world views: Science and Religion, Ascending and Descending paths of Spirituality, Interior and exterior.
- Personal responsibility that is solution- oriented. No deconstruction without a new solution. We “criticize by creating”.
- The return (in their healthy forms) of parts of consciousness and culture that have been cut off, through processes like shadow work.
- The ability to find a functional fit for the situation, something that works- without absolutes.
- Metabolizing the whole spiral of developmental stages through the ability to see the entire spiral and to digest and use all the insights and tools of all ways of being human.
- A flex flow approach to problem solving, more than one right answer.
- Seeing all reality as arising in four quadrants with four primary perspectives, Subjective (individual interior) Intersubjective, (collective interior) Interobjective (collective exterior); Behavioral. Individual exterior).
- Useful orienting generalizations given to the world: States and Stages; the Pre-trans Fallacy; AQAL model, (quadrants, levels, lines, states and types). Level/ line pathologies, etc.
- Opening into the highest states and stages available- aspiring to the place beyond current conceptions of the self that is revealed in the “spiritual experience” and operation from that state and evolutionary stage.
Practice, Practice, Practice.
Learn More:
A Primer on Integral Theory by Boulder Integral Founder Jeff Salzman
What is the Integral Movement?
By Corey deVos and Integral Life