What Is "Integral"?

Over the course of the past two years I have begun paddling to more islands in the integral archipelago.  It started with conversations with Jeff Salzman at the Integral Institute’s Daily Evolver, morphed into a year-long dialogue with Layman Pascal on integral politics on the Institute’s web site, went on to a reconnection with my old Log Cabin colleague Rich Tafel, now a senior fellow at Steve McIntosh’s Institute for Cultural Evolution, and finally leading to a handful of Facebook pages dedicated to various integral expressions.

I have been highly critical of a lot of stuff that I have read in many of these encounters, much of it based on my sense that there is a lack of intellectual and spiritual rigor in so much of what we are moved to say and communicate.  Now I don’t like being critical—and I choose to notice the arrogance that much of my response seems to come from—mostly because I fancy myself a lover not a fighter.  Still, something within compels me to keep diving ever deeper into this transpersonal realm, and to share what I discover with other inhabitants of the archipelago.

One source of discord might be a disagreement on exactly what “integral” is.  If we all mean slightly different things, then we fail to have a useful dialogue if at the same time we assume that we have a common meaning for the word.  We simply talk past one another and, if we’re not careful, assume something’s wrong with that other guy who just won’t get what I’m saying when in fact he’s thinking something slightly different.

The main sources of divergence seem to be from various Wilberians and Gravesians seeking to interpret Wilber's and Graves' work.  It’s too bad Wilber went whole hog into Spiral Dynamics and then abruptly pulled back and recast the color scheme.  Further complicating the picture was Don Beck’s development of Spiral Dynamics Integral and the break with Christopher Cowan.  Also, since Spiral Dynamics concentrates on the vMemes, or the values line of development, it is not strictly speaking an integral model, which of course Beck sought to address with SDi.

Further aggravating the situation is the complication offered by the various iterations of Wilber’s map-making, of which at least five have been identified by Wilber.  From Sex, Ecology, Spirituality through Integral Psychology, Wilber has offered slightly differing versions of the stages of the spectrum of consciousness, aka the Spiral.  It was his adoption of Graves’ notion of “the momentous leap” from the personal to the transpersonal waves that introduced much of the variance of understanding among the integralites of what exactly lay on the far side of the leap.

Indeed, he originally adopted the term “integral” from Jean Gebser’s classifications of the waves of collective consciousness extensively chronicled in The Ever Present Origin.  Gebser called the inchoate transrational emergence he detected back in the 1930s the “integral/aperspectival” wave.  By that he meant that, contra the rational (orange) individuation stage which was characterized by the development of inner space that permitted self-reflection (individual self-conceptualization) and thus recognition of perspective itself, the awareness of perspective-taking as an activity of being was now arising among humans.

The "Integral" Case for President Obama

Integral Life contributor Terry Patten recently published a plea for “integralists” to support Barack Obama’s reelection entitled "The Integral Case for President Obama."  I acknowledge that Mr. Patten’s call is a noble attempt to get his arms around the challenges of the current breakdown of the global order from as advanced a perspective as he could muster.  He deserves credit for being courageous enough to raise the matter of evolution of consciousness in the very real context of our actual political economy, and for being willing to expose his stand to analysis and criticism.

That said, I am happy to oblige.

It’s been a serious concern to me for some time now that people associated with Ken Wilber, the Integral Institute, and its various offshoots keep using the terms “integral movement” and “integral community” so casually, because  I have no idea what those words mean.

The lack of specificity about the common understanding of “integral” in these labels is a symptom of the general intellectual sloppiness that postmodernism and Boomeritis have injected into our public discourse.  It is unfortunate that Wilber and many associated with the Integral Institute both tolerate and often perpetuate this.

Let’s see if we can’t bring some clarity and specificity to the matter.


The Meaning of “Integral”

Wilber first began using the word “integral” in Up from Eden, where he referred to Jean Gebser’s application of it to the integral/aperspectival wave of consciousness that succeeded the mental/rational [Orange] wave.  Then, in Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality and The Marriage of Sense and Soul, he introduced “integral” to the AQAL model, referring primarily to the first levels of consciousness in the transpersonal bands.  In A Theory of Everything, Wilber presented the idea of First and Second Tier from Spiral Dynamics, with the First Tier comprising the prepersonal and personal waves, and the Second the transpersonal.  “Second-tier thinking . . . is instrumental is moving from relativism to holism, or from pluralism to integralism” [italics in original] (p. 12).