Christmas Eve, 2024
Thoughts about this year
I wrote the italicized text on December 24, 2023. The quote blocks are my thoughts today.
From time to time, I have doubts about Integral Theory. That’s good because I get to test it out again and again. At its core, Integral is about growing, the fertilizer that feeds growth, and the obstacles that slow or stop it.
I have fewer doubts than before, but I hear doubting is healthy so I try to face them directly. I do worry that the wisdom of the theory is inaccessible to people who do not have the time or inclination to learn about it. It is a wisdom theory and requires study, contemplation, experimenting, and living the precepts. And don’t worry, the precepts incorporate the world’s religious and wisdom traditions, so it is not a replacement for your own beliefs, although it may be time for an update. I’m doing that, and for me, a religious life is once again viable, but it looks and feels very different than it did in my youth.
Integral Theory is the backbone of this religious revival that now includes compatible takes on science, culture, and the inner workings of my psyche.
But Integral, like life, has a myriad of moving parts. Just as you focus on one you see it is connected to several more. I have ADD, so it is either torture or a candy store, depending on the day. This complexity is why it takes time to grow. You have to go through quantum leaps like the electrons do, to get to new levels.
Now, in 2025, we have to take quantum leaps in our cognitive abilities, our psycho-social values, and our religious outlooks to solve worldwide problems that are beyond the capacity of our savannah-nurtured brains that are still looking for the next meal. We have painted ourselves in the corner of too much to do in too little time…maybe. I hope not.
We physically grow, some more than others. We grow cognitively, learning numbers for counting and language for communicating. We grow morally and ethically by sharing, helping, forgiving, and giving. We grow spiritually, first learning about doing right or else! (With God always watching.) All that stuff about vengeance and retribution played a developmentally appropriate role at an earlier stage, but we later learned about more generous kinds of love; think Prodigal Son.
The Western World has lost its way. Traditional (Blue) values gave way to Modernism, with science and technology saving us so much physical labor that we assummed it could do anything, including revealing the secrets of life, the universe, and everything.
But Modernism went unchecked, populations exploded, the oceans and air are polluted, and we were neglecting the needs of people. So Postmodernism had to be invented to solve those problems. We don’t understand it yet, but Postmodernsim is committing the sins of the earlier stages: its getting too far ahead of people and they are rebelling.
Because we don’t see the overarching architecture of Integral Theory, we don’t know that there is a successor stage to Postmodernism; no one in the mainstream is articulating or modeling it. Without that, we are opting—temporarily I hope—for a big regression back. To what? To Blue level plans to regulate our morals mixed with some deep Red anger that will lash out blindly.
I write about “glimpsing integral” because only a small percentage of our culture are there and in my opinion, they have not yet figured out how to live integrally in our communities and organizations. They are spending way too much time talking amongst themselves instead of dealing with the issues of the vast majority of us still working the Tier 1 stages. They may, heaven help us, be repeating the mistakes of each new stage before. They are so excited about the new worldview of Integral, they don’t have time to muck about in the old Tier 1 stages. They may be so far ahead of others they no longer have the language to bridge the gap and talk to regular people.
I’m guilty of this, so I write as a way to practice how to think and talk. But I’m a beginner.
Our self-awareness grows, detecting inner feelings of fear, anger, or happiness. We learn these life-saving tools evolved for the conditions of earlier times. Ironically, to survive now, we need to rise to a new level above our savannah or jungle reactions. These Stages of growth and the different Lines or Intelligences that grow give us hope for ourselves, our children, and each other. As Ken Wilber says, Integral Theory is psychoactive: as we learn about it, the Theory stimulates and reinforces the insights, skills, and characteristics it describes.
But we need to learn the psychoactive technologies to create the generative growth loop that happens when we move to a new stage of awareness and capability. We are learning that the axial age wisdom traditions discovered and developed the various mindfulness techniques that help us move beyond fight or flight into thoughtful responses that we can create by mutually engaging our prefrontal cortexes. Our psycological sciences are discovering the wisdom of the wisdom traditions and packaging that work into methods that can help us explore and use the “gap between stimulus and response.”
Integral also gives us tools to identify and use the good, the true, and the beautiful. These are, respectively,
those values we hold in common with others, which we call the good
the truths we discover and can verify about things and events in the physical world, the true
and the internal experiences, values, insights, and beliefs of our personal inner life, the beautiful.
Our worldview has been distorted by the overwhelming success of science and technology, so much so that we have come to believe that if we can’t measure something, it does not exist. If this were so, what do we make of our love for our children, the marvel of a full moon, and the exhilaration of musicians in harmony? Integral’s Quadrants element helps us think about and evaluate—to give value to—the events and experiences in the good and beautiful quadrants.
Nothing more to add here other than to remind you that the posts I wrote in the Quadrants 3.X series explain how we can determine truth, truthfulness, and rightness in these realms and not be left adrift by the inability of the scientific method to help us in the subjective parts of our life experience.
To round out the elements of Integral, which constitute the “framing” of the construction of my lifelong project of Growing Up (still underway), are States and Types. These are minor elements, but they can rear their heads and distort my reality without warning. While Integral talks about states in terms of wakefulness, dreaming, and causal, I think in simpler terms, like the state of vigilance or fight or flight, as opposed to the state of flow. Reality looks very different in these two states, which is why we think better once we’ve calmed down.
Finally, there are the typologies. I am an introvert. I push against it and can act extraverted for periods, but that is an act. It is good to practice extraversion because it gets me out of my shell, helps others feel comfortable, flexes my social muscles, and is the grown-up thing to do. Knowing our types using assessments like the Enneagram, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Social Styles, and Conflict Styles is useful and can help us develop our interpersonal skills. It can also help us reign in the snap judgments that our type might affect.
So, regarding those doubts I mentioned above. They often come from doubters, inside my head and on the outside. I understand where they are coming from; I almost did not learn about Integral, and I know there is no quick way into this worldview. I don’t know what hooks people. No elevator speech grabs one by the lapels before we get off at our floor. All I can say is that it makes me smarter when I process ideas using the Integral framework. I encourage you to join me. Go to the Content’s page to read about Integral in a logical progression. I hope you will look into the resources I’ve listed here.
Some are looking at 2024 with dread. Integral TheoryTheorydes a means to be better versions of ourselves. What if we look at 2024 as a time to grow?
In what ways did we grow in 2024? Many liberals and progressives think we regressed. I think our culture has taken a step back, but I think the causes, while leading to dangerous possibilities, are more benign than we think.
Just as a few examples illustrate, Democratic voters let their anger towards Republicans condemn attempts by a very few conservatives to do the right thing. Right now, Mitch McConnell, perhaps one of the top three villians working against “truth, honor, and the American way” in the last 25 years is hinting at opposition to Trump in the next year. Given the response he’s gotten, don’t be surprised if he takes his ball and goes home. Important resistance goals like his support for Ukraine could vanish with him.
A couple years ago, Glenn Beck wrote and spoke about mistakes he made in his angry rhetoric during the Bush years. People on the left attacked him so viciously he ultimately gave up his attempts at repairing relations.
Neither of these responses to reconciliation or collaboration are examples of later stage maturity. They are clear examples of Tier 1, right and wrong thinking that excludes reconciliation or collaboration. We are always hoping for the rehabilitation of incarcerated people, but when it comes to openings from our political opponents, are we incapable of foregiveness or dialogue?.
2025 will probably be hard. We might find allies in unusual places. We should keep our eyes and hearts open. We are the ones who got beaten. I’ve heard humility can be a good teacher.