1.0 Introduction
What have you been up to lately?
Two things have occupied my time and attention in the last five years: spirituality and truth or justice. And they overlap.
Justice for me includes environmental justice, income equality, fairness, social acceptance, access to health care, food, and housing, ensuring safety and security, and democratic values like voting rights and free speech.
Spirituality is an internally focused process where I figure out things like my ultimate beliefs, values, and to the extent I can, my follow through in living out those convictions. My spiritual quest led me to Integral Theory, which has given me a long-sought “perspective on the world, politics, religion, justice, how we think and why we believe the things we believe1.” This perspective is an astonishing breakthrough for me and my mission is to share it with others.
Having an over-arching perspective on the world is like having a map that shows everything. Maps leave out lots of details, but they also feed our imagination: “What is that town like?” The Integral map gives directions to many destinations and gives us a lay of the land, but you have to go there to see the rich details of each place. We will be zooming in and out, looking close at times and wide at others; both perspectives have value. But hitting that sweet spot of capturing the complexity of reality in simple terms can lead to rewarding leverage of our reasoning powers.
Oh. This is going to take more than one cup of coffee…
1 Urban, Tim. What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies (p. 18). Kindle Edition. 2023 (paraphrased)