The Offical Integral Institute Statement"Integral" means "inclusive, balanced, comprehensive." The Integral approach may be contrasted to other methods—mythic, rational-scientific, pluralistic—which, as they themselves announce, exclude other approaches as being inferior. They are thus, by definition, partial and incomplete. These latter methods, although widely accepted and dominant in the world's cultures, tend to generate partial analysis and incomplete solutions to problems. As such, they appear less efficient, less effective, and less balanced than the Integral approach.
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6 comments:
I'm interested in how this institutional self-fashioning shakes out, as someone who is committed to integral but maintains a hermeneutic of suspicion about certain institutional tendencies.
There is a way in which the future is what we make of it. If you want integral to work in a conventional academic context ("acceptance"), you might as well take it to conventional academics. The Integral Review is one way in which this is happening, thankfully.
This represents my own humble contribution to this process.
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/announce/show.cgi?ID=158387
Happy doodles,
Anderson
The world is what we make it, but how do we carve out an integral niche without getting lost in the jargon, or being accused of being in a cult by skeptic "projectionists" who don't get (as in post-formally) what wilber and others are saying about not getting hung up in the concepts?
I've read some of your stuff before dga, so I think you could help us all out a bit by maybe elaborating a bit (or a lot) on whay you say above.
What is your version of "integral"?
Integral: the word means to integrate, to bring together, to join, to link, to embrace. Not in the sense of uniformity, and not in the sense of ironing out all the wonderful differences, colors, zigs and zags of a rainbow-hued humanity, but in the sense of unity-in-diversity, shared commonalities along with our wonderful differences: replacing rancor with mutual recognition, hostility with respect, inviting everybody into the tent of mutual understanding. Not that I have to agree with everything you say, but I should attempt at least to understand it, for the opposite of mutual understanding is, quite simply, war.
-- Ken Wilber (Boomeritis)
"The word integral means comprehensive, inclusive, nonmarginalizing, embracing. Integral approaches to any field attempt to be exactly that—to include as many perspectives, styles, and methodologies as possible within a coherent view of the topic. In a certain sense, integral approaches are "meta-paradigms," or ways to draw together an already existing number of separate paradigms into an interrelated network of approaches that are mutually enriching."
—Ken Wilber, "Foreword", in Frank Visser, Ken Wilber: Thought As Passion
Some context:
Integral means comprehensive, inclusive, balanced, complete. In the Twentieth century, several theorists extended this term to refer to a stage of consciousness or mode of being which can integrate multiple perspectives, rather than having to accept one to the exclusion of all others.
The first person to use the term integral in this sense was Sri Aurobindo, a prolific Bengali Vedantin, who called his method "Integral Yoga". Sri Aurobindo considered the ultimate goal of most forms of spirituality (samadhi, nirvana, etc.) to be the starting point of a more complete form of spiritual life and practice, one that ultimately envisages the supramental transformation of the material world, the phsysical body, and human society as an inseperable facet of individual yogic self-development (AQAL).
In Sri Aurobindo's view, the only consciousness that can truly be termed "integral" is the supramental consciousness, because the mind is an instrument of division and can never truly grasp the entirety of things in a single regard, holding each thing in its place, in a space of oneness and totality.
More recently, the theorist Ken Wilber has popularized the term Integral. In his usage, "integral" refers to a mental framework and an intellectual attitude of inclusiveness. Despite this important difference, there is an underlying agreement that as a race we are moving towards a more harmonized and inclusive stage of consciousness.
“An integral approach works with our physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social dimensions, level upon level, consistently taking all of it into account, without losing touch with the totality that includes and pervades it all.” -- Robert Masters
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