Experiments in Second Tier Community

From Pacific Integral:

Collective Individualism: Experiments in Second Tier Community

by Terri O'Fallon, Venita Ramirez, Jesse McKay and Kari Mays

This paper describes an ongoing experiment in fostering development through an integrally informed educational program, called Generating Transformative Change in Human Systems (GTC). This program forms the structure for second-tier communities whose aim is to liberate greater service in the world, while holding the ongoing development of participants, facilitators, and the systems to which they are related.

In this presentation we will provide an introduction to the history and characteristics of the GTC program, present initial research findings of its impact and suggest questions for further research. Since the initial results of our research with the Leadership Development Framework (LDF) shows developmental shifts in program participants that exceeded our expectations, we offer suggestions for further research that explore the reasons for the implied impact the program is having on its participants’ development.

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SDi and the Palestine-Israel Conflict

From Integral Life:

Eleanor Roosevelt once said that "poor minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, and great minds discuss ideas." Integral minds, we might add, discuss all three. In the Integral Profiles series, host Jeff Salzman sits down with some of today's most notable thinkers, teachers, and leaders, discussing the many ways they are catalyzing the Integral vision in their lives, in their hearts, and in their work. These men and women are collectively defining the leading edge of evolution in today's world, their thoughts and actions actively influencing the shape and scope of tomorrow's possibilities.

Don Edward Beck, Ph.D., is Co-founder of The National Values Center in Denton, Texas, and President and CEO of The Spiral Dynamics Group, Inc. Beck co-authored The Crucible: Forging South Africa's Future (with Graham Linscott, l991) and Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership & Change (with Christopher Cowan, l996). He also writes a "Sports Values" column for the Dallas Morning News and appears often in the media regarding issues related to values, sports, and racial divides.

Here Don offers an intimate glimpse into his own life and career. He discusses the current phase of his work: traveling the world and applying Spiral Dynamics to various geo-political "hotspots" all over the planet. He offers his own ideas about healthy models of society, the crucial distinction between stages of consciousness and the contents of those stages, and the importance of preserving many of the early stages of development that are so often seen as primitive and obsolete. He then goes into considerable depth around the specifics of the Palestine-Israel conflict, describing the needs and problems on both sides of the divide, his hands-on involvement with both nations, and the remarkable receptivity with which his work has been met. At a time when tensions in the Middle East can seem so hopelessly combustible, it is encouraging to see Integral seeds being planted in such surprisingly fertile soil, offering us all a much-needed exhale as we wait to see how evolution will continue playing itself out in this difficult region of the world.

Introducing The AQAL Cube Perspectives

Introducing The AQAL Cube Perspectives: Transcending and including the AQAL Square

By Lexi Neale

“Introducing The AQAL Cube” addresses persisting “flat-land” and reductionism issues with Ken Wilber’s AQAL Square, where “two dimensional” interpretations of “three dimensional” processes have left us with many anomalies that may possibly be corrected by the AQAL Cube. First, the AQAL Cube differentiates two domains of Consciousness: The Empirical domain of our gross, mortal being with its 4 Quadrants below; and the Intuitive domain of our subtle, non-mortal being, which inhabits the Empirical domain, with its 4 Quadrants above. Second, each of the three persons is delegated with its own AQAL Cube of eight personal pronoun-perspectives, totaling 3 x 8 = 24. The resulting myriad of binary-perspective lattices generated by the all-person AQAL Cubes, of which the classic Wilber-Combs lattice is but one, is the tip of a vast “ice-cube” of permutations of Kosmic Address, and as such is a potential model for the Human Consciousness Project.

This is a difficult paper, because it calls for some key reforms to the AQAL Model. Most of us have no problem changing a bad thing for a good thing, but few would change a good thing for a better thing. Good as the existing AQAL Model is, there may be little need to change it. But like any other evolving entity, Integral Theory will itself periodically break out of outmoded forms into new and liberating dimensions.

In this paper I attempt to present an argument that Ken Wilber’s 4 Quadrant Model, which I here refer to as “The AQAL Square”, can be transcended and included by differentiating an additional dimension of four additional quadrants, as an 8 Quadrant Model, which I here refer to as “The AQAL Cube”. I propose the additional dimension that the AQAL Square fails to adequately differentiate is nevertheless differentiated cross-culturally by the possessive and non-possessive personal pronouns, as our material and non-material being respectively.

I present the case that all our pronoun-perspectives, as aspects of our conscious awareness, can and should be integrated into the AQAL Model as the AQAL Cube. In so doing, the AQAL Cube may be able to offer many pragmatic advantages over the AQAL Square. For example, the AQAL Cube would be able to delegate State Stages and Structure Stages their own quadrants, by which to map more accurately their vastly different perspectives, rather than be lines in the same quadrant of the AQAL Square. In other words, my intention in presenting the AQAL Cube is to not detract from what is offered by the AQAL Square, but rather to add to its territory another dimension that has not yet been differentiated by the AQAL Square.

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Introducing The AQAL Vision

Introducing the Integral Vision

by Corey deVos

We have the intuition that everyone is at least partially right, that no human being is capable of being 100% wrong. But how do you tell just how right everyone is? Some are more right than others—how do you tell the difference? Integral theory is an attempt to answer that question.

The familiar Chinese proverb, “May you live in interesting times,” is no doubt fulfilled in our time. For the first time in history, we have access to all the world’s wisdom, to the musings of saints, sages, and scientists through the ages. That access is growing exponentially. Scarcely a century ago, the first trans-Atlantic wireless signal was transmitted; now, we venture out every day on the information superhighway. We are inundated with information, and today, more than ever, there is an impulse to make sense of it all.

Philosophy (literally, “love of wisdom”) might well be the oldest human pursuit. For as long as human beings have existed, we have questioned our existence. And whereas our close evolutionary relatives have demonstrated the ability to create tools and perhaps even display a sense of humor—traditional criteria for what makes us unique as humans—we have not yet observed in them the capacity to make meaning. Perhaps it is meaning itself, and the search for it, that sets us apart.

Every human age has its priceless contributions, its startling insights. Premodernity discerned, beneath the myriad forms of manifestation, “the Great Chain of Being,” a majestic progression from matter to body to mind to spirit. Modernity informs this view considerably; it tells us that we live in a universe that has evolved over roughly 14 billion years. Matter evolved to the point at which life emerged; life evolved to the point at which consciousness emerged. And postmodernity points out that each of us is embedded in a context, largely invisible to ourselves, from which we interpret our experience. Rather than a pregiven world, we enact a worldspace, the product of the phenomena we observe and the viewpoint from which we make the observation. We are, quite literally, viewing manifestation through a set of lenses, lenses that we never knew we were wearing. And in the process of development, we swap those lenses for new ones, viewing phenomena in increasingly more precise, nuanced, and sophisticated ways.


At the leading edge, most developmental theories posit a stage that might be called “integral,” for its hallmark attempt to make sense of everything, to find the pattern that connects. One such theory is “AQAL,” short for “all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types.” The AQAL model, proposed by American philosopher Ken Wilber, is perhaps the most comprehensive view ever taken of how all manifestation, all matter, all life, all thought, and all experience can fit together in a coherent whole. AQAL itself is content-less, which makes it infinitely applicable to any particular area of inquiry. Any field (e.g. business, medicine, politics) can be viewed through an AQAL lens. And this view can vastly enrich our understanding of the contours, limits, and possibilities of that field. Touching in on the five aspects of the model ensures that we have covered all of our bases. We can be sure that we are viewing a given situation from every conceivable angle, and can proceed with the best information possible.

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Towards a World-Centric Moral Sensibility

We're at a unique moment in history, says UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the TED Talk below. Brown believes that we can use today's interconnectedness to develop our shared global ethic -- and work together to confront the challenges of poverty, security, climate change and the economy.

Maps of Meaning

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

by Jordan B. Peterson

We think we live in the "objective" world, but we do not. The objective world is something that has been conjured up for us recently - absurdly recently, from the perspective of evolutionary biology - by the processes of science operating over a span of five centuries (or, perhaps, to give the Greeks their due, over the last thirty centuries). This does not mean that the objective world is not real, even though theories about its nature are in constant flux. What it does mean is that the environment of human beings might well be regarded as "spiritual," as well as "material."

It is of course virtually impossible - even forbidden, at least implicitly - to use terms such as "spiritual" in a serious scientific discussion. How could it be that reality is "spiritual," rather than material, given the overwhelming practical success of the experimental sciences?

There are perhaps two answers to this question. The first concerns our capacity to categorize. It has become increasingly clear, at least since the time of Wittgenstein (1968), and perhaps also as a consequence of Piaget's work, that the categories we use to orient ourselves are at least as much action or significance-predicated as they are descriptive, which is to say contra Augustine that words are not labels for things as much as they are tools for the obtaining of goals. Since it is not precisely clear where the "object" ends and the "category" begins, perhaps it is the case that even those things we naturally perceive as "things" might be better regarded as tools for the obtaining of goals rather than as absolute entities in and of themselves.

The second answer is somewhat more abstract, but is related conceptually to the first. It is clearly the case that our concept of situation or thing is context-dependent. What we parse out of the exceedingly complex "environment" that presents itself to us is always only a limited subset of that environment, and perhaps precisely that subset which serves our present purposes (as we attend to some few things, and ignore a multitude of others). We might say, then, that different purposes require different "objects", and that the highest and most general (and also therefore necessarily the most abstract and "long-term" and least immediately evident) purposes require us to parse out the highest and most general categories, tools, or conceptions. If what we extract from the environment are things more like tools than objects, it might be possible to take a radically fresh look at conceptual systems other than those of science, on the chance that what they are talking about are things which are more like tools than objects.

As a consequence of adopting such a perspective, it may be possible to posit that we are no better at understanding our own past than we are at truly coming to grips with the conceptual systems of other cultures, and to remember or at least hypothesize that we really do not understand what our forebears meant when they used categories such as "spiritual" (any more than we understand what they meant when they said "virgin birth," for example, or "holy Trinity," or "resurrection of the Savior", or even "Tao"). If that is the case (which is the only alternative to presuming that everyone unfortunate enough to live prior to the dawn of the scientific age was pathetically ignorant, despite their incontrovertible success at surviving), then things may still be seriously other than we presently presume.

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An Evolutionary Mind

From Metanexus:

An Evolutionary Mind

By Alice Andrews

"Close your Deleuze; open your Darwin."
—Robert Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal

Not that long ago, for about a year, I dated a cute, left-wing economist off-and-on (though mostly off). We found each other attractive and exotic and perhaps even fascinating, but we didn’t get along or get each other one bit. It was a frustrating and futile experiment in the chemistry and mathematics of pairing with someone so different in every way—even our horoscopes said we were disastrous for each other. (That I would even mention the word horoscope in a piece for public consumption would no doubt make him cringe and clear his throat a few times.) But in the process of going toward something so foreign and at once attractive and repellent, I solidified my worldview that there really are two different kinds of minds.

Recently, the New York Times ran an article titled “The Political Brain.” The piece suggested that the liberal mind and the conservative mind are quite different, and that this difference is related to the differences in the way their limbic systems (in particular, the amygdala) respond to particular stimuli—particularly suffering and violence. The author made clear to point out that it was difficult to parse if liberals were born with more sensitive/reactive amygdalae or if their experiences, etc., shaped the patterns of response; and that indeed it was probably a little of both, as these things often are.

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When Minds and Machines Become One?

From Google:

Ray Kurzweil visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book "The Web Within Us: When Minds and Machines Become One." This event took place on July 1, 2009, as part of the Authors@Google series:



At the onset of the 21st century, it will be an era in which the very nature of what is means to be human will be both enriched and challenged, as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy, and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity.

The paradigm shift rate is now doubling every decade, so the twenty-first century will see 20,000 years of progress at todays rate. Computation, communication, biological technologies (for example, DNA sequencing), brain scanning, knowledge of the human brain, and human knowledge in general are all accelerating at an even faster pace, generally doubling price-performance, capacity, and bandwidth every year. Three-dimensional molecular computing will provide the hardware for human-level "strong" AI well before 2030. The more important software insights will be gained in part from the reverse-engineering of the human brain, a process well under way.

While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil presents an inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny in which we will merge with our machines, can live forever, and are a billion times more intelligent...all within the next three to four decades.

Wilber-Combs Lattice Revisited

The Wilber-Combs Lattice Revisited

by Jan Brouwer

Wilber V is definitely an improvement on earlier stages. In Wilber III-IV there always lurked in the background of his theory some slight uneasiness. For it remained somehow a puzzle how psychological development stages (structures) are to be matched with (higher) states of consciousness. The relative simple answer to this question at the time was: higher states of consciousness, like the ones exhibited by the mystics of world culture, are merely higher stages/structures of psychological development. You first have to go through all of the lower stages of development before the ripeness settles in to realize some of the higher spiritual states. Second tier development can only begin after consolidation of first tier growth. And so it is with third tier development: it can only come after first and second tier development and not before or in between.

This solution to the problem of how states and structures were to be related ('stack the first on top of the latter' as Wilber himself now describes this earlier theory rather derogatively, making higher states of consciousness somehow equivalent to higher stages) was in itself the outcome of a deep crisis in Wilber's philosophy. For Wilber I-II still adhered to Jungian and neo-Romantic notions of spirituality being a return to the glory and innocence of childhood. Enlightenment in this phase was seen as a kind of home coming to 'the trailing clouds of glory' (Wordsworth) of our golden childhood. Children were seen as still possessing spiritual treasures we adults somehow seem to have lost. In this earlier view spirituality is to be defined as the art of finding those lost treasures again. This was Wilber at the beginning of his career.

But this made Wilber himself (and others) rather uncomfortable at the time. For the data of zone #2 research about psychological development did not match this theory. Researchers like Piaget, Baldwin, Loevinger and others had busted the myth of childhood spirituality being a higher kind of realization. The 'trailing clouds of glory' were proven to be rather chaotic meteorological phenomena, with archaic dark thunderstorms and sudden magical lightings, instead of enlightened celestial glory all of the time. Childhood was proven to be more of a tentative beginning within a gradual spiritual process than the acme of it.

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JAN BROUWER is webmaster of "The Mystical Site" and editor of the online forum Integral Mysticism. He lives in the Netherlands. He can be contacted at archimysticus@planet.nl

Integral Spirituality and Personhood

Integral Spirituality

By Terri O'Fallon

Integral spirituality is the experience of a Sacred, embodied, evolutionary “now”, speaking through us in multiple voices. It incarnates all facets of our lives, inviting past and future into one moment. Integral spiritual practice, then, seems to be a consummate, persistent inquiry of many shades and shadows extending throughout life. Though our assumptions about reality restrict and bind us, they also protect us from tumbling permanently into those amazing states into which we “peak”, but do not yet have the energetic capacity to live in consistently. As the formless universe awakens to itself through form, like a sleeping child, our incarnated being begins to know the Sacred as the Sacred simultaneously knows us.

Living fully into our earthly personhood as we “peak” into the transcendent, two prominent, implicit questions seem to be “Who am I?” and, “Who am I not?” Our embodied, immanent experience is with us in awareness from the day we are born. How can we wake up in consciousness to the everyday sacredness we hold within our flesh, skin, heart and bones, and unite it with the transcendent within which we are coming into being?

A question that arises in more comfortable times is “Who am I?” Steeped in the confidence of our own incarnate measure of knowing, there seems to be no other truth. “This is who I am!” In this full exploration of our knowing, we envision everyone else as having, or needing to have, these same beliefs. “Yes! This is the way the world works”!

But inevitably, a disorienting dilemma arrives; we tremble, wondering how we can survive this torturous and ghastly occurrence. We have no way to make sense of this experience. We flail, squirm and wish we could do something to get out of this agonizing space. Our assumptions and beliefs do not make sense any more. There is a discomfort in every cell in our bodies, for our beliefs are not large enough to make sense of the anguish we feel so deeply. Mind numbing fuzziness creeps into our ordinarily cogent mind; the simple task of making a “to do” list seems impossible; let alone the capacity to carry out a plan. We find ourselves living suspended in this liminal space where the being we once were no longer makes sense, and the being we are yet to be, has yet to emerge.

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Integral Life Coaching

From Integral Life:

Integral Life is launching our brand new coaching service in July. One of the questions we are being asked is why Integral Coaching is different from all the other coaching programs out there. This week we are pleased to let you listen in to a conversation between Joanne Hunt, co-founder of Integral Coaching Canada and her client Huy Lam. If you are interested in what the Integral Coaching method is like, this set of four videos is a must see.

Huy is also launching his Coaching blog later this week on Integrallife.com. Be sure to check it out!

The Coaching Topic

In this first clip Joanne and Huy talk about the topic he chose for his Integral Coaching experience.

Metaphors Aid in Transformation

In this piece, Joanne and Huy explore the power of metaphor in the Integral Coaching method, devising analogies to describe our "current" and "new ways of being."

Current Way of Being: White Crane

In this piece, Joanne and Huy discuss his current way of being metaphor… White Crane!

New Way of Being: Braveheart

In this piece, Joanne and Huy discuss his new way of being metaphor… Braveheart!