Integral movement

This article is about the integral movement in New Age philosophy and psychology. See Integral (disambiguation) for other uses.

The integral movement (also called the integral paradigm, integral philosophy, the integral worldview, or the integral approach) is A New Age movement that seeks a comprehensive understanding of humans and the universe by combining scientific and spiritual insights. The movement originates with the California Institute of Integral Studies founded in 1968 by Haridas Chaudhuri, a disciple of Sri Aurobindo. A notable current proponent is Ken Wilber.

Integral thought is claimed to provide "a new understanding of how evolution affects the development of consciousness and culture". It includes areas such as business, education, medicine, spirituality, and sports, and psychology and psychotherapy. The theme of the evolution of consciousness has also become a central theme in much of integral theory . According to the Integral Transformative Practice website, integral means "dealing with the body, mind, heart, and soul."

Integral thought is seen by proponents as going beyond rationalism and materialism. It attempts to introduce a more universal and holistic perspective or approach. Proponents view rationalism as subordinating, ignoring, and/or denying spirituality. Wilber begins by acknowledging and validating mystical experience, rather than denying its reality. As these experiences have occurred to humans in all cultures in all eras, integral theorists accept them as valuable and not pathological.

Historical development of integral thought

The adjective "integral" was first used in a spiritual context by Sri Aurobindo from 1914 onward to describe his own yoga, which he referred to as Purna (Skt: "Full") Yoga. It appeared in The Synthesis of Yoga, a book that first published in serial form in the journal Arya and was revised several times since .

The word was totally independently suggested by Jean Gebser in 1939 to describe his own intuition regarding the next state of human consciousness. Gebser only afterwards discovered the similarity with Sri Aurobindo .

Haridas Chaudhuri, a student of Sri Aurobindo and philosophy in his own right, developed his own perspective and philosophy. He established the California Institute of Integral Studies (originally the "California Institute of Asian Studies"), in 1968 in San Francisco (it became an independent organisation in 1974), and presented his own form of Integral psychology in the early 1970s .

In Spiral Dynamics, Don Beck and Chris Cowan use the term "integral" for a developmental stage which sequentially follows the pluralistic stage. The essential characteristic of this stage is that it continues the inclusive nature of the pluralistic mentality, yet extends this inclusiveness to those outside of the pluralistic mentality. In doing so, it accepts the IDeaS of development and hierarchy, which the pluralistic mentality finds difficult. Other ideas of Beck and Cowan include the "first tier" and "second tier", which refer to major periods of human development.

In late 1990s and 2000 Ken Wilber, who was influenced by both Aurobindo and Gebser, among many others, adopted the term "Integral" to refer to the latest revision ("Wilber-IV") of his own philosophy, which he called Integral theory. He also established the Integral Institute as a think-tank for further development of these ideas. In his book Integral Psychology Wilber lists a number of pioneers of the integral approach, post hoc. These include Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Gustav Fechner, William James, Rudolf Steiner, Aleister Crowley, Alfred North Whitehead, James Mark Baldwin, Jurgen Habermas, Sri Aurobindo, and Abraham Maslow .

Daniel Gustav Anderson has suggested that Wilber's Integral Theory is derived from the writings of the Sri Aurobindo. However, his claims in this and other areas have been refuted by scholars of Sri Aurobindo's teachings.

According to John Bothwell and David Geier, among the top thinkers in the integral movement are Stanislav Grof, Fred Kofman, George Leonard, Michael Murphy, Jenny Wade, Roger Walsh, Ken Wilber, and Michael Zimmerman.

In 2007, Steve McIntosh mentions Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin along with many of the names mentioned by Wilber .

In the same year, the editors of What Is Enlightenment? listed as contemporary Integralists Don Beck, Allan Combs, Robert Godwin, Sally Goerner, George Leonard, Michael Murphy, William Irwin Thompson, and Ken Wilber.

Also in 2007, Gary Hampson suggests that there are six genealogical branches of Integral, based on those who first used the term. These are Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, Ken Wilber, interdisciplinary scientist Ervin László, philosopher Ashok Gangadean, and Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner .

List of individuals

:* Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) was a visionary yogi rather than a systematizer, and although he referred to "integral" only in the context of spiritual transformation, his writings influenced others who used the term "integral" in more philosophical or psychological contexts. The word "integral" was originally used by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to describe the yoga they taught. Their integral yoga involves an integral divine transformation of the entire being, rather than the liberation of only a single faculty such as the intellect or the emotions or the body. Important teachings include: Evolution, Involution, the Integral psychology, the psychic being, Integral yoga, the Triple transformation, and the Supramental principle. Major works include: The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, and Savitri. According to Sri Aurobindo,

(T)he Divine is in his essence infinite and his manifestation too is multitudinously infinite. If that is so, it is not likely that our true integral perfection in being and in nature can come by one kind of realisation alone; it must combine many different strands of divine experience. It cannot be reached by the exclusive pursuit of a single line of identity till that is raised to its absolute; it must harmonise many aspects of the Infinite. An integral consciousness with a multiform dynamic experience is essential for the complete transformation of our nature. — Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p.114

:* The Mother (1878-1973) was Sri Aurobindo's co-worker. She continued Sri Aurobindo's work of Integral Yoga and spiritual transformation after his passing, and founded Auroville, an international community dedicated to human unity, and based on their teachings. A record of some of her experiences have been collected by her disciple Satprem in a thirteen volume work called Mother's Agenda.

:* Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968) was a Russian-born Harvard sociologist who advocated a cyclic view of history. He referred to the emergence of a future, spiritually-based integral society. Writing at the same time as Sri Aurobindo, but independently, he began using phrases like "integral philosophy" and "integralist"..

:* Jean Gebser (1905-1973), was a Swiss phenomenologist, and author of The Ever-Present Origin. He conceived of history as a series of mutations in consciousness. Gebser saw in the momentous events of the 1930s and '40s a new mutation in consciousness which he identified as the transition to the integral stage.

:*Haridas Chaudhuri (1913-1975), a Bengali philosopher, was a correspondent with Sri Aurobindo and founded the California Institute of Integral Studies. In the Chapter IX captioned, "The Vedanta as Integral Non-dualism" of his 1951 book, Sri Aurobindo: The Prophet of Life Divine he described Sri Aurobindo's philosophy as purnadvaita-vada. Author of the book, 'Philosophy of Integralism,' he later developed his own theory of Integral psychology. Along with Frederic Spiegelberg, he wrote the title paper and edited the 1958 symposium compendium, The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo.

:*Michael Murphy (b. 1930), author of The Future of the Body, and with George Burr Leonard thee co-founders of the Human Potential Movement and of Integral Transformative Practice, and co-authors of The Life We Are Given. Murphy also co-founded the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, with Richard Price.

:*George Burr Leonard, is the co-founder (with Michael Murphy) of Integral Transformative Practice, and author of numerous books on human possibilities and social change. He coined the term "human potential movement".

:*Ervin László (b. 1932) is a philosopher of science, systems theorist, and integral theorist who posits a field of information as the substance of the cosmos.

:* Ken Wilber (b. 1949) is an American writer and autodidact who popularized Integral thought or integral thinking in the current sense, to develop an all-encompassing, evolutionary theory that incorporates and honours all perspectives, while at the same time presenting a larger picture. Wilber, borrowing centrally from the writings of Adi Da, also built upon the ideas of previous integral thinkers like Sri Aurobindo and Jean Gebser in developing his own highly complex integral theory. Wilber's books include: [...] Ecology Spirituality, Integral Psychology, and Boomeritis. He is the founder of the Integral Institute. According to Wilber,

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

:* Don Beck is a management consultant and proponent of Spiral Dynamics who has collaborated with Wilber and contributed to the development of Integral theory.

:* Richard Tarnas (b. 1950), is a cultural historian and professor of philosophy and psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. he is author of The Passion of the Western Mind (1991) and Cosmos and Psyche (2006)

:*Yasuhiko Kimura (b. 1954) is integral philosopher, writer, and lecturer.

:*Andrew Cohen (b. 1955) is an American guru and author of "evolutionary spirituality." He has been influenced by a number of evolutionary thinkers, including Sri Aurobindo, and is a friend of and collaborater with Ken Wilber. He is founder and editor in chief of What Is Enlightenment?, a quarterly magazine that features essays by and interviews with many integral thinkers.

:*Robert A. McDermott is professor of philosophy and religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and has studied the work of Rudolph Steiner and Sri Aurobindo. One of his audiotapes is called "Sri Aurobindo, Rudolf Steiner and the Integral Ideal"

:*Allan Combs is the author of The Radiance of Being: Understanding the Grand Integral Vision, Living the Integral Life. He has worked with Ken Wilber recently to create a theory which they call the "Wilber-Combs Lattice".

:*Robert Kegan is a Harvard developmental psychologist who is considered to be an integral theorist. He is a member of the Integral Institute.

:* Paul H. Ray is a sociologist and author who refers to the emergence of a new progressive society or culture beyond traditionalism and modernity, that, following Sorokin, Gebser, and Sri Aurobindo he calls "Integral culture". He and his wife Sherry Anderson have coined the phrase "Cultural Creatives" to refer to this new demographic

:*Sally Goerner is an interdisciplinary scientist and author of a number of books, including After the Clockwork Universe: The Emerging Science and Culture of Integral Society. She is co-founder of the Integral Science Institute.

:*Ashok Gangadean has written a number of books on the concept of a global consciousness. he is Co-Convenor of the World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality. He started using the word "integral" in 2006, inspired by László’s and others.

:*Jorge Ferrer is the author of Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality and a core faculty member in the East-West Psychology Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His book is an attempt to go beyond both the influence of Ken Wilber in transpersonal psychology and the epistemological implications of postmodernism, by means of Richard Tarnas' participatory epistemology.

:*Frank Visser is a Dutch author, Theosophist and webmaster of Integral World, a website that hosts a large number of articles about Wilber and Integral Theory.

:*Steve McIntosh is an independent scholar, businessman, and Integral theorist. He is author of Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution

Integral psychology

In the 1940s Indra Sen, a devotee of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, established the field of Integral Psychology, based on Sri Aurobindo's teachings, although his book of the same name only appeared in 1986 . These ideas were later developed in a scientific and evolutionary context by Don Salmon and Jan Maslow.

A further interpretation of Integral psychology was developed, although not in detail, in the 1970s by Haridas Chaudhuri, who postulated a triadic principle of uniqueness, relatedness and transcendence, corresponding to the personal, interpersonal and transpersonal domains of human existence.

Like Sen, Ken Wilber wrote a book entitled Integral Psychology, , although the subject matter is very different to Sen's. Here he applies his integral model of consciousness to the psychological realm. This was the first book in which he embraced the Spiral Dynamics model of human development. Wilber also identifies an "integral stage of consciousness" which exhibits "...cognition of unity, holism, dynamic dialecticism, or universal integralism..."

According to Brant Cortright of the California Institute of Integral Studies, Integral Psychology is born through the synthesis of Sri Aurobindo's teachings with the findings of depth psychology. He presents Integral Psychology as a synthesis of the two major streams of depth psychology – the humanistic-existential and contemporary psychoanalytic – within an integrating east-west framework.

Integral theory

Integral theory is a term often used to describe the teachings and work of the American writer Ken Wilber, referring Either to the synthesis of different perspectives and methodologies, or to his own "AQAL" theory. More recently, the term has been adopted by Hungarian systems theorist Ervin László in a scientific context.

Wilber's Integral theory

Although Wilber originally spoke of Integral theory in terms of a synthesis of different methodologies that can be used in the study of consciousness, "Integral theory later came to be considered synonymous with "AQAL" . AQAL refers to "All quadrants, all levels", and equally connotes "all lines, all states, all types".

Central to Wilber's methodology is the concept of vision-logic is a post-formal, but personal, level of cognitive development. A characteristic of vision-logic is the ability to conceptualize and compare different perspectives or points of view. In the book [...], Ecology, Spirituality, Wilber describes vision-logic as a planetary awareness. He uses it to translate the term vernunft as used by the German idealists, which means something like "transcendental knowledge".

Wilber's AQAL theory has been criticized as too unilinear of a progression. Also, some of his examples have been criticized as not actually constituting components of the respective systems..

László's Integral theory

According to Ervin László, a Theory of Everything would include not just mathematical formulas and quantum physics, but life, mind, and culture as well. He points out that although Wilber in A Theory of Everything refrs to the "integral vision" of a genuine Theory of Everything, he does not present a science-based theory as such . László's 2004 book, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything presents his own version of an Integral theory in terms of a fundamental energy and information-carrying field that informs not just the current universe, but all universes past and present. This is then used to explain physical, biological, evolutionary, cultural and psychological, and even paranormal and spiritual phenomena.

Integral art

See main article Integral art

Integral art can be defined as art that reaches across multiple quadrants and levels, or simply as art that was created by someone who thinks or acts in an integral way. Such artists may have been influenced by integral thinkers, or developed integral art independently.

Applications

Specific aspects of Integral Theory such as Wilber's Four Quadrants and Don Beck's Integral Spiral Dynamics have been applied in the world of business and business leadership, International development, and even marine ecology.

Intersections between critical theory and integral theory have been explored. Integral theory is based primarily on philosophy and psychology and is used by Integral psychologists, and by personal coaches and individuals working on personal development. It is also used by teachers, as a basis for understanding individual students' needs and abilities.

Online and print journals

Over the last seven years, a number of journals, have developed around the theme of Integral thought, at the same time further helping to define it. The first of these, in 2000, was Kosmos journal, which is affiliated with the United Nations, and features Don Beck, Ervin László, Ashok Gangadean, and others. Five years later, two online peer-reviewed journals were established, Integral Review, which Wilber, Gebser, Aurobindo, László, and others, and Conscious Evolution, which covers a similar scope. A less intellectual, more glossy, print and online publication is What Is Enlightenment? Magazine, which is based on the philosophy of Wilber, Cohen, and Beck but also interviews various, evolutionary, spiritual, and "integral" thinkers and teachers.

See also

• Evolution (philosophy)
• Integral yoga
• Integrative learning
• Spiritual evolution
• Relationship between religion and science
• Quantum mysticism

External links

Websites

• Integral World website and online resource maintained by Wilber student and critic Frank Visser; originally commmentary and criticism of Wilber's work only, but since 2006 and especially 2007 has also featured a more diverse range of essays and interprations of Integral thought.
• Zaadz on-line community affiliated with the Integral Institute, but much more diverse than just Wilber-supporters alone.

Blogs

• Integral Praxis Post-Wilberian blog by the Integral Research Group (IRG), provides a diverse range of essays and links to all apsects of the Integral Movement
• Science, Culture and Integral Yoga (SCIY) Aurobindonian multi-authored blog based on the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in the context of diverse social commentary, founded by Rich Carlson

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