Integral life practice 2: mind

November 19, 12:25 AMLA Religion & Spirituality ExaminerKurt Barstow

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The Four Quadrants of Integral Theory

Integral Life Practice provides a complete framework of experience in that it includes in its four core modules the three vehicles for practice that correspond to the three major ways human beings can know things--through the body, through the mind, and through the spirit. Body, the first module, was discussed in the last article. The second module is Mind and here the category shifts from sensory to mental experience. What is unique to this category, as Ken Wilber points out in an essay in Eye to Eye (Shambhala, 1996), is “that the very data of the mental mode--its words and symbols and concepts--simply because they are indeed symbolic, intentional, reflective, and referential--can be used to point to, or represent, other data, from any other realm.” Practice in this area is obviously potentially the most wide-ranging since it could include study in virtually any academic discipline, reading in almost anything, looking at art or visual culture, and so on. Because we use words, concepts, and symbols to say things about mental but also about bodily and spiritual experience, mind is the most important means of communication between people and has the capacity to cover our full range of experience. This makes it an extremely important part of the cross-training involved in Integral Life Practice. To read an anatomy text or a book on chakra psychology, for example, can inform even though it cannot substitute for an experience of our body. To read The Old Testament, The Gospels, The Koran, a Buddhist Sutra, The Bhagavad Gita, or The Tao Te Ching might inform though it cannot substitute for an experience of spirit. Whether they are read individually or taken together collectively may cause them to inform our sense of spirit slightly differently--spirit within a specific cultural context or spirit experienced trans-culturally. Integral Life Practice is flexible enough to have a place for different spiritual traditions, although there is an emphasis on that which is shared between traditions.
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Many people may already recognize aspects of Integral Life Practice in what they currently do. There are certainly already a great number of people who perform some kind of physical exercise, do something with their mind, practice some form of prayer or meditation, and work on themselves psychologically in some way. That is because Integral Life Practice is not just an arid or empty structure but derives from the basic ways all of us can know ourselves or experience the world. Unique to Integral Practice, however, are some of the specific practices in each module that it has newly invented, distilled, or modified from tradition and the roadmap it has created to help us understand our experience of virtually anything as well as how to locate ourselves in an evolutionary developmental progression. The cornerstone of the Mind module is the AQAL (shorthand for all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types) system. This is a map of consciousness that attempts to be as complete as it is possible to be at this time. As Ken Wilber says of AQAL, “It’s yours. You already own it.” It is, in other words, already territory that you experience or are capable of experiencing because it is derived from a synthesis of hundreds of the best spiritual, psychological, moral, cognitive, and other developmental models. And, as is often said in integral circles, “although you shouldn’t mistake the map for the territory, at the moment it is the best map we’ve got.”
 

The four quadrants of integral theory refer to the three aspects of consciousness always available to your awareness. These correspond to the first person (subjective), second person (interpersonal), and third person (objective) perspectives of speech. These three viewpoints of consciousness are important for the Spirit and Shadow practices that will be taken up in later articles. In the diagram you see here, third person singular (it) and third person plural (its) make up the upper and lower right quadrants, first person (I, me, mine) makes up the upper left quadrant, and second person (you, yours, which indicates a relationship of I and thou, or we) makes up the lower left quadrant. What you have then is on the top level the inside (thoughts, feelings, sensations) and outside (neurotransmitters, the brain, physical systems of the body) of the individual and on the bottom level the inside (culture and worldview) and outside (social system and environment) of the collective. Any of these perspectives of consciousness are available to our awareness in a given moment. As I write this, for exammple, various physical processes are taking place in my body, such as neuronal firing, change of heart and respiratory rate (objective, upper right) that correspond to thoughts and feelings (subjective, upper left) I am having as I struggle to synthesize and summarize something that is complex and somewhat technical. I am writing with an imagined sense of an audience of people who would read a Religion and Spirituality article (intersubjective, cultural) and I am writing for a specific website on the internet that is somewhat like a newspaper, somewhat like a blog site (objective, environment). To be integral any area of activity needs to include all these quadrants. Take art, for example:

Upper Right Quadrant (It): materials, techniques, the play of light on the physical object, formal analysis

Upper Left Quadrant (I): sensations, thoughts, feelings in a beholder as he or she looks at a work of art

Lower Left Quadrant (We): cultural elements common to people at a given historical moment that might inform the upper left quadrant: religious beliefs, cultural values, aesthetic principles or formulas, discourses about visual phenomena, systems of viewing, narrative expectations, styles, modes of understanding, symbols

Lower Right Quadrant (Its): socio-economic institutions for which art is created and through which it is viewed( patronage, the art market, collective  endeavors): the church, private patrons, the guild system, the artist as genius, the salon, the studio, the gallery, the  museum

One would probably find that an awful lot of integral work has in fact already been done in various academic disciplines such as art history that wasn’t necessarily called integral at the time but encompasses these four quadrants. Notice the complete interdependence of these four quadrants; an account that deals with just one area would seem somewhat incomplete.
 

Integral Humor: A Four Quadrants Cartoon by Tom C.

To take another very important topic, culled from Ken Wilber’s introductory book The Integral Vision (Shambhala, 2007), we might look at Integral Medical Care. In this view allopathic medicine is only one area that affects disease or illness, operating in the upper right quadrant, while alternative care operates more on the interior of the individual (upper left quadrant). Also affecting disease and wellness are cultural views (lower left quadrant) and social systems (lower right quadrant). So the overall view would look something like this:

Upper Right Quadrant (It): Orthodox Medicine-physical interventions such as surgery, drugs, medication, behavioral modification

Upper Left Quadrant (I): Alternative Care: interior states such as emotions, psychological attitude, imagery, intentions, visualizations

Lower Left Quadrant (We): Cultural Views: communication between doctor and patient, attitudes of family and friends and how they are conveyed to the patient, group values, cultural judgments about a disease, meaning of an illness, support groups

Lower Right Quadrant (Its): Social Systems: economic factors, insurance, healthcare policies, social delivery system

All of these components will affect the treatment, progression, and healing of a disease as well as general wellness.
 

The second part of the Integral map of consciousness deals with lines and levels of development. Lines are the various areas in which we develop as human beings (spiritual, psychological, moral, cognitive, and worldview, to name a few) and levels are the permanent states that provide a measurement for those lines. They are all hierarchical progressions, meaning not that one is better than another but that they move from lesser to greater complexity, each stage must be gone through before we get to the next, and the higher stages both include and transcend the lower, although the lower do not include the higher. (An important part of integral theory is that the universe is basically built in hierarchies--from atoms to molecules to cells, and from letters to words to sentences). What is quite extraordinary is that all these lines of development in different areas follow a basic course that unfolds from matter to mind to spirit and from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, to use the broadest formulas, that is to say from the smaller and more self-contained to the larger, more expansive, and all-encompassing. This is the meta-hierarchy. The color system of the seven chakras, which progress from the base chakra (physical survival) to the crown chakra (spiritual enlightenment), is used along the left vertical line to visually denote this movement from body to spirit. In the chart shown here below, for example, three lines are shown.

The first line is based on the humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow separated needs into deficiency-based needs and growth-based needs. In the first class one attempts to reduce discomfort, to satisfy an appetite, to seek something outside themselves. Once a lower need is taken care of, one can turn to a higher need. First come physiological and safety needs, the need for food, shelter, and money. Once those needs are satisfied we can turn to things like love, belongingness, self-esteem, for which we are still dependent on environment. With growth-needs, in distinction to deficiency needs, desire  is not something that needs to be put to an end for us to be satisfied; instead it is a positive value that urges one toward self-actualization (individuation, self-expression, the development of capacities, talents, creative tendencies, constitutional capacities). Self-actualizing individuals will experience and treat the world differently than will people with serious deficiency needs. They are more autonomous, less needful and attached. They are more likely to have ongoing peak experiences and to enjoy qualities of being rather than always focusing on becoming. Certain factors might suppress one from participating in life at this level. Men, for example, who have been stuck in the role of money-maker to provide for a family or make a better life for their children may never get to realize some of those self-actualizing needs. And since the higher needs are dependent on having the lower needs met, a self-actualizer might run into enormous obstacles if he or she experiences a change of fortune, an economic downturn, or a serious illness with no health insurance. The deficiency needs might then come to be overwhelming in such a way that there is a tug-of-war between growth-oriented values and immediate deficiency needs. In other words, although there are interpersonal implications for being on any point in this line, it is not primarily a measure of morality. A self-actualizer may have attained that level by being quite selfish (think of the artist with only time to devote to his art) whereas the money-maker may be stuck in that role for the most selfless of reasons. And even if one has attained the level of self-actualization, one may find oneself, due to circumstances beyond one’s control, needing to focus at a lower level. Fortunately, there are a number of institutions and means in the culture that make available aspects of the self-actualization state--such as peak experiences--to those who might be primarily existing at a lower level: education, parks, museums, spiritual communities, sports, music, financial aid and fellowships. But as long as one is having or perceiving primarily deficiency needs, it will be impossible to achieve self-actualization as a more or less permanent state. There is a certain fluidity to this structure, then, and the point of having it is because by locating oneself within it one can see oneself and one’s relationship to the world more clearly and completely.

Stages and Some Lines of Development from The Integral Vision

The second line shows Jean Gebser’s structures of consciousness, from archaic to integral, and the third a combination of the research of Michael Commons and Francis Richard, Jean Piaget (developmental psychologists), and Sri Aurobindo (a spiritual sage), that outline a cognitive/spiritual development of mind from sensorimotor to symbolic to rational to cross-paradigmatic to the transpersonal realms of Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmind, and Supermind (these existing above the integral perspective). Without having to delve into the specific qualities of each, which one might  well do as part of an integral practice, one can see the same general development from bodily to spiritual ways of knowing, from lesser to greater complexity, and from a limited to more expansive viewpoint. Personal development and worldviews in this map unfold in the same fashion, from egocentric (narcissistic self-absorption) to ethnocentric (a larger view of self-identity that includes family, faith group, race, or nation) to worldcentric (an even larger view that embraces all people regardless of race, creed, gender, class, or sexual orientation) to kosmocentric (identification with all life and consciousness). Behind all these developmental lines, of course, is essentially the map of  the evolution of consciousness, our return to the source, a movement toward spiritual awakening or enlightenment. The point of this is not to be able to sketch out a developmental superiority for oneself but rather, through the various lines of development, to see where one’s strengths and weaknesses lie. Someone can be, for example, cognitively very advanced but at a much lower level spiritually. Or one may be aesthetically advanced but undeveloped morally and emotionally. The other point of levels is to be able to understand both one’s own and other people’s perspectives.

There last most important aspects of integral theory to mention are states and types. States of consciousness are temporary and some of these are available to people at virtually all stages. States of consciousness may include altered or meditative states and peak experiences. The three basic states of consciousness, available even to an infant, are waking, dreaming, and deep formless sleep, which correspond to the gross, subtle, and causal. To these may be added the nondual, which is an awareness that sees no difference between the manifest world of form and the unmanifest world of spirit or emptiness. What’s interesting about the great variety of the many in terms of states is that one tends to experience spiritual states at one’s developmental level. So a mystical experience at a mythic/ethnocentric level might be understood as a union with Christ, who indicates the sole road to Salvation whereas the same experience at an integral level might be experienced as the Christ Consciousness available to all individuals that is similar in conception to Buddha Mind or witness consciousness, a quality that may be called different names by different traditions but points to a universal condition fundamental to all human beings. The other point to make is that it is possible to attain enlightenment as a spiritual state and still be at a developmental level that is ethnocentric and bellicose, as was the case with some Japanese Zen masters who expressed very nationalistic sentiments and were supportive of World War II. There is, in other words, a state enlightenment and a stage enlightenment, which are not exactly the same things. Finally types refers primarily to gender, clearly a huge topic of discussion. On the integral map each stage of development has a masculine and feminine component. Healthy masculinity tends toward “autonomy, strength, independence, and freedom,” and healthy femininity tends toward “flowing, relationship, care, and compassion.” In unhealthy states, those qualities are either exaggerated or downplayed, so unhealthy masculinity “dominates in fear” and unhealthy femininity finds “chaos in fusion.”

As I write this I have had as many questions as answers, which I think is testimony to the fact that the integral map both covers an extremely huge territory of real and complex experience and is a useful model for inquiry into one’s own life. For example, is it not possible to simultaneously have spiritual experiences that are in the mythic traditions that one might belong to and have an integral viewpoint? What are the various ways one might move from deficiency to growth needs? This, it seems, could involve on the one hand making enough money to feel secure or on the other hand the taming of desire on the other hand. Are there different developmental lines that tend to work together or have a synergistic effect on each other, the spiritual and moral lines, for example? Should alternative care really be placed only in the upper left quadrant? Don’t chiropractors, massage therapists, and acupuncturists affect the physical body too? Would the energy body be included in the upper right quadrant? My clunky, struggling synopsis in no way does justice to the integral map, for which one should really listen to the eloquent, passionate, and precise discussion of Ken Wilber on the CD included in The Integral Life Practice Starter Kit. In a way, what is most apparent about the integral map is that it is not a dead thing set in stone but rather provides a lively framework for the discussion of lived and potential experience. That makes it a useful tool both for understanding multiple perspectives and for spiritual transformation.