The State of the Integral Enterprise: Part II

THE STATE OF THE INTEGRAL ENTERPRISE

Part II: Key Ideas for a World at Risk
Roger Walsh

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ABSTRACT Given the extraordinary threats facing the world, this article explores the question, “How can integral studies and integral practitioners contribute most effectively to help resolve the great challenges of our time?” This article first explores integral ideas that might be particularly helpful, and then investigates ways in which individual integral practitioners can identify and optimize their own contributions.
 

KEYWORDS: awakening service; Integral Theory; global threats; karma yoga; perspectives
 

Correspondence: Roger Walsh, Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, University of California Medical School

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
– General Omar Bradley
 

Those of us in the integral movement assume that integral ideas can make significant contributions to the culture, and that part of our work is to implement these ideas and to make them better known.1 Of course, each of us prioritizes these ideas differently. Let me encourage you to stop for a moment to do an experiential exercise. Take a moment to relax, breathe, or meditate. Then ask yourself, “What integral ideas would most benefit our culture and our world?” Allow your mind to bring to awareness those ideas that you feel are most important to communicate to the larger culture. What follows are seven ideas, actually hypotheses, that seem especially important:
 

An integral vision is possible, applicable, and valuable. Much could be said about this idea. However, since everyone actively involved in the integral movement bases a significant part of their life on this assumption, we can probably take it as a common tenet of the community.
 

All perceptions reflect perspectives, and all perspectives are partial and selective. Perception both reveals and conceals, clarifies and obscures. What is crucial to recognize is that all perceptions reflect perspectives, and all perspectives are selective. When this goes unrecognized, problems ensue. For example, to the extent that any perception is not recognized as perspectival—and therefore as partial, selective, and relative—it produces a corresponding experience, worldview, and self-sense that will be assumed to be accurate and correct, and therefore will likely:
 

• Go unquestioned
• Result in self-deception and delusion
• Create suffering
• Reinforce one’s current belief system and worldview
   

Serve a defensive “legitimizing” function (Wilber, 2005) (i.e., it will serve to defend and preserve the current self-sense and developmental level rather than foster further development)
 

Integral practitioners therefore seek to:
 

• Recognize unhelpful, partial perspectives, in both themselves and others
• Release and integrate these limited, harmful perspectives into more encompassing (contextually wider and developmentally deeper) metaperspectives and integral-aperspectivalism
• Beyond this, integral practitioners will eventually aim to dissolve all perspectives into pure awareness. From this pure awareness, perspectives can then reemerge. As they reemerge, helpful metaperspectives can be intuitively selected, with their partial perspectival nature recognized, their integral-aperspectival potentials realized, and their spiritual ground remembered (Walsh, 2006)