Integral collapse

So, what I'm seeing is that within the "Integral" Community, there are two energies separating out. One is interested in Theory and Holding space. The other is interested in Decisions and Action. I'm sure I'm oversimplifying, but it's good enuf for now. For a long time the Dominant energy has been for Theory and Holding space. This is why you and I and some others are going to catch alot of pushback for asking these questions.

Decisiveness and Action wants to emerge from The Field. This will energize alot of resistance. Prepare yourself.

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"The Left Hand Path, not merely the Right ... must take the lead."

~SES pg. 148

Why can't both of these worlds manifest?  What if those who are ready (2nd tier and beyond?) are able to function in a way that is immune to the collapse, which really is nothing but an invented reality enacted by deficiency needs?  What if the "collapse" is a collective nightmare that not everyone gets a chance to wake up from? 

I'm not saying that I've drawn out a plan with logistics or anything, just that what I see in healthy 2nd tier consciousness is an ability to, through the waking realization that we create our world, emanate value great enough to sustain many whereas first tier remains dependent on what it can get for itself, whatever that self is -- one person, a community, a race, a religion.

Let's say that the collapse happens and that web of material exchange and agreements with numbers attached to them and debts and credits is pulled out from under the feet of the whole world at once (as I believe we're witnessing).  How are first-tier people going to behave?  Are they going to search for their piece of the dwindling pie and wrestle the crumbs away from others?  Will this behavior precipitate their own purge from the world?  How will 2nd-tier and beyond behave?  Will they see far enough to know that giving without expectation of reciprocity is the only hope they have to live as one?

Maybe I'm getting a little mystical and extrapolating too much, but this is what makes sense to me.  Those who are ready will form an integral world and those who aren't won't, and it'll happen because it'll be time for it to happen -- now or never.

I can't speak for integral, but the way Spiral Dynamics made sense to me was by recalling my experiences as a kid growing up in Africa as a European. We passed through 4 African nations, all with different kinds of problems, which later made sense as problems of different altitudes.  I recall Don Beck and Chris Cowan describing in their book an example of someone operating at yellow (teal/integral) -- it was a gamekeeper in an African savannah.  As a person, the gamekeeper was looking after the ecology of the area, and could think and value this high notion of the health of the whole.  But as a human, they were also in good relations with all the local tribes, the politicians, the tourists, ie. people from all walks of life, from all altitudes and cultures, etc.  

I also recall Don Beck describing in an audio somewhere that the world needed more flex/flow to handle the complexity, so solving global problems isn't necessarily about creating a hew, higher global governance -- when I listened to the audio between Wilber and Garrison, I interpreted some conflict of opinion between the two on this question of what the United Nations, or America, should be doing to usher in and lead the world to a new stage of organisation -- and Ken was making a point that big changes usually only happen after big wars, and trying to create change can simply lead -- as history tends to show -- to things spinning off into unforeseen problems and conflicts.

As I heard Garrison say that he was keen for America to use its power as global empire, to be the one to push the world into that new stage, I found myself agreeing with Wilber. What Beck talked about as an alternative was the ability to detect complex problems as they arise spontaneously out of chaos, and assemble using existing resources from wherever available and needed, systems to handle the problem, and then once that problem is handled, the organisation dismantles and the resources go back to where they belong. This means that you don't need a lengthy global agreement at the highest level of the United Nations, just to get anything done. It also means I guess that you don't create institutions that are ready to handle the previous problem, and totally unprepared for the next problem.

It does mean thinking way outside the box, and this is where intergral's structure of being -- not so much the specific ideas, like, quoting Wilber, page 345, but the actual structure of integral awareness is so important, I intuit.  We need innovative solutions for problems big and small, and these problems are more complex than something we'll handle with a bit of brainstorming and some more powerpoint charts. Integral is an exercise in perspective taking, and shifting perspectives, and doing so in such a natural way that shifting perspectives becomes a method in itself, a habit of being. I was saddened that a coupe of really nice people, the Vales, said that they had been struggling for decades to get their ideas heard, ideas like The Autonomous House.  I had a copy of it when it had a simple yellow cover, without title. I found it sad because they hadn't just talked ideas, they'd built it for themselves, and yet they remained ignored for a long time. It seems to me in retrospect that their message was received in a black and white, either/or sort of way, by the rest of the architecture community. They basically decided, either you're green, or you're not. The community really lacked the kind of flowing perspective shifting and integrating that was needed to get the idea out to the world. 

Flexibility and flow. As Michael Crichton talked about in his audio interview with Wilber, most people underestimate the complexity of the world, and he referred to examples like the inner molecular pathways operating inside simple biological cells (he was a trained medic if I recall) and that just looking at those diagrams is mind bogglingly complex. And yet we imagine the global system operates with much less complex mechanisms, and that we can anticipate the likely problems. The flex/flow approach is to basically say that we don't know what the problems are really going to be, but we need to adapt quickly and efficiently to handle them as they actually arise.

There's a long list of potential global scenarios in a book by Peterson, a futurist at the Arlington institute. The point as a futurist isn't to say or predict that any of these things will happen, but to wonder what might the impact be if they happened and how we might design solutions to cope? Then there's the point made by Taleb in his book The Black Swan, where he says it isn't the things you think might happen and even expect to see happen that are the most dangerous, it is the ones that nobody is even aware of because they believe them to be too unlikely, but are actually more likely than anyone supposed and so when they happen, they really destroy a system. Humans seem to have a hard time making predictions when confronted with complex systems which operate with novelty.

One of the early ecologists maintained that nature was a system in balance, but some have criticised this for being a view which was derived from amber level notions of empire, order, and stability. Later, ecologists discovered that natural systems, when severely damaged, like a forest fire, don't regrow the same, they regrow in a very different way, and become a whole different ecology, still rich, but different. Natural systems change, and they change in ways that perhaps, simply can't be anticipated. So complexity, flexibility and flow, seem really key aspects of yellow or teal or integral awareness, and I'm surprised more people don't focus on that.

Peterson says that in the coming decades, he imagines two very broad different scenarios: one is a world with the internet, and the other is a world without. The integral model is just trying to bring an awareness of some things which various fields have been ignoring, like altitudes of development. Ignoring stuff that's part and parcel of the system is not going to help us see the complexity. And then we're into Black Swan scenarios where everyone is worried about problem A but problem B is what happens instead, and is devastating. So whilst we might think the internet is really important, we also need to look at the things that we think are so obvious as to be quite true and beyond question, because those are the things that qualify neatly as Black Swans. 

Flex flow is also about creating more adaptive connections, and Beck says that he sees yellow and turquoise, the individualistic and the communal aspects of integral, arising together. Wilber says that knowledge of the model like AQAL, or even just the altitudes, is itself a psychoactive thing, which means that someone at blue can see the model, and it cognitively shows them how they could link up into orange (consider how many fundamentalist religious organisations simply brand anything and everything other as wrong). So if you can keep the goodness of blue, but also add the innovation of orange, then that's a path. Also, you can take orange and access transpersonal states, and then re-inform orange, not as an individual's right to greed, but as an individual's self worth being about their sense of doing things with excellence, high standards and especially, integrity. Various commentators have pointed out that this financial bubble was created because the rules of the game were being violated (and other say it was a Black Swan because people just didn't understand the system, but thought that they did). Either way, having the integrity to question one's own model, seeking truth, and understanding, be it a model of the market or a model of an ecosystem, is a core value. That a physicist said about the value of science, "bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong", indicates that kind of integrity can begin at orange altitude. 

Sorry that's such a long piece, but you got me thinking. 

I can say for collapse though, you can read some descriptions of what happened in Soviet Russia, and my own impression from places like Zambia is that, life goes on, it just reorganises at whatever level can be managed and is best adapted to the situation. Zambia suffered badly when the value of copper, their main export, collapsed. You get used to walking into supermarkets and there being almost nothing on the shelves. It does mean no clean drinking water, needing to hire guards for the community, and militias self organising, and little or no health care, and a lot of burning of trees for fuel, and so on, and people becoming willing to do very dangerous jobs, rather than live in their villages, at the mercy of the weather and crop failures. When tsunamis hit poor countries, the death toll is enormous because they didn't have building standards (couldn't afford them) so most buildings collapse immediately. When tsunamis hit rich countries, there is enough wealth of local technology for recovery, and they had pretty high building codes to withstand the situation anyway. If there is a collapse, the poorest countries are the least likely to survive, I would wager. 

[ v.2 edited for typos; added a paragraph ]

This guy has something to say towards the end about cultures with mixed values and those with higher values who have the power to punish tell those with lower values: "We have the power to punish you, and I won't punish you. But give me my fair share!"

Significant.

--

"The Left Hand Path, not merely the Right ... must take the lead."

~SES pg. 148