How I came to Integral.

My path to Wilber was through a religious education class at my Unitarian church. We read “A Brief History of Everything” and the entire class found it to be difficult reading. I found it difficult as well but there were certain things that instantly struck me as true—just true enough that I thought it would be worthwhile to continue trying to understand as much as I could long after the religion class had passed.

First and foremost what I knew to be true, from my prior education as an anthropologist, were the concepts behind cultural evolution as it related to the primary techno-economic base of the culture. From my studies in anthropology I knew that the kinds of gods, the organization of family, the status of women, and many other cultural elements were at a minimum coincident with the way that society made its living. In horticultural society women had relatively high status, there were more female deities and frequently society was matrifocal.   In Agrarian societies religion became dominated by only male gods and usually only one single God. Women’s status fell, and the circle of caring and concern extended to “us” but not to the “other.”

I had also had studied the development of the human being from infancy and knew of the stages of pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational learning and the personality characteristics displayed by humans as they matured through each of these stages. What I learned in “Brief History” that was instantly new and tied into this was Spiral Dynamics.   I had inklings of SD in my studies—the outlines of the theory because of learning from many sources that gave vague indications—but I had never overtly learned the theory.

All three of these together: Spiral Dynamics, the science of Infant development, and social techno-economic development, suddenly came together in a way that simply blew me away. So much of so much suddenly made more sense than it had ever made before.

Learning about my education: that I had come from an amber meme family, gone to university and started receiving a rational enlightenment education, which quickly veered into postmodernism in my later anthropology studies, told me so much about what had happened in me already that I was highly suspicious that there might be more to learn about where I was going as well—even though, as Wilber of course predicts, I had much more difficulty seeing the potential levels above me. I exited college as a solidly green postmodernist and although I have no overt memories (it was a long time ago) I undoubtedly had a bit of the mean green meme in my personality.  I prided myself on making gay friends even though I didn’t have a gay bone in my body, as an expression of this pluralistic meme.

If I could find a foreign friend I also quickly navigated there, even marrying a French woman (maybe not much for an extreme postmodernist who would still say we both come from “white European” cultures, but very much something for a son of a fundamentalist protestant family who was terrified that my French wife might be (gasp!) catholic).

Coming upon that ominous choice that one like me faces in college, abandon your education or abandon your fundamentalist mythic beliefs, I abandoned the later and with it all spirituality which I, by then, associated to be something firmly attached to the amber mythic level. Indeed, as Wilber says, I was rational, and forced to leave behind spirituality as to me all spirituality was pre-rational.

Another important aspect of the change that “Brief History…” brought to me was Wilber’s point that quadrant one behaviors, spiritual behaviors operating in the “I” quadrant, would grease the wheels of personal evolution. And this I had had experiences with as well. I still to this day haven’t concluded whether some of my most important spiritual moments were translational or transformative but I did instantly connect with the idea that certain spiritual moments in me had made a huge difference in my ability to move up the SD ladder. My first intense moment standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon is an example: it left me changed forever.

It opened up a change in how I view every human being that I have encountered since. That is a spiritual practice—and so I knew that there must certainly be something true there as well. I had completely dismissed spirituality as an illusion.   Wilber sometimes says that those on the descended path (definitely me) see the ascended path as evil. I have always simply seen it as delusional. To me, in the grossest reductionist fashion, I had seen the world of the ascended to be nothing but illusions by those seeing things that weren’t there. You can’t measure it, you can’t count it, it has no location, and how can it actually be there?

But honestly I was lucky to have gotten this far. Because there is a part of me that like many, if not most progressives and liberals, hears the word “spirituality” and thinks “superstition.” Here I feel luck, for myself, but also, for others, concern. How many green meme people are actually ready to evolve if we could simply find a way to disguise the word “spirit” until they get over the hump and begin to understand the trans-rational meaning of spirit instead of the pre-rational?