LOST : The First Integral TV Show

The LOST experience is one that is best absorbed start to finish.  

Crash landing on the island the castaways get to have a kind of second life.  Through their interactions and doings they become better than they were.  They transcend their flaws.  

An elaborate cosmic "game" is being played with human "pawns" by Jacob and his twin brother The Man In Black.  Jacob's take on humanity is that they can change, and ultimately that someone can replace him.  The Man In Black's take is that it always ends the same, implying that human nature is ultimately destructive.  

This cosmic game plays out Good vs Evil, but not in the traditional sense.  Jacob has candidates to replace him to go on and protect the island.  Jack carries out Faraday's plan to "hit the reset button by blowing up the atomic bomb."  Instead of this being a destructive act, on the Island it is a creative act.  It creates the "sideways" reality where our characters have forgotten the Island times and go on about their "lives" until awakened by Desmond.  

This sideways creation culminates at a church with all faiths represented with Christ having a special symbolic significance of resurrection and heaven.  The Kingdom of heaven is within you...  Many of my comrades view the sideways as a kind of purgatory and therefore the show loses meaning because "Whats the point?"  I think that it is sort of but is more complicated than that.  

John Locke - Green

Jack - Orange

Kate - Orange

Hurley - Green

Sawyer - Blue

Charlie - Green

Sun - Blue

Jin - Blue

Richard - Green

Ben - Yellow with Red Sub Personality

Desmond - Yellow

Jacob - Turquoise

All characters transformed one way or another during their time on the island.   This really is not complete because certain characters have a few really high lines of development which make getting a 'center of gravity' reading difficult.  

LOST is fantastic!  

-s

I too absolutely loved Lost.  Not only is it a landmark work of television in terms of being integrally informed, I doubt there will ever be another TV show (unless I happen to be working on one myself, sometime in the future), to which I feel a greater personal connection.  I'm going to take a bit of a different tactic with this, because I think the characters in Lost are supposed to represent real, living, fleshed out people, rather than allegories for thematic elements or levels of development, and I don't really believe it's very useful to try to assess a person in totality, even in terms of Center of Gravity.  I think it's more important to assess the respective levels of actions, words, structures, and works, and it helps a lot if one acknowledges the specific line of development one is discussing, as well.

Thus, I think almost all of the major characters in the film have at the very least a cognitive understand of Green structures of consciousness.  Their values are all over the map, and they change a lot through the course of the series.  In fact, I think one of the major purposes their experiences on the Island, facilitated by Jacob, was to get them to the point of being able to take a more integral perspective, and thus be ready to take on the role of Protector for the Island.  I think that the mysterious machinations of the Island are, in fact, so complex, that at least a Turquoise cognition is required to develop a working understanding of them.  Thus, Jacob, from at least a Turquoise-cognitive perspective, possibly higher, and probably a Turquoise-value perspective, as well, designed various tests, plans, and methods of searching for his "candidates" that would allow them to develop from the variously less-than-integral climate they inhabit to at least a Turquoise understanding of the workings of the world around them.  This allows them to protect the Island, which I think represents the Source of all time, space, location, perspective, and the human condition itself.  Thus, to protect the Island is to protect the experiment of the human being.

What I found particularly compelling was the complexity of the show's spiritual perspective.  I think it may be the first televised work of film (with the possible exception of Six Feet Under), to present, in-depth, a truly integral (Teal or higher) spiritual perspective.  This is particularly striking in a culture where offerings in the spiritual lines typically fall in the Amber-or-lower category, even for people who are otherwise operating in/with structures of much higher complexity.  I don't think Locke's insistence on faith in the Island, for example, represented a wholly Amber spirituality.  Certainly, there were amber elements there, but his spirituality was ultimately one of experience, not one handed down to him via his ethnic tribe's system of doctrines and myths.  He was a man searching for something to believe in, something that would help him transform beyond what he currently understood as him"self".  On the Island he engaged in deep mystical states, and though his life ended tragically, he wound up essentially liberated from the baggage of doctrine and dogma that has haunted his past.  He got transcended his unhealthy relationship with authority and his father-image by surrendering himself to a higher Authority, that of pure, experiential Reality, itself.

And it would be easy to label Jack as an Orange materialist, but not so fast!  Jack clearly had an incredibly complex understanding of the dynamics of groups and systems, which is what made him such an excellent leader.  I think the tremendous skill he demonstrated as a leader alone places him at at least a Teal and possibly Turquoise cognition.  And based on his Live Together, Die Alone speech, I think he implicitly, intuitively understood and revered the importance of the entire spectrum of consciousness, manifested in the ways in which we are all connected to one another (but in a way that actually allows us to work functionally together, systemically, not just in an "all perspectives are acknowledged" kind of way).  I think this shoes the first signs of Teal values.  I interpret Jack's story as, generally, one from Green to Teal to Turquoise, and when he was fully integrated at Turquoise, he was able to let go of a great deal of his psychological baggage in order to become the Protector of the Island, at which point his experience at the center of the Island, the Source of divine light, he may have even had a rapid transformation to Indigo or higher cognition, values, spirituality, etc... in his final moments of life.  And then we see his eyes snap shut, ending in the way we began.