“A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.” — V for Vendetta

This mix was created in the spirit of the great protest songs of the 1960’s, channeled through one of the most (r)evolutionary art forms of our time: socially and spiritually conscious hip hop (don’t worry, there are plenty of rock and roll touch-points scattered throughout for the uninitiated). This set covers a very wide range of emotional content, from frustration to optimism to outrage. I also attempted to weave a variety of perspectives together, from premodern to modern to postmodern, as a demonstration of how these different points of view can all “fit together” into a single cohesive experience.

Every song in this mix is carefully wrapped around two main thematic pillars, which should be instantly recognizable to the Integral crowd:

Wake up.

Rise up.

As the editor of IntegralLife.com and a long time integralist, my primary motivation is to do everything I possibly can to encourage growth and awakening in this world. For the record, it is not my goal to proselytize the Integral Vision until the entire planet evolves to integral consciousness—that would clearly be a fool’s hope. Rather, my role is to continuously document and present the key insights, perspectives, and practices that can be so effective in catalyzing our own personal and cultural growth, providing our small but ever-emerging community with the tools they need to step more fully into the world—so that each of us can become more skillful communicators and agents of evolution in our own little pockets of the Kosmos.

One of the common problems I have seen in the integral community is the temptation to use developmental perspectives to dismiss or write off other people’s perspectives. Unfortunately, once we’ve made an object out of someone else’s subject and lumped it into one category or another, it can become difficult to think outside the color-coded box, and the risk of egregious oversimplification and even contempt can disconnect us from the sort of empathy required to understand the problem and to find the solutions that we need.

One of the themes we often discuss here at Integral Life is the desire to create a healthy “conveyor belt” that can help us grow through increasing waves of consciousness, complexity, and care. But I do not believe that we can begin to hope for a healthy “conveyor belt” in the left-hand quadrants without healthy economic mobility in the right-hand quadrants.  Without a way to prevent such massive income disparity, without real economic mobility and the opportunities for growth and self-authorship that it allows, without a healthy and robust middle class, the gaps between each stage of development become dramatically increased—after all, the very best way to prevent people from growing into their fullest potential is to keep them locked into deficiency needs. This in turn ensures that the world remains perpetually entrenched in conflicting ideologies, reinforcing our collective fear and cynicism, and ultimately resulting in complete political paralysis. In other words, welcome to America in the 21st century.

For these reasons, I believe it is extremely important for all of us to pay very close attention to the populist movements currently sweeping across the planet, and to seriously consider what the Integral Vision might have to contribute to these movements. Each of us holds our own unique piece to this massively complex puzzle, and all of us have a vital role to play in the ongoing drama of evolutionary emergence. Integral philosophy offers an exceptionally rich and powerful framework to help us make sense of all this complexity, but we cannot allow ourselves to remain forever stuck in abstraction. We must live this vision in our daily lives—in our hearts, in our hands, and if need be, in our boots. We must step beyond our own biases and pre-conceived notions of how the world should work. We need to remain ever vigilant to the dangers of partiality, while at the same time being careful not to get lost in the forest without ever touching a single tree.

It helps to remember the story of the Buddha, which is the story of a man who sat and sat and sat some more, until finally it was time to stand up.

My friends, it’s time to stand.

It’s time to dance.