Ken unpacks his own approach to integral historiography, helping us to better understand our own place in history — and history’s place in us.

love history. I always have. And that love seems to move in a couple different directions.

I love being able to have a sort of birds-eye view of history, being able to see the major universal themes and patterns and challenges faced by humanity at every era of human unfolding, noticing how history never truly repeats but sure likes to rhyme with itself. It helps me understand my own place in this evolutionary unfolding, and deepens my appreciation for the many everyday realities I take for granted that support my own consciousness right now. All of this helps to enrich my enjoyment and appreciation for being alive, right here in my own skin. That’s my love from 50,000 feet, which helps me understand my own place in history just a little bit better.

But I also like to really zoom in and lose myself in the details, in the history of minor players and everyday objects — to step outside of my own knowledge and context and experience and leave those things behind while trying to inhabit the perspectives of different people in different cultures living in different historical periods. People who were just living their lives, blissfully unaware of how their actions would shape subsequent historical events, or how future historians would eventually regard them. People with the same basic drives and desires and emotions as I have, but who live in cultures and contexts that seem alien to me. Ordinary people who were making the moment-to-moment decisions that would later become frozen in time on a museum wall.

So there are the two ways I tend to relate to history — it helps me better understand myself, and it helps me better understand the Other. It helps deepen my appreciation for the person I am, and all of the accumulated karma that led to my own existence, and it shows me the person I easily could have been had the circumstances of my birth been even just a little bit different.

And whichever direction the current happens to be taking me at any moment, both leave me with this strange feeling that all of history is somehow happening at once — or is at the very least is still happening.

As Ken has said, “all history is the study of an Other in space-time”. For me, an integral enactment of history brings me to the thinnest edge of that infinitely tapered boundary between “self” and “other”.

Which is why I was so excited to talk to Ken about his essay, “Who Ate Captain Cook? Integral Historiography in a Postmodern Age”. It’s one of the big reasons people so enjoy Ken Wilber’s work — because he takes us on a journey that helps align our inner experience with our outer perceptions of the world, of history, and of evolution at large, where consciousness itself becomes the integrating principle across all time and all space.

So watch as Ken unpacks his own approach to integral historiography, where the AQAL model helps illuminate both the facts and the most salient interpretations of human history.

—written by Corey deVos

Music by Stuart Davis