Integral Life strives to provide a community space that is integral—comprehensive, open, inclusive, and transparent. The quality of this integral space depends on the quality of your participation. Therefore, like all communities we have guidelines, and ours are integral. The following guidelines are designed to help make everyone’s experience in this “we-space” a fulfilling one:

Let your very next communication in this space come from your Highest Self.

If you understand what “integral” means, then let the next words out of your mouth be from your own integral mind or integral awareness. If you don’t know exactly what integral means, then use “Highest or Higher Self,” “True Self that is no-self,” “Spirit Mind,” “Big Mind,” or whatever you are comfortable with that evokes the highest or deepest or brightest You.

Feel the thinker.

Feel your self, feel your ego, feel the self-contraction. That which feels the thinker is beyond the thinker, that which feels the self is beyond the self, that which feels the ego is beyond the ego, that which feels the self-contraction is free of the self-contraction. When you feel the thinker (or ego, etc.), you engage your Higher Self. You take the stance of the Witness, the I that is aware of I, the I-I in you that is beyond you. And the Witness, although itself empty, takes on and speaks integral at any level.

Therefore, feel your ego, or feel your self-contraction, and then speak and act from the awareness that’s doing the feeling; that sees the ego as an object like any other; that impartial Mirror Mind reflecting and embracing the universe in its brightness and luminous equanimity, the higher perspective that is no special perspective but open to all. Make the subject object whenever you can, and this will help you come from your Highest Self.

But don’t make a big deal out of this. Simply try to feel the thinker or feel the self-contraction every now and then, and sooner or later it will make sense and feel natural to act from a higher level that is not the ego but is aware of the ego.

(Those rules help with your Higher Self, however you understand and intuit it. And now, a few rules to help with your lower self (aka, your unconscious, your shadow, the disowned self, or the self that will sabotage your every move, given a chance).

Discern your “emotional buttons,” or the things to which you overreact.

In many cases, whether or not your judgment is true, a hyper-emotional recoil often means that shadow elements have been triggered, or as everyday parlance has it, somebody “pushed your buttons.” Simply notice this happening; try to make the subject an object (which, as we know, is the fundamental rule of development). In other words, try to make the reactive self (the lower self) an object of awareness. Just see and feel your emotional reaction; you don’t have to do anything else. It’s that simple. Don’t worry whether something spectacular happens or not; that very act has already caused a small transformation and disidentification, and repetitions of that simple act will have a profoundly cumulative effect. Of course, you can do more work on it if you choose, but most essentially, they are ways to just further that process.

You can investigate this more if you want. If someone or some comment gets on your nerves, what are you pushing against? Seek the underlying value in you that is trying to be expressed in your emotional charge. If you’re experiencing strong recoil, resistance, or rage, odds are what you are experiencing is a symptom of your own shadow. If this is so, we recommend doing a little shadow work with your response. Again, don’t make a big deal out of this, but work on it in whatever way you know how.

If you don’t want to do shadow work, or don’t have the time for it, not to worry: as we said, simply feel the self that is recoiling and acting negatively. Simply try to make the subject an object. And then go on about enjoying the community.

Don’t wait for others to make the experience you’d like; ask explicitly for what you want and take steps yourself to help create it.

Before you offer your wisdom to or about others, remember that your perspective is yours, and just one of many.

Can you admit that your perspective is a limited one? Can you distill out your clear observations from your interpretations and assessments? Are you still curious about other perspectives? Are there any shadow elements in any of your interactions in the community? Before pointing out the negatives in others, we try to clean our own house first. Don’t be afraid to make judgments—we want your opinions and judgments very much—just try to have the next judgment that comes out of your mouth be a discernment from your Higher Self.

It is your imperative to do your best to understand and accurately represent other people’s viewpoints. It is also your imperative to clarify your own viewpoint if you are feeling misrepresented.

Amber stage — this a top-down communication style. Perspectives are handed down through a perceived media or institutional “authority”, and then talking points are repeated uncritically by adherents to a particular ideology.

Early orange (expert) stage — this is “debate culture”, where the goal is always to compare the most idealized version of your own perspective (which is often established via Amber top-down communication), to the most negative straw-man depiction of the other’s perspective. Believes “critical thinking” primarily means to be critical of all perspectives that are not your own. The goal is to feel like the smartest person in the room.

Late orange (achiever) stage — this is more like “dialogue culture”, where the point is not necessarily to “win” a conversation (though that can take place as well), but rather to learn more about each other’s views and values. These dialogues can certainly take the form of debate, of course, but not the “bad faith” debate of early orange, which likes to make caricatures and straw-men out of opposing views. Instead there is more emphasis on “steel-manning” each other’s point of view, rather than straw-manning them, since “critical thinking” means we need to be even more critical of our own ideas than we are of other people’s ideas.

Green stage — this looks something like “discourse culture”, where the dialogue is opened up to far more perspectives, which can produce a far more robust conversation with a pluralism of informative perspectives across a wide spectrum of thought. At this stage, “alternative” perspectives are often actively prioritized over “mainstream” or “orthodox” or “dominant” perspectives. Often lacks a way to navigate these accumulated perspectives, or to recognize which perspectives may be more relevant/germane/legitimate (that is, a lack of a real “enfoldment mechanism”). This is the stage that many/most of our social media platforms currently run on.

Teal stage — I like to call this “enfoldment culture”, where participants have done the inner work to dislodge their identity from their political or ideological views, allowing them to have more robust conversations, to rethink or enhance their own positions, and to distinguish partial-truths from less-partial-truths, whether in themselves or from others. Can still be passionately invested in a discussion or a set of ideas, but there is much less “grasping” since that passion is yet another subject to be made into object. Has much more capacity to fold together seemingly irreconcilable truths, often by using methods such as polarity management, integral truth claims, and stage-specific interpretations of truth.