Why Practice?

by Corey deVos

I’ve often said in a few of these programs that in many ways I consider Ken Wilber, and people like him, to be someone who sort of came along 20 or 30 years before his time. He was paving a road towards integral perspectives and solutions and practices before the life conditions really started to hit us — the life conditions that actually begin demanding more integral perspectives and solutions. And now here we are, right? These things are starting to crash down. We have global pandemics, we have things like climate change, we have things like wealth inequality, we have just the general epistemic breakdown and aperspectival madness that’s emerging from things like flat social media platforms, where everyone is getting into sort of siloed into their own little information spheres.

And we’re witnessing a lot of fragmentation right now. It feels oftentimes like everything is moving apart from everything else. It feels like things are kind of pulling apart.

And what this really makes clear to me is that the world right now doesn’t only need new, better ideas, more integral ideas. It needs those too, but we need something more than just new ways of translating the world around us. The world’s not only demanding translation, it’s demanding new transformations. And that always begins on the individual level.

We have a lot of people both on the right political right and on the political left who are demanding certain social transformations, and I can get behind a lot of those social transformations. But I also know that, if they are not foregrounded by individual personal transformation first and foremost, then they’re all doomed to fail. These things will not and cannot be selected for by the rest of culture. And even if they do, they’re not going to be genuinely transformative.

And I think that this is the opportunity that we are trying to create on the Integral Life platform — we’re trying to give people actual vehicles of transformation, so that they can transform the world from the inside out. They can find their place in the world, and find the world’s place within them, and do the lifting that’s required in order to move into better possibilities for the future.

And then I turn my attention to the work that we are doing together, and it just makes it that much more immediately valuable to me. It’s like, this is why we’re doing what we’re what we’re doing. This is why we continue to come back to programs like this, and to practice platforms and all of that — because we genuinely want every single person in our audience to feel like they can be a part of something new that’s trying to emerge.

But it’s not going to emerge around you — it can only emerge through you.

So again, the timing is perfect, and I’m hoping that the next 10 years of our work together is following this exact trajectory, becoming more sort of immediately relevant to the world around us and what we’re going through. Because I think there’s a model of sort of isolated spiritual seeking that existed maybe a couple of decades ago, which doesn’t really feel relevant anymore. This isn’t just about sort of making yourself feel better about yourself and the world around you. This is about actually finding ways to get our hands on the wheel, so that we can start navigating together towards a better future in the face of all of these crises and challenges and life conditions — by the way, life conditions which have to emerge in order for integral to sort of come up from the cracks in the first place.

I mean, that’s kind of the point, that integral doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. It actually requires challenges, it requires real challenging life conditions in the lower-right quadrant, which produces, I think, new responses. And this is us basically trying to figure out — making it up as we go along, in a certain kind of way — but trying to figure out what these new responses might be, what they might look like, and how we can carry them in our hearts and into the world.

So that’s sort of my overall frame for “why practice?” It’s not just “what is practice”, but “why practice?”

Well, because the world has never needed you more than it needs you right now.