We are very happy to announce the launch of our new Integral Life Community platform, which you can find on community.integrallife.com.

This community is available to everyone for free. And as with any truly worthwhile community, ours has rules. Be sure to check out our Road Rules, which offers a series of micro-practices and basic guardrails to help you remember to always speak from your highest Self, to take the perspective of the person or people you are talking to, and to practice good interpersonal hygiene at all times. Users who violate these very basic rules of etiquette will be banned by the community admin and/or moderators. Read more about our Road Rules here.

Furthermore, the software we are using is a very well-regarded platform called Discourse, which utilizes a “Trust Level” system that will allow our most active and committed contributors to help moderate and organize the community experience. You can learn more about the Trust Levels here.

So please, come help us co-create a bigger, better, more integral community experience by joining the Integral Life community today!

Why not Facebook?

Facebook has become the default platform for community interaction over the last few years, and is fine for what it does (besides the whole “nearly destroying Western civilization” thing, of course…) Much of the ongoing activity in the integral space is happening on Facebook, and I think we’ve likely all seen various strengths and weaknesses with this model. 

We have also seen the online integral community sprawl into a large number of various sub-communities on Facebook — Integral Global, Integral Agape, Integral Poesia, Integral Space, Integral Toonz, etc. Because these groups are basically distinct from each other, distinguished as much by ideological balkanization as by differing user interests, I think it’s clear that Facebook has actually contributed to a large amount of fragmentation in our community.

There is also something about the wide-open public nature of most of these sub-communities that can also compromise authenticity and genuine empathy. Facebook is in many ways an inherently narcissistic platform, bending even our highest contributions toward ego-centric gratification and ethnocentric groupthink. We believe you will find the new community platform to be a more focused and well-lit experience than you find on Facebook, one that incentivizes genuine participation and conversation over self-promotion.

Facebook also contributes to the problem of “making an object out of each other’s subject” (at least in my own experience) which is a very slippery slope toward potential abuse of integral perspectives, and something that is explicitly called out in our own community Road Rules.

Either way you slice it, I think Facebook falls short in terms of contributing to an authentic shared reality between participants in real time. 

Plus, it is not clear to me that offloading the integral community to a potentially compromised platform like Facebook is the most ethical thing to do. So, we created an integral alternative to Facebook, which we hope all of you will find equally enriching and enjoyable.

All of this factored into this new Integral Life Community, which we hope will help transcend the many problems with Facebook while also including the amazing connections and friendships that have emerged there.