Although some individuals, organizations and worldviews privilege either agency or communion over the other, the Integral disposition fully embraces both.
I chose the URL and identity of this website, “The Integral Heart,” in part to emphasize the healthy communion that is a natural expression of healthy Integral agency.
Structures of awareness always have special strengths and weaknesses. Since Integral consciousness has evolved so recently, there’s no research yet that clearly identifies its tendencies towards limitations and pathologies. But most structures differentiate themselves from the previous one via a somewhat exaggerated reaction.
Some theorists suggest that the early indications are that Teal (the earliest Integral structure) can tend to give excessive weight to its mental maps and models—as powerful as they are—and lose some connection to the embodied, intuitive aspects of awareness that were cultivated at Green. It appears that some healthy, positive aspects of Green can be temporarily suppressed at Teal, as the self attempts to wrap its mind around a radically larger and deeper sense of reality.
With Integral discrimination, we can see much more clearly why every perspective is partial, and thus we can critique every point of view with a whole new level of penetrating insight.
It is just as true and real that with Integral vision, we can see much more clearly how every perspective is uniquely and valuably true, and thus we can appreciate the whole world with a whole new level of honoring embrace. This extends and deepens in Turquoise, the second level of Integral awareness, which evolves beyond Teal.
Even while valuing the liberating importance of healthy criticism, a special focus of The Integral Heart is to shine a light on honoring and appreciating what’s good, true, and beautiful about every perspective and particle of the whole evolving conscious Kosmos.
This website will attempt to provide a forum for respectfully re-including some marginalized healthy Green values, by holding them in a wider, Turquoise understanding. At a higher level, the spiral winds back over itself in new, higher levels of agency and communion. This new level of communion integrates agency more fully, raising universal communal values into a solidly Integral expression (rather than remaining stuck in simplistic Green categories).
Thank you Terry…
[posted by Terry Bishop]
Thank you Terry. What a beautiful map of the path through teal. In my own experience, the cognitive burden of critiquing and reclassifying all my favoured perspectives has tended to make me appear a bit heady, to say the least. And of course I can see more easily the perspectives of others, and in that heady space I am prone to critiquing THEIR perspective as a projection of my own process. Oh dear. Now I know why I stopped getting invited to parties ;-).
And it resonates as profoundly true that emergence into turquoise is related to the capacity to see the glass as half full, and to celebrate that in an embodied way wherever I may find it. Many times I have seen Ken do that in his video talks. In your recent talk in Byron Bay in Australia, I saw that same principle in action, where you took questions then replied by honouring the partial truths of the questioner while weaving their thread into a much broader integral tapestry for the benefit of us all. Quite inspiring stuff to see modelled in such a grounded way.
In this article (and in the name of your website), you bring emphasis to the embodiment of communion as an aspect of healthy integral agency. Bravo! That emphasis feels like the exit from the mental maze of endless perspectival analysis. With that focus, I can ground my teal mental gymnastics in the reality of the objective world as I see it. Without that reference point, I am vulnerable to “aperspectival madness”, lost in a mental maze of perspectives that goes on forever. But when I am focused in the field of communion with others, I create the possibility of choosing actions that serve some good or other. Without an objective (relative) reference point, my actions have no meaning.
And yet, here I find my great challenge. In the world I experience, there is a compelling and urgent vacuum of leadership that is adequate to the challenges of our times, and leadership is a quality of agency. Being a masculine type, history itself seems to be calling me to do what I can to embody that leadership quality before our collective madness takes the biosphere past the point of no return. Yet I feel my own agency so vulnerable and soft in the face of the conflicting needs of others, a bit like a sand castle before the incoming tide. As I learn again to resonate with others, it becomes difficult to tell where I end and the other begins. The great conundrum for me is to find adequate certainty in a given perspective to be willing to stand in opposition to another, potentially causing them pain, in service of the highest good.
The emerging sense of agency within resonates with that urgency in a way that inspires determination and even fierceness in the face of challenge. I am called to embody courage in the face of uncertainty, and even ruthlessness in response to efforts to deconstruct my initiatives. To stand firm against the pounding surf of worldly objections asks of me an intense focus on my agency, lest I become just another irregular blip in the sand on the beachhead of our evolutionary process.
When I stand firm, I consistently encounter challenges from a feminist worldview that leadership and conviction are vehicles of dominator hierarchies and best eroded as soon as possible. It is in those moments, where reason is dashed on the rocks of contrariness and avoidance, that I can find no substitute for that aggressive fierceness that burns at the core of my agency. The paradox I must then answer is how to navigate the minefield of inspiring others to be more flexible in their perspective taking while standing firm within my own view.
It seems my only defence against turning into an integral Hitler is an equally fierce experience of compassion for the suffering I see in and around me, but a compassion that is capable of recognising that the highest good is sometimes served by a path that involves a lot of pain. On those rare good days when I’m not wallowing in my own stuff, the suffering seems ubiquitous and overwhelming, and compassion is the life raft that stops me from drowning in it.
So it feels like your emphasis on communion is specific to the teal altitude, in combination with a feminine orientation towards the collective that is necessary for emergence into turquoise. Can you recommend a practice on how to sustain integrity on the agency side while opening myself to black-hole gravity of collective needs?
I’m also wondering if the primary focus of my efforts to embody integrally-informed communion might be a 2nd person relationship with Spirit, whose energy can then flow through me in my engagement with the relative world. It strikes me that only through that particular relationship with Spirit can I hope to eventually find the certainty I need to make a stand against the endless waves of fear and doubt from the stormy ocean of samsara. Would you care to comment on that?
Better late than never!
Thanks for this thoughtful and heartfelt commentary and these queries, Terry.
By now, I know you’ve found your own answers to these questions. But I’l respond — better late than never!
First, I think there’s a both/and to the agency-communion swings between SDi vMemes and the view that levels/structures are typologically neutral. Both communion and agency express at all levels, and certain typologies might express more communion (or agency) at any or all levels (including the quality ordinarily de-emphasized. AND the swing to communion is a tendency at turquoise.
First of all, collective needs are not a black hole if rightly understood.We stand in the center of a mandala of needs, beginning with our most basic personal needs and eventually extending to higher and communal needs in successive concentric circles of concern until it includes the needs of the whole Kosmos. If we are freed, in integrity, to put our own oxygen mask before tending to our children, and then friends, neighbors, strangers, the whole web of life, and beyond, then we can stand in non-separation and still ground relative action in care for self-boundaries.
Practices that can strengthen agentic integrity, IMO, are founded on the distinction between reflection and action. Many Integralists tend to be influenced by the postmodern prediliction for reflection over action. So David Allen’s Getting Things Done is often the most practical practice. Or even the simple injunction to devote at least a certain percentage (50%? 67%?) of time to execution rather than reflection, planning, or discussion.
The attempt to embody integrally-informed communion with others is radically liberated when one awakens to a felt, lived, intimate relationship with existence itself, the always-with-us universal Beloved. If we, in some authentic way, have experienced that we are fundamentally “in-love” with all that is, then we don’t have to summon our limited creature-power to the burdensome task of vanquishing fear and doubt in order to love, as if it were an action, rather than the always already condition of our relationship to al that is. However, sincere and authentic practice, paradoxically, sometimes takes the form of “faking it until you make it” — that is, acting “as if” what we know to be true is the case, even when we can’t feel it. By acting on the basis of a presumption, it eventually becomes almost immaterial whether we feel it in any given moment, and, presto, we do feel it much more, and often predominantly.
Intimacy?
I’m also wondering if the primary focus of my efforts to embody integrally-informed communion might be a 2nd person relationship with Spirit, whose energy can then flow through me in my engagement with the relative world. It strikes me that only through that particular relationship with Spirit can I hope to eventually find the certainty I need to make a stand against the endless waves of fear and doubt from the stormy ocean of samsara. Would you care to comment on that?
Please take a look at the
Please take a look at the last paragraph of my reply to Terry Bishop, just above this, where I respond to your question.