Integral punktar

“Transcend and include” are the watchwords of the Integral movement. Usually they refer to stages of consciousness and culture, but they apply to biology as well.

   

This Transcend and Include feature of evolution is powerful. For example, cells have evolved over billions of years to be very reliable molecular machines. Organs composed of these cells, such as the human brain, work reliably as a result.

By transcending and including what has come before, evolution has equipped us with the necessary “hardware”—complex brains capable of thinking in complex ways—to not just survive in the world, but to shape it.

——

AQAL

Ken Wilber:  To clarify, AQAL is this general integral framework that we use, which has five main elements—we call them Quadrants, Levels, Lines, States, and Types. Quadrants are the fundamental perspectives you can take on any occasion—you can take a 1st-person, “I” perspective, or there is a perspective of a 2nd-person, the person being spoken to, “you”.And when you and understand each other, “we”have a mutual understanding. And then we can just look at something as an object, as a 3rd-person, or a person not present—a “him/her”, a “them/they”, or an “it”. And so the fundamental perspectives are I, we, and it. And there are a lot of variations on that—it turns out to be the same as the “Beautiful, the Good, and the True”, or “Art, Morals, and Science”, or frankly the “Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha”.

Levels is perhaps one of the most important in terms of integration. Levels refer to vertical stages of development—structures of consciousness, levels in any developmental sequence. And these kinds of levels cannot be seen by introspecting, they can’t really be seen in meditation or contemplation. And it’s why of all the aspects of an AQAL model, the ones that the traditions are particularly not very strong on are these structures of consciousness.

Then there are states of consciousness, the third component. And traditions are extremely rich in understanding of states—unexcelled, as a matter of fact. There are states of consciousness that everybody knows, natural states of consciousness, and the traditions maintain that there are at least four or five major natural states. These are things like waking, dreaming, deep sleep, pure witnessing (called turiya in the sanskrit tradition) and One Taste, turiyatita. I will come back to those in a minute, and come back to levels as well.

Lines refer to developmental lines, and people are aware of these as multiple intelligences, for example, or any capacity or talent that develops in a series of discreet and recognised stages. Evolution itself, going from atoms to molecules, to cells, to organisms—that’s a classic developmental or evolutionary sequence.

The last item is Types. And types are kind of a catch-all, it’s just to remind us that we want to keep our options open, keep looking, keep the mind looking for all the things that need to be included. Types are things that can be applied really to any of the previous elements. Its not uncommon, for example, that in developmental sequences people appreciate looking at the masculine and feminine types of any of these stages. Because often, as Carol Gilligan was probably the most famous to point out, the female develops “in a different voice”, even though she still develops through the same stages, as Carol Gilligan herself pointed out.

Now that framework, which we just sometimes shorten and call “AQAL”—all Quadrant, all Level—the AQAL framework, as Patrick mentioned, is the structure of samsara. In other words, it’s the structure of the manifest universe, the structure of Form, capital “F”. So when the traditions say “Emptiness and Form are not-two”, Emptiness of course is vast unqualifiable reality as such, beyond any terms or qualities, including the one I just said. And that’s why it’s sometimes called Emptiness, because no concepts can grasp it—and most importantly, the idea that it is not a concept is also false! Unfortunately in the West, American Buddhists tend to say that it is “no concepts”, and that you have to get rid of concepts, and thereby landing themselves squarely in Buddhist hell—but thats another story.

So, in a sense, you still do want to get out of samsara, meaning you want to get out of an exclusive identification with the world of form, and find that in you which is infinite. And then I will use some qualifications as metaphors—you want to find the True Self, or the Real Self, or Suchness, or Godhead, or the Abyss, and so on. And then the ultimate goal is to find a union of this infinite Spirit with the entire world of Form.

Now the catch—and this is something that the West has added—is that the world of form is evolving, it’s developing. That is where the levels particularly come in to play. There are levels of development in the various lines that people have. But nonetheless, that entire AQAL framework is, in a sense, a map of the prison floor. And if you have a map of the prison, it helps you with an escape route.

We don’t want people confusing AQAL with Reality—AQAL is relative truth. Absolute truth is your ever-present, pure Suchness, or Thusness, or I AMness, or I-I, or Buddha Nature, or Godhead, and so on.We want to be able to not have any specific identification with the world of Form, other than the entire world of Form itself. When people start studying AQAL, that’s great, because they learn the framework and it helps them index really anything in the manifest world.

And for those levels, I will use Jean Gebser’s names—he was a great pioneer in developmental studies or genealogy—and his general stages of worldviews went from archaic, to magic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral. And those are essentially still true, those work just fine. Of course you can sub-divide those stages all you want, but the real point here is that those are stages of Form, those are stages of samsara’s unfolding. I’ll just say it’s a vertical climb, just as a metaphor—at any point you are developing and climbing that ladder of Form, you can choose to “turn right”, so to speak, and start getting off the world of Form all together. You can let go of all gross forms, you can let go of all subtle forms, you can let go of all causal forms. And once you have done that, you have let go of the entire world of form, and any particular level that might be in it. And that then is pure Emptiness, or pure Openness, or pure Dharmakaya, or pure Godhead, or pure I AM, or pure Abyss.

That “turning right”and getting off the world of Form is what the great contemplative traditions are all about, in terms of a capacity to deliver you a freedom from samsara. And so the Great Liberation is not found just by climbing rungs. The Great Liberation is to get off of rungs altogether, to let go of it all together, to drop it altogether. And that’s exactly what the traditions offer—a time-tested psychotechnology for getting into subtler and subtler states, letting go of grosser and grosser states, until you have let go of states and form altogether.

And that’s what Patrick was talking about when he was saying that integral students would have a way to bring vitality, and life, and basic sanity, and the Great Liberation to whatever you are doing in Form. To make that Form integral. Real integral means being able to use both an understanding of the development of Form, and an understanding of the way you let go Form—you transcend and include it. And it’s that combination that marks the Fourth Turning, because nobody had really understood the developmental levels of form previously, not in a way that the West brought. It’s that levels part that is such an important addition. So with both of them—levels of form and contemplative transcendence of form—putting both of those together, you truly have a very very integral view. One that allows you to both increase consciousness and increase your capacity for Freedom and Fullness.

—–