Everyone Is Right

Join Lisa Frost and me in a new monthly series that will explore how to bring more depth and artistry to our Integral Life Practice — the very best and most effective practices to help you Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, and Show Up in your life, your relationships, and your work in the world. Integral is itself a practice-based theory. “Integral Methodological Pluralism” is just a fancy way of saying, “here are all of the available practices that are available to us — practices that reveal everything we know about life, the universe, and everything. And here’s how to put all of those practices together, so we can better understand our reality, lead better/more fulfilling lives, and leave the universe and everything in better shape than we found it.“ In other words, practice is at the very core of integral. How do we grow up? We practice. How do we wake up? We practice. How do we clean up? That’s right, practice baby! How do we show up? Practice, practice practice, practice — and allowing the fruits of our practice to spill over into all four quadrants. These aren’t just conversations about the integral map — they are about living in the integral territory. Watch as Lisa and I take an in-depth look at our new Integral Life Practice platform, which offers a vast collection of self-guided practices as well as calendar of live daily practice sessionss led by skilled practice leaders from around the world, attended every day by a powerful community of like-hearted people who are profoundly committed to their own growth, awakening, and impact. Visit https://integrallife.com/calendar for the full Integral Life Practice session schedule.

We highly recommend you watch this instead of listening! You can find the full video here: https://integrallife.com/inhabit-your-inner-theatre/ Corey and Ryan take you on a cinematic journey through the stages of human development, using a series of 21 carefully-curated film clips to illustrate some of the most important qualities of each stage. Why film clips? Simple — it’s fun! Plus, these clips are from some of the most popular films from the last 80 years, commonly-shared reference points that most of us are already familiar with. This gives us the opportunity to put together one of the most accessible, friendly, and entertaining ways to introduce these important ideas to newcomers. And for those who are already familiar with integral thought and practice, this discussion will still be fascinating, fun, and occasionally moving, while also helping you more deeply contemplate the important difference between enjoying integral artenjoying art integrally. And as you watch, try to remember: all of this is actually happening inside of you. You may be viewing these film clips on a screen in front of you, but the stages we explore here are all alive within you right now, either as capacities you’ve already developed or as potentials that are waiting to be unleashed. 

The Witness itself is the ultimate movie screen — the effortless, simple feeling of being behind all of our perceptions. All of this is just a fleeting dance of light, sound, and shadow projected within your consciousness against that empty, all-pervasive awareness. So grab some popcorn, sit back, and enjoy this very special tour of your own inner theatre.

Robb Smith on Bitcoin by Integral Life

The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. The “Darth Vader move” is what happens when someone with an exceptionally high level of development uses the skills and capacities of that level for purposes generally deemed to be “wrong” — often the result of a highly developed cognitive intelligence combined with a poorly developed moral intelligence (Nazi scientists being the classic example). What happens when our higher angels get hijacked by our lowest demons? What is the cause of the Darth Vader move, and how can we prevent ourselves from being seduced by the Dark Side of the Force?

Excerpted from the full discussion here: https://integrallife.com/capitalism-growth-became-enemy-prosperity/ "To use the metaphor of our era, we are running an extractive, growth-driven economic operating system that has reached the limits of its ability to serve anyone, rich or poor, human or corporate. Moreover, we’re running it on super computers and digital networks that accelerate and amplify all its effects. Growth is the single, uncontested, core command of the digital economy… An operating system designed by 13th century Moorish accountants looking for a way to preserve the aristocracy of Europe has worked as promised. It turned the marketplace into one giant debtors’ prison. It is not only unfit for the needs of a 21st century digital society; central currency is the core mechanism of the growth trap." Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus To be alive in today's world is to be living through a raging, roiling argument about money: how it’s generated and how it will be distributed in the 21st century. Money dominates the changing politics and economics of the western hemisphere. Whether jobs, free trade, taxes, student debt, housing prices, AI-based automation, wealth disparities, educational funding or any of dozens of other headline-topics, how society will create and share value and resources sits at the forefront of our current moment.

Watch as Beena Sharma, Susanne Cook-Greuter, and Corey deVos offer a must-see presentation to help us understand the many healthy and unhealthy responses we are seeing to the coronavirus pandemic, all the way up and down the spiral of development. Chances are you are already seeing all of these responses surfacing all around you: in your social media feeds, among your friends and family, and even within yourself. And it can be confusing at times, seeing all these different and often contradictory responses flooding into your consciousness all at once, and trying to navigate our way through them in order to figure out which are more true, which are more partial, and which you resonate with the most. This presentation will help reduce that confusion for you — giving you a way to fold all of these different views and values into a greater sense of wholeness and meaning, while also giving you permission to return to some of these earlier stages in order to tend to the many concerns and anxieties that may be present for you there. It’s important, after all, to remember that none of these stages are inherently “better” or “worse” than any other. Although there are certainly healthy and unhealthy expressions at each stage, and our capacity for both complexity and compassion both increase as we move into the later stages of development, we can nonetheless also find within each of these stages a series of responses that are perfectly appropriate for the various life conditions we may find ourselves in. Sometimes the intelligences and capacities associated with earlier stages are best suited for a particular set of problems, and less suitable for other problems. Sometimes only later stages are capable of handling a certain magnitude of complexity, and other times these later stages can over-complexify certain problems and make things worse. Which means that all of these stages have their appropriate place, both out in the world and within ourselves. So join us as Beena and Susanne help us sort through all of this, taking us on an intimate 1st-person journey from the earliest stages of growth all the way to the deepest transpersonal stages of unity consciousness.

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” ― Ernest Hemingway Our crisis of trust has been rapidly compounding in recent years, as the internet has delivered us into an age of aperspectival madness — an epistemic breakdown where shared reality becomes splintered into hermetically-sealed social media silos, where all enfoldment between opposing perspectives breaks down completely, and where evidence-based truths become sacrificed on the altar of narrative beliefs. “Trust” is something like an immune system for our society. It prevents our collective body from being infected by propaganda, zealotry, and social regression. Here at the tail end of 2020, it is clear that we are experiencing a crisis of truth, as well as a crisis of meaning. And underlying them both is an even deeper crisis — a crisis of trust. Trust, of course, is a paradox. We live in a highly complex and highly specialized civilization. Our daily lives depend upon us being able to trust a massive interconnected system of strangers and institutions, just to be able to put food on the table every night that won’t end up making our families sick. And yet when our fundamental trust in those same strangers and institutions begins to collapse, so do the foundations of civilization itself. When our fundamental trust in each other becomes completely dismantled, then so does our capacity to perceive and understand truth. After all, our perceptions of “truth” depend on a mutual recognition of “truthfulness” — another word for trust. And when we allow ourselves to believe that everyone is always already lying to us from every direction (other than our own preferred media silos, of course), then our reality suddenly becomes unknowable. As President Obama recently said: “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.” This is a truly wicked problem. It is a tremendously complex and multivalent challenge, with causes and effects that can be tracked through all four quadrants. And like any other “wicked problem”, it is not something that can be solved in a piecemeal fashion: focus too much on any single variable and all the other variables change immediately — which means that partial solutions actually risk making things worse. Watch as Ryan and I take a deep dive into the wicked problem of social trust, looking at this meta-crisis through each of the four quadrants, as well as some key practices and perspectives that can help us restore our trust in each other, in our institutions, in ourselves, and in the grand evolutionary unfolding itself.

Watch as Ryan and Corey reflect on the results of the 2020 Presidential Election, exploring its implications for the world and within our own hearts, while also creating a space where we can begin to release some of the fears and anxieties many of us have been struggling with during these chaotic and uncertain times. What is our work going forward? How can we begin to heal the deep ruptures that have formed in our society? What sorts of personal and political shadows have emerged for us over the last few years, and how can we better manage and re-integrate those shadows? How can we learn to set our political views and identities aside, so that we can find a deeper and more fulfilling connection with each other? How do we skillfully engage with friends and family members who subscribe to unfalsifiable narrative realities such as QAnon? After years of social fragmentation and media balkanization, how can we possibly begin to put Humpty Dumpty back together again? We hope you enjoy this special post-election episode of Inhabit! Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Corey deVos and Mark Fischler discuss how best to expand and embody our most integral influences and intentions. Excerpted from the full 2-hour conversation here: https://integrallife.com/the-fierce-urgency-of-now/

In this very special episode of Inhabit, Ryan and I focus on one of the most essential elements of any Integral Life Practice — directly engaging your democratic systems and showing up to cast your vote. Watch as Ryan and I discuss the following: -Why it’s never a good idea to base our electoral decisions on the current state of the culture wars - Why it’s important to differentiate “politics” from “governance” - Why it’s important to differentiate ordinary people on the left and the right from the social holons of Democratic and GOP political parties. - Can a person’s political views be used to assess their overall development? - Can a solidly integral person be a Trump supporter? (Spoiler: of course they can.) I also offer an in-depth exploration of cynicism — how to recognize it in our own lives, and how to escape its corrosive influence. We do this by drilling down to a more fundamental polarity — the “trust but verify” polarity, which shows how trust and assumptions of good-faith should be integrated with healthy skepticism and critical thinking. But when this polarity becomes disintegrated and balkanized, it inevitably takes us into the negative poles of naïveté and cynicism. The good news is, by understanding this core polarity we can wrap some healthy guardrails around our own enactment of political reality, and catch ourselves when we feel ourselves sliding toward one of these unhealthy poles. Why is this important? “Corruption” and “cynicism” are related in many important ways. Many of us feel like our cynicism is a natural response to corruption — why should we trust a system that is so obviously rigged against us? However, the opposite is equally if not more true: it’s not so much that corruption results in cynicism, but rather cynicism creates a vacuum that gets immediately fillled with corruption. Which makes “escaping cynicism” absolutely paramount right now, as it is one of the most significant obstacles preventing so many of us from fully inhabiting this democracy, making our voices heard, and choosing the deliberately-partial actions and decisions required to move the political pendulum where we'd like to see it to go, rather than waiting for the world to catch up with us before we are willing to participate. Finally, I take a few moments to present my “3-Point Plan to Save Democracy” — the three most crucial systemic changes we need to make in the Lower-Right quadrant in order to restore healthy political enfoldment, de-escalate the culture wars, and rehabilitate our democracy. You don’t want to miss that.