Everyone Is Right

Without wisdom, knowledge becomes dangerous. This is as true for integral knowledge as it is any other. When our knowledge so far outpaces our wisdom, we can fall in all sorts of traps — including know-it-all arrogance, spiritual bypassing, self-aggrandizing mysticism, bad interpersonal hygiene, and possibly even diabetes and tooth decay. This can be a challenge for all communities, including the integral community. Especially when we are living at a time when information is so overabundant. We are drowning in information, and most of it is bad and broken information, and it takes a fair amount of wisdom just to be able to tell the good from the bad. Which is why Ryan and I wanted to do this special episode of Inhabit — to take a fuller look at what exactly “integral wisdom” means, and what sorts of wisdoms tend to naturally fall out of the integral map itself — quadrant wisdom, stage wisdom, shadow wisdom, type wisdom, polarity wisdom, etc. — all of which help us to enact that integral map in increasingly skilllful, friendly, and effective ways. Watch as we explore a number of practices and perspectives to help you bring your own wisdoms to the surface, allowing you to move through the world with more skill, compassion, and humility.

In this free discussion, Ryan and Corey offer some simple practices and perspectives to help keep us grounded and engaged during this transition not only into a new year, but into a whole new decade, with a whole new set of possibilities, challenges, and life conditions emerging all around us. Whenever our environment changes around us, even something as simple as the calendar moving into a new year, it’s an opportunity to also do some work to change our interiors. We tend to move naturally into a more reflective space, reviewing the previous year and imagining the one to come, cycle through this process of making an entire year’s worth of accumulated subjects into objects — all of our decisions, all of our successes, all of our regrets, etc. It’s a chance to take inventory of our own lives — where we’ve been, where we’re at, and where we would like to go next. Just because the world around us seems to be in more turmoil than ever before, doesn’t mean our inner lives need to feel that way too. And as the world continues to become more and more chaotic, conversations like these invite you to discover the unmovable subject within yourself, so that you can cultivate the resilience, equanimity, and stamina required to bring your gifts more fully into the world. Because now more than ever, the world needs you. Something new is trying to emerge. And it can only emerge through you.

We all possess a unique constellation of traumas, enacted by your own unique kosmic address, and which can lead to your own unique wisdom. This is what we hope to help you uncover today.

As the star of Judge Judy, Judith Sheindlin presides over the #1 show in US daytime television, where she rules on small-claims disputes drawn from real-life litigants across the country. Now in its 23rd year, Judge Judy attracts 10 million viewers a day who are eager to watch the 76-year-old grandmother transform into a Valkyrie for Justice, laying waste to the mendacities of cheating lovers, thieving landlords, lying teenagers and meddling mothers-in-law. In this episode I examine her genius and her enormous contribution to the evolution of consciousness and culture. —Jeff Salzman

Many integralists are fans of Otto Scharmer, MIT professor and developer of “Theory U”, a brilliant tool for activating higher stages of consciousness that has gained wide acceptance in organizations. As a leading public intellectual Dr. Scharmer also writes about politics and culture. In this episode, integral psychotherapist Dr. Keith Witt and I discuss Scharmer’s political theory as presented in a popular and much-shared article, Axial Shift: The Decline of Trump, the Rise of the Greens, and the New Coordinates of Societal Change.

In this special Devil’s Night interview, our good friends Bruce Alderman and Layman Pascal talk to Hofman and Daemon, former members of The Satanic Temple in New York, and founding members of the Satanic organization LORE: The Satanic Collective of NYC, about the history of Satanism and the new Integral and Metamodern-ish forms that are currently emerging. These ain’t the baby-sacrificing satanists your mother was afraid of in the 1980s. They’re the sort of satanists who build statues of Baphomet outside of government courthouses in order to protect free speech and the separation of church and state from religious fundamentalists who are determined to legislate their own mythic morality. They are not anti-Christian, anti-spiritual, or even anti-religious — in fact they want to help integrate the apparent polarities between spirituality and sensuality, between masculine and feminine, and between light and shadow, pulling all of these together into a sort of “transcendent hedonism” that fully honors the dignity of the separate self even while plunging it into a far more expansive space of selfless awareness. Their approach is something we might call a “social tonglen” — becoming the darkness, playing the scapegoat, and consciously taking the hits, all in service of achieving greater social good. “Everybody kind of knows the Socratic ‘daemon’ — that there’s some kind of higher indwelling spirit that may have been unnecessarily excluded throughout history, and to which we might turn for real guidance in ourselves or as the essence of ourselves. But we also know what it means for a drug addict to go to a self-help program and says ‘he’s got a demon inside him’. So there’s a way for the darkness to draw you down, or to draw you up, and there’s an archetype or a figure that can represent either of those. And for most people they’re very conflated. People who are hyper-reactive against something like ‘satanism’ — even very sophisticated people can be weird about it — and one of the reasons is their own non-integrated shadow, but another reason is they’re aware that there’s a tangle between the evil they don’t want, and the evil they do want.” —Layman Pascal So join us as we take a short walk on the dark side, where demons and daemons alike dance to the throbbing rhythm of a living, breathing, ever-evolving universe.

The Integral Vision: Origins and Applications — 04 — The Architecture of Growth by Integral Life

The Integral Vision: Origins and Applications — 03 — Taking Perspectives on the Culture Wars by Integral Life

The Integral Vision: Origins and Applications — 02 — Communism, Postmodernism, Women's Leadership by Integral Life

The Integral Vision: Origins and Applications — 01 — The Origins of the Integral Vision by Integral Life