The Integral Worldview: The Secret to Healing Ourselves and Our World

By Michael Emerson

Integral means comprehensive, inclusive, and uniting. Your worldview is the lens, or perspective, through which you see reality. The next stage which is now unfolding is the Integral worldview. It is the most comprehensive view of reality we have right now. The knowledge in this book is compiled from the biggest names in Integral thought. Ken Wilber and others helped me see the "big picture." If you feel the world is falling apart and becoming more and more polarized, you should read this book. The Integral worldview helped me see the underlying wholeness of myself and my world. It showed me a path to healing myself and my world. My hope is that it will do the same for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667858838

Book preview

Introduction

What if there was a secret not yet commonly known, the knowledge of which would heal ourselves and our world? My premise is that the Integral worldview is that secret. Integral means comprehensive, inclusive, and uniting. A worldview is your set of beliefs. It is your mental map of reality that influences how you perceive, think, know, and act. It determines the very questions you can ask yourself and your view of future possibilities. Your worldview is the lens, or perspective, through which your awareness sees reality.

Our worldview evolved in the same way our body evolved, one stage at a time. Anthropologists agree that humans have gone through about six major awareness stages in our history. Each stage of awareness has a different perspective of reality. Researchers are now seeing signs that the Integral worldview is coming online as the next major stage in awareness evolution. For the first time in history, all the world’s knowledge can be accessed by almost anyone through the Internet. The Integral worldview will be unique because it puts all that knowledge into a single comprehensive framework. Understanding the Integral perspective of reality will help you connect the dots, giving you a big picture view of the underlying wholeness of yourself and your world. 

Do you feel the world is polarized, disconnected, and falling apart? This book will show you how the Integral worldview reconnects everyone’s partial truths. It will show how to use discriminating wisdom to judge and rank those partial truths. The Integral worldview acknowledges and reconciles the different viewpoints on both sides of the political culture wars. Most importantly, the Integral worldview can provide the necessary tools for approaching today’s complex individual, social, and global problems. This book will show how the Integral worldview combines a wide diversity of partial truths into a single interrelated network of knowledge and shows how mutually enriching all the partial truths are.

As Ken Wilber said, If you have seen truth, you must simply speak out. Speak out with compassion, speak out with angry wisdom, or speak out with skillful means, but speak out you must. This book is my small way to speak out. To help spread knowledge about the more inclusive truths and perspectives that evolution is pulling us towards, which is the Integral worldview. 

I was introduced to the Integral worldview by Ken Wilber’s book, A Brief History of Everything. After reading it, I felt an epiphany. All of a sudden, the world made sense to me. It may have been similar to the joyful realization Galileo felt when he discovered that the earth moves around the sun. Galileo faced criticism at first. The church doctrine was that the earth was the unmoving center of the universe. Galileo’s viewpoint was violently opposed. The church forced Galileo to recant his discovery and placed him under house arrest. The moment he was set free, he looked down to the ground and, stamping the earth, said, And yet … it moves.

Galileo’s scientific rationality saw a higher stage of truth than the myth-believing minds of the church leaders could see. Galileo’s rational worldview was a higher stage of awareness which brought a more adequate way of explaining our world. Similarly, the global problems of our world today make it necessary to find a more adequate way of seeing our world. The Integral worldview is the next higher stage of awareness that can provide the necessary perspective and more adequate truths to heal ourselves and our world.

In the words of Ken Wilber, Evolution is not done with us yet. On the contrary, it is still very much alive in humanity’s tireless quest for greater meaning, greater purpose, and greater sophistication. This evolutionary impulse keeps us moving forward, allowing modern science to emerge from magic and superstition, modern medicine from leeching and bloodletting, chemistry from alchemy, psychology from phrenology, astronomy from astrology, democracy from theocracy, and the list goes on. Every field of human inquiry continues to move through wave upon wave of increasing accuracy, fidelity, and applicability. Integral is the next wave and dramatically enhances each of these fields—art, medicine, psychology, spirituality, sustainability, leadership, and many more—while also showing how they all fit together in a seamless totality of knowledge and understanding.

If the Integral worldview conflicts with your worldview, you are allowed to hold on to your most cherished truths. But, as Galileo might have said, And yet … please be open to the possibility of higher, more inclusive, truths.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Dedication

Epiphanies are enlightening realizations that allow you to understand problems from a new and higher perspective. This book is dedicated to Ken Wilber. His words are a constant source of enlightening realizations in my life and a powerful healing force in the world.

The understanding of ‘evolutionary consciousness’ is perhaps the most important thing lacking in Spiritual practices today. Evolution means growth and development. This means that there are aspects of reality that have not yet arisen in our consciousness. But they will arise if we grow.

Ken Wilber

Chapter One:

What is Awareness?

Evolution has a direction. That direction is towards more complexity, inclusiveness, adequacy, and awareness. Evolution is taking us towards the Integral worldview. The evolution of awareness is critical to understanding the Integral worldview. So, before we get to the evolution part of the story, let’s define the awareness part of the story.

Dictionaries define awareness as the subjective ability to perceive external information. An aware agent can perceive and act on that perception. Awareness has two aspects: an aware subject and an object of that awareness. Awareness is the feeling we all share of I am in here (the subject) and the world is out there (the object). This inner feeling of I is constant throughout your life, with all our memories to prove it. Awareness is all your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. It is the song stuck in your head, the sweetness of chocolate on your tongue, the throbbing pain of a smashed toe, and the fierce love you feel for your child.

We all know what it means to say, I. But do we? It is easy to define the many things we identify with, but the underlying subjective awareness of I is like searching with a flashlight to find the light source. It reveals the various objects that the light falls on; my body, abilities, age, beliefs, and thoughts, but it never shines on the source of the light.

Awareness can be sensed by looking inward and being aware of awareness itself – being aware of pure subjectivity. Your mind’s job, with its thoughts and feelings, is to distinguish between the good stuff that will help you survive and the bad stuff that will kill you. But your thoughts and feelings are not the entire extents of who you are. Your mind is a tool you use; you are aware of it. Your mind is an object, as are your thoughts and feelings. Who or what is aware of your mind and its thoughts and feelings? That is pure subjectivity. That is pure awareness. Awareness is an essential part of who you are. It is the light source that is so hard to find.

Awareness is not a thing. Like empty space, it has no features of its own. It keeps its quality of emptiness when something appears in its space. Awareness is not an it. It shouldn’t even be a noun because it is not an object. Awareness is more like a verb. It is what the subject is doing – more like aware-ing. It is not about getting into a particular state. It is happening right now, even if you don’t notice. It’s not some mystical experience. It is just everyday witnessing of experience. It’s not something you have to learn to do. You simply need to notice it.

You cannot see awareness, just as an eye cannot see itself without a mirror. You can experience pure awareness, but only when the mind takes a rest, is distracted, or gives up trying. Those are the times when your identity shifts from the content of awareness to awareness itself. It’s not about what you’re aware of, but who or what is doing the aware-ing. Is it my thoughts? But I am aware of my thoughts. So what’s aware of them? Try turning your focus around from what is noticed to who or what is noticing. The idea is not to come up with an answer. The idea is to ask a question that shifts your perspective from the foreground objects of awareness to the background subject doing the aware-ing. Let the foreground objects be whatever they want to be. Who or what is aware? Awareness is aware. For a moment, be awareness.

Awareness is what is noticing your current experience right now. Awareness is what’s looking, hearing, tasting, feeling, and smelling. Awareness is the space in which appear dreams, thoughts, and emotions. Awareness is the unchanging I am feeling that stays with you from childhood.

Consciousness and awareness seem to have similar meanings, but there is a significant difference. Consciousness is non-dual or not two, – meaning there is no subject/object split. There is no boundary between the I in here and the world out there. I capitalize the word Consciousness because it is synonymous with the word God or Spirit. Consciousness is prior to existence, existence itself, and that which is beyond existence. We cannot say, We came from Consciousness, because we never left. We cannot say, When we die, we return to Consciousness, because we have already arrived. It would be like trying to come from a room you never left or go into a room you occupy. Consciousness is non-qualifiable, non-conceptual, and beyond description. Words can only point you in the direction to experience it for yourself. It is similar to trying to describe the taste of a peach to someone who has never had a peach. All you can do is point to a peach and let them have a taste.

On the other hand, awareness is a duality meaning a subject is doing the aware-ing, and there is an object of that aware-ing. Awareness is qualifiable: meaning it is conceptual and describable in words. Awareness is not prior to or beyond existence like Consciousness. Instead, awareness is the form Consciousness takes in our manifest world of existence.

We are so engrossed with the objects or appearances revealed by the light that we pay no attention to the light.

Ramana Maharshi

Chapter Two:

The Integral Worldview Embraces I, We, and It/Its Perspectives

The Three Faces of Truth

Have you ever noticed that every major language has three pronouns that signify first-person, second-person, and third-person perspectives? The first-person, I, deals with subjective truths such as thoughts, feelings, memories, and perceptions. I truths have to do with self-expression, art, and the beauty in the eye of the beholder.

The second-person, We, refers to the intersubjective truths such as shared values, meanings, language, relationships, and cultural background. We truths describe how we – you and I – treat each other. Do we do so with honesty, truthfulness, and goodness or not? In other words, do we treat each other with basic morality.

The third-person, It, represents the objective truths such as matter, energy, behavior, and competencies – in other words, the physical sciences.

First, second, and third-person pronouns represent different dimensions of reality and the different perspectives to which language has adapted. These dimensions are so fundamental to the Integral worldview that we call them the three faces of truth. These dimensions of reality are also referred to as the four quadrants. We arrive at four quadrants because reality has interiors, exteriors, individuals, and collectives. We simplify it to the three faces of truth by calling the singular exterior It and the plural exterior Its both It.

Another way to say I, We, and It dimensions of reality is to say they refer to art, morals, and science. Or self, culture, and nature. Or truth, goodness, and beauty. The point is that every object or event in the world has all three of these dimensions. You can look at any object or event from the viewpoint of how I personally see it, from the perspective of how We see it, and from the perspective of It, the objective facts of the object or event.

If you leave out one or two of the dimensions of reality, art, morals, or science, things go terribly wrong. For example, today’s materialistic scientists believe that only exterior It perspectives exist. They believe matter and energy to be the fundamental substances in nature. They believe physical interactions in the brain produce awareness. Science has been wildly successful in increasing our understanding of nature and advancing technology, but it makes a horrible mistake when denying the truths of the I and We perspectives.

Western medicine is an example of the need to embrace all three perspectives. Conventional medicine believes in objective causes of physical illness. It, therefore, prescribes mostly objective interventions. But the Integral worldview claims that every event also has an I and We dimension. The recent increase in alternative medicine has made it clear that the patient’s subjective emotions, attitude, and intentions play a crucial role in both the cause and the cure of physical illness as well.

How a culture subjectively views a particular illness – with care and compassion, or ridicule and scorn – can also profoundly impact how a patient copes with their disease and affect the course of the physical illness itself. We know that cancer patients in support groups live longer than those without similar cultural support.

The Holy Trinity is an example of the three perspectives in our lives. The third-person (It) face of awareness is God-beyond-us. In the Holy Trinity, this is the Father. This perspective is the more objective face of God. The second-person (We) face of awareness is the God-beside-us. In the Holy Trinity, this is the Son. This perspective is the intimate, more relational face of God. The first-person (I) face of awareness is the God-being-us. This perspective is the Holy Spirit. This perspective is the personal subjective face of God.

We don’t need to throw out Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam. We need new, more evolved versions of them. We want to hold on to the rich historical traditions while transcending their culturally limited and sometimes prejudiced practices. We need to include all three faces of God into our Integral Spirituality – a God-beyond-us we can talk to in our prayers, a God-beside-us we can relate to in our hearts, and a God-being-us we can say is our truest self-identity.

The ‘I’ and the ‘We’ and the ‘It’ each radiate the glory of the Ground of Being that they are. And in the radiant awareness, every ‘I’ becomes a God and every ‘We’ becomes God’s sincerest worship and every ‘It’ becomes God’s most gracious temple.

Ken Wilber

Objective Truth Does Not Exist

It is easy to prove that the only direct experience you have is your own subjective awareness. Objective truth does not exist. Do a simple thought experiment. Think to yourself, I exist. Do you feel like you are directly experiencing the fact that you exist? Could I talk you out of the fact that you exist? Why not? Could it be that you directly experience your existence by aware-ing, which is self-validating?

Now try to directly experience the blueness of the sky. You can’t do it. The rods and cones on your retina pick up those 450-nanometer wavelengths of photons that your awareness interprets as blue. That is not a direct experience at all. It is an experience filtered and modulated by your awareness.

Our physical world depends on our subjective awareness for its interpretation. We are so accustomed to our beliefs matching those around us that we forget objective reality does not exist. What we call objective physical reality is consensus reality. Things are said to be real and true because the majority of people agree they are real and true. Grass appears green because most people in the world see grass as green. If most people were red-green color blind, the objective truth would be that the grass is red.

Our physical senses limit what they tell us and lie about reality. For example, we only see a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can’t see radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, or gamma rays. Likewise, our ears hear only a tiny portion of the entire sound spectrum. The subjective interpretation of our senses has evolved for our survival, not for experiencing reality.

If we can agree that all we ever know are the sensations, feelings, thoughts, and images in our subjective awareness, how can we be so sure there is a physical reality causing our perceptions? Doesn’t it have to be an assumption? Yes, it is an assumption, a very plausible assumption. The laws of physics and biology are the same everywhere. We cannot repeal the law of gravity or walk on water just by believing we can. The simplest way to explain these universal laws is to assume some form of data about physical reality is really there. However, we may never know it directly, and its nature may be nothing like how we experience it.

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

Marcus Aurelius

Everything Has an Inside and an Outside

By definition, awareness is as fundamental as matter because matter has the subjective ability to perceive external information. All matter/energy was created at the Big Bang at the reactivity stage of awareness. Subatomic particles have a primitive reactive awareness. They can sense and react to the four fundamental forces in nature – gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear force, and strong nuclear force. Particles don’t think about their day, but they have a small, subjective experience. We are not talking about specific forms of awareness, such as self-reflective awareness, which is the capacity to reflect on one’s existence. We are just talking about primitive awareness, which is the ability to perceive information and act on that perception.

For most of this century, it was unacceptable to look into the mysterious inner world of awareness – it was not a relevant topic for serious science. One reason for this lack of acceptance is that mathematics became the language of materialistic science, but mathematics has a limited, purely quantitative vocabulary. Think about the joy we feel seeing the beauty of a rose. Science can’t put those qualities of joy or beauty into a mathematical formula.

Scientists say they can’t study awareness because it is unobservable. They can’t peek inside someone’s head and measure their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. But scientists deal with unobservables all the time. For example, subatomic particles are too small to see, but scientists study them indirectly by observing their vapor trails in cloud chambers. Awareness is as unobservable as subatomic particles, but awareness can be experienced directly, unlike particles that are neither observable nor