Integrity: the Foundation of an Integral Life

August 22, 2008 By Tom

After setting up my profile at the new, just-launched Integral Life website, I’ve been visiting the nascent discussion forums and have started to engage with other members a bit. In the section headed “What does an Integral Life mean to you?” I responded enthusiastically to one member’s suggestion that integrity seems to be an essential element of the integral stage. This is an all-important point that I feel often gets overlooked in discussions about integral development, about integral life practices, and about the orienting direction and mission of the Integral Revolution as a whole. Here’s what I wrote:

I think integrity, more than anything else, needs to be the foundational factor of the integral, post-postmodern stage. This isn’t fundamentally about lines, levels, or quadrants; it’s about continually striving for perfect integrity, in the biggest possible sense and for the biggest possible reasons (and knowing that, in an evolving Kosmos, we’re never going to reach a static perfection).

The AQAL framework is needed, though, to guide us in this inwardly felt pursuit, illuminating as it does the fact that at this point in our species’ development, integrity needs to happen at all levels, across all lines, between the One and the Many, the Inner and the Outer, simultaneously. It’s an inconceivably enormous task, planetary in scale (and beyond), and impossible for any individual to achieve alone. All we can do is all we can do, however, so I think the wholehearted and committed cultivation of our own individual integrity should be our personal pursuit and ongoing contemplation, 24/7. And from that increasingly solid foundation, we can inspire others with our own living example and thereby endeavor to forge integrity in the intersubjective and interobjective domains as well…

I’m a student of Andrew Cohen’s, and his “Six Principles of Evolutionary Enlightenment” are essentially pointing to this radically nondual, AQAL integrity: where an individual’s purest motives (1st Principle) are mirrored in that individual’s actions (2nd Principle), and where that fully autonomous, integrated individual (3rd Principle) lives and works in nondual harmony with the greater collective of his peers and society (4th Principle), all of which is happening in a Kosmocentric, integral edge-pushing context of constant evolutionary tension (5th Principle) and holonic natural hierarchy (6th Principle).

In my own experience, I know that even after over a decade of studying and, to some degree, mastering integral theory at a cognitive level, the only thing that seems to have any traction whatsoever in actually inching my self — and my life — out of its profound embeddedness in the postmodern swamp is my own sincere pursuit of integrity. Because if there’s anything that is antithetical to our culture of postmodern fragmentation (and our own relativistic and narcissistic values), it’s integrity — forged in the soul, for the sake of the whole, from the Ground of Being up.


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Robert MacNaughton on August 25, 2008 3:53 pm

    Hey Tom,
    Wow, thanks for this treatment on Integrity. You have fleshed-out many of my feelings in a way that’s clearly quite developed. Integrity is explicitly what I’ve declared as my purpose at this time in my life, so I honor any perspective on it that I can find.
    For others out there that may be interested in the offerings at IntegralLife.com, please use this coupon code when signing-up to receive a discounted membership: C62E4F
    Thanks again Tom, I look forward to hearing more of you reflections,
    Robert MacNaughton
    Integral Life Community

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