Just to further underline the point, amber doesn’t ONLY consolidate around ethnicity, but rather defines its “us vs. them” around any number of shared characteristics — especially if there is a “code” at the center of the group that reinforces cohesion and conformity within the group. That “code” can be anything from the Bible, to the U.S. Constitution, to political belief systems, to military chains of command, etc. Perceived adherence to the code determines your social standing within the amber group. “We believe this, while they believe that, therefore we are superior” is a central fault line at the amber stage.
I remember about 30 years enjoying sports competitions but now I find them just strange, like I’m observing primitive rituals, lol.
Same, actually. I was never very interested in sports, and it’s no coincidence that my kinesthetic line is one of my most difficult to grow I played football for a year in high school, but that was mostly to bridge my relationship with my dad. I do have a very romantic fondness for baseball, however, which is why I used that example
I encourage you to check out the film clip examples I used for the Amber stage on this page, where I try to demonstrate healthy, unhealthy, and neutral examples of Amber. The video game clip is a lot of fun too.
Thought I would share some paragraphs I wrote a few weeks back, which gets into how/why different typologies might show up differently in different aspects of the integral project.
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Reminds me of the ongoing conversations I have with Ken about “equal opportunity vs. equal outcomes”. Ken is often critical of the “outcomes” argument, often framing it as a conflict between orange and green, and likes to point out that you generally cannot have both simultaneously. But I’ve begun to enact this a bit differently — not as opposites, but as a critical polarity between Zone 5 autonomy and Zone 7 social self-organization: we expect that truly equal opportunities in Zone 5 would result in essentially equal outcomes in Zone 7, but only after accounting for typology, proclivity, development, etc. Which to me means that…
a) Unequal opportunities tend to create unequal outcomes,
b) Unequal outcomes can then reinforce unequal opportunities,
c) Outcomes can therefore be a useful measure of just how equal our opportunities are,
c) But unequal outcomes does not necessarily mean that opportunities are also unequal, because of the whole typology/proclivity/development thing.
All of which is to say, considering that our own internal analytics suggest that our own Integral Life audience is pretty evenly split between men and women in terms of overall web traffic (about 55% women to 45% men, according to GA), I think we see different typologies engaging differently with different nodes within the larger integral project. The “talking head” podcasting space does seem to lean toward men, while our practice platform, for example, is skewed pretty significantly toward women (both in terms of who shows up to practice, as well as the practice leaders that attract the largest practice groups). Which makes a certain amount of sense, considering masculine and feminine typologies. I also notice that certain live shows tend to attract different kinds of audience — when I do a show with Dr. Keith, we tend to have more women then men joining the live call (granted, Dr. Keith is a hunk of sexy man meat).
So it’s interesting to me, just noticing the patterns of our own social self-organization, and who chooses to show up for certain activities within this space.
Especially interesting, considering 15 years ago our audience was probably more like 70% men to 30% women, so our outcomes (and opportunities) are feeling much more equal these days.strong text
All of which is to say, I think we do see unequal outcomes in the integral podcasting space, but that doesn’t mean there are unequal opportunities, just different types and levels of interest!
Are you ok that almost all Integral Elite are white males?
I’m not trying to “do woke” on Integralism, but it is a bit unusual that you’ve referenced no Integral participation by any of our under represented minorities.
Do you think broadening the Integral Intelligensia to include a minority or three might add some richness to Integral?
If nothing else introspection into why such a bottleneck exists might yield some richness, yes?
“Are you ok that almost all Integral Elite are white males?”
Again, I think this is inaccurate. I suppose it depends on your definition of “elite”. Over half of our practice leaders are women, as are most of our practice attendees. One of my shows is co-hosted by a Jewish man (I guess Jews count as “white” these days?) The co-host before him was Diane Musho Hamilton, and we did a series of long-form shows that explored race and racism, and included a number of prominent black voices. We’ve even talked about this exact issue right here on these shows.
As for my concern, I am constantly trying to bring integral ideas to new audiences, and always hope to bring more representation to our offerings. Thankfully we’ve already shifted the male/female ratio — again, there are more females in our audience than males, and more females leading and participating in our weekly practice sessions.
“Do you think broadening the Integral Intelligensia to include a minority or three might add some richness to Integral?”
Sure, to a degree, which as I just explained, we already do But this is also largely a self-selecting space, which is going to be more appealing to some typologies more than others.
In fact, funny enough, one project I am actively thinking about is doing a new series with a good friend of mine, an integral Shambhala Buddhist practitioner and Black Panther member who is also a fellow hip hop dj. We are both madly in love with music, but come from very different backgrounds — and because “cultural exchange” is such an important Zone 3 intervention to get us out of ethnocentric thinking, I was thinking of doing a series that basically imitates the highly popular “reaction videos” we see on YouTube, where folks listen to music from way outside their usual musical idiom and share their appreciation. I bet we’d have a lot of fun with that format, while also exposing our audience to a wide variety of new musical influences.
“If nothing else introspection into why such a bottleneck exists might yield some richness, yes?”
Yes, exactly as I did above. Did you read the whole spiel about socioeconomics, middle class developmental privilege, and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs above? That’s the result of years of observation and introspection — including introspection into my own conditioned biases, blind spots, privileges, etc. and how that might influence my ongoing content production.
I think the whole confusion here is that @FermentedAgave is trying to appeal to unhealthy Green Postmodern meta in a “gotcha, you aren’t woke because your group is mostly white”
All the while not realizing that Integral isn’t a community that places Green Meta as the priority.
It’s not about the efforts, which I think noble in intent, but more about outcomes.
The visible participants would seemingly be White males, with Diane as about the only active top stature woman engaged in Integral.
I’m not saying you do anything to exclude anyone, it’s just that it ends up with majority of the Deep Integral thinkers being white males. And no don’t think the odd Jew or Gay changes the underlying White male basis.
Just something to consider as the demographics for you community change over time.
And just perhaps Integral is a decidedly masculine ideology at the core. Tthe “benevolent observer” performing critical assessments on humanity might itself be decidedly masculine, decidedly Western/White.
Yes, and well considered. This is an interesting conundrum. If remembering past conversations, Integral Theory is essentially focused on implementing a cognitive trickle down. IT is really only focused on the top few % cognitively gifted in order to trickle down/out to rest of humanity the ideology. I would include a knowledge domain fanning out to this as well when IT focuses on those that self select to psychological, sociological, government administrative, legal activist, social activist domains. It would then fan out to various domains such as health care, political, perhaps communications/marketing domains.
In short not much focus, on bringing forward say a kid in a ghetto, but focusing on the social activist working to determine what’s best for the lower tiers.
You mention self observation and introspection. Are there review boards or procedures to enable these introspection? Or is it based upon personal inights and epiphanies?
Of course the marketplace assesses ideas and votes with adoption as a feedback loop.
Again, I think much of this comes down to the “equal opportunities vs. equal outcomes” comment I made above, where we are seeing how different typologies showing up differently for different facets of the integral project. Our two main ILP teachers, who do practices every single week with our community, are both women. In many ways, they are even more “prominent” than Diane, in terms of their visibility and frequency of contributions to the field. While the podcasting space does indeed tend to be dominated by males. Which makes a certain amount of sense to me, actually — women tend to be (but not always) more interested in 1st-person practice and 2nd-person relating, while the men tend to be more interested in 3rd-person ideas.
We also have a new show gearing up that will be hosted by Kelly Carlin, so yes, we are always looking for ways to diversify out talking heads. We’re not going to enforce a quota system or anything, but are constantly looking for new voices to add to the chorus.
That feels a bit narrow, in terms of describing our audience. The roles that you identify as our primary demographics are all exterior-facing, when in reality, the vast majority of our audience show up here for the interior-facing principles and practices (e.g. waking up, growing up, cleaning up, etc.), and THEN applying those insights and wisdoms to the exterior world. So it’s more of an inside-out evolution, than an outside-in revolution. Honestly, if we had more government administrators, social activists, etc. we would probably exert a lot more influence than we currently are
So our political conversations, for example, are not really the primary focus of the site (even though they seem to generate the most discussion, maybe because there is more room for disagreement). In a sense, discussions like those are secondary — what we are doing is taking folks who have done the work within their inner quadrants, and creating a space where they can use that inner-work to help the rest of us make better sense of the exterior worlds we find ourselves in. They represent various views from the integral stage, but not the rungs of the ladder that lead people to those views.
So really, I’d say that Integral Life has five primary and intersecting types of offering, all five of which factor into the sorts of views we share in these discussions:
Integral metatheory
Psychological health and wellbeing
Spiritual awakening
Sense-making
Community of practice
That said, many of our favorite integral scholars, professionals, and intellectual ambassadors have done a fantastic job of applying this material to just about every knowledge domain in existence, as seen in our weekly Journal of Integral Theory and Practice offerings. The basic idea here is, just like the Renaissance allowed all these fields of human inquiry to mature into their rational orange versions — alchemy to chemistry, astronomy to astrology, phrenology into psychology and neuroscience, etc. — the “integral renaissance” will do something very similar, revolutionizing these fields from the inside out, while also showing how all these fields “hang together” within the frame of integral methodological pluralism.
A simple way to think about it:
once upon a time all these fields were all fused together, with a single or very limited set of authorities (the Church, the King, etc.) governing all knowledge, and even forbidding certain kinds of knowledge.
Then modern orange and green stages allowed us to differentiate these fields from each other — we can talk about physics separately from psychology, separately from morality, separately from spirituality or mathematics or anthropology, etc. Each of these fields then uses rationality to illuminate some corner of the Kosmos, revealing something important about our inner and outer universe. So we get an entire school of science devoted to the elephant’s tail, another devoted to the elephant’s trunk, another to the elephant’s leg, etc., and then they fight among themselves around which body part is most fundamentally real.
And now the integral renaissance allows us to re-integrate these fields back into a cohesive and coherent whole that reflects our total understanding of life, the universe, and everything, so we can finally see the full elephant and understand that it is one single living organism. And in fact, this process of fusion -> differentiation -> integration can be seen at every level of evolution; this is just the most recent iteration of that ongoing evolutionary process.
I think you may overestimate the size of our organization
We are basically 3 full time employees, and a small handful of part-timers, contractors, and volunteers, trying to hold all of this on our shoulders. I’m actually regularly astonished at how much good work such a small team is capable of doing together!
So some of our primary contributors include a Jewish man, a gay man, a lesbian woman, and a Sri Lankan woman, but we still don’t win any diversity points at all? Damn, now we’re never going to win the woke olympics.
Robb Smith is our resident Republican. Though I believe his voting record is more independent in recent years.
I’m working on getting Rollie Stanich, my dear brother, former employee, and author of Integral Christianity The Way of Embodied Love, to possibly host his own Christian-focused program. I just featured him in our most recent episode of Inhabit, published last week:
You might also check out our regular Centering Prayer practice sessions, here:
For more Integral Christianity resources, here are some additional links for you:
Thanks for the well considered and broad posting. Lovely sharing on your Transformative relationship with Jesus!
Sounds like you’re doing quite a lot to create a “big tent”.
I’m still a bit hung up on the integral “assessment of those people” who consistently show up as “lower on the development scale” vs the integral community’s self assessment which seems to be “we’re so advanced only these people can peddle with us”.
I mean, this is just how development works. I understand that the notion of vertical development makes some people uncomfortable though.
You have to grow through concrete-operational cognition before you make it to formal-operational cognition. And you have to grow through form-op in order to make it to vision logic. You can’t skip stages.
You have to learn arithmetic before you can learn algebra. And you need to know algebra before you can learn calculus. You can’t skip stages.
Similarly, you have to grow through orange before you make it to green. And then you need to grow through green in order to make it to integral. You can’t skip stages.
And “more developed” doesn’t mean “superior”, unless we are talking about specific tasks. A 12th grader is more developed than a 4th grader. Does that make an 18 year old “superior” to a 10 year old? Of course not. Just more equipped to handle a greater degree of complexity. We don’t expect fourth graders to do calculus — it is literally over their heads. In fact, it would be cruel to put them in that position in the first place. The goal, as always, is exactly as Ken states:
“At any point in history, the political ideal is to let each stage be itself, and govern from the highest reasonably available at any given time.”
Very long answer Corey… If say an Integralist were to get caught up in an ego/shadows driven view of themselves and the world in which they live, what might that viewpoint look like?
This is where my question regarding feedback mechanisms in Integral Theory. Otherwise an always linear progression from the somewhat sacred origin texts.
Are you asking if it’s possible for people to overassess their own development? Yes, of course, we see it all the time. Also folks who underestimate their development. In fact, I’ll go much farther — it is pretty much impossible to assess your own development, because we cannot clearly see our own zone 2 structures. What’s more, our development occurs over multiple different lines of intelligence, and they don’t all move at the same rate.
The best you can do, really, apart from taking expensive tests to see where you might be and where your challenges might lie, is to surround yourself with a “community of the adequate” and be willing to allow their support and critical feedback to guide your ongoing growth and awakening.
The fact that these shadows and misperceptions exist, doesn’t mean the stage itself doesn’t, or that it isn’t the result of a sequential growth hierarchy. Which is why, if a person has not grown through the green stage first, there’s no way to “be integral”.
I played football for a year in high school, but that was mostly to bridge my relationship with my dad. I do have a very romantic fondness for baseball, however, which is why I used that example 
But this is also largely a self-selecting space, which is going to be more appealing to some typologies more than others.