I thought I would try to summarize Integral thought. My current best guess is:
Cultivating the healthy coexistence of elements from all stages of every healthy hierarchy we can identify.
Cultivating healthy coexistence is important since developmental hierarchies may often be recapitulated in ways that could lead to the co-occurrence of elements at various stages of development.
Cultivating healthy coexistence is also important since developments at each stage contain the co-occurrence of elements from all previous stages, where adding positive forms of novelty to elements from all previous stages produces new, desirable stages of development.
I would like to read other people’s summaries of Integral thought. Please share!
Hi Jason, all I can do is repeat things I have learned by reading Wilbers latest book The Religion of the Future. I hadn’t heard of Wilber before picking up this book on the NEW shelf at the library a month sgo.
Where have I been the last 22 years???
In 2005 my christian belief was challenged by ethno-cultural rioting in my own local area in Sydney Australia. This set me on a path of discovery of alternative views, cultures, faiths and ultimately brought me to the interfaith movement. While I was used to a simple faith, the bewilderment and seemimgly infinity of the worlds’ beliefs led me to yearn for a new faith which ultimately would evolve from all the existing faiths, each of which all individually fell short of a complete and comprehensive faith. Perhaps this is it. Or this is a precursor of it. I liken Ken Wilber to John the Baptist who announced the coming of the promised messiah. Announcing it is time for a dramatic change in humankind’s way of relating to one another.
I wrote this in 2016 fully two years before I heard of Wilber. What do you think? https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5PQEQjrgWm1VVJDaDFTWFJia2M/edit?usp=docslist_api&filetype=msword
You make a lot of good points. I’m part of Unitarian Universalism and I share your enthusiasm for interfaith approaches.
A key to the Integral approach is that is shows us ways that every individual can improve their development without them having to change their religion (this may be assuming that their religion has the same basic concepts as the major world religions). These growth approaches are based on empirical developmental studies. I too think that a new global faith is likely to emerge someday, however, it’s important that we find pathways that we can all improve along whichever faith we choose.