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Integral Students at Fielding: Q&A with Ken Wilber
Imagine going to a university where you can take the best courses from the best professors in the best departments from the best schools: Welcome to Fielding Graduate University in partnership with Integral Institute!
This last fall (2006), Integral Institute launched two academic partnerships offering certificates and Master's degrees accredited by two renowned universities: Fielding Graduate University and John F. Kennedy University. One of the central visions of Integral Institute's academic partnerships is to create a network of relationships with various colleges, universities, and graduate schools who offer accredited degrees and programs.
We are very excited at I-I to be working with both Fielding, a long time leader in distributed learning, and JFKU, the only university in the world that has an Integral Studies Department explicitly based on AQAL. All courses in both certificates and Master's degrees are taught by faculty who are experts in and practitioners of the Integral model.
Ken Wilber is a guest lecturer in both programs, providing students with direct contact with the originator and leading expert in Integral Theory. Each quarter, students have a chance to get on the phone with Ken and ask him their burning questions about the model and its application.
The following call occurred between Fielding students in the first course of the Integral program. Randy Martin, who is faculty in the program, serves as the moderator. Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, who is also faculty and the Excutive Editor of the AQAL Journal is also on the call. Listen and enjoy and imagine what it would be like to be a student studying the Integral model in a graduate school setting and having direct access to Ken Wilber and leading pioneers of AQAL.
Is your education powered by AQAL? For more information on how to get an Integral education go to: www.IntegralDegrees.org
| Hurricanes, tsunamis, drought, global warming, melting icecaps, eradication of biodiversity—to many of us these harbingers of our planet's seemingly imminent environmental meltdown are becoming more and more apparent each year, while the need for effective and enforceable sustainability policies on a global scale are becoming more and more urgent. And as is usually the case with human development, we find ourselves locked into the dialectic of good news/bad news, with our own fate as a species quite possibly hanging in the balance. First, the depressingly bad: the very notion of ecological sustainability requires at least a worldcentric set of values—yet according to research over 70% of the world exists at egocentric or ethnocentric waves of development, rendering "one-person-one-vote" types of democracy miserably incapable when it comes to saving the human race from itself. How, then, can we possibly develop and implement the policies that we so desperately need? This, as Ken mentions, would require something resembling "enlightened leadership," in which an elite body of policy makers, who embody the highest available altitude of human consciousness, are able to make the decisions which simply could not be made at lower levels of development. Do such leaders actually exist? Is there any good news to counterbalance the bad? Ten years ago, Ken would have likely said "no." These days, however, he seems to be humming a slightly more optimistic tune…. |
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| At first glance, it may appear to some that there is no greater threat to the planet than the world of business. It is, after all, the relentless pursuit of the Almighty Dollar that so often occludes us from the long-term consequences of our greed, too distracted by money to see the sky falling right on top of us. This, anyway, is an all-too-common perception of what business represents to many people, most of whom would be surprised to hear that a closer look reveals quite the contrary: business is not the arch-enemy to sustainability. Not only that, it might just be the environment’s very best hope. Business is itself, or can be, quite innocuous, simply being an efficient means of moving and exchanging artifacts (anything created by an individual or social holon, such as a beehive, a car, a log cabin, or a painting.) It can, however, be inhabited by any level of consciousness, and is therefore driven by an entire spectrum of human motivation. In this discussion, Ken offers a brief synopsis of the types of things an integral business needs to look at, in terms of management, product, and market: Which altitude are decisions being made from? Which altitude are products being created from? Which altitude are the products being sold to? And what exactly is it going to take for business executives to begin thinking in terms of long-term ecological sustainability? |
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| This paradox is clear: we desperately need to begin finding truly worldcentric solutions to global sustainability; otherwise we are certainly committing a slow collective suicide—yet 70% of humanity remains at ethnocentric or egocentric stages of development, incapable of even caring about such solutions. The need for massive world-wide transformation has never been more urgent, and yet we still don't even understand what makes people transform in the first place! So how, from an integral perspective, can we help people grow into these higher stages? Ken makes it clear that the priority of the integral movement is really not to attempt to transform people, but instead to help them best translate the world from whatever level they are at. This might be visualized as taking a horizontal approach, rather than a vertical one, in which the goal is to help balance all four quadrants, to the very best that they can be balanced at a particular level. Integral consciousness, after all, allows for all levels of development, without forcing its values upon anyone else—and while we might hope for the most amount of vertical transformation possible within a given lifetime, we all have the right to remain at any stage for any amount of time. It is important, therefore, to establish stations of life that offer healthy translation for each stage of development, thus truly serving the most depth for the most span, and through which the natural transformation of humanity can move most fluidly. |
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| In an Integral Model, the psychograph measures the degree of growth an individual has achieved in various lines of development—cognitive, moral, aesthetic, kinesthetic, values, affect, etc.—as awareness expands from egocentric (me), to ethnocentric (us), to worldcentric (all of us), to Kosmocentric (all sentient beings) modes of being. The purpose of such a tool is two-fold: 1. By knowing one’s own strengths and weaknesses, one can navigate life much more effectively, compassionately, wisely; and 2. The psychograph shows how close your consciousness is to being one with everything. Using the psychograph as the reference point for a wide-ranging exploration of the developmental aspect of an Integral Approach, Ken touches on how developmental stages are more like “probability clouds” than rigid rungs in a ladder, the critical—and almost universally unacknowledged—difference between social dominator hierarchies and natural growth hierarchies, why cultural creative boomers are unable to correctly understand Carol Gilligan’s work on moral stages of growth in both men and women, and the newly created “Indigo Award” that recognizes and rewards one of the least acknowledged minorities in our culture: those with Integral consciousness. |
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| Along with Quadrants, Levels, Lines, and States, Types is one of the five fundamental elements of the AQAL Integral Model. Types has been explored in approaches such as the Enneagram and Myers-Briggs, but the simplest typology is that of masculine and feminine. Here the student questions whether gender identity is not simply a matter of types, but perhaps also a developmental line. As Ken explains, yes, looked at certain way, gender identity is most definitely a line of development. At an egocentric level of development, gender identity is closely tied to one’s biological sex as a male or female human organism. At an ethnocentric level of development, those biological differences between men and women are then cemented in gender roles as “God’s way.” At a worldcentric level of development, one is finally free to critique and reject the socially-constructed gender roles of one’s culture, and then create one’s gender identity as one wishes. At an integral and Kosmocentric level of development, one actually becomes in a sense “trans-gender,” as one’s locus of identity is found in all that is arising, of which the body-mind is one small part. Ken goes on to comment on the four-quadrant nature of sex and gender identity, and the importance of a truly integral feminism…. |
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| From the Mayan prophecies of 2012 to the Aquarian Age, ever since the 60’s many of us have felt that something big is about to happen in human consciousness—indeed, in human history—and that we are lucky enough to be a part of that monumental transformation. So what’s going on here? Is this simply the narcissistic fantasy of our time, or are we truly fortunate enough to be participating in the culmination of 15 billion years of evolution? As might be expected, the truth seems to be somewhere in the middle: no, we are not going to “go up in light” any day now, but the evolving universe has become conscious of itself, and it’s only through the precious human vehicle that this understanding is realized—that is, if we survive long enough to engage the glorious possibilities before us. As with any evolutionary step forward, the promise of the good to come is weighed against the new terrors hidden in this nascent power. Ken goes on to discuss his work-in-progress, The Many Faces of Terrorism, and how, with the advancement of pluralistic values on a global scale, and the implementation of worldwide one-person-one-vote electronic democracy, only 50% of the population may survive this brave new world…. |
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| For anyone who has ever wondered how Ken does the work he does—work that has been compared with that of the true geniuses of humanity— this is a gem of a conversation. With a degree of humility that some might find surprising, Ken explains that his skill at pattern recognition and information synthesis is akin to that of an “idiot savant”: no one knows how it works, it’s not something one can take personal credit for, and all one can do is their utmost to communicate the truths of this gift as best as he or she can—with humor, and lightness, and freedom. As Ken jokes, “Is he special, or is he just weird? History will tell….” Truly, this is one of the most fascinating and revealing segments on Integral Naked, and we invite you listen in…. |
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