This Week on Integral Spiritual Center....
It’s sobering to
consider that so many of today’s most eminent teachers are partial!
But as Ken points out, Appendix III (and the Integral approach in
general) is meant not so much to point out that partiality as to
highlight expertise in a highly specialized area. AQAL is an
incredible tool for both situating various approaches and for
understanding how they are related to each other. To the extent that
the conclusions of these approaches fall within their area of
expertise, they are most assuredly true. But to the extent that their
conclusions overstep their area of expertise, a broader context such as
AQAL can be enormously helpful.
The potency of AQAL to
situate various approaches derives from its own formulation. Take, for
example, the field of psychology. Ken points out that there are six
major schools of psychology, each advanced by brilliant researchers who
pioneered a particular approach to the field. Ken’s approach was to
ask “what must be the characteristics of the human mind, such that the
major conclusions of each of these schools could hold true?” His goal,
rather than to work within one of the major schools to further its
particular conclusions, was to reverse-engineer the human
psyche—indeed, the entire Kosmos—altogether. The result of that
inquiry was AQAL, perhaps the most complete map yet of the Kosmos we
inhabit and the awareness in which it arises.
“The Myth of the Given”
highlights a number of otherwise brilliant modern approaches to
spirituality that fail to take into account the insights of
postmodernity, thus unwittingly perpetuating the myth. Postmodernity,
Ken demonstrates, deconstructed not only the mythical formulations of
premodernity; with the same ferocity, it deconstructed the rational
formulations of modernity! Postmodernism shows—rightly so—that nothing
is apart from its context. But in doing so, and especially in its more
recent turns, it throws out both the premodern and modern babies with
the bathwater. Context, contends the integral approach, is not
everything—but it is something! The integral approach is the first to
take the truths of premodernity and modernity, consider their context
as postmodernism necessitates, and locate them in a larger map. Once
this blind spot is acknowledged, says Ken, it is easily remedied,
leaving us with enduring truths, properly contextualized, and situated
in a greater whole. And that changes just about everything….