What if you had a map of everything? I don’t mean the kind of map that gets you from London to Sydney.
I’m talking about one that leads you from the befuddled state of confusion to the great state of clarity. From the lowlands of lagging inertia to the summit of inspiring insight?
What if this map helped you piece your inner world together so you could see the relationship between your fears, desires, hopes, and dreams?
For example, what is the relationship between overwhelming sexual desire on one hand and a sudden and total longing for God on the other? How does it all fit?
Such a map does exist (in fact there are several). And although it doesn’t cover everything, it endeavors to include nearly everything. It’s called Integral Theory and it was pioneered by a thinker named Ken Wilber. Think of Ken (and others like him) as a cartographer of inner and outer reality and a synthesizer par excellence.
In essence, this theory provides a dynamic view of reality that charts the evolution of how we see the world. It’s also the story of human development. It tells this story by outlining our basic perspectives, stages of consciousness, states of a awareness, and lines of development.
In part 2 of my interview with long-time meditator Ted Saad, we dive into the relationship between meditation and Integral Theory (listen to Part 1 here). What can this marvelous map teach us about meditation?
As Ted reminds us, we shouldn’t confuse the map for the actual territory. Nevertheless, you’ll learn how it can help you make sense of your world, inner and outer, in some wonderfully refreshing ways. Today we rough out the edges of this map for you and examine how it can help your meditation practice.
In Part 2 of my interview with Ted Saad, we discuss:
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The 3 great states of consciousness we pass through each day
- How meditation allows you to experience different states of consciousness
- How meditation trains your awareness in different states of consciousness
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The man stages of human development over time
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The 3 essential human perspectives
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The story of human development
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Why states of consciousness change quickly and stages of consciousness change slowly
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How the developmental journey of humankind mirrors the developmental journey of each human being from infant to elder
Show Notes
- Listen to Part 1 of my interview with Ted Saad
- A Brief History Of Everything by Ken Wilber
- Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck and Chris Cowan
- If you enjoyed this podcast, you may also like our Meditation for Life Mini Course
- Learn more about our free awareness meditation course, How To Free Your Mind & Discover Deep Peace
- Take a self-paced introduction to Meditation, explore the How To Meditate Core Training Program
- Leave us a rating & review on iTunes
Photos via Flickr CC: Mattias Östmar, Kent Bye, Norman B. Leventhal Map Center
Its completely incorrect. Meditation has nothong to do with Integral theory. iT is about the mind and meditation is beyond the mind. This is all to confuse people and mislead them from experiencing meditation. Also much of this new age paychology is an appropriation of Hondu philosophy and it needs to be recognized otherwise its plagiarism,
Hi Ragini, Thanks for this. Your comments will hopefully allow me to clarify what might be confusing for some. Integral Theory (IT) is not meditation nor does it pretend to be. If you listen to the podcast, that should be clear. It’s kind of like comparing apples to oranges. Instead, Integral Theory is a theoretical framework that attempts to create a map of reality, and that includes both the inner and outer experiences of the self, the other, and the cosmos.
In that light, it’s actually very helpful in providing a context for meditation, but please don’t confuse the map for meditation itself. In my experience, one way that Integral Theory is helpful in understanding some of what we experience in meditation is through it’s treatment of states and stages of awareness. In meditation, we can and do experience different states of awareness. Integral Theory helps to make a lot of them explicit. That can be very helpful for the practitioner. Again, we shouldn’t confuse a map of awareness states with the experiences themselves or the states themselves.
In terms of IT serving to confuse and mislead, I guess I don’t understand.
Finally, there are some really good critiques of Integral Theory that are worth exploring. You can certainly find those online. Also, as you suggest, there are ancient schools of Eastern Philosophy, like Yoga, that offer their own maps of reality and being. But I don’t think it’s accurate to say that IT is an appropriation of Hindu philosophies. It’s not to say that Ken Wilber wasn’t influenced by Eastern thinking, because he was. But this theory also integrates a lot of Western psychological and developmental models and research based on the work of Clare Graves, Jean Piaget, and others. Like all great works over time, it draws inspiration and intelligence from many sources, those philosophies you mentioned being one such source. If we were to call it plagiarism, then a good number of great literary, artistic, academic, and philosophical masterpieces would need to fall into the same category.
Wow thank you so much for this interview. your podcast is really scratching where I’m itching! Particularly in opening up a sense of the possibility of integrating meditation practice with the intellectual life of the mind . The questions discussed here are very much my own questions. Thank you.
Hi Timothy, I’m so happy to hear that. Thanks for the positive feedback. Let me know if you have any more questions.