One of the most fundamental divides that exist today are those between philosophy and science: the struggle between what someone perceives and what objectively exists. Integral changes all that.
Integral grew up over the last century and solidified in the writings of a man named Ken Wilber. Ken Wilber is a scientist-cum-philosopher who created a meta-theory that is arguably the most accurate method for understanding the supposed divide between consciousness and external empirical scientific study.
Ken Wilber says that there is a dangerously naive attempt among many people toward reductionism—to collapse the cause of consciousness into matter, for example, or to say that one or the other is an illusion. The battle has always been the hardcore mystics saying that all can be explained and understood to be consciousness and nothing more, and the hardcore scientists who say that objective observable reality is all there is and nothing more.
By contrast, Wilber suggests that neither side can truly say that they have a monopoly on the true nature of reality. Each perspective exists simultaneously as two halves of the same whole. The methods for observing and explaining one side cannot be used for observing and explaining the other, but they are both valid for the perspective in which they operate.
Wilber developed a framework that outlines these different perspectives of observation by defining four major categories that cannot be reduced into each other. It can be viewed as a four-quadrant grid (often called the AQAL grid):
| Upper-Left (UL) “I” Interior Individual Intentional e.g. Freud |
Upper-Right (UR) “It” Exterior Individual Behavioral e.g. Skinner |
| Lower-Left (LL) “We” Interior Collective Cultural e.g. Gadamer |
Lower-Right (LR) “Its” Exterior Collective Social e.g. Marx |
| Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber | |
The upper-left (UL) quadrant represents an “internal individual” perspective. This is the realm of interior experience: Emotion, thought, intent, conscious experience, subjective perception, etc. These are all things that cannot be examined empirically by behavioral science. Wilber suggests that the methods for exploring this perspective are those provided by the contemplative practices: meditation, self-exploration, and self-analysis.
The behavioral and observational sciences exist in parallel, but view things externally. This is represented on the four-quadrant grid as the upper-right (UR) quadrant. Applied to the human body, this is the perspective that we learn in biology class: the brain controls the body through the nervous system. Body systems are essentially complex chemical reactions.
The lower-left (LL) and the lower-right (LR) quadrants mirror the upper-left and upper-right, but they deal with the collective.
The LL quadrant deals with the interiority or “collective consciousness” of groups: culture, philosophy, morality, and the subjective ways we view ourselves and others through cultural and group lenses.
The LR quadrant deals with the study of societal behavior and systems–group biological traits, anthropology, architecture as it relates to the society that built it, systems theory, social institutions, law, etc.
And here’s where the “meta-theory” part comes in: while I’ve used people and societies in this example, the four-quadrant framework can be (and is) applied to virtually anything: politics, sexuality, finance and spirituality.
The underlying principle is that while these quadrants clearly interrelate, the methods used to observe the phenomena from each quadrant cannot be used to observe the phenomena in any other quadrant accurately. They exist simultaneously, and do not collapse into or necessarily explain each other.
There’s so much more (such as lines, levels, states and stages) that even I have not had the chance to dive into. Furthermore, Ken Wilber has released many books on the subject. I recommend starting with A Brief History of Everything
Let me know your questions and comments below!
BONUS: Ken Wilber on Deep Science:
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