What is Integral?

What I see going on is a whole bunch of apparently distinct and maybe even competing considerations with their own different communities of practice and interest, all of them essentially converging. That there really is a single emergent – a transpersonal and entirely post-personal clarity that we are all evolving into, in which a kind of purity of heart and innocence of spirit is coming into being. There is an integral revolution that is not an extension of the old metaphysics, the old histories and stories. What’s coming is a kind of break, a kind of transparency in which the new conversation isn’t even explicitly spiritual or explicitly political. It is about Being itself asserting it’s own health beyond the pale of the old conversations. I see this moving forward in the dialogues in this series and in culture more broadly and what it’s asking is a radical system upgrade of every individual. We won’t be able to make it in this new world except by being practitioners in a whole different way. It’s a new relationship to our own hearts, to the pain. It’s difficult to be a human being and it’s always challenging us to go beyond our limits and how we are related to all of that; it only works if we are profoundly humble and profoundly serious students in the school of life. It really will take a kind of integral spiritual practice that is currently really rare. So that seam has expressed itself. Every single interview has touched on an aspect of this and each person I have interviewed has been a beautiful voice and transmission of some aspect of this.

In this territory you find your synthesis not by splitting the difference between apparently different points of view but getting lit up by the transmissive potency of each apparently contradictory point of view and discovering oneself in a transcendent state of consciousness and identity that transcends and include them all.

Terry Patten, 2012