agency

Although some individuals, organizations and worldviews privilege either agency or communion over the other, the Integral disposition fully embraces both.

I chose the URL and identity of this website, “The Integral Heart,” in part to emphasize the healthy communion that is a natural expression of healthy Integral agency.

Structures of awareness always have special strengths and weaknesses. Since Integral consciousness has evolved so recently, there’s no research yet that clearly identifies its tendencies towards limitations and pathologies. But most structures differentiate themselves from the previous one via a somewhat exaggerated reaction.

Some theorists suggest that the early indications are that Teal (the earliest Integral structure) can tend to give excessive weight to its mental maps and models—as powerful as they are—and lose some connection to the embodied, intuitive aspects of awareness that were cultivated at Green. It appears that some healthy, positive aspects of Green can be temporarily suppressed at Teal, as the self attempts to wrap its mind around a radically larger and deeper sense of reality.

With Integral discrimination, we can see much more clearly why every perspective is partial, and thus we can critique every point of view with a whole new level of penetrating insight.

It is just as true and real that with Integral vision, we can see much more clearly how every perspective is uniquely and valuably true, and thus we can appreciate the whole world with a whole new level of honoring embrace. This extends and deepens in Turquoise, the second level of Integral awareness, which evolves beyond Teal.

Even while valuing the liberating importance of healthy criticism, a special focus of The Integral Heart is to shine a light on honoring and appreciating what’s good, true, and beautiful about every perspective and particle of the whole evolving conscious Kosmos.

This website will attempt to provide a forum for respectfully re-including some marginalized healthy Green values, by holding them in a wider, Turquoise understanding. At a higher level, the spiral winds back over itself in new, higher levels of agency and communion. This new level of communion integrates agency more fully, raising universal communal values into a solidly Integral expression (rather than remaining stuck in simplistic Green categories).