The Daily Evolver

The struggle between the Muslim and Western worlds is not only a clash of civilizations, but also a clash of development. I had a good conversation on this subject with Dr. Aftab Omer, a sociologist, psychologist and integralist who was raised in Pakistan, India and Turkey, and who has lived in the US for much of his life. Aftab is president of Meridian University in Petaluma, California, and has written on topics including cultural leadership, transformational learning and the power of imagination. Here’s some of what we talk about in this podcast…   4:13 The intrinsic developmental effect of living in multiple cultures and speaking multiple languages. 6:45 The unique histories and soul-spaces of Muslims in South Asia and the Middle East. 16:00 Accommodating the shamanic legacy that underlies traditional religions, and the need for spiritual anchors, initiation and embodiment. 21:00 The developmental adolescence of militant groups like ISIS who lack the consciousness required to lead and govern a complex state. 32:00 Colonization: the special problems of cultures that are conquered by more developmentally advanced cultures. 42:40 From Cairo to Mosul: what are the successes and failures of the new Obama Doctrine of restraint? 48:00 Integralists can help by demonstrating developmental compassion, personal humility and the ability to live in multiple worldspaces. 56:40 Integral sectarianism: how we can use the lessons of geopolitics to help solve the problems of the integral movement, and make the next stage of human development more healthy and vibrant. …and the profound question for us, our inquiry, is what constitutes effective integral action in response to the intensity of this [Muslim] anguish? It’s not World War Two, its not the Holocaust, yet in the specific places where the fire is burning at the time the experience is as intense. So Aleppo isn’t any better than the Warsaw ghetto.   ~Dr. Aftab Omer  

  Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world. Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life. To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so. Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand. – Walt Whitman THE EVOLUTION OF SEX Creativity is the essence of the kosmos. The Big Bang itself was an act of mind-stopping fecundity that has continued to complexify, in material and mind, for the past 13.8 billion years. The latest emergent appeared last week on Big Brother, the CBS reality show, where a straight man and a gay man began snuggling with each other. Even I am shocked and moved to ask: what’s going on here? What is Eros bringing on now, and is there no rest for the weary? Every stage of development expresses sex in its own way, including animals and bacteria. In fact sex itself is a relatively late emergent in the evolution of the universe. Life started out asexually. We had 2 billion years of single cells simply dividing, passing 100% of their genes on to the next generation. But the kosmos, which is known for its big surprises (such as the advent of life itself) eventually presented a new means of reproduction that exponentially multiplied creativity: sexual union with other individuals. This is the point where life makes the deal that if each individual gives up 50% of his genes, the resulting variety of the offspring will more than make up for it. This brought forth a splendid new display of life into the kosmos and today virtually all plants and animals reproduce sexually. PART CHIMP/PART BONOBO We get our first glimpse of early human sexuality by looking at the animal kingdom from whence we’ve evolved. One of the most interesting lessons can be found in the difference in sex and gender behaviors between chimpanzees and their close cousins the bonobos. Chimps are aggressive and brutal, and the males dominate the females who are often isolated from each other. Over in bonobo land, on the other hand, it’s all “make love not war” and “love the one you’re with.” Bonobos have an inordinate amount of sex with themselves and with whoever is handy of either sex. The difference? Chimps live in trees and hunt, which favors the physical prowess of the male. Bonobos forage for food on the ground, which is something  the female can do in full partnership with the male. As a result the females affiliate with each other which creates a counter-force to male domination. This emergence of female power changes the entire system. So are humans more chimp or bonobo? Theories differ as to the earliest human, and I have no problem imagining that dawning cultures could be both brutal and loving as life conditions varied. But one thing is clear: by the time we reached the red, warrior stage of development we were channeling our inner chimp.  And since then we’ve been working our way toward bonobohood. In fact, one of the great culture wars of our time is going on between pre-traditional cultures — where women are shrouded and girls’ schools are burned down — against a society where women have full partnership. Female empowerment is indeed lethal to the patriarchy. One of the developmental themes of human sexual and gender relations as we develop is that women become more and more powerful as new cultural structures arise. WHAT’S NEXT IN SEX? So what is integral sex?

  WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, JOE DIMAGGIO? A NATION LIFTS ITS LONELY EYES TO YOU… The USA lost the battle — to Belgium in the World Cup — but soccer won the war. America is now officially smitten. More of us watched the USA’s final match in the World Cup than watched last year’s World Series, the championship of the great, all-American sport of baseball. Soccer integrates the red altitude impulse to fight and win, civilized by amber rules, produced by orange business and expressing a green world-cultural identity. It is helping Americans become better world citizens (and not all conservatives like it). Yet soccer presents a challenge for Americans because it is so, well, foreign. The arcane ranking system, the low scores, the theatrics (as Rachel Maddow points out, the only arena where Americans feign injury in order to manipulate the game is politics) — all these require us to take new perspectives, which of course is an engine of evolution. The World Cup is explicitly un-American, since it has the word ‘world’ in it and we have zero chance of winning. If I wanted to spend ninety minutes watching foreigners beating us up embarrassingly, I would just leaf very slowly through our students’ international math and science test results. — Alexandra Petri in The Washington Post Which brings me to our lovely host country, Brazil. Or is it a dystopia, I forget. What happened to all the stories about how bad Brazil had screwed things up, about the stadiums being unfinished, the transportation system broken down, rampant criminality, the people up in arms? In the weeks leading up to the games I would’ve thought that they were going to be called off, or played in the midst of rubble. Then suddenly the story of Brazilian apocalypse shifted to…let’s play ball! This points to a polarity that host countries have to navigate. They fight hard to win the privilege of hosting a huge event like the World Cup or the Olympics. After all, it’s a chance to get the attention and respect of the world. The downside is that in our contemporary media environment the host country’s flaws get highlighted as much – if not more so – than their achievements. We can blame the media — as long as we remember that the media is us.   We tend to think that the media is conveying information, that it’s factual and logical. (We tend to think this about ourselves too.) But actually what reporters do best is tell stories, morality tales about good people and bad people, involved in some drama that stimulates our thinking and emotional systems. And like good storytellers of all times and places they spin the “facts” to make the story more vivid and meaningful. For months, the story they/we have been telling of Brazil is of a country that has fundamentally entered the stage of modernity, with all its attendant goodies but without sufficient regard for their poor. Hundreds of thousands of people rose up in a series of large demonstrations, critics railed against the government, experts predicted failure. And though the protests have dwindled since the games began (it seems that the disaffected have World Cup fever, too) the point has been made. Brazil and the rest of the world have all seen something that cannot be unseen. To see is to care, and to care is to act. That’s why integral theory stresses the idea that the leading line of human development is the cognitive line, with cognition defined very simply: what are you able to see? In the case of Brazil are you able first of all to see the poor?

  It’s good to be back for the 2014 Summer Series of the Daily Evolver weekly live calls! If you ever wish to join the calls in real time, you can register here. Thank you to my friends at Integral Life, the world’s leading online integral community, for hosting the calls each week. ITEM #1: FISH STORY I start this call with an account of my personal discovery of the interior world of our finned friends. It began with a post I wrote on the Daily Evolver blog late last week linking to new research that shows that fish can think, feel, make friends and suffer. A report of the research out of Macquarie University in Sydney Australia, stated: Fish have very good memories, live in complex social communities where they keep track of individuals and can learn from one another. This helps to develop stable cultural traditions. And there is mounting evidence that they can feel pain in a manner similar to humans. My discovery ended two days later, when I Inadvertently brightened a little corner of my own back yard. ITEM #2: QUICK REVIEW OF MALEFICENT Next I share some thoughts about the new movie, Maleficent, which retells the classic fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty, and stars Angelina Jolie as the wicked godmother. Fairy tales have been told for centuries as a means of transmitting life lessons about good and evil, particularly to children. In the traditional telling of Sleeping Beauty the princess presented a role model that was beautiful and good, but essentially passive and powerless. The wicked godmother on the other hand was…well, wicked; she put a curse on the King’s newborn daughter because he had snubbed her at the christening. In Maleficent, Angelina Jolie’s version of the wicked godmother is motivated by a far more justifiable anger. And that’s a key point. In our new, post-modern retellings of these tales, which in addition to Maleficent include Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, OZ the Great and Powerful, and even the current Disney mega hit Frozen, the protagonist isn’t just “good” and the antagonist just “evil”; they each contain some of both ends of the polarity. We see that while the evil character may do bad things, it is a result of being mistreated or misunderstood. The new lesson is that good and evil reside in each of us. The word Maleficent is itself a mash-up of the words malevolent and magnificent. And as the narrator intones in the last line of the movie (spoiler alert) as the camera pans away from the image of a newly wiser, stronger, more mature Angelina Jolie, “And so the kingdom was brought together not by a hero or a villain, but by someone who was both hero and villain…” ITEM #3: CAN INTEGRAL THINKING HELP US UNDERSTAND IRAQ? I begin my comments on Iraq with a look inside the minds and hearts of the jihadis who have surprised the world with their sudden success in taking over the northeast, Sunni-dominated areas of the country. This week we got a remarkable view into what motivates these young men, when they released a well produced twelve minute video on YouTube, in English, directed to the young Muslim men of the West. In the video a small group of fighters, later identified as having come from the UK and Australia, sit in a row in an outside setting and tell their stories. Entitled “There is No Life Without Jihad,” the video makes a passionate case for forsaking the comforts of western life to come fight for Allah. One speaker, a Brit named Abu Bara Al Hindi, says: Oh my brothers living in the west, I know how you feel. In the heart you feel depressed.

I met Graham back in the nineties when he ran a web design firm in Seattle. He’s always been on the emerging edge of culture and technology and is one of those people that has an integral mind whether or not they ever use the vocabulary or reference the maps. He has a developmental view and doesn’t see modernity as the enemy, necessarily, but as the foundation upon which a thriving postmodern culture can be built. He founded the popular Treehugger.com and is now focusing his attention on LifeEdited, which designed and built this amazing apartment in Brooklyn — just 420 square feet in size — that is an example of how we can use smart design to cut down on energy, space and resources and still create more health and happiness in our lives. Graham is a pragmatist. His TED talk Why I’m a Weekday Vegetarian, demonstrates an integral way of leading the culture forward through a change that needs to happen. Everyone on the planet can’t eat meat three times a day, but “people don’t want to have their last hamburger.” He advocates important incremental changes using education and the power of good design. Graham had just arrived to his rustic cabin in Maui when Jeff reached him last winter to talk about the view from the front lines. “America has super sized itself over the last sixty years,” he says. “We have about three times the space per person of any other Western country, and it gives us giant environmental footprints. We’re routinely living beyond our means and racking up tons of debt. “We have a twenty-two billion dollar personal storage industry just to keep all the stuff we collect. It would all make some sense if we were happier, but we’re not.” There is a name for this uniquely modern affliction: affluenza, and Graham knows it well. When he wrote an op-ed in the NYTimes called Living With Less, A Lot Less, critics pointed out that downsizing advice from a millionaire was hardly compelling when much of the world was still trying to scrape up enough calories to feed their families. But from an integral perspective, where we see all the altitudes of development online in the world at any given time, of course we’re privileged to be solving the problems of modernity, that’s what you do in postmodernity. Graham points out that in the modern age we have become so efficient at making things that hoarding doesn’t make sense anymore, though it may have at one time. “The modern mindset is a growth mindset,” Jeff reminds us, “whereas the orienting economic principle of postmodernity is sustainability.” LifeEdited is helping with that shift by building housing for singles and families that are only two-hundred to one thousand square feet, respectively, and making these units function like much larger spaces. Communal resources will include spare bedrooms that are bookable online (because you don’t always need that guest room, do you?), a “product library” for things that you may need occasionally but don’t make sense to own, communal space like professional kitchens, roof decks, fitness areas and a great room for parties and gatherings. Who needs to heat and cool a giant room in their home that gets used a few times a year? “Most design is for things that happen very rarely,” Graham explains, “like a four wheel drive truck, for instance. We’re redesigning the experience of living for what it’s like ninety percent of the time. Then you can share the things that everyone only needs once in a while.” LifeEdited are creating examples of smart communities for the future, focused in dense areas.

Before you speak, Let your words pass through three gates. At the first gate ask yourself “is it true?” At the second ask “is it necessary?” At the third ask “is it kind?” -Sufi saying You’re only as sick as your secrets. -AA axiom The ability to lie is actually a developmental milestone. At sixteen months a child can hide an emotional state, and around age three she can lie outright. By age six we’re all lying a couple of times a day. Research shows that college students lie in fifty percent of conversations they have with their mothers, and people who are dating lie thirty percent of the time in their interactions with each other. The ultimate irony is that the person you’re most likely to lie to is the person you’re most intimate with. “The culture normalizes different lies and levels of lies with different worldviews. We expect certain groups to tell specific kinds of lies and others not to,” says Dr. Keith. There are lower left quadrant standards at all stages, and those standards tell us what is acceptable as a lie and what isn’t. Blue, or traditional, can embrace a lie if they think the motive is virtuous (“We are not hiding any Jews here”), orange if it’s legal or even profitable (all advertising, basically) and at green, if someone is not being cared for in a way that I can idealistically imagine them being care for, then I can justify lying. Jeff points out that with politics we actually expect people to lie openly and consistently — we’ve normalized it, culturally, for an entire profession. Indeed, lies are a form of discourse. Twenty-five percent of lies are told purely for the benefit of the person being lied to, says Dr. Keith. “Almost all psychotherapy is concerning where people lie to themselves about themselves. Super anxious people are lying to themselves about how dangerous the world is. Super depressed people are lying to themselves about the possibilities of having a joyful life.” ~Dr. Keith Witt There are lies of commission and lies of omission, conscious lies and unconscious lies. For instance, for some couples it’s against the (unspoken) rules to be mad at each other, or to be critical, so they lie about what they’re feeling or about what they really think. To be congruent they have to lie to themselves about it too, and voilá, an unconscious lie. Dr. Keith experiences this regularly in his practice. There are even endogenous lies that were put into our psyches at an early age, which we may still believe, even in the presence of evidence to the contrary. Do you see why a skilled psychotherapist might be important? Dr. Keith tells Jeff that if all psychotherapy were just focusing on what was a distortion or a lie, and what was compassionate truth, that function alone would make it useful and good. Lying is a subtle violence that we perpetrate against ourselves and others. As we develop, of course, we’re much more sensitive to it. As Dr. Keith says: “I distrust stuff that comes out of me that’s colored by shame, threat, anger or fear. I know there’s truth in shame, threat anger and fear, and even depression and sadness and anxiety, but I know I have to do dialysis on those emotions to get to the truth beneath them. And if I don’t do the dialysis I’m at risk to do violence, I’m at risk to lie to myself or other people.” When we finally learn to touch onto absolute truth we can begin to work with relative truth consciously. It becomes less about the lies that we tell and more about the compassionate truth that we fail to speak; less about protecting our idea of self and more about discovering who we are becoming. As we develop more self-awareness and transparency, lies become less tempting because they become less useful and actually just plain uninteresting.

Our left hemisphere learns new routines, but it is our right hemisphere where the habits are hardwired — and it changes slowly. The brain evolved to not give up habits that it has associated with a satisfactory life. We are what we repeatedly do. —Aristotle I learn the coolest stuff listening to The Shrink & The Pundit sessions. For example, as you repeat a certain action it activates a specific neuronal network in the brain. Cells go there and wrap the neurons in a myelin sheath (myelin is a white, fatty, electrically insulating substance). The myelinated nerve is up to one hundred times faster! If you practice enough those circuits become heavily myelinnated and then that action becomes habitual, like the way my fingers are hitting these keys — you don’t even need to think about it. Which is great! Until it isn’t. Habits are hard to change. We can use pain and pleasure (the proverbial vinegar and honey) but mostly it just takes time. A habit is a pattern of self-reinforcing processes. A Princeton study suggests that about forty percent of what we do during the course of each day is purely habitual. Dr. Keith thinks that’s a conservative number. In his forthcoming book, Integral Mindfulness: From Clueless to Dialed In, he explains that to change something is to first be aware of it. Observation plus compassion equals mindfulness, and that’s your primary tool for regulating existing habits and creating new ones. Keith learned from Ken Wilber that the universe is composed of habits that are including and transcending each other through the mechanism of chaos. The nature of chaos is that it seeks coherence (involution). That’s a force as powerful as gravity. Systems naturally want coherence so they create habitual ways of being. It’s life’s general shape or mode of growth. Every once in a while a stable state is disturbed, there’s a disintegration and then a re-integration into something different. The universe has reorganized and created a habit that is more complex. Those more complex habits appear simpler but they’re not. “You could say humans have a habit of self transcendence,” Dr. Keith Witt A hundred years ago, William James famously declared that it took twenty-one days to create a habit. Modern neuroscience would say he wasn’t too far off. Integrative neurons start creating hard wired circuits back to your amygdala after about thirty days of doing something different. A spiritual teacher of mine named Sylvia used to say the most powerful thing we have is our attention, and in that moment when you realize you have the power to switch the energy from point A (your habit) to point B (your new intention) it is the most powerful moment in your life. Sometimes you have to apply that attention over and over and over until it begins choosing itself. Saying no to one thing by saying yes to another is called a reciprocal inhibitor. Studies have shown that people are twenty-five times more successful if they try to cultivate a new habit rather than just resist the bad one. So instead of smoking a cigarette, do a breathing exercise. Instead of eating a bag of chips, take a walk. It’s hard work, so it helps to get excited, and have someone that inspires you and embodies where you want to go. Even better yet, get that person to coach you. If you can engage repeatedly in the process where you go to the edge of where you’re competent and you make a mistake, correct it, make a mistake, correct it…that is a growth mindset. You have to be willing to be intimate with your weakness. An integrally informed mindfulness can give you a higher quality of self-awareness. Jeff often likens it to Google Earth,

A GREEN ECONOMIST ADVANCES, A GREEN ENVIRONMENTALIST SURRENDERS EPISODE 91 Using mountains of data to make the case that capitalism, left to its own devices, concentrates money in the hands of the few at the top, French economist Thomas Piketty is making a splash among the economic intelligentsia in the U.S. with the publication of his new book, Capital in the 21st Century. Debuting at number one in Amazon book sales, and receiving rave reviews from mainstream media and economists, Piketty has made the rounds of policy makers in Washington DC and New York, challenging the conventional economic orthodoxy that modern capitalism is a great generator of equality. He makes the case that the flatter economic distribution enjoyed by the West after the two world wars was less a feature of laissez faire economics and more a result of the wartime deconstruction of the previous trusts and multi-generational family fortunes. This looks like a significant shift in elite thinking that may help usher in more egalitarian economic policies over time. It supports Said Dawlabani’s thesis in his book Memenomics: The Next Generation Economic System, which I have examined at length in an earlier Daily Evolver episode, that the Orange altitude economy launched by Ronald Reagan in the 80’s may be re-orienting itself to more Green altitude egalitarian impulses. Along those lines, Piketty advocates raising progressive tax rates up to 80% for the highest earners as well as a worldwide tax on wealth. These are radical ideas to be sure, and are receiving the expected jeers from the political right, but if his thesis is borne out it will begin to change the conversation. Evolutionarily it’s right on schedule; as Piketty said in an interview with the Huffington Post Live last week, “income inequality is only getting started, and this century could look a lot more like the deeply unequal 18th and 19th centuries than the more-egalitarian 20th.” EARTH DAY 2014 In the second half of the call I honor Earth Day with an update on global climate change, and a look some of the reactions to the recent series of I.P.C.C. (International Panel on Climate Change) reports from the United Nations. The issue is, of course, vastly polarized at the moment with predictable responses from both the climate deniers and alarmists (as the political right and left are known to each other). One reaction to the climate controversy that is a bit outside the box is that of Paul Kingsnorth, a lifelong environmentalist from Britain, who is leading the way into a new relationship with global climate change: surrender. In a major profile in last week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine he shared his views on the “human machine and the age of ecocide.” I had a lot of friends who were writing about climate change and doing a lot of good work on it. I was just listening and looking at the facts and thinking: Wow, we are really screwed here. We are not going to stop this from happening. Everything had gotten worse. You look at every trend that environmentalists like me have been trying to stop for fifty years, and every single thing had gotten worse. And I thought: I can’t do this anymore. I can’t sit here saying: “Yes, comrades, we must act! We only need one more push, and we’ll save the world!” I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it! So what do I do? The first thing that Kingsnorth did was draft a manifesto…called “Uncivilization,” it was an intense, brooding document that vilified progress. “There is a fall coming,” it announced.

DAILY EVOLVER EPISODE 90               We started this week with a couple of quick items: first a comment on Brendan Eich, who was pushed out as the CEO of Mozilla (makers of the Firefox browser) because in 2008 he supported Proposition 8, the California voter initiative that banned the state from granting gay marriage. A quick poll on Tuesday evening’s call showed that the vast majority of the callers thought Mozilla’s actions were wrong.  I’m not so sure I agree. I guess I’m for a world without shaming, but till then I’m happy that instead of being shamed for being gay, people are now (in some circles at least) being shamed for being anti-gay. Once again, evolution is beautiful but not always pretty. The second quick item regards economic corruption. I often make the point that what we see in developed countries as “corruption” — powerful people colluding for mutual profit — describes 100% of the economy at pre-modern altitudes. Yet by the time we get to modernity this kind of corruption is criminalized (though, of course, far from eradicated). But what about post-modern corruption; is there anything new and different emerging?  I think we can see a perfect example in Flash Boys, a new book by Michael Lewis that exposes the practice of high speed stock trading, where savvy traders set up shop right next to a stock exchange in order get the millisecond advantage gained by proximity in electronic transactions. I think Time Magazine sums it up well: “More than ever, the economic injustices of the world are made possible by the unequal distribution of information.” DOES POLITICS MAKE US STUPID? In our first major story, we look at an essay published by Ezra Klein, How politics makes us stupid, in which he reported on a study done at Yale University by Law professor Dan Kahan who set out to answer a question that I think most of us have asked, particularly when we’re in a heated political disagreement: “Why don’t facts win arguments?” The researchers started by creating a neutral control experiment: first, they asked people to interpret a data set of four numbers that revealed the efficacy of a skin cream in relieving a rash. The data, presented in quadrant grid, showed the number of people whose rash got better and worse while using the cream, and the number of those whose rash got better and worse while not using the cream. So was the cream effective? As might be expected, the better peoples’ math skills were the better they did at the problem. Next the researchers presented a highly politicized problem: does a ban on concealed handguns increase or reduce crime? Using data sets similar to the skin rash question, (some showing a gun ban cutting crime and some showing a ban increasing it) peoples’ math skills no longer determined how well they did at solving the problem. Ideology did. Liberals and conservatives were both able to solve the problem — but only when it fit their ideology. In fact the better they were at math the better they were able to use the data to support their pre-established political positions. Those with strong math skills were almost twice as likely than those with weak skills to get the problem right when it fit their worldview. As Klein points out: “People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right.” This partisan filter is at work throughout all political discourse and flies in the face of the conventional understanding of why we have political disagreements, which Klein calls the More Information Hypothesis, “the belief that many of our most bitter political battles are m...

Apparently we're kind of clueless about intimate attachment in general. According to Dr. Keith we aggrandize romantic love, we’re afraid of sexual lust and we have no idea about long-term attachment. We mix them all up, basically. Ninety percent of the people and couples that come to Keith for help present with a problem in their marriage or primary partnership. That tells us a couple things. One, like many other mammals we're drawn to pair bond. Most people who are allowed to get married, do. And two, it tells us that marriage is challenging and most of us need some help to learn how to do it well. So why aren't we taught how to do it? Probably because your marriage is not your parent's marriage. It’s not even the marriage that you had yesterday. As cultures change marriages must change with them, so a successful marriage fifty years ago is not the same as a successful marriage today. I've noticed that the marriages of my parents, my friends, and my friend's children are all very different. Keith says when you get married you're not just signing up for one marriage, you're signing up for many marriages. It's going to change from romantic infatuation to intimate bonding, to living together, to having children. It'll change through family, through aging bodies and changing endocrine systems. Each one of those changes is associated with new structures of consciousness around how you hold yourself in the marriage, and how you hold your partner. What makes marriage so challenging is that the relationship needs to be successfully reorganized, consistently, by both people in order to keep working. Despite the constant change, studies have shown us there are specific characteristics present in successful, happy relationships. Author and researcher Nate Bagley found the following things in common: -The individuals were dedicated to self care -They were committed to helping each other get through anything -They trusted each other -They had intentionality. They didn’t take their love for granted. They did something everyday to show love for each other There is always going to be conflict though, and couples that want to be together for the long term have to know how to navigate it. Keith says there are a lot of factors, but Bagley discovered a few very important ones: Couples that stay together don’t fight to win, they fight to resolve the conflict. They focus on trying to understand each other and lastly, they really try to be nice to each other. Imagine that! Being nice… When it comes down to brass tacks, couples that can down-regulate anger and up-regulate the positive emotions are ones that are destined for the long term. Easier said than done. Of course, if you have stable access to 2nd tier consciousness then you're really ahead of the game. People operating at the teal altitude can observe structures of consciousness in themselves and their partners, and as we know from studying development, mindful self-observation accelerates development which gives us response flexibility. In relationship, when you are responding to your partner, to their happiness and suffering, you are definitely accelerating your development. Keith says he's never seen this researched the way that meditation and other practices have been researched (yet!) but he's found it to be true in his own life. Send your questions and comments for the show to jeff@dailyevolver.com. Record a voice memo on your smartphone or use the Speakpipe button on DailyEvolver.com.

THE DAILY EVOLVER LIVE EPISODE 88 This week I focused on a topic that is always front and center in the culture wars: the role of the public sector and the private sector in our lives, and the tension between the two. One story that captures this tension in the U.S. is the Supreme Court hearing of the complaint by Hobby Lobby, a chain of retail stores, seeking an exemption from having to provide “morning after” contraceptives in its employee health care plan under the new terms of Obamacare. The founder of Hobby Lobby, David Green, is a devout Christian who donates half the company’s pre-tax earnings — $500 million so far — to evangelical ministry.  An amber traditionalist at heart (though clearly an orange modernist in his ability to build a very successful business), Green specifically objects to birth-control medications such as “Plan B” that would destroy a fertilized egg. This detail is often missed in media reports which represent the company as objecting to providing any contraception whatsoever. In fact, they are objecting only to the class of “morning after” contraceptives, which they consider to be a form of abortion. As integral practitioners, let’s pause for a moment and enter the worldview of conservative Christians (amber altitude) which is radically different than the worldview of those of us who have become secular at heart. For them the world is an enchanted creation of Almighty God. Likewise, life itself is a gift from God and only God can create it. Being faithful means that we are grateful when God sparks a new life into being, and we joyfully make room. To do otherwise would be to disobey God. At the amber altitude the battle cry is “God and Country,” with God coming in first and country second. Humanity is corrupted, fallen, and although we have to “give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” the ultimate purpose of life is to be righteous and holy under a Law that supersedes the puny laws of man. It makes perfect sense: to whom are you going to owe your primary allegiance, the crowd in Washington or the Creator of the universe? If you are a child of God living in His enchanted creation, that decision is easy. A similar issue surfaced in a recent controversy out of Arizona, where the legislature passed a law defending the “religious freedom” of private businesses to, for instance, deny to bake a cake for a gay wedding. In this case the Republican governor vetoed the legislation. The reason? There was too much blowback from the secular business community, who feared an economic boycott of the state, particularly the upcoming Super Bowl scheduled in Phoenix next year. So it turns out that the dollar is almighty too! In fact one of the most potent evolutionary forces in modern culture is the trumping of money over traditional ideology (orange altitude over amber altitude). As a result of the Arizona outcome, similar initiatives promoting this conservative brand of religious freedom in other states have been seriously undermined. This question of corporate personhood shows up in other cases as well, most notably the Supreme Court case Citizens United, which lifted the limit corporations and labor unions can donate to independent political groups. HOW THE PRIVATE SECTOR EMERGED For most of human history, of course, there was no such thing as a private sector. The tribal elders (in the magenta altitude), the warlord (in red altitude) or the king (in the amber altitude) could control your life in whatever way they saw fit. In the middle ages, we saw the gradual emergence of charters given to various guilds who could exert some independent control over their trade: blacksmiths, farmers, weavers, barrel makers – even executioners! In the 1500s we saw the emergence of mercantilism,

Listeners--this podcast is from March, 2014. -BW I started the show this week by responding to a couple listeners who think I've gone a little soft on modernity (Orange altitude). The first, David O'Conner from Australia, critiqued me by saying, "you believe a little too much in the evolutionary goodness of Orange without sufficiently taking into account what is not so good about Orange." Good point. So let me self-correct a bit. Every stage of development comes online bearing a dignity and a disaster. For instance, on the upside Red brings on the juice of individual power; on the downside it gives rise to plunder and patriarchy. Amber civilizes us, but into a conformity that ultimately becomes stultifying. Each stage experiences radical new powers that are used for both good and ill. The powers that emerge in Orange are jaw-dropping in all four quadrants: in the exterior quadrants, science and technology turn dirt into Chevys, create "the indoors" and triple life-spans. Orange becomes world-centric and modern people are able to mobilize resources from all corners of the planet. Money flows, as well as communication and travel. In the interior quadrants, humanity abandons millennia of dogma and superstition in favor of observation and reason. We wake up to our own individual sovereignty and ascribe equality of status to every citizen under the rule of law (not men). Astonishing! But the interiors and the exteriors do not always come online at the same time. People with modern exteriors often harbor pre-modern interiors that are quite provincial and even ethnocentric. This is a dangerous stage of the game: modern technology in the hands of a pre-modern mentality (think of a 12 year old with a chainsaw), and it is the source of much of the downside of Orange. Listen to the podcast for more analysis. I ended the call with a look at a major Pew study this week that seeks to reveal the soul of American Millennials, our youngest adult generation, ages 18 - 33. The upshot of the research? It turns out the youngsters are less supportive of institutions like religions, political parties, even marriage and career -- and more tuned into their own networks of people and organizations, networks which are much larger than those of previous generations. Send your questions and comments for the show to jeff@dailyevolver.com. Record a voice memo on your smartphone or use the Speakpipe button on DailyEvolver.com.

A CONVERSATION WITH DR. KEITH WITT (AUDIO) The “shadow” is a Jungian term that means the hidden aspects of our psyche that motivate us but that we are unaware of. For instance, we may experience an anger that comes out of nowhere, an inexplicable attraction or aversion to other people, a depression that descends in times of stress. In this month’s installment of The Shrink and the Pundit, Dr. Keith Witt, integral psychotherapist extraordinaire, approaches the subject of psychological shadow from an unusual angle: neurobiology. As good integralists we’re aware that for every interior state of mind (upper left quadrant) there is an exterior neurological corollary in the brain (upper right quadrant). Whatever you’ve repressed or negated, projected or idolized, it’s likely the function of a neural network that served you at one time, but is not necessarily serving you now. This explains why psychological problems can usually be dealt with more effectively when a body-based therapy is included. “When people talk about somatic psychotherapy, to me that’s a redundancy,” says Dr. Keith. “All psychotherapy is somatic.” We’re always working with a set of values (upper left quadrant) that are neurologically programmed (upper right quadrant). “I don’t decide to get excited or angry … I discover myself in the midst of that and then have to decide what to do with it.” Keith explains. Your autonomic nervous system can be rewired by a traumatic event and stay that way until you do the necessary healing work of reintegrating that memory so it has less and less trauma associated with it. For instance, let’s say somebody insults or threatens you. Your nervous system may constellate a defensive reaction instantaneously. If your pulse goes above 100 you’re in a diffuse physiological arousal and have passed a threshold where you may lose the capacity for self-reflection and empathy. A therapist who is aware of this will help you decide how best to respond: when it’s important to stay in relation to the conflict and when it’s best to take a walk. The coping mechanisms you learn in a relaxed state are not necessarily accessible in a defensive state. All shadow work requires taking parts of yourself that have become dissociated and re-connecting to them in a safe environment with positive intent. This is the basis of many of the new and very effective therapies for trauma recovery, including PTSD. “Add compassion and let it happen,” Keith says. As always, Dr. Keith is a fascinating conversation partner. Have a listen. Listen or download below. Need some help to listen on your mobile device? Click here.

Dr. Keith Witt joined me and about 100 integralists from all over the world at The Integral Living Room gathering here in Boulder a few weeks ago, where we explored approaches to creating a higher-level interpersonal space among us. Because Keith’s ideas were so influential to the design of this event, I was interested in hearing about his experience and sharing my own. The Living Room was a sophisticated flex-flow workshop where we tried to hold a framework that was tight enough to give the gathering a structure, but loose enough that it could change as needed. We wanted information and influence to flow both ways, and for the we-space to tell us what it wanted to become. The entity created by the “we” seems to have it’s own destiny. It’s a tricky thing to pull off but we had an amazing group of people present and they were up to the task! In this episode of The Shrink & The Pundit Keith and I talk a little bit about how we felt during and after the event. We talk about the difference between trans-rhetorical practice and integral trans-rhetorical practice, how to engage with other people in looking for a deeper truth that neither side knows yet, and letting yourself be influenced and led by the power of the we-space itself. We also talked about the things that didn’t work quite as well, and what we would like to see more of in future gatherings. We both agree that one of the greatest gifts of community is its ability to reflect back to individuals the truth of who they are, and especially to help people see where they are spiking into higher levels of genius in one or more lines of development. Finding ways to evoke more of this is high on the list for future events. Keith and I were both especially inspired by the young people who attended the gathering. We both see wisdom and awareness in these young twenty-somethings that we would normally associate with elders (and which was conspicuously absent in our boomer generation when we were in our youth). Integral consciousness is indeed arising earlier in individuals than ever before. Keith and I concur that these folks provide the best evidence of all that our future is in good hands. Hear the full dialog here…

A dialog on Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey with Dr. Keith Witt Before I encountered the work of Ken Wilber, Joseph Campbell was lighting me up with his synthesis of the myths of all cultures.  Like Ken, Campbell had a gift for the meta-narrative, for seeing patterns in seemingly disparate times and systems of thought. In this dialog with Dr. Keith Witt (who is also a huge Campbell fan), we discuss the gift of Campbell’s formulation of The Hero’s Journey, which is his name for the basic pattern of the great myths, and which turns out to be a guide for our own lives. Although told in wildly different ways throughout the world, the basic story is the same. It begins with the “call”, which is often a big blunder or a disaster that leads you to what Campbell called the belly of the whale. If you say yes to the calling you find yourself on the threshold where you have to leave the old ways behind and venture into the unknown. Guides will appear to help you on your journey, and though some may betray you, if you make it through you will be the master of two worlds. Most of all, you’ll have a gift to bring back and share with your people. When I first read about the hero’s journey in Campbell’s classic book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I remember feeling a tremendous amount of relief. I stopped blaming myself so much for my problems. Life is supposed to be like this. It is difficult but those difficulties have meaning. Like most of us in the modern world, I was taught the opposite: that hardship and travails are to be avoided. If things are too challenging then you are doing something wrong. The hero’s journey is dangerous, but remaining where you are is no picnic either. Sometimes people just plain decline their “hero’s call”, which leads to a stunted life or even death. Even if you say yes there’s no guarantee that you’ll make it through. People get dismembered or find themselves in the land of the lotus eaters and decide they will never leave. But usually the transformation causes us to want to bring the gift back to our people, to share what we’ve learned. What a wonderful thing: your travails have meaning. I was also deeply inspired to realize that I myself am the hero of my own story, and that I am daily encountering magic and guides, if only I pay attention. I also realized that I can sprinkle a little fairy dust on other people, and be a guide for them. One of the characteristics of Integral consciousness is that magic comes back online. Not the gripped, “domination magic” of the magenta stage of development, but a recognition, scientifically vetted, that we are riding the updraft of 13.8 billion years of emergence toward ever-unfolding goodness, truth and beauty. And that as we realize this we are able to consciously influence our story, our evolution, and co-create our own heroic journeys with a loving and intelligent kosmos. Listen or download here: