Due to a technical glitch the first two minutes of the podcast are low quality, then it gets better.
5:20 BOYHOOD
I start this week’s call with a brief review of a new movie that I would nominate as an integral masterwork: Boyhood, by Richard Linklater.
Shot over a period of 12 years, Boyhood traces the life of Mason, an ordinary Texas boy in his development from first grade through high school graduation. The actors, featuring Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke and the lead character played by Ellar Coltrane, grow and age through the movie. The story and dialogue were written over time as well, sometimes shortly before a scene was filmed, and are designed to bring forth the essence of the actors themselves, especially the young leading man.
Mason grows up in the movie right before our eyes, from an introspective yet spirited six-year-old, to an awkward adolescent hiding behind his hair, to a wry, thoughtful young man seeking to understand the world as he records it with his ever-present camera.
Though much happens in the movie none of it is extraordinary. And Mason himself isn’t particularly interesting — which allows him to be interesting in every particular. He has his problems to be sure, with his sister, friends, parents, stepparents and a girl, but the movie is not about that. It’s about growth itself, which alone turns out to be a potent narrative driver. We literally get to watch Mason grow. We see the shape of Mason’s face change in real time, along with his voice, his mannerisms and his thinking, creating an emerging, essential Mason-ness that is unique in all of time and space. In this way Boyhood reveals the most astonishing secret of all: everybody is fascinating. Every life is worth penetrating and appreciating.
Also of interest to evolutionaries, the movie revolves around the fourth dimension: time. Virtually all stories have a trajectory that unfolds over time. But with Boyhood, the passing of time is the theme, and it invites us to feel into the power of emergence in our own lives. I just hope Richard Linklater, the wise, sweet genius behind this movie is busy on the sequel, Adulthood.
11:25 THE CHALLENGE OF SUFFERING
“How can I be fully happy when I know anybody on the planet is suffering? The answer is I can’t be fully happy. I ought not be fully happy. I have to hold what’s going on within the larger field, in the greater space of…joy? Bliss? There are other names for it but it includes suffering. It’s not the opposite of suffering anymore. When we have that online then actions in the right quadrants, what we can do to help people, become more clear and useful.” ~Jeff Salzman
I think one of the main challenges we face as we enter integral consciousness is that we become aware of two realities that are often unseen and irreconcilable at first tier.
The first reality is that from the larger perspective of history the human condition has gotten better, in all four quadrants, steadily and dramatically. Today, those of us living in the developed world are blessed with lives of astonishing ease and plenty relative to virtually any time, place or people.
On the other hand children are being blown up by bombs. The 24/7 footage from Gaza is just the most immediate example of the ugliness of the second reality: that for millions of people in pockets around the world life is as desperate and abject as the worst of anything we have seen in history. Good thing we can take multiple perspectives.
In the podcast I address the challenge of suffering more as an inquiry than as a commentary, and invite listeners to share their thoughts. The topic was stimulated last week when I received this message from a long-time listener, Peggy Babcock:
I was glad to hear that you’d be talking about both Ukraine and Gaza yesterday. And I confess to a certain level of disappointment in what felt like a deliberate choice to speak about it in a detached, clinical sort of way. I know Integral has been criticized for doing that, but given the very real global angst of the last week, it felt pretty pronounced.
For one, I’ve read Steven Pinker’s book [The Better Angels of our Nature, which makes the case that violence has decreased in history] myself and, while I agree with his conclusion, there is no way we can turn away from the grief of war, loss, fear, death itself. It seems to me that a truly integral approach would be to both hold the larger view AND include the deep pain that people are experiencing…whether Jewish, Muslim, as parents, as Americans, etc. at whatever level of development.
It would help if you could name this innate deeply felt desire to protect ourselves (and your listeners) from emotional distress. But the way beyond our current state is not to avoid, but to go through our experience. How we are each navigating that would help all of us to gain clarity…even if it means understanding that it’s all too complex for us to wrap up in one neat and tidy package! How do we, as integralists, hold the paradox of knowing many details and still NOT knowing what the solution should be?
Peggy also shared this gem from Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodron:
As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. To the degree that we’ve been avoiding uncertainty, we’re naturally going to have withdrawal symptoms—withdrawal from always thinking that there’s a problem and that someone, somewhere, needs to fix it.
I was also happy to hear from noted developmental psychologist Susanne Cook-Greuter, who was on the call. In a message to me yesterday she makes a fascinating point about the expanding capabilities of integral consciousness to hold suffering:
Could it be that the much greater amount of resources later stages have available makes it easier to deal with the many more hurts one registers? At least that is how I have explained it to my students in the past. While we pick up much subtler forms of suffering, we also have become more resilient as well as skillful (metta meditation, tonglen, breathing techniques, tolerance for ambiguity and helplessness etc.) and aware that suffering and joy are two sides of the same coin.
We consider comments from a number of other listeners as well, working our way to a better understanding of how we can not only relate to suffering, but actually be helpful. I hope you are stimulated by the podcast and moved to share your thoughts as this important and ongoing discussion continues.
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Hey Jeff.
It has been said the theme of “Boyhood” is that all we have are the moments; *there is nothing more.* Grappling with that, it feels like something is missing. Is it that AQAL awareness of the moments inflates them to the size of universes?
Love from DC!
Teri
Yes, I agree. I wasn’t inspired by that line in the movie. I think the way I’d put it is that “there are moments, and there is emergence.” If Boyhood doesn’t demonstrate that, I don’t know what does …
Jeff, I hope you are not placing yourself in a position to be the global Integral authority on all the problems of the world. It is a good thing to say: “It is mystery. I don’t know.” We need to be the friend of mystery and the unknown.
Thanks friend, that’s very good advice.
As I read I cannot avoid the images flowing of all the pain and suffering in the world. I remember the first time I became conscious of it, I was giving a conference in Ecuador and showing graphics on infantile mortality and morbidity…and suddendly I stopped, gazed at the audience, kept silence, and FELT literally felt the statistics as moving images of children dying, felt the tears, felt my body! I stopped. Put the paper away, and continued after a silence my talk. No longer from statistic and logics of scientific thought, that was a support but from my heart! I realized that something had happened inside and it had to do with a
feeling function of my psyche long forgotten in the realms of logical thought. My consciousness had expanded and I begun to FEEL and sense the suffering of the world. A new portal opened and I walked into the dark tunnel of my soul! Much was waiting for me to discover and continue to unfold!
Beautiful, Teresa! I can imagine that was a powerful teaching / transmission for your audience.
Another possible explanation for the recent research associating certain genes/personality traits with being conservative, liberal or a particular world view would be that these traits don’t predetermine worldview, but rather they effect the speed which a person matures developmentally. In this case people with certain genes would top out at blue/orange in our present world while those at the liberal/integral levels would have different genes. This would better account for the radical cultural shifts and developmental emergence we’ve seen over the last several centuries while the genetic makeup of the population changes much more slowly.
There are a number of genetic/personality factors that could play into this including intelligence, openness and sensitivity to cognitive dissonance.
This could be tested by doing the same study associating genetic makeup with a particular worldview across cultures with a different center of gravity.
Peggy Babcock articulated perfectly the disconnect I have been experiencing regarding the immense suffering in the Israel-Gaza conflict and how to hold an integral perspective regarding the conflict. And Teresa Sosa, in her comment above, showed one way to hold the larger view and include the deep pain that people are experiencing. (Peggy’s words). Thank you Jeff for providing this forum.
Hello Jeff, I am very happy to have come across your site. In regards to Gaza, I was very struck by the way you describe a second tier perspective, or experience, of this disaster – mainly the realization, that this kind of suffering is a part of life and that it is possible to accept its complexity and ambiguity without the compulsion to come down on either side or push it away. But this kind of interior development only seems meaningful in as much as it leads to a more responsible and responsive way of being, right? Otherwise, the freedom of this level is great for the one who has reached it, but will not benefit anyone else.
And then a question about Pinker’s thesis, which seems accurate in some parts, but leaving out of the picture that as far as the whole planet and especially other species go, things have not really gotten better….?
Thanks for writing. As for your first point, yes indeed, it’s not enough to just have a realization; one has to actually use it to the benefit of others.
Regarding Pinker’s thesis, it’s complicated: we now have 7 billion people on the planet, 5+ billion of whom have a pre-modern center of gravity and therefore lack a world-centric consciousness. People at this stage have always fouled their nest (the Easter Island phenomenon) and driven species into extinction. It’s just that they could do less damage with oxen and spears than with bulldozers and industrial waste. Adding to the problem, now most premodern people have bulldozers built by moderns. As with war, the big issue of our time is modern technology in pre-modern hands.
Modern peoples do develop a local ecological consciousness and post-modern peoples develop a planetary ecological consciousness. The latter are the first populations to notice and care about extinctions. So yes, we have a problem as the pig of non-world centric populations moves through the python. The goal is to get enough people to world-centric consciousness before we’ve irretrievably fouled the world nest.
Jeff you lovely man, so wonderful to hear your expansive talk on the ‘boyhood’ movie and ‘gaza/Israel’. And also especially wonderful to hear your increasingly wise words on Putin, now more nuanced since your European adventure. I love that your confronting the caricature’s that narrowly seek to demonise Putin and by extension Russia. Personally I’ve never felt comfortable that a whole countries concerns be reduced to one persons personality. It’s often a convenient way to ‘enemise’ a whole nations people and that’s always alarming to me. I happened to be in Russia soon after glasnost, staying with an economic professor friend who was there to ‘help’ advise Russia on how to become capitalist. Every western country had their ambassadors there to do the same. Interesting thing was the feisty arguments that followed at vodka fueled, private parties amongst all these so called capitalist expert advisers. It seemed they could hardly agree on anything themselves and I remember then, feeling sorry for Russia as I could see the worst form of ‘vulture’ capitalism was going win sway. Many euro economists were aghast at this but alas the piliging took off. I’m not at all surprised a man such as Putin has come to the fore in response to this. The Russian people are not as naive as the western media would portray.
In short what I want to say is that ‘ it’s the economy, stupid! ‘ or more integrally, it’s ‘orange’ that’s central to what’s going on in this ‘ modernity ‘ lead political world. More precisely it’s the battle within ‘orange’ itself, that’s at play. That is – healthy ‘orange’ that peacefully advances individual freedoms and mobility verses unhealthy ‘neo-con’ orange that is sociopathically violent in its pursuit of ‘ego’ freedoms.
As for Israel/Palestine conflict, let me just say it’s a much vexed heart that doesn’t see the disproportionality at play there. Both in pains and responsibility. I believe more power obliges’s more responsibility, at least in second tier it ought too. With that in mind it’s not so in easy to just only say ‘ I understand both sides ‘ .
Wow, interesting experience of glasnost, and a good example of the upside and downside of modernity.
As for “I understand both sides”, yes this is actually a green realization, and a huge achievement over earlier structures that don’t understand both sides. But there is a next important move to integral that realizes that the person or group who is more developed, and as you say, powerful, has more responsibility to move things forward.