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Dr. Joseph Dillard is a psychotherapist with over forty year's clinical experience treating individual, couple, and family issues. Dr. Dillard also has extensive experience with pain management and meditation training. The creator of Integral Deep Listening (IDL), Dr. Dillard is the author of over ten books on IDL, dreaming, nightmares, and meditation. He lives in Berlin, Germany. See: integraldeeplistening.com and his YouTube channel. He can be contacted at: [email protected]

SEE MORE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY JOSEPH DILLARD

My Perspective on Integral AQAL

Joseph Dillard

Chat GPT's assessment of my perspective on Integral AQAL in Frank Visser's essay, “The Role of Integral World in the Integral Community: Criticism and Controversy” is not so much incorrect as it is vague and superficial. Reading it caused me to reflect that perhaps I have not done a good enough job of laying out my basic perspective on Integral AQAL and my reasons for it. These include a fundamental high respect for Wilber's perspective and for Integral Theory; a belief that an over-reliance on a hierarchical developmental model generates elitism; a need for a much stronger emphasis on multi-perspectivalism as well as the need for a distinction between cognitive and empathetic multi-perspectivalism; too great a reliance on psychological heliocentrism and not enough on polycentrism; a greater focus on the integration of the waking and dreaming states; how a failure to meet mid-personal standards of reason, falsifiability, and collective legality generates an idealistic variety of Wilber's pre/trans fallacy; and a prevailing assumption that moral intention predicts and justifies behavior, with the consequence that both moral behavior and justice, as defined as accountability before law, are seriously under-emphasized.

The chatbot didn't address any of these perspectives with much clarity, although it said I was concerned that Integral Theory puts too much emphasis on hierarchy, with a consequence of a tendency toward elitism.

Let's take these points one by one, and I will attempt to explain why I think they are important for Integral theory.

A fundamental high respect for Wilber's perspective and for Integral Theory

As a university student majoring in philosophy, comparative religion, and psychology, and then later, as a clinical social worker with a PhD in holistic health, in private, in-patient and out-patient settings, I had both the broad contextual background and a day-to-day work interest in finding and using conceptual frameworks that were coherent and practical. When I discovered Wilber's work in about 1983 I was immediately impressed. My interest, support, and respect was not based on abstract or philosophical priorities. I was particularly taken by his series of essays in Brown, et.al., Transformations of Consciousness, on human development, what could go wrong at each stage, and what to do about it. Wilber's analysis of human development was deeper and more useful than the theories of professional psychologists and psychiatrists that I had run across in my extensive trainings over many years. This was in addition to the breadth of Wilber's erudition regarding worldviews in general, but in particular, Hindu, Buddhist, and Western enlightenment worldviews.

My critiques of Wilber come from a perspective of believing in the fundamental efficacy of Integral Theory and that it deserves to be learned and built upon. I don't consider it hyperbole that Wilber stands in a position something analogous to that of Freud, whose major contribution was not the strength of his ideas per se, although some of them, such as his defense mechanisms, were brilliant, but in the fact that he stimulated an explosion in thinking and re-thinking of human psychology, mental health, and treatment modalities. I don't believe that the creative cross-pollination of Integral AQAL is anywhere near dissipated; au contraire, I think it has only begun.

A belief that an over-reliance on a hierarchical developmental model generates elitism

Whether or not Wilber and his major supporters agree, this is by far a common, and perhaps a majority assessment of both Wilber and Integral AQAL. The problem is that many people don't get past that initial perception of non-egalitarianism, and so dismiss Integral Theory before they understand its breadth, depth, and explanatory power. This is not only a shame but a sad state of affairs.

It does not fix this issue to argue that because Integral is multi-perspectival, that all perspectives and developmental levels are legitimate and “equal,” since they aren't equal in a theoretical structure of nested holarchies, in which some levels include and then transcend others. Personally, I believe that holarchies are an accurate presentation of part of the evolutionary structure of life. However, going forward, it is essential that Integral Theory do a better job of emphasizing compensatory factors that are also baked into the evolutionary structure of life. These explain why elitism is not only one part of the picture (as in meritocracy), but that it is the wrong solution for evolutionary development in many instances. Solutions that Mark Edwards, among others, have pointed to, including networking, relationships, and systems, which are de-centralized and do not function or evolve based on hierarchies or elitism, need to be emphasized much more powerfully and centrally by Integral going forward.

A need for a much stronger emphasis on multi-perspectivalism

In my experience, Integral multi-perspectivalism has either been of the “map reading,” cognitive variety or else a superficial egalitarianism which devolves into a bland relativism. Because Integral Theory defines itself as including and transcending, then ipso facto, any objections are misunderstandings due to ignorance, stupidity, or dogma. It is a neat trick that is a performative contradiction, in that it defeats Integral Theory's own claim to multi-perspectivalism.

In the exterior, objective realm, there are also serious limitations in the ability to apply multi-perspectivalism. It is as if multi-perspectivalism claims hierarchy yet ignores making moral determinations in the name of some combination of multi-perspectivalism and egalitarianism.

For example, can we really not make a moral judgment about who is persecutor and who is victim regarding Israel and Palestine? Is it really not possible to make a definitive judgment that genocide is being carried out with the explicit military, economic, and narrative support of Western democracies? Can we really not see how the citizens of Ukraine were betrayed by their own government with the full support of the West, which cynically used then in a proxy war to weaken Russia? Can we really not understand that all Russia's alternatives to invading Ukraine were blocked by the West? Are we really not capable of developing empathy, not only toward the perspective of Ukrainian citizens and Western governments, but also toward Russia? Are we not capable of seeing how fear of being labeled anti-Semitic, combined with the censoring of Palestinian perspectives on the ongoing genocide, combine to make multi-perspectivalism regarding the Gaza conflict almost impossible?

The broader point is not which of the above perspectives is “true” or “right, but that the cultivation of empathetic multi-perspectivalism is vital for personal development. It is essential if we are not to contradict our personal empathy for our family and collectives by demonstrating both an amoral disregard and an immoral complicity in crimes against humanity. The Chatbot clearly missed my emphasis on this issue, which I have addressed again and again in multiple essays.

The need for a distinction between cognitive and empathetic multi-perspectivalism

As Alfred Korzybski famously said, “The map is not the territory.” Integral Theory is an impressive and highly useful map, but it is still only a map. As a map, it is an interior collective interpretive structure. It is not an exterior personal or collective embodiment of that structure. Wilber has attempted to address that issue with his book, Integral Life Practice, which is an excellent exposition of physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and interpersonal disciplines to support self-development. It's is a very good guide, and I recommend it.

However, it does have two major limitations that I see. The first is that these life practices are chosen by you and me. It is assumed that we know what our deficits are and which practices are most central or important for our development. Do we? Looking back on our lives, how good has our decision-making and our objectivity regarding our life choices been? How about that first love, the one we thought would be forever? How about those addictions we have that we just can't seem to shake? How about those poor career and work decisions that we made? It is easy for us to rationalize and justify them by saying we wouldn't be who we were if we hadn't had those experiences. And we could just as well argue that we would be someone entirely healthier today if we had known then what we know now.

The point is that leaving the determination of our Integral Life Practice up to ourselves or even to “experts” is problematic, based on our own past life histories. These sources of guidance need to be combined with the input of “subjective sources of objectivity,” something I teach in my work, Integral Deep Listening. There exist innate, authentic, subjective perspectives that we can access that know us better than any objective expert does and which see our blind spots in the Johari Window that we typically overlook. They also tap into emerging potentials that want to be born within us. Therefore, their input, when combined with our own and objective “experts,” is more likely to yield an integral life practice that stands the tests of time. Wilber's Integral Life Practice, as it now stands, does not take this important determinant of our goals into account.

The second limitation is that it is based on cognitive multi-perspectivalism, our “map” or worldview, including our sense of who we are, instead of on empathetic multi-perspectivalism, which is who and what disowned others think we are and what we need. “Walking the territory” instead of just reading maps is about taking on disowned perspectives. Objectively, that might be, for example, going to live with an Israeli or a Palestinian family or both. It might be going to live in China, Iran, or Russia. Empathetic multi-perspectivalism is about immersion. It is about suspending our identity in order to take up and integrate the perspectives of disowned others. This is not something that Integral Theory emphasizes, although Wilber's 3-2-1 Shadow process is an attempt to get at it. It heads in the right direction, as do Gestalt, Psychodrama, Constellation therapy, and various forms of “parts” and shadow work, but it is not enough. We can tell that on an interior level by the general failure of these approaches to sufficiently recognize the relative autonomy of “shadow” perspectives. We can tell it in our objective reality by the common non-empathetic and often ill-informed views expressed by many integralists toward disowned outgroups, like Russians, Chinese, or Palestinians.

Fortunately, one doesn't have to move to a foreign country to practice empathetic multi-perspectivalism. All they have to do is take up a practice of interviewing disowned and discounted dream characters and the personifications of life issues important to them. As a result, over time they will move from a cognitive to an empathetic multi-perspectivalism, due to taking up the transpersonal yoga of “walking the territory” of disowned perspectives of all sorts.

Too great a reliance on psychological heliocentrism and not enough on polycentrism

Psychological geocentrism is a Ptolemaic world view. Life evolves around me, my needs, and those of my ingroups. I am the center of my reality. This is not simply the natural world view of animals and young humans. It is the world view of most adults, regardless of education and intelligence.

The historical religious response to the limitations of psychological geocentrism has been psychological heliocentrism. Through mystical and near death experiences we can arrive at the realization of a transcendent Self that is One with All. By analogy, we are one with the sun, the giver and sustainer of all life, not the earth. Reality orbits not around our self, but around our Self. This is psychological heliocentrism, Maslow's self-actualization and Jung's “transcendent function.” It is Assagioli's “Higher Self,” and de Chardin's “Omega Point.” It is Vedanta's Atman and Buddhism's non-dual no-self that still has a soul, reincarnates, and is one with Dharma.

Neither psychological geocentrism or heliocentrism reflect the nature of reality as revealed by cosmology. We now know that the universe has no center, or that every point is functionally the center of the universe. This is a polycentric world view, as contrasted with a psychologically geocentric or heliocentric views. It is a view that psychology has generally abhorred, viewing it as “decompensation” and the fragmenting and dissolution of identity, a threat to the major work of both development and psychology: the strengthening of “coping mechanisms” and the self. However my work has, over some four decades, conclusively demonstrated that polycentrism builds empathetic multi-perspectivalism and a grounded, balanced, and stable self-sense, even in young children. This is an empirical conclusion that everyone is encouraged to evaluate for themselves. It is not something that needs or should be taken on the strength of external authority.

Integral would be well-served by placing less emphasis on understanding the map and more emphasis on incorporating the world views of disowned outgroups.

A greater focus on the integration of the waking and dreaming states

On the whole, humanity maintains a primitive attitude toward dreams and dreaming that has not changed much as a result of the advent of writing, civilization, philosophy, and technology. Most people continue to assume that dreams are, with rare exceptions, irrelevant and to ignore them. Those who do pay attention to dream reality typically project meanings onto dreams that say much more about their world view and values than it does about the dream itself. Those projected meanings could be symbolic, or attribution to divine, secular, or even demonic causes.

The future of humanity will at some point involve the integration of the waking and dreaming states. That will not be in the form that most approaches to lucid dreaming take, which is, to a large extent, a colonization of the dream state by waking assumptions and values.

Integral AQAL can do much more to move this important evolutionary integration forward, for reasons I have outlined in several essays here at Integral World.

How a failure to meet mid-personal standards of reason, falsifiability, and collective legality generates an idealistic variety of Wilber's pre/trans fallacy

It is not unusual to find Integralists ignoring the Law of Parsimony, a basic rational assumption that helps us determine which, among likely possibilities, is most likely to be true or effective. It is as if reason is not as important as either belief or personal experience. That assumption pretends that one can skip mid-personal in development, as if it has already been transcended. But the Law of Parsimony exists because it is a heuristic tool which is correct more often than not. Those who choose to ignore it are likely to find themselves wrong, more often than not.

Integral and integralists also need to get their heads straight regarding falsifiability. Do they buy it or not? If they conclude there are some domains and issues that are not subject to falsifiability, that is fine, as long as they do not attempt to support them scientifically or empirically, as Wilber does with Eros and Evolution, and the Eye of Spirit.

To ignore or trespass the standard of falsifiability is another example of imagining one can do something transpersonal that does not include mid-prepersonal. Perhaps you can, but based on the Law of Parsimony, the most likely explanation is that you are actually doing something prepersonal, but convincing yourself that it is actually transpersonal.

That same approach can also be sometimes observed in the integral treatment of law. Because Integralists are multi-perspectival, some appear to believe that they have somehow transcended accountability to collective societal norms. Somehow and for some reason, those norms are no longer important, legitimate, or applicable to them. Sometimes there are reasons given, such as appeal to divine law or to personal mystical experience. Sometimes the argument is that, because law is unsettled or ambiguous, that there is no reason to appeal to it to justify one's actions or moral positions.

There is also among some a notable aloofness from such mundane and secular affairs as geopolitical circumstances and the administration of justice. This is easy enough to maintain when such issues do not directly affect us. If it is not our family that is being killed or expelled it is quite easy, as well as convenient, to maintain a self-image as an empathetic, compassionate person, while in fact appearing to exhibit a degree of amoral, if not immoral disregard.

Such approaches are reminiscent of “spiritual bypass,” with the intent of making one not accountable to and before collective norms expressed as law and justice in the external collective quadrant. It can be a way to justify amoral and immoral behavior in the external individual quadrant, based on the belief that a moral intent automatically means behavior is moral, regardless of what others or laws may conclude. This is an idealistic version of Wilber's pre/trans fallacy.

A prevailing assumption that moral intention predicts and justifies behavior, with the consequence that both moral behavior and justice, as defined as accountability before law, are seriously under-emphasized

I have alluded to this issue above and I have also written about it in a number of essays at Integral World. The error is largely due, in my opinion, to Wilber taking Lawrence Kohlberg's levels of moral judgment and assuming that because one demonstrates the cognitive capacity to make highly moral judgments that they actually do so. The assumption is that interior intention and values are manifested in personal behavior. The further assumption is that if others, particularly outgroups, view such behavior as immoral or unlawful, they just don't understand. It's a problem with their perception, not with one's own behavior, because righteous intent explains and justifies any and all behavior as moral.

For examples, we need only look at the outrage of the West at Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which they view as clearly illegal, in addition to being immoral. Similarly, we need only look at the outrage of Russians at the West arming fascist neo-Nazis who celebrate and raise statues to Stephan Bandera, a noted collaborator with the Third Reich, who oversaw genocide on hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles, among others. It does not seem to sink in, on an empathetic level, how Russians feel about Nazism and neo-Nazism after losing some 27 million citizens in WWII. On the other hot geopolitical front, we need only look at the justifications Palestinians give for terrorism against Israelis or the justifications Israelis and their supporters give for terrorism against Palestinians.

While there is room for sincere and honorable people to disagree on all these issues, assuming that because we find our position to be moral that it is therefore actually moral in the realm of external collective reality is a fundamental rational violation of Integral Theory, because it subordinates the perspectives and interests of the exterior quadrants to those of the interior quadrants. It does not matter what harm our nations do to others because our intent is to bring democracy and uphold human rights. Coincidentally, we have a current example of this in the outrage of European elites at the remarks of U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who accused Europeans of hypocrisy regarding those very issues. Integral Theory makes this same logical fallacy, of assuming that moral intent justifies behavior, regardless of how it is viewed by out-groups. Integral does so not only in the moral realm regarding issues of justice but also in the empirical realm, in particular regarding evolutionary theory, but in a different sort of way. Because we experience purpose in ourselves and in mystical experiences, we project that onto external collectives. The universe must be purposeful, mirroring our experience and intent. It is not such a huge step from the assumption that the universe is purposeful to imagining it is also moral: loving, spiritual, compassionate.

Conclusion

Hopefully, when future chatbots assess my position on Integral Theory they will be able to provide more accurate responses. We can see from surveying the above critique that they are considerably more specific than the chatbot in Visser's essay noted. In addition, none of these critiques deconstruct Integral Theory itself or personally attack Wilber. Instead, they argue for important changes in emphasis in how the Integral world view is conceptualized and conveyed. These imbalances must be addressed if, going forward, Integral Theory is to achieve the credibility it deserves on the world stage.