Domains

Get a Feel For Integral Awareness

"Integral" means comprehensive, balanced, and inclusive. Whenever we think, feel, or act in an Integral manner, it carries a sense of wholeness or completeness - like we're not leaving out anything important. Usually, this is an intuitive experience. It simply feels more right, more true, more in touch with reality.

Four Dimensions of being

As mentioned by Ken Wilber et al., there are four facets of your own awareness, which are so close and self-evident, they are easy to miss. Many conflicts or misunderstandings - personal, political, cultural, business-related, and even spiritual - result from neglecting one or more of the quadrants. One of the first things we can do to get a feel for Integral awareness is to check in with the 4 quadrants of your own experience.

The quadrants refer to four dimensions of your being-in-the-world:

Your Individual Interior (i.e., your thoughts, feelings, intentions and psychology)
Your Collective Interior (i.e., your relationships, culture, and shared meaning)
Your Individual Exterior (i.e., your physical body and behaviors)
Your Collective Exterior (i.e., your environment and social structures and systems)

They also refer to four corresponding perspectives in your present awareness:

Image by Wilber et al. (2008)

Levels of Consciousness

Levels of consciousness is an expansion from the Four Quadrants. It suggests that there are indeed higher and lower (or more and less evolved and aware) structures fo consciousness, and that we, as individuals and societies can grow to higher levels in progressive stages or waves of development. We can also look at biological evolution as an example of levels of consciousness.

Simple levels of physical and biological evolution. Image by Wilber et al. (2008)

As the circles show, molecules are “higher” than atoms because they transcend atoms, yet also embrace them in their own makeup. Cells go beyond molecules in a similar manner, as do organisms with respect to cells, and so on. When a higher level transcends and includes a lower level, a qualitative emergence occurs, which means that something new comes into being that wasn’t there previously. This “something new” signifies an evolutionary level.

Growing into higher levels of consciousness and health involves transcending and including who you once were. The old you develops into a new you. The new you keeps some enduring characteristics from the old you, while shedding the transitional aspects of the old you. From each higher, deeper vantage point, what was once invisible becomes visible. You’ve experienced this, yes? You’re not the same person today as you were ten years ago and you know it. You can look at the old you and describe the many ways you’ve grown beyond your previous self, as well as the many characteristics that have remained.

Stages of Moral Development. Image by Wilber et al. (2008)

Thus, moral development tends to move from “me” (egocentric) to “us” (ethnocentric) to “all of us” (worldcentric) to “all sentient beings” (kosmocentric)— Hence, here you are in the "I" or "Ego-centric" Quadrant/Sector/Domain of Mindful Wellness.

The "I" Domain is further sub-categorized into Awareness and Lifestyle. Awareness comes first, as awareness is the first step to change - You can't effectively change something that you are not aware of. Lifestyle follows awareness, and is the application of the awareness gained in the first sub-category. It is the choices you make every moment or your life (your lifestyle) that will create the Integral life.