Integral Life Practice is a growth process—individual or collective or both—that

has only become possible in the last decade or two. It depends on some incredibly

exciting breakthroughs made by Integral Theory and other disciplines involving the ways

that human beings and organizations grow and evolve and develop. Now I’m going to

throw out a few technical terms that you don’t really need to pay any attention to now,

but I’m just going to say them for the record—and then, when required, I’ll clearly and

simply explain what we do need to know for this practice. But an overall Integral Life

Practice involves Showing Up in all 4 quadrants; Growing Up to higher levels; Opening

Up in various lines; Waking Up in higher states; and Cleaning Up, both in its positive

aspects or flourishing and in its negative aspects or shadow work. Sounds like a lot, yes?

But the point is that these various processes are all now occurring whether we know

about them or not. These aren’t just theories that are postulated to exist as some sort of
complicated speculation; they are evidence-based realities that are crashing into us every

single minute of every hour of every day. They aren’t things like deconstruction, which

is a theoretical conceptualization that you can believe or not as you wish. They are

actually existing territories that are genuine realities in our very own being, fully present

and fully active in each and every one of us.

Integral Life Practice takes all of these various territories—some of which have

been known for centuries and some of which were only discovered in the last decade or

two—and pulls them all together into a self-fulfillment, self-development, and

self-growth experiential practice, drawing on all of these enormous potentials in

individuals and thus allowing individuals to become the best, brightest, most developed,

most caring, and most realized that they can possibly be.

Is this worth it? Does following this practice really do anything that important or

that beneficial? Well, this is for you to decide. What’s going to happen is simply that,

some of my friends and I, who are convinced of its worthiness, are going to share with

you a series of straightforward exercises and experiential practices, and let you try them

out for yourself. When we explain them, see if they make sense to you; if so, give them a

try. You’ve got nothing to lose—and judging from the feedback that we’ve gotten from

those who have tried, it will likely be very much worth your while.

So let’s get started, yes? Various experts in Integral Life Practice will be

presenting exercises covering one or more areas from Showing Up, Growing Up,

Opening Up, Waking Up, and Cleaning Up. Today, I’ll be focusing particularly on

Growing Up and Waking Up, starting with the latter.

 Waking Up is the process found worldwide, and often going back two millennia

or more, a growth process leading to what is variously known as Enlightenment,

Awakening, Metamorphosis or Transformation, Moksha or Freedom, the Great

Liberation. Virtually all of the world’s Great Religions have at least two aspects, known

as exoteric or outside-knowledge, and esoteric or inside-knowledge. Exoteric or

outside-knowledge is usually a series of stories, often magical and mythic, purporting to

explain the origin of the universe, of human beings, and often in relation to a supernatural

being or beings full of miraculous power; and this side of the religion usually involves

learning how to assume a correct relationship with this ultimate Being. It’s a belief

system based on various myths often handed down for centuries.

But esoteric or inside-knowledge is not a mythic belief-system; it is a

psychotechnology of consciousness transformation. It’s an interior mental science that

aims at a direct experience of what is said to be ultimate reality, resulting in a

mind-shattering realization of Enlightenment or Awakening. Here, one doesn’t merely

think about an ultimate reality, one becomes identified with that Reality in a state the

Sufis call “the Supreme Identity”—you, and ultimate reality or Spirit itself, are radically

one, and that realization is said to release an individual from the original sin, separation,

or dualism of identifying only with this small, finite, temporal, separate-self sense, and

identifying instead with the entire Kosmos in all its glory. This is said to be both an

ultimate Freedom because, being one with the All, there is nothing outside that could

enslave you; and it’s also an ultimate Fullness, precisely because you are indeed one with

the All, with nothing outside of you that you could possibly want. So this is the ultimate

goal of Enlightenment, or the Supreme Identity of ultimate Freedom and radical Fullness,
where you experience a oneness with the entire universe, ending all suffering and misery

and ushering in a world of seemingly endless happiness, wellbeing, and wholeness.

Sounds a little far-out, doesn’t it? Well, let’s wait and see what you think after we do our

experiential practices and you get a direct glimpse of this for yourselves.

In the meantime, we can simply note that, as we earlier said, virtually every major

Great Religion has its outside, exoteric, usually mythic components or belief systems, as

well as these more interior, esoteric, meditative or contemplative aspects. These interior

esoteric schools form the great meditative and mystical systems found all over the

world—in Hinduism, we have Vedanta; in Judaism, Kabalah and Hasidim; in Islam,

Sufism; in Buddhism, core practices leading to nirvana or Enlightened consciousness; in

Taoism, contemplative Taoism; in Christianity, mystical and gnostic Christianity, and so

on. And has often been pointed out, all of their esoteric versions maintain essentially the

same basic core truth of the Supreme Identity—in the very deepest part of you, you are

one with Spirit, you contain the entire universe. Tat tvam asi—Thou art That, as the

Hindu Upanishads put it—in your very True Nature, you are one with the entire Ground

of Being.

That realization is often called an Awakening or a Waking Up, because it releases

us from the dream that we are just this small separate-self sense, this self-contraction, this

skin-bound ego, born only to live, enjoy a bit, suffer a lot, and die. Instead we awaken,

we wake up, to our real reality, a unified oneness with the entire universe. And it is this

process of Waking Up that is core to the world’s great esoteric Wisdom Traditions.

One of the best known versions of a Waking-Up practice is known as

mindfulness. This practice is becoming quite popular in the West, although it originated
in India close to three-thousand years ago. But it is a profound, simple and

straightforward, very effective form of Waking Up. It also has many very beneficial

secondary effects, from increased health, to lessened depression, to lowered blood

pressure, to significant pain management, among many others—and it’s being promoted

in the West mostly for these many secondary benefits, often without much mention of

Enlightenment or Awakening, although its original purpose was indeed (and remains) a

path of Waking Up. I’m going to walk us through a simple version of this practice in just

a moment. But first, let me tell you where this is all going.

Waking Up points to a profound spiritual growth process in humans. And simply

note that, odd as it might sound at first, this overall practice and its results don’t have to

be put in spiritual terms. They can be described simply as realizing our own highest

potentials; or awakening our greatest talents and capacities; or realizing our essential

oneness with all of evolution; or increasing our health, happiness, and wellbeing; or

finding our transpersonal and superconscious Real Self; or simply awaking from a dream

world to a higher, truer reality with a greater consciousness, focused in the timeless Now

moment. But the experience itself is usually so profound and earth-shaking that it is

often given spiritual, infinite, eternal, ultimate and absolute terms—because that’s what it

feels like. In other words, the same Enlightenment experience can be interpreted in

many, many different ways—secular to spiritual and everything in between, and that’s

fine. But if you’re put off by religious or spiritual terms, just don’t use them, and don’t

think of this in those terms. You don’t want to miss this opportunity just because it’s

worded in a way that doesn’t work for you, so please remember that. The essentially

worldwide and universal experience of this realization in the world’s great esoteric
Traditions is just a significant bit of evidence for its reality, but you don’t have to get

caught up in its spiritual interpretations. Whatever interpretation works for you is just

fine. The point is simply that we do have access to this higher, deeper, truer reality, and

it is a reality that we can actually practice to realize. Very similar awakenings are often

had with near-death experiences, some kinds of psychedelics, spontaneously in nature or

while listening to music or making love. But those who have these experiences are

almost universally convinced of their profound reality; there is little doubt that they have

had an experience of near ultimate dimensions—and I think you’ll start to see what this

means when we get into the actual experiential exercise of this ourselves. But if you’re

put off by religious or spiritual terms, just ignore them, wait till you have one of these

experiences yourself, and then choose whatever terms work best for you. I’d actually like

to hear what terms you come up with; so maybe we’ll have a little time to explore that.

Now we said that this experience of supreme reality can be interpreted in many

different ways. And that’s a very important point, because the crucial role that

interpretation plays in all knowledge and experience was only realized fairly recently,

during this last century. Previously, throughout most of our history, it was common to

differentiate between knowledge and opinion. Opinion was something that may or may

not actually be true—it’s just based on your hunch or your guess or your, well, opinion.

But knowledge was something that was certain. To say something was knowledge and

not opinion meant that it was definitely and universally true, true for all people at all

times. It was only in the last century that we started to realize that much of what a culture

takes to be knowledge doesn’t necessarily or even usually have that much certainty—it’s

often a truth generated only by that culture and for that culture—it’s more a cultural
opinion, as it were, rather than a universally true knowledge. It isn’t a fact, it’s just an

interpretation of facts.

At the same time that that was becoming realized, the ways that human beings

create their various interpretations was also becoming understood for the first time. The

basic point here is that the capacity for interpretation is something that grows; it isn’t

totally given, all complete and fully functioning, right from the start, but rather it grows

and develops over the course of time. When human beings are first born, most of their

capacities are very undeveloped and their actual knowledge, very minimal. Then the

human being goes through numerous processes of development, an overall

developmental process that takes a person from immature and poorly developed, to more

mature and more developed, and finally into stages of great maturity and maximum

development—hopefully, anyway.

Thus a person’s morals, for example. An infant at birth has little if any formed

moral principles; it’s ruled by instincts and desires. In moral development, these are

called preconventional stages. As the human continues to grow, it eventually moves into

a series of stages that are determined by the culture it’s in; it adopts what its clan or tribe

or nation considers to be right and wrong, good and evil. These stages are known as

conventional or conformist stages—“my country, right or wrong,” “law and order.” If it

continues growing, it will move beyond what it was taught by its culture and rather start

to think for itself, using more universal and worldwide moral principles. These stages are

called “post-conformist” or “post-conventional”: they are “post” or “beyond” their more

narrow culture and are more global in outlook. Now in each of these stages, when

confronted with a moral problem or question, the human being will interpret that
problem—and its solution—according to the moral stage of growth that they are at.

Somebody at preconventional stages will give very egocentric and self-serving

responses—“What’s right is what I say is right.” A child at this stage will simply take

toys from other children, with no conception of right and wrong. Moving up, somebody

at conformist stages will move beyond their own selfish desires and start to identify with

the desires of their primary group, but only that group—they will be in favor of their tribe

or their group or their nation, and all other groups can just fend for themselves—again,

it’s “my country, right or wrong.” But this primary group can make no mistakes—its

opinions are taken to be absolutely true knowledge, not even to be questioned. And

higher yet, somebody at post-conventional stages will give responses that treat all

humans fairly, regardless of race, color, sex, or creed—not just their group, but all

possible groups. So from egocentric (self-centered) to ethnocentric (favorite group-

centered) to worldcentric (all humans centered); from “me” to “us” to “all of us”—thus

our morals get bigger and bigger and bigger, so to speak. This is clearly an expansion of

awareness, an expansion of identity (“me” to “us” to “all of us”), and thus an expanse of

moral concern (from just me, to just my group, to all groups, all humans)—and thus an

increase in capacity for love as well. Clearly, something very important is happening

with this maturation process.

Now this whole process is what we call “Growing Up.” A human being has a

large number of capacities and numerous different intelligences, and virtually all of them

are subject to growth and development—all of them are subject to Growing Up. And at

each stage of Growing Up, you will interpret the world differently. We just saw that in

moral development, a person will go from selfish views to group-first views to all-groups
or all-humans-fairly. And each stage thinks that its truth and values and views are the

only true and good ones in existence; all the others are off-base, goofy, or just plain

wrong. And we’ll come back to that point; it’s important.

Now starting about a century ago, these various stages of development first began

to be explored and studied—this overall movement from egocentric (“just me”) to

ethnocentric (“just us”) to worldcentric (“all of us”). In our overall history, this

understanding of Growing Up was a relatively recent discovery and investigation. After

all, we saw that some forms of Waking Up, for example, were studied and practiced

going back two or three thousand years (often more); but the real study of the stages of

Growing Up are only about 100 years old. Why the big difference—3000 years or more

versus a mere hundred years?

A major reason is that when you have a profound meditative or mystical or

Waking-Up experience—such as being one with entire universe—you know that

experience immediately and directly. There’s just little doubt about it. But this isn’t true

with these stages of Growing Up; they are more like the rules of grammar in all

languages. Bear with me here for just a minute. Anybody brought up in a particular

culture ends up speaking its language fairly correctly—they put subject and verb together

correctly, they use adjectives and adverbs correctly, and in general they follow the rules

of grammar of their language quite correctly. But if you ask any of them to write down

those rules of grammar, virtually nobody can do so. They are following these large

systems of grammar, but none of them know that they are, let alone what they are.

These general stages of development in Growing Up are just like grammar.

While you are at a particular developmental stage, you will follow its rules and patterns
quite accurately, but you will have no idea you are doing so. Somebody at the conformist

moral stage of development will think that their ideas are just the way things should be;

they will have no idea that they got those ideas from their culture. And there’s nothing in

their ideas that will alert them to that fact. Like grammar, you can’t see these stages by

introspecting or looking within. They are hidden maps that we use to navigate whatever

territory we find ourselves in, and we have no idea we are using them. We think our

maps are the actual territory itself. We are looking at the world through them, we are not

looking at them. And so we don’t really even know that they’re there. And we definitely

confuse map and territory—not good.

And this is why we can’t discover these basic stages of developmental Growing

Up, these hidden maps, by looking within. We could sit on our meditation maps for 20

years, looking within, and never see any of the rules of grammar at all—nor any of these

hidden developmental maps. Rather, human scientists have to study large groups of

people over many years, track and record their various developments, and then figure out

exactly what rules and patterns they are following at each stage. And precisely because

you can’t see these stages by simply looking within, not a single meditative or spiritual

system anywhere in the world has any of these stages of Growing Up. Stages of Waking

Up, yes—you can see those by looking within. But stages of Growing Up, no. And

some of our models of Growing Up have 5 stages, 7 stages, 12 stages, or more—and not

a single spiritual system anywhere in the world, no matter how old or new, has anything

like any of these sequences anywhere. These detailed stages of Growing Up are indeed a

very recent discovery—another reason no religions anywhere have anything like them.

And I think you can start to see the problem here.

 Now, in all fairness, the many schools of developmental psychology that do study

these stages of Growing Up—mostly Western psychological and sociological schools—

although they do have a fairly detailed understanding of the major stages of Growing Up,

virtually none of them have anything like Waking Up or stages leading to Awakening and

Enlightenment. The reason for this is that, as a fairly permanent acquisition, the state of

Waking Up is usually the result of many years of a specific practice—meditation or

contemplation or yoga or contemplative prayer or self-actualization practices, and so on.

Not many people, certainly in the West, devote a great deal of their time to these

practices (if they even know about them). Thus, when Western researchers started

studying the various stages of development that were present in any typical population,

they found many examples of people at virtually all the various stages of Growing Up—

it’s a natural, normal maturation process that will occur to some degree whether you

work at it very much or not; but researchers found very few if any people who were

permanently at a Waking-Up state (and when they did, they didn’t know what to make of

it, and so tended to just ignore it). So there are very few, if any, major Western

developmental models that have anything like Enlightenment, Awakening, Moksha or

Freedom, satori or nondual unity, the Supreme Identity, and so on.

So humanity is today—and has been throughout its entire history to this point—in

a very strange situation. We have at least these two major paths of development—a path

of Growing Up and a path of Waking Up. But never have both of those paths been

practiced together—ever. This means that humanity has actually been practicing,

working, to be partial, limited, fragmented—and virtually from day one. In short,

humanity has actually been working to be broken. And all of history is a history of a
broken humanity. It is only in the past decade or so that it was realized that we have both

of these paths of growth, and that both of them are incredibly important and truly

necessary if we want to be fully developed and truly whole human beings. And this very

possibility opens us to an entirely new and radically innovative future, the likes of which

we have never, but never, seen before.

And that, in a sentence, is the aim of Integral Life Practice—to combine the very

best of the paths of Growing Up with the best of the paths of Waking Up. Of course, we

include a few other territories as well (such as Showing Up and Cleaning Up, as we’ll

see). But the paths of Growing Up and Waking Up are truly central, not only to Integral

Life Practice, but to Life itself, to being a fully whole and complete human being, no

matter what other activity, discipline, or path you’re engaged in. And as incredible as it

sounds, it really is only in the last decade or so that humanity has had this possibility

made available to it—the possibility of including and practicing paths of both Growing

Up and Waking Up. This itself is truly rather extraordinary, even revolutionary.

Now if becoming a truly whole and complete human being—or simply

understanding what that would mean—makes any sense to you, has any appeal to you,

then let’s explore it in a few more details. Then we’ll get to actual practices in both

Growing Up and Waking Up, so you can experientially realize these paths and directly

decide for yourselves. Okay?

Let’s start with looking into a few more points about this relatively recently

discovered path of Growing Up. As we said, every human being has the potential for

numerous capacities, talents, and intelligences that they are born with. Now it used to be

thought that a human being had one major intelligence—usually called cognitive
intelligence and measured with the all-important IQ test. But more recently, it’s

increasingly been realized that humans have what Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner

called multiple intelligences—we have not only cognitive intelligence, but also emotional

intelligence, moral intelligence, linguistic intelligence, intra-personal intelligence, values

intelligence, and so on. These are sometimes also called lines of development, or

developmental lines, or just lines (as in, “all quadrants, all levels, ALL LINES…, all

states, all types”—which is how this version of Integral Theory is often technically

referred to). But there’s an equally important discovery that goes with all these

intelligences or lines. As different as these multiple lines are, they all grow and develop

through the same basic levels of development. That is, different lines, same levels.

So, exactly how many levels or stages of overall development in Growing Up are

there? In a certain sense, the response to this is somewhat arbitrary. It’s like giving the

temperature of, say, a glass of water. We can give the response in the terms of

Centigrade, or Fahrenheit, or Kelvin, among others. If the water is boilng, Centigrade

will say it’s 100 degrees and Fahrenheit will say 212 degrees and Kelvin will say it’s

close to 700 degrees. Which is right? Clearly they’re all correct, it just depends on how

much detail you want, with Fahrenheit having around twice as many degrees or stages

between freezing and boiling as Centigrade does, and Kelvin 4 or 5 times as much. You

just have to say which scale you are using. The same is true of the general stages or

levels of development. There are models that give 3 basic stages, some give 5, some 9 or

12, some more. But if you take all of the available models and put them all together,

what you find most often are essentially the same basic 6-to-8 or so major levels of
development. I did a book called Integral Psychology, and in it are charts from over 100

different developmental models, and in the majority of those, the same 6-to-8 major

levels keep showing up again and again. Once more, this doesn’t mean the others are

wrong; it’s more a matter of how much detail you want; and the most commonly used are

these basic 6-to-8 or so major levels of development. We’ll be going through each of

these in just a moment, so you can clearly see what each of them looks like (and which

one of these level-stages you are mostly at—a discovery that might surprise you).

Right now, the major point is simply that these levels of development are indeed

very important, because in many, many ways, the very views, ideas, and experiences that

you have of reality at any moment are in large measure molded, even determined, by the

level of development you are at (in any of your multiple intelligences). Your level of

development is so important it will even help determine how you experience something

like Waking Up. And yet most of us don’t even know we have these levels of

development, let alone what ours happens to be—they really are hidden maps, just like

grammar. And some people get rather angry when something like this is even

mentioned—they, understandably, don’t won’t to be told that what they took as their own

original thoughts are in many ways largely determined by the hidden maps, gotten largely

from their culture, that govern their interpretations of reality. But variations of these

levels of Growing Up have been tested on everything from Amazonian rain forest tribes,

to Australian aborigines, to Mexican workers, to Russian citizens, to Illinois housewives,

and no major exceptions have been found to their existence. When we focus on them,

we’ll go through all 7 or 8 major levels of development, and clearly point out how you

can understand each one of them in your own awareness right now, thus purchasing some
degree of freedom from the hold they have on you at this time. So that’s a crucial reason

for us to become aware of these stages or levels in our overall path of Growing Up—to

speed up our dis-identification with them or letting go of them or being free of them.

Now for this dis-identification, we’re going to use, in a central way,

mindfulness—thus, for the first time, bringing together aspects of both Growing Up and

Waking Up into an integrated, unified practice. As in introductory overview to this, and

just for the moment, we’re going to temporarily set aside Growing Up and focus instead

on Waking Up (and then we’ll return and fully and profoundly join both of them in a

truly integral or unified fashion—part of the major breakthrough of the last decade or so,

fully driving toward being a whole, complete, and truly fulfilled human being).