Growing Up and Waking Up: A Conversation With Ken Wilber About Leaving Transpersonal to Form Integral Psychology

Doug:

Thank you so much for taking the time out to meet with us. Our hope, Ken, is to get your sense of where you’re at as a person, scholar, thinker, and evolving being and to give you an opportunity to offer your thoughts to the transpersonal community regarding the past, present, and possible future of transpersonal psychology.

Ken:

Well, my recommendation is to disband or, at the very least, come up with a different name.

When I was a member of the transpersonal community, I started out very happily, and I was excited to work as I felt that what I was doing was part of the field. I had published a lot of articles in both the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (JHP) and the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology (JTP).

However, in almost every year in the JTP, there would be some sort of contest to see who could define transpersonal the best. And I would always watch those and think to myself, “Geez, if you can’t even define what you’ve got, you certainly can’t market it.” And there was always concern that the importance of the field wasn’t being met by an appropriately large market. And I just kept thinking, “Well, yeah. Nobody knows what it means. How can you sell it?”

Then there is the other problem that is associated with the laxity of the name “transpersonal,” which I have come to call the “pre-trans fallacy.” A whole lot of this was going on in the field, and it had become irritating.

As I saw it, the transpersonal field was increasingly focused on the prerational, prepersonal, preverbal, pre-anything, with such things getting celebrated and elevated to some sort of transrational glory. And this was becoming disturbing because, among other things, we already had the problem that transpersonal psychology touched occasionally on spiritual concerns. As far as the liberal press was concerned, they only had two names for any sort of religious orientation: you were either a fundamentalist nutcase, or you were a new age nutcase. But you were a nut, one way or another. So, we already had to deal with that problem.

So in addition to getting thrown in with nutcases of one variety or another, there was the glorification of prerational orientation. As long as something wasn’t rational, then it was assumed to be divine. It became very common to take prerational structures and elevate them to transrational structures. This was happening a lot in the transpersonal field.

Part of the problem is that development seems to proceed from pre-rational, to rational, to trans-rational, and from pre-personal, to personal, to transpersonal. Because of this, you want to pick a name that covers all of development and that’s what “integral” did for me. I just started thinking more in terms of integral psychology and have come to recognize two important types of developmental sequences that have never really been distinguished before.

No major religion or spiritual system differentiates them. No major Western developmental model differentiates them. But it’s the difference between what I call “growing up” and “waking up.” These are dramatically important developmental sequences. But they really are quite different. They’re made of different types of psychological elements. One is made of structures of consciousness. That’s the developmental model associated with growing up. The other is made of states of consciousness and includes all the waking up approaches.

Humanity discovered states of consciousness and the whole process of waking up going back several 1,000 years ago. However, we didn’t discover structures of consciousness or their development in what I call growing up until just about 100 years ago. We really don’t have a single system anywhere in the world that combines both waking up and growing up. And so, since no system ever really combined both of those, then humanity has actually been attempting to fragment itself in every major system that it has. There has never been a system that allowed it to be whole, that actually practiced both of these. And both of them are incredibly important developmental sequences. And they’re two very different approaches to spirituality.

Harris:

With transpersonal psychology being muddled because it doesn’t have a clear definition and therefore can’t garner support and energy in any sort of a clear way, do you think transpersonal psychology can deal both with waking up and growing up?

Ken:

Well, it wasn’t very much at the time that I decided to leave. In fact, one of the reasons that I decided to leave was because it wasn’t really dealing with either one. What was particularly irritating to me personally at that time was that there was just an occasionally published piece on development. But it was very rarely connected with things like stages of meditative development, for example. Most of the really profound meditation and contemplative systems around the world have left maps of the spiritual path.

Harris:

I’m thinking of Dan Goleman’s work in early JTP (e.g., Goleman, 1971), still some of the best stuff on meditation.

Ken:

And of course, Daniel P. Brown has done a lot of work on that type of thing. However, at the time, even that kind of stuff was very, very rare.

So, I had worked on a book in 1985. Because I wanted to sidestep the media new age nutcase thing, I literally got nothing but scholars from Harvard. And we did the book Transformations of Consciousness (Wilber et al., 1986). For the time, I think it was really pioneering. And we hadn’t yet fully figured out how to differentiate waking up and growing up. We would look at all these developmental models of psychology, and we would develop these developmental maps of meditation. And what it just kept looking like is that the Western models had sort of run out about two thirds of the way up and the meditation models, whatever you started with, started and sort of overlapped, but then they had three, four, or five higher stages that just really weren’t representative on any of the Western developmental models at all. So the common thing was to just sort of stack one on top of the other. It sounds very idiotic right now.

Regardless, what seemed apparent to me at that time in transpersonal psychology was that there were very few people who were interested in studies on development. And I just found that irritating.

Doug:

Your departure from transpersonal psychology seemed to coincide with the rise of postmodern influences in the field [and the criticisms of structuralism associated with it]. I don’t think that was coincidental, was it?

Ken:

It wasn’t coincidental; it was tied in with it. Part of it was an actual misunderstanding of the types of structuralism that there was. . . . Structure was looked at as any sort of rigid controlling thing. Piaget actually wrote a book on structuralism (Piaget, 1970). In it, he points out very clearly that it’s nothing but an intuition of wholeness. That’s what drives structuralism; it is the realization that you didn’t just have these various parts wandering around in the human mind but, instead, that they were all coordinated as manifestations of an integrating, self-organizing whole. That’s what the structure was.

And so you have people like Daniel Brown and others, I’ve been doing it myself for quite a while, comparing the stages of meditative unfolding in the various systems. And you can see broad similarities that were occurring. The same thing happened if you actually looked at all the developmental models in Western developmental psychology that started about 100 years ago. And again, these are doing two very different things. But by comparing both classes, you could start to see an enormous number of similarities between the Western models and the enormous number of similarities between the contemplative models. That was really telling us something very important. Exactly how those two were separate wasn’t exactly clear at the time that I specifically left transpersonal. But what was clear is that these developmental sequences were occurring, whether we put them together in one big developmental scheme, or whether we would eventually see exactly how they’re separate but related to each other.

The point was that development was clearly an extremely important component, and it was getting largely ignored in transpersonal and humanistic psychology.

But what started to happen in both of them was that, in the first wave, there was an immediate dying down of any interest in anything that has something that looked like the hierarchy. Then the second phase was just an absolute moral attack on anything that had a hierarchy. When all that was happening, I didn’t see any intelligent discussion about the difference between dominator hierarchies and actualization hierarchies or growth hierarchies. Nature everywhere is producing growth hierarchies.

One of the really important differences between a dominator hierarchy and a growth hierarchy is that, in dominator hierarchies, the higher you go in the hierarchy, the more people you can hurt or oppress or exclude. In growth hierarchies, the higher you go in the hierarchy, the more people you include. [However], they were throwing out all hierarchies. That’s just disastrous.

Harris:

So, is that the dynamic that was a big part in motivating you to move away from transpersonal psychology (i.e., the growing affinity to postmodernism and the growth of social justice sort of concerns that were maybe politically correct and naïve)?

Ken:

Yes, because what had started to happen is that [the postmodernists contributed to a push] from orange ¹ rational modernity into a green postmodern multicultural egalitarianism. And what’s so astonishing about that is they actually went into the school systems, certainly in most Western countries and certainly in North America, and within one generation had taken them over, literally. And now they pretty much own the humanities; it’s unbelievable . . . but it’s a reality. I suppose there’s some good news in there, meaning that when we actually start to get around 10% of the population into those states of development, there’s also at least the possibility that we could take over education the way green took it over previously. But back then [i.e., 1970s], that’s what was just starting to happen.

And we can also see this, by the way, not just [in journals] like JHP and JTP, but [also in colleges]. There were around four or five or so major kind of alternative college systems back then. [During the earlier years of these systems], you could actually get a master’s and your main text, for example, was The Atman Project (Wilber, 1980) [which promoted a view of development to include] the whole spectrum. But then within about a decade, these systems went from embracing integral orientations into pure green, and usually broken green. It’s usually a mean green meme.

I remember this at [one of these alternative schools], because they had asked me to join the board. I was impressed with the number of really incredibly smart, gifted people that had come together on that board. So I was glad to join and I actually enjoyed the board meetings and was on it for 10 years. During those 10 years, we saw [the school] go from just waking up [to including] growing up, and then stressing the integral sector stages of growing up. [But by the end of those 10 years] the student body had shifted right down into really deep green, really deep aggressive green. They were soaked in waking up, but their growing up had slipped down a stage or two. [As a result], a lot of teachers just started quitting because they just couldn’t take it. It was just so irritating and annoying. But the students were insistent they were all victims, and it was just horrifying. Then suddenly some of the board members [resigned] as well. It was not looking good.

By that time, it was also becoming pretty obvious that areas like transpersonal psychology were embracing theories that previously were simply elevating and over blowing the importance and the influence of anything that was literally prerational or prepersonal. Those [theories] were everywhere. Books were coming out on them and the journals were continuing to publish that kind of stuff. That was probably the straw that broke this camel’s back.

Harris:

It is kind of paradoxical to me that when humanistic and transpersonal psychology started to go postmodern, you found that a difficult situation to live with, yet within the schemes, the postmodernist or “aperspectival” is seen as higher, but yet it’s harder to tolerate and it’s not really higher.

Doug:

So [if I am understanding you correctly], your frustration with, and stepping back from, transpersonal psychology was because of the creep-in of the moralizing tendency of people who embrace the green. Do you think that [withdrawing from the field] was the best way of responding to it?

Ken:

Well, at the time that was combined with an irritation with defining myself with a term that can’t be defined. And I was getting very tired of that. And I was getting very tired of the number of models that were in the field that were just covering the basement, basically, and claimed they were covering God. It was really getting irritating. And there just became less and less things about it that I found positive.

At some point, when the negative outweighs the positive, even if it’s just 51%, you tend to go, “Okay. That’s it. I’ve had it.” And that’s what happened. It just became a field that was just too stuck in a swamp of suffocating problems. The whole postmodern thing turns out to be something that essentially just hit all the humanities and has been a nightmare.

Any of the ones that have any sort of integral capacities of thinking haven’t had the postmodern takeover, or really the extreme postmodern takeover. Because my complaint is that the type of postmodernism that we see is a result of a broken green. It’s not healthy.

Harris:

That clarifies a lot, right there.

Ken:

Yeah. And that’s a real, real problem. It remains to be seen how that’s going to turn out. But the number of things that are tied to what the negative, broken green is doing is truly alarming. [For example], values like free speech and the whole notion of universal rights emerged with orange. All of the emancipation movements, including the women’s movement, all those began with the orange stage.

Each higher stage is supposed to transcend and include the previous stage. So, green was supposed to transcend and include the freedom that orange introduced. But it got so rabid and so extremist on its values of equality and egalitarianism that it started to push freedom out of the picture. It’s really not that interested in freedom. It wants equality. Unfortunately, those two are contradictory.

Because human beings are born with different capacities, you can either have freedom or you can have equality, but you can’t have both. Kurt Vonnegut actually wrote a short story once about a society that had nothing but equality. And so on the basketball teams, for example, the players who had any sort of natural talent had to wear extra weights, you know like 50 pounds of extra weights. They’d be more …

Harris:

More equal.

Ken:

Everybody had to have exactly what they call equal outcome and not what orange argues for, which is equal opportunity. Both of those are important but, unfortunately, green really absolutizes equal outcome.

There’s this whole thing called the intellectual dark web that’s been created. It’s got well over a billion views and its people [include] Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Haidt, Joe Rogan, David Reuben, Murray Douglas, and Sam Harris. For many of the members of the intellectual dark web, the thing they all have in common is that they’re alarmed at greens. They’re alarmed at greens repressing the freedom of orange and not including it, which is what it should do. That’s one of the reasons it’s broken green and not a very healthy green.

So that has just turned out to be a nightmare that’s hit humanities at large, and humanistic and transpersonal psychology just happen to be two of the hundreds of casualties of that particular problem.

There is still, or at least it was at the time that I left [transpersonal psychology], a disinterest in developmental studies in general and the idea that [development proceeds in] stages. That means something’s higher than another. That can’t be right. That was combined with a really widespread pre-trans confusion.

And so we had enormous number of preverbal, prepersonal, preconventional, prerational you name it, being eulogized and elevated to, in a sense, transrational glory. This is a real, real problem. It’s a real problem, among other things, because you want to help people find their own highest potentials. [If nothing else], you at least want to get the direction in your head. You want to get that part right. Because it is not a good thing when you are heading down the hill, when you are thinking that you are heading up the hill. That is really not a good thing for an entire field to do. Yet that was the tendency that [transpersonal psychology] had. That, combined with the fact that all of the prerational approaches were piling up at the bottom of the ladder down, made it a field that I would not want to be a part of. There were just fewer and fewer things that I could point to and be happy about.

Doug:

[I think it important to point out that] you, too, are a casualty as far as the decisions you had to make. Certainly, from the point of view of myself as a person who has continued to identify with transpersonal psychology, your loss from the field was a casualty for the field, and a considerable one.

What you just said is powerful for me, because by emancipating yourself from transpersonal psychology [due to your mounting dissatisfaction with it], you gave yourself space to do some really exciting stuff. At this point, how do you see your thinking relating to whatever transpersonal psychology has become?

Ken:

Well, first of all, my general interest in the field itself had already been declining, but it started to decline even further, faster. There was just less and less reward for publishing an article in JTP, for example. I just wouldn’t get anything out of it. In way over half the cases, I would just disagree with the whole direction they were going. It would seem just really profoundly, profoundly confused in my own mind.

I was striking out in directions that I basically hadn’t seen before. It struck me as being really interesting and really worth pursuing. That’s definitely what I wanted to do. I did not want to get caught up in the approaches that I considered just to be incorrect. [The scholars promoting these approaches] basically had good intentions, I want to be clear about that. I don’t feel anybody had any malevolence. [I just viewed them as] confused.

And so, generally my own sort of compass point since I started doing this kind of writing is I would go anywhere where there’s some sort of truth. I don’t care what its reputation is or where it comes from or who did it. If there’s any sort of truth to it, then I’m on. That’s sort of the driving orientation that I’ve had for five decades now. And that just led me less, and less, and less into something called transpersonal.

[After about 6 months or so after I left the field, I had learned that JTP] had something like around 600 subscribers. Whatever it was, it was getting quite small. So right around that point I just sort of stopped. I just didn’t even subscribe to the journal anymore. It just wasn’t worth it in terms of payout that I had got. I essentially just kind of went on and really didn’t think about the field that much, didn’t track it. I was tracking Lithuanian forms of hermeneutics more than I was tracking transpersonal psychology.

Harris:

Do you think the integral approach transcends but includes transpersonal?

Ken:

Well, my plan is that anything that had any sort of partial truth and validity to it, whether it’s transpersonal or not, is something that I would want to embrace. This is one of the reasons that I kept the ingredients and the general framework which is generally referred to as AQAL which is short for All Quadrants, All Levels [and includes] all lines, all states, all of the types.

If I find any ingredients from some other model, or some other approach, or some other discipline, and they seem really important, but don’t fit in the framework that I have now, then my top priority becomes finding ways to make sure that I can incorporate that into the framework. And that’s the drive. That’s sort of the point of the framework. There are a lot more elements that I deal with in my “meta” theory than just those five elements. But those are five are sort of the most central and the most important. There are also ones that aren’t recognized that often.

Harris:

But what I’m wondering is, as you moved on to create integral psychology, what did you take from transpersonal psychology with you that was good, solid, and helped you go further?

Ken:

Well, [I took] pretty much everything that I believed at the time that I considered myself a member of the transpersonal community. I didn’t just say, “Oh, I’m leaving and by the way here’s 40% of the [stuff] that I believed when I was here. That’s gone.” I took 100% of what I believed with me.

Harris:

I wonder what percentage of what [you took with you] was believed in the transpersonal community.

Ken:

How many people would identify themselves with something called integral psychology versus how many people would stay with something called transpersonal psychology? My best guess at the time is it was about 50/50. And that still seems to be essentially correct. But again, at the time, I sort of stopped tracking the movement . . . Not just the whole difficulty with naming and defining the field, but just the number of models in it that were regressive, just flat out regressive. I have no idea what the field’s actual composition is today.

Harris:

I was reading your book [The Religion of Tomorrow; Wilber, 2017] and noticed that you used the term transpersonal probably a dozen times or maybe a little bit more.

Ken:

Yeah, well as long as you have a framework set out where people can see that there are domains called prepersonal and there are domains called personal, then transpersonal makes a certain amount of sense. So, because of that, then, I found the word to have a general type of usefulness. It’s not something that I would use just on its own so to speak. For instance, if I were describing my approach or even an area of it, transpersonal wouldn’t be the best word for that. But in the context of overall developmental scales in waking up and then growing up, it has a specific type of meaning that becomes relatively clear in the context of the whole thing. And it’s mine, so I don’t mind that.

Harris:

I wonder if it’s possible to better define transpersonal as opposed to abandoning it. [And as I think of it], transpersonal “psychology” is very narrow to me. I like to think about transpersonal art, anthropology, and sociology, and a whole range of disciplines that are involved in trying to get out of a limiting perspective to something larger. My vision of transpersonal is highly aligned to the integral perspective and wonder whether these two movements have any commonality or [room for] dialogue?

Ken:

I don’t know if that amount of associations with the term in my own mind has failed to keep up with where the field might be right now or if this is actually just an inherent problem of the name itself. But I look at something like the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice and, in it, they have published articles where over 60 different fields have been completely reinterpreted using an AQAL integral framework. And so there really are a lot of things like integral business, integral college, integral art. I mean, the Architectural Digest did a whole year’s worth of articles, and it was a complete reinterpretation of every aspect of architecture based on the AQAL model. I mean every aspect, it was history, it was materials, it was space, it was construction. It was really unbelievable.

So integral architecture, integral education, integral psychotherapy, I mean it just sort of goes on and on and on. And then I think about something like transpersonal architecture? It just doesn’t sound right. If you do transpersonal business, I would think, well okay, they are doing mindfulness in business or something. [When you use the term integral, it is obvious that] you’re not just talking about one sector of human being. When you say transpersonal, you clearly mean transperson, you mean it’s not personal, it’s not prepersonal.

So is that what the field works with? It just studies the transpersonal components of the human being? Because, that’s what it’s called. So, that’s what I would expect. And so if somebody did something like transpersonal architecture, first that would be very confusing, but then sort of, you have to think about it and say, “Well, okay, what does that mean”? Architecture that goes along with churches? What is that exactly?

So, for most of those disciplines, it’s not clear at all. I mean if you would say transpersonal education, okay, well you’re educating a transpersonal component of human being. So, when does that even start? So, the name is a problem. I mean it’s right there.

Doug:

This is part of the reason why precision of word usage really matters. If we don’t have a point of shared understanding to begin with, the whole thing turns into a [muddled mess] before you even start your journey. And I think that’s been one of the main problems with transpersonal psychology right out the starting gates.

I read Anthony Sutich’s original position paper in JTP. [In a paper published in 1972, he defines transpersonal psychology as] the scientific study of and responsible implementation of findings related to [and then he lists off a wide range of different topics of study]. It’s not very academic nor is it very precise. At least he mentions science. I like that, actually. And, responsible implementation, [which implies the importance of ethics. I consider this to be important].

Ken:

Sure. And even though, when you mentioned areas that it’s the scientific approach to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the scientific part is meant to shield them from the transpersonal name, number one—that’s why it’s there. In other words, who [cares]?

No actual discipline of psychology has to say we’re a scientific study of [whatever it is we study]. Like are we going to say that we are a nonscientific study of [whatever]?

The whole list of those things is given precisely because they can’t summarize them all in a few words. Any discipline should be able to say what it is in one or two sentences and then, if you want the whole list of stuff that it looks like, that’s fine. But they can’t do it in two to three sentences. That’s why they are doing all of this. They can’t really tell you what it is.

And that was my biggest complaint about the name of the school, and probably one of the very main reasons why I left . . . and so that’s the problem. It’s never going to change if we don’t change the name, ever. . . . If you expect to see that particular discipline and its body of work, whatever that is, continue forward, the single most important thing you have to do is change the name.

Just think about the word transpersonal just by itself and decide what that means. Once you’ve figured that out, then ask does that blank psychology, whatever the transpersonal means, does that work as a phrase? So just think of a couple of the names for transpersonal and say, how does that fit with psychology? Because I’m not sure the problem is “transpersonal psychology.” I think the problem is transpersonal. Psychology is fine.

Harris:

Except most of the people who are involved in transpersonal psychology are using psychology terms just for its power advantages, and they’re not at all in line with anything scientific.

Ken:

Right.

Doug:

Well for what it’s worth, the common synonym, or presumed synonym, of transpersonal is spiritual. Some people even make reference to the early history of how are we are going to name this movement, and some say Stan Grof was the one who suggested transpersonal because spiritual psychology was being considered, but spiritual was too religious in tone.

Harris:

Charlie Tart told me that, for his Transpersonal Psychologies book (Tart, 1975), he tried to get it published as “spiritual psychologies” and it was rejected for that reason.

Ken:

Even then, you would want to ask—am I really saying that, as spiritual psychology, that what I’m actually studying is just the psychology of spirituality? Is that really all I’m studying? Because again that, to the extent it deserves a name at all, spiritual psychology, it’s a subdiscipline of some other discipline.

Among other things, you get an enormous amount of difficulty in terms of how people interpret spiritual itself. A common phrase is “I’m spiritual but not religious.” So, is spiritual psychology something called religious orientation? Then you have the whole pre–trans fallacy that always gets thrown in there. So there will always be people who think of spiritual as just being prerational or preverbal or prepersonal, that kind of thing. That’s a problem.

But I would focus on that word transpersonal. Because I think what happened when people like Grof and company were thinking about a term is they saw the problem with something like spiritual, and so they proposed alternatives. When they got something like transpersonal that was relatively new, it was relatively unheard of, it didn’t seem contaminated or misused. In just looking for something that wasn’t like spiritual, they cut short their discriminating investigation of the word transpersonal and sort of adopted it because, oh well, that’ll work. So let’s just take that. If somebody was there to play devil’s advocate and actually argue some of the problems that would eventually come up from using that term. Like one, nobody knows what it means. Two, it sounds very limited; it describes only a very small area of human psychology. Three, it’s clear and plain that it’s not an inclusive psychology. It’s nothing pretending to be comprehensive or unified or integrated.

It’s not just the definition, it’s what is actually conveyed by the name of the school itself. One of the reasons I see it as particularly problematic is that most of the definitions of transpersonal refer to an area that has limitations. Transpersonal doesn’t refer to every single aspect of a human being. Usually when you do something like that, something like infant psychology, that’s the same kind of statement as transpersonal psychology, it’s referring to just a particular area of human growth and development. And like I said, if it’s a subset of some bigger whatever you’re talking about, even if it’s humanistic psychology, then you have infant psychology as a chapter in the book of humanistic psychology. You understand you’re going to look at infant psychology from a humanistic perspective. If you just had a field called infant psychology, it would sort of make sense but it would also be very confusing because, if it’s psychoanalytic or behavioristic infant psychology or humanistic psychology, whatever it is, you would actually have to have some sort of explanation about just what your approach was to infant psychology.

Those are the kinds of problems you get into with something like transpersonal psychology because the word transpersonal itself is limited. You could still see it being a chapter in, let’s call it unified psychology. [In such a book, you would know what] transpersonal would mean. It would mean those areas that extended beyond the personal or the prepersonal. But just like infant psychology, it doesn’t work well on its own. Because it’s inherently describing a limited area of human nature.

Harris:

I’m not sure about that. I don’t know why one couldn’t specialize in infant psychology and recognize that it’s a subdiscipline of psychology and that it’s drawing from behavioral and cognitive and physiological and social, and focusing in on infants.

Doug:

Well, part of what makes this aspect of the conversation challenging is [trying to determine] the extent to which theory defines a content area or to what extent [a discipline or subdiscipline] should be defined as a descriptive versus a theoretical entity. Then [there needs to be consideration of the area’s] objects versus its structures, dynamics, processes, and outcomes. If you’re not clear on those things, the whole thing becomes a very confusing mess.

In 1993, Roger Walsh and Frances Vaughan published a delightful paper on transpersonal definitions in the JTP. They lay out really clean, clear, helpful definitions, and they’re descriptive. No ideological commitments; they define it as a content area, [and they concretely provide] the object that the descriptive use of these terms refers to. I thought to myself when I first came across it, it’s so easy. It makes everything so easy. I like that, that’s easy.

[Changing topics], to what extent does the integral vision need to be made available to science? I often wondered, “Does Wilber give any thought to how a program of research would come to bear on his thinking?” To what extent can science, however it’s construed, bring rigorous evaluation to [your integral theory]?

Ken:

Well, the way that integral impacts various areas has been something that I’ve essentially just been leaving open to people in those areas, depending on what they want to do. So, there are a fair number of people who at least consider themselves scientists that have taken up the model, and they’ll use it in their own field. Sometimes they’ll go out and actually do studies. Some did integral psychotherapy and then created integral intake and then actually submitted that to empirical testing. An editorial in Unified Psychotherapy actually said that research on the integral model had created the first empirical evidence ever really gathered effectively from ongoing therapeutic processes.

One of the main groups is working on cellular research; they call it “abiogenesis,” in other words the first cellular life forms. They specifically adopted an AQAL framework when they realized that the first living cell couldn’t be just a single cell, there had to be a group of them. It just altered their models entirely in terms of what they were trying to create. So, those kinds of things continue to happen and, of course, I think they’re terrific. I’m delighted. So anytime anybody wants to do something like that to the extent that they contact me I usually support it.