Part One
Ground: The Foundation

Psychology is the study of human consciousness and its manifestations in behavior. The functions of consciousness include perceiving, desiring, willing, and acting. The structures of consciousness, some facets of which can be unconscious, include body, mind, soul, and spirit. The states of consciousness include normal (e.g., waking, dreaming, sleeping) and altered (e.g., nonordinary, meditative). The modes of consciousness include aesthetic, moral, and scientific. The development of consciousness spans an entire spectrum from prepersonal to personal to transpersonal, subconscious to self-conscious to superconscious, id to ego to Spirit. The relational and behavioral aspects of consciousness refer to its mutual interaction with the objective, exterior world and the sociocultural world of shared values and perceptions.

The great problem with psychology as it has historically unfolded is that, for the most part, different schools of psychology have often taken one of those aspects of the extraordinarily rich and multifaceted phenomenon of consciousness and announced that it is the only aspect worth studying (or even that it is the only aspect that actually exists). Behaviorism notoriously reduced consciousness to its observable, behavioral manifestations. Psychoanalysis reduced consciousness to structures of the ego and their impact by the id. Existentialism reduced consciousness to its personal structures and modes of intentionality. Many schools of transpersonal psychology focus merely on altered states of consciousness, with no coherent theory of the development of structures of consciousness. Asian psychologies typically excel in their account of consciousness development from the personal to the transpersonal domains, but have a very poor understanding of the earlier development from prepersonal to personal. Cognitive science admirably brings a scientific empiricism to bear on the problem, but often ends up simply reducing consciousness to its objective dimensions, neuronal mechanisms, and biocomputer-like functions, thus devastating the lifeworld of consciousness itself.

What if, on the other hand, all of the above accounts were an important part of the story? What if they all possessed true, but partial, insights into the vast field of consciousness? At the very least, assembling their conclusions under one roof would vastly expand our ideas of what consciousness is and, more important, what it might become. The endeavor to honor and embrace every legitimate aspect of human consciousness is the goal of an integral psychology.

Obviously, such an endeavor, at least at the beginning, has to be carried out at a very high level of abstraction. In coordinating these numerous approaches, we are working with systems of systems of systems, and such a coordination can only proceed with "orienting generalizations." These cross-paradigmatic generalizations are meant, first and foremost, to simply get us in the right ballpark, by throwing our conceptual net as wide as possible. A logic of inclusion, networking, and wide-net casting is called for; a logic of nests within nests within nests, each attempting to legitimately include all that can be included. It is a vision-logic, a logic not merely of trees but also of forests.

Not that the trees can be ignored. Network-logic is a dialectic of whole and part. As many details as possible are checked; then a tentative big picture is assembled; it is checked against further details, and the big picture readjusted. And so on indefinitely, with ever more details constantly altering the big picture—and vice versa. For the secret of contextual thinking is that the whole discloses new meanings not available to the parts, and thus the big pictures we build will give new meaning to the details that compose it. Because human beings are condemned to meaning, they are condemned to creating big pictures. Even the "anti-big picture" postmodernists have given us a very big picture about why they don't like big pictures, an internal contradiction that has landed them in various sorts of unpleasantness, but has simply proven, once again, that human beings are condemned to creating big pictures.

Therefore, choose your big pictures with care.

When it comes to an integral psychology—a subset of integral studies in general—we have an enormous wealth of theories, research, and practices, all of which are important trees in the integral forest. In the following pages, we will be reviewing many of them, always with an eye to an integral embrace.

Elements of my own system, developed in a dozen books, are summarized in charts 1a and 1b. These include the structures, states, functions, modes, development, and behavioral aspects of consciousness. We will discuss each of those in turn. We will be drawing also on premodern, modern, and postmodern sources, with a view to a reconciliation. And we will start with the backbone of the system, the basic levels of consciousness.