This moment in history - a crucial time for Integral

    This is something I've been thinking about for a couple of months now.  I've shared this vision with many people I know, but it's worth writing down, if only to record it for later.

    When you ask most people, "When did the postmodern wave start in America?" the answer you'd get most often is "the late 1960's".  And there's some surface truth to that.  As we see on Mad Men, the early 1960's were just the 1950's with JFK as President, and math and science in the ascendant because of Sputnik and the Cold War.  There were still enormous cultural structures that served to define everyone's role in society.  In the late 1960's, though, a generation of people managed to see through those roles (although only temporarily for most) and began to ask some fundamental questions about them.

    But I think a better answer to pinpointing the true start of the postmodern wave of consciousness (i.e. Spiral Dynamics Green) is the Beat Generation of the early 1950's.  These men and women really kicked it all off.  And yes, I completely understand that they couldn't have existed in a context without the prior work of philosophers like Heidegger, Nietzche, Camus, Sartre, etc. but their work (and the conclusions one could draw from their work) wasn't widespread in the culture at all.

    To me, the Beat Generation really started it all off, by creating an ethos and a body of art (cultural touchstones) that the people who came after them were able to read and be influenced by.

    And, really, how big was Beat culture, anyway?  I'm not exactly sure, but I think it's safe to say that the Beats, back in the early 1950's, pretty much consisted of a small group of people in each city who would get together and look at each other and finally get to say out loud to another human being, "The world is seriously fucked up, isn't it?  I mean, no one gets what's really going on.

    So, doesn't that sound an awful lot like Integral these days?  Just a few people in each city who get together to talk about their new worldview, right?

    And that's why I think that this moment, this year, is crucial in the development of Integral.

    You see, we're the Beat Generation for Integral.  Cool, man.

    We have the opportunity, right now, to actively shape the development of Integral, and to be able to offer its expanded perspective to many more people.  Or we could sit back and see what emerges from it.  But we have the opportunity to do that without being completely drug-addled the way they were in the 1950's, and to do it with a lot more confidence and clarity and purpose and humility than those intrepid explorers who hung out with Kerouac.

    I think we'll look back five years from now and ask ourselves, "Did we do the right things back then?  Did we screw some things up?  Did we do enough?"  When that comes, I want to know that I did enough... that I might have made some less-than-optimal choices on the way, but that I knew Integral well enough to make some good choices about how to organize local groups around it.  That I came up with and supported offerings that helped the community to grow through the levels if they were only ready to participate.

    The Integral wave of consciousness is going to hit very big in about ten years... and we already have a President who clearly is demonstrating some Integral levels of thinking, whether he's read Ken Wilber or not.  Are we going to take a hand in shaping that wave, or are we going to just let it emerge?  Are we willing to own that the future of the movement is quite literally in our own hands, and that we have to step up and lead within it?  Or will we sit back for other people to define that for us?

    I'm choosing more agency than communion right now, and it makes some sense in the context of the historical moment I think we're in.  What about you?