The Daily Evolver

The struggle between the Muslim and Western worlds is not only a clash of civilizations, but also a clash of development. I had a good conversation on this subject with Dr. Aftab Omer, a sociologist, psychologist and integralist who was raised in Pakistan, India and Turkey, and who has lived in the US for much of his life.

Sex evolves like everything else, so what's next? This week Jeff looks at the amazing, creative, pervasive phenomena of sex and how it's evolving in all four quadrants. What are the roots of our sexuality, where are we now and what is emerging? He starts with a shout out to his favorite new art form and inspiration for this week’s topic: reality TV.

In this week’s call Jeff explores the issue of cultural identity from an evolutionary point of view. He uses the examples of the World Cup and the story told about Brazil by the international media leading up to it, as well as the continuing drama in Ukraine to illuminate how, even in our globalized world, culture has a unique power to move events. His special guest is Ukrainian integralist Oleg Linetsky.

This week Jeff focuses on the situation in Iraq, where the jihadi group ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham) has taken over the Sunni area of the country. Their aim is to install a medieval caliphate throughout the Middle East (“we know no borders,” they say). What does integral theory tell us about these fighters and how to deal with their threat to the country America misguidedly attempted to liberate into modernity?

I met Graham back in the nineties when he ran a web design firm in Seattle. He’s always been on the emerging edge of culture and technology and is one of those people that has an integral mind whether or not they ever use the vocabulary or reference the maps. He has a developmental view and doesn’t see modernity as the enemy, necessarily, but as the foundation upon which a thriving postmodern culture can be built. He founded the popular Treehugger.com and is now focusing his attention on LifeEdited, which designed and built this amazing apartment in Brooklyn — just 420 square feet in size — that is an example of how we can use smart design to cut down on energy, space and resources and still create more health and happiness in our lives. Graham is a pragmatist. His TED talk Why I’m a Weekday Vegetarian, demonstrates an integral way of leading the culture forward through a change that needs to happen. Everyone on the planet can’t eat meat three times a day, but “people don’t want to have their last hamburger.” He advocates important incremental changes using education and the power of good design. Graham had just arrived to his rustic cabin in Maui when Jeff reached him last winter to talk about the view from the front lines. “America has super sized itself over the last sixty years,” he says. “We have about three times the space per person of any other Western country, and it gives us giant environmental footprints. We’re routinely living beyond our means and racking up tons of debt. “We have a twenty-two billion dollar personal storage industry just to keep all the stuff we collect. It would all make some sense if we were happier, but we’re not.” There is a name for this uniquely modern affliction: affluenza, and Graham knows it well. When he wrote an op-ed in the NYTimes called Living With Less, A Lot Less, critics pointed out that downsizing advice from a millionaire was hardly compelling when much of the world was still trying to scrape up enough calories to feed their families. But from an integral perspective, where we see all the altitudes of development online in the world at any given time, of course we’re privileged to be solving the problems of modernity, that’s what you do in postmodernity. Graham points out that in the modern age we have become so efficient at making things that hoarding doesn’t make sense anymore, though it may have at one time. “The modern mindset is a growth mindset,” Jeff reminds us, “whereas the orienting economic principle of postmodernity is sustainability.” LifeEdited is helping with that shift by building housing for singles and families that are only two-hundred to one thousand square feet, respectively, and making these units function like much larger spaces. Communal resources will include spare bedrooms that are bookable online (because you don’t always need that guest room, do you?), a “product library” for things that you may need occasionally but don’t make sense to own, communal space like professional kitchens, roof decks, fitness areas and a great room for parties and gatherings. Who needs to heat and cool a giant room in their home that gets used a few times a year? “Most design is for things that happen very rarely,” Graham explains, “like a four wheel drive truck, for instance. We’re redesigning the experience of living for what it’s like ninety percent of the time. Then you can share the things that everyone only needs once in a while.” LifeEdited are creating examples of smart communities for the future, focused in dense areas. Half of us live in cities now and that number is going up. The future is in cities, and that’s where the big changes need to happen. In this lifestyle, where your home becomes your office and the city becomes your living room, it’s an antidote to the separation and alienation of modernity in which the pendulum has swung far in favor of autonomy. Graham wonders if underneath our modern suburban lifestyles is a fear of intimacy. The modern critique: how does the economy work when we are consuming so much less? “We’re smart enough to figure that out in the time it’s going to take for these changes to take effect,” Graham says.

Lying is a subtle violence that we perpetrate against ourselves and others, and almost all psychotherapy is concerning where people lie to themselves about themselves. As we develop more self-awareness and transparency, lies become less tempting because they become less useful and actually just plain uninteresting.

Our left hemisphere learns new routines, but it is our right hemisphere where the habits are hardwired — and it changes slowly. The brain evolved to not give up habits that it has associated with a satisfactory life. We are what we repeatedly do. —Aristotle I learn the coolest stuff listening to The Shrink & The Pundit sessions. For example, as you repeat a certain action it activates a specific neuronal network in the brain. Cells go there and wrap the neurons in a myelin sheath (myelin is a white, fatty, electrically insulating substance). The myelinated nerve is up to one hundred times faster! If you practice enough those circuits become heavily myelinnated and then that action becomes habitual, like the way my fingers are hitting these keys — you don’t even need to think about it. Which is great! Until it isn’t. Habits are hard to change. We can use pain and pleasure (the proverbial vinegar and honey) but mostly it just takes time. A habit is a pattern of self-reinforcing processes. A Princeton study suggests that about forty percent of what we do during the course of each day is purely habitual. Dr. Keith thinks that’s a conservative number. In his forthcoming book, Integral Mindfulness: From Clueless to Dialed In, he explains that to change something is to first be aware of it. Observation plus compassion equals mindfulness, and that’s your primary tool for regulating existing habits and creating new ones. Keith learned from Ken Wilber that the universe is composed of habits that are including and transcending each other through the mechanism of chaos. The nature of chaos is that it seeks coherence (involution). That’s a force as powerful as gravity. Systems naturally want coherence so they create habitual ways of being. It’s life’s general shape or mode of growth. Every once in a while a stable state is disturbed, there’s a disintegration and then a re-integration into something different. The universe has reorganized and created a habit that is more complex. Those more complex habits appear simpler but they’re not. “You could say humans have a habit of self transcendence,” Dr. Keith Witt A hundred years ago, William James famously declared that it took twenty-one days to create a habit. Modern neuroscience would say he wasn’t too far off. Integrative neurons start creating hard wired circuits back to your amygdala after about thirty days of doing something different. A spiritual teacher of mine named Sylvia used to say the most powerful thing we have is our attention, and in that moment when you realize you have the power to switch the energy from point A (your habit) to point B (your new intention) it is the most powerful moment in your life. Sometimes you have to apply that attention over and over and over until it begins choosing itself. Saying no to one thing by saying yes to another is called a reciprocal inhibitor. Studies have shown that people are twenty-five times more successful if they try to cultivate a new habit rather than just resist the bad one. So instead of smoking a cigarette, do a breathing exercise. Instead of eating a bag of chips, take a walk. It’s hard work, so it helps to get excited, and have someone that inspires you and embodies where you want to go. Even better yet, get that person to coach you. If you can engage repeatedly in the process where you go to the edge of where you’re competent and you make a mistake, correct it, make a mistake, correct it…that is a growth mindset. You have to be willing to be intimate with your weakness. An integrally informed mindfulness can give you a higher quality of self-awareness. Jeff often likens it to Google Earth, where you can view the whole picture and also zoom in to a precise address. There’s just more information in that kind of granularity — lines of development, what quadrant you’re operating in, your state of consciousness. Even your typology can be likened to a bundle of habits that you’re predisposed to perform, and knowing what those are can be immensely helpful. Integral is a developmental system in four quadrants. This is where it really trumps 20th century developmental psychology. 20th century developmental psychology shifts quadrants unconsciously and it’s frankly quite confusing, but integral doesn’t do that. So you can see the healthy expression of your current developmental level and what your next developmental level is. You can adjust yourself in terms of observing your good and bad habits and start cultivating good habits that involve horizontal health, which is more healthy with your current worldview, and vertical health which encourages you to move forward.   – Dr. Keith Witt That self observation, even if it has compassion in it, is still coming from a worldview, a specific perspective. But you’re aware of it and you’re aware of others that are available to you. You know what’s more healthy and less healthy and more or less what serves development. That’s a superior form of mindfulness. But then it gets really interesting. Earlier in life, when you’re in a Socialized Mind stage, the culture around you largely determines what your habits will be. As you evolve — if you evolve — you move into a Self-Authoring stage of development, where you are cultivating the ability to expand your choices and shape your own habits. People moving into second tier consciousness, or what can loosely be correlated with Kegan’s Self-Transforming stage, begin to find something very different. It feels like they start losing choice. Why? Because development goes in a particular direction and the lines converge towards service to God and service to the world. And so after a while your life starts informing you on the habits that you’re going to have to change and the habits that you’re going to have to cultivate, and that’s self-transforming mind.  – Dr. Keith Witt It feels like you begin to lose choice because in a way, you do. The deeper currents become more available and conscious to us as we develop and in general they lead us to habits that are more beautiful, good and true. You’re also unlikely to be rigid about them. Jeff says that cultivating second tier consciousness often feels to him like he’s “being lived.” I can relate to that. “At this stage in the game it feels like a lot of it is just unfurling the sails, and allowing the moment to inform where I’m going and what I’m doing and what’s appropriate. What’s the best use of Jeff in this moment, in this day?”  Losing choice turns out to be a higher form of liberation. So enjoy this latest installment of The Shrink & The Pundit and let us know what you think on Facebook or Twitter.

This week Jeff took a look at the emergence of some radical new Green ideas in the economic conversation, with an advanced peek at the influential new book “Capital in the 21st Century”, by Thomas Piketty. He also addressed the cultural issues of climate change and a striking new way of dealing with it: give up.

This week Jeff takes a look at new research that reveals how worldview overrides evidence in determining one’s political perspective. He also explores the conservative view of the Russian/Ukraine situation by critiquing an essay by Robert D. Kaplan, Geopolitics and the New World Order in which Kaplan argues that “in geopolitics, the past never dies and there is no modern world.”

If it was just the genes talking we’d have serial marriages lasting on average four or five years, and we’d cheat on each other every chance we got.  ~Dr. Keith Witt Apparently we’re kind of clueless about intimate attachment in general. According to Dr. Keith we aggrandize romantic love, we’re afraid of sexual lust and we have no idea about long-term attachment. We mix them all up, basically. Ninety percent of the people and couples that come to Keith for help present with a problem in their marriage or primary partnership. That tells us a couple things. One, like many other mammals we’re drawn to pair bond. Most people who are allowed to get married, do. And two, it tells us that marriage is challenging and most of us need some help to learn how to do it well. So why aren’t we taught how to do it? Probably because your marriage is not your parent’s marriage. It’s not even the marriage that you had yesterday. As cultures change marriages must change with them, so a successful marriage fifty years ago is not the same as a successful marriage today. I’ve noticed that the marriages of my parents, my friends, and my friend’s children are all very different. Keith says when you get married you’re not just signing up for one marriage, you’re signing up for many marriages. It’s going to change from romantic infatuation to intimate bonding, to living together, to having children. It’ll change through family, through aging bodies and changing endocrine systems. Each one of those changes is associated with new structures of consciousness around how you hold yourself in the marriage, and how you hold your partner. What makes marriage so challenging is that the relationship needs to be successfully reorganized, consistently, by both people in order to keep working. Despite the constant change, studies have shown us there are specific characteristics present in successful, happy relationships. Author and researcher Nate Bagley found the following things in common: The individuals were dedicated to self care They were committed to helping each other get through anything They trusted each other They had intentionality. They didn’t take their love for granted. They did something everyday to show love for each other There is always going to be conflict though, and couples that want to be together for the long term have to know how to navigate it. Keith says there are a lot of factors, but Bagley discovered a few very important ones: Couples that stay together don’t fight to win, they fight to resolve the conflict. They focus on trying to understand each other and lastly, they really try to be nice to each other. Imagine that! Being nice… There is a way to love. If two people want to get there and they’re willing to take care of themselves and change, they can find a way through to love again and again and again. That’s really the bottom line. If you want to take it down to just one thing, the evolution of consciousness is just getting better and better at finding our way through to love.  ~Dr. Keith Witt When it comes down to brass tacks, couples that can down-regulate anger and up-regulate the positive emotions are ones that are destined for the long term. Easier said than done. Of course, if you have stable access to 2nd tier consciousness then you’re really ahead of the game. People operating at the teal altitude can observe structures of consciousness in themselves and their partners, and as we know from studying development, mindful self-observation accelerates development which gives us response flexibility. In relationship, when you are responding to your partner, to their happiness and suffering, you are definitely accelerating your development. Keith says he’s never seen this researched the way that meditation and other practices have been researched (yet!) but he’s found it to be true in his own life. The relationship itself becomes a container for the updraft of development in both the partners. How inspiring!