RE: Integral 2.0 ft. Bruce Alderman, Layman Pascal, Aljoša Kutnjak, Joseph Camosy & more

I’m new to integral, about a month in. To your point about theory vs application: Watching videos, hearing podcasts and reading literature about integral theory and adjacent ideas has drawn me in. Connecting with the integral community on Facebook has caused me to take a step back, recoil in horror actually. I can not make an informed decision about 2.0 yet, but for what it’s worth, I immediately felt a more welcome, stable, progress conducive vibe from you and your group than any of the others. I’d appreciate any easily digestible explanation of the 2.0 distinctions. For instance, give a steel man description of the OG integral idea so that I first fully understand the original position. Then, describe the upgrade.

29:20 ON Sean Esbjorn-Hargens maybe start here?: https://www.metaintegral.com

Layman's so funny at 24:24. He builds up expectations for the big 2.0 endorsement to a great cresendo, only to shatter them at the last moment by endorsing Integral 1.666 instead. This was a masterful moment of indirect communication by Layman. But David has no self-awareness and so he missed the point of this skillful teaching entirely, which only made Layman's back-handed Zen master compliment even more obvious: David wouldn't know Integral 2.0 even if it grew horns and spat shit in his face.

8:15 did I miss the argument as to why the quadrants do not go all the way down/are not tetra-arising? Maybe that’s in another video? Maybe that’s the one you’re working on responding to my questions about how your emergentist theory avoids falling into the incoherence of dualism or epiphenomenalism?

As we all know in integral theory, there is a difference between waking up and growing up*. In this respect, and according to Dr. Lynn Fuentes video *Why It Is Important to Grow Up before Waking Up why are you David and your followers focusing so much on theories when what we really need is to grow up first? Maybe I'm mistaken, but the only way to grow up is with the right kind of psychotherapy that deals directly with our unresolved inner conflicts, unresolved feelings, illusions, entrenched beliefs/ideologies, and trauma. We may think we don't have any of this but on closer observation they can be revealed for what they are. But the need to know and fear of knowing the truth about ourselves keeps us from waking up. We know what spiritual bypassing is yet we are acting it out unknowingly by being enamored with all manner of Integral theory, talking about it ad nauseum, all the while forgetting that we need to grow up first. What has help me grow up besides intense psychotherapy, is reading all of Erich Fromm's books and those of Dr. Karen Horney (horn-eye) I also read other books that address human problems in a vey direct way without theories that only complicates and obscures the intended meaning. Among those books is Dr. Steven James Bartlett's Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Psychological Health This book is written so that anyone with a high school degree can understand and what he has to say tells us that we live in a very sick society that is infested by, among other things, mediocrity. Mediocrity can be just as deadly as Covid -19. We fret over the latter for dear life, as we should be, but say nothing about the former, i.e. the utter ignorance and stupidity so pervasive in our society. I believe the only way to wake up the masses is through narratives. We need stories created in such a way that act like antidotes to mediocrity. People loves stories and profound meaning can be inserted in them that fortify the mind as vitamins do to the body. How else can we wake up the masses? THE MEDIOCRE POPULATION, THE NEW BARBARIANS Mediocrity, as we shall see later on, often takes the form of an intellectual impairment. The medieval Scholastics would have called it a state of impoverishment of the soul, an ignorant or willful confinement of vision that glorifies the trivial, the fatuous, the superficial. In the last chapter, we saw how the medieval moral theologians identified an impoverishment and illness of the soul, which they called acedia. The mediocrity and social mediocracy in view here are manifestations of just such a psychological impoverishment. Modern psychology does not yet include mediocrity among its clinical categories, yet there can he no doubt that it is a stultifying and infectious disorder that permanently disables. Mediocrity is a blindness not of the eyes but of the mind, and in particular of that part of the mind in which our special cares and sympathies take up residence. Mediocrity is a disability of values, as we shall see in greater depth in Chapter 8. The blindness of mediocrity is reflexive, that is to say, when men and women have this blindness, they cannot, for their very blindness, see that they are blind.3 The world of their cares is hermetic, exclusionary of all that does not gratify consumption, provide an adrenaline fix, or act as a soporific. In short, for the mediocre, culture does not and cannot exist.

I dunno, David. So far I'm 15 minutes in and the gist of your "Integral upgrade" seems to be "If I have to read it in a book or a journal, it must not be valid, since validity is determined by popularity. Make a video about it and we'll see if it's true!" I grant that academia has many faults, including the fact that journals are behind paywalls and books are expensive. But many of us are equally critical of the publishing industry racket and the capitalist knowledge economy, and we share our work free online. Have you read any of it? Do you engage in in-depth textual discourse? Do you disagree that some philosophy is best done in written form in the context of peer-reviewed communities of the adequate? This all already exists. Join us!