What is Integral Theory?
The word integral comes from Integral Theory, a contemporary leading edge approach from the field of consciousness studies, psychology, research supported spirituality, and social sciences. As a prime understanding framework for human behavior integral theory is also applied to organizations, leadership, business, ecology, and other areas of life. The founder of Integral Theory is contemporary American thinker and writer Ken Wilber who is often regarded as “the Einstein of consciousness” and some think his work is as much a game changer for the 21st century as Freud was for the 20th century in psychology or Einstein in physics.
What if we attempted to find the critically essential keys to human growth, based on the sum total of human knowledge now open to us?
What if we attempted, based on extensive cross-cultural study, to use all of the world’s great traditions to create a composite map, a comprehensive map, an all-inclusive or integral map that included the best elements from all of them?
What is so special about Wilber’s integral approach, and what makes many people be interested in it in all continents is that it is a metatheory. That means that it is not merely a subjective theory of one person, but it integrates 100+ well established and time tested theories in the field of consciousness, psychology, meditative traditions, philosophy and sociology. Due to this wide integrative nature, it is the most inclusive, encompassing theory that we know of today, in other words the one that brings together the most number of players from the field and integrates it into a new, holistic and rationally based model of reality.
Integral theory has five major topics:
Ken Wilber – founder of Integral Theory
The most important part of Integral Theory is the stages of consciousness - structure and state stages - which describes the levels of personal development all the way from birth through childhood, up to adulthood and even beyond. Through the higher reaches of human nature till spiritual awakening and its refined stages. Finally we have it all in one system. All what psychology and the spiritual wisdom traditions have ever had to say about development. For the first time bringing these together and integrating, finally we have a universal map in our hands and we don't have to be partial, split and take sides. Inside of humans, it is all one. And in the outside world:We as psychologist, coaches, shamans, yogis, doctors, scientists, business leaders, tech people, politicians and change makers, finally we can stand united, and work together more successfully.
Bence Gánti - psychologist, founder of IEC
(also called levels / altitudes of development / consciousness)
STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT / INTERNAL VIEW. What we find on stages of development in a person. The “psychology of stages”.