Integral Consciousness

"We need to pursue a 'science of interbeing' that integrates the methods of cognitive science, phenomenology, and the contemplative and meditative psychologies of the world’s wisdom traditions."
-Francisco Varela

"Since there has never been, and never will be, any experience or knowledge outside of consciousness, and since any scientific verification takes place in experience, the foundation of both inner and outer science is consciousness. Indeed, consciousness is the foundation of all knowledge, whether personal or public. Any assertion regarding anything outside of consciousness is, by definition, not accessible to any experience and, therefore, not verifiable. Since an assertion regarding anything outside of consciousness is not verifiable, it cannot be a proposition of science. We thus arrive at the second fundamental of integral science:

2. Scientific propositions are propositions about experiences within consciousness, i.e. within the pure space of awareness that contains all experience."

-Thomas J. McFarlane, Integral Science

"Matter is not lower with consciousness higher, but matter and consciousness are the exterior and interior of every occasion... As we will see, there are some aspects of the higher dimensions that might indeed be truly meta-physical; but the first thing we should note is that a great deal of what premodernity took to be meta-physical is in fact intra-physical, not above nature but within nature.

The postmodern contribution to the discussion can be summarized by saying that every individual is nestled in systems of cultural and social networks, networks that have a profound influence on the knowing and being of individuals themselves... Systems theory in its many forms emphasizes the fact that every individual organism is inseparably interconnected with its environment in dynamic webs of relationships and ecosystems...

#1 Increasing evolution brings increasing complexity of gross form
#2. Increasing complexity of form...is correlated with increasing interior consciousness
#3. Further - this is the connecting hypothesis - increasing complexity of gross form is correlated with increasingly subtlety of energies. As evolution proceeds to more and more complex gross forms, the increasing degree of gross complexity is accompanied by subtler and subtler corresponding (or signature) energy patterns"

-Ken Wilber, Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Subtle Energies


"Human consciousness is not located in the head, but is immanent in the living body and the interpersonal social world. One’s consciousness of oneself as an embodied individual embedded in the world emerges through empathic cognition of others. Consciousness is not some peculiar qualitative aspect of private mental states, nor a property of the brain inside the skull; it is a relational mode of being of the whole person embedded in the natural environment and the human social world."

-Evan Thompson, Human Consciousness: From Intersubjectivity to Interbeing



The integral worldview, which we now explore in detail, represents a transcendence of postmodernism because it does what postmodernism cannot: it fully recognizes the legitimacy and evolutionary necessity of all previous stages of development. Integral consciousness thus grows up by reaching down. It produces evolution more effectively because it understands evolution more thoroughly. And as we come to better appreciate the subtle habits and methods of evolution—its gentle persuasion, and the way that it grows from within itself, always building on what came before—we can begin to see how the degree of our transcendence is determined by the scope of our inclusion.

-Steve McIntosh, Integral Consciousness

The universe seen from within is Light; seen from without, by spiritual perception, is thought. - Rudolf Steiner