While exploring what it means to live an integral life is a common goal across these many groups, what that actually looks like in practice is far from defined. At the Boulder Integral Center, they’re doing what Salzman calls “integral R&D.” The goal is to create an atmosphere that supports evolution in all aspects of human life—physical, spiritual, emotional, social, and intellectual. To that end, they put on a regular series of workshops, seminars, classes, and practice groups on everything from meditation and yoga to “shadow work,” group dynamics, and even a seminar on treating drug addiction from an integral perspective. Many of these trainings are focused on individual transformation, but Salzman is most passionate about the new culture that is developing between members. As he says, “Our real mission is to see what can happen between a long-term group of integral practitioners who are dedicated to transformation at all levels.” But Salzman is the first to acknowledge that getting a group of people to make the kind of commitment required to pioneer a new stage of culture and consciousness together is an enormous task, particularly in our contemporary age of the individual, in which the freedom to do what you want is held paramount. “One of the challenges and opportunities of integral,” he says, “is that so many options are open. That’s the integral orientation toward life. So how we go about creating a committed community with real direction, in this limitless context, is very much the inquiry that we’ve set out to explore.”

One of the biggest questions that the movement as a whole is trying to tackle is how to make this sophisticated perspective accessible to a broader, more mainstream segment of the population. Integral is arising out of the postmodern worldview—sometimes referred to as the green meme (based on a color-coded model of sociocultural evolution called Spiral Dynamics)—whose values emerged on the shoulders of the baby-boom generation through the sixties revolution and now dominate the most progressive pockets of culture worldwide. Postmodernism has brought many gifts, including the environmental and civil rights movements and the ability to appreciate the value of the diverse cultural perspectives that exist on the planet. But for those who are trying to advance the integral worldview, the target audience is composed of the people who are starting to recognize that, in addition to its positive attributes, postmodernism has some significant failings, including its tolerance for “anything goes” moral relativism, its “give peace a chance” naïveté, its tendency toward fragmentation, and its “me generation” reputation for narcissism and materialism. Figuring out how to reach this audience, which he calls “exit green,” is one of the primary concerns for Robb Smith in his role as CEO of the world’s leading integral think tank, the Integral Institute (founded by Wilber in 1998) and its brand-new for-profit cultural arm, Integral Life. This past August, I-Life launched a website that Smith describes as “a meta-map of the many different methods that people use to develop, with all the services that they would need to do so.” The site offers a combination of social networking, e-learning, multimedia, an integral store, and even web-based personal coaching. Through this combination of educational and developmental tools, Smith is hoping to create “the most accessible package” for people to develop and embody an integral perspective “without having to read five Ken Wilber books.” He also intends to create “an engaging experience that doesn’t make people feel like they’re doing something fringe and that’s as reputable as Starbucks or Apple or Harley-Davidson. That’s what our culture trusts, and that’s what we’re trying to build.”

But there could be a danger in this approach. By trying to make the integral worldview more accessible to a broader population that is steeped in postmodern values, some worry that there is also a risk of losing what is most compelling about integral itself: the fact that it’s a new and higher worldview that demands the cultivation of a more sophisticated philosophical orientation toward life. As Steve McIntosh, an emerging voice in the integral movement, suggests: “I think that we have to be somewhat stalwart. We can’t water down integral. We can’t make it palatable to postmodern sensibilities, because that would eliminate its very attractiveness. The people we want to attract are those who want something more than the postmodern values that we’re trying to transcend.” In his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, media theorist Marshall McLuhan made his famous point that “the medium is the message,” suggesting that how we convey meaning may actually be synonymous with or even more important than the message itself. And for the integral movement, which is trying to figure out just exactly how to facilitate real and sustained cultural evolution, communicating the integral worldview in a way that does justice to the truly radical nature of the perspective itself seems to be a significant challenge that it will continue to face.