In the first decade of the twenty-first century, it’s hard to imagine living in a world without democracy and the natural right to live a life of one’s own choosing. These fundamental principles of modernity, which flourished in the salons of Paris during the late eighteenth century, have become so ingrained in our individual and collective psyches that we mostly take them for granted. But the principles of the Enlightenment might never have become manifest were it not for the founding fathers of the United States, who designed the world’s first democratic government and self-determined nation with only their philosophical convictions to guide them.

Fast-forward more than two hundred years to the present, where another group of individuals is attempting to incite a new philosophical revolution that has such profound and broad-ranging implications for human life and the world that some observers of cultural evolution are calling it the second Enlightenment. They’re talking about the emergence of the integral worldview. And thanks to the work of philosopher Ken Wilber and others, this new perspective is helping hundreds of thousands of people around the world—including the editors of this magazine—to start to see the many dimensions of reality, both inner and outer, as multiple reflections of one unfolding process of cosmic evolution. After decades of relative obscurity, an international movement of integral scholars, practitioners, and activists is now working to give this little-known perspective more legitimacy in the public eye. And through a variety of social networks, websites, centers, academic programs, and conferences, they are attempting to build the cultural foundation for what integral theorist and author Steve McIntosh suggests could ultimately be “a new, historically significant level of human civilization.”

The roots of the integral movement go back more than a century to the theories and visions of various philosophers, mystics, and developmental psychologists, such as Sri Aurobindo, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Jean Gebser. But in the last thirty years, so much more developmental work has come to the fore that we now have a variety of maps and established theories to describe these processes of psychospiritual, cultural, and biological evolution and how they are related. Perhaps the most complete synthesis of this recent work can be found in Wilber’s AQAL (All Quadrants, All Levels) model, which is based on years of exhaustive research and spiritual inquiry and brings together the many disciplines through which humanity seeks truth—the spiritual traditions, the physical and social sciences, politics, art, ethics, and psychology—into one comprehensive “theory of everything.” But while AQAL and other theoretical frameworks have been important catalysts for the integral movement, it is clear to many that they are just “maps” and that far more significant than the frameworks themselves is the emerging worldview that they describe. This unifying perspective could not arise at a better time in history, as the complexity of our moral, political, environmental, and spiritual challenges demands a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of reality—one that appreciates the interior dynamics of consciousness and culture that are at play below the surface of every issue.

The attempt to create a cultural movement is not a solitary endeavor. What may be most promising about this new wave of integral activism is that while Wilber continues to remain a central voice, the integral baton is now starting to be carried by a much larger group of people. Jeff Salzman, a Colorado entrepreneur, is one of the new leaders in the movement. In early 2008, he and a small community of integral practitioners transformed a 7,000-square-foot Lutheran church into the Boulder Integral Center as a venue for creating a new culture based on the shared values that are emerging in the integral worldview. Salzman’s group is one among a number of grassroots social networks that are popping up in major cities around the world, from Frankfurt and London to Sydney to San Francisco and New York. Many of these groups meet in online discussions or at in-person “meet-ups,” which serve as havens for those who have been turned on to the transformative potential of the integral worldview to develop their understanding with others who share that same intention. Another new face in the integral movement, Ewan Townhead, is the cofounder of Integral Europe, a web-based community that he hopes will be the central hub for organizing groups and activities internationally. As he points out, “If you really are pushing into an integral stage of consciousness but you don’t have the group or sangha around you to support that, the culture at large will just drag you back.”

For Salzman’s Boulder group and some of the more active networks around the globe, getting together to talk about integral theory has given way to a natural interest in exploring what it means to actually live from this radical new perspective that allows you to see the many dimensions of yourself, culture, and the universe not as separate or fragmented but as interrelated parts of one integrated, evolving whole. As a result, some have established formal organizations and centers to support deeper, more ongoing relationships and practice among their members. In 2007, the Integral Loft was founded in downtown Seattle’s Pioneer Square as a joint venture between the Puget Sound’s leading integral organizations: Pacific Integral, Generating Transformative Change in Human Systems, Kore Leadership, and the Women’s Integral Leadership Circle. This past summer, the Santa Monica Center for Integral Living opened its doors to serve as the integral hub for the greater Los Angeles area. Even Miami Beach is going integral—Florida style—with the 2005 opening of the Standard Hotel and Center for Integral Living, a destination spa, urban resort, and retreat center whose design was based on integral principles. And in Germany, where the integral movement may be more organized than anywhere else in the world, there is a governing body, the Integral Forum, that publishes a quarterly magazine, hosts an annual conference, and oversees more than twenty different integral salons in cities throughout the German-speaking world.

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.

One of the most promising ways that integral is being conveyed to a broader audience is through the world of academia. According to Dr. Sean Esbjörn-Hargens of John F. Kennedy University in Pleasant Hill, California, “The more we can establish the integral model as an academic discipline, the more it can be viewed as legitimate within mainstream culture.” The halls of the academy have long been Western society’s incubator for all forms of knowledge. But these halls have for the most part been closed to integral theory in spite of the fact that many books have been published on the subject and that the theory itself provides the framework for a truly interdisciplinary academic approach. But Esbjörn-Hargens is trying to change that. In 2006, he partnered with Integral Institute to establish the Integral Theory Department at JFK University and the world’s first accredited master’s degree program in integral theory. Through the program, Esbjörn-Hargens and his colleagues are trying to test and prove the efficacy of what they call the scholar-practitioner approach to education and research, which gives equal emphasis to both “transformational self-inquiry and intellectually rigorous scholarship.” In addition to gaining a theoretical understanding of the dynamics of consciousness and culture that the integral model reveals, students also use spiritual practice and other forms of self-reflection to explore and develop their own interior dimensions. While the fledgling master’s program is still quite small (eighty students in this fall’s cohort), it is only one of what Esbjörn-Hargens refers to as “the four legs of the integral academic stool.” Hargens has also helped start the peer-reviewed Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, the Integral Research Center, and a biennial academic conference, all of which serve as forums for a growing number of scholar-practitioners who are applying the integral model to a diverse array of disciplines—ecology, international development, psychology, and spirituality—to compare their findings and start to build an evolving body of integral knowledge.

Of all the new developments in the integral movement thus far, the most significant may be the “Biennial Integral Theory” conference, the first of which was held this past August at JFK University and which Ken Wilber called a “historic and momentous event.” This academic conference, which was sold out months in advance and carried a waiting list of more than three hundred people, was officially organized as a showcase for the work being done by the network of integral researchers and practitioners that JFKU has pulled together. A quick flip through the conference brochure revealed a fascinating array of research presentations, including “An Integral Perspective on Climate Change,” “Integral Education at the Elementary Levels: Big Philosophy for Little Kids,” and “Integral Politics: The Islamic Movement and Political Crisis in Turkey.” There were also panels that assembled many of the integral world’s leading figures to discuss everything from “Integral Feminism” and “Integral Law” to a roundtable inquiry into the question “Does Integral = Ken Wilber?” But while a lot of important information was distributed through the many presentations and panels—and a major step was taken toward putting integral theory on the map as a truly legitimate academic discipline—the significance of the conference was much greater. The gathering was a cross section of the integral world itself—a unique blend of spiritual teachers, philosophers, journalists, academics, professionals, and many leaders of the growing integral networks across the globe. For most of these five hundred participants, it was the first time they had been at an event of that magnitude, where everyone shared an interest in the integral perspective. By bringing this global meta-network together, the conference started to give the relatively independent actors in the integral world the kind of confidence and connection that come from recognizing that they are part of something much larger than their individual communities and specific bodies of work.

So the integral emergence is at a significant point in its development: While not yet a mainstream movement, it is no longer limited to a small handful of pioneering individuals. And while the definition of what this integral future will look like is far from clear, even among those who have started to explore this territory through their own lives, communities, and work, the fact that so many are becoming interested in hashing it out together is a sign that something important is occurring. As Steve McIntosh noticed on his recent book tour throughout many of the integral world’s budding centers, “There is a sense of excitement and vibrancy among the people you meet. And people are showing up in good numbers. It’s not yet a popular movement, like you might read about in Newsweek. It’s not like Eckhart Tolle on Oprah. It’s more about the quality of the ideas and the commitment of the people than it is about the number of people who are interested in it.” And for this small but growing group of integralists, just as the founding fathers of America could never have completely foreseen the impact that their revolution would have on the future of humanity, it is likely that the full significance of the philosophical and cultural activism being carried out in the many corners of the integral movement is far beyond what any of its members can grasp or intuit at this early stage. But in spite of this fact, there is a bold sense of pioneering spirit, fueled by conviction in the truth and potential of the integral perspective itself, that is driving the movement forward—often blindly—into a hopeful future.