lt, for example, said the British and Americans are “akin…in feeling and principle.”
Pushed by those shared principles, the U.S. bankrolled the British in World War I. The U.S. and Britain
began exchanging intelligence about Japan in 1937. And as Britain fought alone against Hitler,
FDR opened the “great arsenal of democracy” so that Churchill might keep his island nation alive.
Churchill knew America paid a price for focusing on the Atlantic. “If the United States have been
found at a disadvantage at various points in the Pacific Ocean,” he said after Pearl Harbor,
“we know well that it is to no small extent because of the aid you have been giving us.”
As if to consecrate the U.S.-U.K. bond, FDR’s personal envoy to Britain, Harry Hopkins, rose
during a dinner with Churchill and quoted from the Book of Ruth: “Whither thou goest I will go,
and whither thou lodgest I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God,”
he declared, dramatically adding, “even to the end.” Churchill wept openly.
During the war, Churchill set up a Joint Staff Mission in Washington, D.C., as a liaison to
the U.S. military. FDR’s military liaison to Churchill was the Supreme Allied Commander,
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. Indeed, the pairings of presidents and prime ministers underscore
the common bonds and common history: Churchill and FDR, Churchill and Truman,
Churchill and Ike, Reagan and Thatcher, Clinton and Blair, Blair and Bush. Together, Britain and
America shaped the postwar world—rescuing West Berlin from Stalin, building NATO, defending
Korea. By the mid-1950s, they agreed, in the words of a Pentagon memo, to “coordinate the atomic
strike plans of the United States Air Force with the Royal Air Force” and share “atomic bombs in
the event of general war.”
Thanks to Anglo-American resolve, the Cold War was won without those bombs ever falling.
As Britain and America braced for another kind of war, in Kosovo, Prime Minister Tony Blair
recalled Hopkins’ toast during a summit with President Bill Clinton. This time, it was the
American leader who wept.
…
comprehensive and fully integrated view of reality that we have ever seen. Which is important now more than ever—as our planet gets smaller, our problems get bigger and demand a new level of thinking and problem solving... or else we risk making things even worse.
A Greater Capacity for Perspective: One of the core insights that comes alive with integral consciousness is just how fundamental perspective is to our universe. It is literally the stuff dreams are made out of—not to mention thoughts, relationships, behaviors, interactions, and everything else that has ever existed. Folks at an integral stage of development are able to better understand, navigate, and participate with all different kinds of perspective, allowing us to truly see ourselves, each other, and our world with more wisdom, openness, and inquisitiveness than ever before.
True But Partial: Due to the power of perspective, the integral stage is the very first to honor and include the values from all other stages that come before it. This is something altogether new—if there is one thing these previous stages all had in common, it’s the belief that their stage represents the "correct" way of behaving and seeing the world, and all the others are completely false. We can see this playing itself out every day in our various culture wars as the religious fundamentalists, the rational materialists, and the pluralistic postmodernists all continue to insist that their values are the only "true" values, and everyone else’s values are either delusional or straight-up demonic. Integral awareness offers us the cognitive and communicative tools we need to begin relieving the extraordinary tension and even violent antagonism that exists between these often conflicting sets of values, allowing us to see wholeness where we may once have only seen brokenness.
It’s Evolution, Baby! Evolution is not done with us yet. On the contrary, it is still very much alive in humanity's tireless quest for greater meaning, greater purpose, and greater sophistication. It is this evolutionary impulse that keeps us moving forward, allowing modern science to emerge from magic and superstition, modern medicine from leeching and bloodletting, chemistry from alchemy, psychology from phrenology, astronomy from astrology, democracy from theocracy, and the list goes on. Every field of human inquiry continues to move through wave upon wave of increasing accuracy, fidelity, and applicability. Integral is the next wave, and is already dramatically enhancing each of these fields—art, medicine, psychology, spirituality, sustainability, leadership, while also showing how they all fit together in a seamless totality of knowledge and understanding.
The Rebirth of Spirit: One of the greatest contributions integral consciousness is making to the world is the reclamation of the spiritual. As we just mentioned, we have allowed almost every other field of human inquiry to mature out of the magic and mythic backwaters. But why not spirituality? To this day, spirituality seems to belong mostly to the zealots, the fanatics, and the charlatans, and is largely dismissed by the modern rational world (to the detriment of us all). But spirituality is not theproduct of superstition, magic, and mythology—it just simply has not been allowed to evolve beyond superstitious, magical, and mythological interpretations. And it is these interpretations—not spirituality itself—that make easy targets for writers like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris.Because spirituality has not been given an opportunity to shift from belief to direct experience and truly thrive in the rational and postmodern world, we have been a bit too eager to eliminate the dogma, the myths, and the "us vs. them" ethnocentricity, and as a result have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Luckily, integral spirituality saves the baby. Not only does an integral approach to spirituality offer a way to evolve each of the major spiritual traditions (e.g. Integral Christianity, Integral Buddhism, Integral Judaism, Integral Sufism, etc.), but it also allows for the most inspiring and fruitful interfaith dialogues we have ever seen, as we continue to explore how the experiences of awakening, enlightenment, and atonement have been interpreted from person to person, culture to culture, all across the ages—and then reinterpreting these experiences to not just survive today’s 21st-century world, but to deeply enrich it as well. These are without a doubt the most intelligent and insightful discussions of spirituality you will find anywhere on the planet.Most importantly, integral spirituality helps to distill the wisdom, transmission, and transformative potential contained within these ancient traditions, bringing more freedom, consciousness, and compassion to your life than you ever thought possible.
It is truly an extraordinary time to be alive. We are witnessing the emergence of something historic: the rise of integral consciousness. This is our very best shot to create a more peaceful and sustainable world, to awaken from the violent slumber of humanity’s adolescence, and to align ourselves with the future of evolution in this backward corner of the Milky Way. We know that we are only barely scratching the surface in terms of the contributions integral consciousness has to make to the world—but as the integral movement continues to gain momentum around the world, we can’t help but to feel a little more optimistic than we did even just a few years ago.
Ken Wilber…