In a moral crisis, humanity is in need of moral education that reaches across all levels, all quadrants, and all lines with a baseline of common values. How can the integral movement help to facilitate such an effort?

The integral movement lives in an echo chamber, speaking mostly to itself in its own jargon, addressing green and turquoise intellectual, spiritual and psychological circles, but not reaching people at other developmental levels or subcultures, most of whom are unaware of its existence. The alt-right and conservative movements speak mostly to people within the purple, red, blue, or amber zones. To compound the problem, New Agers, liberals and Progressives inhabit mostly orange and green quadrants. We are all speaking different languages. How can we help to develop a moral theory and process that addresses and answers the needs of people at all the levels below teal, as well as second quadrant?

This will be a group brainstorm, based on the ideas of Piaget, Kohlberg, Gilligan and the methods of Freire.

Many people feel we may now be living in what may be “the end of the world as we know it.” Between climate crisis, the demise of democracy, the possible dangers of runaway AI, encroaching likelihood of world war (in a recent YouGov survey conducted in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the US, more than 40% of people think that another world war is likely within the next 5-10 years, likely involving nuclear weapons) .

As leaders and spiritual guides face the unthinkable, how do we help ourselves and the people who depend upon us, to sustain the gaze and live with grace and compassion?

This experiential workshop uses the adaptation of spiritual practices developed by Joanna Macy, Buddhist Teacher and systems theorist, taught to psychotherapist and spiritual activist, Rev. Dr. W. Hunter Roberts in the 1980’s at the height of the cold war.

A meta-narrative is an overarching story that gives us context and meaning—a purpose to life. Meta-narratives provide the unifying big picture that encompasses, transcends, and integrates the smaller stories and themes contained within.

Historically, religions and mythology were the primary authors of meta-narratives. However, meta-narratives fell into extreme disfavour with the rise of post-modernism and have been further broken down until we’ve ended up in silos of identity, with nothing more than our fragmented personal or maybe tribal or cultural narratives. To make matters worse, the dominant Western Newtonian meta-narrative called “scientific” leads us to conclude we are nothing more than a chemical accident with no value or purpose. Technology platforms are reinforcing those narratives by pulling us deeper and deeper into self-reinforcing echo chambers, in ways we can’t see, reinforcing our individual worldviews, creating fear, and driving us apart.

The breakdown of a unifying meta-narrative has served no one well and has made us even more fragmented and estranged from our world and one another. To address our meta-crisis, we need a mytho-poetic, yet scientifically verifiable, narrative that includes everyone, and which is integral in nature. We need a narrative that lifts up the human story rooted in nature, to ennoble, encourage and call us to further evolve in this time of crisis.

Our individual voices compose a new collective story to pull us into a future that works for all. In reclaiming our story, we would own our destiny with a narrative that doesn’t divide, but brings humanity together in a narrative where all voices matter.

The challenge inherent in creating such an integral meta-narrative is that, while it might seem on the surface that such a narrative “should” come from those of us who are integral ourselves, many of us also come from relative privilege and the global north, and lack the lived experience needed to credibly assert inclusivity in any narrative we might create. We also risk ignoring the true nature of how transformation replicates. Real change, lasting change, is inside out. It transmits cell to cell between people with relationships grounded in trust–slowly at first, and then all at once, like the imaginal cells of a butterfly.

In this workshop we will explore the history of meta-narratives, our current state of affairs, and the potential for unintended consequences should we embark on a deliberate effort to coax a new meta-narrative into being. We will conduct a small-scale experiment to collectively rewrite our future through the co-creation of a group meta-narrative, and examine the outcomes as a learning experience to inform an aspirational attempt to run the same experiment on a global scale.