Applying Integral Philosophy to Communications and Taxonomy Generation
I had contacted Ken Wilber's Integral Institute a while ago asking if there had been any scholars who have tried to integrate Wilber's Integral Philosophy with the field of communications or journalism.
I had written a few preliminary articles on the concept of "Integral Journalism." But before I took this concept too far, I wanted to find other scholars who have already synthesized Wilber's philosophy with communications theories. I don't have the time or the resources to do this type of thing by myself -- especially if I couldn't receive any support from Wilber or his Integral Institute.
The Integral Institute put me in touch with Adam Leonard who did a 200-page master's level dissertation on this very topic -- applying Wilber's Philosophy to the field of communications. I had a very interesting conversation with Leonard this past weekend where I gave him a summary of all that I'm doing and what I hoped to accomplish. He is very much interested in trying to apply some of his integral insights to this project -- specifically in creating an overriding taxonomy based upon Wilber's AQAL system
To Leonard's knowledge, there hasn't been anyone else who has integrated Wilber's Integral Philosophy with communications theories. This is good and bad. Good in that it's exciting to be on the cutting edge. Bad in the sense that it is a much higher risk to be on the cutting edge since there is a chance of going too far beyond the acceptible bounds of academic inquiry.
David Weinberger has been talking a lot lately about the taxonomies that libraries use to organize all of human knowledge. Wilber's philosophy tries to comprehensively include all academic fields into one comprehensive taxonomy called AQAL -- short for "All Quadrants, All Levels, All Lines, All States, All Types."
Wilber provides the best map that I've discovered so far for organizing and understanding the relationships between so many different academic disciplines. His 851-page book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution comprehensively lays out this integration.
The first application of Wilber's Philosophy that I came across is a medical textbook from the Institute of Noetic Sciences called, "Consciousness and Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind-Body Medicine." Wilber writes the forward to the book (page 1 | page 2), and his ideas are applied to a medical context by a number of different holitistic practitioners.
The National Institutes of Health is researching how "relaxation, hypnosis, visual imagery, meditation, yoga, biofeedback, tai chi, qi gong, cognitive-behavioral therapies, group support, autogenic training, spirituality, and prayer" can directly improve health. These types of spiritual and Eastern practices are having positive and measurable effects in healing people, but yet there is no viable or widely accepted scientific model to explain how or why they work.
Wilber's Integral approach integrates these anomalies by creating a comprehensive map of reality that includes spirituality and the invisible nature of human consciousness. His integral approach is so popular within the Complementary and Alternative Medicine circles because he integrates so many different insights from a wide range of academic disciplines and cultures. These types of spiritual insights are being introduced to the wider society with the scientific validation of holistic medical theories, but these types of spiritual insights are applicable to nearly every human endeavor and will spread to other disciplines over time.
But it looks like I may be a little too far ahead of the curve, and I am waiting to read over Leonard's dissertation to see how he has synthesized Wilber's ideas with the academic world of communications.
Deciding how to organize nearly 80 hours of information is a daunting task, and I want to use the most comprehensive taxonomy that I can find -- I hope that Leonard and I can use Wilber's Integral approach to provide some valuable insights throughout this process.
