Question: A person comes to an integral group from the “outside.” He already has certain worries related to the material world, conflicts, problems with children, and so on. How can one transition from his routine predicaments to integration?

Answer: Everything has to be discussed in the group. However, it should be done specifically in the attempts to rise above corporeal problems. Various problems related to gender or character, to anything that might transpire between us have to be raised and discussed. We are a research group; we scrutinize ourselves. This is why we have to be ultimately sincere and interested in detaching from our animal “I” and rising above it into our integral “I,” which gradually is turning into “we.” So, there is nothing we should hide from one another.

At the same time, we shouldn’t concentrate on, dig into these issues too much: your personality against mine, somebody’s attractiveness, or animal, hormonal, drives… We have to discuss these things in brief in order to help each and everybody rise above them and keep ourselves specifically in this state while we continue understanding and sensing them in our animal body, as we know that they don’t exist at the next level.

We’ll constantly be “hanging” in the gap between our internal layers as if between the sky and the earth. This state will emerge in us and bother us for a long period of time: We’ll constantly be getting urges upwards and downwards. This is what our work is all about.

Within the inner states that we go through, we have to test our internal baggage of doubts, impressions, and aspirations in order to firmly position ourselves on the ground, to fly up as a balloon from earth to the “ceiling,” leaving behind our egoistic properties, ambitions, desires, and impulses. I am still aware of all of my problems, but internally I want to identify myself with the “ceiling,” meaning with my next step.
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From a Talk on Integral Upbringing 3/1/12

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