“Integral” is fast becoming a very loosely applied term, supplying a bit of contemporary heft to otherwise pedestrian nouns, while it slides ever further into that once-was-fashionable territory that has swallowed up such terms as “holistic.” This does not mean that we ought to dump “integral” or start dumbing it down or hoist it up onto a post-postmodern soapbox, but rather that we define it as clearly as possible, both directly and through comparison with related terms.

“Integral” to me basically means inclusive in a radically comprehensive manner. I say “radically” for a number of reasons: (1) What’s being brought together constitutes not just parts of a totality, but also as much as possible of that totality’s presence, in as many directions and depths as possible; (2) such a bringing-together is far more than just a get-together or reunion or conference of partially connected items or qualities; and (3) the circle of extension that reaches from within out beyond every part illuminates and deepens the connections between all the pieces or qualities being brought together, literally integrating them without any requisite homogenization or dilution of individual differences. (Implicit to this is the fully embodied realization that everything exists through relationship, along with the invitation to become intimate with it all.)

“Holistic” (and “wholistic”) was the pseudo-hippyish ancestor of “integral” (even though Aurobindo was using “integral” long before the 1960s), as full of New Age, anemically grounded optimism as it was lacking in genuine practicality. “Holistic” meant well, but didn’t rise for long from the kind of sloppy/fluffy thinking and metaphysical quicksand that made it an easy target for probing minds that didn’t give a damn about spiritualized cognition and its sidekick clichés. “Integral” is a more sober term than “holistic,” more imbued with a sense of true inclusiveness, but nevertheless is in growing danger of shipwrecking itself on overly intellectual reefs, especially as it busies itself theorizing about its theorizing. Where “holistic” had an anti-intellectual quality to it, “integral” can tend to lean too far the other way. In both cases, however, there is a lack of real embodiment.

“Integral” is an increasingly popular adjective. Placing it before words like “parenting” or “cooking” or “dog-grooming” tends to give them a touch more respectability. It’s easy to stick “integral” in places where it may not belong. So use it sparingly. Don’t trivialize it. Be discerning in your use of it.

An integral approach is not just sophisticated eclecticism or a neatly mapped mixture of applied methodologies. We may be meditating, working out, doing a bit of shadow-work, and keeping up with the latest in integral theory, but this does not necessarily mean that we are actually being integral. We can only say that we’re being integral if our various practices and ways of being are functioning together (and not just in our eyes!) as a consistently embodied, more-than-adequately functioning whole, through which we are, however gradually, cultivating intimacy with all that we are. We may not have fully arrived yet, but are on our way, and have the momentum to back this up, along with an integrity that runs more and more deeply through all that we do.

Being truly integral means, among other things, developing intimacy with everything that constitutes us. A genuinely integral consciousness lives such intimacy both conceptually and nonconceptually.

An integral approach works with our physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social dimensions, level upon level, consistently taking all of it into account, without losing touch with the totality that includes and pervades it all.

Overly intellectual approaches to being integral pay insufficient attention to emotions, in part perhaps because emotions are just too messy and too nonlinearly inclusive of the rest of our dimensions to be able to be neatly mapped. Emotions implicate us as a totality. They obviously involve the physical/physiological and the cognitive, but also include the social, and sometimes also the spiritual. (Very briefly, affect is the intrinsic, biological dimension of emotion; feeling is our conscious experience of affect; and emotion is the framing and dramatization of feeling. Where affect is reaction, and feeling the recognition of affect, emotion is adaptation.) Emotion involves feeling, cognition, social factors, related action tendencies, and perspectival capacity, all of which interact and work together. Any integral approach that only superficially deals with emotions is only superficially integral.

An integral approach is not going to be much of a reality for us if we ourselves are not already living, to a significant degree, in an integral fashion. Part of what is needed is a clear recognition of where we are not integral, not in healthy relationship to some aspect of ourselves, not in integrity. Facing our fragmentation rather than trying to rise above it or only superficially deal with it is a step toward integrity. “Integral” is a bit like “love,” in that both terms are actually quite profound in their meaning, but are often used too readily or superficially. The intention to be integral is not in itself integral.

May we do whatever is needed to make “integral” a fitting term for how we are actually living.

By the time I was 8 or 9, I was fascinated by sea shells, collecting local ones — oyster drills, periwinkles, mussels, chitons, hairy whelks — and buying (with whatever allowance I could get for my chore-doing) others through mail-order catalogs. On rainy weekend mornings, I'd periodically remove my shells from their boxes — matchstick, glass, wood, cookie-tin, all stuffed with enough cotton to protect their precious contents — and line them up on my bed, marveling at their coloring and shaping, fantasizing about having a larger collection. I knew their common names, and I also knew their Latin names, and I was in love with everything about them.

Sometimes I'd do public showings of my collection, unselfconsciously telling my audience, be it my Grade V class or my mother's friends, all about each shell. I was in many ways a damaged child, and my shells, in their unwavering crystallized beauty, provided me with a haven from the more difficult aspects of my life; I could always count on them.

It didn't matter to me that they were not literally living, at least not until I was well into my teens, at which time the empty houses that they, in effect, were started to gnaw at me with an increasingly pointed symbolism. But I still kept collecting, keeping some contact with the wonder that had so easily pervaded me as a young boy gazing at a palely pearlescent chambered nautilus or extravagantly glistening cowry or perfectly spired and spiked turret shell.

I once persuaded my mother (probably in 1959 or 1960) to buy a particular gastropod from a catalog, one that I could not afford; I believe that the price was $1.75. The shell was less than an inch long, delicate and exquisitely shaped, a pagodan wonder trawled from deep water somewhere in Japan. Ancistrosyrinx pulcherrissima was its name, and its only name, and I lusted after it. My mother kept it in the little plastic box in which it had arrived, eventually passing it on to me a few years later. Having that miniature molluscan masterpiece in my hands was incredibly important to me, probably because it so effortlessly spoke of an outer perfection that I obsessively sought, a perfection that would magically bring me the emotional and psychological immunity for which I longed.

When I reached my 20s, I all but ceased collecting shells, but nonetheless kept my collection, packing it from new residence to new residence. In my 30s I decided not to keep my shells boxed up anymore, and so had many of them soldered to a wood-backed square of dark red velvet in the pattern of a heart, with ten segments which all met at the center of the heart. This piece still is with me, currently gracing our bedroom wall. And the rest of my shells? I gave them away, keeping only a Golden Cowry.

At the same time, my interest grew in what actually inhabited shells. When I came across slugs, I saw them as snails without shells, thickly millimetering along. The many-tentacled cephalopods residing in chambered nautilus shells really snagged my eye, as did the exotic, wildly flowing creatures that both lived in and largely surrounded the fantastically colored cowry shells that I'd long adored.

I remember 6 or so years ago being at Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island's eastside: The tide is very low, and I'm slow-walking barefoot through the unfurling morning into foot-deep, faintly rippling water through which shows barnacly, densely oystered rocks and fatly ribbed deliciously squishy sand. Sunny white dumpling sky. Shallow water wonderland turning adults into fascinated kids. So easy it is to forget to look at life with tidepool eyes.

I hunch down around a moon snail. No empty specimen shell with a neat little Latin label. This one is hugely alive. Its body dwarfs its fist-sized shell. So pink the suctioning flesh, so green-stained the creamy spiral housing. The details I know about moon snails don't dilute my wonder. It's hard to imagine this creature getting its whole body back into its shell.

Sand collars abound, looking like the bottoms of rubber toilet plungers with the centers cut out, but they are not rubber, being instead the egg containers of the moon snail, composed of eggs, mucus, and sand, shaped by the moon snail's circular pink foot. Somewhere behind the thick steak of that boneless flesh is a raspy tongue sharp enough, with the aid of some shell-dissolving acid, to drill neat little holes in clams and other mollusks, through which their innards can be sucked out.

Nearby are sea stars with enough arms to delay an easy count. I find one, surprisingly soft and dark orange, clutching a large crab to its underside, about to begin a meal. Geoducks — clams weighing up to five pounds — squirt up water several feet above ground. Crabs scuttle everywhere. I'm up to my knees now, scanning the waters with a happily hungry eye. I find three or four empty moon snail shells, each highly polished inside, a couple of which I'll take back with me, reminders of the rough yet delicate beauty of a morning that deserves to live on as other, more plastic interests take their all but inevitable grip.

I no longer collect shells, but still love their beauty. In my grouproom I have a large paper nautilus, white and amazingly light, sitting between two Buddha statues, one fit and austere, and the other fat and laughing. My love of beautiful objects has simply expanded, in parallel with my appreciation of beauty itself.

Be the beauty you see
Touch it, touch it deep
Wear it beneath your skin
Be the beauty you see
Give it your hidden gifts
Until you emerge heartfirst
Be the beauty you see
Let it take its needed shape
Through your trembling flesh
Be the beauty you see
Give it what’s left of your brains
And let it dynamite your mind
Be the beauty you see
Beauty’s what we do when we’re free
Be the beauty you see
Take in the beauty you cannot help but be
The beauty that keeps shining through
Ever-perishing
Yet ever new
Never other than true