Ryan Olkey what's up brother hey good to see you good to see you man another episode of inhabit  we're back we're back baby um so yeah i think what we're going to do today is um  you know i feel like i say this every every episode we have i'm like we're going to do  something a little special today but today guys is going to be really special it's going to be  really special uh it's going to be so special in fact that we've even brought on a special guest  so that's how special this is um so let's get into it so today what we're going to be doing  is we're going to be talking about inhabiting your perspective uh you know a lot of people  who watch this show are already pretty familiar with um you know the integral project and some  of the major ideas that come out of the integral project such as the four quadrants  and one of the questions that i see asked a lot in this space is like okay you know the four  quadrants are a great sort of um cognitive tool that helps me kind of make sense of the world  around me but how does this actually land in my life right like how do i actually use these  quadrants how do i actually step into these sorts of perspectives to enact my reality because it's  one thing to sort of look at this as you know a bunch of boxes on a piece of paper right that  it's one thing to look at this as you know a bunch of boxes on a piece of paper right that  it's another to actually sort of practice these perspectives in the moment take these perspectives  on one at a time and learn how to become just a little bit more familiar with these different  kinds of perspectives so that they become that much more intuitive to us um because i think the  basic idea here is that we're actually sort of taking these perspectives and sliding among these  perspectives all the time just about every single day we're taking these perspectives one at a time  taking multiple versions of these perspectives and so what we're going to do today is sort of um  you know something that our guest bruce uh described as a perspectival yoga and i think  that's a really really great frame for the for what we're going to be doing today we're going  to be taking a perspectival yoga that takes a close intimate look at the inner and the outer  of each of the four quadrants and that sounds like a lot i mean that right there is a pretty  you know sort of cognitive phrasing the  inner and the outer of the four what the hell does that mean we're going to show you what that  means and in fact what we're going to do is we're actually hopefully going to show you that  this is actually a simplicity that is on the other side of a whole lot of complexity um we could sit  here and have academic conversations about any of these perspectives all day long if we want to but  we're actually going to sort of you know skip that part a little bit we'll unpack some of this and  talk about some of the interesting ideas behind it but really what we want to do is help folks  learn how to identify these perspectives and take them more naturally more fluidly  um so i think that's what we're here today so let's introduce our guest yeah  we've got mr bruce alderman bruce um it is so awesome to have you on the show today so you are  a professor you are um a a long time integral academic um and you are you know just someone  pretty much since we launched integral naked back in 2003 i think you were one of the the first  people and one of the most prolific people uh in the integral community even all the way back then  um so it is so awesome to have you here with us today man hey great cory thank you yeah it's  it's great to be here i don't know if i've ever met you in person but i'm i'm wondering if i did  because when i went to uh ken's house it was right before like maybe a week before the launch  of integral naked and he announced it to us and said that we're about to do this and if you want  to sign up he gave us the details and there were other people in the house with him but i don't  know if it was you i i i could have been there i might not have i don't know that was like 20 years  ago yeah exactly right that was a long time ago no and it's yeah and basically you and i have been  um you know pretty tight online uh this entire time and in fact bruce you know you're sort of  the guy i go to when i need  someone to check my math you know i've got i've got two people i look to and one of them tends to  be really really busy that's ken and then you know i have you and you know you actually helped me a  lot when i was sort of trying to come up with a way of framing these perspectives um you know you  and i sort of had a lot of back and forth and it was really helpful i think it it you know there  are certain of these perspectives that i had a hard time not necessarily taking but communicating  right there's a couple little  tricky perspectives in here and through my conversations with you it became  so much more clear to the point where like some of these perspectives now i'm having a hard time  not seeing them you know what i mean they're so pervasive i see them all over the place and and  we'll get into some of that um shortly but yeah i think that this is going to be a a very rich  and nourishing conversation for all of us no matter if you are a long time seasoned integral  veteran and you know sort of the academic work inside out  or if you're an integral newcomer and you're just kind of leaning into your curiosity a bit and you  want to learn a little bit more about what these perspectives are how to take them and sort of how  useful they can be um in our lives so i think this is going to be great and i'm psyched to have you  with us bro thank you yeah looking forward to it yeah so ryan i'm thinking you know just a kind of  a little bit of an origin story here so we've done a couple episodes in a row that i you know  sort of in my mind kind of constellate together  and we started off with um you know basically using film clips to describe all the major  altitudes of consciousness uh and then we did a similar episode but using video games and these  two episodes are just have been so well received um which is which is awesome they seem to be  really really helpful for people because they're giving people very common ordinary you know sort  of cultural reference points to to make sense of this stuff um and then last week or i'm sorry last  month we did an episode on inhabit your entertainment where we again sort of unpacked  this a little bit more and talked about how all of these integral ideas and perspectives can  actually give us a more rewarding satisfying and fulfilling really um experience of art media  entertainment etc today's episode actually grew out of those conversations so as i was getting  ready to you know basically write up a piece for the inhabit your entertainment  um out popped sort of these eight perspectives and it's all framed in terms of how to look at a  particular piece of art or a particular object and i like this frame because i think it it helps  keep things simple because you know when you read ken's writing about these perspectives about these  you know they're called zones um it's i mean again it's a lot of heavy lifting stuff it's  deeply cognitive you have to learn big words like autopoiesis  a little secret no one knows what autopoiesis means now bruce knows what autopoiesis means but  it's not a common term and it's kind of hard to use a term like that to make these perspectives  a little bit more friendly um which i think is what we're hopefully going to achieve today is  making these a little bit more friendly a little bit more accessible to people so i started  sketching out sort of you know let's what what happens what are the different perspectives that  we can take on a given work of art so let's say we put something on the table in front of you  in front of us in between us and we have a piece of art and we have a piece of art and we have a  piece of art or that object or whatever it is here are eight simple ways to enact this work of  art that is going to provide more meaning more insight more beauty more connection um and again  just a more fulfilling experience of whatever it happens to be that we're we're looking at at any  given moment so that's kind of where this conversation came from um and in terms of  where we go from here you know i'm thinking what we do is we just spend a little bit of time  describing each zone um give sort of an  experiential view of it um bruce i think that you can give us a little bit more of a sort of  some academic grounding for how these perspectives are used and how they can be useful for us  um and we'll just kind of take it from there does that sound good guys  sounds good to me word all right well let's start sort of where everybody starts in the  upper left quadrant yeah so the upper left quadrant the basic idea here is that all of  these quadrants  have an inner and an outer and what that simply means is we can look at each of these quadrants  from a first person point of view or from a third person point of view so let's talk about what that  means in terms of the upper left quadrant which is the quadrant of our interior individual  consciousness well if we're looking at a piece of art you know i think that there's two things that  really sort of um get lit up for us which is you know the first one is zone one the inner of the  upper left what is that zone one the inner of the upper left what is that zone one the inner of the  lower left what does that mean that basically just means my actual phenomenological experience  the states of consciousness that i feel um sort of the emotional states that i feel whatever  sort of the contents of your awareness are as you're engaging with a work of art so a common  question that we would ask ourselves a zone one question that we would ask ourselves is what is my  immediate in the moment experience of this artwork what emotional or spiritual states is it evoking  for me so i'm going to start with the first one which is the inner of the upper left quadrant  me so does that make sense why that is a a first person it's it's technically a first person view  of our first person right which again is is a bit of a mouthful but i want to make this a little bit  more intuitive for people so right now as people are watching us and i'll let you guys unpack this  in a sec right now as people are watching us they're having an experience right and part of  that experience comes from whatever we happen to be talking about part of that experience comes  from whatever the you know surrounding whatever moods and attitudes and all that that that people  arrive to this conversation with but right now you're feeling something maybe you're feeling  confused about the conversation maybe you're feeling excited to understand more maybe you're  feeling a little bit cranky because you didn't get enough sleep last night or you had too much  sugar yesterday or whatever it is all of this is leaving a phenomenological sort of experience  that you can register right now in the moment and the same is true when we're watching art  or looking at art engaging art  bruce feel free to i i jibber jabber here all the time so feel free to chime in with your thoughts  on on zone one i was thinking really it makes sense to get a good sense for zone one in contrast  with zone two in the sense that one when we're talking about taking the first person and you  know third person perspectives i find that it sometimes lead even though that's technically  correct it sometimes leads into confusion if  we really want to keep it simple i just say the inside and the outside of the interiors and  exteriors right which you've already said but just doing that it it keeps it simpler when you start  getting into the third person you know it's a little bit harder to track in my opinion sometimes  especially if you want to keep it really intuitive but yeah in terms of the you know the first person  the inside of the interior basically it's you don't have to do anything special to get there  right in a way that's immediately presenting itself and that's why i wanted to contrast it  with zone two is that you do have to do something a little bit special in order to be able to pick up  on the outside of the interior and so i can say something now or you can but i i think you'll  unpack it too as you get into that the the shorthand part of that is just  synchronically right now in immediate time and immediate presence  we're in the inside of the interior right that's what we're experiencing immediately  we only really get a sense for the outside of the interior diachronically across time we've got  to kind of be able to notice trend lines in pattern you know in experience over time and then  that helps us pick up on patterns and structures and things like that so it you can't very easily  sit here and and get your outside of your interior right um you need to you can you can  engage in some thoughtful reflection or read your journals or things like that but  there's some extra steps needed right yeah i think uh makes sense to bruce about  contrasting these two because as i think about it i'm contrasting them already in my head in  order to talk about both of them so if we just i don't know if we just do that do you guys want  me to get through zone two and then we can then we can yeah yeah sure i think that would make  sense in this one  yeah yeah totally so if zone one is the inner of the upper left again our immediate direct  experience right now then zone two involves some of the sort of unconscious factors that we have  that we all possess so zone two would be noticing the shapes and the patterns of mind right that  actually determine how we think or feel about the art so it's not just what we think or feel  it's sort of what what are the containers what are the unconscious psychological containers that  influence and give shape and shape and shape and shape and shape and shape and shape and shape and  state to our experience in the moment so this involves things like you know what stages what  intelligences are you know this particular piece of artwork or this object uh what are they lighting  up for me um what shadows are getting triggered for me when i'm looking at a particular piece of  art um so that's basically it what stages intelligence typology shadows etc is this  artwork lighting up within me so for me one of the easy ways that i can sort of distinguish between  zone one and zone two is to be able to see what's happening within me and what's happening within  me and what's happening inside me or where i'm sitting in this moment so the first thing i do is  i kind of figure out where i'm standing and then you know we do our immediate experience versus  sort of our structures our structural aspects of our consciousness is it's really states and stages  right i mean our states of consciousness are all zone one experiences that are all sort of  undeniably real right now in the moment right whereas our structures of consciousness as ken  often says we can't see these things from sitting on a cushion we can't see these things from you  know any number of these sort of uh you know consciousness  focused practices that we might have it actually requires another perspective in order to sort of  look at our interiors and track them over time so basically zone one is what's conscious to us  at any given moment and then zone two is sort of this big ocean of our individual unconscious  and i think the idea here is that art can light both of these up at the same time i mean our most  direct experience of art is obviously going to be a zone one experience that's what presents  itself to us we have a reaction in the moment to a piece of art but then if we sit with that  reaction a little bit more we can sort of get a sense of you know what are the the shapes of mind  that are causing this reaction that are allowing this reaction to sort of emerge uh at this moment  right now yeah so i was thinking uh because i tend to work with people you know and uh training  groups  and then private sessions and mostly in the realm of meditation and dharma but also we do you know  over at buddhist geeks well we have our integral dharma trainings so i'm always looking at from  that perspective of like working with somebody and um from you know the waking up perspective  zone one is just like that thing of constantly saying you don't have to do anything in order  to have this direct experience of awareness of presence you know but what we do is we turn it  into kind of a zone two-ish kind of thing that's funny it's like we're relating to it as this  obvious  object that we're trying to see and then you have to give that up in order to be able to  directly see it uh but then on the other hand in terms of like cleaning up um it's actually  noting over and over again what's happening in that zone one to be able to expose the patterns  in zone two whether they're trauma patterns you know uh or even deeper in a certain way that's  harder to see those structures you know um and that's even trickier though still to this day  i'm not i've not really seen techniques that are just overwhelmingly the ticket in order to  reliably consistently predictably do xyz and then you'll expose your current level of of  development um but you know like with robert keegan's work of of writing down the assumptions  you have about reality and then reality testing them is sort of like that like well here's what  i know my direct experience and now i'm going to try to take a step back and look at those things  and see if i can do that and then i'm going to try to take a step back and look at those things  and see if i notice a pattern um so and in this context we're talking about art which is really  interesting so you know we talk about art bringing us into a very direct experience you know um  rothko is obviously one of the very popular artists you know almost maybe go so popular  to a cliche sense you know like maybe targets printing up rothko's i don't know but still  really profound artist that like was all about invoking state experiences you know um immediately  directly but it's interesting to look at art as as helping us notice patterns  and you know cory to your point of like looking at an artist like uh tritt resner you know takes a  long arc to to look at an artist and see how they're going through the process and then how  might that process affect us as we're listening and growing with that art and i imagine you know  if you're listening to nine inch nails and all of a sudden they you know you put out a new album  that's a little deeper and you're like that might jolt something like wait a minute what i thought  we were just gonna be pissed off and at the world and now you're not like what the hell and you know  maybe that will evoke an awareness of the outer of you know in zone two well so some my initial  thoughts yeah great thoughts boost you have any any comments you want to share yeah i thought that  was great and i was just going to ask what you feel just about the general distinction between  the i and the me and that you know the the zone one is the i and the me is more like the distal  self which is your past self and sometimes art can invoke  you know immediate feelings but art art can also bring up perfume clouds from from your past  selves you know and really you know help you see you know yourself in different periods or you know  uh important stages that you've inhabited before um you know david bohm says that we're always  living you know we not only are we thinking we're always living in a cloud of thoughts and  felts these kind of echoes of things that we've felt and thought before that just keep repeating  right and so some art you know especially some post-modern art i think really tries to poke at  that and and point to kind of the habitual subjectivities that we all inhabit which could  be a zone two kind of apprehension yeah no that's that's that's beautifully said and it's and it's  an interesting point because you know i i sort of i differentiate between sort of an immediate  aesthetic experience right that i'm having from my own experience and from my own experience  from a given work of art versus something that i might just call my my overall tastes right and  my tastes aren't necessarily defined by my sort of direct phenomenological experience like i might  have tastes for types of art that make me uncomfortable in my immediate experience but  like there's it there's something about it that resonates there's something about the cosmic  address of this piece of art it's zone two cosmic address resonates for whatever reason with mine  and it can go the other way too like i know that that there there is media um there are entire  genres of media that i tend to avoid because it triggers zone two shadow material for me right i  don't like um uh you know a heavy sort of or horror movies or things like that because they're actually  they're triggering a heaviness that is already um that i already have wrapped up in shadow  within my own zone two based on my own experience and i think that's a really good point and i think  my own personal experience so i can feel an avoidance there because there are certain kinds  of art that just don't land in my zone two very well so i i push it away and i i tend to avoid it  and ryan i loved your point about cleaning up because it's it's it's really interesting right  where the path of waking up is largely a zone one sort of set of practices the path of growing up is  largely a zone two set of practices but cleaning up sort of sits right on this line because cleaning  up is when we're taking  material unconscious material out of zone two we're bringing it into zone one making it an object  of consciousness right actually sort of re-internalizing it and then putting it away  right and we kind of get back into this into the zone two background where hopefully it's not gonna  sabotage us as much or it's not gonna be much pain well and we one way to say is we have more  available for zone one experiences actually we reintegrate um unconscious parts of ourselves  you know there's more  in zone one um and actually you know in this arc of art and the other episodes we've done  um and you know in inhabit we're we've always been leaning towards something embodied grounded  practical you know so that way we can really live you know everything we talk about integral  and i think art actually is one of the one of the best i don't know examples or tools  for growing up uh because it's just so hard to see and especially as adults so ken i think  he gives an example of like you know for child development about like one day you just stop  playing with those toys you know you move on kind of thing but as adults it starts appearing like  it's just one continuous unchanging journey like we've arrived and this is how psychology is in the  past is treated adult development but you can easily look i mean for me going back through music  and movies and television shows through the last 20 years and see what was i really into at that  time and then what's my experience of it now and if i go  i don't want to watch this like why you know why it's like oh well because i was acting out my  shadows that i hadn't integrated yet or because i was less developmentally mature and at that time  and that doesn't mean that like everything we have to experience is like oh it's so mature i'm  just meaning like you know there's a general gravity of like what we appreciate so perhaps  it's one of the best mirrors for growing up in an interesting way because i if i try to think about  something else readily available to show me in a mirror sort of way of my own development of where  i'm at where i've been  it's hard to find except music and movies pretty easy yeah no it's interesting you're if you if you  go through sort of all the previous incarnations of your tastes right it's it's it almost like  it's almost like an archaeology of self you know what i mean like i can i can get a sense of what  my patterns and shapes of mind were based on the kinds of art that i was attracted to and then i  can take that next step and be like okay so there's that inertia behind me how  is that presenting itself today i think this is also why for a lot of the art we really deeply  love and you know creates a lot of value in our lives this is why we're able to continue growing  into that art as we continue to mature right because there's actually what's maturing here  is our zone two sort of these factors that are under the hood of our consciousness right yeah  i was just thinking like um that that funny experience which i don't have hardly anymore  but like if you meet somebody from  your past long time ago maybe someone from high school or something like that kind of thing  and if they are still just exactly into the exact same stuff they were at that time and you were and  then it's kind of it's kind of weird it's kind of like huh nothing new just literally the same  movies and same music and art well wow that's we can feel that disconnect you know and it's not to  say that like hey there's plenty of things like you throw on ace ventura guess what i'm still  going to really enjoy it it's a stupid ass movie but but if that was like  only the extent of my maturity you'll be a little worrisome right right yep that's true  all right well that's basically zone one and two if there's anything else we want to say  um about this i mean you know again this is this is oftentimes um sort of the the cornerstone and  the capstone of our artistic experience because so much of this occurs within obviously our direct  and i think once we have a good sense of that we can move on to uh the lower left quadrant  one thing i would just throw in um yeah yeah not to take us on too much of an aside but  there's something about states impacting what you're experiencing in zone one and two also  and you know that the shifting the states will actually change what's showing up and how you  feel about what's showing up right  and one thing that's i'm bringing that up for is uh from a meditation experience since i'm here with  a buddhist geek i'd like to bring it in but i was on a intensive retreat in malaysia on panang  island of vipassana retreat there and i remember the teacher mentioned the farther that you proceed  in this path the less you're going to care about music it's going to just come across your screen  of consciousness as unrelated disjointed um sounds that are just vanishing and that that the thread  of music will fall apart for you and that's why we don't even focus on music here that was one of  the things that moved me to a different path after that conversation with him but i did find later  that after actually deepening in certain state experiences some kinds of music for whatever  they did fail to land subjectively for me anymore where before they would and now it just sounded  like very uh cardboard going through the motion gestures that are meant you could see oh emotion  is supposed to be evoked here and nothing happening yeah totally that's a good good  point yeah because so much for at least you know being uh generalizing here you know there's a  big arc of the path that is deconstruction you know it's deconstructing and and loosening the  grip on experience and then later having it reintegrate and re-emerge but it's it's so hard to  assess all this out because it's all happening at once you know so like the state you know state  experiences awakening can like totally change how we feel energetically about a piece of music like  we feel the deeper energy of it the deeper state experiences about it and it just doesn't land for  us you know and um yeah it is really interesting that taking apart and putting back together again  and what what still shows up and what just disappears yeah yeah cool yeah well hopefully  that was useful for people in terms of just differentiating discerning the aspects of our  you know individual consciousness that are fully available to us right now versus those aspects  that just aren't that we know are that are just part of our unconscious and they're always kind  of ticking along in the background right giving shape to our phenomenological experiences in the  moment so hopefully that's that's  helpful for people and now we can make a transition to the lower left quadrant and i think that this  is another sort of um it's this is another area where it's probably a little bit easy for people  to intuitively grasp the difference between the inner of the lower left and the outer of the lower  left and one of the examples that i commonly use to help sort of you know foreground the the the  difference here is have you ever walked in on someone else's inside joke  right so you're you're you're hanging out with a bunch of friends your friends tell an inside joke  you feel like an outsider you know that they have a shared context here that you are outside of you  cannot take a first person view of their context because you're not a part of it you can only look  at it from the outside so we feel this and obviously these kind of exist in you know  concentric circles i mean you can be on the inside of you know sort of one lower left circle and  the outside of many  others or you can share an inside like for example all of us here today we all speak english  right so we all have a basic sort of lower left um uh bubble that we sit in that we can share and  yet ryan i have a different relationship with you than i have with bruce and if i start telling  certain kinds of jokes ryan that you and i have shared over the years that's going to land one way  and same if i if i you know joke around with you bruce it's going to land in another and our  audience is not going to be able to follow any of that so you know i'm going to be able to follow  any of that so you know i'm going to be able to follow any of that so you know actually sort of  minding our our zone three and four containers i think it's it's really important and this is  where a lot of you know things like skillful means and and knowing how to play to your audience for  example this is where a lot of this comes in so let me just describe real briefly um the simplest  i think the simplest distinctions between zone three and zone four and then we can unpack this  a little bit so zone three is the inside of the lower left the inner of the lower left which means  shared meaning and the experience that you have with other people in this case around a you know  a particular artwork as well as with the artist him or herself so a question that you would ask  here in zone three is how are other people experiencing and interpreting this artwork  how do their experiences and interpretations influence my own how would i respond to this  artwork if the artist was standing right in front of me right now zone four on the other hand is the  outer of the lower left this is how we sort of see the art of the lower left and the outer of the  inner of the lower left and then we sort of are able to appreciate how this piece of art fits into  you know larger cultural contexts or simply different cultural contexts um we might ask  you know we might consider how a given piece of art impacts um you know all of the sort of  unspoken rules and permissions and taboos that shape our discourse so when we have these kinds  of conversations there's there's an inner and an outer to it and the inner is basically consists  of everything that we actually understand and we can't really understand the inner and the outer  share and relate with each other and the outer is sort of like you know again this this this  unspoken set of of of rules and permissions where if you transgress that you're going to get some  fairly immediate feedback um and in fact stand-up comics i think make their home in zone four they  make their home in trying to figure out exactly where those lines are drawn and trying to figure  out if we can push that line and we can push that line and we can push that line and we can push that  one way or the other and sometimes they push too far and you know their career suffers as a result  and other times the really masterful comics in our culture are able to at least bring these sorts of  lines and taboos etc into consciousness if not sort of subversively push them out a little bit  more so common zone four questions are going to be what are the cultural currents or patterns that  this artwork is trying to hold a mirror to how resonant or subversive is this art  work is it playing it safe or is it pushing the edge how would this artwork be enacted across  multiple different cultures and contexts so if i took this artwork out of our english-speaking  american context and dropped it into i don't know pakistani culture how would it play that  requires a zone four perspective right in order to get a sense of that bruce does this math check out  makes sense to me yeah i think you put it well and  it was just putting me in mind of you know if you've ever taken a journey through you know  different world music traditions and tried to expose yourself to very different types of music  for instance um you could really be confronted with that inside outside joke the inside outside  meaningful resonance thing you know and for instance i can think of you know some forms of  korean music that i've listened to or  japanese or indonesian or other kinds of music where when you listen to it there can be a zone  one response an emotional response arising but there's also can like an aura of puzzlement  around what are they trying to recreate here what is the meaning that they're wanting to share  because sometimes it really shows up as very alien there's some korean styles of music that  when i was first exposed to them it sounded like they were taking a journey through the  making a long surf on very depressive currents um really deeply depressive mood that they were  drawing out with their sounds but it was totally puzzling how am i supposed to relate to this i  couldn't get the inside cultural bead on what they were weaving and you can only do that by  familiarizing by basically learning the language right learning the shared language whatever that  happens to be that is being used to enact this art within a particular culture um ryan i'm sure you've  got some thoughts about this as sort of the you know the language expert that you are you've got a  deep passion for language itself and i'm sure that you have felt this this sort of the line in the  sand that separates yeah zone four as people are you know becoming more fluent well yeah and you  know the biggest thing where this shows up is humor so and for me humor comedy is one of the  art forms and um yeah  so one of my teachers my favorite version of spanish is mexican spanish it's just to me there's  just the slang of mexico's brilliance uh but with one of my teachers we'll share different humorous  things from both the cultures and some things that are really funny in spanish you can't really  translate into english and vice versa like key and peel uh you know is this one of the oh we actually  know i i talked with them about our our clip on team america yeah uh that we shared that in that  episode and um just because the words have double meanings that work for us like ass  means a part of the body but it means like a person who's mean not cool or whatever you know  whatever we might say that in that context it meant red amber yeah yeah and admit something  even more meanings right but they don't have that same word in in spanish doesn't mean those  multiple things so you can see that like really quickly humor breaks down and it can be one of  the hardest things to get that's like the last thing you get in learning a language  because it you have to really immerse yourself in that um zone three really it's a zone three and  you're trying to find it through like zone four and i don't know where we where you put grammar  and things like this but it's really uh really interesting and you know i was gonna say also  with the differentiation between zone three and zone four um well even with maybe with zone four  in particular um so in one version of art to me it's validating and you said resonating so that's  one thing and i think of the enneagram for example which is not art but it's often a crowd pleaser  if somebody comes to it they're just like i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't  know it's like oh yeah tell me about myself and you're objectifying yourself in a certain sense  you remember the first time i came across enneagram four and you know that's what i am and  i was like oh yeah it's validating so art can be like that where it's validating even though  we're seeing you know we're seeing the the outer of what was only inner you know before that moment  and um uh but then as soon as we make something outer inevitably we're distancing ourselves from  because we're no longer completely identified with these unspoken structures of culture and  shared meaning um and then you know it can be disturbing or disruptive you know because we're  something is shaken loose and um and i think that's what the art that gets most attention  in the kind of zone four area is like what is shaking up and that's often what's  happening but the validating thing i think is totally happening all the time we just don't  talk about it very much because it's just you know pleasant and whatnot but what's interesting  here too is that like if you look at this so like if you have disruptive art like i don't know some  forms of graffiti or something like that or just a new art form that's just like we're going to do  something totally different it's going to make everybody uncomfortable for that artist and the  people who really really appreciate that that's actually not disruptive to them they have a that's  their shared meaning it's like this is the art we create and so it's not disruptive for them it's  disruptive for other people who don't aren't in that shared developmental level or whatever it  might be so it's interesting how these things just keep cycling you know in terms of alternating  between what is subjective and what is disruptive and what is disruptive and what is disruptive and  what is object as a as a we and what is uh object yeah ryan that's i think a critical point here is  that again these are not boxes on a piece of paper these are not sort of discrete categories in other  words all of these zones sort of have a way of bleeding into each other and creating feedback  loops with each other they dance all of these zones are constantly dancing with each other  and it's one thing to kind of press the pause button on reality right and say okay well this  is this is all clearly zone three phenomena  zone four here's you know really kind of separate and tease things apart but once you hit that play  button again and the universe is in motion again and all of these things start to again bleed into  each other yeah these resonances and and disruptions and feedback loops and so forth yeah  yeah that's why like in my uh intro to integral theory that i uh gave a talk on at buddhist geeks  and that video is online 30 minute talk is my best version of 30 minutes i start off with a quote from  hokai sobel a tweet he had that don't worry it's just everything and everyone happening all at once  and that's always really important to never forget that like we're it's really useful to  distinguish this rather than making it a big blob of you know without any distinctions that's horrible  but like you know when we distinguish the stuff then we got to like let that go and realize it's  all happening at once and that's really important um the other the last thing i want to say about  this is like in terms of art and we talked about this a bit i think in the uh one we did on movies  this is in in the in the lower left zone three and four is where i often will feel the distinction  between especially in documentaries where somebody wish once or no it's even worse in in in fictional  content where somebody wants to talk at me they want to get on a soapbox and tell me stuff rather  than create a shared artistic experience like immerse me in the shared meaning the shared  journey and then at the end i step back and say wow what happened the experience changed me or  solidified something and you can always tell that like what happened to me and i'm like oh my god i'm  like oh my god what happened to me and i'm like oh my god what happened to me and i'm like oh my god  when somebody is trying to create this piece of art in a zone in a lower left kind of manner but  what they end up doing is not creating art and they're just talking at you which doesn't feel  good and you know documenting some people it's kind of like uh like bilber says go to i'm right  dot com and like a documentary is like yeah tell me all the things i already know and uh then that  feels good but for me it's not great art right right because the documentary is not trying to  form a relationship with you exactly and lower left is a relational dimension it's a relational  dimension right um i have to go  talk to the tree guys real quick i'll be right back guys and i'll wrap a little bit okay you  know another another example of this where we can i think see all four of these zones that we've  talked about so far kind of you know at play with each other is just in some of our favorite bands  musicians artists uh that we've you know acquired throughout our lives so like for example  one of my favorite hip-hop bands ever is a band called blackalicious um unfortunately the mc for  blackalicious his name was gift of gab  uh he passed away just a couple weeks ago uh which was deeply sad and i was i was really i was really  shaken by his by his passing um not only because he was super young he was only 50 years old and  he just had uh two kidney transplants and you know we were all very excited for his his recovery and  unfortunately he ended up passing but when i think about you know my love for this group where does  this love really really come from well it comes from you know i was in my 20s when i discovered  this was at a point when i my my spirituality my spiritual self my awakening path was really  beginning to present itself to me in a very very strong and powerful and insistent way and yet i  didn't have a lot of role models out there to emulate right i hadn't yet discovered you know  i mean i think i i was into ken but that still felt like a very sort of small community that  was supporting what he was doing and i wasn't seeing much of this represented in the culture  around me so i was like okay i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this  at all uh and then i found this group where you know not only did they make me my in my zone one i  i felt these states right i was like oh i'm able to recontact these states for myself just by  listening to your music which oh by the way i'm tremendously attracted to because you're making  music that's appealing to my you know these zone two factors that i have right but then there was  that next step it was not only is there an artist that's actually giving voice  to sort of these unseen parts of myself but that artist is then in turn being selected for in  culture these guys are finding popularity which means i'm not the only one who sees something in  what they're doing and that is validating that i think gets to to ryan's point this is validating  like oh my god i'm not going crazy other people experience this and what was useful for me bruce  was that it wasn't just someone like me having similar set of experiences but here's someone  from a complete world and i'm not the only one who sees something in what they're doing and i'm not  the only one who sees something in what they're doing and i'm not the only one who sees something in  different cultural background right these are this is uh you know someone who's 10 years older  than me african-american lived on grew up on the west coast i grew up on the east coast so you know  a different set of cultural experiences and yet these same what felt to me like universals were  being expressed through that different context so in a way sort of that that shared and differing  lower left context between zone three and zone four  to the point where you know 25 years later they continue to be one of my all-time favorite artists  and clearly from that resonance exactly yeah i was thinking about do you ever watch i think you  do i think we both kind of confess to each other that we have the secret vice of watching reaction  videos sometimes yeah definitely i do yeah but you know in the of course in in the music community  you know often the like with uh dimash kudaibergen you know all of his all his followers are the  deers you know or lady gaga you know has them you know they form a tribe you know they form this  cultural movement and a tribe and i was thinking about prospectively what's interesting about  what's going on with reaction videos there's kind of a between what's going on among most of the  audience members maybe and what's going on with the reactors but on the one hand we're we're  vicariously enjoying their enjoyment or their reaction to that but i think it's you know there's  a they they refer to the reaction channel membership as family there's a definitely a  sense of kinship that we're all enjoying taking this musical journey together but they're entering  the first person experience of of in  encountering that music for the first time and for many in the audience i think it's almost a zone  two thing and that it's it's showing us our me of what i was like and what i felt when i first  encountered that thing encountered that piece of music yep no that's that's a great example and  just just so our audience knows exactly what we're talking about so we're talking about those videos  where you have like two hip-hop guys listening to megadeth or there's other versions where you  metal heads listening to like k-pop right yeah exactly and and describing their reactions and  it is really interesting because bruce i think that actually shows how we can simultaneously  share these zone three containers at one sort of concentric level and also be sitting outside  of them at another level because you know where there's a shared sort of reality is god we all  love music right someone comes into this with a good faith kind of you know a good faith kind of  you know kind of uh posture where like i'm going to expose myself to new music because i love music  and i'm sure there's going to be something in these new experiences that i love however i'm  going to be listening to things that are sort of outside of my idiom right and that idiot your  idiom is defined in zone three well i mean i'm going to take that back that your idiot i mean  there's unconscious elements to your idiom as well that are that are sort of being reinforced  and i'm going to take that back and i'm going to take that back and i'm going to take that back  i often think about it in terms of the zone three is whatever happens to be discussed among a group  of people at any given point in time right those conversations can span any number of topics and  territories and so forth and yet surrounding that conversation is something we might call an  overton window this is something we hear about a lot in politics so you know donald  trump comes along and he swings the overton window what does that mean that means he's actually  changing our zone four structures changing the permission sets the unspoken permission sets that  we share so that something that was taboo to talk about yesterday is no longer taboo to talk about  today and this reshapes again because these things bleed into each other that then you know changes  how i relate in the upper left quadrant both in terms of my direct zone one experience  and  my zone two sort of structures um it all gets kind of bent whenever one of these factors in any one  of these zones changes so does everything else because this is always tetra emerging or octa  emerging whatever whatever metaphor we want to use here but i like i think the political example  helps a little bit because there's a lot of these terms that um get thrown around a lot and if we  just take a closer look at it we can actually see how this is actually delineating these eight  primary  perspectives for us which again just gives you know that much more proof to the idea that we're  already always taking these perspectives we just don't necessarily know it when we are  right and i think that becomes huge in the next quadrant so should we shift to the upper right  quadrant yeah let's go this is this is one where um i struggled a little bit bruce and i was i was  very grateful for um the time that we spent together sort of hashing this out it's not that  i had a hard time taking the perspective i had a hard time communicating sort of the simplicity  of the of this perspective and that's the zone five perspective so let me talk about the difference  first and then we can unpack this a little bit because i think this is this is actually a really  profound one so the upper right quadrant this is when we're looking at something from the outside  an individual object or whole on or what have you from the outside so we're looking at a person a  frog a you know or or a set of signifiers such as an artwork right we're looking at it sort of  objectively um so here we have two zones the inner of the upper right is called zone five  and basically what this is that's let's let's continue talking about looking at a piece of art  if we're looking at a piece of art the zone five question is basically going to be a reconstruction  of the artist's interiors based on whatever it is that we happen to be looking at right  so here's this artwork here are the forms of the artwork here is sort of the colors that they use  or the sounds that they put together the the tonalities you know all this stuff that we can  look at in third person what does this mean as soon as we ask the question what does this mean  we're taking a zone five perspective right especially if we're basing that question  purely on what we see how the art is presenting itself to me right now well what does that mean  well we have to take we have to reconstruct someone's  interiors this is you know oftentimes when you think of the upper right quadrant we think of it  in terms of zone six just a third person completely objective view let's just describe sort of how it  works how it behaves etc um and that's sort of as you know as as objective as we possibly can get  that's a zone six perspective so that would be viewing the artwork as a self-contained whole  appreciating its objective forms and features as well as the skills talents techniques and  performance and the art itself as a whole so that's a zone six perspective so that would be  we're not asking questions like what does it mean we're not bringing any first person  sort of awareness to that we're just looking at it objectively but the minute we start asking  the question what does this artwork actually mean based on the forms that i see in front of  me right now now we're taking a zone five perspective and zone five is is profound for  reasons we'll talk about in a minute because it's a perspective we are always always taking  without knowing it and that's why it was so hard for me to figure out how to communicate it  exactly yeah when we were first talking about it also i was thinking about it in its more advanced  forms and thinking that this comes on pretty late um but the more that we went through it and tried  to simplify it the more apparent it became that this is actually something that begins to surface  in us even you know very early and i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good  point and i think that's a really good point um even as soon as we're able to take a a theory of  other minds right um yeah there's another there's another way of framing the zone five that i talked  to you about which i think is more tentative but um and i think it's hard to make a a whole  discipline out of it but for me if zone five is defined as basically the inside of an exterior  and we arrive at the inside through a process of reconstruction based on our observations of  exterior elements and a good example of this is something like von wexkel's biosemiotics  where you know he will look at different organisms and then attempt to reconstruct  their experiential world based on their ecological niche and their equipment you know and and  whatever we know about the organization and we're able to take a look at it and we're able to  take a look at their organism and their environment and what is important to them you know we can begin  to reconstruct what is the experiential world of of you know that being and of course we can do it  as we talked about with with other people too looking at them from the outside and trying to  what's the world like for them based on what i can see from the outside  so that relates to what you're saying about you know trying to get at what the artist's interior  was  in the creation of that piece of work but there's also you know something i wanted to highlight  which is that sometimes the work itself seems to have a kind of interiority it doesn't have  a conscious agency like it's you know a living you know fully developed sentient being but  there's a aura to it that i think i used the word with you a kind of mana that comes out of it i  think you said mana funk yeah funk yeah there's a funk to it mana funk to it um there's some  quality of presence that manifests from the artwork that sometimes you can't even directly  trace at least consciously to the artist's intent right um it may not you know it happens  in the magic of the proportions and the and the interplay of the elements that there is some kind  of power that comes through it that you can subjectively feel um that's not your feeling  it's a communication you know you you have subjective states and reaction to an object  but also you can sense sometimes an emanation from a piece of music or from an object that  seems to be its own you know powerful  powerful  powerful  powerful  uh scintillating presence yeah yeah and me and maybe this is associated with subtle energies  um which again can get a little bit tricky to to talk about um maybe it's just a matter of  proportions like you're saying i mean there's sometimes you look at a landscape and it has  that mana funk to it now no one create there was no artist there was no agent that created  you know a sunset as as an artifact for example this is sort of just a naturally  or a natural thing that's just a natural thing that's just a natural thing that's just a natural  organically occurring process and yet even there there can be a radiance there can be it feels  almost like a communication but there's not necessarily an agent behind it there's just a  a transmission um and it can be hard to put your finger on what that feels like looks like tastes  like um other than yeah there's just sort of a funk a glow a spark a certain allure maybe a a  life force but in a different way than we usually mean that and sort of you know when it comes to  biology and sort of you know it's just sort of a funk a glow a spark a certain allure maybe a a life  and and such um and it's mysterious and it's it's and it's as you say it's hard to um it's hard to  talk about because you can't quite put it into a bottle right but the other aspects of zone five  this is where we i think really can and i love that you mentioned biosemiotics because um just  to show that this is stuff that comes online fairly early in our development or at least it  can come online fairly early in our development just last week i was having a conversation with  my daughter who's eight years old and we were basically talking about the fact that we're  basically asking what is it like to be this animal versus that animal what would it be like  to be a dog right and i would frame it like this so we know that you know these animals all sense  reality differently they have different sensory organs right so a dog is primarily reconstructing  its reality based on scent right and a bat is mostly you know reconstructing its reality based  on sound and people you know we've been talking about this for a long time and we've been talking  about that in the past you know let me go aquesta  right whenever we're interacting with  people who we don't know. We have no shared relationship with these people. It's just a  name on a screen and a string of words. And then we start trying to ascribe an interior to those  words. What kind of person would say something like that? What we're doing is we're reconstructing  each other in zone five based only on these third person signifiers that we have. So whenever an  integralist says something really stupid, like you're so green, in order to write off someone's  entire point of view, they are taking an irresponsible zone five perspective. And what  they're not doing is recognizing that this is limited to zone five because you don't know,  again, you have no relationship with these people. And rather than trying to form a relationship,  rather trying to develop a shared context that would actually give you that much more  traction in your assessment of each other.  Instead, you just kind of jump right to labeling each other. Oh, you're so paranoid. You're so  green. You're not into whatever it might be. That is a zone five sort of reconstruction of  someone's interiors based on very, very limited sort of objective data that we have. And again,  it's something we're doing all the time. Exactly. It's very common to hear on the  internet people complaining about, oh, you're just projecting on me as if projecting on somebody was  a wrong thing to be doing.  But I think now we really understand that projecting is something that we're always doing.  It's a zone. It's part of our zone five activity. It's part of the overall suite of things that we  do to build relationships with others. And so there's always this element of reconstructing  and projecting. It's just we can do it better or worse. That's right. And yeah, Ryan, it reminds  me of several episodes ago, we were talking about, I can't remember the episode name, but it was  Inhabit Your...  Social media or something like that. But we were basically talking about internet hygiene.  That was sort of the basis of the show is internet hygiene. And so much of this hygiene,  well, we can see how it gets kind of farmed out across all of these different perspectives.  There's a zone four hygiene, there's a zone two hygiene. But there's also this zone five hygiene  where we need to be able to call ourselves out, right? And prevent ourselves from kind of sliding  into what Bruce was talking about, sort of this pure projection. Because actually,  sometimes what we're doing is we're partially taking a zone five perspective, but we're loading  it up with our own zone two baggage, right? Which again, shows how these perspectives kind of bleed  on each other and why we need a little bit more fluency with these perspectives in order to tell  one part from the other. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting  based on the context. So I wrote down some notes here for this upper right. Yeah, and in the context,  integral community, those are the kinds of things I would say, Corey, like what you just said,  because it tends to be objectively, I'm saying this is what tends to be the behavioral pattern.  So I'm making an objective statement here, like an upper right kind of statement about what I see,  and in an inference about what I think it means about people's interiors, which I'm okay with.  In a pluralistic context, there's maybe some allergy to that, you know, where it's like,  you can't say something objectively, because all that exists in cultural context, you know,  things like that.  But you know, it's kind of one of those things like, well, you know, the old saying, like,  if it quacks like a duck, well, that's such a, can be a cop out. Like, it's just like,  I can just validate myself and being like, I'm right, because I just said it quacks like a duck  and that's very simple. So very, there we go. But no, but it's kind of like that. Like, literally,  if you hear something quacking, and you see it flip flopping around, we can recognize patterns  and reality as objective things and make an estimated guess that like that thing that I see  floating across the water, I think that's a duck. Yeah, but in the end, maybe I'm wrong.  Um, but like, Bruce,  you said we can do all this better or worse. So I think we're right now looking at upper right. So  let's just lean into it. You know what I mean? So that's where it's upper right and upper right  is all about it. So what are we what are we in here? So for me, like, just a couple of things,  you know, like, in simple terms of like art, we look at film, and we can talk about the color  palette, right? This is something really simple, like looking at color tones. And some directors,  for example, are well known for color palette, like Wes Anderson, you know,  like, automatically, look at that. That's really interesting automatically, without  just seeing the color palette and the presentation of the it of the screen,  a person could be like, it's gotta be Wes Anderson. Now, it could be wrong. But a lot of times you can  be really right. It just and then if you add in other things, the tonality of the delivery of the  actors, like you can map that out on frequency, like, is it more of an understated, there are a  lot of understated monotone sort of ballpark ish, you know, things combined with the color palette,  combined with the type of music, you combine all these different it's, you can make an assumption  about who that person was, including their interior. So these things will happen all the  time. And of course, the bigger question, then we say, what does that evoke, you know, in us?  And that is really interesting, because obviously, like, well, can we say the color yellow,  objectively evokes something in a human being? That's harder sounds like music, or just different  kinds of sounds, maybe we can say something like that. So if like, you scrape your nails on a  chalkboard, and you're like, oh, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't  know. Yeah, maybe someone's out there is like, so good. I love that. Keep to keep doing that.  That's could very well be the case. But you could do a test and say, like, how many people have a  visceral response that they subjectively report, we can map out their brain and say, like, what  activity do we see happening? Do we see a fight or flight response, you know, when nails are across  the chalkboard, and so we can make some inferences, you know, about objectively, like, well, this  thing produces this kind of thing, response in the audience. And,  and, of course, all that goes into like, the thing about like, what does this mean? But at first,  we have to look at those initial layers and say, like, for me, those are very valid.  Watch this, it is talking to me. Yeah, so we get at the meaning, but like, that's a very valid path  to say, like, and that's where I think filmmakers, for example, really dive into that's what it's all  about. Like, how can I use these it's to hopefully produce some range of responses in those people  who are  watching it, and therefore, like the reverse engineering, like Bruce, you're kind of talking  about that reconstructing? Yeah, we can do that and say, like, oh, well, all these colors, all  these sounds, like I remember in Dark Knight, one of the it's that I found fascinating was Hans Zimmer  tried to find a sound to play in these repetitive scenes with the Joker. And he finally landed on  a razor blade across strings, like, and like, and it's really subtly under there. But like,  you hear it, and it creates a tension, because usually, we don't like  metal,  scraping sounds doesn't provoke, evoke a relaxed state of being, you know, it's tense, you know.  So, and then the other thing, Bruce, you mentioned something here that I wrote down, like,  that there's an interior to the art, like an it factor to it. So in the same way that we could  take a psychedelic, that's an it thing, that's having an it response, that then has some correlates  that we can predict, you know, like that happening in the brain, I think that happens in art music.  Now,  it's psychedelics, we can really identify that the chemistry and all this stuff, and then say,  well, this is what's likely to happen where it's a little bit harder in, in art. But I think that's  true, too. There's an it aspect to it that like, in and of itself, because of all these different  factors and how it impacts us, we can see a reflection in our own biochemistry. That's  just super, it's super obvious that it happens. It's not as so obvious to like how we describe  those it's. And because of that, last thing I'll say here is transmission. So we talked, you, you,  you were using different words, Bruce, but that's the same for me, the same thing is like,  it transmits. And this is really interesting, because we can talk about in Dharma, like  receiving transmission from teacher to student, that's considered really important, something  happens there. That's magical. But we can talk about that, too. And I'm a believer in this,  too, that like, if you see a teaching written down, it's now in an it form, it's in a book,  it's ink on a piece of paper, and there's words there. But it transmits, I've had that experience,  like something happened there, you know, that I'm just not going to reduce, deconstruct,  and say nothing is meaningful happening there. So anyways, all this stuff comes up for me in,  in this upper right it zone. Yeah, that's all. That's all really well said, Ryan. And you know,  it got me thinking about things like music theory and color theory, which I think are largely  sitting on that line between zone six and zone five, because what it's saying is we expect that  an ad the average person, these tones are going to produce these, you know, interior effects, right?  We associate these with these. Now, that's not necessarily going to be true  from individual to individual in terms of their actual zone one experience. But we predict that  yellow on average is going to make people feel happy, red is going to make people feel agitated,  and, you know, so and light blue is going to make people feel calm, you know, so there's, there's,  and there's the cultural context, sort of zone five work. Yeah, it's really an example of like  an it thing of cultural context. So one thing, so if you ask the average person in the United States,  uh, do people in Latin  America, South America, like spicy food? I guarantee most people would say, yeah. But  actually, it's Mexico is really a place where they really like things spicy. So a food that  has a spicy effect produces a joyful response, like a subjective response. But actually, in like,  Venezuela or Colombia? No, they're like, Oh, no, they actually much more mild.  So there's some assumptions there that like, oh, if I make a spicy food,  it will produce certain subjective responses. And that that might not be the case. So there's some  cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold,  cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold,  stuff there for sure. And that's, you know, like, in the pluralist context, there is truth to that,  because that because we have a lower left quadrant. So it's a little harder to nail down.  But like, at the same time, I want to toss it all out and say that no, no, even that cultural  context, then we could objectively identify like these factors of it can produce this particular  result in this group of people. Yeah, yeah. And Bruce, when we were talking,  you mentioned something really interesting, which was, um, reminded me that Ken Wilber had once  described the integral project itself as largely a zone five project. Why don't you tell us a little  bit of what you think he meant by that? He didn't say it directly, actually, but  it was in the, the afterwards to the Dancing with Sophia book. And it was also a part of  a presentation that he gave at the I think it was the 2013 Integral Theory Conference.  But in there, he was talking about all of the zones, and talking about critical realism,  and how it tends to focus on some more than others, and that you need to be able to take all.  And then he talked about what integral involves in terms of all of the zones. But then when he  actually described why it's important to take all the zones, he actually described it in terms of  enactment.  And autopoetic play. So he actually used the language of zone five to basically describe  the integral project. And I think I used the phrase with you that, you know, that the Zone  five is kind of like the Klein bottle contact point in the aqual matrix, and that  there's a kind of everything kind of loops back into Zone five where, yeah, there's this notion of  auto voices and an accident. And I think he was talking about sort of the Federal Code, but he's  enactment but there's this i think this kind of deep intuition that we can see  you know the the soul of the cosmos in a sense that we we relate to the whole  cosmos is having an interior and an exterior and that that's an avenue into feelingly contacting  the whole display and bringing it together in integrative harmony to me there's a zone five  element to working with the interior and the exterior that way in order to bring together  a more coherent dynamically unfolding and active evolutionary picture of reality  that's beautiful it's a beautiful frame because you know ken often says this material is  psychological  and i think what he means by that i just was talking about this in another show what he means  by that is that integral theory really comes with a mirror all right and if you're doing integral in  purely third person terms where again you're just pushing diagrams around on a piece of paper you're  just drawing boxes and lines and you know sort of it's a categorical approach to integral it's not  an enacted approach to integral and i think that that is sort of the the you know the that's the  zone fiveness of it that you can't talk about it in a way that you can't talk about it in a way that  you can't talk about these ideas without simultaneously inhabiting these ideas and  sort of you know reflecting that mirror within um and in fact if you're not doing that you're  probably missing something really really important here um and i think it's it's it's a really good  point and i also see this there's something we talked about before the show i also see this in  terms of like so much of our legal system is built in zone five right because our what our legal  system is asking a jury to do is to look at what's going on in the system and what's going on in the  case and look at the third person facts of a case and decide determine whether or not the defendant  intentionally willfully transgressed right that's the difference between murder and manslaughter  for example and that's a big distinction intent is a huge distinction when it comes to law but  you can't trust that the person you're talking to is going to be truthful about their intent so you  can only reconstruct their intent based on the third person facts of a case and decide determine  the person facts and factors of the case so the jury's presented these factors they're given an  argument to why that violates you know the laws in the lower right quadrant and then they're left  to determine for themselves whether this person intended to commit those crimes or or not and  their their punishment um is going to be based largely on how much intent was in there but  figuring out that intent is purely a zone five activity because we're saying right from the  start i can't trust that this person is going to be completely truthful and how they present  themselves to me right so i i have to reverse engineer this from the facts that are presented  to me from the lawyers from the prosecution etc that's a great point and when you were  talking with me about that this morning you you gave a caveat that there's also the lower left  involved in that the intersubjective testimony so it really seems that we're we're weighing  both yeah what we can construct of the interior based on the external factors that are available  to us and the testimony of reliable um you know witnesses and and other parties that's right  together that can help us really get a good hopefully a good sense of of what the intent was  yeah i think if that if if um if the lawyer is uh worth their money they're doing everything  they can to make sure that the jury doesn't only  have third person facts to consider the case they're going to do their best to bring in some  of these second person lower left element they're going to bring in character witnesses either for  or against right i mean either side can bring in character witnesses again just to help the jury  form a relationship with the with the defendant um rather than only judging them based on the  third person sort of facts of the case because sometimes the facts of the case just are misaligned  something but don't necessarily prove intent and i mean someone really could have been in the wrong  place at the wrong time and have a cluster fuck of circumstance that makes them look guilty but  as soon as you bring in some of these second person lower left kind of character reinforcing  perspectives that that calculus changes a little bit and therefore our you know our sense of how  guilty they are or how innocent they are can change and i think this is the same thing when  we're talking about how we are constantly engaging with people and how we're constantly engaging with  in zone five perspectives when we're talking on the internet with each other if someone is  completely anonymous then you're really only limited to a zone five point of view but bruce  when you and i talk on online on facebook or whatever we have a whole history of relating  behind us right so we're not only seeing each other in third person we're also seeing each  other in second person and therefore we can have a more authentic reconstruction of each other  as we go that doesn't only exist within sort of  that confinement of zone five we can have a more authentic enactment i get a better sense of who  you are as a person because we have a shared history together right and that should be the  goal of anyone so if you're watching this next time you accuse someone of being so green because  you disagree with the signifiers you see in a chat window on your screen maybe just take an  opportunity to try to deepen that relationship a little bit and understand that there's a lot  of iceberg underneath the surface that you have to deal with and that's the goal of anyone so if you're  you have no awareness of whatsoever and i think that this helps us be a little bit more kind  right and maybe a little bit more patient with each other as we interact with each other on  places like facebook yeah thankfully my picture of you is not built only by the authors of integral  2.0 thank god for that that's an inside joke  so some of our audience are  feeling uh feeling their zone fourness right now um but that's okay we'll just leave it there um so  so let's move this into uh the lower right quadrant and this is i think another  fascinating territory that has um some really important political um implications i think that  we can unpack in a second and in a way this can be a little bit again these right hand quadrants  these right hand zones can be a little bit tricky at first but i think if we sit with them long  it kind of sinks in and and it clicks right and once it clicks you start seeing it everywhere so  the main distinctions between in the lower right quadrant is between zone seven the inner of the  lower right and zone eight which is the outer of the lower right so zone seven if you're looking  at a piece of art and you want to take a zone seven perspective some of the things you might  consider would be uh what social and systemic factors shape the artwork's creation and meaning  as well as my own experience of the artwork so a question here is what are the conscious or  unconscious social conditions and circumstances surrounding the artist that are embedded in this  artwork how does that inform the artwork itself how does it change the meaning of the artwork  itself how do my own social circumstances influence my experience and my enactment  of this artwork so i just want to say this is sort of the zone  you see a lot of um the wokeism movement for example or the critical race theory movement  they are very very keen on sort of these zone seven inertias right and how um our perspectives  can be unconsciously conditioned by the surrounding systems and circumstances that  we find ourselves in and how that conditioning can itself shape or change the way that we  interact with each other and change or transform the meaning of a particular work of art with or  without the artist intending that to be so right so this is sort of a place where a healthy marxist  point of view can start to come in like let's track what these sort of conditions are and then  try to estimate how this shows up within an an average consciousness that's actually engaging  this system right so what are the embedded unconscious elements like this is where we can talk  about, you know, this artwork was, you know, made from privilege or was, you know what I mean?  There's any number of these terms that we can start to use that actually become a little bit  more useful if we locate them in this zone and much less useful when they sort of color outside  of the lines and get misapplied to other zones. Just to finish the cycle before we unpack it a  little bit, zone eight. So that was zone seven. Zone eight is pointing to these social conditions  themselves sort of objectively. So when we're looking at art, we might appreciate the overall  technical, economic, and logistical systems and collaborations that made the artwork possible,  including the overall quality of production, distribution, and or commercial value of the  artwork. How well did this artwork sell? That is actually going to factor into your appreciation  of what you're doing. So that's a good point.  How mainstream was this or how underground was this or, you know, so forth. A question that you  might ask is what kinds of tools, instruments, or technologies made this artwork possible?  How successful was the artwork? What kind of behind the scenes collaborations made it possible?  How does the overall production quality enhance or detract from the transmission of meaning?  And for me, I engage this practice all the time. When I watch something that I really like,  I go to IMDB, right? And I start like looking at,  like every actor that was in it. I want to know where they were in their careers when they created  this thing. I want to know what was going on with the director. I want to know, you know,  what's going on in the writer's life. There's just something I want to understand sort of the  lower rightness of how this production, this collaboration came together in the first place.  And that actually sort of factors into my appreciation of a work of art.  Yeah. One of the obvious things, I mean, I've got several notes here, but one of the things I want to  of the obvious uh ones to look at in art is uh sales just simple we all everybody's experienced  this like is an artist quote selling out which means that like creating art uh mainly for a  benefit of a social economic system or under pressure you know the record label for example  says you need to make a song that sells it needs to go like this sound like this now go perform it  you know it's like okay they do that um or you know you find i i saw the other day i don't know  some random video about radiohead uh their um okay computer album like the the record label  was just like no effing way this thing is crazy garbage and they're like tough we're gonna do it  anyway so they they kind of pushed against that economic that social economic system  and ends up being one of the most popular albums of all time but you can see that a lot you know  and especially music i think because music we often say this should be pure give me your music  right and if it doesn't feel pure we note that or maybe we don't because we're just like i don't  care  give me the candy you know film is a little bit harder sometimes right because there's so much  you can't hardly make a film without all the economics being involved and so sometimes it's  hard to know is like is somebody creating a film authentically or not tv we see this quite a lot  you know like does a series continue or not simply based on economics that's it it could be an how  many amazing shows in recent years have been canceled for no good reason not because of the  art because art is great but because of some hidden algorithm that we don't even have access  to now because only in netflix  or the app and so this impacts greatly our experience of it some other simple things like  can we do we watch an episode one at a time or do we get a binge it right that's a different totally  different experience and that's that's a system the technological systems the control of the  delivery systems um does it have ads or not that's changed big time like i don't watch anything with  ads anymore you know um but that used to be part of our viewing experience and that was very much  part of a social economic system  um but you know on the deeper things like some of the you know if we look at cultural systemic  oppression and racism we look at like who has access to resources and you can trace this back  to like who has access to education like who can get into the best music schools who can get into  film schools such that you get the experience to develop um uh your artistic abilities and then  have contacts so you can then get your script in front of somebody it's already really incredibly  hard to get a film made you know um and uh that impacts what films get made and who gets spotty  in a in a in a movie these are all social economic factors that aren't just it's not just somebody's  merit like this is really clear in a heavily capitalist system that yeah not everybody's  getting to make the art and one last thing i'll throw out there is something really interesting  that i think ties into this is like country music is really really interesting um it's one of the  ones you can analyze that show quite distinctly four quadrants in there and uh i don't really  listen to country music but i do like sturgill simpson it was the first country music that i  artist that i heard that i was like i want to get this album he's really progressive also seems to  be kind of deep spiritually won a grammy for best country album uh but this uh country music cmas  they they won't even let him in the door oh wow now maybe that's a bit yeah so it might be a bit  more on the there's things happening it's heavily on that lower left side of like that doesn't  but that's think about that but then there's a systems of controlling who he has access to  right so he can't get access on television to be performing  in front of all this massive audience because they don't like his lower left stuff or some  of the whatever bizarre state experiences things that he communicates but it's really fascinating  to see how this play out but those are the kind of things that of course too corey i love  behind the scenes and like how does a film get made especially because it's so crazy that we  can even make a film and how many systems it takes to all work so that way we can just sit  back and watch a film and then criticize it that's right that's right and and i think oftentimes the  modern move is to recognize that the sort of the the medium is just as much a part of the arts  transmission as anything else it's not just a canvas it's not just but like no this is actually  so i think for example you know the beatles one of the things that the beatles did  was they weren't just playing their instruments you know according to their skills in the upper  right quadrant yeah they took the entire studio and turned it into an instrument  they took they made an instrument out of their shared environment and that was a post-modern  move that was actually them saying this isn't you know the studio isn't just the background where  it's it's capturing our performance it's actually part of the performance right and they innovated  this new way of making albums that was totally so that that abandoned this idea that the studio was  only there to get the highest fidelity live live-ish recording you can it was actually like no  there's a lot of possibilities in the studio that we can't find outside the studio let's play with  those possibilities and bring this into our art sort of explicitly right which in turn created the  platform for things like electronic music for example or like this you know the medium is the  message which is a very very common post-modern refrain and in fact bruce i would love your opinion  on this because my sense is that of all these zones  silver out there we're only actually on six so that has to work on that at least  if you can get it that had to be a bit more sophisticated to have thoseIGHT  but let's not vantage out as much of a  think about zoned-7 in zone 4 and least of all the current zoned-7  in zone 4 really begin to come online particularly the zone seven at later  altitudes it's hard to discern zone 7 it's hard to discern how systems are actually  limiting or affecting choices being made on by the individual participants of the system  it's hard to notice that until you get to the green altitude or at least at  at the green altitude is when you really start caring a whole lot about it,  which again, I think is my good faith enactment of wokeism.  A lot of sort of the conditions that wokeism is responding to with a great  amount of urgency can be found in zone seven and can be found in zone four.  And oftentimes zone seven and zone four have a way of sort of reinforcing each  other, which in turn reinforces our zone two shadows and structures of  consciousness because these all bleed with each other.  And, but is that your sense that a zone seven perspective is,  it comes a little bit later in the game?  Yes. Yeah. I think even zone eight and seven,  there are simpler ways that we can engage with systems and take systemic  perspectives and be aware of interdependence and things like that.  But often it's actually not until we have access to computer technology that  allows us,  that allows us to detect patterns over time and interrelate factors together  with, you know, once you get past two or three feedback loops,  the human brain is overwhelmed in terms of being able to make any adequate  kinds of predictions.  And we only really can begin to build a systems picture using software that  can help, you know, run different equations,  and scenarios,  and then give it to us in a presentable form that we can digest.  We can kind of deceive ourselves that we're actually seeing systemically when  actually we're,  we're really seeing at often at best some down translated simpler pictures  based on,  on, you know,  more complex analyses.  So that's just one technological side to that.  And, you know,  I think in something like social autopoiesis where it's looking at communication flows within a system,  you know,  you can track that,  but it's without,  you know,  software and without a lot of research,  it's really hard to do that.  You know,  I think memetics,  you know,  the art of the growing art of memetics is trying to do that now.  Looking at how memes operate within systems.  And there's a,  you know,  a zone both left-hand and right-hand lower quadrants are involved in that.  So,  yeah,  but definitely I think it comes on later and it's hard to do well.  And,  you know,  I think that's a real learning curve for all of us is to be able to practice the art of systems thinking and really develop in that.  Learning to see and appreciate,  to see and appreciate feedback loops and how they work and how they interact and to recognize the limitations on our ability to actually do that well.  Right.  I wanted to throw in a couple little extraneous kinds of things just very quickly about what I could possibly be associated with the lower right and art.  I'm thinking about some analyses again that were done with mathematics and computers,  but beginning to perceive similarities mathematically in the patterning for instance of a culture's music and a culture's architecture.  That there's a deep systemic ratio going on in terms of how people are interrelating different elements to create an aesthetic, to create a mood, to promote states.  That are also, you know,  you know,  often happening unconsciously,  but are nevertheless detectable systemically in terms of,  you know,  what kind of,  you know,  intervals and scenarios and notes are used in a composition and what are,  you know,  the proportions used in architecture or in,  you know,  fashion and other or ritual enactments.  Those things are present systemically,  but they're not easy to pick up on.  But once you do,  they're really fascinating to investigate,  you know,  in terms of what's going on,  you know,  with the overall cultural zeitgeist and the kinds of art that they're producing.  And although this is a bit on the mythic side,  I was thinking about what some old Chinese emperors used to do,  which is that they would listen for certain kinds of,  they would have people go out,  they would have people go out to different parts of the kingdom and listen for what kinds of scales are being used.  And there was a sense that certain scales are harmony producing and certain scales are disharmonic.  And they wanted to try to catch where disharmony was growing in a cultural system and in their social system and stop it because they felt systemically,  that would have broad,  broad impact on the health of that community and the relationship of that community to the rest of the,  the empire,  the kingdom.  Very interesting.  And that actually,  so there's one,  because there's a,  there's a version of that in the West too,  around the evolution of temperance,  right?  How do we tune a piano?  Right?  Because pianos can't be tuned sort of linearly.  There's a curvature to sound that can be really,  really,  very difficult to tune a piano where every note is,  is sort of harmonizing in key with all the other notes because of that curvature.  So,  you know,  we've had imperfect temperaments throughout our history.  So this is all zone eight stuff.  This is like how music theory is sort of,  you know,  organized so that we can use it to create a art.  However,  the options,  the opportunities that you have to create art are either going to be limited or opened up by sort of,  you know,  the lower right rule set that you're coming from.  So for a long time with previous versions of temperance,  there were some notes that actually became literally illegal to play.  Laws were written to prevent musicians from playing certain notes because these notes were too discordant and disharmonious and associated with evil.  It was the devil's notes,  right?  And then,  you know,  you have these little other versions of temperance where you actually sort of mitigate that problem.  There aren't these dead zones on the keyboard anymore,  like they're,  like they're used to be.  But it's fascinating because we start here with sort of a,  a,  a set of rules in the lower right quadrant in the,  in zone eight,  which is then going to,  we can take the perspective of how those rules are going to limit creativity by taking a zone seven look,  or by looking at actual artifacts that were created under those rules,  and do a direct comparison.  But every step of the way,  we're seeing how these perspectives,  once you change one factor here in this zone,  all of a sudden you're changing culture a little bit,  both on the inside and the outside,  you're changing consciousness a little bit,  both on the inside and the outside.  And this is one of the reasons why I continue to think that an integral response to the social justice movement needs to include these kinds of perspectives.  These are the valuable perspectives that are,  are being surfaced by things like critical race theory that we want to,  you know,  avoid throwing out with the rest of the bathwater.  And there's a lot of bathwater there too.  But if integral doesn't actually consciously take on these perspectives and either translude them or come up with a more fulfilling set of zone seven and zone four factors themselves that have more explanatory power,  then,  you know,  we're,  we're in like a healthy relationship with some of these cultural emergence that we're seeing.  And in fact,  I think that by recognizing these zones and how some of these theories really do excel in some of these zones,  but completely fall on their face when they misapply them to other zones.  Again,  like you can't take a Marxist look at sort of how consciousness can be shaped by our systems and then start calling people a racist because of it.  That's a zone category error,  right there.  Just because an average person is growing up in these systems doesn't mean that their zone two structures are determined to be bigoted or racist or homo,  you know,  homophobic or what have you.  It just means that like,  oh,  this,  this can happen to an average person.  It doesn't mean it did happen to an average person.  So this is where we have to be careful.  And this is what I get really excited about.  Cause I'm like,  this is,  this is how integral can begin to directly contribute to these conversations,  clean them up by putting things together.  And I'm like,  I don't know what I'm doing here.  It's not even my job.  I'm like,  and I don't know what I'm doing here.  And so we're slowly starting to see this as a way to come up by putting things in their proper place.  Right.  Everything in its right place.  And once we have a sense of like,  okay,  you're allowed to color here,  but the minute you call her outside the lines and go into another zone,  you're,  you're doing bad,  non-exclusion.  We can call you on that and you can rain it back in that way.  There we can actually take your work and it can be useful.  And sort of a larger enfold.  Men of all these different.  Perspectival zones.  That seems really urgent right now.  Yeah.  And Corey,  urgent right now yeah and cory uh i've still been really liking how you referred to green as  pre-integral uh in a lot of ways and just kind of still turned around in my head over and over and  um one of the things is that like it's so interesting that that green as pre-integral  has like so many things going for it all at once and yet like can't get it all together in order to  be effective that's the thing like to be really effective and it's just because all the pieces  haven't been put together enough you know certain things aren't owned the authority especially is  not really owned even though it's acted out and so integral can do that now on the integral side  since we're speaking to presumably people who are at this kind of maturity level um the thing is is  that like we really have to inhabit like this is we've said this since day one like if you're not  actually inhabiting everything you're talking about then  like one you very we not we might not be integral that that's one i know scary thought that like oh  actually just because we're reading ken wilber's books doesn't mean that that's where we're living  from but maybe we are but like it's just not fully enough and that means that we can't we can't be  effective as integral people so like and that's why i think art is actually really really incredibly  useful to viscerally evoke that like where am i inhabiting and where am i not inhabiting so using  the for example the model we created  today or that really you and bruce mapped this out i'm just here along for the ride uh that like if  we can use this map you know and um as a way to inhabit then then maybe we can get somewhere but  if not man it's just a tired old story and we we need we need change we need effectiveness in the  world so i i like this combination art feels fun and enjoyable and integral theory feels incredibly  useful it gives us perspectives but combined the two  yeah maybe we get somewhere yeah that's why these episodes have been popular like when we covered  the movies and things like that yeah that's right no that's right because there is um you know again  our art oftentimes speaks for us it speaks through us and uh you know we have the the luxury and  really a privilege of being able to grow up alongside our art i mean there's a sense in  which it feels like our art is maturing alongside us um it's really our enactment of art that's  maturing with every step  but that is such a rewarding feeling right where like you can be completely just swept away by a  piece of art when you're say 18 years old right and then 20 years later you are still swept away  by that same piece of art like you get that same zone one phenomenology of just like i lost myself  to this and yet that gets reinforced by all these other little details and perspectives that have  come online and that have come online and that have come online and that have come online and  that have come online ever since the first time you saw that artwork so that artwork it feels like  it grew with you you can see more of it right even if the effect it has on you is more or less the  same there's more of it to have that effect and that is i mean there's something just absolutely  gorgeous about this something very very special about that right and i think that that's what um  you know i think that we tend to be more attracted to forms of art where we can have  that kind of relationship where we have a sense that like there's a little bit of this that's over  my head right now and i can't wait to catch up to it right i can't wait to revisit this 10 years from  now um i think those are the pieces of art that really get you know sort of tattooed uh onto our  hearts in a certain kind of way  just commenting about the difficulty of apprehending systems taking the systems view  mm-hmm there's a exception  to that and that is really that stories are like the inside of systems oh interesting and it's  through story that we can begin to feel the contours and the dynamics and the interactions  of systems and so that to me brings art very centrally into the picture in terms of really  understanding and working with and affecting change in our systems is telling the right  stories the right stories with the right stories with the right stories with the right stories with  both the right depths and the right um edges to them that that raise that puzzlement and and that  can inspire that growth absolutely  no it's beautiful well guys it's been over an hour and a half here um do we have any any anything  else we want to throw on the table before we start to i'm thinking one of the things i'll do is i'll  just read real briefly the questions from each zone just as you know kind of put a capstone on  it and um and then i'll just read them and then i'll just read them and then i'll just read them  um because there's a lot of complexity here and i'm hoping that there's a a simplicity on the  other side of that complexity that can help people again just be a little bit more fluent  with these perspectives and a little bit more confident of their capacity to enact them uh at  any given any given moment but before we do that is there anything else that we want to throw on  the table if there's a moment i have a four question pop quiz there are four major theories  of art imitations of art imitations of art imitations of art imitations of art  basically how well does this represent that it's looking you know how how accurate of a  representation of the object is this what zone is that  that's i mean that feels largely like a zone six point of view i mean if we're doing an  object to object comparison yeah yeah for me too it feels like zone six how about yeah  formalism which basically just looks at all of the elements of the artwork and how  well they're executed and how well they're interrelated  uh largely zone six but also maybe a bit of zone eight right right then emotionalism  basically what are the feelings that it evokes that's an artist successful for how well it evokes  feelings that's going to be a zone one right there yeah right  and let's see oh yeah instrumentalism which basically means uh that the art how successful  is the art at communicating a message oh there we go zone three baby yeah with all the zone four  constraints about what kinds of messages can and won't be delivered at a given time and you could  even get some zone seven in there too yeah in terms of affecting systemic change through right  right cool that's great  yeah no that was that was that was a nice little breakdown and again i think what it what it what  it shows us is um how valuable truly subversive art is which isn't to say that resonant art you  know sort of verifying art isn't you know ryan when you were gone i was telling bruce about one  of the reasons why i love blackalicious so much is because they they resonated with me they they  weren't they weren't they weren't subverting anything within me they sort of um helped me  feel like oh other people have these experiences too but the art that i've been doing i've been  doing for years is going to be something that we tend to really hone in on right the art that we  20 years later look back on and be like wow that was important art right is going to be like that  subverse like this art was created in you know among a certain set of circumstances and all that  but it itself changed the circumstances it changed what we feel like we're allowed to talk about it  changed what we're allowed to find beautiful right which is constantly in flux in our culture  yeah change something and we're going to be able to talk about it in a way that's going to be able to  and it's it brings me back to you know ken's sort of uh view of of just the microgeny of evolution  itself how every single moment there is a karma and a creativity right and there's a choice every  hole on has at every moment a choice between inheriting the karmas from the previous moment  or you have that spark of creativity where you get a chance an opportunity to create something new  and if that thing that new thing gets selected  for that becomes the karma of the next moment and this is how things evolve this is how cultures  evolve this is how individuals evolve um through these little just opportunities to punctuate  our existence with genuine moments of free will and choice i don't think most of us engage in  free will very often you know at all i think that 99 of the time we are just following the  inertias of our physics our chemistry our biology our  psychosocial conditioning but then you get these opportunities to make a different kind of choice  and for me these perspectives i think becoming more familiar with these perspectives  expands the range of choices that are available to us at any given moment to both inhabit our  reality and also to enact it in new and novel ways that can hopefully create more meaning for  ourselves and for the people around us  and cory one thing you mentioned there and i'll just put this as a little footnote for people to  pull on the thread later but um maybe think about we've mentioned this a couple of times but the  generational theory um like these big arcing phases that humanity can go through and seem to  line up you know it's just one offering but like i would imagine that what if this is kind of thing  is true like what phase humanity is in will change what kind of art we're seeking for various reasons  so like if we're you know if we're you know if we're you know if we're you know if we're you know  like like people would say we're in most likely the crisis mode right now the the so there's  unraveling in the crisis and then you get to um you know start again and you know you can go back  in time like golden periods things like that but these days i'm more interested in something that  grounds me i'm not interested in in like art like ted lasso we talked about ted lasso that's the  kind of thing i'm just like give me something that just you know every day i'm dealing with  the news and everything i just want something simple right now but i'm not interested in like  but in a different period you start getting an itch like let's stir some shit up you know we've  been complacent for a while you know what i mean so like i think it's really interesting how we  relate to that in a bigger meta cycle of art which is a whole nother probably episode but like i just  no i think you said made no i i love it and in fact i want to do a future episode right  inhabit your generation let's bring some gen xers on yeah oh that'd be fun no bruce what is your  sense generational theory is this largely a it feels to me largely zone seven and zone four  we're what we're doing is we're reconstructing average uh average agents an average sort of  sense of what an agent engaging these changing systems these historically changing systems  would look like and then we're noting how that changes sort of the different permissions and  taboos that exist within their cultures does that does that feel right to you that does yeah  awesome i like it when things feel right to you because it makes me feel spark  um i think i probably have to go check on my tree guys again y'all so i um but uh i know we're  wrapping up so i may say goodbye at this moment cool awesome yeah uh ryan what i'll do is i'm just  going to read through these zones again um just to again remind our audience of of everything we  just went through um bruce i also want to just take a quick opportunity to thank you bruce is  raising his hand right now yes bruce no i want to thank you for  you know taking this time to spend yeah about this it's been endlessly fascinating and i want  you to take a moment just to talk about um the integral stage yeah really great uh having you  here bruce i really enjoyed it looking forward to next time i gotta take off y'all good to see you  thanks thank you take care bye thank you ryan yeah nice to talk with you and to be with you  cory and yeah um thank you it's been great to hang out with you this is our first time to do  something like this i really enjoyed it definitely not our last yeah great great  yeah been for two years now pushing away at uh developing the integral stage and initially the  idea for that was to have a place where uh we could take some of the forum disputes and have  a face-to-face encounter and talk about some difficult topics where uh maybe things could  be worked out and maybe contact could be made in ways that were not possible in just the forum  space where there's  signals being exchanged and we don't feel we're as much face-to-face with another individual  but in getting the integral stage rolling um we decided you know actually it was me in the  beginning um decided it was i didn't want to jump right out of the gate into something  that difficult so i started just producing other content on you know themes and um engaging with  people who are recognized as you know in  our community as having something to say but don't often get put into the media very much  and and how can we bring those voices forward and explore intersections of what's going on  in the integral community with uh metamodern and game b and synthiest and other sister and  brother communities that are out there that seem to be intuiting a number of the same things that  may be taking a little bit different track and having different emphases but what could happen if  we begin to synthesize these voices more and bring them into greater dialogue with each other how can  we contribute to our emerging integral moment through that and so that's pretty much what the  integral stage project has become still mostly centering integral voices but also regularly  entering into dialogue with metamodernists or game beer  other kinds of folks around um i think the the major themes that are up for the broader meta  community um and layman pascal is a good dear friend and he noticed i was not that fluid  in terms of interviewing and he was more loquacious than i am and he said i can probably do some of  these interviews and he's done a wonderful job with it and he's done a lot of the interview  content for us um i still  you know do videos and i do some interviews and and talks but um a lot of my time now is  behind the scenes producing the videos i'm yep gradually developing some skills over a couple  years from really terrible to now mediocre and i'll i'll keep going i'm loving your graphics  these days man i told you that a couple days ago i'm loving it great now and the conversations that  that you have on the integral stage are just there's they're so rich and they're so um sort  of unabashedly  uh in depth you know you're you're not you're not you're not necessarily trying to break this  down for integral newcomers i mean these are conversations for and among people who have  given this some serious thoughts some serious consideration and i think you're doing such a  good job of illuminating this sort of i'll just call it an integrally adjacent territory that we  all share together um i get the same sense that we're all sort of headed in the same direction  we're just kind of taking slightly different directions and we're all sort of heading in the  different paths to get there and those paths have different emphases from from other paths  and in fact i would suggest folks listen to a conversation we just published with yourself  uh rob smith and uh paul marshall um on integral life where you're actually talking about sort of  the big three um you know integrally adjacent uh projects that we're you know trying to  coordinate a little bit um that was that was a really great discussion that got a great  response from our audience so i encourage people to check that out great thank you that was a delight  to do and paul marshall's doing really great work in that area exploring those intersections i've  done a little bit but he's done a lot more in writing his book and and some further things  after that fantastic well bruce thanks again man i'm just gonna uh make a quick transition here  i'm just gonna read some of these questions again for folks and then um we'll say goodbye  does that sound good great cool man all right so just for review here are the eight  perspectives that you can use in fact that you probably are already using without knowing it  in order to more fully enact your art and really your world your life your relationships etc so  here they are in the upper left quadrant zone one the inner of the upper left what is my immediate  in the moment experience of this artwork what emotional or spiritual states is it evoking for me  zone two the outer of the upper left what  stages intelligences typologies shadows and other unconscious material is this artwork lighting up  within me in the lower left the inner of the lower left zone three how are other people  experiencing and interpreting this artwork how do their experiences and interpretations  influence my own how would i respond to this artwork if the artist was standing in front of me  right now zone four which is the outer of the lower left what are the cultural currents  or patterns that this artwork is trying to hold a mirror to how resonant or subversive is this  artwork is it playing it safe or is it pushing the edge how would this artwork be enacted across  multiple different cultures and contexts now we go to the upper right quadrant zone five the inner  of the upper right uh what does this artwork say about the artist's interiors what meaning can i  infer or reconstruct from the inner of the upper right what does this artwork say about the artist's  and the text form content etc of this artwork zone six which is looking at the upper right quadrant  from the outside the outer of the upper right what are the most important features elements  or qualities contained within this artwork how skilled is the artist both technically and in  creating the desired effect within this artwork now we go to the lower right quadrant the inner  of the lower right quadrant zone seven what are the conscious and or unconscious  social conditions and circumstances surrounding the artist that are embedded in this artwork?  And how does that inform the artwork itself? How do my own social circumstances influence my  experience and enactment of the artwork? So you're sort of asking both in terms of the artist and in  terms of yourself. And then finally, zone eight, which is the outer of the lower right, what kinds  of tools, instruments, technologies, et cetera, made this artwork possible? How successful was this  artwork? What kind of behind the scenes collaborations made it possible? How does the overall production  quality enhance or detract from the transmission of meaning? So those are the eight zones. They've  been tremendously helpful for me over the last few weeks as I've been sort of just opening up some of  this material and trying to name some of the simplest versions of these perspectives. I hope  it's valuable.  to you guys at home as well. Yeah, let us know in the comments right down there, wherever you happen to be  watching this video on YouTube or Integral Life or what have you. How helpful has this conversation  been? What questions do you have that you want us to cover in a future episode? Thanks again for  watching. Bruce, thanks again for joining us, brother. And we'll catch you guys next time.  Thank you.