Hi, Ken.  It's good to hear your voice.  Yeah, me too.  Thanks for responding to the interview.  Well, yes, certainly.  And any time you all want to stop by, that'd be wonderful too,  but we can certainly start with the interview.  Okay, perfect.  So, Ken, I'll first do some questions on your life in general  and then something about what is happening today in the world  and then of the structure you have built of knowledge and thinking.  Sure.  Okay.  So, first of all, something really simple and very general maybe.  How would you define what you do?  The integral approach that I've developed is an attempt to be as comprehensive  and as inclusive as possible  and to be as inclusive as possible  and to be as inclusive as possible.  An approach to reality.  And that means a comprehensive and inclusive approach  to every known human discipline.  So that would include integral medicine, integral politics, integral education,  integral spirituality, integral law, and so forth.  And it is based on multiple perspectives.  And multiple dimensions of all human beings.  It's cross-cultural and applicable to virtually any situation that arises.  And it is fundamentally an attempt to get out of the partial, fragmented,  and broken approaches to reality that are so common right now  and replace them with the ones that are so common right now.  Or supplement them with this more inclusive  and larger, if you will, approach to problems.  Okay.  How did you choose this path, Ken, when you were...  I don't know if you can tell us, when you were a kid,  if you had some special experiences that took you to do this life.  Sure.  I went to college at Duke University.  In the medical program.  And most of my education up to that point had been in science.  And so it was an objective study of reality,  looking for facts and data and objective truth.  And the medical program was more of the same.  It was dealing with human beings, but only human beings as objects.  As organisms that...  Can be treated in just objective, monological, flatland approaches, basically.  And it didn't address fundamental questions that were typical for a young person.  Somebody in their late teens and early twenties.  Which is the standard questions.  What's the meaning of life?  Why am I here?  What is worth valuing?  What is the good life?  What's the good, the true, the beautiful?  And none of those were being addressed by any of the college courses I was taking.  And at that time, I'm a typical boomer.  This was in the late sixties and early seventies.  And there was a beginning influx of Eastern traditions into the United States.  And as I began reading those, including Taoism,  and Vedanta, and Zen Buddhism.  As I began reading those, they had a profound impact on my life and on how I looked at things.  And it became clear to me that the scientific approach wasn't wrong.  It was just partial.  It just dealt with a part of human beings potential.  And I was interested in the other parts, the interior parts, the subjective parts,  the parts that included consciousness, and awareness, and spirituality.  But I wouldn't deny the trues of science.  So for me, it wasn't either or, either exterior science or interior consciousness.  It was both.  It was how can we have both spirituality and materialism and have both of them fit,  have both of them work.  And I had come up with a framework  that included all of these various approaches and made sense of them,  made a place for them in this comprehensive framework.  And so I was 23 at the time,  and I had switched from medical program to biochemistry so I could do research.  I wanted to do something creative or novel.  And so I had switched to biochemistry  for my graduate degree program and had taken my master's  and had all the courses for my doctorate, except the research.  And I was looking at the main forms of psychotherapy and spirituality,  the main forms of human change, the main forms of taking people,  people that are unhappy or have angst or  anxiety or interior problems and making them happy,  making them awake, making them healed, making them cured,  making them enlightened, making them liberated.  And if you look the world over, there were six or seven major schools  of psychotherapy and spiritual practice from Zen Buddhism to Gestalt to Jungian  to existential.  And at 23,  I finally came up with a way, a framework that all of those could fit.  And I wrote my first book called The Spectrum of Consciousness.  And as the title suggests, the idea is that human beings are not just  one level of consciousness to which there are these six or seven  different approaches all fighting to be right and all of them claiming to be right,  which they all can't be.  It's not six or seven approaches  to the same level of consciousness.  It's six or seven levels of consciousness  to which each of these approaches are telling the truth.  So the spectrum means that human beings do indeed have a spectrum of consciousness,  of levels, of structures, and the different psychotherapeutic  and spiritual approaches had each adapted to a different level.  So looking at it that way, they could all be right when working on their own level  of consciousness, their own developmental level, their own ontological level,  however one wants to conceive it.  But coming up with this framework, this spectrum model allowed all  of the major approaches to be essentially correct.  So they were true but partial.  And the personal experiences that pushed me in that direction were  indeed the influx of these Eastern traditions that particularly worked  with transpersonal or mystical or spiritual states of consciousness,  and particularly Zen Buddhism, which is a very powerful form  of enlightenment or awakening, a very powerful practice for that.  And then the question was, how does that fit with something like psychoanalysis?  And the answer is they're each dealing with a different level  of consciousness, and human beings have access to all of these levels.  And therefore, all these different approaches have some sort of value.  So the personal experience for me was the influx of Eastern traditions,  many of which I began to practice, and it became really clear that in general,  the scientific approach to reality was dealing with exterior, objective,  monological dimensions,  of what I would later come to call the outer quadrants, the exterior objects.  And spirituality and psychotherapy were dealing with interior dimensions  and what I would come to call the interior quadrants.  And so coming up with that integral  framework allowed a place for everything, allowed basically all of these approaches  to be right, but partial. And that was a very, very  sort of satisfying discovery for me because I knew that all these different  approaches were telling the truth. They all made absolute sense to me.  There was some clear reality that all of these approaches had.  And then the question was not which one is right so that all the others are wrong.  The question was, how can they all be right?  And that was the major question that pushed me from, you know,  the early 20s when I wrote my first book to today, some 25 books later.  And all of them have that same essential purpose,  which is taking many different disciplines  and showing how they all fit together in a larger scheme.  Do you think that this approach you have made that includes the integration  of science disciplines and spiritual disciplines is spreading out  or is it just part of a select cultural group?  Well, particularly in the last five to 10 years, it's had quite an impact  on a great number of different cultures in this country,  everywhere from the entertainment business to business itself, to politics, education,  big impact on psychotherapy.  An entire issue of a well-known psychotherapeutic journal was devoted  to the integral approach to psychotherapy.  Future Studies, an entire issue of a Future Studies magazine was devoted  to the integral approach. Sustainability, an entire issue of a major journal devoted  to aqual approaches to ecology and sustainability.  And it's had a wide spreading internationally as well.  I mean, my books have been translated into upwards of 30 languages,  which is quite impressive considering that they're basically academic.  And so the interest in them seems to be continuing to grow.  And I believe that the main reason for that is that the actual number of people  that are growing, having their own awareness,  growing awareness, grow and develop into integral levels is increasing.  And what I mean by that is if you look at the developmental component of human  beings, which is one aspect of the integral approach and we take, let's say,  Gene Gebser's stages of growth and development, which goes from  archaic to magic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral,  to higher, and those names mean pretty much what they sound like.  All human beings develop through those stages or waves of unfolding, waves of consciousness.  And the number of people at the integral stages or waves has gone from about 2%  to about 5% in the last decade, and we expect it to go to around 10% within a decade or two.  And that's  very significant because the integral stages are the leading edge of evolution in humans.  The stage right before that, the pluralistic stage has about 20% of the population  in Western states, in Western nations, about 20% that's pluralistic.  One question. How do you calculate this, more or less?  There are  different models of development, and these models have tests  that the founders of the models invented to find out what stage people are at.  And then these stage models are when they're first conceived.  They're tried in a small number  of people to see if everybody goes through the stages.  And then it's tried in larger numbers, larger groups of people to see.  And then their changes are made if  some of these stages aren't applicable.  And so it's tried and readjusted, and then tests are created to tell what stage  people are at based on these different models.  And then they're tried in other cultures.  So basically, the integral approach uses  models that have been tried in numerous different cultures and still are found to be true.  And so the Jane Lovinger sentence completion test  for example, was created by Jane Lovinger, who is a person that founded one of the  most accurate maps of consciousness development for the self or the ego structure.  And she has about eight major stages of development.  And they're all very similar to Gene  Gebser's archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, integral, and higher.  And so,  according to the Jane Lovinger sentence completion test, which has been given in  many different areas in several different cultures,  we find that about 2% of the population is at integral stages based on that test.  And then also using spiral dynamics  founded by Claire Graves and then Don Beck and Christopher Cowan,  also about 2% of the population a decade ago was at  integral stages.  And now, according to both of them, it's more like 4% or 5%.  So that and several other tests are used to estimate.  This is a rough estimate of the number of people at these stages.  But because there is a growing number of people at integral stages,  and the integral stages are defined as stages that self-consciously  intuit the previous stages of development and attempt to integrate them.  What happens with most stages of development up to integral  is that each stage thinks that it is the only correct way to look at reality.  So the mythic or conformist or fundamentalist stage thinks that its  approach to reality, usually religious fundamentalism,  that its approach to reality is the only correct way.  And then the next stage, which is rational or modern,  egoic rational, scientific materialism, thinks that its approach is the only  correct approach to reality, and then stage after that,  the postmodern, the pluralistic stage, thinks that its approach is the only correct way.  But when people get to integral stages,  they believe that all of those previous approaches have some fundamental truth.  They're fundamental.  They're fundamentally important.  So the people at the integral stage, whether they studied psychology or not,  start to simply have a very inclusive approach to reality and want to make room  for both traditional values and modern values and postmodern values.  So whatever language they use,  they intuitively understand that premodern and modern and postmodern all have a place.  So they develop a both-and type of thinking.  And I believe that because my books have essentially come from these integral  levels, going all the way back to the first book, that when people themselves  develop into these integral stages and they find my books,  my books simply reflect the territory that they're already at.  And I believe  the reason that there's been such a fair amount of interest in my work is just  coming from people that are at integral stages and find that my books just offer  a map of the territory that they're already at and the territory that they know.  Maybe they haven't articulated it or they can't quite find the words for it or they  don't know the evidence and data about the integral stages that they're at.  And when they read my books, there's kind of a click, kind of a  reflection. And they feel, oh, I know this.  This makes sense to me. This is where I'm at.  And then because the number of people at integral stages is now increasing  significantly, then I think so is interest in my books.  My books didn't create this territory.  People are at these integral stages by themselves.  But my books reflect this territory.  And so there's a deepening interest in my work around the world, I think, for that reason.