INTRODUCTION PART I PART II PART III Page 1 Page 2 PART IV Page 1 Page 2 PART V NOTES Notes 1-8 Notes 9-19 Notes 20-30

Overview

      Moment to moment, the universe hangs together. Somehow, the universe of this moment and the universe of the previous moment are both similar and different: similar, in that the present moment resembles the previous moment in important ways; different, in that it is also significantly new. The more you think about it, the more mysterious the whole thing is....

      The inheritance of the past is one the central topics we will be discussing, because it turns out to be a key in almost every area of human inquiry. But it also touches on what is perhaps the most crucial question in the whole area of spirituality.

      All of the ancient spiritual traditions--from shamanism to Neoplatonism to Christian mysticism to Buddhism--maintain that, in addition to this physical realm, there are higher realms or higher dimensions or higher levels of reality, and these higher levels already exist in some sense (e.g., as Platonic forms, Hegelian ideas, Aurobindian involutionary deposits, archetypes of all varieties, or as shamanic higher and lower worlds). For Aurobindo, to give one example, all of the higher levels of reality are laid down by involution and therefore pre-exist in a real sense, and thus these higher levels unfold or become manifest during evolution (so that evolution is simply unfolding what involution enfolded or deposited). But all of the modern and postmodern currents deny that there are higher realms--or, more generally, deny that there are any sort of pre-existing givens at all (including any sort of pregiven ontological structures: modernity denies higher structures, postmodernity denies structures altogether: either way, spirituality is out). Spiritual traditions insist that salvation is in some sense a re-discovery of an already existing reality. Postmodernity insists that nothing is discovered, everything is constructed. The entire 'fight' between ancient and modern hinges on that central issue: are there ontologically pre-existing levels or dimensions of reality?

     If there is ever to be a spirituality that can be respected by the modern and postmodern world, it will have to figure out a way to fit those two contradictory claims together. What is required, to put it bluntly, is a way to derive all of the basics of a spiritual worldview--from satori or salvation as a 'coming home' to the existence of levels or waves of consciousness--but without postulating ontologically pre-existing realities. If we can't do that, then spirituality is dead in the modern and postmodern world of intellectual respectability.

     We begin this attempt at a post-metaphysical reconstruction of the spiritual traditions with the prosaic point of the inheritance of the past....

Kosmic Karma in Four Dimensions

     The inheritance of the past: it seems that all holons, to some degree, are influenced by the holons that went before them. (A holon is a "whole/part," or a whole that is also a part of other wholes: a whole atom is a part of a whole molecule, which is part of a whole cell, which is part of a whole organism, etc. The Kosmos is fundamentally composed of holons, all the way up, all the way down. And all holons seem to inherit some sort of past....) The universe of this moment is somehow different from the universe of the preceding moment, but it also shares some similarities, yes?

     In other words, this present moment is both similar to the preceding moment and also somehow different. That issue--the relation of the present to the past--turns out to be crucially important, for it touches every aspect of our lives (psychological to sociological to spiritual). It appears that the past-and-present somehow constitute an inheritance-with-novelty--in other words, the present moment is a mysterious mixture of karma and creativity. That karma-and-creativity appears to be the very matrix of our moment-to-moment reality, and how we conceptualize that matrix will therefore be a crucial ingredient in our own self-understanding.

     We open with the specific topic of karma, or the inheritance of the past. In order to get started, let's simply assume that the present moment inherits something from the past, and let us attempt to outline some of the features of this inheritance in order to show what might be involved.

     This inheritance is almost certainly a four-quadrant affair--that is, all four dimensions of holons bequeath their present to the future as the past. The four quadrants are four of the basic ways that we can look at any event: from the inside or from the outside, and in singular and plural forms. This gives us the inside and the outside of the individual and the collective. These four perspectives are not merely arbitrary conventions. Rather, they are dimensions that are so fundamental that they have become embedded in language as pronouns during the natural course of evolution. These embedded perspectives show up as first, second, and third person pronouns. Thus, the inside of the individual shows up as "I"; the inside of the collective as "you/we"; the outside of the individual as "it/him/her"; and the outside of the collective as "its/them." In short: I, we, it, and its.

     (Technically, "you" is second person and "we" is first person plural, but I often include "we" as part of the "you" dimension, because in order to treat you as a "thou" and not an "it," there must be an overlapping horizon of mutual understanding or "we." So I often use "you/we" as the general second person perspective, with the four basic dimensions therefore being I, we, it, and its, or the inside and outside of the individual and the communal.)

     These four perspectives, embedded in virtually all languages, appear to represent four major dimensions of being-in-the-world. There might be others, but these four are especially fundamental. (For an extensive account of the four quadrants, see A Brief History of Everything.)

     The idea, then, is that the inheritance of the past can be looked at from all four perspectives--or in all four dimensions of being-in-the-world--with each one showing us something important in the overall equation. Different theorists have given cogent explanations for some of these dimensions and their types of karmic inheritance, but we want to include all of them in a more integral explanation. Some of these types of inheritance are shown in figure 1, "The Inheritance of the Past in All Four Quadrants."

	INTERIOR	EXTERIOR
	Prehension Subjective Identity Agentic memory	Autopoiesis Individual morphic resonance    and formative causation Genetic inheritance
	Habitus Cultural Memory Mutual prehensions Intersubjective background	Systems memory Ecosystem autopoiesis Chaotic and strange attractors Social autopoiesis Collective formative causation
Figure 1. The Inheritance of the Past in All Four Quadrants

     For example, Whitehead gave the classic explanation of how the interiors of individual holons are passed on as future inheritance: namely, prehension (or prehensive unification). Each actual occasion--or each present moment--as it comes to be, does two things at once: it prehends (or experientially feels) its immediate predecessor (i.e., the present moment touches, prehends, or feels the immediately preceding moment), so that the subject of this moment becomes the object of the subject of the next moment. This means that the present moment is, in part, determined by the nature of its predecessors: it is handed an inherited past as part of its feeling in this moment, a feeling that is therefore a prehensive unification of all ancestral feelings, and this inheritance is the basis of a type of causality exerted by the past on the present (i.e., a causal inheritance of past objects that were once present subjects, or a feeling of feelings). But two, according to Whitehead, the present moment then adds its own moment of creative novelty or emergence--it feels something entirely new--and thus it also transcends the past to some degree. Thus, each moment transcends and includes its predecessors, inheriting a history of feelings (or objects that were once subjects) but also adding a creative novelty found nowhere in the past--but a creative novelty that then itself becomes part of the inherited feelings handed to the future, which will then likewise transcend and include that inheritance.

     With a few qualifications, I strongly agree with that general Whiteheadian view of the nature of moment-to-moment existence. Whitehead actually discovered the inescapable reason that the Kosmos is holarchical in its very nature: each moment transcends and includes its predecessors, the very definition of holarchy.

     But we add a crucial item: this is a four-quadrant affair, all the way down--a view we also call quadratic. That is, each holon or actual occasion has subjective (I), intersubjective (we), objective (it), and interobjective dimensions (its)--the four quadrants. Whitehead brilliantly described moment-to-moment manifestation in the subjective and (to some degree) intersubjective dimensions. But we will be adding non-prehensive inheritance in the objective and interobjective dimensions, as well as fleshing out the intersubjective realms in a way that is clearly not found in Whitehead. David Ray Griffin, Whitehead's ablest interpreter, suggested that Whitehead's approach be called partial dialogical and the quadratic approach be called complete dialogical, which seems fair enough [See "Do Critics Misrepresent My Position? Appendix A--My Criticism of Whitehead as True but Partial: The Move from an Incomplete Dialogical View to an Integral/Quadratic Formulation," posted on this site].

     Nonetheless, the important point is that Whitehead was the first to spot the general features of the microgenetic holarchical nature of moment-to-moment existence, so we are more than glad to be Whiteheadians in this general area.

     However, for the objective and interobjective dimensions of Kosmic inheritance, we might look instead to Rupert Sheldrake's notions of morphic resonance and formative causation. Sheldrake's work, as we will see, is merely one of many types of explanatory theories in the Right-Hand quadrants, but it has received a fair amount of critical praise and highlights elegantly some of the important issues involved in the inheritance of objective and interobjective forms. But it is important to realize that the points we are making about Right-Hand inheritance can be made without reference to Sheldrake's work. Most of the types of inheritance in the Right-Hand quadrants are very simple and prosaic affairs, involving, for example, biological and sociological autopoiesis, DNA replication, systems maintenance, chaotic and strange attractors, institutionalized forms and modes of production, and so on--not very far-out stuff, actually, at least when compared with some of Sheldrake's ideas. But Sheldrake has highlighted some of the more esoteric aspects of formative causation, which makes the essential points glaringly obvious, so we will use his examples as some of the countless instances of Right-Hand inheritance.

     What we will be doing, then, is surveying the various theories of inheritance--or theories of how the past influences the present (see fig. 1). And because, in the Age of Synthesis, we do not want to leave out any valid perspective or any dimension from our integral account, we will attempt to fashion an overview that includes all of them. This will give us the beginning outline of the inheritance of the past in all four quadrants, or a quadratic account of Kosmic karma.

     A quick summary of what we will find is that each holon seems to relate to its predecessor(s) as follows:

     1. In the Upper Left, each holon is a prehensive unification of all of its predecessors--a subject of experience that, as it comes to be, prehends the previous subject as object of the new subject: that is, it feels the interiors of its predecessor: it is a feeling of a feeling, and thus it inherits--and to some degree is determined by--the feeling/awareness of its immediately preceding moment of feeling-awareness (which in turn once felt its predecessor, and so on). This is dryly described as "prehensive unification," but what that really means is that I feel the feelings of the moment before me, which had felt the feelings of the moment before it, so that what I am now experiencing is a felt condensation of the entire history of the Kosmos in its subjective dimensionality (a microgeny that recapitulates cosmogeny).

     This present prehension of past prehensions constitutes a type of inescapable causality exerted by the past on the present (this, of course, was Whitehead's answer to Hume). If you (or any holon) can feel this moment, and then feel this moment, then there is a degree of continuity (and therefore a degree of causality) of the previous moment on this moment, because the previous moment is now a part of the whole of this moment (i.e., the whole of one moment becomes a part of the whole of the next, which is why moment-to-moment existence is a holarchy of holons--and that is prehensive unification: each moment is a holon that transcends and includes its predecessors). The "include" aspect inescapably builds into the present moment a felt causal influence from the past. To put it bluntly, the fact that I can feel the previous moment means that I am to some degree influenced by the previous moment--the present is influenced by the past because it can feel it.

     This is karma, yes? Or certainly a part of it; in this case, the influence of yesterday's feelings on today's feelings. This inheritance is virtually impossible to deny coherently. (Hume thought he had demolished any such inductive sequences, but all he demolished is any attempt to prove that tomorrow's patterns will be the same as today's; he did not disprove that today's patterns are similar to yesterday's. In fact, Hume flirted with the notion that causality was actually something like a habit, but it was really Charles Peirce who first clearly pointed out that what we call laws of nature are actually habits of nature, a point we will return to shortly.)

     But I am not merely determined by my felt karma; I can also, to a degree, transcend the past via my own creativity: in this way only is some degree of freedom possible. There is not only the inheritance of the past, there is, in each moment, a spark of novelty, of newness, of something that never came before. "The creative advance into novelty," as Whitehead put it--and he saw it as an inescapable feature of the Kosmos all the way down. (Creativity for Whitehead, of course, is simply a spark of Spirit present in all actual occasions.) So we both inherit the past--or include and embrace it in our own feelings (and thus we are influenced and molded by the past to some degree)--and also go beyond the past, with this moment's intrinsic capacity for newness, for novelty, for transcendence, for a little bit of freedom.

     This subjective or prehensive inheritance-and-transcendence was one of Whitehead's great discoveries.

     Incidentally, Whitehead's analysis of the micro-structure of all subjective occasions (i.e., the subject of one moment becomes the object of the subject of the next moment, or a feeling of feelings) explains why we see the same general pattern on the macro scale: that is, psychological development is marked by one major pattern: the subject of one stage of development becomes an object of the subject of the next stage of development. Whitehead, as I said, simply gave the infrastructural analysis of why this holarchical unfolding is universally and inherently built into the Kosmos.

     2. In the Lower Left: Moving a bit beyond Whitehead, each subjectivity exists in a sea of intersubjectivity, and this sea, too, has its karmic influence. Individual holons and communal holons prehend their past. They are both influenced by the past, and then move beyond it to some degree. They transcend-and-include their past feelings and shared values with moments of creative emergence. Cultures, in short, have memories.²

     This cultural background--the Lower-Left quadrant--is inherited moment-to-moment by the subjects arising within its horizon, not as a separate entity but as the form or pattern of their communal arising. This is what we mean when we say that communal holons can prehend their past--or in very simple form, we say that there are cultural and social memories--there are patterns in culture and society that repeat themselves to some degree, the lingering influence on the present of a past that was once present and is therefore carried forward to some degree as Kosmic habit.³ In the Lower Left, we refer to cultural memories, which are reflexive and pre-reflexive meaning-backgrounds, communal feelings, and mutual prehensions (or intersubjective inheritances), and in the Lower Right, we refer to social or systems memories, which are interobjective patterns of systems maintenance and ecological reproduction. The explanation of how sociocultural patterns reproduce themselves is a primary task of all social theories, from social autopoiesis to ecological sustainability.

     But let's not overlook the fact that each holon is transcend-and-include: any holon arising in mesh with a particular culture can, to some degree, transcend that culture. With reference to the cultural background, the cumulative moments of creative novelty in subjectivity can eventually alter the very form of intersubjectivity itself (we say that the quadrants arise together and tetra-evolve, or that they "tetra-mesh," or that they "tetra-interact"). But the general point for now is that cultural holons have a past, a karmic inheritance, and this inheritance of intersubjectivity (or the inheritance of mutual prehensions by members of a culture) is an important part of Kosmic karma.

     When Bourdieu writes about a culture's habitus; when Heidegger describes a culture's interpretation of Being nestled in historicity; when Gebser outlines major frames of interpretation (magic, mythic, mental, integral) inherited in various cultures over time; when Gadamer details the inescapable significance of solidarity in establishing mutual understanding--in all of those cases, they are describing cultural inheritance--the collective feelings (or mutual prehensions) of the Lower-Left quadrant as they are carried forward as a Kosmic habit influencing all individuals meshed with those cultures. We will return to this crucial idea of cultural background--and its inheritance (and transcendence)--throughout this presentation. So important is it--especially for including the postmodern moment in our integral account--that we will devote an entire section to it Excerpt B [soon to be posted]. But first, let's finish our quick survey by looking at inheritance in the remaining quadrants:

     3 and 4. Upper-Right and Lower-Right Inheritance.

     That is a brief outline of subjective and intersubjective inheritance, the means by which the felt dimensions of the Kosmos reproduce themselves moment to moment, while still allowing creative emergence (which then itself becomes part of the inheritance future holons will transcend and include).

     But each holon also has objective and interobjective dimensions; that is, there are objective correlates of individual and cultural prehensions. One version of this inheritance of exterior realities is offered by Rupert Sheldrake. Briefly, we reframe Sheldrake's general theories as follows:

     Each holon--when looked at in an exterior, third-person perspective (and not in the first-person prehension of the UL or the second-person mutual prehensions of the LL)--appears as a morphic unit with a morphic field. The morphic unit refers to the stable pattern, structure, or form of the holon; and the morphic field refers to the various fields surrounding the unit (which will be explained as we proceed). I agree with Sheldrake on those essential items, as long as we remember that these terms refer to a holon as viewed in third-person singular--that is, the Upper-Right quadrant only. But in that dimension, it is quite true, as Sheldrake puts it, that "morphic fields are associated with holons at all levels of complexity." And holons, Sheldrake correctly points out, "are arranged in nested hierarchies or holarchies."⁴

     Sheldrake often uses the analogy of a vibrating string: if you put two pianos together and hit the C note on one piano, the same string will start vibrating in the other piano. The two strings vibrating together is called morphic resonance, the one string causing the other to vibrate is analogous to formative causation (because the form or pattern of one string is causing or evoking the same form or pattern in the other).

     A morphic unit/morphic field is thus one aspect of (or one way of looking at) a holon's Upper-Right dimension. Accordingly, while each holon is subjectively prehending its previous feelings (UL)--and thus being determined in part by its past feelings--the exterior form of the holon (UR) is resonating with its previous forms, and therefore its present form is determined to some degree by the past forms of its own manifestation: this is morphic resonance and formative causation operating in an individual.

     Thus, among other things, what appears in the Upper Left as prehensive unification appears in the Upper Right as moment-to-moment individual formative causation. And just as subjective prehension (UL) is meshed with fields of felt intersubjectivity (LL), so individual objective forms (UR) are meshed with fields of interobjectivity (LR)--that is, both individual and social holons have morphic fields (with all of them tetra-arising and tetra-evolving in AQAL space).⁵ We will return to the collective forms in a moment.

     A morphic field is sometimes referred to as a morphogenetic field. "Morphogenetic" means "developmental groove"--it means "structural or formal" (morphic) "creation or development" (genetic). "Morphogenetic field" is a term often used in biology (e.g., Waddington) to refer to the patterns that govern the development of biological forms and structures, but Sheldrake's point (and I concur) is that all holons (or morphic units) have morphogenetic fields, which is why he uses the terms "morphogenetic field" and "morphic field" interchangeably.

     So what does Sheldrake mean by morphic field (and the related notion of structural or formative causation)? Here's a typical example: as Sheldrake points out, when complex protein molecules first emerged, they could have settled into any number of equivalent forms or structural patterns. There are no known physical laws that state that only one of these many forms must occur. But when enough molecules settle into a particular form, all subsequent molecules, even in a different time and space, will settle into the same form. Sheldrake introduced structural or formative causation to account for this empirical fact, which cannot be accounted for by any known physical forces. Once a molecule (or any holon) settles into a pattern or form, that form appears to exert a type of influence on all similar forms--that is formative causation exerted by one morphic field on similar morphic fields ("morphic resonance").

     Sheldrake gives example after example of morphogenetic fields guiding subsequent development of individual morphic forms. Once a difficult task has been accomplished anywhere in the world--from crystallizing complex molecules to rats learning a particular maze to linguistic words being created--the same task can more easily be repeated anywhere else in the world (as has already been demonstrated by numerous empirical studies). This is identical to what we see with the emergence of psychological forms: for example, in historical unfolding, once the red meme had significantly emerged anywhere in the world, it began more easily appearing elsewhere around the world. A difficult, novel, creative emergence had settled into a Kosmic habit now available to subsequent holons.

     Extensive work on the inheritance of forms has already been done. Brian Goodwin, for example, in such important books as How the Leopard Got Its Spots and Signs of Life, demonstrates that many processes in nature are pulled by complex dynamics toward very specific forms. Of over 250,000 species of higher plants, only three basic distributions of leaves around stems are actually seen. The bone structures of paws, hands, and fins have similar forms in all vertebrae. In other words, only certain forms are available for holons of a given class, and these deep forms are a product of past inheritance that, as Kosmic habits, act as dynamic attractors (strange, chaotic, etc.) that severely limit the types of forms that can arise in interobjective space, even though there is absolutely nothing in the forms themselves that impose these limits.

     Now, Sheldrake is claiming only that these patterns or deep forms are inherited. He is saying that the general structure or form of a molecule is collectively inherited; he is not saying that what this molecule actually does is collectively inherited. That is, the general form of the holon is collectively inherited, not any action or content of that form. This is simply an instance of a very widespread pattern that we often find: namely, various deep features (in all four quadrants) are collectively inherited, but not their surface features.⁶ As we will see, all this really means is that the deep features or Kosmic habits of the universe are simply probability waves for finding a particular type of occurrence in a particular spacetime locale. We will return to this important theme in Part II (below).

     Although we sometimes use "morphogenetic fields" to mean any deep features of the waves in any quadrant (interior or exterior), it must be repeated that technically a morphogenetic field (or a morphic field) is an exterior description of holons, not interior. When you are experiencing subjective or intersubjective realities, you never say, "I'm feeling a nice morphogenetic field." The actual realities of the Left-Hand quadrants are immediate feelings, desires, impulses, images, perceptions, values and mutual understanding, expressed in first-person ("I") and second-person ("you/we") perspectives. When we look at those phenomena from the outside, in third-person perspective ("it/its"), we see exterior forms, morphic units, morphogenetic fields, deep structures, social systems, the ecological web of life, and so on. It is crucially important not to confuse exterior descriptors (e.g., morphic fields) with actual interior realities (feelings, prehensions, etc.). All of them have a place in the AQAL matrix, but none of them can be reduced to, or fully explained by, the others.

     In the Lower Right, there exist various collective fields and systems of morphic units. These interobjective fields are the correlates of intersubjective feelings and values. That is, if you look at the communal existence of any holon from the outside, in a third-person stance, you can discern various forms, structures, systems, patterns of interaction, and collective morphogenetic fields; but if you look at those exterior collective forms from within, in a second-person collaborative inquiry and participatory enactment, you will find, not structures or fields or systems, but mutual feelings, shared values, vivid lived experiences, and so on, all of which are adequately described only from a first- and second-person perspective. (See below, quadratic methodology, or integral methodological pluralism).

     But to continue to focus on the objective and interobjective dimensions (which are the only ones adequately addressed by Sheldrake's theories). Like all other developmental grooves in any of the quadrants, these interobjective fields first emerged to some degree as creative novelty but are now inherited forms that must be included (even as transcended), forms that therefore guide the types of exteriors that can emerge under their influence (just as intersubjective contexts mold the types of subjectivity that can tetra-mesh with their contours).

     So this is what we have: In the Upper Right, there are various morphic units (with their associated morphic fields)--such as quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, and so on. These are seen by looking at an individual holon from the outside in a third-person perspective. In other words, these morphic units are the objective structures or exterior forms of that holon's subjective feelings or prehensions, which themselves can only be seen or felt from within (which is the Upper Left). Thus, the exterior form is atom, the interior is prehension; the exterior form is cell, the interior is irritability; the exterior form is plant, the interior is sensation; the exterior form is animal with neural net, the interior is perception; the exterior is animal with brain stem, the interior is impulse; the exterior is animal with limbic system, the interior is emotion, and so on. Interior feelings are inherited via prehensive unification, exterior forms via morphic resonance and formative causation (among others).

     Moreover, both interiors and exteriors exist in individual and collective varieties. In short, there are individual prehensions (UL) and collective prehensions (LL), as well as individual morphogenetic fields (UR) and collective morphogenetic fields (LR).

     What Sheldrake is offering is a wonderful description of the inheritance of structures or forms in the Right-Hand quadrants. That is, Sheldrake's formative causation refers to the inheritance of various structures or forms that first emerged, in part, as creative novelty, but have now become Kosmic habits that are inherited by subsequent forms--and those are exactly the objective correlates of Whitehead's subjective inheritance of prehensions. In other words, all four quadrants inherit their past, then add a moment of creativity that transcends the past to some degree.

     It appears, then, that all holons have a four-dimensional inheritance or karmic residue, which forms the inescapable platform from which any present moment must be launched. The previous AQAL matrix can be transcended to some degree, but it also must be included, or the present suffers a dissociation and repression of its own yesterday. The typical postmodern view that history is merely a series of complete ruptures with no continuity might actually be postmodernism's description of its own dissociative pathology, puffed up to ontological priorities. In any event, most of postmodernism overlooks the brilliant insights of Whitehead about what must be happening in this moment in order for it to pass into the next. There are not just ruptures, but inclusion-with-some-ruptures, and the inclusion part builds a holarchy into this and every moment. Sheldrake, at any rate, is not ignoring this important inclusion or inheritance of the past, and he is attempting to account for some of its objective forms and deep features.

Summary of Part I

     So far we have covered a very brief introduction to four of the basic dimensions of being-in-the-world--the Upper-Left quadrant: subjective (intentionality; first person singular); the Upper-Right quadrant: objective (behavior; third person singular); the Lower-Left quadrant: intersubjective (culture; second person and first person plural); and the Lower-Right quadrant: interobjective (social systems; third person plural).

     We noted that all of those dimensions of being-in-the-world have aspects that seem to endure and other aspects that appear novel--what we called karma and creativity, respectively. The enduring aspects of Kosmic inheritance we also called Kosmic habits, which are not pregiven realities (archetypal, Platonic, Hegelian, or Aurobindian), but rather Kosmic patterns and routines repeated by enough holons that they become engrained in the Kosmos and are henceforth carried forward, either as enduring physical patterns or self-organizing autopoietic entities of one variety or another. We gave several examples of karmic inheritance or Kosmic habits found in all four quadrants, such as subjective prehension (UL); intersubjective inheritance and cultural memory (LL); organismic autopoiesis and individual morphic resonance (UR); and systems memory and interobjective formative causation (LR). Those are only a few of the types of karmic inheritance available, but they are enough to indicate some of the important factors involved in Kosmic habits and the crucial dimensions of all holons that are being preserved and carried forward (even as the creative aspects of the Kosmos continue to introduce novelty and transcendence). Needless to say, any truly integral account of the Kosmos needs to touch bases with all of those vital realities.

     This is especially important because each of those four dimensions has a different methodology of disclosure and enactment. As we will see: empiricism and behaviorism primarily engage the Upper-Right quadrant; introspection and phenomenology primarily engage the Upper-Left quadrant; hermeneutics and collaborative inquiry primarily engage the Lower-Left quadrant; the ecological sciences, structural-functionalism, and systems theory primarily engage the Lower-Right quadrant. Of course, there are many more types of inquiries available, but these highlight some of the more historically significant.

     All of these different methodologies are not important merely as historical traces; they are all crucial ingredients of what might be called an Integral Operating System (IOS)--an integral methodological pluralism that touches all the bases in a attempt to endlessly open itself to the creatively self-disclosing and self-enacting Kosmos: to feel all feelings, prehend all prehensions, as the Self feels itself to infinity and back, never fixed but always changing each and every moment in an open-ended free for all cascading through the AQAL matrix and infinitely beyond. Once an individual downloads and installs IOS in their own worldview, they begin more conscientiously attempting to include all views, all approaches, all potentials in their own sweep of the Kosmos. IOS initiates a self-correcting, self-organizing outreach to all aspects of the universe previously marginalized by worldviews that were too narrow, too shallow, too self-enclosing to serve as more transparent vehicles of Kosmic consciousness.

     At this time, as the center of gravity in the cultural elite begins to shift from green pluralism to yellow integralism, various types of IOS are being increasingly and actively sought by the academic avant garde--integral theories and practices of all sorts are starting to tentatively arrive on the scene. We are indeed entering an integral age at the leading edge. Exactly what that means, of course, remains to be seen, for the integral age is only beginning vaguely to shimmer on the cultural horizon, right out there in the slowly clearing fog of the misty tomorrow....

     In the meantime, in order to assist any sort of integral understanding being able to reproduce itself autopoietically, and thus be carried forth as an enduring insight of the Kosmos into itself, it appears that we need, among many other things, a way to interpret Kosmic habits that does not rely on outmoded and discredited metaphysical postulates (such as pre-exiting ontological levels or structures of reality, archetypes as fixed and pregiven forms, involution as a predetermined path, phenomena as existing independently of subjects perceiving them, etc.). Unless we can fashion such, any IOS will be burdened with outmoded Kosmic habits that now prevent the novel emergence of more integral modes in the creatively unfolding AQAL matrix. In short, the next step in an Integral Post-Metaphysics is to replace pre-existing ontological structures with... what?