The Integral Heart

How can we help those who are demonstrating and dying on the streets?

I think that what we are already doing — paying rapt attention — is the most powerful thing Americans can do to empower Iran’s popular uprising. If the USA is preceived to be attempting to interfere, we empower repression. If we become a factor in the process, we muddy the waters. But if we simply pay attention, with open hearts and minds, and if we let ourselves be affected by what we see, and if we speak publicly about our human and moral perceptions, in public forums that Iranians can access, we help. It will be obvious that we are paying attention, that we are emotionally involved in witnessing their cultural confrontation, that we are moved and inspired by their courage, dignity, and restraint, that we are learning from their examples.

Mutual awareness involves taking new perspectives. That tends to serve growth into more nuanced structures of awareness. In this moment, the world’s simple witnessing awareness is making a subtle, but fundamental and benignly transformative difference. We are helping by sympathetically identifying with their symbolic martyr, Neda, her family, and her nation.

When the whole world is watching, heroes are seen, and thus empowered. (At least their sacrifice does not go unnoticed.) The world’s rapt attention makese a difference. The observed is changed by the presence of the observer. This intersubjective connection, this imperfect empathic urge unites us with Iranians in a larger “we-space.”

It is a subtle difference, and it doesn’t necessarily change behavior, except as new understandings naturally evoke new behavioral choices. But this simple shift might prove to be the "iota" of difference, the “straw” that tips the balance scales (which may tip only over months or years) in favor of reform and progress in Iran.

Integral Perspectives on Iran's Cultural Divide

In Integral terms, the demonstrators can be distinguished from the regime’s supporters by cultural qualities relating to states, stages, and relationships to shadow.

High states are part of the ethos both of the demonstrators and of the regime’s true believers. Most of these high states are evoked by acts of self-transcendence, whether they be self-abnegation or self-sacrifice, whether they be gross physical acts or subtle emotional or mental acts.

Persians are poets and revolutionaries, a heartfelt, brooding, noble, and passionate people. Each year, on Ashura, faithful grassroots Shia men go into a trance and beat themselves bloody to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hosayn Ibn Ali, in memory of whom Shiism originally emerged. Sufi mystics go together into trances in which they dance and sing and enter into ecstatic communion with Allah. Ancient Persian poetry is full of ecstatic mystic language, expressing a rich and passionate love affair with God. Modern Persian poetry is full of ecstatic emotional language, expressing a rich and passionate love affair with life, and pain, and death.

The structure of Iranians’ values are still centered in traditional agreements about symbols, tones, morés and resonances. But their values also now include certain modern and postmodern values like common sense, respect for the dignity of others, thinking for oneself, and the curiosity to observe the modern world directly. Their values are not altogether modern; but they are not exclusively conformist.

Their eyes have noticed a myriad of details and evidence and colors and shades of grey that the regime is telling them aren’t there. “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?” Everyone “in their right mind” knows the regime has lied to them.

The demonstrators include people with modern and postmodern and even integral values, but the center of gravity that divides them from the traditionalists is just a half-step beyond traditional, the early “expert” interest in taking a critical perspective on the evidence they have, not the modern “achiever’s” inclination to interpret experience in terms of a modern or postmodern systemic or paradigmatic analysis.

But Iranians will see the images of themselves reflected in the eyes of the outside world. And this will affect the dynamics. The excitement that comes from so much positive attention will be combined with the implicit meta-perspective that comes from imagining how you look to others. How much new evolutionary depth will this catalyze in Iranian thinking and perspective-taking?

A shadow most fiercely denied is usually projected. This happens at the level of individuals but also at the level of whole cultures. Cultural projection has been at the heart of the psychology behind the regime’s propaganda for years. By pointing to foreign enemies, by projecting its own xenophobia, the Islamic Republic has been able to coerce national unity.

The demonstrators want to take a new look at all that, to restore their connection to the larger world. They want Iran’s internal narrative to evolve, to reflectively discard what is not working and make new moves that will produce better results. They are taking the first baby step toward re-owning their cultural projection.

Postmodern nonviolence has been playing an important role in the resolution. Iranian society is sufficiently interconnected and self-reflective for this to have powerful impacts, even if Iran is not sufficiently modern in its values and conscience for nonviolence to succeed as directly it did for Gandhi in his struggle against the British Empire.

I hope that in the days ahead the Iranian people are able to get through to their cousins and friends in the police, armed services, Revolutionary Guard, basij, and government ministries. I hope that the institutions of Iranian society will reflect and flex in response to this horror, and shift its stance and nature. I hope that there can be a transition of values and behavior within the Islamic Republic with a minimum of violence and destruction.

However, cultural freedom may not come to Iran until those who “get it” are not just the most conscious members of Iranian society, but the most effective actors — in the institutions (of government, religion, and society) and on the streets. Moral authority needs elemental strength. The change the Iranian people are calling for so eloquently will not complete itself until trustable leaders are able to grasp the levers of power.

New levels of consciousness sometimes don’t replace the old until they can take more effective responsibility for all the brutal facts of life. Good-hearted Iranians cannot cede the military, the government, and the clerical institutions to fanatics and realistically expect to retain their own freedom. This will become a passionate and frank conversation in thousands of homes and offices across Iran. It will be worked out by the Iranian people, on terms we can only partially comprehend.

The uprising is fragmented. Its unity only concerns outrage against the clumsiness of the vote fraud. Ali Laranjani’s public statement questioning the vote tally was very mild, and buried in a series of denunciations of foreign powers for their public statements condemning the Iranian government. In the moderately arch-conservative no-man’s-land between Mousavi and Khamenei are perhaps dozens of potential kingmakers, including Laranjani.

Americans should not be confused into thinking that anti-Americanism will go away after this uprising reshapes the regime. Iranians have grown up hearing stories of how the U.S. plotted and financed the Shah before the overthrow of Mosaddeq’s fledgling democratic government in 1954 (after he nationalized BP’s Iranian oil holdings), how the US supported the Shah even when he brutally suppressed and exploited his subjects, how the US winked, financed, and even sold ingredients for chemical weapons to Sadaam which he used to maim thousands of Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war, including thousands of wounded veterans who are visible heroes who can be seen throughout Iranian society.  

Mostly Iranians are fiercely proud of Iran. Nationalistic rhetoric resonates. This uprising is one enacted by nationalists against other nationalists. But it is not united and fueled by resentment of foreign imperialism.  Iranians’ common cause is their stand for their human dignity, their refusal to be bullied to give lip service to what they see as transparent electoral cheating. Will this prove strong enough to prevail? We’ll soon see.

As brutal as are their divisions, all Iranian players are nationalists, motivated by patriotic feelings. Persia has a strong national strain of mystical intensity. Their ethos celebrates feats of strength, endurance, sacrifice, and bravery that are enacted in passionate, intense, altered states of consciousness. These high states are linked to passionate emotions. If the cause is clearly righteous, and volunteers are seen to be noble and needed, there are thousands of potential martyrs in Iran.

Thus, there will be a compromise, or there will be disaster.  Anything but compromise would require Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to tear apart their country with purges of most of their best-educated countrymen, in something analogous to China’s cultural revolution. Every institution of Iranian civil society contains large numbers of people who question the election and the Supreme Leader.

There are just too many people who might think for themselves. Meanwhile, Iranians of all stripes are getting a huge dose of new experiences of the very kind that is most likely to stimulate them to rethink a lot of things.
Iranians are being empowered by current events. The eyes of the world have been on Iran in a whole new way — sympathetically, admiringly, appreciatively, not as hostile pariahs. And the star of the show during this great moment of history has been Iran’s ordinary Iranians. How will it affect a whole nation to experience this change of perceptions. What is it like, under these cultural and historical circumstances, to go from  being seen as the “axis of evil” to the most admired and heroic of the world’s citizens?

There are millions of people who saw the rigged election results as an unacceptable insult to their intelligence and dignity. “We’re smarter than you think!” they are saying. Mousavi, Montezeri, and Khatami have said it too. But then, a popular movement spontaneously erupted, and the crowds pushed Mousavi further than he would have ventured on his own.

The demonstrations were spontaneous, emotional, and yet still patriotic, still using the traditional symbols and gestures. They marched holding copies of the Koran, they shouted “Allah-o-Akbar” from the rooftops, they declared days of mourning. They very naturally adopted much of the rhetoric and tactics of the revolution that brought the Islamic Republic of Iran into existence. They wanted their experience of justice to be seen.

And what is being mirrored back by the “whole world watching” is respect and congratulations.

In spring 2007 I visited Iran as a member of a citizen’s diplomacy delegation.  The day after we arrived in Tehran, our meetings with former President Khatami, Grand Ayatollah Saanei, peace activist Emmadin Baghi, and Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi were abruptly cancelled. Our cell phone calls and emails had been (and would continue to be) monitored; our activities were reorganized and were strictly controlled by Ahmedinejad’s faction.

Most of the government officials, citizens, clerics, students, professors and wounded veterans, with whom I was able to meet were conservatives. Our every move was monitored by the Ershad secret police. Big brother was definitely watching. And yet this “curse” turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I confronted and explored the much wider gulf that separated the perspectives of Ahmadinejad’s faction from my western sensibilities. (And of course, I had encounters with many much freer spirits here and there along the way.)

In the process, I learned much more about the Iranian soul than I could have dreamed going in. I encountered the intense spiritual passions of the Shia ways that catalyzed startling insights. It humbled me to see how a vast amount of what is under the surface of contemporary Iranian culture and politics tends be opaque to modern Western eyes.

After learning the postmodern lesson that every point of view is partial, we remember how to appreciate what's also true. We graduate from irony. Which performs an essential critical function, and then mostly outlives its usefulness. In a post-ironic worldspace, a sincerely positive conversation is possible. We can speak without a "but," without signaling always that we are cool and hip. Our language can become post-ironic. And then we are freed to say it simply, to speak the most fruitful, sincere and meaningful words we can.  A post-ironic worldspace dares to hope, almost as if naive, something like I did on inauguration day in "Obama Consciousness".

Although some individuals, organizations and worldviews privilege either agency or communion over the other, the Integral disposition fully embraces both.

I chose the URL and identity of this website, "The Integral Heart," in part to emphasize the healthy communion that is a natural expression of healthy Integral agency.

Structures of awareness always have special strengths and weaknesses. Since Integral consciousness has evolved so recently, there's no research yet that clearly identifies its tendencies towards limitations and pathologies. But most structures differentiate themselves from the previous one via a somewhat exaggerated reaction.

Some theorists suggest that the early indications are that Teal (the earliest Integral structure) can tend to give excessive weight to its mental maps and models—as powerful as they are—and lose some connection to the embodied, intuitive aspects of awareness that were cultivated at Green. It appears that some healthy, positive aspects of Green can be temporarily suppressed at Teal, as the self attempts to wrap its mind around a radically larger and deeper sense of reality.

With Integral discrimination, we can see much more clearly why every perspective is partial, and thus we can critique every point of view with a whole new level of penetrating insight.

It is just as true and real that with Integral vision, we can see much more clearly how every perspective is uniquely and valuably true, and thus we can appreciate the whole world with a whole new level of honoring embrace. This extends and deepens in Turquoise, the second level of Integral awareness, which evolves beyond Teal.

Even while valuing the liberating importance of healthy criticism, a special focus of The Integral Heart is to shine a light on honoring and appreciating what's good, true, and beautiful about every perspective and particle of the whole evolving conscious Kosmos.

This website will attempt to provide a forum for respectfully re-including some marginalized healthy Green values, by holding them in a wider, Turquoise understanding. At a higher level, the spiral winds back over itself in new, higher levels of agency and communion. This new level of communion integrates agency more fully, raising universal communal values into a solidly Integral expression (rather than remaining stuck in simplistic Green categories).