The Integral Medicine Wheel

MedicineWheel

In presenting various holistic ideas and models to students, I find that many particularly resonate with the Native American medicine wheel -- an ancient symbol that traces back 10,000 years in the Americas.  Among the different tribes which have used it, the medicine wheel has served both as a map of the cosmos as well as a ceremonial and contemplative tool, a means of honoring and interacting with the world's elemental forces and intelligences.  If you are not familiar with it, the following video presents a good introduction to this tool (from a modern Lakota perspective).  I'm copying Part 1 below, but two other parts are available: Part 2, Part 3.

Recently, noting students' attraction to the medicine wheel, I have begun presenting the Integral map as a post-modern version of this ancient contemplative tool.  Many students, when they first learn about AQAL and the Integral Map, find it to be flat, complicated, and "heady" -- they have a hard time connecting to it on a level that feels very meaningful for them, at least initially.  So, to help bring it to life, I've been experimenting with this alternative approach.  It is not something I would do with all students, or as a primary means of communicating Integral ideas; but I feel comfortable offering it as one way of conceptualizing (and embodying) the map.  Tell me what you think!

The Quadrant Map as a Postmodern Medicine Wheel

The Integral map is obviously very similar, structurally, to the medicine wheel:  a circle divided by a cross, and sometimes further divided into concentric rings.  But beyond their physical similarities, they are complementary in other ways as well. 

As I mentioned above, for many of the indigenous people of the Americas, the medicine wheel is not simply a representational map of the world; it is a tool of invocation, an evocative symbol system meant to call to mind, and connect the practitioner with, a vision of the many vital presences and forces of his or her world.  It allows him to orient himself towards and actively participate in the sacred order of the cosmos.  Because the wheel is often fashioned and used out of doors, frequently in the form of a ring of hand-gathered stones oriented toward the cardinal directions and the vibrant, storied landscape of indigenous consciousness, it is arguably -- and ironically -- experienced in a more "integral" or holistic way than the AQAL map, which often is presented simply as lines and labels on a piece of paper.  The wheel, as an elemental symbol integrated with the landscape and allowing for embodied, ceremonial interaction, "speaks" on many levels at once; whereas the AQAL map is encountered most often as an abstract, purely analytical or "representative" artifact.  And when it is presented or encountered in this way, I believe its potential power or impactfulness is often missed.

As I have come to relate to AQAL, I believe it is best seen as having similar evocative, invocational qualities as the medicine wheel or other mandalic forms -- a symbol system with the power to invoke a particular vision, a particular landscape of meaning.  When we take the enactive paradigm seriously, we must recognize that, with something like AQAL, we are not merely charting out the world as it is.  We are telling a story, engaging in a visionary exercise intended to orient and transform those who interact with it. 

The AQAL map involves a subtler space than the physical space represented by the cardinal directions of the medicine wheel, but it aims similarly to point us in "elemental" directions -- towards our native perspectives (subjective, objective, intersubjective, interobjective) and the "worlds" that they enact.  It invites us, in an elemental way, to orient ourselves, not to a particular landscape, but to the world as an experiential, multidimensional field in which we are active participants.

There is a circularity, also, to the primordial perspectives of the AQAL map.  As Wilber writes, describing how any individual holon arises in relation the entire AQAL wheel of perspective-dimensions, "[M]y supposedly ‘individual thought' actually has at least ... four facets, ... four aspects - intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social.  And around the circle we go: the social system will have a strong influence on the cultural worldview, which will set limits to the individual thoughts that I can have, which will register in the brain physiology.  And you can go around that circle in any direction you want.  The quadrants are all interwoven.  They are all mutually determining.  They all cause, and are caused by, the other quadrants."  But the AQAL map suggests not only cyclical relationships and horizontal dependent-arising; it points also to evolution, to the developmental unfolding of order and form in time.  AQAL is a vision of nested orders, of wheels within wheels within wheels.

A number of other useful comparisons might be drawn also, but I will offer just one more.  As you will note from the illustration of the medicine wheel above, various animal presences and intelligences, various forces and elements of the natural world, are associated with each of the cardinal directions in the medicine wheel.  The wheel situates the human in relation to the greater-than-human world on which he depends, and with which he must live in sensitive, respectful relationship.  In traditional Navajo custom, for instance, the medicine wheel inspires the individual to "walk in beauty" in the world (hozho), to acknowledge interdependence and natural reciprocity in his speech and behavior (k'e).  The structure of the wheel communicates an ethical vision, in other words; a model for right action, not only right understanding.

Big-Bang

The AQAL map also points to our integral relationship with all of creation.  The center point of the quadrants represents, in some versions of the map, the Big Bang - the primordial seed event, the primal Flaring Forth, as Brian Swimme describes it, out of which the Kosmos was born.  The diagonal lines radiating out from the center tell our modern creation story, a story of how particles and clouds of elements have gathered themselves over time into stars and living planets, coral and rubies, eukaryotes and troglodytes, leaping salmon and soaring eagles, women and men.  And this story too bears its own ethical imperatives, its basic moral intuition:  calling us to recognize in the unfolding of complexity and beauty, also the precious gathering of subjective depth; to stand and act in grateful acknowledgment of the entropic gifts of time, nested in circles within circles of teeming intelligences. 

All our relations.