How It All Fits Together: The Quadrants

IOS—and the Integral Model—would be merely a “heap” if it did not suggest a way that all of these various components are related. How do they all fit together? It’s one thing to simply lay all the pieces of the cross-cultural survey on the table and say, “They’re all important!,” and quite another to spot the patterns that actually connect all the pieces. Discovering the profound patterns that connect is a major accomplishment of the Integral Approach.

In this concluding section, we will briefly outline these patterns, all of which together are sometimes referred to as A-Q-A-L (pronounced ah-qwul), which is shorthand for “all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types”—and those are simply the components that we have already outlined (except the quadrants, which we will get to momentarily). AQAL is just another term for IOS or the Integral Map, but one that is often used to specifically designate this particular approach.

At the beginning of this introduction, we said that all 5 components of the Integral Model were items that are available to your awareness right now, and this is true of the quadrants as well.

Did you ever notice that major languages have what are called 1st-person, 2nd-person, and 3rd-person pronouns? The 1st-person perspective refers to “the person who is speaking,” which includes pronouns like I, me, mine (in the singular) and we, us, ours (in the plural). The 2nd-person perspective refers to “the person who is spoken to,” which includes pronouns like you and yours. The 3rd-person perspective refers to “the person or thing being spoken about,” such as he, him, she, her, they, them, it, and its.

Thus, if I am speaking to you about my new car, “I” am 1st person, “you” are 2nd person, and the new car (or “it”) is 3rd person. Now, if you and I are talking and communicating, we will indicate this by using, for example, the word “we,” as in, “We understand each other.” “We” is technically 1st-person plural, but if you and I are communicating, then your 2nd person and my 1st person are part of this extraordinary “we.” Thus, 2nd person is sometimes indicated as “you/we,” or “thou/we,” or sometimes just “we.”

So we can therefore simplify 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-person as “I,” “we,” and “it.”

That all seems trivial, doesn’t it? Boring, maybe? So let’s try this. Instead of saying “I,” “we,” and “it,” what if we said the Beautiful, the Good, and the True? And what if we said that the Beautiful, the Good, and the True are dimensions of your very own being at each and every moment, including each and every level of growth and development? And that through an integral practice, you can discover deeper and deeper dimensions of your own Goodness, your own Truth, and your own Beauty?

Hmm, definitely more interesting. The Beautiful, the Good, and the True are simply variations on 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-person pronouns found in all major languages, and they are found in all major languages because Beauty, Truth, and Goodness are very real dimensions of reality to which language has adapted. The 3rd person (or “it”) refers to objective truth, which is best investigated by science. The 2nd person (or “you/we”) refers to Goodness, or the ways that we—that you and I—treat each other, and whether we do so with decency, honesty, and respect. In other words, basic morality. And 1st person deals with the “I,” with self and self-expression, art and aesthetics, and the beauty that is in the eye (or the “I”) of the beholder.

So the “I,” “we,” and “it” dimensions of experience really refer to art, morals, and science. Or self, culture, and nature. Or the Beautiful, the Good, and the True. (For some reason, philosophers always refer to those in this order: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Which order do you prefer? Any order is fine.)

The point is that every event in the manifest world has all 3 of those dimensions. You can look at any event from the point of view of the “I” (or how I personally see and feel about the event); from the point of view of the “we” (how not just I but others see the event); and as an “it” (or the objective facts of the event).

Thus, an integrally informed path will take all of those dimensions into account, and thus arrive at a more comprehensive and effective approach—in the “I” and the “we” and the “it”—or in self and culture and nature.

If you leave out science, or leave out art, or leave out morals, something is going to be missing, something will get broken. Self and culture and nature are liberated together or not at all. So fundamental are these dimensions of “I,” “we,” and “it” that we call them the 4 quadrants, and we make them a foundation of the integral framework or IOS. (We arrive at “4” quadrants by subdividing “it” into singular “it” and plural “its.”) A few diagrams will help clarify the basic points.

Figure 3 is a schematic of the 4 quadrants. It shows the “I” (the inside of the individual), the “it” (the outside of the individual), the “we” (the inside of the collective), and the “its” (the outside of the collective). In other words, the 4 quadrants—which are the 4 fundamental perspectives on any occasion (or the 4 basic ways of looking at anything)—turn out to be fairly simple: they are the inside and the outside of the individual and the collective.

Figures 4 and 5 show a few of the details of the 4 quadrants. (Some of these are technical terms that needn’t be bothered with for this basic introduction; simply look at the diagrams and get a sense of the different types of items you might find in each of the quadrants.)

For example, in the Upper-Left quadrant (the interior of the individual), you find your own immediate thoughts, feelings, sensations, and so on (all described in 1st-person terms). But if you look at your individual being from the outside, in the terms not of subjective awareness but objective science, you find neurotransmitters, a limbic system, the neocortex, complex molecular structures, cells, organ systems, DNA, and so on—all described in 3rd-person objective terms (“it” and “its”). The Upper-Right quadrant is therefore what any individual event looks like from the outside. This especially includes its physical behavior; its material components; its matter and energy; and its concrete body—for all those are items that can be referred to in some sort of objective, 3rd-person, or “it” fashion.

That is what you or your organism looks like from the outside, in an objective-it stance, made of matter and energy and objects; whereas from the inside, you find not neurotransmitters but feelings, not limbic systems but intense desires, not a neocortex but inward visions, not matter-energy but consciousness, all described in 1st-person immediateness. Which of those views is right? Both of them, according to the integral approach. They are two different views of the same occasion, namely you. The problems start when you try to deny or dismiss either of those perspectives. All 4 quadrants need to be included in any integral view.

The connections continue. Notice that every “I” is in relationship with other I’s, which means that every “I” is a member of numerous we’s. These “we’s” represent not just individual but group (or collective) consciousness, not just subjective but intersubjective awareness—or culture in the broadest sense. This is indicated in the Lower-Left quadrant. Likewise, every “we” has an exterior, or what it looks like from the outside, and this is the Lower-Right quadrant. The Lower Left is often called the cultural dimension (or the inside awareness of the group—its worldview, its shared values, shared feelings, and so forth), and the Lower Right the social dimension (or the exterior forms and behaviors of the group, which are studied by 3rd-person sciences such as systems theory).

Again, the quadrants are simply the inside and the outside of the individual and the collective, and the point is that all 4 quadrants need to be included if we want to be as integral as possible.

We are now at a point where we can start to put all the integral pieces together: quadrants, levels, lines, states and types. Let’s start with levels or stages.

All 4 quadrants show growth, development, or evolution. That is, they all show some sort of stages or levels of development, not as rigid rungs in a ladder but as fluid and flowing waves of unfolding. This happens everywhere in the natural world, just as an oak unfolds from an acorn through stages of growth and development, or a Siberian tiger grows from a fertilized egg to an adult organism in well-defined stages of growth and development. Likewise with humans in certain important ways. We have already seen several of these stages as they apply to humans. In the Upper Left or “I,” for example, the self unfolds from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, or body to mind to spirit. In the Upper Right, felt energy phenomenologically expands from gross to subtle to causal. In the Lower Left, the “we” expands from egocentric (“me”) to ethnocentric (“us”) to worldcentric (“all of us”). This expansion of group awareness allows social systems—in the Lower Right—to expand from simple groups to more complex systems like nations and eventually even to global systems. These 3 simple stages in each of the quadrants are represented in figure 6.

Let’s move from levels to lines. Developmental lines occur in all 4 quadrants, but because we are focusing on personal development, we can look at how some of these lines appear in the Upper-Left quadrant. As we saw, there are over a dozen different multiple intelligences or developmental lines. Some of the more important include:

• the cognitive line (or awareness of what is)
• the moral line (awareness of what should be)
• the emotional or affective line (the full spectrum of emotions)
• the interpersonal line (how I socially relate to others)
• the needs line (such as Maslow’s needs hierarchy)
• the self-identity line (or “who am I?,” such as Loevinger’s ego development)
• the aesthetic line (or the line of self-expression, beauty, art, and felt meaning)
• the psychosexual line, which in its broadest sense means the entire spectrum of Eros (gross to subtle to causal)
• the spiritual line (where “spirit” is viewed not just as Ground, and not just as the highest stage, but as its own line of unfolding)
• the values line (or what a person considers most important, a line studied by Clare Graves and made popular by Spiral Dynamics)

All of those developmental lines can move through the basic stages or levels. All of them can be included in the psychograph. If we use stage or level conceptions such as Robert Kegan’s, Jane Loevinger’s, or Clare Graves’s, then we would have 5, 8, or even more levels of development with which we could follow the natural unfolding of developmental lines or streams. Again, it is not a matter of which of them is right or wrong; it is a matter of how much “granularity” or “complexity” you need to more adequately understand a given situation.

We already gave one diagram of a psychograph (fig. 1). Figure 7 is another, taken from a Notre Dame business school presentation that uses the AQAL model in business.

As noted, all of the quadrants have developmental lines. We just focused on those in the Upper Left. In the Upper-Right quadrant, when it comes to humans, one of the most important is the bodily matter-energy line, which runs, as we saw, from gross energy to subtle energy to causal energy. As a developmental sequence, this refers to the permanent acquisition of a capacity to consciously master these energetic components of your being (otherwise, they appear merely as states). The Upper-Right quadrant also refers to all of the exterior behavior, actions, and movements of my objective body (gross, subtle, or causal).

In the Lower-Left quadrant, cultural development itself often unfolds in waves, moving from what the pioneering genius Jean Gebser called archaic to magic to mythic to mental to integral and higher. In the Lower-Right quadrant, systems theory investigates the collective social systems that evolve (and that, in humans, include stages such as foraging to agrarian to industrial to informational systems). In figure 6, we simplified this to “group, nation, and global,” but the general idea is simply that of unfolding levels of greater social complexity that are integrated into wider systems.

Again, for this simple overview, details are not as important as a general grasp of the unfolding or flowering nature of all 4 quadrants, which can include expanding spheres of consciousness, care, culture, and nature. In short, the I and the we and it can evolve. Self and culture and nature can all develop and evolve.

We can now quickly finish with the other components. States occur in all quadrants (from weather states to states of consciousness). We focused on states of consciousness in the Upper Left (waking, dreaming, sleeping), and on energetic states in the Upper Right (gross, subtle, causal). Of course, if any of those become permanent acquisitions, they have become stages, not states.

There are types in all of the quadrants, too, but we focused on masculine and feminine types as they appear in individuals. The masculine principle identifies more with agency and the feminine identifies more with communion, but the point is that every person has both of these components. Finally, as was saw, there is an unhealthy type of masculine and feminine at all available stages—sick boy and sick girl at all stages.

Seem complicated? In a sense it is. But in another sense, the extraordinary complexity of humans and their relation to the universe can be simplified enormously by touching bases with the quadrants (the fact that every event can be looked at as an I, we, or it); developmental lines (or multiple intelligences), all of which move through developmental levels (from body to mind to spirit); with states and types at each of those levels.

That Integral Model—“all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types”—is the simplest model that can handle all of the truly essential items. We sometimes shorten all of that to simply “all quadrants, all levels”—or AQAL—where the quadrants are, for example, self, culture, and nature, and the levels are body, mind, and spirit, so we say that the Integral Approach involves the cultivation of body, mind, and spirit in self, culture, and nature. The simplest version of this is shown in figure 6, and if you have a general understanding of that diagram, the rest is fairly easy.