Ernest Boyer’s popular approach to scholarly work includes the Scholarship of Integration: “serious, disciplined work that seeks to interpret, draw together, and bring new insight to bear on original research.”88 The Scholarship of Integration doesn’t offer new data; it synthesizes available ideas in the hope that thinking across fields will cause us to create new solutions to problems.
A search on the Web site of the Chronicle of Higher Education yields a plethora of articles stressing “interdisciplinary” teaching or research. A typical comment is that “Creative research and teaching increasingly occur at the junction between traditional disciplines.”89 Jeffery N. Waserstrom says that “interdisciplinary” has become so trendy that it can now be called “the I-word,” a term with increasingly fuzzy boundaries.90 Jossey-Bass, a noted educational press, has published in its New Directions for Teaching and Learning series a volume called Advancing Faculty Learning through Interdisciplinary Collaboration. In Peer Review, a magazine of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, Huber and others explain the importance of “integrative learning” given the “fragmented” curriculum of required and elective courses: “To participate responsibly as local citizens . . . people must also be citizens of the world, aware of complex interdependencies and able to synthesize information from a wide array of sources, learn from experience, and make connections between theory and practice.”91
Recent books on creativity have followed this trend of integration. David Edwards’ Artscience contains case studies of creators who have combined two disciplines usually deemed separate to forge unique careers. He says that “to live at this intersection of the arts and sciences is the most meaningful work of all, more than the creation of a new business, the completion of a novel, or the startup of a cultural center.”92 Ken Robinson makes a similar point:
The recognition of common processes in the arts and the sciences has led to a wide range of collaborative projects and to the early dawning of what may prove in our own times to be a new Renaissance. It is a Renaissance based on a more holistic understanding of human consciousness.93
Clearly, thinking within the boundaries of a discipline can yield important results. Yet after it has been done for a while, there is also value in making connections. Einstein put the idea in a dramatic way: “‘It is a glorious feeling to discover the unity of a set of phenomena that seem at first to be completely separate.’”94 In fact, Robert Sternberg criticizes the fragmentation in competing fields of psychology, with their “Narrow specialization . . . where one looks at a problem with tunnel vision and knows only a narrow range of techniques to apply in solving that problem. In broad specialization, one may look at a fairly specific problem but do so with open eyes and with the benefit of the many problem-solving techniques a multidisciplinary approach leaves at one’s disposal.”95 He calls for a “unified psychology” that eschews “single operations in favor of multiple converging operations” and uses many modes of inquiry.96 Csikszentmihalyi makes the same point but in different worlds: “what we need now is an effort to synthesize the various approaches of the past into an integrated theory.”97 This book is one response to this call. It attempts to unite many fields that we are used to separating into discrete disciplines.
The work of Ken Wilber has a name for this mode of thinking: integral.
Integral Creativity
Spirit and science have been split since Descartes, but Ken Wilber explains that the masters of the great mystical traditions have experiences that are universal and can be replicated, just like scientific experiments, by someone who can attain the same states of consciousness:
. . . these claims are not dogmatic; they are not believed in merely because an authority proclaimed them, or because sociocentric tradition hands them down, or because salvation depends upon being a “true believer.” Rather, the claims about these higher domains are a conclusion based on hundreds of years of experimental introspection and communal verification. False claims are rejected on the basis of consensual evidence, and further evidence is used to adjust and fine-tune the experimental conclusions.
These spiritual endeavors, in other words, are scientific in any meaningful sense of the word, and the systematic presentations of these endeavors follow precisely those of any reconstructive science.98
In other words, the inner science of spirituality has the same rules as the outer science of logical positivism: experimentation and replication. Experts in both fields can replicate the same results, though laymen may not have the “domain-specific skills” to do so.
The Dalai Lama, who has met with many leaders of the scientific community, reports that he has “long been gripped with a fascination for the parallels between this form of empirical investigation and those I had learned in my Buddhist philosophical training and contemplative practice.” Science observes “phenomena,” generates hypotheses, and “validates” them through experiments that, if replicated, contribute to the field. “The Buddha advises” testing “the truth of what he has said through reasoned examination and personal experiment.”99 As Paramhansa Yogananda says, “’Meditation is to religion what the laboratory is to science.’”100
Mystical Creativity: “The Force”
This section is theoretical, with some ideas that are controversial. You may want to skip or skim it. I present it so that you will have access to some of what is said about higher creativity in the philosophical circles that are now seeing a merger of science and spirituality, such as the Institute of Noetic Sciences, established by astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Some of the ideas will be presented again in the discussion of universal principles, physics, and mathematics (Chapters 9 and 10).
Not controversial is the belief of some creators that their ideas come from a higher power. (See above, the “inspirational” theories of the Daimon and the wind; and Chapter 3, The Process.) In Star Wars it is called “The Force,” and in The Matrix it is the ultimate reality. Some creators, like Einstein, Emerson, and Fellini, use the word “God.” However, this word can be controversial because it comes with so much cultural baggage. (For this reason one writer calls this force G.O.D.: a higher intelligence that is Governing, Organizing and Designing.101) You can call this power what you like: Spirit, a higher part of yourself, the “Unified Field,” “The Force,” or “what is trying to happen.”
Whatever you call it, the mystical view is that some creators feel a higher intelligence is helping and guiding their efforts. They believe that cooperating with this intelligence will help us, and trying to “go against the flow” will frustrate us.
This higher intelligence is said to dwell in a realm that has been given many names. Some mystical philosophers today call it the “Causal” realm because it holds the ideas that cause manifestation in our physical reality. A familiar version in philosophy courses comes from Plato, who called it the realm of the “Forms.”
Ken Wilber explains that this realm literally “pulls” on us: a “manifest omega pull on each individual and finite thing.”102 Physicist