Since I shared this blog with the world, a number of people have asked me what exactly “Integral Life” is, and why I chose it as part of this blog’s name. This goes back a bit to college, where my first deep engagement with the contemporary academic fields began.
I attended NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, in which all of the students had the opportunity (or yoke) of designing their own major. Students were able to form their concentrations through study across all of NYU’s schools and departments, and while some came to the program because they had an esoteric interest but clear direction, others in the program simply had no idea what they wanted to study discipline wise, but wanted the freedom to explore.
I fell into both categories. My fundamental interest in school was this idea I had in my head that there was a certain way that people operated in the world, some principle that governed human behavior that was discoverable if I just delved deep into the question. I jokingly called my major “How People Tick” when describing it to others, though this was always a tongue in cheek way of pointing to what I felt was a much deeper concept.
In pursuing my study of how people ticked, I didn’t really have a good sense of where to begin, so started in the most obvious of places: Psychology. And then I moved onto Sociology. And then to social work. Then Politics. Theology. Mysticism. Quantum Philosophy. Photography. Culinary Arts. International Development. Pretty soon I found myself out of credits and sitting in a Buddhist monastery in India writing my senior paper, though thankfully by that time I’d come to a pretty good sense of what I was looking for.
Empathetics: Integral Life 