Not all who wander are lost.
I believe that the inner sense you are talking about is what we call love. We see the beauty around us, and we want to protect it. There are potential paths in front of us. There is a path whereby life is destroyed. There is a path whereby it is saved. Our mission is to keep it on the safe path, so that future generations can continue our mission when we are gone. We do this out of love. As we come to see that every living thing on earth depends on each other, our love grows so that it can embrace it all.
This is why we are willing to make sacrifices: what we are protecting is greater than all of us. Our life gains meaning and purpose when we find that it aligns with this mission.
We plant seeds today so that coming generations may enjoy the shade. That is our love.
This comment is going to sound mean. Just a fair warning.
This strikes me as a classic case of a guy thinking he’s a prophet after doing a bunch of psychedelics. I’ve seen it over and over again. They are so convinced that they’ve “got it” that they often manage to convince others they do as well. You could call it the Messiah complex because, well, duh.
And you know what? Being around a bunch of people who are really nice to you feels good. And that feeling of it “clicking” is the feeling of your cognitive dissonance being wiped out by highly motivated reasoning. They’re a bunch of loons, but I feel like I belong with them. I’m a genius, so if I belong with them they must be a bunch of geniuses as well. Oh! We’re a bunch of geniuses! The Weird Spiritual Teachings are true!
Many incredibly smart scientists in Japan joined a doomsday cult (Aum Shinrikyo) because its members made them feel like they finally belonged somewhere. Loneliness is a hell of a drug. It’s what gets you sucked into cults.
From what I’ve read, integral theory seems to be closer to a mysticist cult than a scientific framework. And I say this as someone who is quite open to process philosophy and systems science, both of which seem vaguely related to whatever integral theory is trying to be.