[Integral Practices] are facilitated by personal traits that promote
creativity in general. Frank Barron, Henry Murray, and other psychologists
have identified personality traits commonly possessed by creative people,
among them:

- tolerance for ambiguity
- openess to experience (including altered states)
- willingness to temporarily set aside reality testing
- nondefensiveness in relation to strong feelings or unusual ideas
- independence of judgement
- attraction to complexity and assymetry
- capacity for creative regression
- capacity for right-brained, or nondominant, hemispheric functioning that
  mediates holistic thinking
- flexibility of perception and ego boundaries
- the ability to create order from disorder and to see similarities in
  the dissimilar
- the capacity to perceive obscure figures or gestalts
- a flair for rendering novel forms from complex stimuli
- unusual capacities for intuition
- psychological risk-taking
- emotional sensitivity
- a strong drive to find pattern and meaning
- feelings of oneness with others

Though these traits have generally been identified among artists, scientists,
and other who produce works separate from themselves, they also facilitate
practices that develop human nature itself. They help to catalyze new richness
of awareness and broader repertoires of behavior. They help bring new
enjoyment, beauty, and creativity to our relationships and into our everyday
life.

These traits are evident, too, in hypnotic responsiveness, which may be drawn
upon to promote certain kinds of exceptional functioning, in the capacity
for transformative imagery, in meditation, and in sports (witness the
umpredictable moves of great basketball players, the surprising strategies
of inspired boxers, the novel movements of great gymnasts and
dancers). The development of metanormal capacities requires receptivity
to unusual experience and a willingness to substitute novel for
habitual responses. The realization of new states and behaviors often
necessitates a temporary suspension of reality testing. To explore
the terra incognita of our latent capacities, we must love adventure,
complexity, and strange territory. Integral practices reorder elements
of body and mind as if they were artistic materials, into new forms of
power and beauty, and for that reason require those personality traits
that promote creativity in general.