Catching Up With Ken Wilber: Part One

 

Ken Wilber

I have followed Ken Wilber off and on since the early 1980's.  I read Spectrum of Consciousness (1977) and The Atman Project (1980) before I went to India.  I found Wilber to be interesting, insightful, and a good writer but, frankly, his early work did not distinguish him in my mind compared with other things I was reading about meditation and spirituality at the time.  Wilber struck me at the time as somewhat of a spiritual cherry-picker while I was looking for the truth.  The similarities between perspectives was not what I was looking for and the putting together partial truths, as Wilber attempted, seemed secondary to my quest.  I was more into Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, Joseph Campbell, Jürgen Habermas, Frederich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre and, later, Ramana Maharshi, Shunryu Suzuki, Chögyam Trungpa, among others.

In 1978, Wilber helped start a magazine called ReVision, of which I read several of the early issues.  It was, in fact, through this magazine that I learned about the work of Bede Griffiths in India and that article truly set me on a course for my trip to India.  In that transpersonal way, Wilber has played a vital role in my personal spiritual quest, though I had no special attachment toward him or his work compared with my other sources of insight.

But Wilber was always there in the background as I attempted to apply what I learned and experienced pre/post-India.  I bought Sex, Ecology, Spirituality in 1996 and felt that Wilber's ideas had really matured to a complex and fascinating degree.  Thereafter, I read The Eye of Spirit (1997) in an attempt to reacquaint myself with other facets of his thought.  That was followed a few years later by A Theory of Everything (2000).  I came to regard Wilber as a forward thinker but his ideas, by now known as Integral Theory, were, for me, just part of the collection of psychological, philosophical, and religious studies that I was sorting through along my own path.  Basically, I was treating Wilber the way Wilber treats every other theory in the world.  He was just another perspective, a deep one that I had chosen not to delve into.

Well, one thing leads to another, right?  My recent obsession with YouTube exposed me to all sorts of people from Mary-Jane Rubenstein to Jordan Peterson to Sam Harris.  In the midst of all that, YouTube recommended that I watch a video interview of Ken Wilber, which I did.  It turned out to be a two and half hour interview of Wilber, now a much older man than when I last connected with him.  I watched it over the course of a couple of evenings.  Suddenly, I related to him in a way that just was not there before.  He was the same Wilber, but more evolved.  Well, I guess I have evolved as well and, this time, something seriously clicked.

Unexpectedly, Wilber resonated with me in new, deeper way.  I can't explain it other than I have grown in ways that make Wilber seem more prescient to me than he seemed back in the 1980's and 1990's.  This led me to reread all my books by Wilber and order a couple more.  I want to devote several posts to my rediscovery of him and will start with selections from how this long interview conducted by John Tangney of The Intellectual Diversity Podcast plays out.
 
Wilber was valedictorian of his high school and was accepted to Duke University (“the Harvard of the South”) about 1967.  His long-term goal was to become an M.D.  But he felt dissatisfied at Duke.  Ultimately, he would receive a graduate degree in biochemistry from the University of Nebraska, but his heart was never in it.  Instead, he was a voracious reader on everything he could find about spirituality, psychology and human development.  That all feels very familiar to me.

But Wilber has a genius-caliber mind and is able to combine his expansive, multi-disciplined knowledge with his intimate experience in various forms of contemplative practice and psychotherapy, all of which he tried personally so he could write about the subject(s) from the perspective of a practitioner not just as an academic.  Nevertheless, he refers to his exposure to all these approaches as “classes.”

Wilber speaks about the dawn of his spirituality:  “I was practicing all of them.  And, worse, I was actually getting something important out of all of them.  And that was confusing because they were clearly disagreeing with each other.  And so I wasn't just unhappy, I was confused.  That was new for me.  I had already studied science and nothing is confusing about that.  There were just more unknown things that needed more science.  It wasn't a problem...I knew they all had something important to say, that was the problem.”

“It dawned on me how to fit all six or seven of these classes together.  To actually integrate them...And the idea was that human beings weren't just a single consciousness, and then that consciousness would learn things that are true, some things that are false and so on. That consciousness actually developed and continued to go through levels or stages or waves of development.  And you could actually track these levels of development and all of them were important.  Most people start development at the lower rungs but they continue to have access to higher and higher rungs.”

Whenever Tangney asks a question, Wilber will take 20-30 minutes to answer, which is sensational due to the extraordinary depth and breadth of his knowledge.  It also means that the 150-minute interview consists of only about 5 or 6 questions.  But they are great questions and Wilber is very gracious in his thoughtful responses.  Wilber believes that the various models of human development all fit together and reveal a great deal about cosmic reality.  Development takes various forms but two of them are "growing up" (your stage or structure of consciousness) and "waking up" (your state of consciousness).  My quotations from the interview are somewhat edited for brevity and to avoid some of Wilber's more technical terms – things I will address in a future post.

“What seems to happen at the very very highest stages of human growth and development,...those state experiences start to become integrated with the structures of growing up....Even if you look at Gebser's stages, which are stages of growing up - archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, integral.  When you're at one of those stages, those aren't a state of consciousness, they're not a direct experience that you have and you know you're doing it.

“So when you're at a magic stage or a mythic stage, you're actually at what we call 'structure' of consciousness.  Structures are much more like, say, rules of grammar.  Everybody who is brought up in a culture learns to speak that culture's language fairly accurately...They're following a large system of the rules of grammar of that language.  But if you ask almost any of them to write down all those rules that they are following almost none of them can do it.  Most people don't even realize that they are doing it.  If you're at a magic structure or a mythic structure or a rational structure you're following a whole set of rules, and that's telling you how to interpret the world.  But you have no idea you are doing that.  Ever.  I mean none.”

This collective lack of awareness has spectacular consequences.  None of the religions of the world incorporate stages of personal development.  They only vaguely recognize them indirectly, through behavior.  Otherwise, no one can articulate these linguistically behaving rules.  So the actual study and understanding of them by the general culture is minimal.  No one is aware of them and, unless they get exposed to it from, say, high school psychology, most people remain uninterested in learning about them.   

“That's why these structures of growing up really weren't discovered at all until about a hundred years ago.  It's very unlike the states of waking up.  Those go back a couple thousand years.  That's why none of the world's spiritual systems, anywhere, has any understanding of the stages of growing up.  And so both of these are important but they are relatively independent, and that is strange.  You can be advanced in waking up and still be at magic or mythic or rational, almost any stage of growing up.  But you can also be extremely advanced in growing up and never have had a satori or spiritual unity experience in your entire life.  You have no idea what that means.

“That's important.  Because it turns out that people will interpret whatever spiritual, waking up experience that they had, they'll interpret that according to the stage of growing up that they're at.  And that sort of changes everything.  And it also explains how some mystics had very profound waking up experiences  but they're still at very low stages of growing up.  They'll still be very ethnocentric.  If a Christian fundamentalist has one of these waking up experiences, and they do fairly often, they'll believe that you can only have that kind of unity experience if you accept Jesus Christ as your own personal savior...You might think you're having it but that's just demonic, it's confused.  So, that's a real problem.

“Because a lot of people when they find out about something like a Zen Buddhist practice or an awakening practice or enlightenment practice will understandably say 'Well, that's what the world needs.'  The world just needs that waking up experience and everything will be great.  But the problem is you can be at egocentric or ethnocentric or worldcentric or integral stage of development and have that spiritual experience.”

Wilber nails my past spiritual quest of attempting to find “the one true way.”  I was misguided.  But, more importantly, applying what he says means, for example, that enlightened people can own slaves and not realize that it is wrong because they are more awakened than they are grown up.  In fact, he specifically points out that every contemplative culture in history has allowed slavery in the past.  The two developmental schemes are exclusive, which creates all sorts of possibilities for human consciousness overall.  It creates a very rich sophistication of consciousness that can potentially be mapped to everyone on the Earth today.  How grown up you are in terms of your psychology has little to do with how “woke” you are in your spirituality and vice versa.  I listened to Wilber frame things this way and I was surprised by my reaction to it.  It seemed to fit, if not all, then a lot of my perspective.

His vision is breathtaking and surprisingly difficult to disagree with.  “It looks like modern human beings haven't be around more than half a million years.  That's a lot of time.  And it's pretty clear that human beings just continue to learn, about their environment, about themselves.  As each generation sort of carries forward, there are two things that you need to do.  This is sort of how I summarize the experience itself as unfolding.  That is that each moment transcends but includes the previous moments.  You are supposed to include what you knew before, but you're also supposed to transcend it or go beyond or add something new.  Human beings have continued to do that.  In some way they are aware of what they knew previously but they continue to add new stuff.  And that looks to be essentially an unending process.”

It seems hopeful that what we, as humans, do is, potentially at least, an unending process.  But, of course, hardly anyone actually sees things this way.  Personally, I find it to be useful to view human consciousness as unfolding through generations of human change.  I think it can  fundamentally explain a lot of things about humanity, from Love to the Anthropocene.  It seems so fundamental as to be undeniable to me.

“Historically, in the west, as we actually went from the medieval period where the average level of consciousness was mythic, 95% of the population saying they believed in Christian dogma, rationality started to emerge as a fairly significant cultural force starting around 1600, 1700, 1800.  You've got the whole rise of modern science, the whole western enlightenment, and all of these areas move beyond mythic orientation and started to introduce the rational orientation.  So they were transcending but including.  They were transcending, going beyond it.  All of that is just an example of the continuing creative edge of evolution.”

Wilber advocates that contemplative inquiry and scientific inquiry are both perfectly valid methods of human discovery.  Both are, in fact, necessary.  He does not discard rational science simply because he meditates (he has practiced Zen for decades).  So his evolutionary theory includes a lot of science, he was a biochemistry major after all: “Darwin's got a little different take on that.  Sexual selection meant that when it comes to sexual activity, males compete and females choose.  And that's still essentially right.  We find that throughout the species.  It does mean that females have an inordinately large determination on how evolution goes forward.  They're making the choices.  And us men are just fighting it out to see who gets to sleep with them.  Darwin believed in that and he believed in love and he believed in moral sensibility.  And those were important factors.  He actually felt that those last two were much more significant for human beings, certainly in terms of physiological unfolding.  It's almost certainly true.  What we find in the first hundreds of thousands of years that human beings were developing, is that they really were working on physiological changes, particularly brain changes, that would help a homo sapien species emerge.

“Starting about 50,000 years ago, after that physiological base had emerged, human beings continued to develop, but now with particular emphasis on their interiors...But it wasn't necessarily just genetic reproduction.  That hadn't changed that much.  Most evolutionary theorists, even into the 50's and 60's and 70's and even into the 80's, maintained that evolution as an actual entity pretty much stopped with human beings about 50,000 years ago...So, there really wasn't any reason to apply evolutionary theory to human beings.  Whenever somebody tried, it was branded as 'social Darwinism' and condemned.”

“My contention has always been, and it certainly would not be accepted by conventional evolutionary theory, is at there is selection pressure and an evolutionary drive...in the subjective components and objective components in the individual human being and in individual collective or group or culture, have evolutionary pressure.  And it certainly is, in part, to transcend and include.  And by include it means whenever an entity just emerges in this moment it has to fit in with the reality that's already there.  If it doesn't fit well it will tend to just get deleted.”

One of the foundations of Integral Theory is that each stage of development can be (though not necessarily, as we will see) inclusive of all previous stages.  The so-called leading-edge of evolution should include all previous stages of our evolution.  This requires a delicate and often difficult balance of the new with traditional components.  “Alfred North Whitehead also maintained that the way you get any universe going, you had to have at least three things.  He called it 'the one,' 'the many,' and the third one is what's interesting.  He said you have to have 'the creative advance into novelty.'  And he maintained that the universe displays that from the beginning.  Creative advance into novelty.  And what 'novelty' means is that is new, it never existed before.  And that's a pure act of creativity.”  The truly difficult part is truly including the traditional when you transcend it.  This is true whether you are talking about cultures or individuals.  The emphasis in this interview is “the evolution of consciousness in the age of Trump.”  Hence...

“Mythic, rational, and pluralistic or relativistic, those are the three major values in the western world.  Those three are at war and that's displayed itself in the culture wars.  And because culture is upstream of politics that's what's actually getting worked out in the political arena...That rational stage which did start to emerge during the western enlightenment on a cultural scale was relatively new.  Because rationality itself really was dealing with universal realities.  That's why virtually all the modern sciences started to emerge around 1600, 1700, and not really much before.  That's because, as a cultural force, this rational mode of thinking wasn't that common to culture at large.  Any sort of highly evolved person, Aristotle, Plato, someone like that, would of course have access to it.  But it wasn't a major cultural drive and the whole modern era emerged from the traditional era.  That's what we saw with the emergence of 'liberal philosophy.'

An interesting side note:  “So, in the French assembly at the time, those who believed in this new, modern, liberal philosophy just happened to sit in the left-hand seats in the French assembly.  And those who believed in the older, traditional, conservative types, they sat in the right-hand.  And they were just called the 'left' and the 'right' and that's where we got the terms.  The conservatives at that time wanted to conserve what was present.  That meant they were in favor of the way society already was.  They tended to support the monarchy.  They certainly had no objection to slavery.  They tended to adopt, wholeheartedly, mythic, traditional Christianity.  And these liberals started to question all of that.  And indeed that would be the impetus for the French and American Revolutions.  The rise of modern representative democracies.  The rise of modern science.  The rise of modernity itself.  For a couple of hundred years, those were the two major political trends.”

“In the 60's a very strange phenomena started to happen and it threw everything into turmoil.  The next highest stage began to emerge in a culturally significant way.  That was the relativistic stage of development...It wasn't just looking at multiplistic perspectives.  It looked at all of those and it differentiated the world into all sorts of multicultural situations.  But it still did not have enough cognitive capacity, it couldn't actually integrate them all.  It has all this multicultural diversity situation.  It by default said they are all equal.”

“Now, there's a problem with that.  That relativist stance, if you push it at all, if you make it extreme in any way, becomes a profound contradiction.  What you are saying is the one correct way to look at the world is by realizing there is no correct way to look at the world.  It is universally true that there is no universal truth.  Now my truth is universally true for everybody but none of y'all's truth is true for everybody, just mine.  Well, that was the problem.  That became ensconced in things like political correctness, it was especially associated with identity politics...It doesn't like any hierarchies at all.  It just won't order anything in terms of greater or lesser.  The problem with those values that deny hierarchy and think everything is egalitarian is that those values themselves only emerge after about six stages of hierarchical development.”

“Simultaneously, as the Left was bumping up, the traditional conservative Right, the enthnocentric conservative mythic stage, they bumped up a stage too.  So, in today's culture wars people on the Right are arguing for free speech and the leaders of the Left are not.  They aren't concerned with it.  They don't like it, for that matter.  So, you actually have these three value systems.  You have the traditional far Right, the base of the Right, they're enthocentric, patriotic, they want to make America great again.  Then you have the traditional liberals, worldcentric, but you also have the new Right that are actively arguing that stage now.  And the main difference in the old Left at that stage and the new Right is that the person on the Right thinks that the person's problems come from within.  They have the wrong value structure, they don't have a work ethic, they don't have family values.  They don't believe in God, whatever it is.  And the old Left believes it's society's problem, society is oppressive.  And then the new Left is multicultural.  They just talk about things like diversity and inclusivity.  These aren't values that the other two really talk about that much.  When somebody relativistic talks about multiculturalism, they don't really mean studying other cultures at all.  Most of them have no clue about what's going on.  They just mean you have to adopt my view of identity politics and if you don't I'll shut you down.”

“The problem is, as a leading-edge of evolution, that relativistic stage...has gotten increasingly extreme and is now almost perfectly self-contradictory in what it does.  Particularly problematic is in not understanding the difference between dominator hierarchies, which are all the bad things they say they are, and growth hierarchies which is how you get [to relativism, postmoderism] in the first place.  All hierarchies are considered dominator hierarchies and all of them are denied.  That is a disaster because what we are losing is that interior drive and understanding of actual development itself.” 

“[Enthocentric and rational stages] think the postmodern radical Left has gone insane.  They really just think they are saying things that are wildly idiotic, completely destroying western culture per se.  All stages have problems but [each of these stages] has problems with actually including other stages.  This is what that new relativistic stage has done.  If you think your view is so correct, you don't even have to talk to opposing views.  The most common thing we see at today's universities...protesters representing this [relativistic] orientation will actually try to shut down views.  They'll protest, they'll scream, they'll yell.  They won't let them talk.  People like Ben Shapiro that represent the political viewpoints of approximately 50% of Americans, these are taken as wild, radical, oppressive, patriarchic tyrants.  They just shout them down if they can.  [Relativism] is supposed to transcend and include, its supposed to have some sort of opening to it.  They're transcending and excluding, oppressing those earlier stages.  And that's a real problem.”

“The fundamental cause of culture wars, you can look at Left and Right through several different definitions, but one of the main ones is how they sprung from these major differences in stages of development...The three most dominant value structures are at each others throats.  Donald Trump came along.  One of the largest type of vote that he got were people that were simply reacting against political correctness.  83% of those of who wanted change voted for Donald Trump. 60% of those said he was 'unqualified,' 65% said he was 'mentally unqualified,' and yet they voted for him.  What they were doing, in part, is the fallout from the culture wars.  If you look at culture at large and you look for counter-forces to this major polarization, there's really not much out there that's doing that.  And the only thing that looks like its out there is a leading-edge tends to become a significant force in culture when about 10 percent of the population reaches that stage.  We had the western enlightenment.  Only about 10 percent were actually at that rational stage.  But once about 10 percent of the culture reach that stage, those values begin to seep and permeate the culture.  Those values became accessible to the culture at large.  It didn't mean that [previous stages] actually embodied those values, but you were open to it, you were more available to it.  And how that's playing out in terms of the political parties, the Left are trying to choose between [rational and relativistic] and it seems to go back and forth.

“What's been interesting about Trump, is that most of the leading-edge media and entertainment and universities are reflecting relativistic values.  Every major postmodern philosopher has argued that there is no such thing as objective truth, it's all relativistic.  And so truth itself has no meaning.  There are entire books on how science is no different from poetry.  It's all just the same.  Again, they didn't think their view of things was subjective, they thought their view was the only way to look at it.  When Trump came out and was so clearly reflecting that original hard-Right ethnocentric view or, at best, a kind of liberal, Wall Street rational, pro-profit, pro-business view, the one thing he wasn't doing was accepting any sort of relativist value...[As a result of Trump's election] what virtually every single major leading-edge media has done in the United States is re-embrace the notion of objective truth...which they should have from the start.  We know things we thought were true 200 years ago aren't true today and we know that.  There are still ways we can use evidence to give the best shot at truth at any given time and that's what truth means and that's not merely subjective.  So that's been very interesting, to see one of the main reactions to Trump, he got in in a sense by attacking relativism, and the net effect is that relativism is re-embracing some of the values it never should have rejected.”

This turns out to be a great summary of what Wilber argues in Trump and the Post-Truth World (2017), which I just finished reading.  Years ago, when I first followed Wilber, I frankly did not see much practical application in his writing.  Though unique, it was certainly indistinguishable from most everything else I was following and studying.  This YouTube video brought home the practical implications of his theories in a big way, motivating me to re-engage with him.

An even longer and more wide-ranging interview (this time conveniently divided up into 25-30 minute chunks) can be found on the Futurethinkers.org channel on YouTube.   There you will discover more on Wilber's concepts of cleaning up, growing up, waking up, showing up, second-tier consciousness, among other interesting stuff.  But you won't find a good overview of Integral Theory as elaborated in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality and A Theory of Everything.  I want to devote the next couple of blog posts to that subject as I have obsessively reacquainted myself with the theory.