GREAT BOOKSA Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber

April 2, 2013

[0:00:00]Jim: ... and welcome to our course on the Great Books where every two

months we take one of the great works of human literature both east and west and north and south and ancient and modern and spend two months studying them. As you recall, we started with Plato’s symposium in February and this month, we’re delving into our second great work with Ken Wilber on a brief history of everything. So I want to welcome Ken to the call and all of you who have joined.

Just to say a few instructional points, you’re all on mute so if at any point you want to ask a question or when I ask for questions or comments, just push any number on your keypad and we’ll recognize you. Also, I would just say that this call is essentially presentational in the way we’ve set up our Great Books course is that with this call, Ken in this case will be presenting and dialogue with Mark Ryan and Will Tago who I’ll introduce in a moment. Then the next month, we’ll have another 75 to 90 minutes where we’ll really engage in deeper dialogue after you’ve had the opportunity to digest this call, which is being taped and will be sent to you to download and listen at your leisure as you can over the next several weeks.

So let me say a few words about the importance of Ken Wilber to Ubiquity University because this is an unusually important call. I’ve said to the staff as we were preparing for this call that in many ways this conversation inaugurates Ubiquity University because Ken is our inaugural chancellor. He was invited to be our inaugural chancellor because of the extraordinary contribution that he has made to contemporary thought.

As we’ve been establishing Ubiquity as many of you know, we’ve really sought to think very clearly and philosophically what our first principles are. Because once those first principles are established, everything else is going to follow from those principles. So there has been a lot of very careful thought and I would say there are two real pillars upon which ubiquity is being established. One is the living universe and the importance of the living universe is really seen in historical context if you think of the founding of the renaissance education in Florence. The Florentines very self-consciously changed the basis upon which education

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was fashioned away from the medieval strictures of the church and the bible to the Greco-Roman civilization and the notion of man the measure and the primacy of human reason.

Ubiquity is very consciously moving away from the Greco-Roman civilizational predicate to that of the living universe and to the notion of not an inert material universe, but one in which consciousness and life and intention permeates everything that is. So that foundation led us very inevitably to integral thinking and practice. Because I think the singular contribution of integral theory, which has really been the creative genius of Ken, is to provide for all of us certainly for ubiquity and I believe human kind as we move into the next phase of our evolutionary development with a whole new theory of how we discern truth. Thereby it has given us I think a new epistemology, a new method to understand more deeply how we know what we know and the different ways that we can know and not rest upon a single predicate like the enlightenment did in terms of the scientific method and the primacy of rational thought. But to understand that truth comes from many different quadrants of reality.

[0:05:57]So in inviting Ken to be our inaugural chancellor, we’ve really made the determination to ground ubiquity not only in the living universe and everything that that implies but to ground it integral theory and practice. So as we launch our university more formally in the fall with our first courses as Ken and I have discussed over the last several months, you know, we’re seeing to make ubiquity integral and we’re seeking to make integral ubiquitous. So you’ll be hearing about holons and quadrants and all quadrants, all levels in many different aspects and terms of art that Ken has coined and profiled over the decades of his research into this matter as we begin to give shape to a university that we hope will contribute to the reinvention of education as we know it.

Now normally in these calls, I interact with the presenter but given the real extraordinary nature of this call as sort of ubiquities and wisdom university is now the wisdom graduate school’s formal introduction to integral theory, I thought it would be good to include Mark Ryan who’s the dean of academic affairs for the new university and Will Tagel who is the dean of the wisdom school of graduate studies. So they’ll be entering into the conversation in due course here.

But I wanted to just begin, Ken, by welcoming you and thanking you for abandoning all hope and entering into the gates of Ubiquity University as you have with such courage and basically to just ask you an opening question of just sharing with us what your pathway was in terms of discerning integral thought.

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Ken Wilber: Right. Thank you. Thank you for that introduction and I want to say how delighted I am to be part of Ubiquity and the exciting prospects that Ubiquity is bringing to education and the educational system. It really is revolutionary. It’s such an overused word but it really is a revolutionary approach to education. I think we’re all excited to be involved in it and it certainly includes all the people who are gracious enough to join us on this call.

So I’m going to just go ahead and give kind of a brief history of how I came up with the general outlines of integral theory. Mark, Will, Jim, if anybody has any questions at any time, just jump in, but otherwise I’ll just give kind of a little bit of an outline here of the overall theory itself and how I sort of came to present the thing.

It started, I was actually at Duke University in the premed program and I was there to be a doctor and found out after a year or two that I really didn’t want to do that. It wasn’t satisfying enough to my own creative drives. You just sort of learn stuff that was already known and it kind of struck me as a glorified plumbing job. So I was really interested in so called big questions, why are we here, who am I, what’s it all about, what’s the universe made of and so on.

[0:10:13]So I began this obsessive search through the world’s great thinkers east and west, north and south looking for an outline of how to answer those questions. I particularly started with types of what might be called therapeutic systems and if we count things like mystical spirituality and contemplation as therapeutic in the broadest sense, because I included those. So I was studying Zen and Gestalt and Jung and Freud and existential analysis and [0:10:57] [Indiscernible] and Daoism and all of these things and trying to figure out some way to put them together.

It was very irritating because in so many ways, they tended to disagree with each other and yet these were the systems that were there to tell me how to become happy. The more I looked at the, the more confused I became. So in addition to simply being unhappy, I was unhappy and confused. I figured that in order to get from the state of mind of unhappy to happy, I’d have to get from the state of confused to unconfused.

So I just continued trying to find some way that all of these different systems could have some portion of the truth because it didn’t make any sense to me that a human mind could produce 100% error. I sometimes say nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. So there had to be

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some sort of truth in each of these systems but they were so wildly different it was kind of outrageous.

So you look at for example Zen Buddhism and the way that you get sort of “happy, enlightened, awakened” in Zen is you transcend ego, you get rid of the ego, but in everything from Gestalt to psychoanalysis, you strengthen the ego so which is right. It was that type of really infuriating, lack of agreement among these great systems that represented the best and the brightest the world had to offer that really consumed me for several years. At the same time, I was also actually practicing various forms of therapy and I was practicing various forms of meditation and contemplation awareness and so on.

Finally, it hit me that these different schools weren’t all addressing the same thing, namely consciousness wasn’t just a single entity. That consciousness is more like a rainbow, there was a spectrum of consciousness. In other words, there were several levels to consciousness. Here I had really just stumbled on the classic great chain of being and the simplest form of the great chain is five levels, which is matter to body to mind to soul to spirit. The point was that each one of those levels has a different structure, a different function, a different type of truth. So the study of matter for example gives us physics, the study of body gives us biology, study of mind gives us psychology, the study of soul is theology and the study of spirit is mysticism.

So by basically coming up with a somewhat more sophisticated version of the great chain, the original version that I presented in the first book that I wrote called The Spectrum of Consciousness had about 8 or 9 levels. But the point is that each of these levels not only had a different structure and a different kind of truth and a different kind of function, but each of the different levels could go wrong, could get broken in different ways. In other words, there are different pathologies at each of these levels. The more I looked at those and then the more I looked at the different therapies, the more it became apparent that the different therapies were each addressing a different level in the great spectrum of consciousness. They weren’t all addressing just one level because the consciousness had much more than one level as I say 8 or 9 levels and therefore 8 or 9 pathologies and therefore 8 or 9 therapies.

[0:15:17]As a matter of fact, that fit very well. The major schools of therapy east and west lines up very, very well with this spectrum of consciousness. So I wrote my first book. I was actually I was 23 years old at the time and it took me something like three months to write and nine months to type and it’s such a classical story. It got turned down by 36 publishers and it’s

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still in print today and has been translated in close to 3 dozen languages, about 35 languages.

So that was sort of the start of what I would call an integral or holistic in the best sense of the word approach, which is namely that all of the different disciplines in a particular area that humanity is offered are true but partial. They all have some sort of partial truth that needs to be taken into account. So what we have to do is simply look at all the different disciplines and then in the sense of kind of reverse engineer what the universe would have to look like in order for all of those disciplines to have some sort of truth.

The first area that I did that in was with the therapy in the broadest sense. But then the more I looked at that, the more sort of little bothersome items started to come to the foreground. For instance in the traditional great chain and I’ll just use the five levels of matter, body, mind, soul, spirit, the human brain was thought to be just pure material and so the human brain would go on level 1 with the rest of matter. The feelings of a worm because those were the biology, the living and [0:17:34] [Indiscernible] prana, bioenergy, those belong on the second level. So the feelings of a worm were higher than the brain structure of a human and something is not quite right about that.

As one of the things that you’ve learned is that the great traditions going back from 2000 years, there are many, many, many aspects of those that were true at the time they were discovered and they’re still true today and they really need to be taken into account. But at the same time evolution has continued and new truths have emerged and actually new levels of consciousness have emerged. So some of the original mystical insights need to be updated because they’re still true but partial but the partial parts are out of date. There’s no way that the great sages for example could have known about dopamine and serotonin and neuroplasticity and the role that the brain plays in human experience and awareness. As a matter of fact, the earth was thought to be flat.

So I sort of started also looking at ways that a lot of some of the newer disciplines fit into this overall scheme. Although you could sort of squish them into the great chain of being, there is something that is not quite right about it. So as I began to look at all the various disciplines including things like ethnomethodology and anthropology and systems theory, and symbiotics and structuralism and phenomenology and all of these disciplines that had developed in more recent times, virtually all of them had a developmental or evolutionary component to them.

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As I looked at those, they all had these evolutionary stages that unfolded in nested hierarchies. Here at the beginning it’s very important to understand that there are two types of hierarchies. Because generally speaking postmodern thought hates hierarchies, feminism hates hierarchies. Most new age thinking hates hierarchies. But that’s because they’re confusing the two major types of hierarchies.

[0:20:34]One which is the bad type of hierarchy which nobody likes are called dominator hierarchies and those are classic ones like the caste system or systems of slavery or oppression or any of those. Those are bad hierarchies and nobody likes those and that’s not what we’re talking about. But the majority of hierarchies in the natural world are called actualization hierarchies.

Arthur Koestler actually invented a term for them called holarchy. It’s called holarchy because they’re made of holons and a holon is a whole that is simultaneously part of the larger whole. So atoms, whole atoms are parts of molecules. Whole molecules are parts of cells. Whole cells are parts of organisms. So a molecule is really a whole part. It’s simultaneously part of a larger whole. It’s also a whole in its own right.

Actualization holarchies are built out of holons and the one that I just gave atoms to molecules to cells to organisms is a classic actualization holarchy. That is also the evolutionary stages of unfoldment that aspects of the universe have undergone. Those are actual stages of evolution moving from atoms and then into molecules and then into living cells and then into multicellular organisms and so on.

So I started looking at these developmental sequences and all these different disciplines had these developmental sequences. Even if you include the great chain of being and realized that it’s in a sense a psychological developmental system, it turned out that as I started [0:22:54] [Indiscernible] all these different developmental models and development stages, they sort of fell into four categories. These categories were all really suggestively similar but they clearly just weren’t the same.

So if we looked at interior cognitive development for example and took it all the way back and made the assumption with Whitehead and Pearce and [0:23:26] [Indiscernible] and others that the universe is a living universe. That consciousness is present in all of its individual particles going all the way down to atoms, which have a proto consciousness or a proto feeling or what whitehead called prehension. So if you look at that developmental stream of consciousness starting with prehension and

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then it goes to sensation and then perception and then images and then symbols and then concepts and then rules and then meta rules and then systemic thinking. You look at that sequence and then you’d look at the sequence of individual structures that possess those as they unfold, and there we find things that indeed go from atoms to molecules to cells to multicellular organisms to organisms with a neural net to organisms with a reptilian brainstem like lizards to organisms with a limbic system like horses to organisms o the cortex like monkeys to organisms with a neocortex like tortoises and human beings. Those are parallel.

Each of those stages emerged together as correlates of each other. But clearly somehow they’re also –even though they’re in a sense the inside and outside of each other, they’re also not the same. There’s something different about them. Then likewise there were stages of development that also seem to occur in groups and so as we looked at how groups tended to evolve or emerge or unfold. Then we started to find in everything from plants and animals different stages of ecosystems up to human beings where different worldviews, different collective ways of viewing the world tended to emerge and evolve in a generally recognized sequence.

[0:25:51]Jean Gebser was one of the first to spot these worldviews as they unfolded in human beings and he gave them relatively simple terms, which were archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic and integral. So I actually started making lists of all these development sequences because somehow they were all referring to the same thing but somehow they would also differ and I couldn’t figure out how they were fitting together.

The great chain of being, which is one of those development sequences, because they were also the correlates, they went with the great chain in groups. Then they’re also correlates of each of the levels in great chain of the human body looked at in a scientific fashion. So that we had the reptilian brainstem in the human body and the limbic system and the neocortex and so on. Each of those emerged or correlated with a different level in the great chain.

So I was looking at all these oat one point and actually had over 200 of these development scales written out on those yellow legal pads. I had them spilled all over the living room floor and every day I just walked through the living room staring at these things going okay what is going on. It finally dawned on me that they all fell into four groups with no exceptions. There are four major groups that these developmental holarchies or evolutionary sequences were occurring in. These turned out

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to be really well recognized from different perspectives and for different reasons.

But the four groups were simply individual and collective and interior and exterior. So you put those two axes together and you get four boxes or you get four dimensions or four perspectives. You get the individual looked at from the interior and we could do that right now when we introspect and it basically is an I space that we’re looking at. That I space is a space of consciousness and that’s where things like meditation occurs. That’s where things like thoughts and emotions and feelings and all of the development sequences that work with those are occurring in that space.

When we write these down on a sheet of paper, just out of habit, it turns out that we put individuals on the top –basically we just make a cross and that gives us four boxes. So we have the two upper boxes which are individual and the two lower boxes which are collective. Then on the left side, the two left boxes are interiors and the two right-hand boxes are exteriors. So we have the inside and the outside of an individual and a collective.

So the inside of the individual is an eye space but we can also look at my organism, my individual organism from an exterior or third person in a set scientific way. Then it’s not composed of thoughts and feelings and emotions and so on. It’s composed of various systems, of bones to kidneys to lungs, the triune brain, a limbic system, serotonin, dopamine, insulin and so on. So that’s what the individual looks like from the exterior in an objective third person scientific mode. Of course that mode would become the dominating mode of scientific materialism. So that upper right quadrant which start out and go atoms to molecules to cells and then cells with the neural net and then cells with a reptilian brainstem and then cells with the limbic system and then cells with the neocortex human beings and so on.

[0:30:25]Then the interior correlates of those are going from prehension to sensation to perception to image to simple to concepts to rules to meta rules and so on. So that’s what you would get if you looked at an individual from the interior and if you look at them from the exterior. Then these also occur in groups or in collectives.

In the lower left, which is looking at a group from the inside and that means looking at its shared values, at its ethics, at its worldviews, cultural morays and so on. In other words the inner subjective dimension and that’s often referred to as culture or cultural networks and individuals

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always exist in some sort of cultural network and that includes language and semantic meaning and so on.

So that’s the lower left quadrant and in the lower right is those same groups can be looked at from the exterior again in the third person objective fashion. There we’ll find things like the techno-economic mode of production and those that evolutionary sequence there is it moves from foraging to horticultural to agrarian to industrial to informational. Those correlate with worldviews that are archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic and integral.

So all of a sudden all 200 of these developmental sequences fit into one of these four quadrants and the quadrants became very important because we can take for example a single thought that I might have and the thought might be something like it’s time to go to the grocery store. Well in the upper left or in the interior, the I space, I see that thought. I experience the thought along with any emotions and images and concepts that might come with it. But in the upper right looking at that same thought from the exterior, I don’t see experiences but I see bodily and brain states. So in this case, I’ll probably see a beta brainwave pattern with so much dopamine being released and mostly in the neocortex. So that is a completely different view than what that thought looks like from the inside or from the interior.

Then in the lower left, the inner subjective or the interior of the collective that I belong to and of course we belong to many collectives starting with families and then localities and then tribes, nations, planet and so on and each of those has a different culture and a different inner subjective background. In the lower left in a different culture, I would have a completely different language and so I’ll probably have completely different thoughts with different emotions and concepts. Meaning is context bound and my culture provides most of that context. So in Nigeria for example, they don’t even have grocery stores like we do so I have a completely different thought altogether.

Then if we look at that same thought in the lower right and look at for example different techno-economic base, if I lived in a different techno-economic base, right now we live in an informational culture those of us in the developed west. If I lived instead in foraging times then the thought would not be time to go to the grocery store. The thought might be time to kill the bear. So the actual type of thoughts that I’m having are also dependent upon the lower right quadrant.

[0:35:22]

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It turns out the lower right quadrant in some ways turns out to be so important and have such an impact on human beings that there is a constant attempt to reduce human interaction to the lower right quadrant. Just like there’s a constant tendency in the west to reduce the world itself to the upper right quadrant of just atoms and molecules.

The lower right quadrant is the quadrant of systems theory and so there are theorists like Carl Marx who will attempt to interpret all of human interaction as being caused by the lower right quadrant. This is one of the first things that we find. It’s something called quadrant absolutism because each of these quadrants have different phenomena in them and they’re not really different phenomena they’re just different ways of looking at the same fundamental phenomena. So we saw that we can look at the thought from the inside, from the outside, from an individual, and from a collective and each time we do that, we get a different view. We see something different about what is making up that thought.

So that becomes really important because each of the quadrants has different objects or different events. Each of the quadrants has different truths, different types of truths, different methodologies, different validity claims. Each of the quadrant has a different perspective so for example first person, second person and third person perspective. First person by the way is the person speaking. Second person is the person being spoken to and third person is the person or thing being spoken about. So right there are the quadrants. The first person I is the upper left or the interior of the individual. The second person you is part of the lower left or the shared culture, which is I share it with you making a we. So the lower left quadrant is a we space and a you space.

Then the right-hand quadrants are objects and so they’re looked at in third person perspective so they generally can be him, her, it, they, them and often are just referred to as it. So the scientific materialistic worldview for example reduces everything to the right-hand quadrants or the third person exterior view and looks at everything as an it lacking consciousness, meaning, value, emotions. Lacking all of the phenomena that you find in the left-hand or interior quadrants.

So you can look at virtually any discipline from art to law to psychology to history to anthropology and you’ll find at least two major schools of thought. One representing the exterior approach and one representing the interior approach. You’ll often find up to four different schools of thought, each one representing a different quadrant. Each of them thinks that their approach is the only correct approach.

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So when we say this now for example you can pick up the Journal of Consciousness Studies and half the articles are about how the first person approaches to consciousness studies are the only correct approaches. In other words the upper left quadrant, the I space is this is the only way to really approach consciousness. This consciousness is something that we know directly and immediately and in first person. So if we make a third person map out of it then not just removing us from the reality of consciousness itself. So only first person approaches are real.

[0:40:02]The other half of the articles are only third person scientific models are real. We would never know about dopamine and serotonin and so on if we hadn’t taken the third person objective experimental approach to studying the brain so the only real approach is third person. Now the integral approach if you say which of those is correct, the integral approach has both of them. Both of them are real and they cannot be reduced to each other nor can the different truths be reduced to each other nor can the different disciplines be reduced to each other.

In the upper left quadrant, we have things like psychology, aesthetics, spirituality, belief systems and experiences. In the upper right quadrant, we have physics, biology, chemistry, behaviorism, [0:40:55] [Indiscernible]. There is some degree of truth to all of those and neither of them can be reduced to the other. That goes the same for the disciplines in the lower quadrant and for the validity claims in the lower quadrants all four quadrants have different type of validity claim or what you have to do to prove something is true in that quadrant. All of them tell us something incredibly important about the world. Like I say this has been known for a long time, I, we, and it. It’s also self-culture and nature that’s also Buddha, sangha and dharma. It’s also the beautiful, the good, and the true. So these dimensions have been around for a long time. But the four quadrants show us exactly how they fit together and they show us why those different dimensions are there. Most importantly, they remind us that every time we take an approach to any phenomena or any topic whether it’s law or history or art, we have to include all four quadrants or we’re going to be leaving something very important out.

Now the same thing is true of levels. If we’re studying art for example, we have to look at how aesthetics shows up on all of the different levels of the great chain or simply there’s art of the material world, art of the living world, art of the mental world, art of the soul world and art of the spiritual world. We have to include all of those levels or we’re leaving something out.

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So sometimes, my approach to the integral vision is sometimes called the AQAL, which is short for all quadrants all levels. Those are the two of five fundamental dimensions all of which we have to include if we’re truly going to have a comprehensive genuinely holistic in the best sense of the world holistic not goofy and savvy but meaning generally comprehensive. It goes sort of without saying that when we look at today’s problems for the first time in history, virtually all of humankind’s problems are global and that means that only global thinking and global solutions will do anything to help with global problems. That means we have to take into account all quadrants and we have to take in account all levels.

So this kind of fundamental integral 101 as I continue to look at this and was now sensitized by the fact that there could be other dimensions so to speak that were kind of out there hiding, I began to look really much closer at the meditative traditions, east and west. Because previously what I had done in transpersonal psychology and what most of the theorists in transpersonal psychology started doing was if you look at virtually all of the meditative systems, east and west they too will have stages of meditation whether it’s the 8 limbs of Patanjali's yoga or the [0:45:02] [Indiscernible] pictures. The contemplative traditions worldwide have a general unfolding of meditative states as they get deeper and deeper and deeper and in a sense closer to the ultimate closer to reality.

[0:45:25]These are based on what are generally known as states of consciousness. States of consciousness the traditions generally give five natural states, which are waking dreaming, deep sleep. The fourth state in Sanskrit, fourth state is turiya and turiya just it literally means fourth and that’s actually the state of witnessing. It’s not so much a separate state as it is that ever present capacity for observing that is operating 24 hours a day and is conscious of everything that’s arising. So if right now if I said be aware of yourself, you look inside, you introspect and you say okay I’m aware of myself.

If you actually sort of look at that closely, you’ll realize that there are two selves that you are aware of. One is the objective self, the self that you see as an object and that you can describe because it’s made of all these finite faculties and qualities and characteristics. So you say well I weigh so many pounds, I’m this tall, I work as a doctor, lawyer, waitress, farmer, I own this car, I’m married, I have two kids, I’m etc., all the things that you tend to think of as yourself.

But then in addition to that objective self, there’s the observing self. There is the self with a capital S. There’s the witness. For the traditions

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this is the true self because first of all the objective self, the small self, the ego isn’t even a real self or a real subject because it can be looked at as an object. So it’s illusory, it’s a pretend self and we’re all caught in the case of mistaken identity. We’re not identifying with our true self, our original face, which is the pure observing self that is a self without any qualities at all. It’s timeless therefore exists fully in the present now moment. It’s space less and it’s therefore infinite. It’s unborn. It never enters the stream of time and is therefore unborn. It never leaves the stream of time and therefore it’s undying.

Zen says show me the face you had the face before your parents were born and that’s literally true. The observing self was present before your parents were born because it never enters time. As matter of fact, it was present before the big bang. It’s the discovery of this observing self, this witnessing self, this true self, this real self that’s the goal of the paths of the great liberation, the meditative and contemplative paths, east and west.

Some traditions add a fifth state because the witness to some degree is still slightly dualistic in that it’s separate from what it witnesses. So there’s a fifth state that is referred to as turiyatita and that means beyond the fourth and that is the state where the witness becomes one with everything that it’s witnessing. This is known as nondual or loosely referred to as unity consciousness.

So here, you’re no longer aware of the mountain, you are the mountain and you no longer feel the rain, you are the rain. You no longer see the earth, you are the earth. You no longer see the moon, you are the moon. You are one with everything that’s arising moment to moment to moment. That is a real and true condition. That is the condition that meditative paths help us awaken and help us become enlightened too.

So what became common in transpersonal psychology is to take most of the western developmental models, which we’re dealing with multiple intelligences and went up about 2/3 of the way up generally speaking what we would call the great chain. They didn’t go any higher.

[0:50:15]So we would take these meditative states and just stack it on top of the western stages so that we had a full complete spectrum that went all the way from matter all the way up to fully enlightened. That was kind of the way that we put eastern and western or more accurately western and contemplative because the west have several contemplative schools together.

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But there ended up being problems with that, not the least of which was that the highest of the western, generally speaking the western stages is that we’re about 2/3 of the way up the great chain. Only less than 1% of the population reached those stages and yet the percentage of the population that had mystical experiences, even the experiences of oneness in some polls were 60%-70%. So something was wrong because in developmental psychology you can’t skip stages.

So what we eventually found is that there’s a difference between the stages that western psychology was looking at and the stages the contemplative traditions were looking at. The stages contemplative traditions were looking at were made of states of consciousness and what the western traditions were looking at were made of structures of consciousness. Structures are simply patterns of mental structure that through which we see the world and interpret the world and experience the world.

So states on the other hand tend to be temporary and tend to be fleeting unless we actually train them. If we train them then thy become more permanent and wakefulness or consciousness itself learns to pass through all of the states including waking or growth state, dreaming or subtle state and deep form of sleep or causal state. Meditation helps an individual to become aware of all of those states. In other words, helps them to become the pure witness. Then if they continue meditating, it helps them to become one with all of those states.

Those states can be experienced at virtually any structure and so those structures that we’re running, one example we gave was archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral. You can be at the mythic structure of development and still pass through all of those states, all the way to unity consciousness. As a matter of fact, you can be at the mythic state and get transmitted as a Zen master because you’ve mastered all of the states of consciousness. But clearly there are structures above you that you haven’t mastered and that’s why one of Robert Kegan’s books who is a great Harvard developmentalist is called In Over Our Heads. Because there are these higher structures of consciousness that many of which are recent and have only recently emerged in evolutionary history. Yet not everybody has achieved those structures. So those structures and the truths that they contain and the worldviews that they contain and the higher morals and ethics that they contain are literally over our head.

So what the means for education is that not only do we want to help people with [0:54:29] [Indiscernible] training, which will happen whenever we give them virtually any sort of meditative or contemplative

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training, but we also want to help them train structures because it turns out that structures are how we grow up and states are how we wake up. We want to do both. Traditionally, education has only focused on cognitive intelligence and cognitive structures. It’s left out all the other developmental lines and states and lines are the next two dimensions of the AQAL framework. So in addition to quadrants and levels, we have states and we have lines.

[0:55:19]Lines were generally one version made popular by Howard Gardner was this notion of multiple intelligences. So that in addition to just cognitive intelligence, we have emotional intelligence, moral intelligence, spiritual intelligence, musical intelligence, mathematical intelligence, kinesthetic or bodily intelligence, values intelligence, and so on. This has a big impact and had already had a big impact on education because we realize that just training to get a high IQ won’t make a fully educated person. Of course Dan Goldman has made emotional intelligence quite well known and quite popular and he simply points out in his many books that emotional intelligence is a much greater predictor of a person’s success in job, in work and in relationships than is cognitive intelligence or IQ. So not only are we not training all of the intelligences, we’re training the wrong ones. So that’s why Jim says we’re not going to get caught in the Greco-Roman model, which basically trained rationality as its one and only type of knowledge.

So an integral approach is going to look at any phenomena at any discipline at any course of human study whether it’s law or art or history or psychology or sociology and it’s going to say we have to look at all four quadrants because it’s something important going on in all four of those quadrants and each of them has a different methodology, a different way of getting at truth in that quadrant. We want to look at all levels and that means that the traditional great chain of being and some of the newer levels that have evolved since the great traditions were first introduced. Those levels weren’t even present at that time and so we can’t rely just on the traditions to give us all of these levels.

We want to include lines and at least a half a dozen of the essential multiple intelligences that human beings have because all of these intelligences answer very important questions about life. Spiritual intelligence answers what is it that’s an ultimate concern to me. Emotional intelligence is what am I feeling and what is the other person feeling. Moral intelligence is of course what is the right thing to do, what should I be doing. Kinesthetic intelligence is simply a healthy and well trained body. We used to have physical education in this country, somehow it just dropped out. I don’t know what happened to it but it’s

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gone from our educational curricula. So we want to include some essential multiple intelligences. We want to include states and that of course comes from simply meditative training.

Then the last is types and there are dozens of different typologies and these are really open to whatever a teacher or a person’s particular choices are. In some cases individuals just use masculine and feminine in the way let’s that Carol Gilligan does where masculine types of thinking tend to rely on rights, autonomy and justice and female modes of thinking tend to rely on care, relationship and responsibility. Now Carol Gilligan’s fourth state in Gilligan does have a developmental holarchy her fourth stage is where in both men and women, the constrasexual attitude becomes integrated. So at her fourth stage, both men and women integrate masculine and feminine modes of reasoning. That’s another version of integral.

[1:00:03]The enneagram is a popular typology and many people will use that. Myers-Briggs is extremely well known, well studies, a lot of empirical data for. In some people we use that. All typologies are, are things that tend to remain the same as you move through the developmental levels. So if you are a five on the enneagram for example, you can attend to remain five as you move from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral. It can just give you extra information about yourself or ways that you can understand others in a deeper or more comprehensive way. So we include types as the fifth dimension again with a great deal of openness on that so that individuals can include whatever typology they want if they feel that it’s appropriate.

But particularly important are the other four dimensions because all of those are absolutely crucial and we can look for example at the culture wars in this country and they go on. You can read pages and pages of them in the op ed section of every Sunday newspaper in this country. There are three different value systems fighting with each other and it just turns out that those three value systems happen to be three stages of development in the values line. They happen to be the mythic or traditional, the rational or modern scientific, and the pluralistic or postmodern. Those are the three value systems that are at each other’s throats and one of them realized that each of them represents an important stage of human development. Each of them has a partial truth that they’re bringing to the table but none of them have the whole truth. The whole truth is all of them are an important ingredient in human development.

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So I mean that’s just a simple example of how taking an integral approach to fundamental issues that are facing us today can handle problems that otherwise are just baffling and certainly don’t have any obvious solution at all. But as we take this integral approach and as we look at all these dimensions that are present cross culturally and present universally, then we can start to get a much more comprehensive and a much more balanced and inclusive approach to our education and to our own understanding. It not only integrates science and religion but it integrates the major forms of human discipline from history to anthropology to morals to law to the various sciences and shows us how the universe indeed hangs together, how it is a one birth, a one song, a single reality. That’s a piece of information that is sorely lacking in our present modern day world of fragmentation and partiality and brokenness. It’s especially important as we start to face problems that are now global. Without some sort of global framework and global thinking, our global problems will simply remain that, problems.

So this is a simple introduction. I hope it made some sense for one of the things that we’re going to try to do at Ubiquity to be able to bring together the various forms of knowledge and disciplines that human beings have discovered going back thousands of years and making room for all of them in a sense that makes sense of everything. So that’s our hope.

Jim: Wow, Ken, thank you so much. That’s the most elegant and concise statement of integral I’ve ever heard. I think you’ve just laid out why Ubiquity is going to be founded on integral thinking and practice. Because as a global university, it’s incumbent upon us to be able to include every aspect as some fractal of the truth and --

Ken Wilber: Right.

Jim: With the multiple intelligences for example, we are building those into the very structure of our curriculum development. So that as a student goes through toward a BA degree, the different bodies of work will be broken into the four quadrants and the different lines and levels and multiple intelligence will be utilized as the student begins to explore what reality really is in its multiplicities of truth.

[1:05:33]Ken Wilber: Right. Exactly.

Jim: And your capacity to bring all that historically conflictual and partial truth into an integral whole I think is a major testament to your achievement. I

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believe that’s where the world is going to end up. If we can’t get the integral, we’re not going to make it ladies and gentlemen. [Laughs]

Ken Wilber: Yeah. [Laughs] Thank you very much for that and I certainly agree. I think we’re at a point right now where it’s almost as straightforward as integral or die because that’s just how on the edge we are.

Jim: That’s exactly right. So thank you. In the little bit of time that we have left, I’d like to bring in Mark and then Will to perhaps a little bit more on the mystical aspects and the chain of being. So Mark, why don’t you take it from here?

Mark: Okay, Jim. Well bless you, Ken. That’s such a breathtaking vision and so generous. You know, just somebody who’s instinctively pluralistic and I appreciate the way it makes [1:06:57] [Indiscernible] such a different perspective. But unlike a simple, [1:07:01] [Indiscernible] it really gives us leads on how such things can put together and not simply be isolated perspective that aren’t really the way that these relationships [1:07:14] [Indiscernible].

Ken Wilber: Right.

Mike: I’m so excited about how this can enrich the discussions with the wisdom graduate students, this particular great book [1:07:27] [Indiscernible] is of course taught what was the wisdom university and we’re calling it [1:07:36] [Indiscernible] graduate studies within Ubiquity.

Ken Wilber: Right.

Mark: I have some questions about that, the enrichment that -- maybe I’ll leave Will for the moment because prior to that I just like to follow up on one thing thinking here as an educational administrator really embarking with your model on a pretty radically different form of education. We’re now thinking about how that can be applied and integrated if you will at the undergraduate level. It’s been certainly going to inform our own thinking about the kind of education we impart.

Ken Wilber: Right.

Mark: Certainly it will drive how we design what we’re doing. But then another element that we’re having some questions about is how thoughtfully can we introduce the theory to students from throughout the world who may be quite young perhaps 18 or so and who have on their minds simple survival in the world --

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Ken Wilber: Right.

Mark: --and getting a job. They won’t have the kind of background in the different fields that you are in fact integrated. So I’m wondering if you can give us any guidance there about how we perhaps briefly because we do want to get into these more mystical questions as well but about how we might prevent what this very profound outlook to very young students of whether it’s appropriate to that.

Ken Wilber: Right. Well I’ve had questions of that myself and so it’s something that I’ve followed closely over the years. I continue to hear things like well we just published an article in the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice by a high school teacher in Hong Kong. He started a course that began on the very first day teaching the quadrants. He said the students got it immediately and then he would introduce the other dimensions sort of one at a time and always with keep an eye on pointing out to the students how each of these dimensions are something that are in their own experience right now.

[1:10:18]I think that’s important because all five of these elements quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types are something that you can experience in your own experience at any given moment. So by pointing that out, and by giving different examples, he was able to introduce the model and he said that the kids just absolutely loved it. So he started talking to other teachers at the high school and they had one of their monthly where everybody all the students get together in the gym and discuss issues that are up. So one of their get-togethers he went out o and the gym floor and drew out the four quadrants. Then he explained them in 15 minutes and everybody got it and he said okay now we’ve got some questions that we’re going to ask you.

It had a whole series of questions, one of them for example was what of the quadrants, which quadrant do you think this high school has done the best in teaching you. Virtually 80% of the students got up and went over and stood in the upper right quadrant so and others they were standard, objective, scientific you know, stuff. Then he said okay which quadrant would you most want to learn about. 90% of them got up and stood in the upper left quadrant. They wanted to know about I. They wanted to know about interior. They wanted to know about what made themselves tick. They didn’t want to know atoms and chemistry and biology and all that stuff.

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So he actually created a second course which was for seniors. This version was for ninth graders and he said they got it but then he created a second one for seniors, which went into it in even more depth and he said about ¾ of the kids that took the first course and have taken the second course. I think the secret here is just always to keep it simple don’t introduce more elements than you have to and make a point of showing how each of these elements are something that they can experience right now.

So when you’re talking about multiple intelligences for example, then if you say okay cognitive intelligence is what happens when I ask you 2+2=4? Everybody want to do that? Okay how does that feel. That’s cognitive intelligence. Now what about if I ask you how you feeling right now. Okay that’s emotional intelligence. Now how about you and a friend of yours are fighting over who should get the last piece of cake at lunch and the first person has already had two pieces of cake and you haven’t had any, what’s the right thing to do? And have them experience that. So okay that’s moral intelligence.

So the point is in each of these, there’s a way that they can experience it and you can do the same with states as well. I mean, you know, Otto Scharmer has got this thing called a You Process that’s become fairly popular. As I looked at it and I actually talked with him about it in an interview, I said you’re just dealing with these three major states of waking, dreaming, deep sleep. The first step deals with waking and then the second step deals with dreaming and then the third step takes you down into formlessness where anything is possible. Then the next step is you through creative will bring forth what you think a solution would be and then the next step is now you give it form and substance and color and texture and then the last step is back to waking growth state and now you’re bringing it into existence. You actually build it or create it or whatnot. He said, you know, I’ve never thought about it but that’s exactly right.

So all of these can be experienced and of all of them, probably the quadrants are the best place to start because they’re easy and they’re simple and they cover so much ground. It also counteracts so much reductionism because if you look at most of the reductionistic systems, they’re all reducing something to just one quadrant. So idealists are reducing everything to upper left and the postmodernist reduce everything to lower left, all knowledge is socially created. Scientific materialism reduces everything to upper right and whole systems reduces everything to lower right.

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[1:15:31]So all of those are important. All of those have very important truths and every single one of them is partial. Every single one of them covers so to speak a fourth of the universe. So just even learning that not only helps the kids to orient and see how things fit together but it helps them spot reductionism in any of other courses that they might be taking.

Mark: Splendid.

Jim: Thank you. Will, do you want to enter here?

Will: Sure. Can you hear me okay?

Jim: Yes.

Ken Wilber: I can.

Will: Okay. Yeah, good. Ken, thank you so much. Your cosmic map making and cosmic storytelling today is really beyond breathtaking, it’s more breath giving so thank you.

Ken Wilber: Bless you.

Will: Yeah. In my own journey, I began practicing psychotherapy 40 years ago after having my roots and beginning in tribal spirituality. I really found great help in your writing eventually about the ascending and descending currents within what might literally be called an evolutionary spiral.

Ken Wilber: Yeah.

Will: You know, as a depth psychologist, I found myself more inclined to the descending current.

Ken Wilber: Right.

Will: After I had an ascending current with meditation and [1:17:21] [Indiscernible] and

Ken Wilber: Right.

Will: Buddhism and Christian mysticism. So I began drilling down as depth psychology tends to do.

Ken Wilber: Yeah.

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Will: Eventually you know, drilling through several basement floors in myself and with my clients and so on, I reached like the place where I started and mainly more deeply connected natural mysticism.

Ken Wilber: Right.

Will: [1:17:57] [Indiscernible] elders at the time to teach me, I found interestingly enough that they were equally – well not all of them of course but that several crucial teachers were equally facile with nature, deity, formas and nondual mysticism and particularly were adept at turiyatita in the sense of not just observing the mountain or witnessing the mountain but --

Ken Wilber: Right.

Will: --being one]. So I’m just wondering, you know, where you are these days in some sense I don’t know if you think this is a fair statement but it appears there there’s a kind of a tendency toward the ascending with a denigration of the descending and wonder how you might respond to that?

Ken Wilber: Well yeah and I think your story is a classic example of why both ascending and descending are in a sense equally important. Because one of the problems even though the traditions tend to arrange the states from waking to sleep to deep sleep to turiya to turiyatita. It doesn’t mean that if you’re – at least in my opinion it doesn’t mean that if you simply are remaining in causal which means completely ascended without any manifest universe, with no Gaia, no nature, no nothing. That to me is in a sense no state to be happy about. It is of course in the [1:19:58] [Indiscernible] tradition the ultimate goal is to get into a state of pure nirvana, which means pure, unmanifest, formless extinction.

[1:20:11]The first person to criticize that extensively was himself a Buddhist namely [1:20:18] [Indiscernible]. He was the one that essentially worked so hard to show that nirvana and samsara are not two. So that mean that in essence your own witness and the world of nature should be not two. Ascending and descending should be not two. You also in the course of both of ascending and descending there are different types of important truths that you run into. The whole path of descent as you so rightly point out is so important in what we just sort of generically call therapeutic endeavors because the entire individual and collective shadow and all sorts of disowned and repressed material is hidden down there. The ascending currents despite what they say really don’t get at

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that material and in some cases can make it worse actually because they’re getting in the practice of [1:21:33] [Indiscernible], I’m not this, I’m not that . So they get more dissociative and even split the shadow off more by just identifying with it more. So there’s an extremely important set of truths and practices that the descending paths bring.

So even though if I lay out the state, kind of lay them out in that general order just because that’s what the traditions do, my whole sense about it is that if you’re really going to be mystically oriented, there’s something important from each of those states that ought to be at least looked at and if possible experienced to at least some degree. That certainly includes nature mysticism. So I am no fan of those higher states just because they’re listed as higher. I think they really have to be integrated with the whole descending current in its fullness because there’s just too much good stuff hidden down there. There’s just too many treasures that are “in the basement.”

The ascending paths like I say no matter what they say, they really don’t get at that stuff, they really don’t. So I’m all in favor of trying to get the best of both of those currents together because they’re truly important.

Will: Yes, thank you and I look forward to exploring this with you further. Sometimes, I’ve said we have to be descend in order to ascend particularly in this particular turbulent era where the natural order is disturbed as it is. And we have to really connect at that deeper level in order to ascend to the solutions level that Einstein mentioned. So I think I’ve heard enough for today but I really appreciate your interest. By the way, I think some of the most moving aspects of your writing have come and I think about the 90-mile an hour [1:24:10] [Indiscernible] that came to you during a period of grief and I think about the rain on the roof on so on.

Ken Wilber: Thank you very much. I really appreciate that.

Jim: I think this is probably a very good point to conclude our call. We’re just about at the end of our session and it feels the right time for closure. Ken, I really thank you and Will, I think you called it. I think this call was beyond breathtaking, it was breath giving. You’ve inspired us all and I can’t hardly wait Ken to be working with Clint and others on your staff to really embed everything that you’ve described over this last 90 minutes into Ubiquity. So that our students can come out of our process of learning literally new creations with the whole new way of viewing the world beyond reductionism and beyond this dichotomy between spirit and matter. But really --

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[1:25:22]Ken Wilber: Right.

Jim: --personify what a living universe means when consciousness and matter are fused into one thing.

Ken Wilber: Exactly. Well it’s my pleasure and an honor to be working with all of you seriously. I really do think that ubiquity is offering I’ll say it again a truly revolutionary approach to transformational holistic integral education. That we’re at the point now where really any other kind of education deforms the human being more than forms them. So I am delighted to be part of this exciting experiment in how to carry this forward into tomorrow.

Jim: Well thank you and I will just conclude by saying that this was just one taste of Ken. Starting on the 22nd of May we’re going to have a six-week teleseminar where over that whole six weeks 90 minutes every week, Ken and his associates will be laying out in more comprehensive detail the full spectrum of integral theory and practice.

Ken Wilber: Thank you.

Jim: Thank you all.

Ken Wilber: Okay. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Mark: Thank you very much.

Wil: Goodbye.

[1:26:43] End of Audio

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