KEN WILBER interviewed by RAQUEL TORRENT- Part II -October 2016

SECOND PART OF THE INTERVIEW TO KEN WILBER  ON OCTOBER 2016

Interview  & Transcription  by Raquel Torrent with questions from Integral European Community

5)  RT:   What's your vision on Ecosophy?

KW:   It is a quite essential pluralistic level of development.  Now, there is of course an Ecological view at Second Tier but it is much more new holons and above all is holoarchical unlike green which is a flat land.  Green is the Great Web of Life where all strands are equal.  But that doesn't work because each higher stage of Evolution has fewer number of holons, a fewer number of entities or things on it than the previous stage. So if you go from atoms to molecules, there will always be fewer molecules than there are atoms. Always. Molecules include atoms. When you go from molecules to cells there will always be fewer cells than there would be molecules, as always cells include molecules. It's the same with stages of development. An Ecological System is a whole range in a holoarchical fashion and so the higher stages of the Ecological System are smaller and certainly in terms of numbers.  One of the principles of Evolution is that at the higher stages there is more depth and less span. A flat land completely erases the value of depth or richness of significance.  It's all completely wiped out.  If you actually take the Great Web of Life seriously and all strands in it have equal worth, then you have to say every atom in existence is equal to a Siberian tiger.  So, kill one atom, kill Siberian tiger, it's the same, ... no difference ¡  It's clearly not right ¡  A human being with HIV virus produces a billion HIV viruses a day, so if each one of those viruses is equal, the same worth as a human being;  then the HIV virus is a billion times more valuable than a human being.  And even Ecologists would say, "wait a minute, a deer is worth more than a single virus".  It cannot be the same. And then you say "well kill this virus, or should I kill this deer?",  Oh, kill the virus, of course ¡  A single bacteria is not worth the same as a gorila for many good reasons that you may have.  Should I kill the bacteria or the gorila, who goes first? Well, kill the gorila, it's the same. It's a horribly confused viewpoint but that's esencially what Ecosophy is a flat land Great Web of Life and it doesn't understand its developmental evolutionary dimensions of depth. Teal does. All Teal Systems of Ecology have that understanding and take that into account.

6)  RT:  What do you think then about the current debate about Specism related to the importance of one specie upon other?

KW:  The way it's normally taken in an extreme fashion namely when saying it's no difference in the value of any specie over another, is exactly to commit this flatland falacy that we were talking about. Because if that really is the case then we could say that a specific species of bacteria (S. Coly)  is worth exactly the same as the species of chimpanzees.  And we can destroy a whole species of chimpanzees and is not worst than destroying a whole species of Staphilococus, for example ¡  This is categorically confused ¡ First thing is that they don't really believe it ¡  They're wiping out thousands of members of their own species just by their own existence.  If they really believed it they would kill themselves and remove themselves from that kind of murderous activity.  We have to be careful though because to simple say that there is this Holoarchy of Evolution that transcend and include the lower stages (so that organisms transcend and include cells, and cells transcend and include molecules and molecules transcend and include atoms).  That's true that each higher stage is more inclusive but notice that the lower stages are ingredients of the higher stages.  So in some ways even if you have certain overall species or holons or certain types of holons (even if they're lower in the Holoarchy) doesn't mean you can get rid of them.  So you can tell what is higher or lower in a hierarchy by just asking what happens if I destroy everything at one level?  How does it affect the levels above it and below it? So, just using atoms, molecules and cells for instance.

If that's a real hierarchy and you destroy one level, then you destroy all the levels above it and none of the levels below it, because the levels below it are ingredients in it and the levels above are not ingredients to them.  If you destroy molecules, all cells and organisms are gone. But not the atoms. They're still there. If you go up and you destroy all cells, organism is gone but not molecules are destroy, not atoms. They still exist.  So, even the fact that higher stages are more inclusive doesn't mean that you can get rid of lower stages.  This is the basis of Integral Ecological understanding. We can claim both: that certain holons are higher and at the same time that if we destroy the lower, we will destroy the higher. And it will ¡ So, we can handle that paradox easily but the flat land can't as they just say that everything has an equal value and you cannot make any judgments or decisions at all.  All species are the same and you have no right to move at all.

If we destroy animals, we destroy ourselves. And we're killing animals left and right. Entire animal populations. It's disastrous ¡  Even if humans transcend and include those holons, that doesn't mean that we can simple get rid of them or mistreat them.   It's just the opposite. We have a moral obligation to treat them fairly, so we can establish a very profound moral sensibility without having to reduce everything to that same flat land of values. That's a relativistic, pluralistic, postmodern nightmare.

7)  RT:  The idea:  "everything is perfect as it is", don't you think that could induce  us to adopt a passive and lazy attitude in life?

 KW:  We have to be careful here because there is a difference in the value structures of Waking Up and Growing Up. Waking up deals with realizing Nirvana; realizing ultimate Reality.  But there's still Samsara ¡  Now for early Buddhism you just try to get off the Samsara altogether. You're gonna get in Nirvana which is a complete state of extinction, meaning that is a formless, unmanifest featureless reality.  No desires, no self, no ego, no things, no events, no time, no space... nothing. Radical nothingness.  But Mahayana Buddhism comes along and says "wait a minute:  Emptiness is not other than Form, Form is not other than Emptiness;  Nirvana is not other than Samsara and Samsara is not other than Nirvana.  And they're not two. They're not dual. Ooooops ¡  Then we have to look at Samsara and in Samsara we have these relative stages of growth and development, so NOW we have to combine the understanding of Absolute Reality, with that understanding of Relative Reality.  These are two aspects of the overall REALITY.   So, when we get a taste of Absolute Reality, and that's the ground of everything that exist, and in that ground everything is radically equal. Everything is radically the Great Perfection. And this is a profound REALIZATION.  It's the highest realization human beings can have. And in that realization Adolph Hitler and Mother Theresa are absolutely identical. No difference¡ But in the relative realm; in the manifest Samsara, world of meaningless and multiplicity there are great differences.  There are differences between good and evil; a difference between helpful and unhelpful; a difference between progress and stagnation and we undergo a relative growth and development through those stages.  And in that relative realm Adohp Hitler and Saint Theresa are not only not the same but if you're actually in the world with   Adolph Hitler,  the correct response if you get a gun, is to blow this creature out, even though he's a perfect manifestation of the divine ¡  We have to get both of those in mind, so if you are saying "Oh, everything is the same, everything is equal, and you're actually coming from a Waking Up state,  that's fine;  but you still have to take that realization into the relative world and there everything is not the same, everything is not equally wonderful. Somebody at an ethnocentric, racist stand is not the same as somebody at a worldcentric, all inclusive stands that treat people fairly regardless of race, color, sex or religion.  That is a higher set of stands than an ethnocentric, racist, sexists stands. It's categorically different. And if you don't keep that in mind, you're not helping¡ You're hurting the world. So, these are both important, and we want both Growing Up and Waking Up.  The problem comes when we have one or the other.

8)  RT:  What would you then tell Cipher (from Matrix) who even though has been liberated from unreal world, chooses to come back to the simulation of Reality just for pleasure?

KW:  There's an old proverb that humans have: "Where ignorance is bliss,  tis folly to be wise" and it is a common fact that human beings have and it is one of the reasons that we have to sort of this worldwife Mythology about a primordial paradox that we are all in. Somehow one day, we wake up and we have fallen. Something horrible happened. And now we hurt, we're in pain and suffering and so on. It turns out that there are two different paradises.  There is a paradise in absolute Nirvana, and there is a paradise in relative Samsara.  Unfortunately we get those mixed up and that's a nightmare¡  So what happens according to most of the world's wisdom traditions, the Spirit originally created this Universe and in doing so it went out of his itself and stepped down and created less conscious and less blissful less joyful entities and so it went from Spirit, to Soul, to Mind, to Body to just the insentient matter and then the Big Bang occurred and the matter of the Universe blew into existence.

Each of those levels had forgotten its higher level, so this fact of forgetting is part of the stepping down. And so in the Big Bang there was just matter, no living bodies, no conceptual minds, there were no luminous souls and the Spirit wasn't so conscious. It was not aware. It was all unconscious. All embedded in material world. And that's Involution. That was the going out of the Spirit in its Primordial Perfection all the way down to the lowest level possible.  That was still Spirit but it was the lowest level of Spirit, just as low as you can get. So now that Involution had occurred, Evolution could happen. And then it's said that evolution went for several billion years until living bodies emerged and in several years more,  then minds emerged and then souls started to emerge and so on. In that huge overall scheme of absolute to relative, we can imagine that anything in the relative universe was once the Spirit prior to the Big Bang or prior to involution itself.  So in that sense a human being was absolutely one with Spirit before it even showed up as a separate human being.  By the time that's happened is already fallen into a relative realm. So what it's in that relative realm starts out and moves from a pre-rational, to rational into trans-rational stages of development. Those pre-rational stages are subconscious to self conscious to superconscious. The subconscious stages are just that.  They're unself reflexive, so they don't self conscious to suffer or they don't self conscious ponder their separation, their alienation, their pain, all that. It's just a blissful infancy childhood without worrying about the world and all the things that can go wrong.

Somewhere around adolescence, rationality comes forth and the separate egoic self sense emerges and all of a sudden we can feel alienated and separated and torn and all that.  We don't remember always feeling like that and so we think the earlier was a complete paradise. And now is a fall from that paradise. But actually it wasn't a trans-rational paradise it was a pre-rational subconscious.  So it is not something that I want to recapture, as I don't want to be unconscious again, be merged in my own infancy. But humans frequently confused those two. They confuse the absolute oneness with the relative stages of pre-rational fusion. This is why universally we have this Primordial Eden and we've all fallen down from that Eden. I wrote a book where I say that we actually have come "Up from Eden" and in that was a relative fall in that world.  But that world itself was already fallen from the Absolute. Is not something that happened in that relative world.  Is something that happened in order to get to that relative world in the first place and to get away from absolute Oneness. And we can rediscover that absolute Oneness. That usually starts to happen after we're rationally self conscious or we've awoken to higher stages. 

So Cipher (from Matrix) wants to go back to being pre-self conscious, he doesn't want to know about it. But he's not discovering Nirvana when he does that, he's discovering his own pre-rational, sub-conscious, unreflective stay of emerging because in reality he cannot reflect on anything but himself. That's his ignorance and that's his bliss. Is folly for him to be wise.

9) RT:  A person that has suffered from the bad actions from Andrew Cohen considers that  being an important issue, the Integral Community would love to receive your advice on what it represents to be hurt by a spiritual teacher who was expected to be trustful , loving and devotional yet broke their amazing trust, ignored them and plans to keep on going by doing the same to other vulnerable unsuspecting and trusting students.  What's your understanding on this matter and specifically, do you agree and support Andrew Cohen to restart teaching or not.

 KW:  The history, certainly in the United States and I think we see a fairly similar thing in Europe, in the United States started in the 60's we had a large influx from Eastern traditions.  And what these Eastern traditions brought that was absent in Western Spirituality?  It was a profound sense or possibility of Enlightment or Awakening or Waking Up.  It's true that there were schools of Spirituality in the West that were Contemplative, Mystical Christianity and Mystical Judaism, Kabbalah and Hasidism, but relatively speaking Western Spirituality was from the path of Growing Up and it was a mythic literal narrative.  So Moses really parted the Red Sea;  Lot's wife really was turned into a sack of salt; God really rained frogs on the Egyptians and Christ really was born from a biological virgin. It's a literal mythic stage of growing up. And that's basically the fundamental type of Modern Spirituality that the Western world had ¡  And increasingly educated adults found all that just impossible to buy and as a matter of fact Western Enlightment itself found that impossible to buy.   

There was not a single culture that didn't believed in God of some sort. There's not a thing like an atheist tribe. It was not a bunch of indigenous people that were agnostic, where we could ask them "Do you believe in God?" and they would respond "Well, we're not sure if we believe or not believe.  So all our minds are just open".  No, they all believed in a volcano Spirit or some kind of a Nature Spirit or in the Wind Spirit.  So God was everywhere until the Western Enlightment claimed that God is dead ¡  And what they meant was that the mythic God is dead.  There was another type of God, which is the Spirit of Waking Up and that wasn't a mythic literal narrative which you have to believe all of these myths or you burn in hell forever¡ That was a direct, immediate realization in consciousness that you're one with the ground of All Beings.  You are one with the Spirit and the entire universe arising moment to moment. This is your true Self, your true being. It's everything that's arising moment to moment. It's a direct immediate fully conscious awareness. It's not some mythic believe system or some magic practice.  So that was Enlightment, that was Waking Up.  We didn't have very much of that before. So as these Eastern teachers came in and they were Zen Buddhists, Theravada Buddhists, were Vedanta into the Taoists and many more.  And all of those had versions of Waking Up and that's primarily what they offered and they just blew westerners away ¡  We just couldn't believe it ¡ 

What we did realize is that in addition to that Waking Up path, there's a Growing Up path and those Spiritual teachers that were coming over here and were highly advanced in Waking Up weren't always advanced in Growing Up ¡  The backgrounds where they were coming from were often mythic, ethnocentric, and so that's where they were.  So we had this really strange conflict, because we had these Eastern teachers that were very high in Waking Up and not that high in Growing Up. Their own students were higher than them, not even in amber, they were usually in  green.¡  They were two stages higher in Growing Up than their teachers, but they had no Waking Up experience at all ¡¡¡ And so they were listening to the teachers' talk and they liked what they where hearing as it seemed like unbelievable wisdom but in the other half, the teacher was homophobic, authoritarian, sexist and racist. It was saying something wonderful but his doings were weird. So we had this horrible conflict and is still an issue now, because when you go to a spiritual teacher and you want a Waking Up transformation from them and that's all you're tracking, you're not going to pay attention to their Growing Up. If you do,  you're going to see their Shadow elements and their moral elements, and you have their emotional intelligence and you have their social intelligence and none of those are increased by simply Waking Up, as waking up doesn't make those better.  This is something that we only learnt a decade or two ago. So that's what we have,  and we see that in a whole strand of Buddhist teachers in America.  Probably the typical zen master that came from Japan were caught in some sort of scandal involved in sex or power or money.  They came from a Japanese culture that was very conformist, very mythic very ethnocentric and they hit the shores of LA where they found free sex, get all the money and run and do anything you want, no rules and they had no bloody idea what to do with all that and they got caught up in that.  And so we had all this problems in our most recent teachers too, including first and second generation Western teachers because they didn't know that we have both Growing Up and Waking Up and we need to do good in both of them.  And when you only take care of either one, it's a disaster¡  It's not a strong term; it's a disaster ¡ 

We've had various teachers that have gotten in real trouble because of all of the above, and this include people like Mark Gafni, people like Andrew Cohen.  I'm generally taken to be incorrect just by being a total supporter of Marc Gafni and I am not.  I was the first fairly well known leader as a matter of fact that removed Marc Gafni from any positions at Integral Institute at all. And I did that a decade ago. And he hasn't come back. I think he's made progress, I do. And that's a whole another story when addressing Andrew Cohen.  Andrew was somebody that had a quite profound waking up experience with his teacher Poonja and it was a close disciple of the great Ramana Maharshi that made a direct transmission to Poonja and Poonja did the same with Andrew.   Andrew somehow and in many ways,  made that available to students. At the same time Andrew had on his growing up side some serious shadow issues. He had a core part of his individual self at a very mythic rigidly domineering hierarchical stage of development. Andrew himself was fairly  knowledgeable of my work and seems that he agreed with it. He reflected into his own being many integral terms and he sort of suspected that he had this problems but they all came ahead several years ago when his senior students collectively rebelled against his teachings and they just basically started leaving him. His whole organization felt apart completely.  All of the suffering that people had experienced under Andrew over the past ten or fifteen years just came pouring out and it was overwhelming for Andrew.  We had been fairly close and I know most of the people that were around him  in the various areas. I know Marc Gafni well, I knew Andrew well and so we continue the talk as this was going on. Andrew came to a point where he strongly saw his self and he said this himself. He had a strong part that was at the mythic stage of development being very authoritarian and very domineering.  He had a strong shadow element that was very narcissistic.  That's how he came to see his problem and I think that's very accurate and that's just exactly right. Waking up won't make those better ¡¡¡ It doesn't ¡ You have to take care of your growing up stuff in its own terms and its own techniques and its own discipline. And growing up won't produce a waking up experience and waking up will not produce growth.  As a matter of fact this stage of growing up we're at determines how well do we interpret our waking up. So if we're at an ethnocentric stage of growing up and we have an awakening in the Spirit, we will still interpret it in very ethnocentric terms.  We will interpret it in racist terms or in sexist terms or a particular nationality  or a particular path as there is one and only true path and everybody else is wrong. There's a book named Zen at War and I always mention it as an example because is taken to be done by great Zen masters but they're talking about something like war and they have prejudices and very ethnocentric opinions. So it is clear that it's not a world-centric or integral stand and they are not too high in their growing up space.  Andrew had had that problem.  He intellectually, thought in sort of Integral terms but his sense of self, his center of gravity, had large components of the same.  It was stuck at mythic and had very large shadow elements.  

You can make a case about him continuing his teaching or not for both Marc Gafni and Andrew Cohen.  On the negative side you can say:  "well a zebra cannot really change his stripes".   Gafni is a so called "sexual predator" and you can't change that he's always going to be exactly that.   Andrew is an authoritarian hierarchical narcissist and you can't never change that either.  On the other hand you can argue "Well both of them were put through several years of hell" When they were called on their issues, they were completely abandoned by literally everybody in the world and they both spent a minimum of several years entirely on their own and they washed everything. They really had to do some introspecting, they really had to do some serious growing up in order to just survive themselves on top of gave up teaching. I saw both of them myself personally grow enormously.  I acknowledge that you can't never be sure about this things but I've seen soo much change in both of them that I would feel fairly comfortable right now recommending the people if they feel moved or drawn toward their teachings if they consider checking it out.  Of course keeping in mind to keep your guard up and don't take reality for granted either. Just check it out.

10) RT:  What do you think about Causality in the context of a disease? Does it make sense to think in a single cause and effect in a time line?  Does it co-emerge in all levels at the same time or it emerges first in the subtler levels and then it's manifested in the material ones?

KW:   In the moment to moment unfolding of Reality the one thing that we can be sure about is that it's much more complex and has many more aspects to it than we're aware of at this particular time in our Evolution. You can go back 100 years or 1.000 to what humans thought was happening and it's just horrifying how ignorant we were.  Today the average human being  contains more information in one only issue than the average human being in the Middle Ages in their entire life¡  Specially if we talk about this moment to moment Causality of what's happening there are enormous number of factors going on and one of them according to many of the traditions is that moment to moment Reality enacts human awareness starts out being absolutely one with Spirit. Then IT goes out of himself and condenses and reduces to a denser more concrete funnel and in that condenses further and then it goes from Ultimate reality to Causal sphere into Subtle sphere and then into Gross dense physical material realm.  So in things like the Tibetan Book of the Dead when the human being dies first the material components of the body stop working and then the subtle components in their body stop working and then causal elements stop working. And then when that happens, then the human being is dead and they pass straight into absolute ultimate luminous radiant Emptiness or Pure Reality.  Every human being is absolutely one with that ultimate Reality at that moment of death. If they recognize that ultimate Reality then they'll remain in that state. They'll remain one with the Spirit and as they go through the other Bardo realms they'll still remain aware as ultimate Reality.  Then they actually can chose if they want to be reborn which is like having a lucid dream or not.  In a lucid dream you can choose what you want or what actually shows up. That actor like state is just a lucid dream and if you know how to lucid dream then you can choose what you want to do.

So, moment to moment we can choose to be lucid. Moment to moment we can either recognize or not  this ultimate reality right now.  That's the case when we feel to be one with everything that's arising moment to moment;  that's  the texture of our own being,  our own self.  Or we may not recognize any of that and then we move away from that Oneness and we contract down into a causual separate self and so we feel we're in here and the world is arising out there. So we introduce this dualism between subject and object. We now then identify within here in this side of our face and looking to the world out there in the other side of our face.  And if we recognize that then we can remain in the state of just a pure witness and we won't identify with any of this and therefore we won't be a victim of life, we'll just be the witness of life and we won't be attached to or addicted to or avoiding anything that's arising because we're just pure awareness, pure witnessing state. If we don't recognize that then we contract that to a subtle state which is generally what the Christian mystics call that the "soul".  There we're a separate solidified being at that point and will identify with certain qualities and certain values that we hold,  certain ideas and concepts and various kinds of wisdom that we have.  if we recognize that subtle soul realm, then we remain with that.  If not then we'll contract down into the gross realm and into that gross conceptual ego. That's not even identified with that disease. So at that point as the ego denies to identify with the body as there is a split between mind and body and we may not even fully identified with the ego (as we can split parts of it and make them shadow), so it gets  smaller and smaller and smaller plugging down to this sensorimotor realm. 

Whitehead had this notion that moment to moment reality comes into existence as an subject of experience and even in the smallest material objects like molecules or atoms, each of those has a little degree of awareness, a little bit of proto feeling and he called that "apprehension".  So this present moment comes to be as an object of experience that apprehends the previous moments, it feels the experience of that moment.  So that previous moment which was a subject, becomes an object of the subject. That's Causality because the past is having an impact into the present, determining the present. If there would this be all what it happens, this subject apprehending the previous object, over and over again, the Universe will be deterministic, mechanistic and causal ¡  But according to Whitehead each moment also beside having apprehension has a little bit of Creativity, so there is a little bit of novelty or newness. If nothing else this present moment is different from the previous moment in some ways.  It's similar in some ways because apprehends the previous moment but it's also different because a little bit of newness has been added. It might just be a small amount but is an optimization of  the Universe not to be a deterministic machine.  So even atoms have just a little bit of novelty. After a billion years or so, atoms came together and jumped into molecules. That was a huge creative leap. Atoms instituted themselves and molecules where there to prove it.  Their creativity kept on building up and building up and all of a sudden very big molecules came together and a cell wall dropped around them and Life emerged ¡ It's a staggering leap of Creativity¡ What we're finding is that each holon, even the  insentient  matter,  has a little degree of awareness and a little degree of Creativity. In a sense that's the Spirit Itself acting through those lower levels in its own awareness and its own creative capacity.  When we say that subject becomes object of a new subject, we're saying that each moment transcends and include the previous moment adding novelty because it goes beyond the previous. So all of that's going on even at the lowest level. So there's never a strict Causality, because it's Causality with Creativity.

If we ask, "well what happens to produce those materials at the lowest levels?  There's a whole process of involution going on as Spirit descends in those lower levels. Each of the higher levels became unconscious or "temporarily forgotten".  And Evolution is the process of recapturing those greater and greater dimensions. And this has happened just innumerable times. At some point a fair number of human beings have already moved from matter to body to mind and the big awakening to Soul and they go on to awaken Spirit and they're quite Enlightened and Awaken and as the vast majority of human beings do that, the Spirit will totally realize Itself and will say "Ok, now let's start all over again. And then close his eyes and create a Big Bang that starts all over a again".  It's a common belief in many traditions. But all of those factors are coming into existence and they're happening in all four quadrants.  That's simultaneous, that's fundamentally  all aspects spreading out through all four quadrants.  These quadrants are different dimensions or different perspectives of the same fundamental phenomena.  They can act somewhat independently even though fundamentally are different aspects of the same thing but those relatively independent factors influence each other and so states of consciousness in the upper left tend to influence brain states in the upper right and vice versa.  You can't reduce one to the other.  You cannot reduce Consciousness to matter and you cannot reduce  material brain into Consciousness.  But they're correlated and whatever state of Consciousness we have, there will be a correlation in brain states.  Even in a Satori experience (the experience of absolute Oneness) the brain will produce a certain brainwave pattern.  So in terms of disease - a disease is a dysfunction of some aspect of Reality - we can have dysfunction in any dimension,  in any level, in any line, any state.  It can happen by past events being misnavigated or in terms of present events. For example if you're stepping in front of a coming bus, then the bus hit you, this happens in the physical body and you can break your leg.  It's not going necessarily going to break your emotions or your mind or your soul, but it will somehow influence.  As it has broken your body,  it has to be treated in that physical level.  If you lie in a broken leg, we just don't want to visualize into getting better, we want to look for a doctor that puts a cast on it and do what's needed to do in that level. Surely that a visualization may help to heal it faster but it's surely not going to cure it because it's a different level.

There's also the notion in this Involutionary component that time and dimension are coming down every time that there's a dysfunction at a higher dimension.  Then that can be carried all the way down to the lower levels. All of the traditions would maintain that if you have something wrong with your physical body is because prior to that there is some sort of dysfunction in your emotional body and part of that is because of some sort of mental dysfunction and quite possibly a soul dysfunction.  So, you can apply techniques for working with those higher levels to relieve  the problem into the material physical body. Therefore, treating those higher levels will help to make that physical problem better.  From most Western Medicine, it varies but more or less we could say that around 50 or 75% of the complaints the people brings to the doctor's office can actually be helped by that doctor.  So about 50 or 75% of our illnesses they have not idea what's causing it.  There is no doubt that there's going to be some aspect of physical mind that we don't know yet.  94% of the Universe is Dark Matter ¡ What the hell is going on out there ¡¡¡ 94% we don't have any idea, there could be dragons ¡¡¡ We only see a 6% ¡ God knows what's going on out there ¡¡¡ Undoubtly there are some physical causes but there're also emotional causes and we call these last two Psychosomatic illness. We have emotional problems and that causes physical problems.  That's a clear example of a higher dimension causing a physical problem.  Cognitive Behaviorism found out that our actual thoughts will determine our emotions and those emotions will determine if we're physically healthy or sick. So our thoughts are having a direct impact in our emotions and these having a direct impact in our physical health or dysfunction.

The illness in Lake Tahoe can be caused by any number of those factors.  The leading theory right now is that is a combination.  You have to have an infection actually present in the body causing the environmental toxin to act in your body.  The infection causes  your body to start producing certain components on the immune system. The environmental toxin causes a mutation in that part of the immune system that produces those components. And we already know that that's what it happens. We know that the fundamental dysfunction in the illness is a problem with a protein called RNA enzyme.  The human body produces it as the first line of defense when viruses or bacteria invade the body.  What happens is that when the body is invaded by this environmental toxin, the RNA becomes a defective form of what's creating.  It's different.  It's smaller and it's five times more active. The body doesn't have to turn it off because it doesn't recognize it, so the body keeps producing that broken RNA. That enzyme starts to dissolve your own RNA.  That's causing a problem. So there are some physical causes right there and as a matter of fact there was an epidemic that caused an infection that a lot of people had, and I had the infection too. In fact it was a spill.  A chemical spill in one of the tanker going on the highway that runs up North of the village.  So both of those factors were present with that output.  But it could also be a particular soul dysfunction and in my own case practicing things like meditation would help that component a lot. This is one of the reasons that I might have been able to adapt to this factor relatively.   

11) RT:  In order to keep this high level of consciousness, do you practice any daily activity, as meditation, silence, prayer, or you may not need it because you maintain a full awareness in all things you do, think and feel everyday, everyhour?

 KW:  Evidently, the practices that I do have changed over the years. In my twenties and thirties, I did an enormous amount of daily meditation and usually once a week a one whole day meditation practice but I also did a lot of shadow work, a lot of Psychotherapy.  I had to write about it and know how it was like, so. I was doing Psychoanalysis, Gestalt Therapy, Rolfing, I mean all sorts of things. A fair amount of my shadow material tended to get addressed.  It wasn't as problematic as it could be.  The amount of meditation somewhat became less as meditative awareness became a habit; so whether I was meditating or not I was in a type of meditative awareness for longer and longer periods and even throughout sleep.  That tends to be the case now.  Often in the morning even though I've been aware during the dream state as the physical body wakes up, I often have from 30 minutes to an hour of a type of an ever present Presence awareness. 

Also,  one of the things in my case that I found has had a really strong impact in my own growth and development (in both Growing Up and Waking Up) and that has been the actual practice of writing.  I know that Sri Aurobindo did endlessly writing. He didn't meditate.  He said he found writing much more powerful.  What you're doing when you're writing is that you take a witnessing awareness to the ideas that come across the screen. For most of my life as soon as I wake up in the morning and it can be three or four o'clock, I get up and immediately sit down either in front of the typewriter (as when I started didn't have computers) or the computer and I don't brush my teeth, I don't eat, don't drink, I just sit down and start writing immediately and it just starts coming out fluently and it doesn't stop.  It will go as long as I'm sitting in the computer. When I was in my twenties, I would do it for twelve or fifteen hours a day and then in my thirties and forties it was from eight to ten hours.  Now is four to six.  I've always done it like that being the first thing in the morning and  now is like from 4 o'clock to 8 o'clock. After that I go to do to whatever I have to do for the rest of the day, but I've have gotten four hours out of the way. For some reasons that has just never stopped ¡ It's actually gotten worst. I went from writing one book a year, to write two books a year to write three books a year. Yes, it's like getting worst... I think I have a brain tumor ¡ Ha, ha, ha. There are two other things that I want to mention.  In part because when I contracted this chronic physical illness I really started to do a lot of physical practice to help the physical body, in particular I started weight lifting which had a enormous impact on me. Lesser meditation and yet weight lifting had the more impact on me than any other thing that I've ever done. And just in a week or two ¡  And the other thing I do very very aggressively is multivitamin intake.  I take an enormous amount of vitamins since my twenties.  In my formal education I got my graduate degree in Biochemistry and so I know a lot about biochemical aspects of the human body and particularly the role of oxidation and therefore antioxidants and so on. I continue to do that and consider that has made a big difference on my health.