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TRADUCCIÓN 2 Entrevista KEN WILBER -2021

Preguntas de la 11 a la 20

11.  ¿Y qué nos dices sobre la Filosofía? ¿Dirías que ha perdido su función iluminadora? Parecería que las opiniones, sentimientos e ideas de las personas están tan fragmentadas y polarizadas, que han perdido toda curiosidad por la Evolución real, y que hay más práctica del "bienestar" que lecturas intelectuales y debates inteligentes.  Esto parece dejar de lado la Línea Cognitiva ¿Podría la Práctica Integral llevarnos a la Iluminación por sí sola?

KEN:

En realidad, lo que veo que está pasando - y en cierto sentido se podría decir lo mismo de los Psicólogos y de otros académicos- es que hay un cierto aumento del interés por la Filosofía, y pienso que es porque la Filosofía está teniendo, algo así como, un pequeño renacimiento.  La razón es Internet -que es como una nueva Revolución de Gutenberg- puesto que ha cambiado el número de personas que tienen acceso a la información. Pensemos, en la publicación de libros.  Si una Editorial publica un libro, y se trata de un libro académico difícil, y venden unas 10.000 copias: estarán encantados, muy contentos con el resultado. Están ganando dinero.  Cubren cualquier adelanto que han dado al autor, y recuperan el dinero invertido. Hoy en día, las "estrellas" de Internet, pueden llegar a tener 20 millones de visitas ¡¡¡ Dios mío, esto no se había oído antes !!! Literalmente, nunca antes !!!

Por ejemplo, Jordan Peterson.  La razón por la que habrás escuchado sobre él es porque tiene cerca de un billón de visitas !!! Muchas de estas "estrellas" -como Jordan Peterson) enfatizar la importancia de la Filosofía, puesto que ellos mismos ofrecen explicaciones filosóficas.  Menciono a Jordan Peterson, pero también podría hablar de David Rubin o Joe Rogan.  Éste último ofrece un Podcast visual una vez a la semana y tiene 4 millones de suscriptores. Eso significa que hay muchas personas que están recibiendo estos mensajes de esta persona. Y Joe Rogan es un fan de la Filosofía, tal como lo es Dave Rubin.

Dicho sea de paso, ninguno de los tres se considera ya un Demócrata.  Si les preguntas por su filiación político-social, te dirán: "Soy un liberal-clásico".  Y ahí están los tres, utilizando la mismísima frase; lo que nos habla de un liberal clásico al estilo antiguo,  de nivel Naranja. Eso representa una orientación a favor de los derechos individuales, la libertad de expresión, etc. Debido al hecho de que tenemos este tipo de telón de fondo circulando con esa gran cantidad de seguidores, y gracias a que buena parte de ellos son Filósofos, y de ahí que alaben la Filosofía.  Esto es lo que está haciendo que exista un 2% de aumento en el interés por lo filosófico.  Y ¡¡¡ un 2% de 4 millones, es mucho público !!!

La Web Oscura intelectual -por cierto- tiene varios cientos de personas con una orientación, primordialmente, filosófica, desde Sam Harris, a Eric Weinstein, y siguen y siguen, y si hay algo que no les gusta nada es el Materialismo Científico.

Cuando el Materialismo Científico se apoderó de la Filosofía, dijo: "La Filosofía huele a huevos podridos, y está totalmente equivocada. No es científica.  No puede aportar ninguna criterio hipotético verificable". 

Actualmente, el Materialismo Científico se está debilitando un poco;  la gente está empezando a encontrar y ofrecer sus propias filosofías personales, y pienso que eso es lo que está creando este interés por la Filosofía?

12.  ¿Qué tipo de problemas intuyes para la Comunidad Integral en el futuro, puesto que parece que está, también, muy fragmentada?  Hay personas que dicen que la Teoría Integral -per se- está obsoleta, y están aceptando como "Integrales" otras teorías que no lo son, y que ni siquiera incluyen 3 de los elementos de la misma, diciendo que lo hacen para ser más inclusivos ¿Qué recomendarías para unir estas divisiones (Wilberianos, y No-Wilberianos,), pues aún así se llaman a sí mismo "Integralistas"?

KEN:

En su conjunto, lo Integral está aumentando.  Diría que el interés por lo Integral nos muestra un crecimiento sostenido. Mis libros -por ejemplo- se continúan vendiendo más y más, y están siendo mencionados, públicamente, por muchas personas.  Como sabes, casi todo el mundo en Hollywood conoce lo Integral, y en el mundo Académico, siempre hay uno o dos Departamentos que han escuchado lo que es la Teoría Integral.  Incluso en la Política: Al Gore, y por ejemplo a Bill Clinton, le encanta y lo menciona todo el tiempo.  De modo que por ese lado, está creciendo, ahora bien, es evidente que en ese gran número de personas siempre hay algunos fragmentos rotos, y esos también han aumentado.  Entre otras cosas, porque es un efecto secundario del propio crecimiento del número de personas interesadas en algo, puesto que también aumentará el número de personas de ese grupo que luchan contra eso mismo.

Por lo tanto, lo que diría es que las personas deben tener cuidado con lo que hacen, si es que -en algún punto- lo Integral ha significado, realmente, algo importante para ellos. Diría que tengan cuidado a la hora de adoptar la Teoría.

Recomiendo que lo hagan de un modo tan completo e Integral como les sea posible, pues existen muchas personas repartidas por todo el mundo que se denominan filósofos integrales, y en cambio no han creado, ni siguen la Teoría Integral. Son filósofos que yo mismo conozco e incluso me gustan. He aprendido cosas de varios de ellos;  puesto que cuando veo algo que encuentro óptimo,  automáticamente, lo robo y lo incluyo, de alguna manera,  en mi próximo libro.  Siempre he hecho eso, puesto que nunca me ha importado de quién proviene la idea, si es buena; puesto que lo que me interesa es que sea verdadera.  Tomo la verdad de allí donde la encuentro - por lo que las personas deben ser cuidadosas a la hora de adoptar una Teoría, pues son libres de usar el enfoque de quien quiera que no sea yo, sólo que es importante asegurarse de que cubre tantos campos, como cubre mi trabajo; pues de otro modo no será tan Integral como podría serlo.  Y esto es lo que he visto que está ocurriendo.

Hay personas que aparecen en escena, verdaderamente, impresionados con lo Integral.  Quiero decir que leen acerca de ello y se alucinan. Después, hay muchos que empiezan a pensar que lo Integral es idea suya, y empiezan a decirlo por ahí, y a escribir sobre ello. En cambio, al hacerlo, raramente incluyen un 10% de lo que yo he incluido en mi obra.  Y aún así, siguen haciendo estas afirmaciones y, siempre hay personas que les creen y les siguen. De ahí, que sea importante tener cuidado con eso.

Y de nuevo, si alguien desea elegir algún otro filósofo, bien se llame a sí mismo integral o no, y siempre que les enseñe y ayude en algo, pues es estupendo, por supuesto. Que adopten a esa persona, la citen, y usen lo que dice;  pero que no digan que son Integrales.  Es lo único que digo. 

En este sentido, pienso que se comete un gravísimo error al citar la palabra "Integral", y lo que queremos decir con ella. Por ejemplo, Roy Bashkar y Edgard Morin con su Realismo Crítico y su Teoría de la Complejidad, respectivamente. Estas Teorías no son Teorías Integrales, y es muy lamentable que las presenten como si lo fueran. El francés Edgard Morin, incluye tres enfoques en su Teoría de la Complejidad, que llama "Lo Bueno, lo Verdadero y lo Bello", y Sean Sbjorn Hargens, que presentó lo que pretendía ser una versión renovada de lo Integral, pensaba que estaba tratando, de verdad,  con todas las áreas de todos los cuadrantes, y no era así.  Este señor francés, utilizaba la Verdad, lo Bueno y lo Bello, desde el Cuadrante Inferior Derecho, primordialmente.  En otras palabras, no las estaba integrando, realmente.   Estaba, tan sólo, ofreciendo una visión científica materialista. de los tres, aunque como incluyó los tres, sí estaba siendo integral, y en cambio no estaba creando una  nueva Teoría Integral. Tampoco el otro hombre Roy Bashkar,  La parte positiva es que cuando Sean dijo que todas esas teorías (la mía, y la de Morin y Bashkar ) encajaban en los cuadrantes, ¡¡¡ por lo menos estaba utilizando los 4 Cuadrantes para explicar lo que él pensaba que era su nueva Teoría Integral. !!!

Eso es lo que suelo encontrarme; personas que piensan que tienen un nuevo enfoque Integral, y muchas veces piensan que están cubriendo todo lo que yo cubro, y en cambio,  no lo hacen. Y esto es porque no captan la importancia sutil de las diferencias en todas las áreas que presento, porque son importantes: los Cuadrantes, Niveles, Líneas, Estados, y Tipos; y si no tenemos todo eso -así como el sistema del Self y el trabajo con la Sombra-, entonces no estás haciendo una Teoría Integral, puesto que no estás cubriendo todas las bases, ni tampoco la forma en la que deberían ser tratadas

Esa es la razón por la que no son teorías tan Integrales como podrían serlo, si estuvieran incluyendo todo eso, como debería ser incluido..

De modo que sí es un problema y, más o menos, me he acostumbrado a él.  Aún lo condenaría si lo viera.  Quiero decir que aún lo critico cuando lo veo, aunque ya no me enfado, dramáticamente, como lo hacía cuando era joven, puesto que -como dije antes- ya no me enfado.  Si hubiera algo que me enfadara, esto sí podría ser algo que me enfadase: ¡¡¡estas personas afirmando ser Integrales, cuando en realidad no lo son !!! 

He dedicado mucho tiempo uniendo todos estos elementos juntos en este Marco Integral, porque pienso que sus elementos son extremadamente importantes, y necesitan ser incluidos.  De ahí que cuando alguien revienta el esquema, están quitando algo que no debería tirarse a la basura, puesto que dejan de incluir esto o aquello;  y eso es lo que me molesta, puesto que he utilizado muchísimas horas con estas personas, y sé cuán importante es, también, su trabajo.

En relación al futuro de la Teoría Integral, mi sentir es que -desde mi primer libro: "The Spectrum of Consciousness" ("El Espectro de la Conciencia") lo Integral tuvo cierta desventaja, puesto que trataba de ser inclusivo;  puesto que una de las cosas que queremos tener en cuenta, y no perder de vista son los estudios evolutivos, puesto que son increíblemente importantes, y en cambio, son casi universalmente pasados por alto u olvidados.  Yo seguiré incluyendo los niveles de desarrollo. La parte negativa de eso es - cosa que no ocurre muy a menudo-  que para apreciar esta Filosofía, tengas que estar, por lo menos, en un determinado nivel de desarrollo/conciencia,  o bien es que , sencillamente, ¡¡¡ no te enteras !!! Siempre he enfrentado ese problema, y ha representado un tema importante, y -por supuesto- ese narcisismo aparente, es lo que las personas llaman nazismo;  lo que es una locura, porque eso significa que no lo pillan Y ¡¡¡ ese es el verdadero problema !!!

Veo como se despliega el futuro por primera vez, pues tenemos entre un 6 o 7% de la población en niveles de 2ndo Grado Integral de Desarrollo, por lo que diríamos que está tomando un rumbo correcto. Por ello, podemos asumir que en unos 10 años, el porcentaje de la población en nivel Integral será, probablemente, de un 10%, lo que significa que podemos ver el desarrollo de lo Integral.

Y si no te encuentras en el 2ndo grado de conciencia, o si no tienes alguna de tus inteligencias múltiples alcanzando ese grado, entonces no vas a ver qué es eso sobre lo que tienes que opinar, puesto que te va a pasar por encima. Y, si no lo conseguimos, pasará sobre nosotros, que es lo que ocurre con gran parte de la población con respecto a mi trabajo.

Ha estado en sus manos, y aún lo está, teniendo en cuenta el nivel de éxito que he tenido.  Considerando lo mucho que depende de ello, es extraordinario.

Por todo lo anterior, en realidad no tengo ninguna queja, puesto que no muchos filósofos tienen a un Bill Clinton citándoles o a un Al Gore diciendo "este nuevo libro es uno de mis libros favoritos", o a Sharon Stone o Julia Ormond citándome ¡¡¡En serio, ha sido inaudito!!! Y siento que puedo morirme mañana, y lo haría muy muy feliz, gracias al número de personas a las que he podido ayudar, y que se han enriquecido con el trabajo que he sido capaz de desarrollar para ellos.

De modo que eso me hace sentir genial y mi sensación sobre lo que va a ocurrir es - teniendo en cuenta que el centro de gravedad de la población se sigue moviendo hacia niveles más y más elevados, gracias a que todos tenemos un Eros innato- que el porcentaje de la población mundial que va a alcanzar el nivel Integral continuará ampliándose, y cuanto más lo haga, más personas encontrarán mi trabajo, y yo podré encontrar otras personas de orientación Integral para trabajar con las personas.

Así,  pienso que es estupendo, y espero que ocurra.  Creo que sí lo hará.  Lo que no sé es cuánto tardará en ocurrir. Haciendo una conjetura salvaje -viendo la dirección que mi trabajo está tomando en la actualidad, por primera vez en mi vida - no estoy tan preocupado con el hecho de que las personas tengan que estar desarrolladas por encima de un cierto nivel, como para comprar uno de mis libros, o bien apreciar su contenido, o incluso para decir que les gusta lo Integral. Me siento bien con respecto a dónde se encuentra el mundo en este momento, cuando tratamos sobre este tema.

Por supuesto que me gustaría que ocurriera más rápido que lento; simplemente, porque tenemos muchos problemas mundiales, y pienso que uno de los enfoques más ampliamente aceptados en la solución de problemas -que vamos a ver utilizándose más y más en el futuro-  será el que junte a un montón de personas Integrales, y se les pregunte las grandes preguntas que el mundo se está haciendo ahora. Esta será una práctica común, y ¡¡¡el mundo estará agradecido, y eso será magnifico!!!

Serán algo así como los "asesores políticos" de nuestros derechos socio-políticos -y eso será, por cierto, un subproducto de la cosa más importante que, a mi entender, necesitamos hacer como civilización humana si queremos vivir- y eso es tener en cuenta los Cuadrantes Izquierdos de nuestra Realidad.

Por ahora, tenemos el Materialismo Científico. Ahora, tenemos esta gran cantidad de temas que surgen del enfoque en los Cuadrantes Exteriores.  Y digo, "fantástico, ya está". Y va a continuar con la Tecnología:  Microsoft,  Google, y todo eso. Va a continuar explotando;  pero si no incluimos los Cuadrantes Izquierdos, y los insertamos en nuestro Sistema Educativo, poniéndolo a disposición de la mayor cantidad de población para que se  hagan conscientes de su religión y su espiritualidad, y que así continúen con su desarrollo evolutivo;  entonces, nos perderíamos la mitad de la Realidad;  lo que podría convertirse en una verdadera pesadilla.

Si las personas tienen acceso a eso, también serán capaces de ver a los que se están moviendo hacia los niveles Integrales, y que están haciendo algo con ellos. Estoy convencido de que eso será bueno para todos.

13. Estoy tratando de crear un nuevo "Espacio del Nosotros" para la Práctica Integral de Vida, tal y como lo propone Terry Patten en su libro "The New Republic of the Heart" (Una Nueva República del Corazón) para estar abierto a otro Vmemes, y así entablar amistades integrales, y mantener conversaciones profundamente sinceras.  Somos 4 organizadores (2 de ellos con una visión integral y otros 2 con una mentalidad Nueva Era).  Es muy complicado encontrar acuerdos en cualquier cosa ¿Cómo crear grupos de Práctica Integral (con esta idea de ser el cambio que queremos ver en el mundo) con personas de pensamiento Verde en el grupo? ¿Podrías darnos alguna recomendación para crear grupos abiertos, como propone Terry Patten, y así abrir la comunidad Integral a otras personas , aparte de tener mucha paciencia con sus ideas? Puesto que mantener círculos cerrados no es evolutivo. Por lo que ¿cómo podemos hablar de visión Integral con personas que tienen valores pluralistas Post-modernos?

KEN:

Bien, esa es una muy buena pregunta, y también es muy difícil. Una de las cosas que puedes intentar hacer  -porque es, sin duda, un tema de lo más delicado, y tienes que tratarlo de manera muy sensible-  es preguntar a las personas.

Te daré diversas formas en las que podrías proceder. Una es, simplemente, preguntar a todo el mundo:  ¿cuál es el nivel de desarrollo en el piensas que te encuentras? Y si puedes conseguir que alguien te diga: "bueno, yo pienso que estoy, primordialmente, en Verde, aunque pienso que estoy abierto a las ideas Integrales".  Si consigues que alguien diga algo como eso, entonces, ya tienes un píe en la puerta; y entonces puedes decir: "Ok, veamos todos.  Somos diez en este grupo. Siete de vosotros habéis levantado la mano como Verdes, por lo que cómo os gustaría a vosotros siete gestionar el feedback que os ofrezcamos cuando os veamos en Verde? ¿Queréis que os lo digamos, o no? Así, si dicen que "no", todo el mundo sabrá que se están cerrando a cualquier discusión, y si dicen "bueno, quizá podríamos tener 10 minutos de feedback al final de cada reunión, donde todo el mundo podría decirnos lo que piensan". Entonces, ya lo tienes !!!

Lo que es buenísimo es que todo el mundo tiene estas inteligencias múltiples, y la mayoría de ellas se encuentran en diferentes grados de desarrollo.  Por lo tanto no es inusual que te encuentres alguien que tiene un desarrollo moral en Verde, por ejemplo, y un desarrollo cognitivo en Esmeraldo o Turquesa.  Eso puede ocurrir muy a menudo y si puedes atraer la atención a ese tipo de realidad, diciendo, amablemente algo como: "¿en qué nivel creéis que os encontráis cada uno?"  Y conseguir que traten ese tema, entonces ya está.  Tan pronto como puedas poner eso sobre la mesa -y esa es la parte más dura-.  Quizá podrías hacerlo no poniéndolo de manera absoluta, sino hablándoles de las "Líneas".  ¿De qué línea estamos hablando?  ¿En qué nivel esa línea?  Y así, elegir cuatro o cinco líneas diferentes para hacerlo incluso más concreto.

14. ¿Hemos llegado al techo de la conciencia humana, tal y como estaba concebida? ¿Quizá sean los ciborgs y la Inteligencia Artificial los actores principales de la Vida en el 2ndo grado de Conciencia, en vez de los humanos?

KEN:

Bien,  una cosa sí es cierta, y es que, cuando la Inteligencia Artificial alcance lo que se da en llamar la Inteligencia Artificial General -lo que significa que ahora disponemos de una Inteligencia Artificial muy limitada.  Eso quiere decir que es una I.A. que puede ocuparse de una sola tarea específica.  Puede jugar al Ajedrez, o puede jugar al "Go", o incluso puede conducir un coche, o algo por el estilo; pero no puede hacer lo que hace la inteligencia humana.  Lo que la hace tan complicada es que tenemos, como poco, una docena de inteligencias diversas, y cada una de ellas pueden atravesar doce o más niveles de desarrollo.  Por eso, hasta que la Inteligencia Artificial pueda llegar a igualar eso, no vamos a conseguir la Inteligencia Artificial General, que así pueda desarrollar una inteligencia verdaderamente general, ¡¡¡ aunque sea artificial !!!

Es un tema complejo en sí mismo, puesto que parecería -dada la dirección que la I.A. está tomando- que sí conseguiremos esa Inteligencia Artificial General en algún momento. Y parte de esa complejidad yace en que no tenemos una buena comprensión de los Cuadrantes Izquierdos,  puesto que han sido expulsados fuera del conocimiento durante mucho tiempo.

Si miramos a los Filósofos que incluyen la Conciencia en el conjunto de su Filosofía;  por lo menos la mitad de ellos tienen lo que se conoce como mente panorámica, que significa que creen que la conciencia está presente en cada cosa del Universo. Por lo que un átomo tiene un poco de conciencia, y una molécula tiene un poco de conciencia.  Alfred North Whitehead lo llamó "prehensión/prensión".  Eso significa que cada mónada individual, o cada totalidad en el Universo tiene un poco de "prensión", por lo que los quarks, tienen prensión quarkiana, los átomos tiene prensión atómica, las moléculas tendrán prensión molecular, y así en adelante.

La cuestión es que si tomamos la Conciencia y asumimos que forma parte de la conciencia atómica, y que los átomos forman parte de las moléculas;  entonces, la conciencia atómica llega a ser una pequeña parte de la conciencia molecular y la conciencia molecular, entonces, estará presente en la conciencia celular. En cambio, lo que tenemos ahora, desafortunadamente, es que cuando los investigadores trabajan en la Inteligencia Artificial, miran sólo lo que ven dentro, como composición, y por lo tanto ven sólo la conciencia que pueden ver, lo que suele ser alguna forma de racionalidad; cuando esa racionalidad -en realidad- incluye conciencia atómica, conciencia molecular y conciencia atómica, y todas esas "prehensiones" se construyen una encima de la otra para finalmente estallar en una conciencia racional.

Hoy en día, cuando alguien investiga y mira dentro, sólo ven conciencia racional, retirando todo lo demás de la superficie,  y así crearán un programa que reproducirá la racionalidad, y lo hará muy bien. Por eso, si tienes que crear  un juego como el ajedrez, puedes crear un algoritmo que juegue al ajedrez mejor que cualquier humano pueda jugar, y en cambio no pueden aún conseguir que la Inteligencia Artificial pueda coger un clip. Así, el típico dicho es:  "En I.A. lo que es difícil es fácil y lo que es fácil resulta difícil"!!!

Solía ser muy difícil, por ejemplo, que un ordenador jugase ajedrez, porque el ajedrez era el epítome de la conciencia más elevada que los humanos podíamos tener, que es la racionalidad. 20 años después, cualquier juego de ajedrez en un ordenador puede ganar a cualquier humano. La parte más difícil del ajedrez, resultó muy fácil, y la parte más difícil es algo que un niño de un año puedo hacer sin problemas. Un ordenador no puede hacer eso, lo que demuestra que lo más fácil es lo más difícil.

Pienso que la razón por la que no podemos hacerlo es porque aún no tenemos una comprensión suficientemente compleja de la Conciencia;  lo que incluye conciencia atómica, conciencia molecular, conciencia celular, conciencia reptiliana, conciencia mamífera, conciencia primate; pues todas ellas tienen un poco de aprehensión, y no lo estamos teniendo en cuenta. Pienso que esa es la razón por la que no conseguimos que la Inteligencia Artificial haga esas pequeñas tareas que los seres humanos podemos hacer aún en nuestra temprana edad; porque los seres humanos sí estamos incluyendo la conciencia atómica, y también incluimos la conciencia molecular y la conciencia celular. Todo niño de un año está incluyéndolas, por lo que puede hacer, por supuesto,  todas estas cosas tan difíciles, a las que un ordenador no puede ni siquiera acercarse.  Eso sí, asumiendo que, a medida que el mundo se vaya volviendo más Integral, y  comience a comprender que tenemos -como poco- 4 Cuadrantes y probablemente 8 Zonas, entonces podremos reconocer: "Ok, necesitamos empezar a incluir los Cuadrantes izquierdos en nuestros algoritmos o no vamos nunca a cubrir todo lo más fundamental y entonces nunca lo conseguiremos"

Estoy aceptando que en algún momento, vamos a dar ese paso. Tan pronto como empecemos a desarrollar enfoques Integrales de la Conciencia, nos acercaremos a la Realidad.

Por cierto, que diría que esto ya está empezando, porque hay un ordenador, por poner un ejemplo, que se llama "Sofía", y que es el programa de ordenador más visualizado del momento.  Ha estado en toda clase de programas informativos de la televisión matinal.  He visto un video sobre cómo han procedido las personas que han creado la inteligencia de  "Sofía", y lo que me alucinó es que han incluido nueve inteligencias múltiples, y han desarrollado un programa informático para cada una de esas nueve inteligencias.  Ahora que lo que no han incluido, han sido los Niveles.  Trataron de incluir los Cuadrantes, al incluir las Inteligencias Múltiples del Cuadrante Superior Izquierdo. Fue fascinante verlo y también ver cuándo daban ejemplos de cada una de las Inteligencias Múltiples. 

En cambio, me decepcionó mucho el ver el resultado final del programa.  Tanto, que retrasé 10 años la estimación temporal que había hecho antes sobre cuándo iban a conseguirlo, porque fue horrible. Las buenas noticias es que por lo menos estaban tratando de hacerlo, es decir que ya saben que están ahí. Si son capaces de unir Cuadrantes y Niveles -como lo han hecho con las Líneas - y después le añaden Tipos y Estados, ahí ya sí que lo conseguirían.  Pero se están acercando.  Y llegará a ocurrir.  Asumo que en unos 30,40 ó 50 años.

Hay un gran desacuerdo sobre cuándo ocurrirá que se consiga desarrollar la Inteligencia Artificial General.  He escuchado a alguien que en unos 5 años, y en cambio la mayoría dice que será para el final de siglo.

La Conciencia Humana no ha tocado techo para nada. A medida que las personas se vuelvan más Integrales, y empiecen a incluir más de las cosas que ahora están dejando fuera -observa que casi ningún Psicólogo Evolutivo Occidental tiene conocimiento o ni siquiera ha oído hablar de los Estados o Niveles de Desarrollo de la Conciencia hasta el Despertar o la Iluminación.  Por ejemplo, las grandes tradiciones de la Iluminación, no entienden nada sobre Psicología Evolutiva.  De ahí que El Despertar, y El Crecer, nunca se han confluido.

En cuanto las personas empiecen a aprender más acerca de las capacidades de su propio Crecimiento, y también comiencen su aprendizaje sobre las capacidades de su Despertar,  asumo  - y por supuesto esto forma parte de la aceptación " la Religión del mañana"-  que las personas empezarán a desear tener experiencias de Despertar, y así, cuando se volvieran bastante populares, y la gente comenzara a experimentarlas,  habría un crecimiento enorme en la cantidad de Conciencia  que tendríamos disponible para nosotros.

Por todo ello, sería ya un avance descomunal, sólo incluyendo El Despertar en nuestro mapa de la Realidad - teniendo en cuenta que todo el mundo conociese su propia potencialidad-, y si luego también incluyeran El Crecimiento, dirían:  Wow, estoy en este nivel y resulta que hay 4 o 5 más por encima.  Quizá desee ir hacia uno de esos" ¡¡¡ Eso también sería grandioso !!!

Tienes que estar en Naranja, por lo menos, para llegar ahí y comprender que existe algún tipo de objetivo verdadero y completamente exacto. No pienso que estemos demasiado cerca de nuestro potencial para el Crecimiento de la Conciencia.

15. Hoy en día, parecería que,  la Computación Biológica y esos "robots vivos" (de acuerdo con la Universidad de Vermont), conocidos como "xenobots" están generando una gran expectación en la Comunidad Científica, puesto que han demostrado que ya es posible crear vida biológica artificial programable.  Piensas que los ordenadores de silicio se están quedando obsoletos?

KEN:

No pienso que la Computación Biológica vaya a terminar con la Computación basada en el Silicio. No estoy muy seguro de cuáles son las capacidades exactas de los "xenobots", pero gran parte de la Revolución del Silicio fue comprender que las máquina de silicio podían funcionar tan bien como los cerebros humanos en, por lo menos, un área específica; por eso aún no lo tengo tan claro. Necesito conocer más sobre los "xenobots", qué hacen, cómo funcionan, de la misma manera que en los seres humanos  encontramos silicona, tendría que ver qué puede hace, de verdad, esta biología basada en el carbono. Quizá lo haga mejor.  Pienso que aún está muy verde, es demasiado moderno, puesto que está en sus primeras etapas de desarrollo. Considero que aún no estamos en disposición de comparar.

16.  Esta situación de la Pandemia ha provocado numerosos miedos, especialmente con  el libro de Klaus Schwab's: "The Great Reset" (El Gran Reinicio) y las políticas que fueron recientemente discutidas en Davos ¿Cuántas de tus tesis sobre reduccionismo de "tierras planas/llanuras" pueden activarse contra estas nuevas ideologías del siglo XXI, en concreto el  Transhumanismo?

KEN:

Es muy comprensible y también un deseo muy humano. Hay un par de formas del Transhumanismo, pero una de sus ideas básicas es que la conciencia humana podrá ser transferida en su totalidad a un superordenador, cuando por fin las máquina lleguen a conseguir la Inteligencia Artificial General, y así viviremos para siempre en una máquina basada en el silicio.

Lo primero que me viene a la mente, siempre, es "bien, eso puede ser cierto, pero -por favor- asegúrate que a nadie se le cae la máquina al suelo, porque de pronto ¡¡¡ la vida eterna se habrá convertido en nada !!! Esa parte, es que no me la puedo quitar de la cabeza.   De ahí que nunca pueda ir más allá con el Transhumanismo.

Todo va a depender, por supuesto, del hecho de que lleguemos a conseguir la Inteligencia Artificial General.  Ahora, que también hay otro tema, y es ¿qué grado de conciencia vas a cargar en la máquina para toda la eternidad?  ¿qué pasa si te encuentras en el nivel de desarrollo Ámbar/Ego? Me estás diciendo que nunca más vas a querer Crecer? ¿Y Despertar?¿Vas a tener un Despertar automático, y en qué  nivel te vas a despertar?

Es típico que todo esto lo pase por alto el mismo hombre joven friki en edad universitaria, que ni consigue una cita, ni puede dormir, y se pasa toda la noche sentado frente al ordenador tecleando algoritmos ¡¡¡Dios los bendiga!!! Nos han desvelado un montón de cosas buenas, pero esta es una de esas frikadas masculinas, y no le dedico mucho tiempo.

Digamos que, la única conciencia que me gustaría mantener durante toda la Eternidad , sería una verdadera Conciencia Integral, puesto que de otro modo no vale la pena.  Sería un destino horrible, espantoso.

17.  Como bien sabes, Ken, los Psiquedélicos nos pueden ofrecer una lente introspectiva poderosa, gracias a su "valor sorprendente" que favorece la inmersión que puede desencadenar una respuesta emocional más rápìda y profunda, que las prácticas meditativas.

Esto las hace más efectivas en el tratamiento de ciertas enfermedades como la depresión, los desórdenes post-traumáticos, la anorexia o las adicciones, etc.  Podríamos incluso decir que podría provocar la chispa hacia una espiritualidad introspectiva.  Por ello, ¿cuál es tu opinión sobre este Renacimiento Psiquedélico en las instituciones universitarias, como John Hopkins, o bien el Colegio Universitario Imperial. Deberían integrarse estos estudios y experiencias en la sociedad a través de centros especializados y expertos?

KEN:

¡¡¡ Opino que Sí !!!  Soy un Boomer, por lo que nací y crecí durante los 60, y aunque nunca he tomado LSD, o cualquiera de esas drogas, cuando empezaron a hacerse ilegales, me enfadé muchísimo, porque pude ver que, aunque yo mismo no las tomara, había mucha gente que disfrutaba de experiencias trascendentales genuinas con ellas.  Por eso, aunque sólo fuera para fines de investigación, deberíamos mantenerlas cerca, puesto que nos dan muchísima información sobre el cerebro.

Estaba furioso contra todo eso de una manera impulsiva, que fue lo mismo que sentí cuando Universidades como la John Hopkins y algunas otras empezaron a investigar, especialmente, con Psilocibyn y otras sustancias.  Obtuvieron resultados muy replicables en diversas personas con experiencias transpersonales, profundamente, trascendentes.

Este estudio era tan creíble y extraordinario que se lo conté a Jordan Peterson, y en uno de los podcasts -que ven más un billón de personas- que estos experimentos con Psilocibyn triunfan cuando se trata de la existencia de lo que el llama "conciencia absoluta", que es cuando se disuelve el ego, y eres uno con absolutamente todo. El comenta: "la existencia de la conciencia absoluta es ahora - y cito textualmente-  incuestionable".  Me refiero a esto por el gran impacto que tuvo en él, y una de las cosas por las que es conocido -y por la que incluso sus detractores admiten- es  que siempre ofrece gran cantidad de evidencia científica, que avala todo lo que dice.  Y ese es sólo un ejemplo de lo que pueden conseguir las sustancias Psiquedélicas.

Por supuesto, pienso que deberían obtener más apoyo.  Deberían legalizarlas, aunque sólo sea por el hecho de que mantenerlas ilegales, hace que sea muy difícil realizar ningún tipo de estudio científico con ellas. Es necesario atravesar una enorme cantidad de pasos burocráticos  gubernamentales  para poder conseguir algo parecido a un permiso legal para investigar en eso;  aunque estés en la John Hopkins.

Por lo que pienso que es terrible que sigan siendo ilegales desde hace tantos años, puesto que por eso no se ha podido investigar más.  Y los estudios científicos nos dejarían saber qué ocurre cuando hacemos Budismo Zen, que crea un estado de conciencia indiscutible.  Esa es la verdad y podemos soltarla como producto del Materialismo Científico confirmando estas realidades transcendentales, y así probar que existen.

18.  Ken, ¿estás feliz? Describenos ¿qué es para ti la Felicidad, y cuál es para ti la cosa más importante en tu vida?  ¿Qué haces para mantenerte feliz día a día?

 KEN:

Describiré mi tipo de felicidad diciendo que lo más importante para mí son las prácticas y los ejercicios.  Esos que puedes hacer una y otra vez para intentar llegar a la conciencia de lo absoluto, de la que hablábamos antes. Los tibetanos la llaman "Un solo sabor", porque te sientes UNO con todo lo que existe, con todo lo que emerge momento a momento.  Y cuando esta experiencia se vuelve realmente sólida, la sensación de separación;  de ser un ser separado, o tener una identidad separada,  tiende a desaparecer.  No significa que no seas consciente de tu pequeño yo;  lo eres, pero, también,  eres consciente de lo que llamamos el "yo verdadero" -que es uno con el fundamento de todos los seres- , y eso es lo que te da un sentimiento de unidad con todas las cosas.

Cuando eres uno con esta base de todos los seres, eres uno con todo, porque este es el terreno de todos los seres, no de un solo ser particular, sino de todos.  Esto ha sido expresado y experimentado universalmente por todas las tradiciones de sabiduría. Se afirma que para obtener esa realización, hay que tener una "Iluminación" o un "Despertar" o una realización "Siddha",  y es universal.

En el pasado, se decía que esa práctica era el núcleo de la felicidad. Por ejemplo el Vedanta es una de éstas, y el llamado "Un solo sabor" es "Satchit Ananda", que es estar consciente y gozoso,  y el gozo es cierto sentido un sentimiento que proviene de la liberación absoluta de cualquier apego o identificación con cualquier cosa. Ese es un sentimiento de gozo o la gran alegría de la felicidad.

Esto es algo que,  por alguna razón, se me ha dado, y es reconocido como la verdad última, y las tradiciones que mantienen este enfoque, suelen tener algo que denominan: "La doctrina de las dos verdades".  Existe la verdad relativa, y la verdad última o absoluta.  Cualquiera de estas verdades que nos daría la Ciencia:  Física, Química, Biología, y cualquiera de esas, se les dice, verdades relativas;  lo que significa que tienen algo de verdad, pero que esa verdad se aplica tan sólo al universo relativo manifiesto.  No nos dicen nada acerca del fundamento de todo ello.  Cuando descubres esa base, te das cuenta de que es la verdad última, puesto que es la verdad absoluta en relación a cualquier verdad relativa que exista.  Algunas personas llamarían a esto "intuición".  Y yo la he tenido como que era la verdadera última, además de ésta verdad relativa.

La primera persona que estudié sobre este tema fue Krishnamurti, y mucha gente conoce a Krishnamurti, puesto que se hizo bastante famoso hace tiempo, y también Alan Watts, que escribió mucho sobre estos temas.  Pude reconocer la verdad de lo que decían, y comencé a practicar, especialmente Zen y Dzogchen.  He practicado - en mayor o menos medida- la mayoría de las tradiciones religiosas del mundo, incluyendo The cloud of Unknowing (La nube de lo Desconocido), el trabajo del padre Thomas Keating.  Pero una de las cosas que estas verdades últimas enseñan es que no se puede alcanzar la Iluminación, y se puede conseguir porque, literalmente, ya la tenemos. Y no sólo está ya presente, sino que sabes que la tienes.  Cuando consigues un Satori - que es cuando despiertas a esta verdad- te das cuenta de este fundamento de todos los seres, y también reconoces: "Oh Dios ¿cómo he podido olvidar que he sabido esto durante toda mi vida? ¡¡¡ Qué demonios !!!"  Y sí, muchas personas llaman a eso narcisismo. Llaman narcicismo a la mayoría de las cosas que tú y yo encontramos importantes ¡¡¡Así son las cosas !!!

La Conciencia es -bueno, pongámoslo de este modo:  "si alguien no llama narcisismo a lo que sea que estás haciendo, es que probablemente no sea verdadero. Mantén eso en la cabeza ¡¡¡Afortunadamente nosotros tenemos eso a nuestro favor !!!

A medida que continuaba con mi práctica, y seguía teniendo estados satori, empecé a ver esto cada vez más obvio. De modo que no sólo estaba siendo consciente de algo, sino que, además, me estaba dando cuenta de algo que había sabido toda mi vida.  Y esa conciencia se ha convertido en una presencia más y más constante en mi diario vivir. Por eso, la mantengo, incluso en los momentos en que me puede causar problemas, ¡¡¡ como ocurre en mi estado de sueño sin sueños !!!

Eso es lo que me hace feliz y es bastante constante como una sensación, una realización.  Y esa es para mí la felicidad más grande.

19.  ¿Has tenido algún contacto o recibido mensajes de Treya desde otras dimensiones? ¿Piensas que estos contactos son posibles? ¿Existe la vida después de la muerte?

KEN:

El problema que tengo con eso es que siempre he conocido a personas que piensan que hay algún tipo de Reencarnación; algo así como que avanzamos después de muertos.  Siempre ha habido creencias de estos dos tipos y ambas son contradictorias.  No pueden ocurrir ambas al mismo tiempo.  Y por eso siempre menciono esto a cada una de ellas. Está este tipo de personas que creen en lo que yo llamo la Reencarnación de grado corriente; que es algo así como que yo Ken Wilber, atravieso los Bardos, y entonces, el Ken Wilber que fui yo de verdad -tanto si puedo recordarlo como si no- volveré a nacer en un nuevo cuerpo en el futuro.  Y esto continúa hasta que me haya Despertado por completo y ya no me reencarne más.

Incluso las tradiciones difieren profundamente en la comprensión de algunos de los puntos sobre lo que significa la Reencarnación.  Por ejemplo, Shankara, que fue el brillante genio filosófico que fundó el Hinduismo Vedanta, dijo la famosa frase:  "El Señor es el único e inigualable transmigrante".  No resulta difícil para mí ver eso y estar de acuerdo con esa versión porque significa que sólo hay una Conciencia, y sólo una que se reencarna una y otra vez.  Y el la llama "El Señor".  Y nosotros la podemos llamar como queramos. El Zen la llama "Big Mind"(La Gran Mente), y esa es la única Conciencia que existe y que continúa existiendo. En cualquier caso, así lo creo.

Al creer esa versión, no es muy posible escuchar o contactar con Treya, porque ella sería ya La Gran Mente ahora, y ya no sería, forzosamente,  la pequeña Treya.  De modo que esa es mi versión de la Reencarnación. Una versión en la que creo porque ya he experimentado el UNO ¡¡¡Eso es el Despertar !!!  Sé que esto está ahí siempre, y es eterno -lo que significa que no tiene tiempo-.

El otro tipo de persona siempre piensa que las almas prosiguieron su marcha más allá de la muerte, y así hablaban con los mediums que pudieran recibir mensajes del otro lado. De hecho existen numerosos estudios sobre ciertos mediums que ofrecen una indicación positiva de que cuando reciben mensajes  de una persona que está al otro lado, y comprueban con las personas que realmente han conocido a esa persona qué nivel de precisión tiene la información; y en algunos casos … el nivel es muy alto. No en todo los casos ni mucho menos, pero sí en algunos. Parece que reciben información de esa persona muerta, y habitualmente la persona no sólo puede llevar muerta desde hace mucho tiempo, sino que la medium puede decir "Oh, voy a contactar.  Estoy contactando a William James ahora".  Y William James vivió sobre el 1.900.  Estos mediums dirán que están contactando con alguien que lleva muerta hace mucho tiempo.  Y puede ser que sea alguien con quien están hablando que les conocía, y así pueden comprobarlo.  O bien sólo lo dicen por que sí. Quizá para mostrar que pueden hacerlo, o por cualquier otra razón.

Si todo eso es cierto  -y digamos que la persona que dice que está hablando con William James, lo está haciendo con una versión de él que está viviendo en ese nivel del más-allá- entonces,  eso significa que William James no está reencarnado.  No ha continuado avanzando desde el año 1.900, porque estás hablando con él desde el otro plano. Y ya han pasado por lo menos 100 años, y aún está anclado en ese nivel desde el que te está hablando a ti ¡¡¡ Eso no suena bien !!!

(Ken,  se para un momento, visiblemente conmovido )

Siempre que hablo de Treya, suelo empezar a llorar, de modo que si lo hago, discúlpame, por favor, pero es que ¡¡¡ eso es lo que me ocurre !!! 

Tuve con ella, lo que podríamos llamar una experiencia con el más-allá, pero ocurrió de manera inmediata.  Habíamos decidido que en el mismo momento que muriese, le leería su parte favorita del Libro Tibetano de la Vida y la Muerte, y también las frases preferidas de unas cartas que ella solía llevar siempre consigo que tenían  mensajes espirituales. De modo que empecé a leerle todo eso durante unas tres o cuatro horas después de que ya estaba muerta. 

Estuve de acuerdo en leerle todo eso durante 24 horas sin parar, y eran como las 4 o las 5 de la mañana, después de su muerte, cuando escuché este ruido enorme en la habitación. Fue un sonido tan grande, que incluso me agaché; era así de tangible.  La sensación que tuve fue que ella acababa de completar su Iluminación. Cuando escuché ese sonido, tuve el sentimiento de un profundo Satori y lo sentí, claramente, como un regalo que ella me hacía.  Sin duda. Sí. Ella me estaba transmitiendo ese Despertar.  Permanecí ahí en ese estado durante -por lo menos- un mes, lo que era muy poco habitual en esos tiempos.

Pienso que esa fue la culminación de my propio trabajo espiritual, y fue como recibir una transmisión de un maestro Zen o algo así.  Me he sentido muy agradecido con ella por regalarme eso, y puedo decir que fue un tipo de experiencia con el más allá. Ella llevaba muerta como unas seis horas cuando sentí la conciencia de la presencia. Y durante el resto de ese mes, la Conciencia del Fundamento de todos los seres  fue indudable para mi, y en cierta forma la sentí como si fuera Treya.  Así es como lo describiría, y por lo tanto ese es el sentido que le doy  a mi experiencia.

Con respecto a la película sobre la vida con Treya, sobre la que me preguntas, se suponía que se iba a estrenar a principios de Enero, pero el Covid lo ha impedido, puesto que todos estábamos queriendo verla y ahora no sabemos para cuándo va a poder ser, aunque estoy seguro de que irá bien.

20.  ¿Cómo te gustaría ser recordado por las generaciones futuras? ¿Y cuál es el mensaje que te gustaría dar a los niños y jóvenes de hoy en día para guiarles hacia el futuro?

KEN:

Es importante vivir la vida siguiendo algún principio; como por ejemplo "la verdad".  Lo que ocurre es que la mayoría de la gente no se da cuenta de que "decir la verdad", no es suficiente, porque hay muchos tipos de verdades ocultas ahí fuera.  Por lo que, definitivamente es importante elegir vivir tu vida de acuerdo a la verdad de lo bueno, lo verdadero y lo bello.  

Algo así es estupendo, pero ten cuidado de seguir siempre buscando la verdad, porque lo que me ha ocurrido en mi propia vida es que la comencé con una pasión por encontrar la verdad fuera la que fuera, y eso lo encontré en la Ciencia.  Y es que en la Ciencia, siempre te topas con la verdad mires por donde mires. Si miras a la Física, encuentras verdades, si miras a la Química te encuentras con verdades, si te acercas a la Biología, también encuentras verdades, y así en adelante. 

Las personas que siguen "lo bueno, lo verdadero, y lo bello" dirían que la razón por la que algo es verdad es porque es un concepto, como ha sido desarrollado metodológica y prácticamente como un enfoque de tercera persona; por lo que entonces podemos mirar a la verdad objetiva en tercera persona,  y eso es lo que hace la Ciencia. Mientras que la  Belleza mira en primera persona.  La belleza se encuentra en los ojos del observador.  Y lo bueno mira a la verdad en segunda persona.  Por eso, tuve suerte porque me enamoré de la Ciencia, en donde encontraba verdades por donde mirase, puesto que eso es lo que la Ciencia ofrece.  No podía encontrar -en esos momentos- nada en la "Belleza" o en la moral de "lo Bueno", mientras estudiaba la Ciencia.

Entonces, esa fue una de las primeras cosas que empecé a aprender, a medida que me desarrollaba en mi adolescencia.  Después empecé a interesarme más con lo que iba a hacer con mi vida, y ese tipo de cosas, y a medida que seguía observando profundamente a la verdad, empecé a darme cuenta de que todas las verdades que aprendía eran importantes y necesarias para tenerlas en cuenta, pero, extrañamente, no era TODA la verdad que existía, y de la que podía aprender.  También tenía que mirar a la "Belleza" y a la "Bondad", y una vez que llegué a la Bondad, y me encontré con la virtud moral en lo "Bueno", entonces, no pude evitar encontrarme con los niveles de desarrollo que la moralidad había atravesado, y me di cuenta que otra verdad era la verdad evolutiva y, ahí fue cuando me tope con todos los modelos evolutivos que hay ahí fuera.  

Por supuesto que estaba impresionado por el hecho de reconocer que me había perdido todo ese grado de verdad. Y me dije: "Oh, existen más de cien modelos de Psicología Evolutiva en mi libro "Psicología Integral", cómo es que antes me  había perdido estas verdades que estaban ahí?"

Había obtenido las verdades de la Física, la Química, la Biología;  ¿Cómo diablos me perdí todo eso? De modo que ahí fue cuando tuve algo así como ¡¡¡ mi primera gran Intuición Integral !!!

Por todo lo anterior, a las siguientes generaciones les diría, que, sin duda, es vital incluir la Verdad, pero asegúrate de que esa Verdad incluya todas las verdades posibles, y no sólo una parte de ellas, porque existen las verdades parciales, lo que también está muy bien.

Eso es lo que a lo que me he estado enfrentado todo el resto de mi vida;  más verdades parciales que he intentado unificar.  Cada vez que me encuentro con una verdad parcial importante, la empaqueto en el marco Integral y continúo construyendo y construyendo,  por lo que, definitivamente, le diría a cualquier joven de hoy en día:  "escoge algún principio, como la Verdad, por ejemplo, con el que quieras comprometerte;  pero asegúrate -especialmente si eliges la Verdad-  que elijes una verdad verdadera, y cerciórate de estar incluyendo la mayor cantidad de verdad que puedas".

Por cierto, que seguro que te vas a equivocar, por lo menos el primer par de veces que lo intentes.  Por lo que si quieres empezar con alguien que lo ha intentado muchas veces de manera muy dura, entonces ¡¡¡ puedes comenzar con mi trabajo!!!  Me encantaría que empezaras por mi trabajo, pero, por favor, sé la persona que verdaderamente lo amplía, no la que afirma continuamente que lo ha hecho, sin haber expandido nada. Por lo tanto, por favor, ampliad mi trabajo, porque una de las cosas que hoy sabemos a ciencia cierta es, que la Verdad va a continuar ampliándose y ampliándose más y más.

Entrevista, transcripción y traducción:

Raquel Torrent

http://www.innerpositioning.com

 

 

 

KEN WILBER -20 QUESTION'S FULL TRANSCRIPTION

KEN WILBER INTERVIEWED by Raquel Torrent

February 14th 2021, in the midst of the Pandemic

This man of deep black eyes, great height and impossible sitting postures because of his long legs, has turned 72.  This man that has made a conjunction between the East and the West in his vast works, that has been praised and criticized by many in equal parts, that has created the most used Theory in the world to explain reality by the majority of human disciplines -including Politics- has gain the respect of being called the Einstein of Consciousness and one of the most influential philosophers of our times. 

The first time I visited Ken Wilber in his small apartment in Denver, before his actual loft, was in 2005. After that I've been back another 4 times and this past year 2020 I was pretending to pay him my 5th visit and yet the Pandemic arrived.  Then I saw him at the online 2020 Integral European Conference, where he brilliantly gave the finishing touch of the well organized event.  He appeared as a surprise for Julia Ormond that was so wonderfully interviewing Sebastian Siegel who was presenting the film adaptation of Ken's book Grace & Grit.

After that I made several attempts of connecting with Ken for several months, until  he tenderly wrote me "let me get better"…indicating that he was not feeling well. I waited with the fear that something really bad was happening. Now after a long wait,  we are very lucky to be with him and the wonder that he's with us !!! Let's  celebrate his 72 birthday with this interview made with the questions from the Integral Community at diverse parts of the world. As many people has asked me about your health as we care about you, and also because staying healthy -in the midst of this Pandemic- is the main concern of everyone in the planet right now, that's going to be our first question.

1.  How have you been Ken during your time of silence? What has happened to you that made you stay away from your - let's say-  public life? Would you say that you've had any lucid experience according to your teachings during your "recovering" period?

KEN:

What's happened over the years as I continued my own meditative contemplative growth and development is -as I've written about- that I have a consciousness that essentially stays present 24/7. 

In other words, I have this non-dual awareness -the sense of being one with everything that I'm aware of- and that consciousness will continue from waking into dream, into deep sleep and what sometimes happens, specially into deep sleep that is technically called "consciousness without an object" it's just pure emptiness and you're aware of nothing that is arising at all.  There's just some sort of a luminous emptiness and on occasions when I get into that and I still have a bit of waking awareness, I end up sort of sleep walking.  I can get up without recognizing that that's happening and walk around.

  What happened this time is that I got up and I walk right into a table which is made of steel and I felt and broke both of my feet and it really hurt a lot.  I had to get into the hospital.  I was in there for over a week or so and it took several months to actually heal.  So that's when you were trying to get a hold of me.  That's what was happening and again because of that constant consciousness I can deal with a lot of pain because pain simply arises but I'm not identifying in any way with it. But still if I'm in a great deal of pain that's what my mind is trying to get aware of and so I can't easily focus on other items. So I was sort of "out of work" for several months as I was dealing with the pain that was just running through my body. 

Together with the two feet I broke my lower left leg and I had to have surgery on that and a big two foot long titanium rod is now in my leg.  So I set off the metal detector in an airport without having anything on me at all !!!

So that's why I didn't get too much work done or looked at e-mails for several months, but I don't have Covid or anything like that.

2.  Following with this subject of health.  What do you think about this Pandemic?  Does it bring the evolution of consciousness that we were waiting for? And how do you see the way governments around the world have and are navigating through it?  Why do you think that many people do not even want to follow the security measurements as they say that all this is a man made socio-political conspiracy?

KEN:

In one sense whenever something like that attacks the whole world it does have or it can have at least in some degree an effect on making the world aware that "we're all one". So it can have a bit of that impact. But we in the West I don't think that governments have handled the Covid as well as they could have and part of the problem was that as soon as it hit we got a lot of what it turned out to be exaggerated estimates about the number of deaths and the impact that this would have.  So we started closing down in a very severe way with not much effectiveness. 

The biggest change has been to hurt the world economically in a quite bad way.  So what happens is that as we watch the real impact that Covid has on human beings what we found out -that we didn't know when it first hit- is that if you track the people that are getting Covid, the majority of them have what is called a co-morbidity.  People that have some other health problems that underlie if they're getting Covid faster than what they should. 

We know now for example that if you are over 75 you have a 12 times greater risk of getting Covid. And yet there are other co-morbidities that just come from life style choices that we make for example if you have three of these co-morbidities.  99% of the people that has died had one of them and as I mentioned you see that they are the result of a life style, not so much inherited illness or something like that.  They're hypertension, obesity and the third one:  diabetes.  And the adult diabetes comes from eating overabundance of refined carbohydrates and sugars.  So you can see that there are life style choices that have been associated with all three of these co-morbidities.

If we had known that and had been watching for those factors, estimates are that the Covid crisis wouldn't have been much worst than a bad flu season.  But we didn't do that and there is still a very wide spread feeling about Covid being a extremely lethal, dangerous disease which is why some governments, like for example the United Kingdom are thinking in doing a third complete national shut down and I think what that is doing is helping the people that had a bad attitude toward this in the beginning, like "Oh, I don't know why we're having a shut down, it's not that bad at all", to  increase in number as they were tending toward that believe any way. So what that is  doing is driving these population toward a more extreme right hand views because "you just can't trust the government, they always get it wrong, we should just take charge of ourselves" and that kind of thing.

So I think that the Covid crisis, has had both of these effects. There are some people that have felt more united with the rest of Humanity that was suffering from something like that but it's also increased the portion of the population who's driving toward that extreme right hand -political shift- that we've seen occurring all around the world.  People typically mentioned the tensions with Donald Trump, the Brexit, a lot of the changes in Eastern European countries, Italian elections for example, as being an increase of the right hand populism that is going all around the world and I think that the Covid is in part contributing to that.

So, again I think that it brings good news and bad news and I think that a lot of the bad news have come because our governments sort of panicked at the beginning when they saw that this a very contagious illness and that was killing  people and they made some estimates -and I realize that is extreme but some said that there were going to be 70 million deaths worldwide from the Covid-.  So it was sort of that panic at the beginning that set us a little bit on the wrong track to handle Covid worldwide.

What I would like to see is more studies that do carefully track co-morbidity factors because what some people are so doing is just count the number of deaths or the number of new cases of Covid there are without saying "Oh, by the way, 99% of these people had co-morbidities factors".  So, give us a full account of the picture and that would be a good place to start.

I do not believe in the Conspiracy Theories.  They've never appealed to me. I don't think that the Governments of the world are trying to control us. Mainly because it is soo difficult to get that people agrees on anything. Let alone getting them together in something that is a bit far out !!!

It's very difficult to get some data on the effect of the measures that are been taken to cope with Covid.  We don't really know if they actually help. Because there are several countries around the world that have extremely low rates and what is it that they're doing that's different?  For example, some countries don't have lock downs very much and some of them have very low Covid rates. 

On balance I just don't trust the overall data that much because there's always some countries like Spain that takes a very serious approach but yet is not obvious that all these countries have that much of a lower rate of Covid spread.

Many youngsters are not following measures as a reaction in part to some data that suggest that people under 20 years old almost never get Covid.  I saw one report where less than 2% of people under 20 years old get Covid.

But in any case I do not think that is a worldwide Conspiracy.

One of the big problems with Covid is that different diseases always have different rates of infection on different population but Covid is one of the relatively few that has large differences in the rates attached to different populations (young vs old, and now the different co-morbidities in other types of populations).  And whenever you have an illness like that which attacks different populations at very different rates, the governments are always going to have a hard time handling those without getting a bunch of negative feedback because if they say, "well nobody can go into a bar, nobody can go into a restaurant, nobody can go to church, nobody can go into a movie house" That's  everybody!!!   It's not "only those people that have a high rate of infection can't go out and then let everybody else go on about it.  The government if it does something is going to be criticized and if it doesn't… it's also going to be criticized !!!

3.  If you would have the key for transformation, what would it be the best recommendation for avoiding the destruction of the human kind? What would you say that are our biggest challenges right now? And what would it be necessary to reach the 10% of the population at an Integral Stage?

KEN:

The first thing worth noticing is that the single thing most important that Humanity needs to do is hit that 10% of the population that reaches Integral or Second Tier stages of development.  Anything else is offered if it doesn't include a population that can see the importance of what's been recommended or at least think about it in an Integral fashion, it's not going to happen. So that's the first ingredient. However we decide is going to work, get at least 10% of the population in Second Tier.

When I first started writing in this field the percentage of the population that was at this Integral stage was actually like a 3 to 4% and now we have -depending on which model you use- like 5,6,7%.  So we're starting to get there and Evolution itself is driving in that direction, so we got THAT in our favor. 

In terms of help move large amount of population in that direction, I think that one of the most important things that we have to do is go through the Education System, because that's one thing that Green demonstrated with Postmodernism, but nowadays everyone that looks at a College system tends to be alarmed with what is happening in the Western world, that it's a broken Green establishment that believes in multiculturalism, equity, diversity, identity;  all those could be interpreted in an Integral fashion but they're not being interpreted that way but through a broken Green view. 

A lot of people say "This came on so fast !!!"  It was 2015 in America when we hit Halloween and all of a sudden Yale, and Missouri and Universities like that started writing their students letters saying "be careful what you wear in Halloween because you don't want to wear Cultural appropriated material and so on.  And all the professors that wrote their kids "no, don't you worry what do you wear on", they were fired !!! It was really insane. The most common feedback I heard it was "it's happened so fast. When did that start?"  And I would say that started in a bad way in 2014/205. It's been building in that direction for a couple of years but it broke out around five years ago. But the positive thing that it shows us is just how fast our major educational systems can so traded and change by a particular Philosophy -in this case was Postmodernist multicultural broken Green- but it had an enormous impact. 

The good news are that it can go that fast and that can affect our Educational Systems starting from the highest  and it'll go down from there as that's what we've seen. That's what Green has demonstrated.   

The good news are that just as we had the leading edge of the population which was Green at the time that it took over and it went very quickly sour, into broken Green;   when 10% of the population becomes Integral that could do have the same impact on our University's setting.  The fact that when Green took over Universities it was about 15% of the population but some Universities move out into Society at large and most of the business now have sensitivity trainings: even though it was no evidence whatsoever that that works but they almost all have it.  And the same with governments,  although Trump signed an executive order when he was at the office as only he would,  saying "No government will give any sensitivity training anymore".  So he threw it out. But Biden probably would throw that out too, but we'll see how that goes.

It is very possible, though that if we get our Educational System aligned with just a small percentage coming from the leading edge of development that could have a really major impact and I think is one of the few places that just a  leading edge -even if it's a 10% or 15% can have a huge impact just by going through the Educational System because that broken Green philosophy, even though it started at the upper reaches of education it's now moved to the entire Educational System at least in the United States, and we hear similar things that are starting to occur in Europe, Japan and elsewhere.  But it reaches all the way down so that multicultural philosophy is caught to starting in second, third, fourth grade in America.  So, again, those are good news and bad news and good news it's that it can be done and I think that's certainly positive.

Evolution will do the job of getting up to that 10% in the same way that it's reached leading edges in all years past. It manages somehow to do so. We had the Western Enlightment when only 10% of the population moved to Rational and yet is now known as The Age of Reason, because reason was introduced from that 10% of the population and then it tends to spread throughout the Culture.  Same happens with Green, in 1959, the percentage of the population in Green was 3% and in 1972 Jacques Derrida was the most frequently quoted academic writer in America, so in just 13 years the amount of the population moved to a 13% in that level of consciousness. 

For better or worse, if you look at the years it takes for the population as a whole to move from one stage to the other it's got tremendously shorter.

The two areas that have been hit the most by our non-skillful approaches to handling Covid, one of course is Economy which it's been devastating to most countries and the other one has been Education.  They are the two most important areas of our society although I was going to say that fortunately it hasn't hit Religion but it actually has because when a country shuts down they don't allow people to get together in church. Psychology and psychologist are one of the professions that have a relative large number of their practitioners are aware of Integral Theory because Integral Psychology at least in America -I don't know how is going in Europe- they've started another official branch of Psychology which is called Unity Psychology and the leading branch of that is Integral Psychology/Integral Psychotherapy. 

4.  At the 2020 IEC, Julia Ormond asked you a question about slavery and you didn't quite answer it. May be because in many occasions you've presented in your talks about Integral Theory the abolition of slavery as a sign of Evolution. Yet I see that as a real shadow in such a perception as today in our societies -and above all in the second and third world countries-  there is still too much slavery in front of our eyes and in many instances: political, social, even educative. It keeps on being slavery, insidious and ugly but it's hidden away and even shamelessly used for economic benefits, shown in our clothing labels, just to give an example.  What could you tell us about this?

KEN:

The reason that I probably didn't seem to give a complete answer when Julia asked me that question is I didn't want to point out another obvious factor that goes with all of this. When I say it now you'll see why I didn't want to point it out, because it's considered very politically incorrect to even say something. But in these third world countries that you do still find slavery is because you don't find Integral. They're lucky their center of gravity is up to Amber, and Amber of course has a high percentage of slavery as any other societal type anywhere.

One of the reasons why people do start to object slavery is when they move into Worldcentric/Rational stages.  Keep in mind that we had slavery just about 200 years ago -when I say we, I mean the first world Modern Culture-.   The founders of this culture had no problems with slavery.  Aristotle didn't have any problem with it. Plato didn't have any trouble with it.  And as Thomas Sowell puts it in his "History of Slavery", Buddhist monasteries had slavery, Christian monasteries had slaves.  All of those earlier stages of development didn't object to slavery at all. It was only when we actually got from Egocentric stages through Ethnocentric stages to Worldcentric stages where you find some form of rationality that all of a sudden people were looking at slavery and they were morally offended by it, because they had moved to moral stages that are known as Worldcentric and out of the previous stages that were conformant, that was conventional. And that just was not enough to object to slavery given those circumstances.

So I didn't dwell on that because you want to be very careful when you're talking to a world convention about saying that some types of cultural developments are not very developed. And just have to be careful about that.  But you also have to be honest about it or we'll never get rid of slavery. It would just won't happen. 

That's my major problem with the Western Enlightenment is that it did positively developed Worldcentric/Rational stages but the core of the Western Enlightenment is measurement,  according to Alfred North Whitehead in his book about the development of Modern Science -, he states that Modern science was born in 1605 independently and simultaneously by Kepler and Galileo as they both came up with the idea and I quote "the rules of Nature are the best to be understood through the measurement" . 

So we've had a great deal of observation of the world before then.  Aristotle was the premier, brilliant, and he classified a lot of stuff but he never thought to measure it. When Kepler started to measure, he measured planetary motion and that allowed him to come about with the laws of planetary motion.  And Galileo when he started measuring, he measured earthly motion, so you may see pictures of him as standing in the leaning tower of Pisa and dropping two objects and measuring the speed that they hit the ground and then the genius Issac Newton came along and he united both the laws of planetary motion and the laws of earthly motion with this universal law of gravitation. 

What they ended up doing -according to Arthur Lovejoy- who says that the first most common idea used in the Western Enlightenment was what the French philosophers called "System de la Nature", that's the great system of Nature and this was the most common concept in the Western Enlightenment.  Lovejoy calls it "the great interlocking order" and it was this idea that everything is connected and interacting with everything in a unified wholeness.

The second most common concept according to Lovejoy was "The Great Chain of Being", is the most widely professed  philosophy of human kind in all of its history in East and West. An example of the great chain of being in Christian terms is natter to body to mind to soul to spirit. So all of those were a great interlocking order, closely interwoven one with another but when you start to measure we find that it 's easy to measure matter but it's very hard to measure mind much more less soul or spirit !!!

So, even though most of the great philosopher that became the great pioneers scientists while they're out there measuring what they're measuring is matter and they're not worried, they're not being reductionist because what they believe is the Great Chain of Being.  So no problem with that!  Even Newton ! It's often said that he was the last great believer not the first great scientist.

All of them are still keeping the Great Chain in mind but within a century and a half tons of measurements-all covering the world of matter- and it looked that the only real world was the world of matter.  Still felt to be made of wholes, a great interlocking order, but it was nothing but material exteriors.  In other words what it's been called "the crime of the Enlightenment" is that it reduce everything to the lower right quadrant and up today the official background Philosophy in the Western world is Scientific Materialism and many of them are still engaged in this System's Theory.  They all believe that there is a interlocking whole, and that it's fine !!!

My problem with the Western Enlightenment is that the good news is that it's already at a rational level,  but the bad news is that it uses Rationality as a way to measure Nature!!!  That gave us only "matter".  Then,  they ended up reducing all to the Lower Right Quadrant. What's so funny nowadays is that all the people that want to believe that Science is getting us to a new approach of Mysticism are only using Science from the Lower Right Quadrant, because that's the only Science that we have !!!

So Fritjof Capra, the Dao of Physics, Deepak Chopra, bless his heart, I love Deppak, but he believes that Quantum Mechanics proves to us Mysticism and that would be true, every professional Physicist would have had a Satori !!! And almost none of them have had it !!!

The problem is that third world countries as they've just beginning to move from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic because they're so relatively low in development -magic or mythic-. Those are still levels that not only allow slavery but in many cases encourage it.  Part of the problem with people looking worldwide at the right of slavery is that they often have an anti-colonialist, anti-western civilization bias and they're the ones that are also willing to look at magic and mythic in all their pre-rational level as if they're somehow approaching trans-rational truth or reality. So they're not as open as they should be comparing societies that have slavery and comparing the world views that they actually have.  As if they would notice that the slavery is not a current in countries that have Worldcentric rational world views as it happens in countries that have mythic or even magic pre-rational worldviews.  That is a real problem for all of us !!!   That's what we get because of  Scientific Materialism.  

Many countries that were influenced by the West that they still have slavery up to quite recently, I've just read for example that India had slavery until 1972 and Peru had slavery until 1968.  It's unfortunate but human being have really low levels of developments and they're not puzzled at all. Of course, Rationality has its problems. Every stage has its good news and bad news but one of the particularly bad news at Pre-Rational stages is that almost everyone of them had slavery and what we're still finding today, we find it in the lower stages of development. And that's very sad !!!

All you have to do is just look at the great philosophers of the early stages.  I mean if you're going to find Aristotle not objecting to slavery, then it's all over !!! It's harder to get much smarter than Aristotle in terms of his everyday IQ.  So if he's not objecting to it, you're not going to find hardly any Pre-Rational person that would disagree with slavery.

5. Is Joe Biden the best thing that could have happened to America after Trump?  How do you feel as an American after the assault to Capitol Hill?  What's your vision for the future of the United States in such a polarized political atmosphere?  And do you think that the Pandemic is aggravating the situation? 

KEN:

I think that polarization in America is one of the truly huge problems because America has such a huge influence in the rest of the world. It's not good news for the rest of the world to see the type of polarization that we have.  And I think it came from every level of development has contributed to the mess that polarization has created.

We can't turn our back on the amount of negative that broken green has added, because this polarization didn't exist when there were just Amber and Orange that were sort of the leading edges of our political and civic society.  But when Green started to come in by introducing a multiculturalism and a diversity without really having ways to integrate those polarizations*, they actually started increasing the amount of polarization that we had.  And that was coming from the leading edge levels.  So this is why we call this the "culture wars", came into existence only with Green and we started our political system, while in Europe during  the Middle Ages, the general center of gravity was at Amber-Ethnocentric -people of those stages today we call "traditional values"- and in the Middle Ages they  believed in the king, in country and God and family.  And all of those were important values that a person at traditional level would still tend to adopt or think that they're positive in some way.

* of the worldviews and values of the Amber and Orange

When the Western Enlightenment came it brought with it a Rational view and that rational view was Worldcentric.  So among other things they started condemning slavery for the first time that did ever occurred before in any significant amount and when they got into Politics they had such a novel view of Politics that they actually had to come up with a different name for themselves and they did, and they called themselves "Liberals", from "Liberté", meaning "Freedom" and it turns out that in the French Parliament when all this is happening the Conservatives, the traditional people, they wanted to conserve society the way it was, while the Liberals just wanted to have a Revolution;  change  society to make it to something better, according to their own values.  Their own values didn't believe in Religion,  they believed in Science and didn't believe in traditional values, they believed in progressive modern values.

It turned out that the Conservatives sat on the right hand side of the king and the Liberals sat on the left hand side of the king. So they were called the Right and the Left because of that.  Those are still the terms we're using.  The right it still means "traditional" which in this country are "Republicans" and the left are progressive or liberals, in this country named "Democrats" and for several hundred years those two political parties sort of run the show and even the American Constitution was created with those two parties in mind.

Then starting in 1959, particularly during the 1060's Green began to emerge and Green eventually moved into Politics and because the Democrats always saw themselves as progressive -the exact percentages I don't know but I would say that half of the Democrats went on to become this extreme left or very progressive movement that believed in things like Multiculturalism, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and so on and the other half of the Democrats stayed at the old style Democrats and so they called themselves "Liberals".  Is now common in America, to hear that Liberals no longer means the left but the left is now reserved by only this far left Political Organizations and only the original old time Democrats are so called "Liberals", cause they're liberals!!!

Notice that just as the Democrats broke into two major different groups, so the Republicans did as well and they also moved up a stage and so about half of the Republicans stayed true old time traditional believers. So they still believe in God, in family and country and in all those traditional standard values of the old time Republican.  But then like half of the other Republicans moved into Orange-Rational and they're often referred to as the Wall Street Republicans and they were interested more in  things like Worldcentric Economics and things that could help businesses and so on. They also became interested in wealth in a different way that traditional believers weren't as much. 

So what we had were three Political Parties* and two were Worldcentric but where they say "two is company, three is a crowd", when we added these green values of Multiculturalism and Diversity and so on, on top of the old time liberal values, that's when we got the "cultural wars". These were two value systems that did not get along with each other. The old time Democrats believed in individual freedom, so they believed in the First Bill of Rights for example, and also in the freedom of speech, whereas the new left orientation of the Democrats did not believed in individual values but group values which is called "social justice". 

The old time republicans that had move up to Orange and become sort of the new Republican voice, they also adopted Orange values as the old time Democrats !!! These new Orange Republicans very much believed in individual rights and defended the First Amendment and the only people that you find that now quote this First Amendment are these new Republican voices.  The old Democrats have been silenced by this new left but they'd still vote for the old time Liberals if they find them. Anybody nowadays who's called "center" mean these old times' Orange liberal values and the progressive now just mean Green.  The pure traditionalist now just refer to Amber.

So, we have these three different value systems and that's when the culture wars broke out and the culture wars in particular started introducing this polarization that we're talking about because when there's just Orange and Green they could more or less get along and they might occasionally fight and don't like each other but there were just two of them and then you were just one or the other, so it's fairly easy to chose one. 

When Green was added, it became particularly tough whether you want to be an old style Liberal or a new lefted Liberal because these two really didn't like each other as they really were quite different and in particular Green would always think that "diversity is our strength and we're a multicultural country".  And it's not that they're not true, is that they introduced  types of fragmentation that they still couldn't integrate.  For example a multicultural mission it will only work if you have a leading edge at Integral, because Integral would know how to put together all these multicultural fragments. But if you don't have at least a center of gravity that truly is Integral then you can't claim that you have Integral values, because you don't and then Multiculturallity becomes a fragmented Culture.

So, to the extent that this left branch, previous Liberals, it's been adopted let's say entirely by Universities - Academia, Hollywood and the News Media they're almost true leftys.  And when Donald Trump got elected a large portion of the people that were voting him, where the people that were sick of the "political correctness" that they were getting thrown at them all the time by this far left political group and so they voted for Trump because he was so anti-politically correct. 

I'm not saying that that's good or bad, although it's true that Donald Trump is many problems, Mr. Donald Trump, I assure you;  but that's what in large part got him elected.  I wrote about this in the "Trump and the Post-Truth world" and a lot of other political commentators have written about how this has worked as well.

When Joe Biden was elected, he had behind him all  Academia, all the Press and all of Hollywood.  And so you have to look at the net effect that those groups just sort of automatically were behind him, and they were because, simply because he wasn't Donald Trump and in terms of any positive qualities he might bring, I think he does have some very real positive qualities.  But that's not the main reason why he was elected.  So the main reason it was that he had taken political correctness out of the equation.  The positive benefit that just that alone would bring, quite apart from what Biden himself brings to the picture, the fact that he's not Donald Trump and so it's taking that anti-political correctness out of the scene, that has an enormous positive influence and that's why I can say and I think he can very likely add to the healing of this fracture that broken Green initially stirred up.

How I personally think about Biden, even though he's about my age, I do worry that he could go down and then Kamala Harris, would be President and I feel less positive about Kamala Harris than I do about Joe Biden.  I think that's a bit of a problem.  But looking at the political landscape and the way that it has transformed all over the world in a sense from a two party system to a three party system it's really important.  And it's so important that I'm actually writing a book in my mind about  that topic because I think it's important for people to get an Integral picture of what's happening.

I have a lot of data, I can give a lot of information if we would have more time that just a few minutes to talk about it and of course whenever you write about Politics, you want to be careful but I sort of broke that rule when I wrote the book about "Trump and the Post-Truth world" but I was raising some of those same issues that I'm raising here now.

The bottom line is I do think that Joe Biden's election can help to relieve this fracture and this increasing  polarization that we're seeing now and that we saw with Donald Trump and particularly with the fact that those three major communication systems in America:  Academia, the Press and Hollywood were just so entrenched in the far left-radical leftist orientation, keeping in mind that the fact that I call it far left or radical left is in itself a put down because most of the smart people in any culture, particularly Academia and the Media would be at Green, because Green is the leading edge in today's world and my only complains about Green is just that it went extreme Green, what I call "broken Green".  It's just Multiculturalism becoming absolute, Diversity becoming  an absolute;  and they believed in this so absolutistically that they tended to regress to the absolutistic level which is the Amber-Ethnocentric level and with the regressed stance they maintained that they didn't even have to talk to their opponents and so College campuses are known now for any time a Conservative speaker shows up to speak, they get shouted down.  They don't even want to talk to them.  They just don't want to listen to what they have to say or anything like that at all.  And that's clearly has gone too far !!!  And that's the only problem I have with Green in Culture now.

When the portion of those Green regressed to the Amber -Ethnocentric level were technically taking up a "fascist" orientation,  as that's where Fascism comes from.  It's a "me" vs "they"; "us" vs "them" attitude which believes in "my group are the chosen people". That's the Ethnocentric belief.

Clare Graves calls the Amber stage "Absolutistic" because your beliefs are believed absolutistically and that's what Fascism does. And no matter what stage you're at when you become absolutistic, then you regress at the Absolutistic stage, which is an Amber orientation!!!

That's also part of the problem because the people that they meet down there on Amber, are people that are just coming up to Amber for the first time.  They're people like the KKK or the Neo-Nazis or they're truly real fascists down there at that stage.  And so they* run into them and that's the worst epithet they can think of they'll call somebody or the regressed green will tend to call anybody they disagree with,  the first thing they call them is: "Hitler", meaning "you're fascist". 

* N of T:  the ones which are making the regression from absolutistic broken Green

The problem with that is that if there were a large number of people at the Amber fascist level, then it would be a  problem. The Southern Poverty Law Center which is a think tank of very very far left in its orientation so you would expect them to come up with Statistic that help the far left, they pointed out that in 1920 in America, the number of the KKK members there were about 4.000.000 which is astonishing but today they estimate there's approximately 6.000 KKK members.  So that's not going in the wrong direction !!!  I mean we could take the total number of KKK in the country into a single football stadium. So, I don't think that's something to worry about. It's not significant

Some further evidence for the emergence of Green through Orange is that you might have noticed in the last 5 or 6 years or so that there's been an increasingly growing movement of people that used to be Democrats but either become Republicans or at least they say "I'm not longer a Democrat".  What they usually say is: "I didn't leave the Democrats, the Democrats left me".  They're still at that Orange original Liberal position so they still believe in individual rights, they believe in freedom of speech and they call that out but then they'll say that the reason they're no longer members of the Democrats is…  and they list all the green values !!!  They'll say they're social justice warriors, that they don't believe in freedom of speech anymore, and all of those.   So you find a fair number of fairly well known intellectuals that if they have not fully embrace Republicans -because Republicans still do have -half of them- at Amber  in addition to the half of them who moved to Orange-;  but they'll at least start criticizing the modern Democrats, the far left and this includes people like Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin and a lot of people that are well known online and the intellectual Dark Web is often accused by the far left of being fascist.  And that's where this is coming from.  So an understanding of these three stages of the Political engagement is really important and I think it's going to continue to be in the coming years.

 

6.  How do you see Ken, a transition toward a Natural Law in which we would stop to be a mercantile property for the State since the time we're born with our false identity in a card with a number with which we identify ourselves and where we could be free humans in a free planet. A world where we could manage mutual help and interdependence, using natural resources and technological advancements in a respectful manner?  Do you think that this is possible and do you think we'll be ever ready for that?

KEN:

One of the important options for the Human kind going  forward is of course getting up to 10% at 2nd Tier and we want that to happen in any event but another thing that could possibly happen is that we could get a healthy Green out of a broken Green.  That at least would give us a healthy version of our Green values.  I think that's at least theoretically possible.

We see that with a lot of the leading edges in the past. Sometimes they start healthy and then they just go through a period of getting kind of sick or discombobulated and then often come back.  Whether other ones start out just unhealthy to begin with;  you just get a broken version from the start but they can put themselves kind of back together and all can then turn out. So, theoretically there's at least a possibility that Green which is about 20 to 24% of the population depending on exactly how you added it up.  The percentage of that that's become broken I think that's at least a third of the people at Green have adopted this broken version.  Simply because Green is still leading edge and whenever there's a leading edge in society we start to feel that somehow - like when we entered the Western Enlightenment and even only 10% of the population was in Rational, we started sort to feel that in our bones already, so to speak. People would pay attention to rational scientists from the Middle Ages even if they themselves were not fully at a Rational stage.  So we do get this influence occurring, just from leading edges themselves as they unfold and influence a population.  

In terms of the likelihood of that happening Hmmmm.  For example I think that one of the reasons that our leading edge green went so crazy during our Culture wars, was because of Donald Trump.  Some of the very smartest 20% leading edge people from our culture looked at him and simply could not believe that a man that narcissistic could become President of the United States.  I mean it went insane!!! Even the New York Times (that you know that they're supposedly the world's greatest newspaper) they would start out with horrible editorials about Donald Trump and then occasionally a leading front page news story would start to say slightly bad things about him and then coming to an entire front page saying things like, Okay our stupid president did another stupid thing yesterday and we can't believe it !!!  I mean, just like that.  It went almost that bad !!!

That's what drove this country's polarization to its extreme heights because when people were so upset with Donald Trump they reacted the only way a person can in that state as that affects the structure of their own brain, their own mind, the structure of their own consciousness !!! That's where they took Multiculturalism and started to really break it and they took Green and started to break it and in large measure that was because of the reaction to Donald Trump.  

This was pretty much unheard of at least as far back as anybody can remember what Presidents are like in this country.  We read stories when American Politics first got started it was really horrible and they -the Press- said terrible things about presidential candidates and horrible things about each other.  But this guy was just new and people just couldn't stop their natural opinions of that guy - that got so negative, so visceral and intense that they could just not stop sharing that visceral hatred.

That's what I still blame broken Green per se as being a large part of the problem.  But broken Green I don't think it would have gotten nearly as broken without Donald Trump as the head and so the reason I'm mentioning it her is that if you have somebody as a President that you can respect and look up to then you are at least more likely to start acting not on just a broken Green but more on a healthy Green.  I think that's why Joe Biden got elected because so many people was so sick of themselves for the sick opinions they were having of Donald Trump that they just couldn't stand it anymore and so they said "That's it, I'll vote for that old guy who's going to have a stroke in six months and it'll better than Donald Trump. 

I'm still young enough to remember when John Kennedy for example was President and people just adored him and you could feel it.  You just wanted to be a better self because of who this man was and he had an amazingly cool wife Jackie.  Those things can have an impact and especially when you're looking at something as delicate as helping people develop to higher stages.  What you don't want is somebody who's ostensibly at the top of the grid acting like a Donald Trump. It just doesn't help that much. 

One of the reasons that Donald Trump could get away with anything is what they liked in him was the fact that almost everything he did was anti-politically correct.  He comes down, he talks about mexicans: oh, yeah, they rapists, they bring their drug, they're drug dealers.  If any other Presidential candidate had tried to do something like that he would have been tossed out on his ear so fast and make your head spin.  Not Donald Trump !!! Why? Because he's demonstrating his anti-political correctness when he does almost all of the bad things that he does. KellyAnn Conway pointed out that they were also anti-politically correct whatever else they were and that's why so many Americans would put up with so much from him as they were so sick of the politically correct atmosphere that they felt barreling down on them !!!

Remember, these are people that could or would get fired from their jobs if they said something that was politically incorrect and they were just really sick of it and I don't know how much of a reason that is why people were voting for Trump but as I think it through that's at least a present factor that had to do with how people reacted to Trump .  As Robert Keagan points out: three out of five Americans don't make it to Orange rational stage.  That means 60 % of Americans !!! That's a lot !!!

7.  What book(s) are you currently working on and what are your plans for future publications?   Will there be a new edition of  Transformations of Consciousness?  or something about what you called "Overview" and "Superview"?  Which book of yours you like the most and in which would you say that lays your greatest teaching?

KEN:

Well, one of my favorites and at the same time the book with which I had a great deal of problems with is "Brief History of Everything".  I like it because it's probably the best-selling book of mine and when somebody tells me that they really got Integral after reading this book, I really like it. My publisher told me that I couldn't make a book like that with the format of Questions and Answers and in that moment I just said "No, I'm going with this" And they said Ok. Nowadays it's very out of date in terms of just even talking about things like Growing Up, Waking Up or Showing Up, Opening Up and Cleaning Up.  I mean just even stuff like that.  I've changed my approach to the naming of levels because in Integral Psychology I went over a hundred different developmental models and I actually have charts in the back of the book that have all hundred of them listed.

I've always had different books in which I'm going to work and that come down and through my brain and in this occasion I thought:  I want to do an updated version of "Brief History of Everything" An I did !!! Yes !!! It's my latest book and it's called "Making room for Everything" and it's a similar approach as Brief History but it's simply up to date as it does touch on all of the new ideas or new approaches to old ideas.  I'm right now going over editing it which is very simple for me as I don't have to edit much at all. I think that it will do well.

Then I still have what I've just called "Volume II" for so many years as when I thought about how to name that book I called it Volume Two because it's the second volume in "The Kosmos Trilogy", which started with "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality".  And then this second that I've already done.  I have about a thousand pages of manuscripts, that if I have to call it something, I'm probably going to call it something like "Sex, Karma and Creativity" and the only reason the first word is Sex, is because I promised an old friend a long time ago that when I'd finish writing "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality" I would put the first word as Sex because books that have "sex" in the title, always sell more books.  So I'm going to do this Trilogy and the first word in every title is going to be "sex".  So, it's going to be "Sex, Karma and Creativity".  It's a good book.  It's as long as "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality" but it does cover an enormous amount of topics. 

In reality what this guy was asking about the book "Transformations of Consciousness" what does he means I don't know. Or, Oh, yeah, "Transformations of Consciousness" is the last book I wrote before I met Treya. It was a long time ago !!!  It's the last book I wrote for a six or seven year period.  The reason I chose to write it is that I had gotten in some argument with some idiotic academic that said "well you don't have any data behind.  There's no real data backing up any of those higher states of consciousness or anything your're saying".  That got me so irritated as back then I would still get upset every now and then. So I went to my friends at Harvard and I got six Harvard Psychologists and asked all of them if they would write a chapter for this book.  It's called "Transformations of Consciousness" and the people I got to work on were people like Daniel P. Brown who a lot of people know because of the great work he's done in translating Dzogchen texts and what a terrific meditation teacher he is now.

This book by the way was written 30years of so ago and at the three first chapters of it I introduced the first version of ladder climber view and so I gave an extensive research on the stages of development of the latter; like Cognitive stages and all other stages of development of the climber, including starting with the work from Margaret Mahler and her stages of Self Development and Jane Loevinger. So, I was writing about how those stages went up and then the view that you'd have in each one and so it remained a major work of mine and I still would point to it as a very important foundational text. 

I had not really thought about upgrading it because first of all the stuff that I wrote there is still I think accurate and also most of the stuff that everybody else wrote is also still accurate, so Daniel P Brown for example has continued his work looking at an enormous number of meditation systems around the world and came up with five major stages that essentially they all go through what incidentally are my gross subtle causal. He has presented those same stages in his book so those stages seem to stay the same. I haven't really felt any urgency to redo that book. 

Regarding these "Overview" and "Superview", they were technical names of world views coming from the Third Tier of Consciousness and the reason that they're still kind of circulating, so people are still hearing them is that I was one time thinking of calling two of the volumes in "The Kosmos Trilogy" , precisely those names. But now I'm not going to use them as I will use the ones I told you about being the "Sex, Karma and Creativity" about this transcend and include, the structure of Eros throughout the Kosmos.

 

8. In 2008 the book  "Integral Life Practice" was published in English.  After 12 years, it seems that the movement that could have generated is kind of blocked.  Even their authors did not follow that line ¿What would you change if the book would be written today? What would it be the path to follow for an Integral Life Practice for the present time?  Why would you say that the Integral Movement tends more toward a Philosophical Corpus than to a Practicum Activism?

KEN:

It's hard to say why a book doesn't take off.  The one concept that comes to me and I hesitate saying it as I don't want to sound like it's bragging but if I were to do it all entirely over again, I probably would have written all of it myself.  This was done with two other people and they're both great people and I still love them very much and I think they did a good job, considering how much I didn't contribute to it.  We went over all the theoretical details so I'm fine with the stuff that's in the book and I still think it's a very good book to use for practical aspects of how to apply Integral Theory.  It's when we actually create an Integral Life when we create programs where we actually do a real practice of life. 

I've been an editor at Shambala for almost my entire adult life and we constantly look at the authors and the books they write and how well they do and how well they don't do and we try to figure out well this is why this book sold well and this is why this one didn't and so on, and the only reason I mentioned that I might write it myself is that one thing that we find is that sometimes an author has a particular way of writing that just appeals to a particular group.   If they write sort of almost any book they'll sell a large amount because this group is going to buy whatever they write because they just like to read what they write.

It appears that when we do those studies on my stuff that I sort of have a fairly large group that will just buy pretty much any book that I do in a sense and so the thought is that in order to have a like worldwide series of like groups forming, then that book would have to sell a lot to get out there.  My sense is that the people that like me and are used to buying my integral books would be able to tell if I had written that and they would read it.  Then they would like it or not. 

So that would be one of the things that would be a prerequisite for those books to get out there in a way that people would start creating groups around them.  Then I would give an e-mail address that they could get in touch with and that also would include getting in touch with me.  If we would do something like that, then  I think we would see more of the practical applications actually get out there.

The principles of an Integral Life Practice right now are essentially the ones that we covered in that book and I could go now through the list of issues but I don't think we need to do that now.  I'm sure that if I sit down and read it I would add or subtract something from it but nothing that comes to me now.

"If you want to start a group and we urge you".  If we had just put that in the book I think that would have helped enormously.  I know when Mike Murphy and George Leonard created their book about "Transformative Life Practices"  they included that sort of announcement in it and it helped a lot.

 

9. In your books "Trump and the Post-Truth" and "The Religion of the Future" you offer the data of 5% of the population in a 2nd degree of consciousness.  That is 350.000.000 million people understanding, among other things, that each human being is evolving through different levels of consciousness and therefore accepting the thoughts and values of other. Where do you think that these people are stationed, what do you think they're doing? Because it seems that they're very separated from public media, institutions, associations, public activities and even books.  Don't you think we would need a little more involvement of this so called "evolutionary people"?

KEN:

Keep in mind that the vast majority of people that are at a given stage of development have no idea that they're at that stage, so when developmental Psychologist say:  23% of population are at Green, it's probably less than one percent of them that have any understanding at all of the stage of development that they're at what it means that you seem to have dissapear from the screen if 5% of the population is at Integral Second Tier.  Way less than half or 1% would be aware of their stage and then of that percentage, the percent that's aware of my own work would be even less.  So the overall number it becomes a very very small worldwide percentage that are aware of Integral.  That's why you don't see them.

10. In some of your books you've talked about "the death of Psychology and the birth of the Integral" .  Why do you say that ? Do you really think that Psychology has an expiration date? Or was that just a simple way of talking to open us to the Integral reality?

KEN:

Yes, I think it was a way of introducing Integral and in terms of the actual phrase "death of Psychology", I had actually taken it from a fairly well known Psychological Theorist that had written that phrase in one of his book and  it was written in a footnote and he was just making a sort of a comment off the top of his head but it of course stuck with me because this person also used facts and he called it and I quote "an integral age". And I think he was just looking as a Psychologist that wrote quite a bit of stuff about Psychology and its History and Theory and so on.  So I think he noticed the huge number of different schools of Psychology that we're aware now and that he was aware then.  He really wanted them to come together and so he just thought that it would be the death of all that stuff and the birth of an Integral Psychology that would tie it all together.  So and usually when I use a phrase that somebody else has  used I almost always quote them, particularly if it's in any vaguely academic work that I'm doing.  I didn't for some reason.  I didn't mention this person and I think the reason I didn't is because he had put it -himself- in a footnote, so it didn't seem that important for him and so when I first read it I just noted that and that stuck with me. 

11.  And what about Philosophy? Would  you say that Philosophy is dead? That it has lost its enlightening function?  It seems that people's ideas, feelings and opinions are so fragmented and polarized, having lost all curiosity for real Evolution that there is more practice for well being than intellectualized readings and discussions, what is leaving the Cognitive Line aside. May Integral Practice take us to Enlightenment by itself?

KEN:

Actually, I think what we see happening -and in a certain sense this could be said of Psycholgists as well as other academic subjects- is a slight increase in the interest that people are showing about  Philosophy and I think it's because Philosophy is having like a little rebirth and the reason is the Internet -that's like a new Gutenberg's Revolution- as it has changed the number of people that has access to the information. Just think about publishing. If a publisher publishes a book and it's an academic difficult book and they sell 10,000 copies, they're delighted, they'll be completely happy, they make money, they cover any advance they gave to the author. They make that back. 

Nowadays the number of people that are Internet stars may list like 20 million viewers. Oh, my goodness, it's unheard !!! I mean literally !!! Jordan Peterson for example; the reason you've heard of him is because he has close to 1 billion views !!! Many of these "stars" (like Jordan Peterson) emphasize the importance of Philosophy as they themselves would give philosophical explanations. I mentioned Jordan Peterson, but I can also mention Dave Rubin or Joe Rogan. This latter does a visual podcast once a week and he has 4 million subscribers and that means that many people is getting this communication from this person. And Joe Rogan is a fan of Philosophy and so it is Dave Rubin.

They're incidentally, the three of them, people that no longer consider themselves to be Democrats.  If you ask them what they are, they'll say I'm "classic liberal" and they're there all the three of them using the same exact phrase, what it means an orange original classic liberal. And that's an orientation in favor of individual rights, freedom of speech, etc.. Due to the fact that we have this type of background circulating with such huge numbers and because at least a large portion of some of those are Philosophers they're talking up and that's what it's giving a 2% increase in the interest for Philosophy. And 2% of 4 million, that's a lot of people !!!

The intellectual Dark Web -by the way- has got several hundred people that are primarily philosophical in orientation, from Sam Harris, to Eric Weinstein and they just go on and on and if there's something they don't like is Scientific Materialism.  When Scientific Materialism took over from Philosophy it just said "all the Philosophy just sucks eggs, it's all wrong, it's not scientific, it can't provide any sort of verifiable belief criteria.  Nowadays the Scientific Materialism is starting to run a little bit thin;  people is starting to provide their own background philosophies and I think that's what it's caused all this increased interest in Philosophy.

12.  ¿What kind of problems do you foresee for the Integral Community in the days ahead as it seems that it is also very fragmented ?  Some people say that the IT per se is obsolete and they accept as Integral other theories that do not even complete 3 of the elements.  But they do that  to be more inclusive, so they say.   What would you recommend to unite these divisions (Wilberians and Non-Wilberians but they say they're Integralist)? And  what do you think it will happen with the Integral Theory in the future? Do you  have someone in mind that you trust and are  comfortable with to  maintain your Psychospiritual and Philosophical message?

 

 

KEN:

Integral in the whole is increasing. I would say there is a steady increase in the interest for Integral. My books -for example- continue to sell more and more and they are been mentioned in public by a large number of people, as you know almost everybody in Holloywood knows about Integral and in Academia there's always one or two per Department that has heard of it and even in Politics: Al Gore, Bill Clinton, for example, loves it and quotes it all the time.  So that part of it continues to grow but within that increasingly large population there is of course some split off fragments and that has increased as well.  In part it comes like a natural side effect as when you increase the amount of people that are interested in something you also increase the amount of people that fight within that group.

Therefore, what I would say is that people has to be careful about it to the extent that an Integral approach has really meant something to them.  I would say that they would be careful to adopt it as full and as integral as possible and although there are many so-called integral philosophers worldwide -and I know many of them and like most of them and have learned things from various writers as whenever I find something that I think is really good I automatically steal it and it'll show up in a future book at some point and I've always done that because I never really cared who came up with an idea as what I want it's just the truthful idea.  So I take the truth from wherever I can find it- so what people would want to be careful for is that they're more than welcome to use somebody else's approach, just make sure that covers as much of the ground of my work does or else or else it's not going to be as Integral as it could be and that's what mostly I've seen happening. 

People would come onto the scene and they're very impressed with Integral. I mean that they read it and they get all blown away.  Then a lot of them start thinking that Integral is their idea and they claim it's theirs and they start to write stuff.  I found that they rarely include a 10% of what I've included and yet they keep on making these claims and they can always get a few other people that would agree with them and so just have to be careful about that. And again, I find that if anybody wants to chose some other philosopher whether they call themselves integral or not, if it really speaks to them and does something for them that's fine, by all means adopt that person or quote that person and use that person but don't say they're integral. That's what I'm saying. 

In that sense I think there is a great misunderstanding on the word "Integral" and what do we mean by that.  For example Roy Bashkar and Edgard Morin with their Critical Realism and Complexity Theory respectively. Those theories are not Integral Theories and it is very unfortunate that they're presented as such. The french Edgard Morin, included three approaches in his Complexity Theory which he called the Good, the True and the Beautiful and Sean Sbjorn Hargens who was presenting this as an updated version of Integral, thought that it was really dealing with all of the areas of all of the quadrants, but this French gentleman was using the Truth, Good and the Beautiful that were all essentially from the Lower Right Quadrant.  In other words he was not really integrating them, he was just getting a scientific materialist view of all three of them but as he included the three of them he was been integral but he was not making an Integral Theory. The other guy Roy Bashkar when Sean said these all fit together -because this one guy is focusing on the Lower Right Quadrant and Roy Bashkar is focusing on this quadrant and Ken focuses in this quadrant, well he was still using the four quadrants to integrate the materials. So at least he was using my stuff in order to explain his new Integral approach !!!

That's what I tend to find, is people that think they've got a new Integral approach and many times they think they're covering everything that I'm covering but they're not. And that is because they're not getting the really subtle importance in the differences in all of the areas that I'm presenting, so you want Quadrants, Levels, Lines, States and Types, and if you don't have all of those -as well as the Self System and the Shadow Work, then you're not making an Integral Theory, because you're not covering all the bases neither the way that they should be covered. That's why it's not as Integral as it could be if you were including all that -as they were meant to be included-.

So yeah, that's a problem and I've more or less gotten used to it.  I still would condemn it when I see it.  I mean that I still criticized it but I don't get dramatically upset over it like I would have when I was younger because as I said earlier I don't get that upset anymore.  If something was going to upset me this would be it.  This people claiming to be Integral and they're not really that Integral !!!

I spent a lot of time putting all these elements together in this full Integral Framework because I think they're all extremely important and they need to be included and so when somebody busts the framework open and it means they're tossing out something that shouldn't get tossed out right and they're not including this and that it's what really upsets me because I've spent an enormous amount of time with these people and I know how important their work is.

Regarding the future of Integral Theory, my sense is that - since my first book "The Spectrum of Consciousness" ("El Espectro de la Conciencia") has always had a bit of a handicap because I was trying to be inclusive as one of the things you want to pay attention to is developmental studies as they're incredibly important  and they're also almost universally overlooked or forgotten- I will keep on including developmental  stages.  The negative side of that is that it's not that often than in order to appreciate a Philosophy you have to be at least at a particular stage of development or you just won't get it !!! I've always faced that problem and that's always been a real issue and so of course that apparent narcissism  is what some people call Nazism, which is crazy because that means that they don't get it. And that it's a real problem !!!

I see the future unfolding for the first time since we have somewhere between it looks 6 or 7% of the population at 2nd Tier Integral stages of development and that's headed in very much the right direction.  Then we can assume that probably within 10 years the percentage of the population at Integral will hit 10% and so that means that you can see Integral.  And if you're not at 2nd Tier stages or if you don't have some of your multiple intelligences that at least reaches up into that, then you're not going to see what it is that you're asked to give an opinion about or it's just going to go over your head. And it will be in over our heads, and that's where a large part of the population has been with respect to my work. 

It's been over their hands and I'm actually giving the amount of success that I've had considering how much of it depends on that, it's really pretty remarkable.  That's why I do not have any complaints at all about how I mean not many philosophers have somebody like a Bill Clinton quoting them or Al Gore saying "this new book is my favorite book ", or Sharon Stone or Julia Ormond.  I mean it's been outrageous !!!  And I feel I  truly can die tomorrow and be very very happy with the number of people that I that I've been able to help and that have been really enriched by the work that I've been able to do for them.

So that feels great and my sense about what will happen is -having in mind that the population's center of gravity is continuing to move to greater and greater levels, because we all have a an inherent Eros in us- that the percentage of the population worldwide that reaches Integral will continue to expand and the more they do, the more people will find my work and I'll find other people Integral oriented to people's work.  So, I think that's great and I hope it'll happen. I think it will, what  don't know is  how fast it's going to happen. Making a wild guess thinking in the direction that my work is headed and actually sort of for the first time in my life I'm not as worried about the fact that people have to be developed to a certain stage in order to buy one of my books or appreciate their content or say that they like Integral.  I really feel fine with where the world is when it comes to that. 

Surely that I would like to see it occur faster rather than slower, simply because we have an enormous number of problems and I think one of the most widely accepted approaches to problem solving that we will see in the future is to get a bunch of Integral people together and ask them the questions they're asking themselves.  This will be a common practice to be done and the world will be thankful and that would be wonderful !!!

Something like Political advisors of our Political rights and that by the way is just a side product of what is the most important thing I think we need to do as human civilization if we're going to live.  That is to take into account left hand Quadrants of our Reality. Now, we have a Scientific Materialism.  Now we have this enormous amount of stuff coming from focusing on the exterior quadrants and I say "fantastic", it's done" And it's going to continue in Technology and you know Microsoft and Google and so on. And that's going to just continue to explode but if we don't include the left-hand Quadrants and assessing those in our Educational System, making them available for people at large to be aware of,  for their religion and their spirituality and so on to continue with the development.   If we don't take those Left Quadrants into account then we would just lose half of the Reality and it can be a real nightmare.

If people would do that then they would also happen to see the people that are moving into Integral stages and they might be doing something with all of that and I'm sure that will be a good thing all around. 

13.  I am right now trying to create a We Space group  for the Integral Life Practice in my city (as Terry Patten recommends in his book "The New Republic of the Heart" in order to be open to another Vmemes and then make integral friendship s to have sincere conversations to the core).  We are 4 organizers (2 of them with an Integral vision and another 2 with a New Age mentality).  It's very complicated to agree on anything. Therefore how to create Integral Practice groups (with this idea of being the change you want to see in the world) with green thinking people in the group?  May you give us some recommendations, apart from having a lot of patience with their ideas,  on how to create an open group as Terry Patten recommends to open the integral community to others because been a close circle is not evolutionary. So how could we talk about integral vision with people from postmodern pluralistic values?

KEN:

Well, that's a very good question and it's also very difficult.  One of the things that you can attempt to do, obviously - because this is a very delicate issue and you have to think of very sensitive ways to bring it up-  is just ask people.

Well, I give several different ways you could do it.  One is to simply ask everybody,  what stage of development do you think you're at? and if you can even get somebody to say "well I think I'm largely green, even though I think that I'm open to Integral ideas".  If you can get them to say something like that, you have a foot on the door, and then you can actually say "Ok, all of you now.  There's  ten of us  in this group.  Seven of you raised your hands for being Green, so how would you seven like to handle feedback about when you're being Green? Do you want to try to deal with that or not?  And at least if they say "no", everybody knows that they're shutting off the discussion and if they say "well, we maybe we could have 10 minutes of feedback at the end of each meeting where everybody would give us what they think", then you have it !!!

What is really good is that everybody does all of these multiple intelligences and most of them are at slightly different degrees of development and it's not unusual that you'll find somebody who has a moral development at say Green and a cognitive development at Teal or Turquoise.  That can happen quite often and if you can just draw attention to those kind of facts by just gently saying like:  "what stage do you think you're all at ?" And get them to address that. As soon as you get that put on the table -and that's the hard  part, may be not making it absolute but talking them through "Lines". What is the line you're at?, What level in that line? Then pick four or five different lines to make it more concrete.

14. Have we arrived to the ceiling of the human consciousness as it was conceived? May be cyborgs and artificial intelligence would be the main characters of Life for the 2nd Tier consciousness, instead of humans?

KEN:

Well,  one thing is certain. and that is that when Artificial Intelligence reaches what's called General Artificial Intelligence, -which means that right now we have almost entirely narrow artificial intelligence and that's an A.I .that can only deal with one specific task, so it can play Chess, or it can play "Go" or it can drive an automobile, or something like that, but what makes human intelligence so complicated is we can do at least a dozen different intelligences and they can each go through a dozen or more stages of development and until you can get an Artificial Intelligence that can match that, you're not going to get a General Artificial Intelligence that can do a general artificial intelligence !!!

It's a complex issue in itself and it looks like -given the direction that A.I. is going-that at some point we will get to a General Artificial Intelligence.  Part of the complexity is that we don't really have a good understanding of the left-hand Quadrants because they've been shoved out of our awareness for such a long time.

If we look at Philosophers that do include Consciousness in their overall Philosophy, at least half of them are what's called panned psyches which just means that they believe that every consciousness is present in every single thing in the universe.  So an atom has a little bit of consciousness and a molecule has a little bit of consciousness.  Alfred NorthWhitehead called it "prehension" that means that every single monad or every whole in the Universe has a little bit of "prehension", so quarks have quarks' prehension, atoms have atom prehension, molecules have molecular prehension and so on.  The thing  is that if you're looking at Consciousness and is taken up and becomes a part of atomic consciousness and atoms become part of molecules,  so that atomic consciousness become a little part of molecular consciousness and molecular consciousness is present in cellular consciousness.  What we have right now unfortunately is that when A.I. researchers work on Artificial Intelligence they just look at the look within and see whatever consciousness they can see and it's usually some form of rationality and that rationality in reality includes atomic consciousness and molecular consciousness and cellular consciousness and all of those prehensions are built on top of each other to finally burst out as a rational consciousness;  but when somebody today researches looks within it, they just see rational consciousness and they skim that off the top and they make a program that will reproduce rationality and they can do that quite well.  So if there's just a game like chess that you have to do, they can create an algorithm that will play chess better than any human can play chess but they still can't get artificial intelligence that can for example pick up a paper clip.  So the typical saying is that in A.I. what's hard is easy and what's easy is hard !!!

It used to be tough for example that a computer would never be able to play chess, because chess was the epitome of the highest consciousness that humans have which is rationality.  Then 20 years later any computer chess game can now beat any human. The hard part chess turned out to be easy and the hard part is everything that a one- year -old child can do. For example a computer cannot do any of that and that shows that the easy part is the hardest.

I think the reason that we can't do it is that we don't have a complex enough understanding of consciousness that includes atomic consciousness, molecular consciousness and cellular consciousness, reptilian consciousness, mammalian consciousness, primate consciousness, as all of those have a bit of apprehension and we're not taking that into account.  I think that is the reason why we can't get Artificial Intelligence to do any of those little early things that human beings can do, because human beings are including atomic consciousness and they do include molecular consciousness and also cellular consciousness.  Every one year old is including all of those, so of course it can do these hard things that a computer can't get close to, assuming that as the world gets more integral and it starts to understand there are at least four quadrants and probably eight zones they then would realize "Ok, we've got to start including the left-hand quadrants in our algorithms or we're not just going to cover all the bases and so it's just not going to work. 

I'm assuming that at some point, we're are going to take that step and as soon as we start taking Integral approaches to consciousness it will start matching Reality. 

By the way this is at least starting because for example there's a computer program out there that is called Sophia, that is the most watched computer program in existence.  It's been in all sorts of morning television shows.  I watch a video on how the people that created Sophia's intelligence proceeded and what I was struck by is they included nine multiple intelligences and they developed a computer program for all nine of those multiple intelligences, now, they didn't include Stages in them and they were attempting to include Quadrants when they included multiple Intelligences from the Upper Left.  It was fascinating to see it and also to see when they played each example of each individual multiple intelligence I was so disappointed in the result that I moved back by about 10 years my own estimate of when they would actually get it right because it was horrible. The good news is at least they're trying as they know that it's there.  If they would get Quadrants and Levels -as they've got Lines- and then add Types and States that would make it.  But they're getting closer.  That will happen, I'm so assuming in 30,40 or 50 years.

When that General Artificial Intelligence will be first unfolded, there's a lot of experts' disagreement on that. I've heard as soon as 5 years but most say that by the end of the century.

Human Consciousness has not touched the ceiling at all. As people become more Integral and they start including more of the things that they've been leaving out -notice that almost no Western developmental Psychologist has any understanding or even knowledge about the States or Stages of Consciousness Development up to Awakening or Enlightenment. For example, the great Enlightenment Traditions don't understand anything about developmental Psychology, so we have Waking Up and Growing up and they've never come together.  As people start to learn more about their own Growing Up capacities and also start to learn about their own Waking Up capacities, I'm assuming -and of course this is part of the assumption of the Religion of tomorrow- that people will start to want to have Waking Up experiences and so even if they became fairly well known and people started doing that, that would be an enormous growth in the amount of consciousness that we would have available for us.  So just including the Waking Up in our map on the fact that everyone would know about their own potentials would be a huge growth and also including Growing Up when they would learn that "Wow, I'm at this stage and there are at least 4 or 5 stages above me.  May be I'd want to get to some of those.   That would also be huge !!!

You have to be in Orange at least to arrive there and to understand that there is some kind of and objective that's true and exactly right. I don't think we're anywhere near our potential for consciousness growth. 

15.  It seems that nowadays biological computing and those "alive robots" (according to the University of Vermont) named xenobots are creating a great expectation among the scientific community as they've demonstrated that it's possible to create programmable artificial biological life.  Do you think that silicon computers are ready  to become obsolete?

KEN:

I don't think that biological computing is going to get rid of silicone based computation. I'm not sure exactly what the capacities of these xenobots are but a large part of the Silicone Revolution was understanding that silicone machines could perform as well as human brains in at least some specific areas and so it's not clear to me.  I have to see what this "xenobots" are doing in order to get any real sense out of whether just as in human beings we could find silicone, I would have t see what this biology  carbon based can actually do. May be it does it better. I think this is still extremely too modern and it's in its first stages of development.  I think we're not in disposition to compare yet.

16.  The time of the Pandemic provoked many fears, especially with Klaus Schwab's book "The Great Reset" and the politics that were recently discussed in Davos.  How may your thesis about flatland reductionism can be activated against this new ideology of the 21st century namely Transhumanism?  

KEN:

It's an understandable but very human desire.  There are a couple of forms of Transhumanism but one of the basic ideas is that human consciousness will be able to be transferred entirely into a machine supercomputer whenever the machines would be able to display a General Artificial Intelligence and so we will live forever in a silicone based machine. 

The first thing that I always think about is "well that might be true but if it is, just make sure that nobody  drops the machine that you're in because all of a sudden your living forever is going to be gone into nothing !!! I can't get that part out of my head.  So I can never get much beyond Transhumanism. 

It would of course depend upon getting to a General Artificial Intelligence. And the other thing that I would be very concern about is what degree of consciousness are you going to call yourself and have injected into the machine for all eternity?  What about if you're at Amber Ego Development?  Are you telling me that you never want to Grow Up again forever?  And what about Waking Up, are you going to have an automatic Waking Up and to what stage of Waking Up are you going to wake up to ?

All of this is typically overlooked by the same young geeky males who are college age and can't get a date and stay up all night sitting in front of their computers typing out algorithms. God bless them !!! They've brought an enormous number of good things but this is just one of the geeky male fantasies and I don't think much of it

Let's put it this way.  The only consciousness that I would keep for all eternity would be a truly Integral consciousness or otherwise it's not good. It would be a horrible horrible fate.

17.  As you know, Ken, Psychedelics may offer a powerful introspective lens that, through its increased "shock value" and enhanced immersion could trigger a deeper and quicker emotional response than meditative practices. This makes them more effective to treating certain illnesses as depression, post traumatic disorders, anorexia, addictions, etc. We could even say that they might ignite a spark towards spirituality and self introspection, therefore, what's your opinion on this Psychedelic Renaissance in academic institutions like John Hopkins University or Imperial College.  Should these studies and experiences be integrated in society through dedicated centers and experts?.

KEN:

I happen to think that Yes !!!  I'm a Boomer, so I was born and grew up in the 60's and even though I've never done LSD or any of those when they were first made illegal I became infuriated  because I could see not even having taken them myself  that first of all a large number of people were having very genuine transcendental experiences and if nothing else we should keep them around for research, absolutely, because they're really telling us an enormous amount of information about  the brain. 

I was just infuriated with the whole thing and it was the same impulse that it made me really glad to see when places like John Hopkins University and a few others started researching particularly on Psilocibyn and other substances. And they would get very reproducible results of people having very profound transcendental transpersonal experiences. 

This research was so believable and so extraordinary that I mentioned this Jordan Peterson guy and he's said in  one of his podcasts -seen by a billion people- that these Psilocibyn experiments make it when it comes to the existence of what he calls "absolute consciousness" which is where the ego dissolves and you're one with absolutely everything.  He says:  "the existence of absolute consciousness is now -and I quote- no disputable".  I mean it's had that much of an impact on him and one thing that he's known for even the people that don't like him admit that he always has a great deal of scientific evidence to back up what  he says.  And that's just an example of what these Psychedelics substances can do.

Of course I think that they should get a wide support. They should definitely legalize them if for no other reason than keeping them from being illegal makes it really hard to do any sort of research on them.  You really have to go through an enormous bureaucratic governmental series of steps in order to get anything resembling legal permission to do research on that, even if you're John Hopkins. 

So I think it's terrible that they've been illegal all these years as these has prevented precisely this kind of research. And research will let us know that when you what do you do when you take up Zen Buddhism that creates a state of consciousness that is not disputable and that's the truth and you can put that down as a product of Scientific Materialism proving these transcendental realities, to prove that they exist.

18.  Are you happy, Ken? Describe us your take on Happiness and what are for you the most important things in life? What do you do to maintain happiness in your everyday?

KEN:

I'll describe my type of happiness and I'd say that the most important thing in life are practices and exercises that you can take and undertake to attempt to get into this absolute consciousness that we were talking about. The Tibetans call it "One Taste" because you fell absolutely ONE with EVERYTHING that's arising moment to moment and when that becomes really solid, the sense of separateness, of a separate self-sense or separate identity tends to fall away.  It doesn't mean you're not aware of your small self;  you are, but you're also aware of what's call your "true self" -which is one with the this ground of all being-  and that's what gives you a sense of oneness with everything. 

When you're one with this ground of being, you're one with everything because this is the ground of all beings, not a particular being.  It's the ground of all beings.  And that has been universally expressed and experienced by the great wisdom traditions. It's claimed that to be attaining that realization is said "Enlightenment" or "Awakening" or a "Siddha realization" and it's universally. 

By the past that practice was said to be the core of happiness.  So Vedanta for example is one of these and it names this "One Taste" as "Satchit Ananda" which is being consciousness and bliss and bliss is in a sense a feeling that comes from the absolute freedom of any attachment or identification with anything.  That's a feeling of bliss or great joy or happiness. 

This is something I have for whatever the reason, recognized as being an ultimate truth and the traditions that maintain this approach usually have something they call: "The two truths' doctrine".  There's relative truth and ultimate or absolute truth.  Any of these truth that Science would give you: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and any of those,  they're said to be relative truth,  which means they have some true but that true applies only to the relative manifest universe and they don't tell you anything about the ground of all of that.  When you discover that ground you realize that is ultimate truth as it is ultimate truth for every single relative truth that there exist.  Some people would call this as an intuition you can have but I had it early on that it was an ultimate thruth in addition to this relative truth.

The first person that I studied about his was Krishnamurti an a lot of people know Krishnamurti as he became quite famous back in time and also Alan Watts who wrote a lot about these topics and I just recognize the truth of what they were saying and I began to practice, particularly Zen and Dzogchen at one time or another.  I've practiced most of the world religious traditions to some degree, including The cloud of Unknowing and father Thomas Keating's work and etc.  But one of the things that these ultimate truths teach is that enlightenment can't be attained and it can't be attained because you literally already have it present and you not only have it present but you know you have it present and when you actually get a satori -that it when you wake up to this- you'll realize this ground of all beings but you'll also realize "Oh God how did I forget that I've known that my whole existence, what the hell " !!! And yet people call that narcissism.  They call most of the things that you and I find important "narcissistic". That's just the way it goes !!!

Consciousness is, well let's put it this way:  "if somebody doesn't call what you're doing "narcissistic", it's probably not true ",  so just keep that in mind.  Fortunately you and I both have that working for us !!!

As I continued to practice and kept on having satori states that is something that it came increasingly obvious to me.  So, I not only was realizing something but I was realizing something I had known for my entire existence and that consciousness has become more and more a constant presence with me.  Thus, I maintain it even when it can cause problems like in my deep dreamless sleep !!!

That's what it makes me happy and it's fairly constant as a sensation, a realization for me now and that's what it's the highest happiness for me.

19.  Have you had any contact or received any message from Treya from the other dimension? Do you think that these contacts are possible? Does it exists life after death?

 

KEN:

 

Well, the problem I have with that and that is that I've always known people that believed that there was some sort of reincarnation;  that we went forward after life and they've always been beliefs of two types and both very contradictory. They can't both be happening at the same time.  And I always bring this up to each one of them. There's this type of people that believe in what I call the standard grade reincarnation which is, I, Ken Wilber will continue forward, how Ken Wilber will go through the Bardo realms and then somebody, Ken Wilber, that was really me -whether I can remember it or not- will be reborn in some future body and I'll go on.  And that continues until I'm fully awakened and I won't have to reincarnate any more.

 

Even the Traditions have some quite profoundly different understanding of what reincarnation means.  Shankara, for example, which is the brilliant genius philosopher that founded Vedanta Hinduism, he famously said, and I quote: "The Lord is the one and only transmigrant". That's not hard for me to see or agree with that version because it just means that there is one Consciousness and the same one Consciousness is reincarnated and he calls it: "the Lord". We can call it like you want.  Zen calls it Big Mind and that is the sole existing Consciousness that continues to go on and I believe that in any event.

 

In believing that version I wouldn't necessarily hear from Treya because she would just be Big Mind now and she wouldn't necessarily be just little Treya. So that's that version of reincarnation.  One version that I happen to believe in because I've already experienced One Mind. That's what Awakening is !!!  I know that that's at least there and it's eternal meaning timeless.

 

The other type of person that would always believe that souls went on, or people that would talk to mediums who could get messages from the other side. There's actually been a fairly large amount of research done on certain mediums that does give a positive indication that when they get messages from a person on the other side, then they check with the people that really knew that person to check how accurate the medium could be and in some cases -not all of them by any means, but in some cases they're very accurate and they do seem to actually be getting information from that person and usually that person not only can they be dead for a long time but often a medium will claim to: "Oh, I'm going to contact.  I'm contacting William James now, and William James lived around 1.900 and they'll claim that they're contacting somebody which is dead for quite a long time and it might have been somebody that they're talking with that knew them and so they can check or they're just saying it just because they want to show they can do it or for whatever reason.

 

If all that is true, and let's say the person that is talking to William James, what it's talking is to a version of William James that is living in that in that after-life realm. Then that means that William James did not reincarnate. He didn't continue going forward because you're talking to him still from the year 1900.  So it's at least been 100 years and he's still stuck in whatever he's talking to you from. And that doesn't sound good !!!

 

(Ken,  kind of stops, visibly touched for a moment )

 

Whenever  I talk about Treya I usually would start crying, so if I do just forgive me but that's just the way it is!!!

 

I had what could be called an after life experience with her but it happened immediately. We have decided that upon the moment that she actually died, I would read her favorite portions from the Tibetan book of the Death and also the just the favorite she used to have these cards she carried around that had some of her favorite spiritual sayings on them.  I would read those to her. So I started doing so and on it was about three or four hours later after she had died. 

 

I agreed that I would read them to her for 24 hours straight and this about  4 or 5 in the morning  after she died when I heard this enormous click in the room and I actually ducked; it was so palpable and the feeling was that she had just completed Enlightenment.  When I heard that click, the feeling I had a very very profound  Satori experience and I felt it was unmistakably her gift, Yes.  And she was actually transmitting that Awakening to me and I stayed in that state for at least a month which was just unheard of for that time.

 

I think that was just the culmination of my own spiritual work but it was really like just getting a transmission from a Zen master or something like that.  And I have been very grateful to her for doing that and that was a type of after-life experience.  She had very clearly been dead for six hours or so and I just felt that presence very unmistakably and for the rest of that month that presence of the ground of all being was unmistakable to me and in a part it felt like Treya.  That's how I would describe it and in that sense I had that particular experience.

 

Regarding the movie about Treya and me that you ask me about, it was suppose to be released in the beginning of January but Covid really put a big wrench in it, as we were all wanting to see it and now we don't know when will that be although I'm sure it would do good.

 

20.  How would you like to be remembered by next generations?  And what is the message you would like to give our infants and youngsters of today to guide them into the future?

 

KEN:

 

It is important to live your life according to some principle like "truth". The thing is that most people do not realize that saying truth isn't really enough because there are so many different types of truth that are hiding out there, that what you really want to do is definitely choose to live your life according to truth or the good, the true and the beautiful.

 

Something like that is fine but be careful to keep on looking for truth because what I found in my own life is that I started out with just basically a love of just truth whatever it was and that was in Science. You pretty much hit on truth wherever you looked if you looked at Physics you found truths, if you looked at Chemistry you found truths, Biology you found truths and so on. 

 

The people that present the good the truth and the beautiful would say that the reason that this is the true as it's a concept and as it's been developed in methodologies and practices is a third-person approach and then it looks a third-person objective truth and that's what Science does, whereas Beauty looks at third person truth.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the Good is looking at second person truth, what's a good moral way for us to treat each other.  Thus in the sense I lucked out and fallen in love with Science I would find truth wherever I would look because that's what Science is doing.  I couldn't find anything on Beauty or on moral Goodness while studying Science.

 

Then that was the first thing I began to learn as I developed into my teens and became more interested in what am I going to do with my life and that kind of thing and as I continued to look deeply into truth, I started to realize that all of the truths that I'd learnt were important and needed to be included but they strangely wasn't all of the truth that there was to know.  I also had to look at Beauty and Goodness and once I got into Goodness and the Good and moral virtue, then you couldn't avoid the stages of development that morality went through and so I realized that another important truth was its developmental truth and that was when I realized all the developmental models that were out there. 

 

I, of course, was shocked by how could I miss that degree of truth.  It like I said: "Oh, there are over a hundred models of Developmental Psychology in the book "Integral Psychology" , how did I miss a hundred of the important truths that are out there?

 

I gotten all the truths from Physics, Chemistry, Biology;   so how the hell did I miss all that?  So that's when I had sort of my first huge Integral insight !!!

 

So, I would tell next generations, yes, definitively include Truth but just make sure that such a Truth includes all of the Truth there is and not just part of it because there is such a thing as partial truths and that it's right.

 

That's what I found myself running up against for the rest of my life;  more partial truths that I would try to bring together. Each time I'd find a new partial truth it was important I'd pack it onto the framework and just keep building it out and building it out so definitely I would say to any youngster today by all means: " pick some principle such as Truth that you want to engage in, but make sure particularly if you choose truth that you choose a truly true

truth and be certain to be including all the truth that you possibly can"

 

By the way you'll almost certainly get it wrong at least the first couple of times you try.  So if you want to start with somebody that's tried it hard, then you can start with my work!!!   I'd be glad to have you start with my work but please be the person that truly expands it not that one that just calls themselves into growing claims that they've expanded it whenever they' not done so.  Therefore, please truly expand it. because one thing we know for sure and that is that Truth is going to keep getting bigger and bigger.

 

 

Interview, transcription and translation:

Raquel Torrent

http://www.innerpositioning.com