KEN WILBER's TRANSCRIPTION
of the 10 first questions of the
INTERVIEW made by Raquel Torrent
(Another 10 to come)
February 14th 2021, in the midst of the Pandemic
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 |
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 |
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 coming down and through my brain and in
this occasion I thought: I want to do an updated version of Brief History of
Everything. Yes !!! And I did!!! And 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. After12 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.
