KEN WILBER INTERVIEWED by Raquel Torrent
February 14th 2021, in the midst of the Pandemic
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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.
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* 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 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
