Ken Wilber

Ken Wilber interviewed by Raquel Torrent 2022

The 4th of March You Tube will launch this years' "love day" in Ken Wilber's company but for those who cannot wait or would prefer to read it than to watch it (as I've taken all the unnecessary commentaries on my part and our "Hmmms" and "Yeahs"out)...  

Here you have the transcription of the Interview to Ken Wilber on this 2022 where we have some juicy news on the horizon.  Many of the ones we know that are always new in his presence, and yet several that are surprising.  A real pleasure once more to be with this super-man that now more than ever give a lesson of Integralism!!! 

In short, I'll be publishing the translation into Spanish. 

With love and appreciation to all the Integral Community for your questions.  Now more than ever I want to embrace you to unite in this cry for PEACE !!!

Raquel Torrent

R:           Here we are in this special Valentine's day with the Consciousness' icon Mr Ken Wilber;  a man that since 1986 has created and developed the most advanced and complete operating system to understand ourselves our lives and all the theories... his Integral Theory;   a theory that many  - including myself-  see as a real Theory of Everything.  So hello.  Ken thank you for offering us this opportunity in the official day of love.  I want to celebrate it with you by making you an interview -  that as you know has been prepared by Integralists- from all over the world that  -by the way- have  explicitly told me to send you their greetings and appreciation;   from Argentina to Russia,  Spain and England just to name a few.   So how are you Ken? 

K:           Welcome.  I'm fine.  Delighted to be here and very much looking forward to it. 

R:           Very nice,  we have less questions this year than last.  Last year has been a real success. We've had more than 8.000 views in the recording we made, showing that there are people very interested to hear and listen to you.   So let's hope that also -this year- does the same and creates the same sensation when people read it and listen to it.  They said that it was too long because there were 20 questions and we took kind of like three hours and a half - almost four hours-  so let's see if we can shorten it a little bit in the answers. I have also reduced the nr. of questions.  So we have instead of 20 - to not disturb you so much- only 13 for you today. 

1.  What shock Humanity should receive and suffer before recognizing and acting upon the fact that there are still people who die from lack of food and medicines or even drinking water?  What do you think that it will have to happen to Humanity? Because you know that many things have occurred,  including the pandemic and we're still the same or worst.  People thought that the pandemic was going to kind of open up very much the consciousness and it seems that it's not doing so.  What horrible thing should happen so that we kind of wake up? 

Right,  well any sort of traumatic shock.  I mean a serious traumatic shock that may have that effect on humans.  We would have thought that the global pandemic would have done so and in a certain sense it did.  In a certain sense it left people feeling very vulnerable;  particularly the first year when it came through and hit a lot of people.   That was very upsetting and many of us don't remember quite what that first year was like but it was very traumatic.   People wouldn't go outside.  They weren't allowed to congregate,  they weren't allowed to go to church,  they weren't allowed to go to the movies,  they weren't allowed to have parties together,  they weren't even allowed to go in the hospitals and say goodbye to their loved ones who were dying.   Now it's hard to get much more shocking than all of those put together.  That offered a truly genuine global shock  in terms of what if that didn't have a long lasting effect,   then what could be worse than that?  I don't know.   I mean obviously you can just make up horrible events such as the earth getting hit by an asteroid or some traumatic effect like that. So I mean those sorts of things.  You can just come up with list after list of outrageous  implications of all sorts of really bad events and still think the first year of COVID -

when you add-  and really look back on that and remember all the things that we were forced to do like I said.   I mean not even being able to go and say goodbye to your people dying in the hospital that was just hard or not being able to assemble in church,  not being able to go to school.  There was a complete shutdown.  Not being able to gather in groups not being able to go outside in any sort of large numbers;  kisses,  embrace as well;  nothing.  I mean it was pretty bad so what Humanity needs?  

 R.          Why do you think that we don't get it why don't we get this waking up call?  

K.           I don't know.  In part it's just human resiliency.  We can put up with most anything and the fact that we put up with the first year of COVID,  I mean that we agreed: "Okay I won't go to church" or we agreed "okay I won't go to school" and we agreed to all of these catastrophes and managed to just put up with them.   So to think on even worse tragedies it'd kind of think it'll be hard.  I mean what's worse than shutting down the Economy entirely? Not being able to go to work,  not being able to go to school,  not being able to go to church,  not being able to have Thanksgiving dinner?  I mean this is about as bad as you can get  !!!

And yet human beings would just manage to suck it up and push through it and manage to survive. 

So to think on more horrible things it's kind of hard to imagine stuff more horrible than that first year of COVID. I mean what's more horrible than not being able to assemble not being able to go to church,  not being able to go to school,  not being able to go to Thanksgiving dinner,  not being able to see your loved ones as they're dying in a hospital?  I mean you can sort of think of things that are worse than that by making each of those even more extreme but the fact is we managed to survive that and I think that's the real testimony from that shock is the utter resilience of human beings being able to endure all of those insults and still move on.  

R.           What about this openness to some mode of higher feelings,  of higher thoughts of elevation of consciousness - you know-  this raising up this consciousness?  Why human beings do not  get it as a whole?   You always say that people starts in level one.  That's for sure and they will have to go through it all.  I understand that and yet I mean the whole let's say  people over 30,  people that may really as a whole make a change.   Why don't all of a sudden recognize that it's about time that we -human beings-  instead of keeping up making wars for example (like the one we have now in Ukrainia and Russia) why don't we already overcome all that and really see it as a whole? I mean the biggest part,  the majority of humanity to then be able to pull the others.

K.           Right well I think in fact some of them did but not a whole large number but some people did overcome these and they did it by finding their own larger wholeness and the reason more people don't do that is that most people are nowhere near close to having a wholeness in their own being so if we look at Waking Up or Growing Up or Cleaning Up or Showing up very few people are a long way along any one of those areas.   Very few people have Waken Up,  very few people have Grown Up,  very few people have Cleaned Up, very few people Show Up and so because of that simply tossing them into some terribly straining and stressful situations they don't have the inner ability to overcome those and that's part of the problem of having more people be Integral in their approach.  If all of humanity was Integral we would have met the COVID crisis with an entirely different attitude and we would have come out of that even more fortified in our wholeness yeah.  It's that lack of wholeness in humans -as a population- that is so problematic and that's why we want to of course send the Integral message out,  so that people can more adequately adjust to these kinds of calamities.

 For those who are nearly whole or approaching wholeness what's something like those calamities do is help you continue your growth and they give you a chance to really check it out and move forward in this growth process.   if you're fairly close to wholeness then you can move more towards wholeness and if you're not well you're just going to suffer among all those fragmented pieces.  That's it and that's what most of humanity did !!!  It was a shame, a great suffering;  absolutely great suffering.  

2.  Which would be the way to achieve an Integral Democracy in all nations?  A Democracy that is at the real service of citizens and not at the service of the powerful world organizations?

Well it could be achieved in part through "Education". That's what we need. What we're teaching students now is barely education.  It's usually some sort of indoctrination,  some sort of political endeavor it's not even real.   You don't even study genuine history anymore.  And so it's just become sort of a polarized politicized weaponized indoctrination and that's terrible !!!  I mean what a real Education should be is first of all truly studying all of the standard courses Psychology, Sociology,  and so on but then it would also be set in here is how you can grow !!!

After all part of what you want from Education is to learn how to grow and that means to learn how to become whole and that means learning how to Grow Up,  Wake Up,  Show Up,  Open Up and Clean Up because those are the ways that open human beings do to get greater wholeness.  So if that's what we got out of Education and people graduated with a real understanding of their own wholeness and what it meant and how to apply it and how to use it and how to recognize it that would be an entirely new approach.  Under those circumstances these types of calamities that occurred,  people would have tools that they could engage to use, in order to handle these problems.  Then the real Democracy could be on the service of people and citizens like we say and that would be an amazing event.

We know that each of these areas Waking Up,  Growing Up,  Cleaning Up,  Opening Up and Showing Up,  we know the evidence for each of those is overwhelming.  I mean we have actual data from people who have undergone these various growth processes and there's no doubt that all of them are real and all of them occur and all of them can be engaged and that is a genuine truth and so they are engaged in something that has real results and a real effect on their life and they can check it out themselves.  These aren't just belief systems.  These aren't just abstract philosophical structures.  These are real practices that people can do to engage in energizing their own homes.  The stages are laid out very clearly for each of these types of wholeness. They generally will go through anywhere from five to nine stages and at each of those stages you can feel an increasing amount of wholeness.  It's perfectly obvious.  And so when that's happening then you know that you're on to something because it's your own direct immediate experience.  That's getting involved. So this isn't just some highfalutin metaphysical abstractions.

3.  How do you envision the transition from fossil to clean energies?  Do you see it as an important matter?

Well that's a very complex topic first of all and it's surely a very important subject.  I'll take it in several parts.   The move to green energy is not without problems.  Among other things,  the size of land required to instigate clean energy such as solar and wind is really quite huge.  We wanted to set up wind farms and solar farms that would cover all of the needs of the energy of the United States it would take up about a third of the United States.  They would take up all of California and all the way into Texas.  So that's a problem.   We also have the problem that they're intermittent energies which means they need some sort of battery power but we don't have that.  We're nowhere near having the size and capacities and batteries that will allow us to do that. 

Right now if you take all the solar batteries in the United States all the energy in them they've got enough to last 17 minutes in terms of taking care of all the energy that the United States needs.  It's not looking terribly good.   Now the other thing that I'll say is that I'm involved with some people that are working on absolutely revolutionary approaches to Hydrocarbon Fuel Fossil Fuels and we have already cracked the difficult portion of being able to extract fossil fuels without any emissions and we can convert them into types of fuels that don't emit any CO2 at all.   So that means we would be able to use our excess of fossil fuel  but without emitting any co2.  

So that's being put in place now and we think that within 18 months it'll be widely available to anybody who wants to use it. That would put an end to the nastiness of fossil fuels.  Then it would good news us from having to get into the difficulties of renewables which are truly problematic.  So that's  whenever I think about fossil fuel to renewables I have to think about both of those aspects of them.  Both the difficulties in renewables,  the layout they take and so on and the fact that we have now a technology that can utilize fossil fuels without any emissions at all.  It seems that if both of those hold true it would definitely be a solution to that problem. 

We think that may be even before those 18 months,  I mean we're all ready. The Fossil Fuel Technology is already working.  We can already take small machines and convert fossil fuel without creating any emissions.  What we're doing now is just learning how to put these small machines together to create large output machines. That's what we think we'll have ready within 18 months because is already being done in conversations with the University A&M from Texas.  So it's being hooked up to very real,  very respectable large entities that are supporting this entire matter.  So we feel -and they have agreed-  " if you've got it, if this thing works, you're going to make a fortune".  So there's a possibility that I'll be a billionaire !!!  But quite aside from how much money it makes it's definitely working well.  

R:           When you are a billionaire then you will create the Integral Institute with a big building and everything !!!

K:           Right.   That's right. 

4.  Which is the most obscure aspect of your being Ken?   That with which you've had the most difficulty to recognize and accept?

I would say probably Cleaning Up which is the use of techniques to attempt to unify your shadow elements and you call that in just one word:  "disintegration".  That's how shadow elements are created.  By disidentifying.  They're difficult because there are so many defense mechanisms that you use when you split off or disidentify some shadow element. Those defense mechanisms are very strong.  They're really deep seeded and they definitely take a while to get at. It can be done for sure and I've made I think an enormous amount of progress in doing that but it's still-  I would say-  the hardest thing to do.

It's also like let's say you get mad at somebody for being arrogant.  If you're really reacting to their arrogance and getting angry with it and so on;  that - almost always-  means it's some arrogance you have that you're disintegrating, sealing off and projecting onto that person. So being able to first of all acknowledge that arrogance that you just hate in that person - that is so obnoxious and arrogant and overbearing- admitting that's you !!! That's the hard part.  You have to then identify with it,  re-own it bring it back in and then when you do that you actually manage to reintegrate it.  Then that other person's arrogance will stop to bother you.  It won't bother you as much because you realize it's yourself.

Getting over that little hub of everything I hate and despise out there is something I first hated and despised in myself and therefore yikes. The whole world is opened up to your shadow material and so taking it sort of one at a time helps to work through it but it's very hard to realize that all those things that you hate and despise in the world are those things that you first hated and despised in yourself.  That's why you split them off and projected them.

R:           Would you say then that in your case was arrogance? 

K:           Some sure, some.  Or it can be almost anything that you dislike strongly in other people.  It can be arrogance,  it can be conceitedness it can be aggressiveness,  it can be meanness;  but you're not going to despise them in another person unless you first despise them in yourself;  because not everybody reacts negatively to the person that has arrogance for example.  The only person that's going to react negatively to an arrogant person is somebody who's got a bit of arrogance themselves but they're not aware of it.  They're splitting it off and pushing it out of consciousness and therefore they project it and so that's always the tip away. 

Why is this person upsetting you?  You might get a new job let's say and you have a boss and all of a sudden you just can't stand this boss because he's so controlling and he's so over controlling. So you start to almost hate your boss but you notice that not everybody in the company hates the boss.  Now the boss could in fact be very over controlling but it's only when you project your own over controlling qualities onto your boss that you start to hate him because now you're suffering from two sets of over control equality;  his,  plus yours. It's that double dose of over controlling that's driving you nuts.  But again, not everybody feels this way;  so why do you?  Because you have taken some aspect of yourself split it off and projected them onto your boss.  if you accepted the over-controlling qualities in your own self,  you wouldn't mind them in him. It's only when you despise them in yourself and project them that you start to despise them in him.   Once you see that it can be difficult acknowledging that part of yourself that's over controlling.  After all you originally hated it and projected it so on your boss.  So when you try to take it back you still got to deal with this part of you that hates it in yourself and that can be very difficult very difficult to do.  

I found that that's probably of all the different areas the most difficult one;  and there are difficulties in each area !!! Waking up for example can be a very prolonged and difficult in a sense realization. If you take let's say Zen Buddhism which is a way of Waking Up,  Enlightenment Satori.  If you practice that,  it usually takes two to three years of intense practice before you'll have a Satori so that can be difficult. I've managed to handle those difficulties and they worked out fine for me. I feel very comfortable with the Waking Up part of me now. 

Growing up can be difficult because you're moving from Archaic to Magic,  to Mythic,  to Rational,  to Pluralistic, to Integral stages and if you've had a fairly good upbringing you generally can get to around the Rational stage of development. Then moving into Pluralistic can be very difficult, particularly because you might really dislike what some of the Pluralistic Philosophies are like.   So you get very much a whole sort of woke Philosophy and Political correctness and all of those things.  They're hard to like.  So you have to just realize that they are overblown and exaggerated forms and then grow into that Pluralistic understanding.  After that, moving beyond Pluralistic into Integral can be tough because Pluralistic really gets centered on the fact that there are multiple truths. You want to acknowledge and value all of them but then Integral finds ways to bring them together into unified. That can be a little bit of a difficult step but it usually can be done. I'm very happy with how I've done on that area. 

I'm happy with how it's gone but Cleaning Up is still difficult and I still have to work on that in an almost daily way because what it really means is all of those things out there that you dislike or despise are something that you first disliked and despised in yourself or you wouldn't be reacting to them.  That's it and that's an everyday work !!!  

5.  Are you surprised by the high level of conspiracy beliefs and anti-vaccines activists? Many say that we are in the midst of a socio-anthropological experiment orchestrated by just a powerful lobby.  So what's your take on this?

K:           Of things like anti-fascism?

R:           You know Ken, I understand that this person is referring to the conspiracy beliefs and the anti-vaccines' activists.  There are so many in the world right now !!!  it's a lot of population saying that all that is happening with the COVID and its consequences is a social manipulation.  They say that we're being controlled like guinea pigs' mice as they're experimenting with us.  So what is your take on this?   What do you think about this anti-vaccine people and conspiracy theory ideas that say that we are in an Anthropological, Medical and Sociological experiment?  Are we in the midst of that?  

K:           Well usually when I want to understand a Conspiracy Theory I really want to understand what exactly the people is proposing with such a Theory. What thing is really happening? In general Conspiracy Theories don't work.  Generally speaking a Conspiracy Theory is just a way to look at certain things that are happening and then come up with a sort of paranoid suspicion about why it's that really happening and so they come up with these Conspiracy Theories that sort of make sense if you buy the underlying paranoia. 

R:           Excuse me to cut you off Ken, but in this case,  it seems that there are -they say- proofs by many doctors and biologists and specialists in genetics and so on that say that the vaccines really do not work as vaccines they just avoid death.   The "dead" side of it but they are not vaccines in themselves because they do not avoid to get the Covid - you see -and that on the contrary they are obliging us -the Governments- to put them on and then even to get a "Certificate" to be able to travel from one place to the other just because we are being manipulated.

K:           Even though it's true that Covid affect all ages, it's also true that it affects more those of older ages.  In America there is more than a 90% of people over 65,75 up to 90 or more that has been vaccinated and didn't die or nothing bad happened to them.    That sort of results  undercuts the whole Conspiracy Theory. That which say  that "there's something wrong with the vaccine,  so they're really hurting people".  I don't see how the data supports that.

Now I'm not disagreeing that in many cases a vaccine can cause bad symptoms,  side effects.  I know people that have had the vaccine and felt horrible for two weeks afterwards and that is still a Theory that medical people are trying to work out and try to figure out.  But what happens it doesn't happen to everybody.  It happens to some people.  So you have to at least take that into account. The idea that ninety percent of the population has gotten vaccinated and virtually none of them died that just sort of undercuts the whole anti-vacced notion.

 We're also seeing it come up now particularly with the 25% of the people that haven't gotten vaccinated and get so sick.  Then Joe Biden comes out with his idiotic mandate which says you have to get a vaccine or you can't go to work,  you can't go to school,  you can't do anything. That aggressive reaction is a large part of what's behind the anti-Conspiracy Theories. 

So I understand what the Conspiracy Theories want to present, yes I do,  but  it doesn't really fully fit all of the data the way 75 to 90 have been vaccinated and don't die.  It  don't have any horrible effects but the people that have not been vaccinated and are reacting to this idiotic vacc mandate.  That's the source of all sorts of theories, including the Conspiracy Theories and those negative ideas. The reality is that these people really don't want to get vaccinated.  The 25 percent who shown that haven't been vaccinated, didn't get vaccinated to begin with because they didn't believe in vaccines.  They didn't want to get vaccinated or they thought that would cause some sort of problems.  That's the source that a lot of the anti-vacs' Conspiracy Theories come from. I can sympathize very much with their ideas but I don't think they're worth taking that seriously. 

6.  Alice Bailey  wrote a real Epistemology of Awakening,  more to intuition than to rationality;  inclined to scientism as in your books. So would you call what she wrote "Esotericism"?  And in which degree are you aligned with the way in which it was introduced by her in our Western world?

Yeah,  I'm not familiar with her work,  so I can only put together what you said if you say it's a Epistemology of Awakening,  Epistemology of Enlightenment but it works not on rational grounds but more on intuitive grounds.   Well I would agree in that;  even though I have rationally laid out the stages of Enlightenment and these stages are based on the stages given in the traditional literature and also given on the stages of Modern researchers like Daniel P Brown who gives five major stages of development.  Those five major stages are exactly the five that I give as: Gross,  Subtle,  Causal,  Turiya and Turiyatita.  There's an abundant agreement about all of those but when we say I've laid out rationally what these stages are;  the stages themselves aren't composed of Rationality.   They're composed of Intuition.  That's what they mean.  Stage one is stage one of intuition and stage two is stage two of intuition,  stage three is stage three of intuition, stage four is stage four of intuition and stage five, the stage five of intuition.  So that's the actual way that I spell them out of course.  I have to write about them and so I'll tend to write about them in terms that make sense.  So I'll write about them in rational or at least English terms and explain them that way but what I'm explaining are;  states of intuition not states of rationality.

R:           So would you call that a "Esoterism"? 

 K:          Sure !!!

7.  Knowledge and spiritual practices  are more and more accessible nowadays and having in mind that the Integral Theory talks about an evolutionary upward spiral,  which are for you the reasons for such a violent duality in present stance and criteria?  Those reasons which are dividing humanity completely.  Wouldn't you think that Humanity should have already achieved a "witness consciousness" precisely because of the massive access to information and integral enactment?

Well I think that there are several reasons that Humanity has not yet fully attained a witnessing state and one of them is just what I was saying. These states of consciousness that I outline in rational ways aren't themselves composed of rationality they're composed of intuition and so people have trouble in moving from rationality to intuition. 

Intuition is a very tricky thing.  It's hard to access because it's intuitive, not rational or verbal or any of those and yet if you explain it in rational terms you just usually get stories that are confusing to rationality.  If you read any of the Zen stories talking about these higher stages including the witness and non-duality and so on,   they  don't make rational sense. They're called "koans" and some "koans" you can state them but they don't make rational sense.  For example one "koan" is:  "Show me your original face; the face you had before your parents were born"   or  "What's the sound of one hand clapping".  If you were at that stage and you had that intuition it would make sense.  You'd know and you could actually answer what's the sound of one hand clapping.  In Zen you simply extend your one hand and that's the answer.

When they say: " Show me your original face; the face you had before your parents were born" what they mean is that your true self,  your original face doesn't exist in time.  It's timeless and so being timeless it is the present at every point of time.  Therefore it's going to be present before your parents were born.

"There's a goose and a bottle.  Without breaking the bottle get the goose out".  That's another "koan". All of these make sense if you're at an intuitive stage but they don't make sense rationally and they're very difficult to understand if you're just doing them rationally.  As a matter of fact you pretty much can't understand them if you're just doing them rationally.   I mean how do you get the goose out without breaking the bottle or hurting the goose?  Right?  So that's what makes it hard to move up from the first say two-thirds of development which more or less can be understood in rational terms and then the upper third or so which can't be understood enough and that's what makes it hard getting from rational stages to super rational or intuitive stages.  They are very very difficult.

Most people have to meditate on them if they're doing Zen.   You have to meditate as I said for two or three years before they'll actually crack through rational thinking and crack through into a true intuitive understanding.  Then they'll get exactly that " Show me your face. The original face. The face you had before your parents are born".   That's very easy to do from an intuitive level.  it's impossible to do from a rational level and so people have access to their witness more or less all the time.   It's the thing in you right now which is aware of everything that's happened and it's happening.   So you witness the things around you.   You witness your inner thoughts,  you witness everything.  And that's the witness: getting directly in touch with that as an intuitive reality,  a sharp clear intuitive reality. 

You'll recognize it when you do and that's your original face.  So when you really break into the pure witness,  you'll understand what your original face was.   The face you had before your parents were born because when you break into the witness in a full-bodied intuitive fashion then you become aware not just of the typical stuff you witness but you become aware of the witness itself and the fact that it's timeless.  It's eternal.  Of course it exists prior to your parent's birth and excellence exists prior to the universe's existence.  It exists prior to the Big Bang just because it exists prior to time.

R:            That's a difficult transition That's why Humanity is not ready yet. Unfortunately.   Do you think we will ever get there?  

K:           Yeah sure !!! I think there are growing numbers of people right now that are getting in touch with their witness. Then there's also a step beyond the witness which is called Turiyatita or Non-Dual.  What happens there is that the witness -which is sort of a said master, "Shibayama" calls it-  is:  "absolute subjectivity".  In other words it's the pure subject in you that sees all these objects and the pure subject is identified with nothing.  So it has a vast sense of freedom and release and awareness.  Then the next step is that "subjectivity" itself dissolves and you no longer witness the mountain,  you are the mountain.  You no longer see the sky,  you are the sky.  You no longer feel the earth,  you are the earth. That's the ultimate state so we have at least those two higher stages to go on in terms of human development and as I say I know at least a fair number not a lot but a fair number of people that are witnessing that. They're at the witness stage.  

R:           You said once, five percent.   Do you think we have gone over that 5 percent?  Has anything changed after pandemic or not? 

K:           Yeah still, I would say around five percent.  

R:           So we haven't changed it.   We haven't gone up then from there .  For what I am listening then we go up those paths to higher realms and not only to the witness but  from the witness to Turiyatita -the Non-Dual. Is it only an individual matter?  Cannot it be collectively achieved?  

K:    Yes.  Basically it's mostly individual. Collective achievement is pretty rare. May be in "Communities of Practice".  Zen communities -for example-  they'll sometimes have  this one person who has a breakthrough to the witness and you'll sometimes see two or three other people get a breakthrough very quickly.  It does have a sort of sharing capacity.

R:           Yes,  like Rupert Sheldrake will say:  through "Morphogenetic Fields" !!! 

K:           Yeah he.  And that's fine but only in that case.  If not it's individual.  

R:           Until we finally arrive to this "Community style consciousness",  when it seems that the regeneration process may come collectively.  We're passing now from Sustainability to Regenerative Consciousness where the idea of Communities of Thought, Meditative Practices and Physical and Psycho-emotional Support are spreading all over the world, representing the desirable living style in the future. Maybe in those Communities we'll achieve a collective Awakening and Growing up.  At least it's desirable !!! Meanwhile we'll do it individually.

8. It seems Ken - by your previous interview about pandemic-   that you didn't leave aside any opposing roles (like official -we could say- and critic-)  Which is your opinion now?  Do you think that both are contributing with partial truths?   Would you explain some of its successes and errors?   Have you thought about writing a book about the pandemic?

I  haven't thought about writing a book about the pandemic. As far as I understand it and I'm still having a little trouble understanding it but as far as me taking a position either for the pandemic side or against it I can almost certainly say that my response would be partially for and partially against;   simply because I tend to find Integral positions overlap all opposites. 

So one way to think on the Integral approach is the way the Christian Mystics viewed the world which was what they called the "Coincidentia oppositorum"  which means the coincidence of opposites which means the unity of opposites.  That's of course the same as the non-dual traditions the world over.  So whenever you're particularly talking about relative truth you're always presented with at least two opposites because all of our concepts make sense only in terms of their opposite:  good versus evil,  pleasure versus pain,  up versus down,  in versus out,  good versus bad.  I mean they're all opposites and if you're trying to present a holistic view then you've got to find a way to include both of those opposites so that you can get a "Coincidentia Oppositorium";  a unity of opposites.

So my generic response would be that if I was facing any Pandemic versus non-Pandemic or whatever that I would have definitely not come down on one side or the other;  just like when I was talking about vaccines.  I pointed out the parts of it that would be true and the parts of it that just wouldn't be true at all.  So like I said if 75 to 90 percent have taken the Covid  vaccine and are still alive and nothing bad has happened to them; that would go against their Conspiracy Theory;  but then I said the 75 percent that are anti-vacc and have never been vaccinated they very likely didn't want to get vaccinated from the beginning so they have an anti-vacc prejudice and that's where Conspiracy Theories tend to grow.  Now I said I'm not denying that there can be some truth to them but it's not going to be the sole truth because we have the other half of the story and so that tends to be the way I think about anything and it's always partial truths.

It's always going to be difficult to bring apart the opposites and look for the partial truth in each of them as well as the partial falsehood in either of them and that gives you a much more accurate realistic view of what's really happening in the relative world which is the world of Maya which means the world of opposites.

R:           Yes, also the "Lilah" from the Sufis. The Cosmic Game. 

K:           Yeah, yeah.

9.   The English Psychoanalyst John Bowlby - father of the Attachment Theory (in 1969) together with Mary Ainsworth  (1978) and Mary Maine (1995),  accumulated huge clinical evidence about relational affective nexus and its importance in the human potential's development,  leaving very clear also the negative effect than a toxic and disorganized linkage may have in mental health;  so What's the space that all of this knowledge -  with its proven authentication - has in Integral Theory?  

Attachment Theory is very important and it particularly traces its genesis in the first one or two years of life and they have four or so major types of attachment theory and attachment disorder that can happen. Each one of these disorders has a whole series of psychological symptoms addressed around it and  caused by it. This is what I call  Fulcrum 1 and Fulcrum 2 and I agree very strongly with almost all of that Theory

There's a very well-known theorist on this named:  Daniel P.  Brown and he's just written a text book about that theme on Attachment Theory and he traces it through the early Fulcrums and then he continues and I was struck by this all the way into my higher stages of development including up to Enlightenment.  So he gives a complete account of how Attachment Theory starts at the earlier Fulcrums and how they can affect each subsequent Fulcrum and then he carries it into the three higher stages of development.   So I'm fully in favor of that general theory. Very interesting are also some of the most recent Theories that have been suggested for that.  

I still think that some of the earlier work of Margaret Mahler's for example,  I still think those are very real and can't be discarded.   But Attachment Theory is a very important aspect of reality.

10.  The  Yugas;  a 24. 000 year cyclic age where the world cycles pass through four stages of Evolution -as explained in Hindu Cosmology-  have never appeared in your writings.  Have they been considered for inclusion in Integral Theory? Do they make a case for aspects of AQAL such as the "states of consciousness" or "spiritual and moral lines" being subject to a Cyclic Nature of Evolution? May orienting generalizations be drawn from the said Yugas or Greek ages Precession of Equinoxes and Zodiac Ages to benefit and expand Integral?

 

Well  to the extent it's based on Hindu cycles -  generally speaking  - what happens when we look at cycles of development is that the earlier we go back in History the less useful we find those types of cycles to be applicable;  simply because when we were first present on this human planet the cycles tended to be just that:  cycles.  The way our first Theories of time were based were on the natural seasons:   so spring to summer,  to fall to winter;  right back to spring summer,  fall and winter;  right back to spring and summer and fall and winter.  The Kali Yugas and sensitive "yugas" follow the same kind of circular cyclical approach. 

It wasn't until 1500 or so that we started to break open those cycles and realize that they had a historical linear mode and so we could start following those outwardly. Those tended to then give us the more we looked at those the more we looked at the earlier stages and saw them as being very primitive and well there's no nice way to say it just "fairly primitive" and early.  Then as we kept going we'd go through early pre-temporal periods like zero to 300 A.D. and then we'd slowly see them stretch into 400 500 700 A.D. and then into the Middle Ages and by that time we had a sense of actual History; and "Progress" occurred. Then we passed from Middle Ages into Modern Ages, then into Post-Modern Ages; then coming up on an Integral Age.

Those showed development and it was also during that period that we discovered Evolution particularly the German Idealists discovered it.  Darwin who was a friend of Shelley applied the Evolutionary Theory to Biology for example and others applied it to other aspects of Nature and so we got removed from cyclical periods of time to progressive and historical movements of time. They have just proven to be more telling because during cyclical time there was almost no progress at all.  Things just went round and round and round and for the first 300 000 years that we were on this earth there was absolutely nothing but cyclical time. 

The early tribal people just went from one season to the next to the next back around and around and around and around and they saw things going nowhere.  So we went on like that for a long time and then it started sort of breaking out a little bit and then breaking out more until we moved into linear historical progressive time.  That's what we looked at now and when we think about previous time we now almost entirely think about it in terms of previous stages of evolution.  In other words stages of this linear progressive time.  So when we look back on those early 300 000 years we don't think of them as just going in circles we think of them in terms of the earliest of our ancestors during evolution and so the Yugas and various cycles they're useful in a sort of not very useful sense,  they're not something that works very good no.  

11.  Ken, why haven't you ever talked or debated about any of your critics or about  the people that critic you? 

I have.   Well first of all I have gotten in debates with various people on occasions.  They don't usually get a lot of attention because they're just done with just a few people and we just talk about very specific topics. 

I made a decision when I first started writing that whenever a book would come out there was usually such a huge response -and a lot of it was very good and a lot of it was bad-.  As you can understand are critical and I attempted to answer them in the first year or two but then I just started to realize "this is taking forever and I'm never going to end.  I can spend my time defending what I wrote yesterday or I can write something new today"  Then I decided I wanted to write something new today.  It's from that time forward I've never answered critics in terms of written responses I've never gone to a conference where my work was discussed and I just didn't feel that the time was worth it.  I found that by the time all this criticism and positive stuff was coming that - I was by that time writing a book a year-  I just did not have time to get engaged in all of these discussions. 

12.  In your book "The Religion of Tomorrow" you say that "Kingdoms" are Ontological and "States" Epistemological.  At the Wilber- Combs lattice only "States" appear ( those quadrants of the left hand,  not kingdoms / quadrants of the right hand -body mass energies-).  Our question is: From which raw material/energy are the Svabhavikakaya bodies or empty witness are made of?    And the same about Vajrakaya or body of the non-dual consciousness,  having in mind that you say that there are only 3 kingdoms (ordinary, subtle and causal)?   Couldn't it be that Svabhavikakaya and Vajrakaya are only metaphors without ontological entity?

Okay I'm still not sure I fully understand that. If I understand this correctly I wouldn't say they're just metaphorical.  They are made of the stuff of the higher dimensions of Consciousness, particularly Nirmanakaya, Svabhavivakaya,  Dharmakaya as well Integralkaya or Vajrakaya;  those are actually the substance of consciousness that you recognize when you reach those specific kayas' levels.   Those  levels are made of the stuff that those higher stages of consciousness are made of and that's why they're actually given the names like Nirmanakaya or Sambhogakaya or Dharmakaya.   "Kaya" actually means:  "body".

So it means a real substance;  a real body.  So Nirmanakaya is the body made out of the gross  level of consciousness and the Sambhogakaya is a "kaya" of actual body  that's constructed out of the higher stage of the transformative nature and Dharmakaya -"dharma" generally is taken to mean "emptiness"- in this occasion the "Kaya" then is the body made out of emptiness.  It's the body made out of "vajra" which in this case means the substance that integrates all of the previous.

"Kaya" is a real stuff.  It's a real substance that's  not metaphorical but it's real.  A real body.

13.   It's disgusting this idea of having to go up a spiral as high as possible through levels.  I hear this idea on everyone that starts to learn about Integral.  It sounds to me as a curse:  "you are red"  "you're blue".   What happens if this idea becomes a Government's ideology? Will  we have a turquoise elite on a purple scum crowd?  The very idea of levels is corrupted.  There is no such a thing as people on levels.  It's more likely that there is something we call:  levels acting through people.  So what other ways may we use to talk about the stages of development instead of the metaphors of the levels?   Since 2015 we've been using another metaphor to explain the spiral evolution through music with growing complexity;   because people are music !!!

If you look at accepted models of development whether it's Piaget or Kohlberg's,  Loevinger's or Maslow's, in a book: Integral Psychology, I included charts of a hundred different developmental models with all of the present stages of development.  So if you look at that what you find -as you start following human growth and development-  is that humans start out and in the first 6 to 12 months of life,  they can't do mathematics they can't even read English. They can't do any of these things and what happens is they can't even figure out that. If you have a ball and you hide it behind the pillow it doesn't simply disappear from existence.  That understanding comes about with sensory motor intelligence in the first year or two of life.   So once that develops and they have an object constancy then they move into Pre-operational Cognition and here they can use concepts and words and so.

That's a model that continues to unfold in what it can be called "levels of development".   Now by "levels" nobody means something rigid,  strict and like runs in a ladder.  That's not what it means. Is that if you're at a level;  there's a certain type of capacities that you can create at that level. So as people move from Pre-Operational thinking to Concrete Operational thinking what that means is that they can concretely operate on the world so they can perform multiplication,  addition,  division,  subtraction and so on and come up with concrete operations on the real world around them.  That's a very clear degree of development.  An increased capacity then when they get to adolescence as they can generally start to create a capacity called "Formal Operational" thinking and where Concrete Operational is "thinking" operating on the world.  Formal Operational is thinking;  operating on concrete operational thinking;  so people can start to think things like algebra and variables and x equals and stuff like that, equations; also form a third person perspective. 

Concrete Operational form is a second-person perspective.  Pre-operational is a first-person perspective. By the time they get to the Formal Operational they can take a 3rd person perspective and that means they can conceive universal entities and that is extremely important.   It was the emergence of Formal Operational Thinking -for example, only about 200 years ago- that "Slavery" was abolished. Slavery was present in every culture of the world.   Even though people had Concrete Operational Thinking they couldn't conceive a third person or a universal standard and so when they moved to Formal Operational Cognition and 3rd person capacities then in a 100 year period from 1785 to 1885 slavery was outlawed in every rational industrial nation on the planet.   The first time anything like that had ever happened.  So that represents an enormous growth in consciousness.

R:   Excuse me Ken, but what this guy is asking is if there is another way to call levels?  because it seems he doesn't like the word "levels" related to  because it's making the people like if they are "things" instead of recognizing the whole person.

K:  Yeah levels is a "green anathema" term.  People in green hate levels and they'll do anything to stop levels because levels seem like hierarchy. In every major growth stage there is hierarchy and so that's just something real. If you're green you're just going to have to swallow it.  Just get used to it. 

Levels are problematic and I've frequently written about this.   I'll say we have to understand that levels aren't like rungs in a ladder that they don't just show up discreetly and you step up from one to another to another.   So I frequently instead of levels and lines I use the phrase waves and streams because that gives a better sense of the looseness of what's happening.  Nevertheless in theory we can see levels of development occurring throughout these waves and streams so that's important to realize that and of the 100 models that I gave in Integral Psychology and the charts I gave of all 100 of them all 100 of them had levels;   levels of existence.

That's the developmental way to grow.  I've always been careful again to introduce waves and streams instead of "levels" and "lines".  They're  just a little too rigid in terms of what they're actually doing because again they're not rungs on a ladder or anything like that but in terms of just abstract understanding of what it's happening with a level. We can say Formal Operational is a level beyond Concrete Operation which is the level beyond Pre-Operational which is a level beyond Sensory Motor and we know what that means. So there's always terminology problems and one of the biggest terminology problems I've had is getting from Green to Integral because Green first of all it's getting over Formal Operational,  so there's a lot more looseness to it and it hates any terms like hierarchy and level and all of these.   So these have been very difficult terms for me to deal with.  

R:    This is a wonderful way to end up our interview, Ken, because it gives the consciousness of where we are in the world right now with this "saucepan lid" of the Green level. A lid that until we don't get it up;  everything is cooking inside tremendously and only steam's coming up.  It seems that it has to explode to really go over all this and then be able to really nurture ourselves with that food which is cooking.   So thank you very much Ken. 

K:   My pleasure. Bye, bye.