KEN WILBER 2023 FULL TRANSCRIPTION interviewed by Raquel Torrent-February 14th

Raquel & Ken in Denver 2009

Link to the video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgAh55162eM

Hello Ken, thank you very much for this new encounter with me, which I'm doing in representation of all your "followers", speaking in modern terms, which are keen to listen to you and receive more of your wisdom and charisma.  

RT:  How are you, my dear friend?

KW: Very fine, thank you.

Before we start with the questions, gathered among Integralists from all over the world, I want to state the fact that we're here today celebrating this 14th of February -in which we cherish and honor Love in many countries-  I want to state this because, Ken I love YOU. I am a great admirer of this man, not only as a person -in his generosity, kindness, intelligence and dedication to his own personal and transpersonal development -, but also I admire his extensive work that has been profusely offering to the world even before the creation of his Integral Theory in 1970 and since then up to the present days when he continues with the sharing of his very heart and soul.  All of that making him a real Dharma practitioner.   

His more than 30 books published and translated to many languages about Philosophy, Mysticism,  Sociology, Psychology, Politics, Ecology and Spiritual Evolution have made many people fall in love with him , me being your nr.1 fan as I've read most of your work and am passionate about it.  So Thanks again for being here today with us in this special day and for all you've shared that integrates so well and with so much consciousness and elegance our fragmented world. 

So let's begin:

1st. Question

RT:      What do you think about what Artificial Intelligence is (AI) doing to Art, do you think that it will ever replace artists?

KW:  Well I don't think it's ever going to actually and fully replace Art.  If you look at the stuff that AI is creating,  the various artistic works that they create,  some of it's impressive. It's clearly got a perspective and it's clearly very well programmed.  So it can reproduce certain types of imagery and experiential data that would normally take a human being to create,  but there's still something happening to me when I look at a piece of art and know that it's a result of AI !!!

In other words, it just doesn't somehow feel the same as looking at a real human artist's work, so I think that's a real problem because I think when people get in their minds an idea that they're looking at a work of AI and not a real human being's creation, that's going to start to have an effect on them.  And I don't think it'll be a positive effect.  I think it'll be more or less like the effect it has on me.

I just know that this is an artificial intelligence production and so I look at it that way and it just doesn't have a very positive impact on me because I know that's been artificially created and there's actually just an extensive programming system going on.  

RT:   Yeah, it's like it's missing that human factor.

KW: Exactly, I think that's the problem and so it actually has quite a change in my own consciousness when I look at it,  and in just a word:  it's just not as impressive.

There's a certain type of impressiveness that comes from the fact that "uh an artificial intelligence machine can create works of art that are very realistic and very well done"  and that's fine I mean.   I'm impressed by that part of it,  but then the more I simply look at it and think that this is being done by an artificial machine then the less impressed I become by it and I think that's just a part of the interpretation that the human brain tends to make.   Notice that no artificial intelligence would think that about itself.  In other words,  there's no human feeling coming from that artificial intelligence.   It's not going to look at some painting that another artificial intelligence did and say "wow that looks great".

It's just not going to have that sensation going through it or it's not going to say: " well that's just the product of an artificial intelligence creation and programming and I'm not that impressed by it as it would".  Never will have that kind of expression of its own work.

RT:   We would need to see some experiments with people that look at those paintings or sculptures or any other type of art not knowing that are created through AI and see what they feel about it.

KW:  Right,  because that's very interesting to see and part of the experiment would be first of all to just show them the artwork and then after they've come to their decision tell them it's made by an artificial intelligence machine and see if they change anything about what they feel about it because that's what I sense will happen

RT  Let's see,  we could tell Roger Walsh to make an experiment at the University with that !!!

KW  Yes, that would be fine.

2nd. Question

RT:  Is there a method of evaluating the development of consciousness in a person? That is in which level may a person be?

KW:  Well yes, almost every major Modern or Post-modern developmental psychologist after they've developed their model, or during the fact that they're actually developing their model,  they create tests that they can give people that will tell them what level of development -according to their model- the person taking the test is.   There are probably 15 or so of those tests out there. There's a Kohlberg test, Loevinger test, the Piaget test;  and all of them are very accurate measurement of the level of development that a person is at. 

So those are actually quite prevalent. Even people like Susanne Cook Greuter -who is a transpersonal psychologist- understands that there are higher levels beyond Second Tier or beyond Centaur or even beyond what Loevinger calls her "integrative level" and she measures at least two or three of those. You can take her tests.  She'll be glad to give it to you anytime you like.

So this  is important because it does mean that we have ways to objectively determine that there are stages or levels of development and we can effectively reproduce test scores showing what level a person is at.  Therefore there's nothing subjective about these stages of development. They're very real,  they're very present and are very important. 

When I first discovered the stages of development I was blown away, first of all I was very angry because some of the highest stages were ones where you'd get into like with Zen Buddhism;   where there would be things like Satori and Enlightenment and I was like: " I'm so angry ¿why did nobody ever tell me this?

I didn't find out about it until I was in my adolescence and I was going: "I'm pissed because not only these levels are there but there are these higher levels and I know that I'm going to be fairly high". Once I found that out I started studying every mystical tradition I could get my hands on.  I read every developmental psychologist and looked for ways to get myself out there. 

So that's all very important because it does indicate, as I said, that these stages are real. They're very objective;  reality elements and we all go through them and whether we go through them quickly or somewhat more slowly they're the same stages in all of us, so that's a very interesting discovery.

As such discovery, it was only made in Psychology about 100 years ago by a genius named James Mark Baldwin he was an American psychologist who is a colleague and a friend of the guy that wrote varieties of religious experiences, William James.

William James was himself a genius and it's funny because he was studying states of consciousness while his friend James Mark Baldwin was figuring out stages of Consciousness and so we have States and we have Stages and these two basically discovered both of them and so I always thought it was really interesting.  Of course I started studying The Works of James Baldwin along with William James who I already knew about.  I mean,  most people have had some contact or have heard the name William James and many people have read his varieties of religious experience because it's a very readable wonderfully done book.

RT:  Here in Spain when we were reading things about the History of Psychology, Epistemology, about how Psychology has developed as a scientific discipline,  they were denying William James. He was surpassed by Behaviorism, so they said, because he was too much talking about spiritual realms, so he was denied and put aside; even though, and this is very paradoxical, he was named "The Father of American Psychology".

KW:  Yes, that's one of many, many things that behaviorists got wrong because behaviorists didn't like anybody who was dealing with the Upper Left Quadrant and therefore they just deny it. The only thing that was real was behavior from the upper right quadrant and so they would throw away anybody who was -even a genius- if they were coming from the upper left and talking about interiors or inside or states of Consciousness or anything like that.

Behaviorists didn't believe that the left-hand quadrant existed. I mean talk about getting something wrong,  that's about as wrong as you can actually be.  If you want to get a statement really wrong just say the upper left isn't real.  That's about as stupid a thing as you can conceive.

RT:   I wish that I would have had your terminology and your beautiful Integral Theory when I was studying Psychology in 1982  because you know I learned about your Integral Theory in 1987 or 88.  All my teachers were radical behaviorists and I could have used your terminology with them.  I could have said "hey look at this, you are talking only about exteriors and therefore you are missing half of reality".

KW:  That's right and it's a real shame because Behaviorism really did catch on in a big way, including in America and even today I would wage if you go into any university in the United States and say:  "I want to study Psychology, should I study William James or be a behaviorist?"  Most of them would probably still say:  "oh Behaviorism for sure", because it's still got that scientific claim.

All they're doing is directly denying experiential objectively real reality. They could say: I as a behaviorist might as well claim that I can't see a real world out there or I can't be sure that I have a mind myself because I can't directly experience it. So it's not real and because I'm a behaviorist I study only things that can be studied, so I can only look at how you experience your reality and the names you give it and all of those objective facts about it.  I'll study all of that and that'll make me a real scientist.

And all it does is make you a genuine idiot, because they deny something that then they cannot really maintain.

RT:  Yeah, when they deny for example the upper left, you tell them okay you deny it, with which arguments? Have you been meditating for 25 years and then say that upper left is not true? Can you do that? Because if you cannot answer that after 25 years is because you have not meditated during 25 years;  then how can you deny something you have not experienced? And the funny part is that they say they're the epitome of the experimental science, whenever they are against their own argumentation.

KW:  Right, it's like trying to deny the existence of Satori. Satori is a genuine real experience and real people have had a Satori by the thousands. I mean an entire major branch of religious involvement is Zen Buddhism who is devoted to developing a Satori like experience which is an upper left experience of unity with the entire world.  If you have yourself had a Satori,  like you said,  then you don't have any right to claim it's real or unreal. I mean show me that you've had at least one Satori and you deny its reality. Then maybe we'll have something to talk about to demonstrate that you actually know what you're talking about. I have no obligation to listen to you let alone to believe you.  

Unfortunately Behaviorism came into existence somewhat after William James but it very quickly by the 1950s in America it had become the scientific main stream approach to reality based on a famous American psychologist, Skinner that worked with pigeons,  because you could actually measure their responses.

RT:  Yeah, they also worked with a lot of monkeys.

KW:  A lot of pigeons, monkeys and rats,  what it perfectly fits their own psychology perfectly well.

3rd. Question

RT:  In light of Sean Esbjörn-Hargens work with UFO and other mysteries, and seemingly that there's strong evidence that ancient civilizations had advanced technology (let's say the construction of the pyramids, Machu Pichu, Easter Island, Stone Henge...). If that were the case how would you fit these cultures into the integral map? How an Integral Map would work for advanced civilizations that may roam the universe?

KW:   Well we could take something like the studies that various Egyptian Scholars have made about the very very advanced civilization of Egypt and the early dynasties about the making of the pyramids and so on and many of them believe that they did indeed have very Advanced Technologies.  They even believe that the pyramids for example were involved with the creation of various energy sources and there's a fair amount of evidence that demonstrates that some of these early societies were quite advanced.

Let's keep in mind the understanding that a human being's capacity to create technology is what's needed to then have an entire civilization's using that technology. It only takes a small handful of people to invent the technology and then a very small other handful of people building it. It's the nature of technology.  Once it's in existence everybody can use it,  so I don't have to invent this computer or build it myself.  I just use it. It's already there. Somebody already did create it, so that I can just go out and buy one.

So we can look at a civilization and they're all human beings.  They're all going to be born at the same level and therefore they're going to go through these stages of development that I've outlined and as for people moving into the higher stages and creating high level technology, remember only a very small handful of people have to do that and yet the whole civilization can get their hands on the technology and can show a very high technological level of development.

It would still be a level that would fit into my overall stages of development.  They might get all the way up to Second Tier or a few of them might get into Third. Up to now we clearly had some civilizations developed in the Third Tier having a Third Tier Satori and yet  the number of people in China or Japan that had Satori was still very small. I mean even though Zen Buddhism is built on Satori how many Zen priests were present in early Japan? Not very many. A couple hundred at most.

The fact that certain civilizations were very advanced has been confused by a lot of people and I think Sean Sbjörn Hargens makes this mistake on occasions by simply tapping into that group of a hundred or so people that are truly advanced and are creating technologies that are equally advanced.  Then those technologies spread throughout their entire civilization.  So this is what appeared to happen with places like Egypt and Easter Island, Stonehenge, Machu Picchu and places like that.   Those show fairly odd levels of architectural development. Machu Picchu for example or the pyramids;  but again the number of people who made the pyramids were either slave people very advanced teachers of technology.  

We you don't want to take the production that  slaves made as an example of the level that everybody in their society was. That's an error,  a clear error.  It's  important  that we remember and recognize advanced technological states such as the one in the United States where everybody gets a free education and in some states of course even college education is included and so we count them as being part of the larger society.

So when we say the United States is a fairly technological Society we mean that a lot of people have gotten at least a college education and that's true but many other cultures especially ancient ones had a small number of very advanced people who made very advanced technologies and advanced architecture and had relatively advanced cultures even though very few people were  actually at those higher levels of development themselves.

RT:  Yes, that's a very important distinction and yet if I understand what you're saying is that people are very advanced when they have gone to University?  NO,  not necessarily,  they may be advanced in the level of cognitive line but they may not be advanced at all in their Consciousness structures.

KW:  Sure, well that's quite correct and that's why I said I refer specifically to the technological line of development but most people even that go to universities remain fairly stupid when it comes across multiple intelligence.  They're not artistic Geniuses they're not literary Geniuses and so on. We kind of watch out for that.  We have to be very aware of not saying that because a person has gone to university it's very developed because it might not;  nor should we make the mistake of saying because one culture happened to build three large pyramids they were hugely advanced.

We cannot say that as a culture all of their people were technologically, artistically linguistically,  aesthetically advanced.  That's not so and there's no question in my mind that if you or Sean Sbjörn Hargens had a choice between living in Egypt during the age of the pyramids or living in America in today's age, you would choose America for sure.

4th. Question

RT:  Would you say that in society Science and Religion are more interpenetrated nowadays than when you wrote your book of 1999 "The Marriage of Sense and Soul" or are they still growing individually?

KW:  It's not happening as fast as I would like to see the integration occur. In the 60s something of an anomaly happened because the one thing that a great number of Boomers 60's children did was they took psychedelic drugs and the one fairly dependable result of taking a psychedelic drug is to have a psychedelic experience. Numerous Studies have shown that most psychedelic experiences have several things in common;  for one they all have a direct experience of being one with everything and by any language that's known as a spiritual experience.  So in the 1960s an enormous number of college students and teenagers even and certainly adults, including people like Alan Watts,  wrote books about psychedelic experiences.  That meant Unity with everything and everyone you're aware of right now.  You are already one with things and that's happening right now.  Everything you're looking at, is actually occurring right where you thought your head existed and you'll notice that this is true.

I'm remembering of a book written by Douglas Harding, called:  "On having no head" and in it he explains why the timeless now, that mystical experience mystic's claim it's ever present. It's real because you're already aware of it right now. You don't have to go out and get that experience,  you just have to notice what's happening right now, according to Douglas Harding and this is what makes the book so different and funny in a sense.  He says you can see every part of your body except your head.  You can't see your own head. Only you can see two little fleshy blobs that's your nose but you can't see your face,  you can't see your eyes,  you can't see your teeth.  Where you think your head is,  is actually everything. What you're looking at right now it's all.  If you look at your computer screen,  if you look at a tree, they're arising right where you thought your head used to be and so you don't really have a head.  What you have is an experience of unity with everything you're seeing and that's happening right now whether you're aware of it or not.

So, we have this unified experience and the interesting thing about that Unity is that it has a subjective component and an objective component. It used to be that the subjective component was given a fair degree of importance as a way for us to get at a certain truth.   It's true that the truth was subjected.  It was an interior truth;  something William James would count as very important but when Behaviorists started trying to become scientific and just look at objects of behavior; that's when we got this huge split between subjective and objective. That's of course a natural enough condition and we're all brought up in that belief today anyway and so when you have it pointed out that you really don't have a head,  that you really already one with everything that's arising and it's arising right where you thought your head was;  that's a great discovery. That's a very important discovery !!!

Objective Science and Interior Science are deeply interconnected and most of the mystics of the world's religions are aware of that subject object unity. It's called a "mystical experience" and it's called the mystical experience of unity because you do become aware of the fact that you are one with everything that's arising in your awareness right now,  moment to moment.  The mystics know that, like the apostle Paul says:" let this Consciousness be in you which is in Christ Jesus,  that we all may be one"  And that's exactly right for us and it was obvious to Saint Paul and it's obvious to any Zen Buddhist any Hindu any Christian Mystic, but it still needs to be pointed out every now and then and that's what I was doing with "The marriage of Science and Religion" and in Religion I was talking about the mystical experience of a spiritual union which deals with the same unitary reality that science is dealing with.  This is why William James looked at spiritual experiences as being scientific realities,  and that's what he was trying to show with the varieties of religious experiences he was talking about.  Is that we have an enormous number of these experiences and they're all experiences of Unity.  A Oneness with all of reality !!!

Society has arrived to get together that objective Essence that subjectivity may experience?

No,  well that's why I say it hasn't been occurring as fast as I wanted and it was a little bit different in the 1960s because so many people had taken psychedelics and so many well-known philosophers from Huxley to Alan Watts had written entire books on the mystical experience generated by psychedelics. I had a at least a fair amount of hope that that would continue and yet, no,  it didn't.

RT:  Yes, it's such a pity because it is right now when we more need it. We need more than ever to recognize this Unity, this integration between subject and object because if we don't recognize that; if we keep on being split and divided right now with all the things that are happening in our world, we're lost. We need to encounter that reality because if not we're really lost.

KW:  Right, that's true and among other things it would re-introduce the reality of the religious or spiritual dimension which is very needed because as we know when the world's only real choice is between Christianity or nothing, the nothing in today's world is going to win more often than the Christian version. I noticed that the Catholic Church does a lot of research asking people through the Pew Corporation or so,  questions like:  "if you don't go to church anymore why did you stop?"  And the number one reason people gave for stopping going to church,  especially the youngsters that almost none of whom go to church,  said:  "I don't believe in it.  It's not believable some God born from a Virgin would turn water into wine and you know fishes and loaves coming out of nowhere. I just don't believe any of it.  It's all a bunch of myths !!!

RT:  That's basically correct but that's why I would say that the Church needs to change their way to present Religion. Is not the product which is wrong, is the way to sell it. They need to be better marketers of what they are selling because if not, people is not going to get what they mean.

KW:   Right, that's true and that's a very good point.  They need to become better marketers, because that's what they're doing. They're marketing a product and unfortunately their design is over 2000 years old. It's just not believable anymore.  I had hoped that some of the signs that were obvious in the 60s would catch on a bit and stabilize and even expand but no, it hasn't really happened.  All I find is a general lessening of the belief in the religious myths.  So that's like the number one reason the kids gave her quitting churches: "I don't believe it".  I think that disbelief is actually kind of increasing around the world and the Catholic Church finds that they're losing believers in a fairly alarming way.

RT:  Yes, and  much more now when there is this terrible appearance of abused  children and teenagers  and at the same time,  don't you think that all of that will serve to shaken the roots of the Religion,  of the Christianity so much, that they may start to open their eyes to give their beliefs let's say an actualization?  I really think that it will be interesting to approach Psychology united with Mysticism  instead of continuing with the usual myths of 2000 years ago?

KW:   Yes, that will give the message in a clearer way certainly and I think that Psychology was primed to do this by William James.  I mean he's known as the father of American Psychology and is for a good reason. He was really brilliant,  an absolute genius unparalleled and there's any number of psychological philosophers that turned back to William James during the Psychedelic experience because they would say: " oh he knew this he was already riding on all his varieties of religious experience and that's because he was aware whether he himself tried it or he was just a genius who noticed that this mystical experience was something that occurred in virtually every culture going way back some ten thousand years, maybe even more,  through shamanism. 

He would notice something like that because he was William James and he wrote about it and it was just wonderful writing.  It was just brilliant stuff and I hope that we get to a point where his books become really highly recommended and particularly in Psychology.

5th Question

RT:  In last year's interview you talked about Renewable Energies related to the extraction of fossil fuels without CO2 emissions what it will put an end to air pollution.  How is that project developing?   One year ago you said that it would be ready in 18 months or so.  Do you think that it will really see the light in 6 more months? 

KW:  Well I'm involved with the people that are making this energy and I know them quite well and they have donated an enormous amount of money from their project to Integral Institute, so I can't really speak so that objectively about them but I've seen the project and I know what it does.

It can indeed burn any fossil fuel you want and if you put it through this process it will first take out all CO2 from the fossil fuel,  so when you burn it,  it doesn't release any CO2.

RT:  And why is not still being like spread out into the world so that everyone uses it?

KW:  A lot of it has to do with getting permissions from the state of Texas for example. A lot of its legal issues and so on.  But be sure they have come up with a very creative intellectual process that they used when they developed this method and in the course of that creative process they discovered a lot of other things that this process would do. They're working on some of those other things as well and so that's what's taking them a fair amount of time. 

For example they can clean up methane which is a very bad greenhouse gas and it's produced by every natural gas production. It's a side product. They have a way that they can get rid of that side product and so methane itself becomes very clear and there's no carbon dioxide created by it. They're going to bring that out first simply because it just attaches to whatever natural gas producing unit you already have;  so you don't have to make another one using this process to then produce a clean natural gas. 

You just buy a little unit and put it on your natural gas production and it'll do it  and so they're going to do that first. That took off the 18 months or about half of that.

I would only guess that we could see some real results somewhere less than 18 months.  I'm just not tracking it that closely.  The only thing I know is how real it is.  I mean I've seen it produce this stuff and I stay in touch with the people that are doing it, so they'll tell me but that's all I can really say. I wish I had better news but I don't.

6th Question 

RT:   What are the things that you wish you did in your life that were not possible to make because of your commitment to your main work and focus?

KW:   I'm trying to think of anything else that I would have been as happy doing as I am writing and thinking up this material.  I mean that's just so far ahead of anything else that I could think of.  It sort of makes me think of reincarnation theories that we're all born or reborn with a particular purpose and a particular drive and a particular creative potential and that some people you just know from a very early age that they were meant to be a singer or they were meant to be a movie star or whatever. There was something you just say: " I knew from the moment I saw this person that they were going to make a big hit in doing that". And that's exactly how I feel about this writing and that's why I have indeed written 30 books on the topic and they're published in over 34 foreign languages and I just can't imagine anything else I suppose I would say.  Well I suppose I could be a sports star or devote my life to some sort of sports effort but I can't really think of anything.

7th Question

RT:  Why did you change the colors from Spiral Dynamics in your Consciousness Levels? Many people don't like it and Don Beck was very disappointed with it.

KW:  Don Beck with who we were very good friends at the time and I always respected him.  He had a sort of a reputation as seeing Spiral Dynamics as doing everything and covering every important topic, thinking that it covered all of sin and all of Vedanta and all of Christian mysticism and you just didn't need anything else.  What I had written in my Psychology book,  specifically in "Integral Psychology" is that I talked about developmental psychologists and in the back of that book I listed the stages of over 100 developmental models.  I listed the stages of each of them so there were Loevinger's  stages and Kohlberg's stages and Piaget's stages and Maslow's stages and on and on and what was really clear is that all of those stages had a certain similarity,  so you could see that Jane Loevinger called her highest stage "integrated" and Maslow called his highest stage: "integral" and on and on and so one of those 100 models was:  Claire Graves and Spiral Dynamics.

I didn't want Don to continue to claim that Spiral Dynamics did everything that all of these models did and so when I went to use colors,  I decided I'll just won't use the same colors than SD.

I'll have different colors and that was actually harder than it might sound because I didn't want to use the same color at the same stage for any of the stages I presented.  So Blue,  I didn't include a Blue stage.  I included a Magenta stage and a Teal stage and a Violet an Ultra-Violet stage but not a Blue stage anywhere in it.   So if you wanted to refer to my work you couldn't use the color Blue,  because if you did Don, and now his followers,  would immediately claim that you're using Spirals, yeah,  and that was it !!! I mean that was the sum total of it and I knew he wouldn't like it and I knew that there were other problems with it like other people being aware of it and having to figure it out and all of that but I was determined that Don Beck would not be able to tell me so and so it was a way to avoid that.

RT:  I understand what you're saying, Ken, because the way he was presenting SD puzzled me as I learned directly with him in Dinklescherben, Germany, when he came to Europe to teach his course on Spiral Dynamics.

We were there with Peter Merry studying this SD, which surely at the time sounded wonderfully, and when I listened that SD was Integral, I thought "but it's not" ( as I already knew your Integral Theory so well that I was teaching it myself).  I also saw that Don and afterwards many SD followers  defended that very strongly and I kept on telling them that SD is not an integral metatheory, but just a value line !!!

KW:  That's correct. I wrote several books referring to a process that -in addition to what now I call Waking Up,  which is having an Enlightenment,- covers at least five major different states of Consciousness;  none of which by the way are covered by Spiral Dynamics. So we have Waking Up,  then we have Growing Up, which is the process in which we  explore the multiple intelligences to pass from one to the next, and usually psychologists give between eight and ten multiple intelligences.  Clare Graves covered: one. He covered values intelligence and that's it. He didn't cover artistic and its development or any of those and Don never understood that.

So we have Growing Up in terms of going up through various stages in multiple intelligences or lines.  I've added Opening Up which means you can yourself become more and more aware of the fact that you have those eight or nine different intelligences. You have cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence moral intelligence, spiritual intelligence, aesthetic intelligence and so on.  All lines go through the same levels of development and Spiral Dynamics misses all of that. It doesn't even have more than one intelligence and it calls that a "V meme" for value meme, because that's what it's studying,  the line of values. 

I also cover of course Showing Up and Cleaning Up.

Cleaning Up means working with Shadow material so you can clear up your neurotic emotional mess and Showing up means including all four quadrants or all eight multiple zones of development and each of those four quadrants need to be included because they're the subjective and the objective and the inter-subjective and the inter-objective and those are all very real realities a fact that is not touched on by Spiral Dynamics or even mentioned.

So it's a mess when people think that because I use some of the colors that they used in Spiral Dynamics, then they're the same. Even though I never used exactly the same ones. Nevertheless,  I've got a lot out of it. I appreciate it. It's one of the important 100 different models that I've drawn from and I've always admitted that that's why I would never really get that mad at Don when he would refer to his model as an integral psychology.  I just let it be. I just kind of shake my head and go: "yeah whatever"

RT:  For me Integral Theory is a pair of glasses with which I can see reality at a 360º ; something I cannot do with SD.

KW: Well said,  you just start by asking them in what color  is  Buddhism?   Just start with that. They don't have a level for sure for that. They don't.

8th Question

RT:  What do you think about Greta Thunberg?

I think she's largely being used by her parents

to present their ecological religious system. First of all let's remember the fact that she's autistic and has some other problems.

I think I would prevent most caring parents from letting their little girl become the coverage of national news media because you're always going to get bad news with that. Somebody's going to look at it in a really bad way and it can even be dangerous for her to do it.

I certainly wouldn't just let her go out blaring like that and get put on the front page of every National magazine and every newspaper in the world.  That's a very dangerous thing to let an autistic child do.

Otherwise I mean I thought she had some interesting things to say.  I don't think they're  factually accurate.  It's not factually the case if you really look at climate science for example. It's not true it's nowhere near the case that quote 97 of scientists agree that we're headed for a catastrophic climactic breakdown. The number that believed that is very small.

RT:  I would say, Ken,  that we may not be facing a great climate catastrophe because we don't really know that and yet it's also true that we're traversing a momentum of real climate change that cannot be denied because we experience it all in our own skins every day.

KW:  Right,  well sure but you can listen to people that plan that very differently and they don't see it as catastrophic meltdowns and they certainly don't see it as an existential crisis, like Greta puts which means life or death experience. Even people like Jordan Peterson who is a big YouTube internet star and very very smart, he doesn't believe or anywhere near that there's going to be a climate crisis.

I also think that because I've studied this process a lot and I also studied that the person who claimed that 97% of scientists agreeing that we're in trouble and that we're headed for a catastrophic meltdown is telling a completely crazy story. It's nowhere near 97 percent. This was a person who was just going through all of the scientific sounding articles they could find and most of the people that they counted as scientists didn't even say there was a climate catastrophe. So it's nowhere near 97 of them said that we were going to experience a climate crisis.  It was less than 50 percent or so .

So I don't agree with Greta's facts.  I know it's a Hot Topic and a lot of people still think 97 of scientists have agreed on this but it's just not true and otherwise I wish her well for sure.

RT:  I understand what you mean about using the girl and at the same time to look for the positive in it,  the only thing I can find, and I don't know if you would agree, is this pull of the youngsters to really stand up and talk in what they think and in what they believe at.  I see her as a representation of how youth could talk what they want so that they can walk in it.

KW:  Well yeah,  I wouldn't argue with that.  I just happen to think that it's not nice the use of what their parents do with her. Absolutely not.

9th Question

RT:  What do you foresee that the future brings in the light of what's happening in Ukraine & Iran?

KW:  Well they're both really unfortunate and I think they're especially unfortunate because they tend to display a very bad tendency that the United States of America has in the use of its military, as part of its foreign policy.  So whether we're talking about North or South Korea or China or India or Iraq and Iran or Afghanistan, these are all places that -and I  want to be careful here because I'm having  the sense of something negative to say about the United States, but I don't want to over emphasize that that's what's going on- especially I mean, places like Afghanistan, for example;  we've been there and we've had our troops in. We have been fighting a war in that country for 17 years. Now I mean that's just ridiculous !!! 17 years of continuous fighting, that was as long as the Vietnam War !!!  But neither one of them were the first time we'd ever done something like that and so it starts to get a little concerning that we find ourselves saying: " Okay we've spent 17 years killing those people and they still won't let go.  How stupid can they be?"  Well I don't know maybe you should look at your own policies,  so it concerns me that we get into those kinds of situations.

When the USSR was still in existence we used to get into those situations even more and the reason that so many countries around the world are divided into North Vietnam and South Vietnam and North Korea and South Korea and North this and South that was that we were afraid the Russians were moving in because often they would move into the side of the country that was closest to them.  So they'd be in North Korea and then of course we support South Korea and then the Russians would move into North Vietnam and we had of course support South Vietnam and there was always in North there was the East and West Germany in the same reason and that always bothered me, as is having the world split up into these military factions and especially since both military factions had enough nuclear weapons to blow each other completely off the planet .

Our military program was called MAD ( Mutual Assured Destruction) and it was bad.  It always killed me that they got the wording of that just right. it's mad, you're mad to be doing this !!!

it's not good to give Russia a fair treatment.  It's not good that Russia moves into Crimea when it wanted to and just took it.  It's not good that Russia has moved into Ukraine and is trying to just take it.  None of that is good and it's happening again.  These are very big military powers and the only way we have of actually stopping them besides giving a lot of money to Ukraine and helping them buy troops from Western Europe and stuff like,  that is if they got in an actual nuclear war !!!

RT:  Do you think so?  Do you really think that it may happen?

KW:  Well of course and the only reason I thought that is because of the history of Russia itself and not to mention our own American history.  I mean we got into an almost nuclear catastrophe within Vietnam and they were using localized nuclear weapons on the battlefield.  So I mean you just can't rule it out.  Therefore none of that is good news to me. No, no.

RT: It's really looking dark and therefore in darkness times,  we better prepare. We better look IN because looking OUT is not nice.

KW: That's all right !!!

RT:  So you know the recommendation that I always give to people is. " come on, even if you don't believe in anything,  just look inside because it's time to do so because outside is cold !!!

KW:  That's exactly right and looking within can indeed not only give you that headless sense of Oneness with everything it also awakens that part of yourself that the Christians call the soul and or Hindus called Brahman Atman and Zen just refers to  as the real self ;  part of your awareness that is eternal,  literally eternal and that's exactly the only part of you that would survive if there were a nuclear Madness going on.  

RT:  Do you know Ken that Christian Mystics that were very much in contact with that inner consciousness have not been really heard, recognized and accepted, by the main stream Religion, at least in Spain, only from 20 to 30 years ago?

KW:  And how could that be given Saint John of the Cross and Saint Therese of Avila.  I mean that those are some of the greatest mystics in the world !!! It's incredible that they were denied.

RT:  Well not really denied, but not too much aired, talked or exposed, because they were considered too inwardly. They wanted to just do more external service.  Now that things are changing, the Carmelites have even open a beautiful big building in Avila named the University of Mysticism, even though they're not officially recognized yet as a University by Academia, they have put it that name, because they're teaching Mysticism.

10th Question

RT:   Which are the risks, traps and falacies on the passage from Green, the end of the First Degree of Consciousness  to Teal on the Second Grade?  And how would you recommend to avoid them?

KW:   The biggest difficulty in passing from Green to Teal to Turquoise is getting from Green to Teal in the first place.  The reason for that is that Green is -called various names- like multiplicity stage, it's a post-modern stage or it's a post-rational stage,  also often called a post-conventional stage. 

What it does the move beyond Orange into Green is that it creates what's often called a pluri- dimensional or a multiplicity universe. What that means is that Orange is known as a universal rationality or uniformity because Orange is also called "systemic" because it looks at all the various cultures on the planet and finds what they all have in common, reproducing that information through its universalistic capacity.  Now Green goes one step further and it looks at all those Universal systems that Orange has in a sense created or recognized and it says: " no,  wait a minute, you can get truth from all of those".

Therefore,  we have a really a multiplicity universe and that's where it gets the name multi-rational or post-rational, dividing that universal systems into multiple number of multiple conventions. Yes it comes up with these multiple systems, multi-systems or trans systems,  but it can't pull all of those together.  So Green is the one that divides up the universal system of a Oneness that Orange recognizes but that all it does is reproduce a in a multitude of different multi- conventional, post-conventional , multiple systems.

That can in itself be a problem because, for example,  that is the source of Post-modernism,  because Postmodernism claims there are no universals at all. They just got rid of Orange and all they found was a multitude of different systems of multi-culturalism.

Their multiculturalism was what was real and they didn't even believe in the objective truth;  relativism in one word . So this multiplicity, relativistic universe is what Green gives us being the root of the problem, as Green finds itself frequently fragmented into these multiple systems, trying like crazy to pull them all together into a single unified coherent Oneness system. And it can't do it. 

The first stage that can pull all of these multiple systems together is Teal or Second Tier.  That's why Teal is often called "Paradigmatic" because it pulls all of the different systems together into overarching "Unified Paradigms".   It's also referred to as "Unity" or "unified" or "systemic" and so on. 

So,  being able to make that leap from a relativistic Green to a unified Teal -a paradigmatic Teal- is the first really important step into Second Tier consciousness.  The problem being, of course, that it's actually quite difficult step to make.   That's why most models that include Second Tier like Jane Loevinger, Kohlberg or so on give the total percentage of the population that's at Teal  somewhere between 6 and 7% and yet Green some 25%  of the population. So Green is going around making politically correct statements and ripping the universe up into Multicultural Pluralistic Relativistic Systems;  and it's just a mess !!!

I mean,  I used to get so upset with Green that people would think or even would say to others; "oh you're using that anti-Green book"  and I'd actually ended up writing with a subtitle -in the chapter where I was covering Green-, a section called:  the many gifts of Green,  just so people wouldn't think that I'm just anti-Green.

Green does have many different gifts and that includes not taking Orange's single Universal systems and making them Absolute. I mean that's a fine gift but then when we get to Teal it's called: "Paradigmatic" because it mixes Paradigms.

Now the problem at this stage is, it makes a fair number of Paradigms and yet it doesn't itself have the cognitive strength or capacity to pull those Paradigms together into what's called: Cross Paradigmatic. That's the name that's given to the level that can pull these paradigms together and that's the Turquoise level, and yet that's even much much rarer than Teal. Jane Loevinger's careful research, for example, shows that 0.5% of the entire population makes it to Turquoise which she calls:  an integrated level.  Of course her system is the most widely used developmental model in the world and she stood an enormous amount of developmental studies to forward the research on more developmental studies. Her model has been tested and tested and tested and there have never been any major contradictions found in her model which is why it is the single most widely used developmental model;  even more so than Piaget's.

Piaget in the 50's was a huge hit especially in education.  Every teacher knew those stages you go through and Piaget's cognitive development.

So, again, those are the three major stages Green,  then Teal and then Turquoise.  And those are the major problems that they, each,  get into.   So Green gets caught in a relativistic multi-cultural pluralistic world and Teal gets caught in its paradigmatic world.  They can't come up with a cross paradigmatic structure and Turquoise does come up with a cross paradigmatic structure which is very rare again 0.5% percent. I was just shocked when I first heard that. I actually got a baseball cap and had 0.5 % written across the baseball cap and then every time I get a visitor who would come over, which was often,  and tell me that we're going through a new paradigm right now that's going to unify everything;  I just put this cap on.  I just left it there and see if they asked me what it meant and very few people actually asked me but if I did I'd go: " that's the number of people that are working on this new paradigm"

RT:  Would you say, Ken,  because it came to my mind when you said about crossed paradigms in Turquoise, that this is related to your creation of the Multiplex, that old idea of yours?

KW:  Yes that could be an image.  So, the whole beginning of a Third Tier set of stages or Post-Second Tier higher stages are experienced as States of consciousness so in Zen for example they have the total number of stages of development that they give is five and they go through the five stage stages of Third Tier and Satori being the ultimate sort of experience that they recommend.

When talking about those States Of Consciousness,  I don't refer to them as a stages of Growing Up as all the other stages per se in the First, Second and Third Tier are stages of Consciousness and yet I refer to those Waking Up characteristics as States Of Consciousness because that's how they're usually experienced.   So you know that you can tell the difference between a state and a stage by just looking: within. You can't see a single stage of consciousness. If you look within right now,  you will never see a stage of thought called a "concrete operational stage" or you'll never see a stage of thought called the "formal operational scene". You can't see them. They're just not open to introspection but every time you have a first person state of experience you know it doesn't matter what it is. It's being one with the entire universe and Love and Bliss. You know you're ONE with the whole bloody universe and you know you're in the state of love and the state of bliss and that's unmistakable !!!

That's a very easy way to tell the difference between states of Consciousness which are 1st person direct experiential experiences and structures of Consciousness which are a 3rd person objective stage or levels of experience. 

That's an important,  a really important distinction to me and it's one that I started making fairly early on recognizing I would just actually call them States Of Consciousness and structures or structured stages of Consciousness and they were very important in my own understanding particularly in clarifying the difference between Waking up and Growing up  because both of them have stages so to speak or levels even and it's important to understand the difference between those two.

Every mystical tradition has states;  1st person states of Consciousness and when you experience one of them you know it and they all also have -although not many of them know it or realize it-  they have stages of Growing Up and meditation can increase the speed that you'll go through those stages of Growing Up but they are not themselves a stage of Growing Up at all. If you're just relying on Zen to get you through Growing Up you're not going to grow very fast at all, so that's why it's an important distinction.

RT:  I remember I met the president of the French Transpersonal Association in Paris who was Mark Allen Descamps in 1993 or something like that and I remember he was talking about the Vertical Consciousness and the Horizontal Consciousness, so could we that Waking Up is like the Vertical and Growing Up like the Horizontal?

KW:  Not exactly.  The reason is that Vertical and Horizontal, either they don't apply at all to Growing Up and Waking up or they can both be used to describe different aspects of each process. So we can talk about Vertical Waking Up and there's also a certain sense in which Growing Up stages are also Vertical. You can lay like the 5 stages which are frequently known as "The 10 Zen ox herding pictures"  and those are all Vertical movements. They take you from one stage of Waking Up to a higher stage of Waking Up but there are also degrees that you can experience, at each of those Vertical levels.  For example, a very strong Zen initial Waking Up experience at about stage 2 or 3 and could be viewed as a horizontal expansion of that stage of Waking Up.

On the other hand you can go all the way to stage 10 and have a very minor experience of stage 10.  It's real,  but it's not very wide or very Horizontally developed. Or, you could go on and have a very wide huge experience as Satori, there, embracing sort of everything,  with no distinction at all.   

Well the same thing can be said for the stages of Growing Up because those stages are still usually thought of as Vertical stages of development but again there are large stages of Waking Up. You can  have a small degree of Vertical Growth like maybe moving from Piaget's "Pre-operational coordination" to his "Concrete operational cognition" which is moving you from the capacity to just have a 1st person experiential understanding of something to a 2nd person, the "concrete operational",  which means you can concretely operate on the world. You can then understand things like mathematics or addition or subtraction so 2 + 2 = 4.  When you think that way, you're thinking "concrete operational cognition"  because you're taking 2 x 2 and getting 4 and then you can continue to grow Vertically.

Every time you move through a Vertical stage there's a different name given to it whereas if you have a Horizontal expansion it's not usually given a different name. It's just whoever's giving you the test can notice how strong you are in your outreach or experience of that, so you could move from "pre-operational thinking" to "concrete operational thinking" in a really powerful way, so you get mathematics immediately you could probably even go straight to doing algebra or something like that that would be a very wide horizontal development of "concrete operational thinking".  Then when you move up to the next stage you would be said to be at a "formal operational cognition" and it would be named different than the previous.  It's not long a "concrete operational thinking". It's no longer thought thinking about external reality it's thought thinking about thought which is an entirely different kind of cognition.  It's a much bigger stage of Growing Up but you could do that in a big way or it could be relatively small in terms of this Horizontal bigness.  

That's why I say that Vertical and Horizontal can be used on both Growing Up and Waking Up and Opening Up and Showing Up because these are just two essentially different dimensions that we have anywhere.

11th Question

RT:  Could you give a first person account of where you are at in your vertical development (regarding structure stages) and your horizontal development (regarding state stages), how life is lived from that state stage and that structure stage?  Talking about that: have you thought of writing a second “One Taste, the Journals of Ken Wilber” describing one of the current years in your life?. It would be really inspiring for meditators.”

KW:  Well I haven't thought about doing that.  I will now that you bring it up. Give me something to do !!!

RT:  Well, many people wants to know how is your everyday life, how do you develop your own inner life and externally too. How do you deal with your medical issues and all the rest.

KW:  Well talking about Growing Up,  when I first conceived Integral Theory in my mid adolescent period mid-teens,  I was 14 or 15. When I first came up with the generalized idea,  that included all First-Tier and Second-tier stages and although I knew that the highest Third Tier stage or Turquoise was only reached by 0.5 percent of the population,  I knew that there were a few people somewhere who had gone to higher stages and whether Loevinger mentions that or not doesn't matter because there's just simply no theoretical limit to where you can go and I eventually would trace out four or five higher possibilities.   Then when I thought of the highest or Turquoise Second Tier states, I was already at Turquoise,  so I was fairly conscious, I mean I've just always had a great deal of cognitive intelligence,  so I got straight A's through every class I ever took and A's on Math, A's in History and in Sociology,  just the whole thing I was valedictorian of my High School and gave the valedictory speech and just all sorts of those things.

RT:  Ken, may we know which is your IQ?

KW: Yeah, it's about 167.  My dad's got a genius level IQ also and my mom is also exceptionally intelligent.  They're both very good looking.  I'm the ugly sheep of the family, but my dad looked like Paul Newman until he's deceased and my mom was also absolutely gorgeous. I don't have any living family members now.  She was one of four sisters and they were all dropped dead, but they were like the McGuire Sisters. I mean they're just absolutely beautiful every one of them.

Once I wrote my first couple of books I was becoming very clear that there were higher stages of development and that if I was at Turquoise then I had been at Turquoise for some time  and then it was very likely that I had some degree of a Third Tier stage available.  So I went through several versions of what this Third Tier stages could look like and I used there a very small number of Developmental Models that will have at least one stage of Third Tier Consciousness. Therefore, I have at least some material that I could reference and would help me create these structure stages as they're the ones that I use now. I refer to Post-Integral or Post Turquoise. 

When Third Tier structures occur they often will occur as a part of some Waking Up experience although they're not defined as that.  They're defined as Growing Up structures, but when you generally get a strong mystical experience of first Third Tier it's often what I'd call a Unity Consciousness with Earth, so it's a mystical experience of the gross;  being one with the gross realm.  Then the next stage I would say it's a Oneness with the subtle or dreamed state and then the next stage is a Oneness with the Causal or deep dreamless formless state and then the highest is  non-dual condition;   a Oneness with non-dual and they are given colors like Violet, Ultraviolet and Clear Light and so on.

I've had Satori experiences that have pretty much run that Spectrum and I experienced the sort of highest of that Spectrum um about 10 years ago and the earlier the ones I experienced back 20, 30 years or so ago,  but I knew what to look for because I was such an avid student of Zen and I'm a student of virtually any mystical system anywhere.  I've learned an enormous amount from everyone I've looked at from Taoism to Hinduism Buddhism to Judaism to Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) and all the mystics involved in all of them and it was very important for me to actually come up with the names of Waking Up and Growing Up because that Waking Up it allowed me to differentiate between these states of Consciousness and those structures/stages. There were so many models of the different structures that different developmentalists had recognized these stages of Growing Up and all of them went from models that had like Maslow's five or six stages to Loevinger eight or nine stages and I'd always spent an enormous amount of time studying those models because they were so important to each of us and how we create our world view and not that many people have genuine mystical experiences of Waking Up, so it was important for me to be able to distinguish what I meant by Third Tier Growing Up from an experience of Waking Up even though they often occurred simultaneously but that's a sort of a brief summary of my Vertical stages of Growing Up and the experiences that I have had of Waking Up. 

RT:  Thank you, Ken for this personal account that you gave us because it's very interesting to see your personal inner development.

12th Question 

RT:  What's your Integral view and personal experience about Veganism and its evolution not only as a way of reducing the environmental impact but above all as a way of stopping the exploitation and suffering of animals at the macrofarms and the extensive fishing?  Would you say is a temporary fashion? Is it a need we need to address? Are you a vegan?   How would this matter be seen from the different quadrants? How to integrate meat eaters and walk toward a greener world at the same time?

KW:  I'm not really sure exactly how we would integrate meat eaters with the vegetarians because by definition to be a vegetarian means you're not being a meat eater,  so you're not going to ever find a way to pull them together. I suppose the closest thing we could come to it is that there are many big food companies now -quite a few in America- that are making meat substitute material based on plant material so they're made out of soybeans or something of that sort but they're definitely not meat and you can get those in the form of hamburgers or steaks or any of those.

I personally spent a good deal of my life as a vegetarian and, originally for Buddhist reasons and I've been a pure vegetarian in that form since I was about 20 to 50 years old. I just wouldn't eat any meat at all, then I started sort of going back and forth between mostly soy products and occasional like chicken;  something like that.

I started going back to occasionally eating meat because I had an illness it was called "chronic fatigue immune deficiency syndrome" and it's a chronic illness and I've had it for many years and it essentially exhausts your energy and you feel run down all the time and I found that when I ate meat that helped at least a noticeable fair amount and that was important for me.

But then I found that the chronic fatigue syndrome started to kind of go away and then come back and go away and come back, almost like when I was eating meat or eating vegetables. So I wouldn't follow it perfectly so it wasn't always a vegetarian.  When I ate meat I would get the illness sometimes and sometimes I wouldn't and I'd just eat vegetables but that's a kind of a complex story.

I hope you can get the sort of general flavor of it. I would say on if someone just asked me if I were a vegetarian I'd probably reply "mostly" and just leave it at that because I mostly am a vegetarian and mostly it's for religious reasons.

And what I don't surely like are those macro meat farms or artificial fishing farms because is just crude and I don't like this inducing suffering to animals. It is not nice and it should be stopped in some way.  It's no way to treat a living thing.  It's another part of our mad Collective system.

13th Question 

RT:  Ken, please, I would love to know and I am sure the people which listen and follow you also would like to know,  What are you writing right now? or What are you about to publish?  because I was the other day in a beautiful weekend with your Spanish translator David Gonzalez Raga and he said to tell you, Oh let me see that I remember what he said, because it was not Namaste; it was:  In Gassho, with a great Recognition and a great depth in Gratitude!

KW:  That's wonderful !!!   I appreciate him very much. He's a terrific translator and I know he's translated quite a few of my books into Spanish and yes I've looked all of them translated by him.

RT:  I tell you something Ken, because I know both languages;  I can say that he's so accurate and so exact that in many occasions I say: " Oh God he's our Ken Wilber in Spanish".  He is a great soul and a great meditator.  He's experienced Satori and he has these high levels of consciousness,  therefore he can understand what you say when you write.   He wants to know what's the next book you're going to give out for  translating because your last book he translated was "The Religion of Tomorrow".  So what are you writing now, please, Ken?

KW:   Okay,  it's a book I guess you would call it Holism or about Wholeness. And I point out that you could want to be yourself a wholeness or believe in the unity of everything but you have to realize there are at least five different types of unities in this universe and you can be completely whole in one way and not understand the wholeness in four other dimensions.

So what you have to do is to understand each type of wholeness and I'll show you how to do that in this book and I'll give you some exercises you can do to cover each area of wholeness in this book and we'll do that.   We'll walk through all five of them so when you finish this book you'll have a perfectly good understanding of what Unity or Wholeness or Holism means and the five types. 

Holism in a sense responds to Quadrants, Levels, Lines, States and Types but I've come up with a a different way of naming them that I started doing some time ago. I like these names a lot, they're: Growing Up, Waking Up, Opening Up,  Cleaning Up and Showing Up and each one of those will produce a different type of wholeness.

So imagine for example that it's a thousand or two thousand years ago but it was a long time ago.  It was not any modern era but you were studying then Buddhism. You were walking through the forest one day and the Sun is circling the Earth and the Earth is stretched out and you can you feel really good and you're walking through the woods so you're seeing all these trees,  and all of a sudden you have a Satori and you're one with the sun. You no longer see the sun,  you no longer feel the Earth, you're one with the Earth. You no longer see the trees, you're one with the trees but that sense of Oneness which seems to be a Oneness with everything, you still think the Earth is flat and you'll still think that the sun circles the Earth and you won't know anything about that experience. It doesn't tell you anything about the cells or atoms or molecules in every one of the trees those are different types of unity and you can experience those but they'll be different. We call that, the first experience of the experience of Waking Up.

You may also have a Waking Up experience by studying a mystical religion essentially and so we go through that including understanding eternity and infinity and infinity means that you yourself are one with the infinite universe,  so there isn't a different infinity on the other side of the earth,  there's just Infinity and if you experience Infinity right here,  you've experienced Infinity everywhere and you experience it right here right now because you don't have a head,  right?  So I just I walk them through the headless.  We don't need the head, right? Then you are one with the Timeless Now because the past has passed. It isn't real and the future as future isn't real.

You can think of something from your past right now just anything just pick an image of something that you did yesterday or that happened in the past and then go ahead and remember that clearly and notice that the memory of that past is a present experience. It's something that you are experiencing right here and right now. That's all you're are going to ever actually experiencing, that is this Timeless Now.   The same goes for the future, think about anything that's going to happen in the future and that  is a present thought and that present thought is occurring right here in this Timeless Now.

So that "cliché" of being here and now, is exactly a correct summary of being one with Infinity and one with Eternity, so, it proceeds along those lines  explaining Waking Up and then Growing Up.  I walked through a typical six or seven stages of Growing Up model like Jane Loevinger or Piaget and I explain what first person development is.  That's when you're a very young child and you can only experience your own first person experiences and so if you take a child who's young,  one or two years old and you put a colored ball between the child and yourself and that colored ball is colored green on one side and red on another side and you spin it several times so the child can see both colors and then you stop the ball with the red side facing the child and the green side facing yourself and you ask the child:  "what color are you seeing?", he'll correctly see red and you say: " okay now what color am I seeing?" and he'll say: "red".  He has no idea that you have a different perspective,  a second person perspective on the world and then you can go on up to third person and even fourth person. Jane Loevinger gives seven person levels of Growing Up, so I walk people through that but notice that those are not stages of Waking Up.

You can be going through any first person or second person,  or add third person but you won't be one with the entire universe,  you won't have a Waking Up experience;  not necessarily. And yet you're Growing Up. You certainly want to do that,  so I walk them through how they can recognize the different stages in themselves and then in that arena of different structures of Consciousness. Psychologists recognize a multiple number of intelligences,  as we talked about earlier,  so I can have cognitive development,  moral development,  ego development aesthetic development,  spiritual development and so on.  So you can become one with each one of those and that process I call Opening Up to all of your intelligences.

Therefore, we have a Waking Up, we have a Growing Up and we can then Open Up in any number of these intelligences and Grow Up the different lines, always going through the same levels of Growing Up.  So that's a very important thing for them to understand. Then we also have Cleaning Up, as I go ahead and go back to Freud because it's so interesting that most people know the terms "ego" and "id" from Freud.

RT: Yes, and I prefer Jung as he developed it even better !!!

KW:  That's right, but Jung was first a student of Freud entirely turned on to the notion of the unconscious, because of Freud and Jung writes very clearly about Freud and how much he meant to him and incidentally they broke up.  They stopped talking at all over one argument where Freud was talking to Jung and Freud said: "please tell me you won't give up the "id" Theory, the "libido" Theory and Jung was a little bit startled by that and said: "why?" and Freud said: "because it protects us from the black tide of the black mud of Mysticism". 

What Freud didn't realize was that "everything that he called the black mud of mysticism was everything I was interested in", Jung actually wrote !!!  They never spoke again,  never said a single word to each other after that day.  So that's it, but Jung started because he was attracted to Freud's work but most people don't know that Freud never used the term "ego" or "id". Those are Latin terms that represent the "I" that means one's first person and the "it" which is the third person unconscious material, respectively.

That's not how Freud actually wrote it.  He referred to the "I" and the "it" using the actual pronouns that people use in day-to-day life and so his most famous quote was somebody asked him: " what does this new Psychoanalysis of yours do?" and he said: "where "id" was, there, "ego" shall be". That's how it's translated because his official translator thought that using those Latin terms the "ego" and the "id" would make him sound more scientific.  What Freud actually said was: "where "it" was, there "I" shall become. That's a perfect example of what a decent psychoanalysis does. 

Fritz Pearls used to do, when somebody had a problem, he would sit them down in what he called "The empty chair" which is a chair that was just empty in front of him and he'd have them put their problem or their symptom, their neurosis in the empty chair and talk to it. Actually ask "why are you bothering me? Why are you doing this to me? Why are you here? What can I do to make you go away? and so on. He would strictly have to use the terms the "I" and "it" because if they had a great deal of excitement and were repressing it then it would show up as anxiety and they would never say the anxiety I am causing; they would always say the anxiety it's disturbing me or whatever they're unaware off.

So what the person does is that they go back and forth talking through this "it" from their position being an "I" and very soon if you're talking like you are the "it", then you will end up saying: " the excitement I am experiencing"  and that's causing me anxiety and so as they go back and forth they start to re-identify with the repressed "it" and so that "it" becomes an "I". It actually becomes re-associated with them and so where "it" was "I" have become and that's what Freud was trying to do.

The first time I read that and read that he had never ever specifically used the term "ego" or "id" it was always the "I" or the "it" and he would write that the "I" often suffers from things that "it" does. He would write it just like that and I was just so blown away by that. It was just so impressive and fresh !!! Pearls of course just made it almost paradigmatic, so that's in a sense what you I was writing about Cleaning Up as what it does is that takes any "it" that you have shoved into your unconscious and it brings it back and reunites that "it" with the "I" to form a more whole psyche or more perfect "I".

RT:  Then Cleaning Up is what you were previously calling the work with the shadow?

KW: Yeah.  I got into shadow work in a really big way through the work of Fritz Pearls. He became famous  because of the Esalen Institute which was actually founded by my very good friend Michael Murphy and Murphy was left this beautiful property by his family and he turned it into this growth Center called Esalen which was the first major growth Center in America in the 60. By the 80s there were over 300 growth centers in America all copied off Esalen.  So that was like wild but Fritz Pearls was one of the big stars there on doing "Gestalt Therapy" and he famously said: "I can cure any Neurosis in 15 minutes  and the funny thing is that he could do it. Even his critics tended to agree with him. 

Pearls was simply a genius at working with the "I" and the "it" and he would take somebody and said: "what's your problem?" and then say: "well I have depression or I'm anxious,  or I'm obsessive compulsive,  or I'm overeating,  or something like that and he would say: "okay take that and put that in that empty chair" and then he would have them talk go back and forth and even people in the audience could see that when the person was talking about this "it", they were actually talking as if "it" was them.  Pearls would make them say "I" and then talk to the "it" and so within 10 or 15 minutes they would be re-identified with this "it" and everybody could see it. I mean it was just obvious as hell of what was going on and so then I started reading those transcripts from those sessions at Esalen I got Pearls's books and read all of them and that sort of thing.

All of that was really quite early in my life and it sort of opened me up to the whole Psychoanalysis aspect and the whole of the Freudian or Jungian or Adler or Otto Rank or any of those and so that was the summary of all of those in essence. Is what I call Cleaning Up.  It's a lot of work.

Now the last one is Showing Up and Showing Up means using all Four Quadrants and recognizing the how each of those is a different whole. You can have a whole psyche or a whole external environment or a whole society a whole culture and there are important unities to be found in all of those but notice that you can reunite with your Shadow but that won't give you a Waking Up experience or it  won't make you Grow Up and it certainly won't help you Show Up and so on.  Therefore, by the time we've gone through the book I've taken through five areas of genuine Unity,  a genuine wholeness. So to the extent that they've followed it and done all the exercises and all the stuff,  they themselves will walk away with that kind of new Unity to finally tell them come and Show Up.

The book is called: "Making room for Everything"  

RT:  That's wonderful Ken, thank you very much. It's been great to talk to you as always. Thank you for your presence, your existence, your wisdom and for all that you have given us and continue giving us.  When do you think this book will be published?

KW:  Probably it takes Shambhala about six months or so.

RT: We'll wait then, meanwhile we will keep on deepening on this "Religion of the Future" which is  very very important and enlightening book. 

KW:  Absolutely, that was beautiful.

RT:   THANK YOU, Ken, much love to you. Bye

Interview made to Ken Wilber

on Zoom by Raquel Torrent-2023

Licensed Psychologist and Integral Therapist

raqueltorrent@raqueltorrent.es