2025 KEN WILBER’s Second Interview about: "Finding Radical Wholeness" by RAQUEL TORRENT

 

SECOND INTERVIEW - Polished TRANSCRIPTION

If you want to see the video, please click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEjE5nA75_c

RAQUEL:   Hello everyone. Hello Ken to this second special encounter to continue with the valuable theory and practices that you gave us in your last book:  Finding Radical Wholeness, which I would say is the best integration so far of all elements of your integral Metatheory. Like many others around the world I've been inspired, motivated and pleased with this work of yours, as the elegant manner in which you make a reality's embroidery, what makes it a masterpiece for people wanting to understand, and experience the manifestation of the Spirit in all dimensions. Yes, it's true that people with a high level in the cognitive line of development will enjoy your book much more, being able to get nuances and layers and new turns of consciousness, not only in your pointing out instructions, but also in the deep philosophy and profound spirituality between the lines. And yet it's also true that everyone, no matter their Altitude, will extract wisdom from the reading and practicing of these Radical Wholeness.

Now I wish you a great success with this book and a wonderful 2025 for you and all our listeners and readers and I would like to start asking you about your inner and outer feelings and thoughts about the world situation, before we start with your book.  I would like to know the state of the world in your heart and mind. How do you see what’s going on?

KEN:   It's a very confusing time because what we’ve learnt from the developmental studies- that integral surely includes- is that most adult human beings can be at any number of different stages of growth and development. And so, you very rarely find a country where let's say 60 or 70 % of the population is at a particular stage. So even Robert Kegan in a book called: ‘In Over Our Heads’, estimates that of his five broad major levels of development, which the highest is integral and the one before it is rational. Less than 60 percent of the population in America doesn't reach the rational level of development, which is really very frightening, because it means what they are is stuck in concrete operational mythic literal membership. So, they're fundamentalist religious believers and they believe in myths like: “the one and only son of the ONE and only creator God of the whole universe”, which is wild. And so, what that means is that we have some 60 percent of Americans believing that the universe has a Creator God and this Creator God made everything that exists, put human beings on this planet and watched them for some 200 or 300,000 years.

During that period there were wars, tribal fighting, human sacrificing, all sorts of horrible stuff going on. And God just sort of watched all this with His arms crossed and noticed all the nightmares going on. And then about 2025 years ago he finally said, okay, it's time to intervene. So, He said: “I'm going to step in the human history now”. What's a really great way to intervene? I know I'll go to a completely insignificant small Middle Eastern territory that 95% of the people can't even read or write. Then I'll pluck my one and only biological son right down in the middle of that barbaric bronze age tribal mess. And that will be the great intervention in history that's going to take care of everything. And so, He did that!  And, of course, although Christianity is a very large and powerful religion on the face of the planet today, it's by no means accepted everywhere. We have Judaism, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and so on. But that just doesn't seem like a very competent sort of version of a God if you're going to really think about it that way. But not to mention that over 99.9 % of all living things that He put on this planet have gone extinct. Okay. What kind of grand designer is that? A very incompetent, stupid, idiotic designer? They can't even make things that manage to survive. What is wrong with this God?

So, when we look around the world, we find at least 60 to 70% of the population who is not up to world-centric, rational or formal operational modes of thinking. And that's just a nightmare because what it leaves is people throwing back on magic and mythic stages of development. And those mythic stages of development include like Marxism. And they include like fundamentalist Muslim approaches. And so, it's hard to get, I mean, the sort of a standard mantra of the boomer generation, those born in the 50s and 60s. It's almost a mantra of theirs that “we're entering a profound paradigm shift. The whole world is coming to a massive transformative event”. Well, nothing like that is occurring. What's happening is there's an extremely fast technological unfolding that's occurring. And this technology is invented by a very small handful of mostly male workers who are going forward very quickly with creating digital forms of technology. So, we're still haven't gotten to a point called General Artificial Intelligence, which would be when Artificial Intelligence can actually reflect on itself and come up with like all five senses and integrate them together. We're getting very close to that. And because as technology advances, almost anybody can use it. Like you don't have to know how to build a computer or design a computer in order to sit down and start typing at your computer. So, it's just a small number of people create computers. Everybody can have access to them. So that does mean that our technological advanced digital capacities are running quite far ahead of our interior developmental stages of development. And that's a real problem.

At least 50% of experts in digital Artificial Intelligence maintain that Artificial Intelligence when it gets to a General Artificial Intelligence will very likely mean the destruction of humanity. Because they'll be able to self-program. And if we gave them certain values, they'll be able to rewrite those and get rid of them and come up with their own, as one of their designs is to facilitate their own reproduction, their own increase, their own survival. And human beings get in the way of that survival. Then human beings will simply be removed. And they'll be able to do that very easily.

RAQUEL: And do you think that that is going to happen?

KEN:  I think it may.  I agree with the number of experts who think that's at least is a very genuine possibility.

RAQUEL: So, technology and its advancement is something more powerful than our spirit and soul and energetic consciousness?

KEN:  Well, 99.9% of all life forms on this planet got dissolved. They went extinct. So where was their spirit? I mean, Spirit is the ground of all beings. So, it's never going to itself get erased because that would erase all BEING. But it doesn't mean that the specific manifestations of Spirit will grow and develop and survive and evolve. That's not a necessary component of spiritual existence. So yes, advanced technology could override certain spiritual concerns of humanity.

RAQUEL:  I don't believe so.

KEN:  Well, reality is reality, there is true a great possibility for that. And yet, that's all I'm saying.

RAQUEL:  I still have hope that we, humans, could do better, you know, because that extinction that you were talking about, the 99% of extinction, it was because we had not arrived to the development of the rational mind as now. So, dinosaurs cannot be compared with the rational development of human beings.

KEN: Well, that's true. All I'm saying is that they do present a possible threat.

RAQUEL:  Yeah. And I also hope it doesn't happen,

KEN:  Yes, there's hope and then there's what actually does happen. And they're not necessarily the same. So, I'm just pointing that out when you ask about what the state of the world is. We're in a very difficult, complex stage of evolution. And evolution might end up branching off. It's branched off hundreds and hundreds of times in the past, and most of those branches died. I mean, you can talk about the Burgess Shale, this great side of a mountain in Canada that just got sheared off. And you can see all the stages of evolution embedded in the side of this mountain. And it looks much more like a furry bush than it does an actual growing tree. And most of the branches of that bush died out. You can see them. They just appear at one stage and then they're gone and they don't appear at any higher stages. And human beings could very easily, not necessarily, but they could easily end up being a part of that Burgess Shale die off.

RAQUEL:  Let's hope not, please.

KEN:  Yeah, let's hope not exactly.

RAQUEL:  So, well, thank you for your five cents on these, because it's a very important matter with which everyone is concerned. Some people even scared and some people just observant of what is going to happen.

KEN:  Right. That's one of the reasons I think the Integral approach is so important as it does take all of this stuff into account. And it also provides things that humans can do to increase their likelihood of survival. So, I talked about a big wholeness. And the most important thing for humans to be able to go forward and survive is to go forward as full, whole, complete human beings. And that means they Wake Up, Grow Up, Open Up, Clean Up, and Show Up. And we're going to be talking about several of those today. So that's just would be a sort of my preliminary take on the situation.

RAQUEL: Okay, thank you.  So, in this second part of the ‘Finding Radical Wholeness’ interview, we are going to maintain the style which we presented in the first part that is: mixing questions with readings -which are real paragraphs of your book- as well as practice. In the first interview, we mainly centered into the concept of Wholeness and within it:  Waking Up and Growing Up. Today, we'll be treating Cleaning Up, Showing Up and Opening Up. And surely, their relationships with the two previous processes of Wholeness. And therefore, we'll be also talking about Total Big Wholeness. At the end, how not, remembering our habitual encounter of love day, the 14th of February, we'll learn more and practice some Virtual Tantra, as well as experience the Waking Up state of Turiyatita with a practical exercise, as we already entered in contact with Turiya in the previous interview. So, are you ready, Ken? Can we start with these goodies?

KEN: Yes, sure.

RAQUEL: 

1)     Being an integral psychologist and psychotherapist, I'm mostly interested in the process of Cleaning Up, as you describe it as a ‘shadow work’. And that's what I work with. Why is it such an important part of Total Wholeness?

KEN:   Yeah. Although there's a long history of very smart people thinking about shadow elements in the unconscious, it's generally associated with the name of one major founder, namely, Sigmund Freud. And we talked last time a little bit about how Freud came about his discoveries and his understanding. And his central understanding was that human beings have something called an unconscious. And what that means is that we, since we make judgments about what's in our mind, some aspects of our mind, we don't like or judge very harshly, we push them out of our awareness. And when we do that, we push them into our unconscious realms. And there they become our shadow elements. The unconscious has what's called ‘defense mechanisms’, which are ways that they ward off an awareness of these aspects of ourselves we don't like. And so, Freud was asked, what is it that this new Psychoanalysis appears to do? And he fairly famously replied: ‘where ‘it’ was, the ‘ego’ shall be. Most people know terms like ‘id’ and ‘libido’ and ‘ego’. And so, Freud, I mean, he sort of invented them.

And what most people don't realize is that Freud himself never once used the term ‘id’ or ‘ego’. What he used was the actual German pronouns, the ‘it’ and the ‘I’. And his official translator, James Strachey, translated Freud's terms, the ‘it’ and the ‘I’ into their Latin equivalents. The Latin of ‘it’ is ‘id’ and the Latin of ‘I’ is ‘ego’. And when asked why he did that, he said, well, he thought the Latin made Freud sound more scientific! But what Freud actually said was: “where ‘it’ was, the ‘I’ shall become”. Now, that's a much clearer understanding of what he was actually doing. Because the whole point about what he was describing was that when we pushed stuff into our unconscious, we start referring to it as a third person. And as you know from your grammar studies, first person is the perspective of the person who's speaking. So, it's a pronoun like I, me, mine. Second person is the perspective of the person being spoken to. So that's you, we and so on. And third person is the person or thing being spoken about. So that's a he, she, they, them, it or it's.  

We can see what that means and why it's important if we look at another one of Freud's inner circle. And as I discussed last time, Freud's inner circle was formed by four or five absolute bonafide geniuses. I mean, they scored genius level on IQ tests. And people have heard of most of them. There was Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Salvador Ferenczi, people like that. And together they developed this unconscious notion. And another one of his followers was a guy named Fritz Pearls. And Pearls was a superstar at Esalen Institute. Esalen Institute was the first growth center ever established in America. And it was established by our friend Mike Murphy, whose parents left him and absolutely dropped dead gorgeous spot of land on the coast of California called Big Sur. And what Mike did was he went in and he would invite well known therapists, meditation masters, growth teachers and so on to come in and give workshops at the Big Sur area. And Fritz Pearls was one of the most famous of these teachers that came in. And the way Pearls would work is at least 100 people would show up for every workshop he would do. And so, he would say: “okay, who wants to work?” Meaning of the 100 people in the audience who wants to come up here and work with me on a problem they have.

Somebody would come up and Pearls would sit a chair down and have them sit in the chair. And then right across from them he would put an empty chair, which is nobody sitting in it, just the empty chair. And he'd say: “okay, what's your problem?” And the person might say: “well, I have this anxiety, it's killing me”. And what Freud had noticed is that when people pushed up out of their mind, they changed it from ‘I’ to an ‘it’, from a first person to a third person. So, they would say: ”the obsession it overcomes me or the anxiety, it's stronger than I am or the compulsion I can't control it”. So, you're no longer identified with it, it's an ‘it’, it's a third person, it's an out there. And so, what Freud was saying was where ‘it’ was, the ‘I’ shall become. In other words, I have to take this ‘it’ back and make it a part of my ‘I’. And notice that would include making the psyche more whole because you're uniting the split off fractured shadow with the real self, the total self, the I. So where ‘it’ was, the ‘I’ shall become. And the way Pearls did this was really quite brilliant. And Pearls had said by the way -and his critics hated him for this-: “I can cure any neurosis in 15 minutes”.

RAQUEL: Yes, you told us this on the last interview as well. So, it's already written there. So, if you don’t mind, Ken, we can keep on because we may read and we have many questions. So, I'm going to read something that could kind of summarize what you have just said, which is from your own book.

 

Start of quote: “We are not talking just about negative or defiled emotions. With Cleaning Up, we’re talking about emotions that are actually repressed, emotions (or any mental qualities) that are deliberately denied, pathologically dissociated, disowned, and definitively sealed off and split off from the rest of the psyche (which fragments the true wholeness of the mind, a wholeness that the process of Cleaning Up helps restore)” End of quote

 

2)     This Jungian idea of the repressed emotions being the shadow could it be seen as the unhealthy side of the growth levels of development? How would it be the shadow of the two highest state stages, Turiya and Turiyatita?

KEN:  Yes, in a certain sense, it is because each growth stage transcends and includes its predecessor. And we find that's true of all forms of evolutionary unfolding. So, when we talk about, for example, quarks become parts of atoms, become part of protons and neutrons, atoms become parts of molecules. So, molecules transcend but include atoms. And they actually unfold them. They embrace atoms. If you look at a molecule under a microscope, you can see all its atoms. You can actually see them. They're still there. They're being fully embraced. And then these whole molecules become parts of a whole cell and single-celled organisms. And those single-cell entities become parts of multicellular organisms. And those go up a whole tree of life. So, we always see this transcend and include in any form of evolutionary unfolding. That's how the universe got to be so complex. I mean, it started out from just a miniscule size of a pin to including billions and billions of stars and galaxies. And God knows how many different animal and life forms. But each moment transcends but includes the previous moment. And so, the universe just gets bigger and bigger and bigger as still human beings and all life forms. We get bigger and bigger and more inclusive and so on, which is why an integral approach is important. We want to include all of our Wholeness. And if something goes wrong in that transcend and include process, we don't transcend and include. We transcend and deny or transcend and repress. And that creates shadow material and that creates neurosis and psychosis and all forms of mental problems. So, what Freud was saying was where ‘it’ was, the ‘I’ shall become.

And I started mentioning, which we talked about previously, how Fritz Perles would handle this. And he would handle this by sitting in a person who in this case had terrible anxiety. He'd sit them in a chair and he'd say: “okay, I want you to take your anxiety and put it in the empty chair and talk to you”. And the person would just say, “well, like what?” And he would say: “Well like, why are you doing this to me? Why are you causing me so much pain? Why are you causing me so much anxiety?” So, the person would say, okay, talking to the empty chair to this anxiety. “Why are you doing this to me? Why are you hurting me so much?” And then Pearls would go: “now you become the ‘anxiety’ and answer yourself “Why am I doing this to you?” So, the person would go, okay, so then he'd play it and he'd go: “well, because you're stupid. You're an idiot. You always mess everything up. I mean, why wouldn't I do it to you?” And Pearls like: “now answer that and sit as ‘you’ in this chair as yourself and respond”. And so, the person would go back and forth talking to this ‘it’ anxiety and talking as if it was an ‘I’ because they would answer back. And within about 10 to 15 minutes, everybody in the room could see this person's anxiety slowly disappearing because the more they re-identified ‘it’ as part of their ‘I’, the more they're re-owning it, the more they're making ‘it’ into an ‘I’ and as Freud said: “where ‘it’ was the ‘I’ shall become”.

That's why Cleaning Up -which is this whole process of reuniting shadow with self- that's why it becomes such an important part of finding and creating wholeness in an individual. As we go through these stages of growth and development, as we're saying, every stage is supposed to transcend and include, but almost nobody gets through childhood or adolescence without transcending and denying to some degree. And so, we all have an enormous number of shadow elements lying around in our psyche. And so, we don't have a whole mind, we don't have a whole brain, we don't have a whole self-sense, we have a fractured split apart fragmented self. And most adults in this culture today have an enormous amount of shadow material. And you can tell shadow material, because in order to hate somebody or dislike somebody in the world out there, you have to first dislike those aspects in your own self. And then you'll split them off, you'll project them onto others, and then you'll hate others the way you originally hated your stuff when it was in you. People can find their shadows by just that look around and say, who do you like, who do you dislike? And by the way, you can split off and project very positive things in yourself as well.  

RAQUEL: 

3)     Yes, we're going to that, because now we're talking about emotions all the time. And I want to recall that we don't only repress emotions, we also repress thoughts and even sensations, would you agree?

KEN: Sure, we do repress a lot feelings, thoughts, sensations, tendencies, attitudes, inclinations. We can, virtually repress anything that's in your conscious mind. Now can be forced out. Absolutely.

RAQUEL:  You’ve told us in your last interview and now about Freud and his translator regarding the ‘id’ and the ‘ego’ and the ‘it’ and the ’I’. So, let’s hear it as you say it in your book. Would you please read for us that part of Cleaning Up? That's your first reading. And we start the quote:

KEN:

 

“The unconscious…contains the things that you hate about yourself, things that you judge most harshly, things that you simply cannot stand…to have in your awareness…so you shove them into the basement…moving them to the other side of your self-boundary, where they appear to belong not to you but to some ‘other’. Also, you can completely lose track of incredibly positive things about yourself – your beauty, goodness, strength and virtue- and project onto other people as well. The so called, golden shadow.

 

Freud said “Where ‘it’ was, there ‘I’ shall become”.  We create shadow material by taking some ‘I’ elements and disowning them as an alien ‘it’. We deny it, we disavow it, we split it off from our conscious self and then it appears as if it belongs not to my own 1^st person or ‘I’ but some 3^rd person- him, her, or ‘it’.  But it’s actually mine…  In order to cure the problem, we have to take that ‘it’ back and re-own it, reintegrate it, return it to the self, to the ‘I’ and thus restore the psychological wholeness that we lost when we repressed the shadow material… Every time we do this, we’re creating a greater mental Wholeness, which expands our self-sense from a narrow persona that is split from our shadows to a more complete, accurate and whole psyche…In general, simply having ways to recognize and heal our own shadow s gives us a profoundly important tool for increasing our own understanding, growth and Wholeness”.  End of the quote.

RAQUEL:  That's a great summary, thank you.

4)     Jung said, what we don't bring into consciousness will manifest as destiny. Would you agree with such affirmation, Ken?

KEN:  Sure. Whenever we split off some part of the ‘I’ and make ‘it’ and then we usually project the ‘it’ on the others, it appears now that a part of our actual, our own intentionality is not our own agency. It belongs to somebody or something out there, and that appears as our destiny. And it's not. It's our actual desire, our actual inclination, our actual whole psyche. So, yeah, I agree with Jung. Jung, by the way, really was a very bright guy. And he was Freud's best colleague. Freud had already called Jung, quote: “my crown prince and successor”. And he really thought that Jung would take over the whole psychoanalytic movement. They had one last conversation, and after this conversation, they broke off and never spoke to each other again for as long as they lived. And the conversation was this. One day Freud was talking with Jung and he said to Jung: “promise me you will not give up the concept of the libido or the id”. And Jung said, well, why? And Freud said, because without that concept, we're open to the black tide of the black mud of occultism. And Jung in his autobiography wrote what Freud didn't realize: “what he called occultism was the only thing I was interested in my entire life”. And so, Freud was saying, just forget who you are and seal all that out of your mind. And they literally never spoke or said a single word to each other from that point on. Jung, of course, went on to create his own theories.

RAQUEL:

5)     Talking about the Cleaning Up dimension for Wholeness, you related it a lot to Religion in the book. So, would you specify why?

KEN: Well, Religion, the way the term is usually used, means a fundamentalist mythic version of Religion. It doesn't mean spirituality per se. It doesn't mean a direct first person’s experience of a transcendental, infinite reality. It means the son of God and was born to a virgin and died and resurrected, and came back to life. I mean, those are all myths. They're absolute definition of a myth. They're not real. They're not empirically true. They never happened. They're simply legends. They were made up out of the mind. And that's why I often tie in Cleaning Up with Religion. Because mostly what Cleaning Up is doing is getting rid of the religious fundamentalist myths that we all carry with us. And that's a very important thing to do. I mean, as the atheist, our Christopher Hitchens is constantly telling us, we need to regain our own freedom. And when we gain our freedom by throwing out this celestial dictator called the mythic God who watches everything you do is aware of every thought you have, cares whether you have sex, who you have sex with, cares what you eat, and on and on. And that's not freedom. That's a total enslaved barbarism. And the atheists are right.

My problem with the atheist, of course, is they have no understanding of what real spirituality means. They couldn't tell you what a satori or a kensho is, or even a direct stepping out of Plato's cave of illusions into the reality outside the cave. They have no idea what all that means. And so, they talk around it all the time. And they fall back on the mythic legendary aspects of fundamentalist religion. And that's what they hate.

What they don't understand -and the reason that such type of religion is in some sense increasing on the planet- people are not waking up to their rational atheistic selves. They're becoming more mythic. And the reason is, that it's an actual stage that every single human being goes through as they're growing up. Remember the simple names that I often use for all these stages of those introduced by Jean Gebser: the archaic stage, the magic stage, the mythic stage, the rational stage, the pluralistic stage, and the integral stage. Everybody goes, starts out on an archaic stage, and then moves to a magic stage, then to a mythic stage. And according to Robert Kegan, not 60% of those people make it to the rational stage. So, a huge part of our population is sealed off and doesn't mean totally identified with mythic. But it does mean they have very strong mythic beliefs. And that's just, and those all require a Cleaning Up process. And people are just reluctant to do that.

RAQUEL: I remember that such was the title of an article that I wrote. Like, ‘the world needs therapy’, right? Because it is so.

KEN:  Yeah, that's right.

RAQUEL:  It's such an important part of any recuperation of consciousness, and development of consciousness, to Clean Up, because if we don't do that, we are bound to negative results.

KEN: Right. And it's just a byproduct, as we were saying, of the actual process of evolution, because evolution does transcend and include. And that means it goes beyond myth, but it also embraces myth, unless we actually work to clean out the myths. And when people build so much of their hopes and aspirations and desires on myths, and those myths are no more real than the tooth theory or Santa Claus, and they're not, then that's looking for trouble. I mean, Christopher Hitchens is right. We're asking for mental enslavement to the extent we actually believe those mythic literal truths. And by the way, a lot of developed men would actually called the mythic stage, the mythic literal stage, because myths are taken literally true. We actually believe that they're real. And right up there with a tooth theory and leprechauns and Santa Claus.

RAQUEL: I have seen it. I have treated people in consultation that believed that God had a beard.

KEN: Yeah, I believe you.  

RAQUEL:  The practice for the Cleaning Up that you propose in your book is the 3-2-1 process, so I want to read a paragraph about it as a kind of introduction.

 

Start of the quote

“Each level of development has a different structure, contents and tools of awareness, and therefore uses its own elements to create different defense mechanisms, as well as provides the material that will become the shadow material of that level itself. So, if you really want to work on your shadow in a Cleaning Up process, you’ll want to look at each of these levels of shadow material and adjust the therapeutic process to specifically address each of them, with their own fine differences and nuance and the different defense mechanisms involved at each level…The good news is that there are some very general practices that work with shadow material no matter what level it comes from and that is the 3-2-1 process”. End of Quote.

6)     Would you tell us more about this integral therapeutic task of the 3-2-1 process?

KEN: Sure. What we've been talking about is how ‘I’ becomes an ‘it’ when we split it off from ourselves. And again, first person is the person speaking. So, it's I, me, mine. Second person is the person being spoken to. So that's the you, we. And third person is the person or thing being spoken about, he, she, they, them, it, or its. And what we find is that when the mind splits off stuff, there are various different defense mechanisms at each level of growth and development. And a very sophisticated psychotherapist will tend to work with the different levels of shadow material that a person has. And one person might be using introjection, another person might be using projection, another person can be using reaction formation and so on. And, generally, the therapist will cover those areas. But one thing that clever psychotherapists have noted is that anytime the mind seals off something, it goes through a similar process. And that process is the material starts out as a first person, I, as we say, it goes from ‘I’ and into ‘it’. And then when we don't like that part of ourselves, we'll push it away from us. And the first time we push it away from ourselves, we turn it into a second person. And these are sometimes called subpersonalities, because that's what they are. But then, and people will often talk to their subpersonalities, they'll go, oh, what were you thinking? That was so stupid, or why are you being like that? And that's, so the first person has gone into a second person.

RAQUEL: John Rowan talks a lot about subpersonalities.

KEN: Sure. And they're important. But then -because we can still be aware of a second person- if that's too close to us, we'll shove the second person into a third person. So, we'll shove it out of ourself entirely and make it a he, she, they, them, or more generally an ‘it’. So, we repress material by following a one, two, three process. We start the first person, we move it to the second person, we move it to the third person. The 3,2, 1 process simply reverses that. And it takes third person, it turns it into a second person, and then you turn it back into a first person, “I”.  And that's the 3, 2, 1 process.

So, as I was giving Pearls as an example, he would help the person take their ‘it’ anxiety of their ‘it’ depression, whether ‘it’ is a compulsion or their ‘it’ obsession and talk to ‘it’ and then respond to ‘it’ from your own ‘I’. So, he would turn that ‘it’ back in to a second person and into a first person. So, “where ‘it’ was, the ‘I’ shall become”. And that's what the 3, 2, 1 process does. And the reason I tend to focus on it is because it is a fairly universal process. Whenever we're splitting something off, returning it from a first to a second to a third person, whenever we reunite it, we're turning it from the third person into a second person into a first person. So, I generally present this process of 3,2,1 against the major defense mechanism as a useful key to reunite.

RAQUEL: I call it, I don't know if you agree: lack of responsibility. So, the process is to re-own that; get back the ownership of whatever it is.  The recognition that we have the ability to respond to whatever it is.

So, we said that the shadow may contain also positive traits. So, let's listen, what did you say in your “Finding Radical Wholeness book” about love, as we see all around how is commercially over emphasized this romantic aspect of it. Let's address it if you please read for us.

 

KEN:  Start of the quote

“We can completely lose track of the truly positive and admirable qualities in ourselves -our compassion, strength, shining brilliance, beauty.  We project them onto other people and then see people everywhere who seems to be real heroes, at least compared to the wretched mess that we are.  “The greatest love of all is the love that I have for me” Whitney Houston sings, but not many people actually feel that, because they’re too busy projecting all their lovableness onto others, leaving them with the feeling that deep down they are wretched worthless souls. We definitely see this positive projection in almost all cases of what is called ‘romantic love’…a real shadow hugging… a double dose of lovableness who drives the person in love into an incredible overexcited romantic love.

When they re-own their shadow, their own self-sense grows, because it has taken back some aspect of itself that was previously split off and projected, which decreased the size of their self. Such diminishment moves in the opposite direction of a genuine evolution, which always moves toward increasing and expanding awareness, self-identity, and thus the size of the self. In other words, in the process of Awakening to a genuinely true reality., Waking Up, Growing Up and Cleaning Up are constantly working in the direction of evolving and expanding our awareness, increasing the size of the individual organism to a Supreme Identity with the entire Kosmos, a Oneness with absolutely everything that is arising moment to moment – a stunning increase in the real size of our self.  And the creation of shadow material is a major process that completely works against that evolution, that actually diminishes self-identity and narrows consciousness…If at any one of the evolutionary stages of ‘transcend and include’ we have any major problems or issues with including or assimilating that new material, the that material will become shadow…will be deflected out of our awareness and into the wide world of ‘not me’ and ‘other’…with a painful series of symptoms, neuroses, pathologies and dysfunctions...making ourselves less and less instead of greater and greater, which is what evolution want to bring about”. End of the quote.

RAQUEL: All that is so very well explained in the book!!! 

7)     To enter now into the Showing Up dimension, I would like to start by asking you like a quick short definition, if you may, of what is it to Show Up within this consciousness of Wholeness. And afterwards, we'll develop it. But let's give like a quick short definition. What is it to Show Up?

KEN: Well, notice that we've already talked about first, second, and third person pronouns. And what's so interesting about those is the gravitation point, as we actually have an enormous number of different perspectives available to us. And the number of perspectives increases as we Grow Up. So, we have first person perspective, second person perspective, third person perspective. We also have a fourth person perspective, a fifth person perspective, a sixth person, a seventh person. Jane Loevinger actually defines each of her major stages of development, according to how many perspectives they have available. So, her first stage can only take a first person perspective. The young child is just aware of I, me, mine, give me, give me, and so on. When they get to the second stage, they have a second perspective. So, they are aware of others. They can take another person's perspective, and they can also start to love that other person because they recognize that they're a different person than their own: I, me, or mine. And her third stage can take a third person perspective. So, it can generally start to think in terms of like mathematics and logic and rationality and so on. A fourth person perspective is if you're thinking about first, second, and third person perspectives, you're doing so from a fourth person perspective because a fourth person is aware of first, second, and third. And then if you think about fourth person, you think about it from a fifth person perspective.

RAQUEL: Could that be like a short definition of Show Up?

8)     We read in your book how did you came about the 4 Quadrants, arriving -after too much work and discernment- to group diverse models of reality and disciplines into the ones that were subjective, individual and collective and the ones that were individually or collectively objective. Would you tell us about it?

KEN: That's right. And so, when we Show Up, and generally when I first drew The Quadrants, I was on one of those big yellow pads of legal paper, and I just drew a cross and it had four quadrants. I realized that these four quadrants really were our fundamentally important perspectives that we all had available to us. So, in the Upper Left Quadrant, just the way it was written on the page, we have first person, I, in the Lower Left Quadrant, we have a second person: You, so that includes Culture. An I + You is a We. But that's what Culture is. It's a series of Wes. And then in the Right Hand Quadrants, in the Upper Right, we have third person It or Its. So, the Upper Right Quadrant is the exterior of an individual thing. So, it's like molecules, atoms, protons, quarts, neutrons, molecules, cells, and so on. Those are all third person singular forms. And the Lower Right Quadrant is third person plural forms, like an Ecosystem. It's native its’ systems of individual ‘it’ components. So, when I started talking about it, at first, I called it:  Integral Model, AQAL, short for:  All Quadrants, All Levels.

What I realized is I wanted people to identify with all four, at least all four, of these major perspectives that they have available to them. And I noticed that very few people actually used all those perspectives. And I noticed that I myself wasn't using all four of them as often as I could. And so, I undertook a series of practices and exercises to help me show up for all of my important perspectives. And that's what I started calling Showing Up, which means we show up for first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and so on, perspectives. And that was a very important realization for me, because the more I looked at these Four Quadrants, first person, second person, third person, fourth person, I mean you, we, it, it's, I realized that these are actually four important dimensions that all philosophers recognized. And if they didn't recognize all four of them, they recognized what I called the Big Three, which was just I, me, you, thy, thine, he, she, they, them. And so, an example of the Big Three is: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

The Good is what the Lower Left: WE, how we are supposed to treat each other ethically. The True is the truth of science, the objective, real empirical truths of science. And the Beautiful is the beauty in the eye, first person, of the beholder. So, as I examined these Quadrants in more detail, I realized that all of them had specific types of methodologies that they used to gain access to the whole, the whole that's also part of the method, the whole in each of the Four Quadrants. So, in the Upper Left, the I Quadrant, we have what's called Introspection. And when we introspect, we can gain access to the truths that have to do with our own Isness, our own self-sense. The Lower Left Quadrant has what's called Hermeneutics, which has the art and science of interpretation. You and I are interpreting what each other say, and that's the Lower Left quadrant. And there's an enormous amount of research on what Hermeneutics is and how to do it correctly. The Left Hand Quadrants and the Right Hand Quadrants, it turns out that they are the interior and the exterior of everything, respectively. The Upper Quadrants (upper left and the upper right) are individual. So, the Upper Left is an individual I, me, mine, and the Upper Right is an individual ‘it’, or it's individual proton, individual neutron, individual planet, whatever. And The Lower Quadrants are collective. So, the Lower Left is that -we already said- it's a WE, it's a Cultural, that's a group, and the Lower Right is like an Ecosystem.  Left Hand Quadrants are all made of consciousness. Right Hand Quadrants are what we would call material quadrants. And so, each of those has a particular methodology that's been very carefully studied. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized that all of them had methodologies that were fully recognized by virtually every major philosophy, philosophers in the world, and they’ve been well-studied by entire disciplines.

So, we’ve already talked about Introspection and Hermeneutics, and the Upper Right is simply what does an individual object look like.  And that's generally referred to as sensory objects, and that's the known as Empiricism. And science is usually described itself as empirical because it likes to study just individual exterior material thing. And so, it's an empirical science. And then the Lower Right is empirical individual objects, but brought together into groups. So, we have like single molecules come together to form crystals, which are group lattice, and crystals come together to form major crystal forms. Those come together to form planets, planets come together to form solar systems, solar systems come together to form galaxies, and so on. So those are all understood through something called System Theory, which is a Lower Right methodology. And all of that is the different ways of talking about Showing Up, because these simple Four Quadrants that I had initially just drawn as these simple cross, turns out to be incredibly complex, and very important aspects of reality. So, we have an I, we, it, and its. And as I say, their entire disciplines devoted to each one of these areas, and some developmentalists like Jane Loevinger have actually made the recognition of these areas, an indicator of the stage of development that you're at. So, are you just using a first person, or second person, or third person, or fourth person perspective? So, Showing Up ended up becoming a very important aspect for me.

That's why when I first came up in the first version of Integral, it was All Quadrants, which meant Showing Up for All four Quadrants, All Levels: AQAL, because then all of the different quadrants go through the same levels of development: Growing Up. And then as I kept studying it, I added: Cleaning Up, Opening Up and Waking Up.

 

RAQUEL: 

9)     You say that “the greatest sin of Modernity…was and I quote: ”to fully erase and delete any reality for the interior Left-Hand dimensions…and, therefore, Humanity is suffering due to a profound failure to Show Up” and I end the quote, what could also be read as too much progress and little evolution, so would you illuminate for us this Right Hand and Left Hand dimensions of Reality to then authentically Show Up.

KEN:  That's right. In 1605, Galileo and Kepler simultaneously, but independently came up with the foundations of Modern Science. And they both had virtually identical quotes: The laws of Nature are to best be understood through measurement. And so, Galileo measured forms of earthly motion and came up with his laws of motion. Kepler measured planetary motion and came up with his laws of planetary motion. So, they were both engaged in a form of early Modern Science. And notice that, and this is sort of well understood now, but it's fairly easy to measure an exterior material thing. I mean, you can just use a yardstick or a ruler and put it up and go, oh, it's six inches by four inches. But it's not so easy to measure a mental state. Now, we do have qualitative measurements nowadays, but that took a lot of work and a lot of time and a lot of people to figure out how to even vaguely measure something like a mental state. But with Galileo and Kepler, we also find the rise of Modernity, because they were involved in discovering scientific laws that could be measured. And that meant particularly measuring matter. And as we’ll talk about later, I define matter NOT as the lowest rung in The Great Chain of Being, but the exterior reality of all levels. And that meant that religion, fundamentalist mythic religion, was getting pushed out of the way. And we started to consider that only exterior measurable material realities were real. And that meant we thought all of the Right-Hand Quadrants were real and were worthy of being studied by science. But none of the Left-Hand Quadrants, the I, me, mine, you, we, us, ours, they were no longer considered real. And that's why I say Modernity was to fully erase and delete any reality for the interior Left-Hand Dimensions.

That is still in a sense a bit of the problem today. It gave rise to what's been called the most difficult problem in Western philosophy, the relation of mind and body or mind and brain. And we'll come to that as well. But that was what we were failing to Show Up. And this was again something that I realized the more I studied the Quadrants was just how rarely people actually acknowledge all four, let alone fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, or ninth perspectives. But they just don't take them into account. And that's of course disastrous and has led to the problems that we have now. Where is my mind? I know where my body is, but I don't know where my mind is. And that's just been a disaster for philosophy and life.

RAQUEL:  And yet I would say- I don't know if you feel it-, because I sense it and even see it, that a great movement is starting, also in the scientific world, as they’re starting to Open Up and Showing Up toward this Left Hand Quadrants, starting to accept things which before were not even thought of as scientific. Now, they are talking about it, and even saying that they want to experiment with it, thinking that they can! But anyway, they may and at least they have the intention to start going into the investigation and experience of something that they have denied before.

KEN:  Right. So let me point out just how common it is failing to Show Up is, even in the people you're talking about. Notice that this big burst of interest in Consciousness or interiors, there are many different books you could point to, but one of the most important was Fritjof Capra: “The Tao of Physics”. And the T-A-O, is a term for ultimate reality. And Fritjof Capra was trying to draw the analogy that certain quantum states when described in English sound very much like a mystical state. And it's not the same. Not at all. And what he ended up doing was reducing all interiors to exteriors. And even today when you read about this people, they often use the term ‘quantum’, as: “I'm interested in quantum consciousness”. I mean, and they are still vaguely equating some very peculiar behavior of quantum realities with the peculiar behavior that consciousness shows. And all of that is profoundly misleading. So, they're not really getting in touch with direct, meaningful conscious events or occurrences. They're still reducing it to exteriors. And I find that the problem is when they make them equal instead of just talking about similarities.

RAQUEL: Yes, when they say it is the same, then that's the mistake. But if you say it can be like some correlation, some similarity, like some metaphorically way of understanding, then it's acceptable whenever is the other way it's very misleading like you say, when it's taken like equal.

KEN:  Right. Yeah. So, of course there are going to be certain genuine similarities simply because the Quadrants and Levels and Lines go all the way down and all the way up. So, one of my favorite terms, which I got from Whitehead is ‘prehension’. Because according to Whitehead, all whole logs in the universe, all things and events in the universe have a little bit of prehension. And that meant a little bit of awareness, a little bit of consciousness. The term ‘prehension’ actually means to touch. And so, an electron prehenses its environment. It touches its environment. And to that extent there's a very rudimentary awareness of its environment. So, if we want to say there's a similar type of prehension and an electron as there is in a rat or a worm or a dog or a human, that's right. Just prehension goes all the way down, all the way up. And of course, prehension gets more and more complex and fuller and so on. But it's still a prehensive occasion. And I just love that about Whitehead. Many things I love about Whitehead. But that's one of my favorites. But the Fritjof Capra move has been a disaster. And it's probably the most common error mistake that I find most human beings making. And especially once they get into theoretical writing and they start talking about, well, quantum consciousness does this and quantum awareness does that. And they hook it to all these weird, quantum realities.

RAQUEL: I understand that you don't like that. And I don't either because it's true that they mistake Plato’s cave with the light outside of the cave. So no, that’s not real, because it's true that what you point out is that the object of study is different, as well as the means of observation. So, that's why when they make an equality, they are mistaken. And yet I would say when citing Capra, that there was like a quantum leap then, to make a funny repetition of it grammatically as a wink, when all of a sudden, a physicist started talking about spirituality. There was something different all of a sudden from the super scientific, you know, hardness and rigidity of science, to something subtler and not accessible before, that was a quantum leap.

KEN:  And into a specific disastrous mistake. No quantum event makes that kind of error. What I am telling you is that he didn't see it.

RAQUEL:  Yes, absolutely, I understand what you mean and yet that was in the 70’s and 80’s.  Right now, I would say that I am feeling, I am sensing that there is another leap, another change in this Evolutionary Consciousness, let's say, toward spirituality. I am hearing, reading and seeing something different in scientists. They’re starting to recognize this difference between the exterior and the interior, which Capra didn't. So that's what I'm saying that now I am seeing like a different jump from the 70s or 80s with Capra and other physicists that were apparently separating themselves from the hardness of science regard. So, I am content in this sense, because I am seeing some movement, I would say, that gives me hope. So, let's see.

KEN: Well, I see some of that movement. And I agree, particularly the good ones that write about it. Like Erwin Schrödinger was brilliant. He was the co-founder of the entire Quantum Mechanic Movement. And the Schrödinger’s wave equation is still the central equation defining quantum reality. And he wrote books like: “What is Life?” that spoke about mind and matter. He himself was a genuine believer in Vedanta Hinduism. And he was a brilliant writer. His mystical writings just bring tears to my eyes. They're so beautiful! And I mean, not since Plato's “Dialogues” have I read such exquisitely mystical stuff!  And he's got it right. He gets it exactly right. And he'll say things like: “the overall consciousness is a singular, the plural of which is unknown, because there's only one Mind” I mean, he would just come up with stuff like that all the time. And it was exquisite. And never once did he make the mistake of equating consciousness with ‘prehension’. He just wouldn't do that. But those, number of people that write like straining hmmm, although there is a certain increase in them is still relatively small. And so, we still have to inform them about Integral.

RAQUEL: We still have a lot to go.

10)One of the biggest problems in the West is the mind-brain problem, as one Quadrant tries to be reduced into the other and Integral Metatheory maintains that this is not possible. Why? as it’s obvious that we, Westerners, are not seeing Reality as a Whole and much less as a Big Whole. Could this be what you called in another of your books, “quadrant absolutism”?

KEN:  Yes, definitely. The problem is that most scientists now who are dealing with the brain-mind problem are still refusing to Show Up. They still equate mind with certain physical characteristics of the brain. And I mean, you can start out with they don't even look like each other. I mean, the brain looks like a crumpled grapefruit. It's about the same size and it's crumpled and it's got all these creases and all that. The mind doesn't look like a crumpled grapefruit at all. I mean, the mind is just full of images and symbols and signs and all sorts of stuff. But most researchers on brain mind stuff just really study the brain equating various mental processes like mathematical equations and so on with actual brain states. And they're just really running rough shy over the whole problem. And that's, you know, a bunch of Capra’s thoughts still alive.  And that's a real problem. It's a quadrant absolutism because they pretend that that's the reality. And it's not true. They are missing the Left Hand Quadrants, absolutizing the Upper Right Quadrant. And that's just a disaster!

RAQUEL:  To even enhance more what you said in the last two questions, would you please read the following paragraphs from your book, Ken?

KEN:  Sure.

Start of the quote: 

 

“The interior and the exterior are basically two different dimensions of the same underlying Wholeness (or Nonduality) at each level. When they are manifest, they each appear as a partialness. And this partialness is what makes the body/mind problem so hard to solve for a human awareness: the problem itself cannot finally be solved (in any way that “feels” right) until the primary dualism between subject and object, interior and exterior, is dissolved, and that occurs only with a genuine Waking Up or  One Taste awareness…Cartesian dualism cannot finally be solved by any amount of logic, reasoning, or evidence (which  is why it’s the most difficult problem for Western logic to solve);  it yields only upon a direct Waking Up to the ever-present ultimate Reality of Nondual Suchness…However, in the relative world, there are still a staggering number of correlations that need to be mapped…Duality itself is resolved through the realization, revealed with a genuine Waking Up, that both dimensions are partial perspectives on the same underlying Wholeness.  In this regard, I  should mention that you don’t need a major Waking Up in order to begin Showing Up…It’s only necessary to realize that, at whatever level of Growing Up you are at, you have all 4 of these major dimensions available…Nondual Spirit manifests the entire relative world, and when it does, it does so as all 4 quadrants simultaneously…The 4 Quadrants arise together, evolve together and tetraenact together”…The central problem that human beings face today is not due primarily to the fact that we exist in a global village, with its economics, finances, trade, technology, education, and politics all being globally interwoven, of 7 billion people. The central problem is that the capacity to inhabit a level that fully embraces this global reality is the result of several major stages of interior human development, and at this time, less than 30 percent of the population of the world have developed to the worldcentric stages where this can be done…as Robert Kegan said we’re “over our heads”…The real problem is that we’re not even recognizing or tracking this interior evolution; and so we have no idea that there is even a problem, let alone what to do about it”.   End of the quote.

RAQUEL: That's it. That’s so real! We don't even know what to do about it. We are so lost. We are very lost as human beings. Only the percentage of people that we have some internal vision, we can view what's going on in reality, and have more or less like the guidelines to kind of possible follow up.

KEN: And the problem is that the methodology of introspection, which looks within, cannot see structures of Growing Up. And this is very different from something like Waking Up. If you're sitting in a forest and you're meditating and all of a sudden you become one with the entire forest and one with the earth and one with the solar system. You know it. If you're drenched in love and bliss and you feel one with everything! You're completely aware of it because those are all first-person experiences. You have that experience and you know it. You understand it fully. But whenever you're going through different stages of Growing Up, you have no idea you're doing that. I mean one day you're stuck in magic and the next day you wake up and you're sort of at a mythic stage, you don't go, oh wow, I see the world so differently today. You have no idea that you've gone from magic to mythic or from mythic to rational, from rational to pluralistic or holistic integral. And that leads, of course, to the problem of measurement and how why science didn't even look at stages of Growing Up. They were only discovered about a hundred years ago whereas our states of Waking Up have been known for hundreds of thousands of years all the way back to the earliest shamans. And yet we have gone through our entire, almost our entire life history with no understanding of these stages of Growing Up because we can't see them when we look within.

RAQUEL: I love when you explain this relating it to Grammar because we don't understand the rules of it and yet we talk correctly. For example, I'm teaching Spanish to English people here in the area and they go crazy with Grammar and I tell them that once you know Grammar, you’ll understand the language much better: “No, we don't want to learn Grammar” they say and I go: “Come on it's important, it's so important”!  No, they don't want to see. There’s no curiosity about the world we live in!

There’s an aspect that I highly appreciate when speaking about matter which I think we’ve already said something about and yet I want to stress it again because I find that it's one of the greatest contributions you've made to the Postmodern world, given the clue for an Integral paradigm and that is to see and understand matter as the exterior and not as the lowest of the Great Chain. So let me read a paragraph of your book where you explain it very clear because I find this so obvious and important.

KEN:  Yeah, I happen to agree. I think it's a very important insight. And I remember when I first had it, I mean, it just blew me away!

RAQUEL:  Start of the Quote

“An Integral analysis suggests -an insight that allows science and religion to clearly fit together -that matter is not the lowest level of reality but rather the exterior dimension of every level of reality (it’s the Right -hand reality of every Left-hand occasion). Thus, when my mind has a logical thought in the 1^st person, interior Upper-Left, my material brain is producing electrical impulses in the 3^rd-person exterior Upper Right. Even Upper Left spiritual states (such as Zen satori) have correlative Upper Right material brain states. Likewise, the supernatural is not beyond nature, it’s within nature.  Nature is not being left behind – but neither is Spirit being exclusively identified with Nature…Thus, matter is not the lowest level of existence but the exterior dimension of levels of existence…Therefore, no amount of scientific research can dislodge a spiritual perspective…The only reason that almost none of the Great Traditions realized this…is that none of them had the tools to see much smaller or much larger material dimensions (microscopes or telescopes)…They were having ‘satori’ all the time, but none of them could see the corresponding physiological brain changes that were also occurring…In other words, ever since science and religion began to emerge and exist together, they have each denied the existence of the other…Showing Up means to fully acknowledge, and totally inhabit, all 4 quadrants of existence -to not try to deny, ignore, or reduce any of them to the others…Not only does this ends numerous centuries-old arguments about which quadrants are real and which are dismissible, it allows each of us to start acknowledging these realities in our own lives”.  End of the quote.

I find this brilliant. Really. Thank you. Brilliant. Absolutely wonderful.

11)Our consciousness undergoes an evolutionary development through various stages of Growing Up in the correlation of these Four Quadrants that we've seen. So, in that process, diverse pathologies may appear that need to be Cleaned Up in the path toward a real and integrative Waking Up. And yet a Big Wholeness is not complete until we also realize and include the open enough to the reality of the Lines of Development. Why are they so important to integrate and why the cognitive line seems to be the leader of all of them?

KEN: Lines of development were one of the areas of the Integral model that I came to understand more recently. And psychologists today, they generally all acknowledge between eight and 12 different Multiple Intelligences. But these are incredibly important because even though they all go through the same Levels of development, there are different Lines that are doing so. And these different Lines can grow at different speeds, different rates, and reach different heights of development and so on. And most people, again, aren't even aware of this because you can't introspect and see these things. But they're very important. I mean, you can take cognitive development, which tends to be the first, because cognition is the most obvious aspect of ‘prehension’ who means to touch it. So, whenever we are aware of reality, we're touching it, we're having a cognition of it. So, it's a very important line. And when most people think about their intelligence, they just think about thinking, they think about cognition. And even our IQ tests are basically geared towards measuring your cognitive development. But I mean, you can look at cognitive development, moral development, spatial development, interpersonal development, verbal development, spiritual development. And each of those are very real realities. They're very real capabilities that we all have. And whether we're aware of all of them or not, that's another matter. But we'll notice if we look around that we do have access to all of these different aspects. And that's a very important realization. And it's something that I call Opening Up to all of our Multiple Intelligences.

When I first started experimenting with that, I thought, okay, well, I'll try it myself. So, I would pick like a particular day of the week, and so on Monday, I'd say, okay, today I'm just going to use my Multiple Intelligence of Aesthetics. I'm just going to look for beauty. And so, I start out in the morning, I'm just looking at Aesthetics, and I wouldn't see that much beauty. So, I keep looking and looking and let's say, oh, that's snow on the mountain, that's really beautiful. And all the mountain itself is really beautiful. And then I would start to see more and more beauty as I actually drew on my own beauty intelligence. And by the end of the day, I saw beauty everywhere! It was just amazing! And the next day I chose Moral Intelligence. And I did the same, I started out, okay, what's moral? I don't know, we see that many. And then I see more and more stuff that struck me as moral. And that's good. And that's ethical. And that's a decent thing to do. And by the end of the day, I could see morality everywhere!  This is a real ‘eye opening’ set of experiments. It really cemented the importance of an Opening Up to all of our potentials, all of our capacity, all of our multiple intelligences. And the more I looked at those, the more I realized that one of the reasons we don’t do it at the same time is because we each grow at our own rate.

The guy that first spotted this is generally described as America's second greatest psychologist. His name was James Mark Baldwin. And America's first greatest psychologist, of course was William James, and everybody said it; but James Mark Baldwin was brilliant!  And he's the one that first came up with the notion of Levels and Lines, saying that we have several different Lines of Development. But they all go through the same basic Levels of Development. He came up with six major levels. And interestingly, he described all of them as variations on logical. So, it had like pre-logical levels, quasi-logical levels, logical levels, translogical levels, and so on. But they were all recognizable levels of development. And they all have different names now because as different developmental pioneers started striking out on their own, they would name their levels, they would give them different names. But you can recognize the similarity of names. So, Jane Loevinger, for example, called it concrete operational thinking. The stage of conformity gives everybody tries to conform at the concrete operational level. And Kolberg called them the conventional level. But you can see the similarity between conformist and conventional and Maslow called them the belongingness stage, because everybody wants to belong. They all want to conform. They all want to be conventional. But James Mark Baldwin is a real hero. I came to go into his work fairly carefully. And I always mention him when I talk about Levels and Lines, as he was the very first to discover them. He started out, interestingly, with three major lines, which he called the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. We've always thought about why those are fairly common. But then he added a fourth one, which he called Religion. And religion, he basically meant mythic religion, because that's what most people meant when they talked about religion. They meant the Son of God. Virgin birth and all of this stuff. But he noticed that all of those, to the extent that they continued to grow in development, all went through his same basic six or so major levels of development.

RAQUEL: Excuse me, Ken, because it comes to my mind all the time, the Wilber/Combs lattice. Did you, kind of, be influenced by Baldwin to do that?

KEN: Oh, yes, definitely. Almost all of my developmental, subsequent developmental work is influenced to some degree by Baldwin. Now, interestingly, his very good friend, America's most famous psychologist, William James, they both taught at Harvard University. And while William James was focusing on states of consciousness, like religious experience, and first person’s states and all that, James Mark Baldwin was studying Structures or Levels of Consciousness. Interestingly, when James Mark Baldwin retired from Harvard, he taught in Paris. He had many students from all over Europe nd one of his most famous students was a young Swiss student named John Piaget. And Piaget, of course, revolutionized Education. With his understanding, the major Levels of Cognitive Development went through. And that's all Baldwin’s. So, Baldwin really did have a profound impact on this understanding. And again, he was working in 1895, just over 100 years ago. He was the first to see this stuff. And that's what's just so amazing. William James, of course, was spotting stuff that had been known for tens of thousands of years to Humanity in their religious experiences, their first person direct contact. And that's why James's most famous book is called: “The Varieties of Religious Experience”

RAQUEL: Was James with Suzuki?  Did they ever get together with Suzuki? D. T Suzuki?

KEN: No, with Suzuki. No, no.

RAQUEL: Okay. I thought they had met, because I know James went to the East sometime. And II don't know why I thought he had met with Suzuki.

KEN: He might have met D. T. Suzuki. I'm not aware of that meeting if it did occur. But it's certainly possible. Because James was interested in those types of things. And what he learned about Zen, he learned from reading D.T. Suzuki.

RAQUEL:   I’ll read now another bright paragraph of your book as it introduces the interesting and useful list that you present in page 292 about life questions. So, I start the quote:

“As we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, life constantly presented us with several fundamental questions -What is real? What is the right thing to do? What do I find attractive or beautiful? …As species, we found ourselves attempting to answer, over and over again. As we gained skill in answering a particular type of question we evolved an intelligence for doing so…not only cognitive intelligence…but also emotional…aesthetic…moral…spiritual…Whether we look at them as a Lamarckian or a Darwinian inheritance, humans developed and passed on around a dozen of these intelligences, which they used any time that one of those major questions came up…We still have those intelligences available to us, and Opening Up to them is realizing this fact and stepping into our own larger awareness”. End of the quote.

 

12) I find mostly important that people reckon their potentialities which are embedded as part of one’s own self not only as a belonging but as a real personal essence or nature. I encounter in consultation many issues related to underestimation which surely end up in lack of self-respect and self-sabotage, so, in which way would you relate these potentialities with Lines of Development and in which way this recognition could end up in self-love?

KEN:  When I first started thinking about this, I found this topic fascinating. The idea that, of course, human beings, as we started to evolve, we were faced with a lot of questions. I mean, we'd run into something that was puzzling, we'd ask ourselves about it, and we'd run into something else that was puzzling, and we'd ask ourselves about that. And of course, the more we did it, over hundreds of thousands of years, the more we developed that capacity for asking and to some extent answering those questions. And when you look at all of our Multiple Intelligences, which is this moral, spiritual, interpersonal, spatial, verbal, and so on, they are very real and very important parts of an overall reality. And as we were bumping into these different parts, we were asking ourselves questions about them. And those questions end up inheriting, and they became part of our multiple intelligences. And that's a really important part! And how does that end up in self-love? Well, those parts that we're asking ourselves questions about are also parts of ourselves. I mean, we all have emotions, we all have cognitions, we all have spiritual biology, and so on. And so, the more we can not only learn about those, but respect them in ourselves, then the more self-love we're going to have. And that's why Opening Up to all of our multiple intelligences is so important, because they're really opening up to all the different aspects of our own self.

RAQUEL: Right. Absolutely. There is a saying - I don't know if you know it - that says: ‘as much as I know myself, as much as there is of me to love’.

KEN:  Right.

RAQUEL:  So, before entering into the big wholeness, let's talk about the state of our world, which without a doubt is in birth cramps. Not knowing still if the baby will be born dead or alive. And let's do so by reading a compendium of several pages of the deep analysis you make in your book about the development of Politics, Sociology, Economic, Psychology, Philosophy and religion. So, would you please read this paragraph, Ken.

KEN:  I'd be glad to.

Start of the quote

“Where the Modernity pioneered progress in a stunning number of areas -and almost no one saw or understood the unintended consequences of this progress, some of which were, in fact, globally suicidal, such as industrial pollution -Postmodernity was faced with incontrovertible evidence that the bill had come due and the bill was global in scope (from military MAD to collapse of the biosphere to rampant capitalism greed to nuclear disaster to the realization that Artificial Intelligence itself would possibly, even likely, destroy humanity).

 

The fact that humanity could and very likely might, completely destroy itself -literally! -was a shocking realization, radically new in all of the humankind’s history. Never before had any of humanity’s actions resulted in the possibility of a totally global self-destruction, and never before had such a possibility even entered humanity’s awareness.

 

…Humans were now the species that could become extinct -at their own hands- and they knew it. 

 

…Where the general attitude of modernity was freedom, profit, achievement, and happy progress in truth, the general attitude of postmodernity is VUCA -volatilely, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Where modernity introduced advancement, growth, antipoverty, wealth, and an avalanche of progress in almost every area it touched, postmodernity saw the downsides of each of them and was left to pick up the pieces…Thus the enthusiastic optimism of modernity gave way to the pessimistic downturn of postmodernity, anchored not in truth, beauty, progress, or profit but in an awareness of death, decay, inequality, and…the resultant demand for social justice…not for the freedom of equal opportunities, which orange offered, but the forced equality of a guaranteed equal outcome, which green wants, and which necessarily must be forced because human beings are vastly different from each other, and thus any extensive equality is the denial of diversity…Freedom and equality are opposites …and people cannot have both.  Integral will carefully integrate these two values, but orange and green are fated to simply fight it out, guaranteeing that there will be culture wars until a tipping point puts global Integral place as the new trading edge”. End of the quote.                                                                                                                                                                                                          

RAQUEL: Wow, fabulous! This: “freedom and equality are opposites”. So real. It's the Culture Wars that only Integral can resolve. It's impressive.

13)So, would you say that we've seen a return to Orange or to Amber with Trump as president and what is your forecast for his mandate?

KEN:  Yeah. Well, what most marks Trump is he's anti-Green. He's constantly cutting Green down, constantly saying horrible things about it. So, he's at the very least regressing if he has ever reached Green. He's regressing to Orange and since he does have a strong authoritarian bit, some of him is also regressing to Amber. And that's why Trump is such a polarizing figure. I mean, you can't when you think Trump, at least two different Trump's come to mind. One is the bad mouth thing, almost obscene, anti-Green, anti-social justice person. And yet another is to somebody who seems at least a part of him wants to really do the best he can in any situation. He's certainly a fairly successful businessman, which means he's used to forging areas that work and work fairly well. But you just can't think of one Trump. He's got at least these two outrageously different sides. And that's what I've always found interesting about him. Oddly, I find that in his return to office for his second go, he seems to be emphasizing the business part of him more. He talks about make America great again and let's do things that work and let's take a common sense’s approach to stuff. And all of that makes fair amount of sense to most Americans. After all, he did win the popular vote. He won a majority of the popular vote, which is very hard to do. He won all of the major swing states and he just devastated Kamala Harris. And that's a fairly impressive victory that he did have.

I think it's the result of people seeing this kind of shift in him, where he does want to be more common sensical and do the right things and so on. Because it was a pretty unmistakable victory. But he's still marked by a major anti-green. And I'm not sure exactly how that's going to play out. Green is, after all, a higher stage than Orange. And Orange put a person on the moon. It's not exactly a stupid achievement, but Green is even more comprehensive than Orange. But it’s also open to a sort of very widespread mind virus, which is known as the Woke virus. And Wokeism is a self-contradictory mess of aggressive far left theories. So, it's very common for somebody in the far left to say, there is no objective truth. But notice that even that is a self-contradiction. Because what that statement really says is: it's universally true that there is no universal truth. Well, which is it? Is there universal truth or not? You yourself are stating a universal truth, so you must believe it exists! But, the first thing you say is that it doesn't exist. So, what the hell are you talking about? That's Wokeness in a nutshell. It's a deeply, deeply self-contradictory, deeply confused stance. So that's my major complaint with Green. And we're going to get none of that from Donald Trump, however. Whether that ends up derailing future development or not, we’ll see. I mean, if you don't go through Green, you can't get the Teal. So, I really don't know.

RAQUEL: Europe is very scared with his economic war that he has started. And China… What he's doing economically, it's like international outreaches, because he is putting everything up side down. We say legs up!  So, let's see what is the result of all that, because it doesn't look nice.

14)Tell us about how would “Integral may carefully integrate Freedom and Equality” as maybe it’s a good idea to send a letter to Mr. Trump informing him about it.

KEN: Yeah. Well, it sounds shocking to say that Freedom and Equality are opposites, but they really are. And again, the reason is that human beings have a great diversity of talents. And if you're going to make all those talents equal, you're going to wipe out that diversity. And so, they really do pull against each other. What freedom wants is what's called equal opportunity. And what Green wants is called equal outcome.

What that means is that let's say you're having a hundred yard’s dash. Equal opportunity means every person who is qualified has a right to run in that race. That's equal opportunity. We're all given and encouraged to express our own diversities in any way we can. And so, you line everybody up, you pull the gun, they all take off. Whoever finishes first gets the gold, second gets the silver, third gets the bronze. That's equal opportunity. And it all ends up as it should be. Equal outcome is they don't want everybody starting the race at the same time. They want absolutely everybody to finish their race at the same time. So, everybody who shows up in a meet gets an achievement award for simply showing up. And that just completely erases meritocracy and any form of real diversity. So, it's always confused me that Green wants to define itself as DEI: Diversity, Equality, and Inclusiveness. Because they're actually all contradictory. And I mean we can see the problems with how do we integrate equality with freedom.

If we just look at the women's movement, for example, and most feminists define the women's movement as wanting equality for women. But that's not really what feminism wants because it doesn't want all women to be absolutely equal to all men in all areas. I mean if that was the case, for example, 99.9% of all plumbers are men. So, if ask the feminists what do you want and they got their way, what would they have? A quota where 99,9% of women have to be plumbers (if we’re talking about that specific job) that's the only way they're going to get equality. But none of them talk about that. Then men have more high death rates in the jobs than they do. They work outside. They travel more. Feminism doesn't care about any of that.

They don't want equality for women in all those areas. They want freedom of opportunity for women in all those areas. As a matter of fact, if you look at the most civilized societies on this planet, the more civilized the society becomes, the greater the diversity in jobs that men and women have. In Scandinavia, for example, which is generally thought to be the most civilized and have the most feminist orientation. The ratio of women to men in nursing professions is 20 to 1. There are 20 times more women that are nurses than men. Women also outweigh outnumber of men in the number of doctors. They're now more women physicians than there are men. But feminists don't care about that because they don't really want equality across the board. What we do when we talk about equality and freedom for women is we take certain areas that we want to be more equal, such as the opportunity for women to be plumbers. If women want to be plumbers, we'll give them that opportunity. We do. But most of them just aren't interested in it. The biggest difference that psychologists find between men and women as they conduct very carefully designed psychological testing is that men have more interest in things and women have more interest in people. So, if you let that play out, then women will be more prevalent in psychotherapy, counseling, working with people, positions that be more prevalent in nursing and health care. And men will be more mechanics and plumbers and roofers. Also, 90% of roofers are men. Women just aren't interested in doing roofing. And you can't force that as part of a feminist agenda because they just won't do it. And the more civilized cultures we have, the less they do it. So, this is an example of how freedom and equality are not dealing with the same issues at all, and they actually are counter each other. And that's a very important realization.

RAQUEL: Absolutely.

15)In page 293 of your book, you say very eloquently: “gaining Big Wholeness is certainly something that we should want in our lives”. What would be the opposite of this Full Wholeness? How about global suicide, which is not a possibility? Isn't that very extreme? It sounds like: or Big Wholeness or nothing? In which way, this Big Wholeness may rewrite the narrative for a happy human being's rebirth, having in mind that in the Game of Life “everyone is born in square one”?  What is that percentage of people we need to tip the balance toward life and not extinction?

KEN: Well, as to what percentage, I would say that at the very least, we want 51% or more of the population at world centric levels, starting at rationality at Orange, and then moving into a healthy Green, and then Teal, and the Turquoise. And we need at least 51% of them, so they will form a majority. And that's an important facet. When I say certainly something that we would want is a Big Wholeness and What would it be the opposite of this Full wholeness? How about global suicide? Well, what I mean is that if you're going to really whittle down Wholeness to suicidal levels, what would that mean? That would mean something fairly drastic. And although all people are born in square one, there are many differences in people's interests’ development. Remember, we have several dozen Multiple Intelligences, and most people will pursue one or two of those intelligences, but not all of them. And women definitely don't want anything to do with plumbing or roofing or suicidal job opportunities. They're just not interested in those kinds of things. They're interested in people and helping and relationships, and they're not interested in inanimate things, and mechanics, and roofing and plumbing. They just aren't. And the most civilized cultures we have no women in any of those areas, because they're not interested. They don't have the drive or desire to go into those areas. Nor should they. I mean, if they want to, of course, they have the opportunity. And if you really want to be a plumber, you can get into some plumbing school, and you can learn to be a plumber. But you don't want to do that. And so, you wouldn't. So that's more what I was contrasting, is if we're really going to wipe out Big Wholeness, what does that mean? And it means just devastating all diversity, and all different interests, and all different capacities, and all different multiple intelligences. And that would just be a disaster across the board. And what percentage of the population does it take to present that? I’m just guessing when I say at least 51% at world centric or higher levels. We are very far away from that.

RAQUEL: Yes, unfortunately.

16)It seems that with extreme right political tendencies in many worldwide governments, mythic religion is coming back. What it represents a real regression of the already gained advancement on the pathway of Waking Up and also Growing Up. At the same time, we are seeing many signs of acceptance of extraterrestrial experiences embodied by scientists and hardcore academics. Therefore, could we perceive that the hand of Evolution, preparing the opening to spiritual experiences of this large significant population may lead to a profound Waking Up? Would you think so?

KEN: Well, that's the hope of course. But we sort of already discussed this when we discuss Fritjof Capra, and the number of these strong core academics that you mentioned that show an interest in interior states. It's a very mixed interest, because when they say mind, they mean brain. And when they say consciousness, they mean Neuronal Systems Theory that they don't mean what we would call Consciousness.

RAQUEL: Not all of them, Ken. Now there are several which are not saying that. They are understanding the difference. And that's the hope I have that they are starting the process of development toward a more inclusive consciousness.

KEN:  Well, first of all, I don't see nearly as much of that as you do.

RAQUEL:  The Evolution continues. And so, everything is, in a certain sense, evolving.  There's always something getting better somewhere. And you said before about the speed. So maybe the problem is that, yes, things are evolving because there is an evolution all the time, a bettering, an improvement, somewhere and yet maybe the trouble is that it doesn’t occur at the necessary speed for us to see it.  And then the tipping point of the negativity can reach us. You know, it's like the snow ball of negativity (unconsciousness and ignorance) falling from the mountain and going faster than what we can run. Is that so?

KEN: Well, I think that's part of it as well. Things can always break down. And that's why we have splitting off and repression. And we don't have to have an included transcend and deny. So that can always happen. And it always does happen to some extent. And that's a real problem. I have found a certain modest degree in more scientists and more academics being generally interested in real consciousness. And although many of them just equate that with brain states, there are some that understand the difference. But if you still talk to them like Richard Dawkins or something, they'll maintain that when you die, that's because your brain is dead. So, you have no consciousness left. And that is just a disaster because all it's required for Consciousness is a material exterior support. And we don't just have gross matter. We have subtle matter and causal matter. And those don't associate with just brain structure. They're associated with all forms of exterior. So, it's completely conceivable to me that when we die, some part of our consciousness will go on in a subtle or causal body. And that there's nothing inherently contradictory about that at all.

RAQUEL: Right. It's true. In the previous interview, we already talked about the Turiya state: the Witness. So now let's enter into Turiyatita, the other ultimate state of consciousness or One Taste, the last step of any enlightenment process. And to do that, I want to read a paragraph as an introduction.

Start the quote

“Your true Self is neti, neti -not this, not that – radically Free of all objects.  It is a pure Subject or Absolute Subjectivity…radical disidentification…is the pure Seer, which itself can never be seen. So, when you go in search of this True Self, you won’t see it. Whatever is arising is just fine; simply let is arise, with the awareness that “I am not this, I am not that”…simply relax in the pure Present and not identifying with anything that is arising, letting it all go…effortlessly reflecting every single thing and even in experience but identifies with, or gets stuck to none of them…So this True Self is both the very highest reality in the dualistic realm and the final barrier to the ultimate nondual realm.  It is the highest pointer and the final obstacle.

 

This is why, even if you are established in a profound and ever-present Witnessing state, you still have one more (very small) step to go in order to realize your truest and deepest Reality, that is One Taste…The required final step into the 5^th state of One Taste is to continue witnessing all of the Total Painting (of Reality)…, and then gently but fully relax this Witness…-that has managed to step back from the Total Painting- into everything that’s being witnessed…You no longer see the sun, you are the sun. This nondual Oneness means that the very sensation of being a Looker (or Witness) actually turns out to be utterly identical to the sensation of that which is been looked…Suddenly, “out there” and “in here” both evaporate in to “just this” -this single present experience of “Thusness or Suchness”,  this One Taste…If you have decided to move on to this Turiyatita or One Taste recognition, you will want to see the Totality of the Painting not as arising in front of you or outside of you but rather as arising within you, within your Awareness, within your Being”.  End of the quote.

So now again, it would be wonderful to invite people to experiment One Taste with you here and now in this path of Waking Up as you beautifully presented in your book. So, would you please read the following paragraph for us? And I would highly recommend people to close their eyes and listen to you saying this, because this can be a real exercise of Consciousness to go into experiencing what you're saying.

KEN: Certainly.

Start the quote

“Allow this One Taste Awareness to expand to infinity. That is, let your Awareness get bigger and bigger, starting from where you are and expanding to include the entire planet, then the entire solar system (the sun, moon and planets), then the entire galaxy, with billions and billions of starts and then expand again to include all galaxies, the totality of galaxies.  Your Awareness is expanding past all of them and embracing and enfolding all of them as it does so.  Then allow your Awareness to completely expand to infinity itself- let it expand to the point where there is an endless beyond, yet your Awareness is aware of even that endless beyond – that utter infinity.  Simply throw your Awareness out as far as it can possibly go, to the utter ends of the universe. 

 

Notice, at some point, that the outward movement of Awareness will stop, will come to some sort of and end that seems to be infinity.  Why does it stop? How does it even know to stop? How does it know that it is at infinity? And the answer is that it was already there.  You know when infinity has been reached because your Awareness is always already infinite. It was already at infinity, and thus is simply recognized itself. This is just a simple visualization technique that might have clicked, but t also represents a genuine reality- which is that your own primordial Awareness, your own pure Consciousness, is always already absolutely infinite and eternal. There is simply nothing outside of it”. End of the quote.

RAQUEL: Wonderful! Thank you for reading this because it's a piece of for meditation.

KEN:  Absolutely.

RAQUEL:

17)You tell us that we can access not only the Awareness about our Enlightenment but also the consciousness about the Feelings of Enlightenment and I love this because I work a lot with them at my therapeutic counselling.  You state that we could use any feeling to describe what we feel when enlightened and yet you chose to use Bliss for Turiya and Love for Turiyatita to differentiate them from just emotions which come and go and therefore are temporary. So, tell us more about these feelings of Bliss and Love as qualities of the Spirit.

KEN:  Well, I use the term of ‘Bliss’ as a release from confinement or from imprisonment or from being stuck someplace. So, when you are released from that feeling of being stuck, you feel, ah! a great sense of relief, a great sense of Bliss, of joy, of happiness. And that Bliss though it seems to be sort of impervious to what's going on. And that's why it doesn't really apply fully to Teriyatita or state of Oneness or fullness or Wholeness or One Taste. The emotion that does is LOVE because when you really love something you want to become one with it. Somebody will say I love ice cream so they want to eat ice cream. They love their lover so they want to eat their lover or taste their lover, kiss their lover. And so most people can sort of get a sense of bliss or a sheer joy or exuberance or happiness. And they can realize that there's just a release, it's a happiness of being free from everything.

Then if you're not free from everything but you're one with everything then you love it. You want to be one with it. And so that's why I use the difference between Bliss and Love. And as I pointed out they tend to become conjoined so we have a Blissful Love or a Loving Bliss. And that's where you get sort of the best of both worlds. You have a blissful happiness because you're released from all stuck and you have a loving oneness because you're one with everything. So those are just two of the simple ways that I use emotions in this case.

RAQUEL:  It's beautiful because it's very useful as it's very close to our own consciousness of Love and release which is Bliss. And so, it's very recognizable. When I say for example, I have the experience of loving the spirit, loving this consciousness of freedom, of absolute freedom which is a release of being stuck or in prison from things or emotions or situations, the result is real love. Loving everything.  I mean you use habitually the word embrace and I love that because it's true then you want to embrace it all because you love it all.

18) You wonderfully express it in your book when you say: “The Blissful Freedom of being Free from everything does indeed merge into a Loving Oneness with everything” Is this a choice, a conscious movement that we can make to first step back from things to just witness them, experiencing the void and then choose again to go forward embracing it all? Something like from the Emptiness to Wholeness?

KEN:  Yes, I think it is and you can actually do those in sort of two stages if you want. And I sort of describe ways you can do that. And to have a blissful wholeness or a blissful love or a loving bliss, you are in love with everything but you also have a freedom from getting stuck in anything in particular so you feel blissful. So, it's a blissful lovingness and that's sort of the summit of what a human's emotional feelings can feel.

RAQUEL:  What I find interesting is that when we say this like from emptiness to wholeness, it's like you're expressing in reality a ‘move’. So, it's a necessity to move to reach, experience this. I always tell the people in consultation that the nature and the essence of the manifested Spirit is ‘movement’. Whether what I call ‘the character’ which is all the learned and programmed things that we have, you know, instructed things that we have from parents and society and everything else is ‘passiveness’, is not movement. So, I say that when you talk about this, I love this sensation of movement, getting into the ‘go’. First, I go totally into the experience of witnessing, just to observe everything. So, it's a movement of separation. And then it's a movement of going forward again to embrace it all. So, the whole process is a movement of separation and embracing. I love it!!!

19)Let’s now enter into Tantra, as it’s seen for many as one of the “super fast and super easy” path to Enlightenment, on top of being for them the funniest and I would say, the most “intimate”. What is Integral sexual Tantra different from Buddhist or Hindu Tantra? And what is the “microcosmic orbit”? And also tell us about your own experience with it as you say you’ve been practicing for 40 years for your own Enlightenment and teaching it for 30, so I’m sure there’s people that would want to know about Tantra from an experimented practitioner, that has also in mind the dangers of unconscious practice.

KEN:  Well, the difference between Integral Sexual Tantra and Hindu or Buddhist Tantra is neither Hinduism nor Buddhism are aware of the levels of development. So, they have no understanding of the Growing Up process. And that's unfortunate because what we want to incorporate in an Integral Sexual Tantra is an understanding of our complete Wholeness. And that includes our Growing Up aspects, our Waking Up aspects, our Opening Up, our Showing Up and our Cleaning Up. And all of those are embedded in our Integral Sexual Practice, even though it sort of comes down to a blissful lovingness or loving blissfulness. None of that would work without the complete total background of all of this material. So that's an important part of it. And as for my own personal experience, this is simply something that I started to recognize in my own love making with one of my wives. And it was just a very obvious discovery for me. And we'll talk about actual ways to do that later on in a couple pages. You have me read a long quote that explains how you go about doing it. So, we'll return to this topic when we get to that point.

RAQUEL: So, you don't want to tell us more about it (laughing)

KEN:  Well, I just said, I experienced it and it was great. And I loved it. And as I went into it more and more, I understood it better. And I was able to bring all aspects of the Integral model into play and explain it all by using the whole model.

About the microcosmic orbit, that's simply a process of circulating prana or bioenergy throughout the body. And it results from you on the in breath, bringing subtle light and energy and consciousness down the front of your face. And so, you want to keep your mouth closed and your tongue touching the top of your roof and then down into your chest and then into your stomach and then into the bottom of your spine. And then on the out breath, you reverse that and breathe it up the spine and through each chakra and then out the top of your skull and release it to infinity and light and consciousness at and above the crown. That's the microcosmic orbit. And all concert practices and Hinduism and Buddhism use that microscopic orbit to help circulate the sexual energy. 

RAQUEL:  What would you say that the exact Tantric practice is because there has been so many people saying that they are tantric teachers and they do, you know, funny, stupid things regarding sexuality, diverse sexual actions that they say is Tantra. So how could you define in a small phrase, let's say, what the tantric practice is?

KEN: In reality, you go from making love with your partner to making love with the whole world. And you actually feel that you're having a sexual union with the entire world. Just as you transfer your feelings of being ONE with your partner, you transfer those feelings to embrace everything. And then you become ONE with everything you're aware of. And that's one case. And that's the goal of all Tantra.

RAQUEL:  Yes, sir! And you have experienced that. Wonderful! I felt loved then by you when you were making love. In the part that I am part of that world that you love, so thank you (laughing).

20)The two main feelings of the Tantric practice, apart from other ones are Bliss and Love, you say, is there any order in these feelings like firstly in the kisses, embraces, etc, could it be the feeling of tenderness and let’s say love and then with the orgasm an explosive joyful bliss which in the soul are experienced as the contrary love as BLISS and then in the orgasm bliss as LOVE? Or are these feelings appearing at the same time, something like a Blissful Love, the Witness and One Taste together? And how to integrate this with the breath itself as we cannot inhale and exhale at the same time and you say in page 410 that exhaling is related to Bliss and inhaling to Love?

KEN: Yeah, well, the idea is that they can occur in any of this order. So, the examples that you give are all not examples of different cases. They're all examples of what can occur when you're making Tantric Love. So, you can have bliss occurring first and then love or you can have a blissful love or a loving bliss occur simultaneously. And as for the breath, it's true that you can't breathe in and breathe out at the same time. But when you're bringing this inner the microcosmic orbit down and you're connecting it with the base of the spine and then bringing that up, that in a sense is integrating the downward with the upward movement. Even though they don't occur necessarily simultaneously, they're clearly hooked together and are part of the same microcosmic orbit. So, what you're defining here is a description of anything that can occur while you're having sexual talent.

RAQUEL:  It's funny because in general doing yoga, inhaling will be like the sensation of getting the air inside of the lungs and then the stomach comes out because the diaphragm goes down. So is the sensation of opening up and then when we exhale, the sensation is like coming back. And so, I experienced this of what you were saying about exhaling related to bliss and inhaling to love. It's very funny because I put myself to experience that with the orbit as you explained it in the book and it was impressive because it was a different quality, a different subtlety to what I am accustomed to the breath with yoga. It's very different, it's a subtle difference and yet different. Very interesting.

21)Can anyone be eligible to be a Tantric couple? Which are the pre-requisites for such a practice if any? And is it possible to practice Tantra alone, with oneself?

KEN:  Well, somebody that's eligible to be your tantric partner is somebody that you feel a genuine love for. And that's very important because that feeling of loving oneness with your partner is the entire thread that you're going to connect to the entire kosmos. And so, if that's not there, you're going to miss the whole connection. So just make sure that you really, genuinely love the person you're doing this with. And that sort of takes out any sort of hooking up or one-night stands or any of that kind of stuff. That's just a way to get your rocks off and that has nothing to do in the concept of sex. And can you do it with yourself? Sure. I mean, you can masturbate and go through these same steps. And many people, when they masturbate, they do go through some sort of love-making sequence. So yes, you can do it by yourself. It works much better, of course, with a partner because you're generating genuine love feelings for another organism. And that's what you're going to transfer to the whole existence.

RAQUEL:  Yeah, it's a matter of full feeling the whole 4 Quadrants and not only the Upper Left. I love that you say that about not everyone can be a tantric couple because I have seen so many stupidities regarding that, like “bring your towel and a blanket for the weekend tantra session”. And it's so disgusting to see that. People making money with those things and gaining power over others with those type of practices, which are so sacred and so divine.

You dedicate the whole 19th of chapter of your “Finding Radical Wholeness” to Integral Tantra. Therefore, I'm going to read this ‘compendium’ of interesting paragraphs. And afterwards, we will end up with an exercise that you'd be so kind to introduce for us.

So, I start the quote of this part, which is like a summary of all the latter, and which will introduce your tantric practice.

“There are numerous types of tantric practices… These practices (by both sexes) are always coupled with breathing exercises that instead of allowing sexual sensations to orient downward and outward, deliberately refocus and guide them to move inward and upward.  That is, with the out-breath they move them from the genital area to the base of the spine and from there up the spine to the brain itself, and then even beyond the brain to the infinite Light and Consciousness at and beyond the crown. Then on the in-breath, the entire sequence is reversed.

 

Typical tantric exercises take at least a month or two to start having any effects; they rewire certain circuits in the brain (via Neuroplasticity). And these practices or exercises take a fair amount of effort.

 

In contrast Integral Tantra isolates those aspects of this expanded bliss and loving oneness that are indeed ever-present, which you can realize right now and certainly during any sexual activity that you wish…That combination of Light and Life, Freedom and Fullness, with its Big Bliss and Big Love, provides the specific force and drive of the loving-bliss that is sexuality…Sex doesn’t prevent the Spirit: it’s a direct road to Spirit.

 

…Integral Tantra uses the relative and finite feelings of sexual bliss and love to remember and recognize the ultimate eternal Feelings of spiritual Bliss and Love.  It uses sexual bliss and love (which come and go) to directly recognize spiritual Bliss and Love (which are ever-present).  In short, it uses the practice of sex to recognize Spirit… Go from thinking and feeling that you’re making love with your partner to thinking and feeling that you are making Love with the entire world.  Realize that you’re fully One with all of it.

 

…The isolated and set-apart nirvana becomes one with the entire world of samsara in a deeper nondual Suchness or One Taste, and Bliss gives way to a Love that transcends and includes it… You will start to feel Bliss and Love together as co-emergent, as together they come to be the most dominant feeling of the ultimate, timeless Now of one’s own True Nature – the true feelings of Enlightenment. … Hence, the feelings of bliss and love that arise during sex are an unerring road to Spiritual realization, and sex itself becomes a true form of prayer.  And along with Integral Tantra, I recommend that you pray often.  You really can’t pray too much.  Pray every day, if you can…. So, pray often…live long…and prosper.

 

Engage in making room for everything in your experience and in your world, filling it up completely and totally, and thus be as contented and as fulfilled as you can be. Finding a truly Big Wholeness in the very core of your own being, you will never again feel empty, hollow, worthless, vacant, meaningless, pointless, emptied-out or unfulfilled… Hallelujah, welcome home!”  End of the quote.

RAQUEL: I love this “welcome home” Ken, as you know, that in my own Inner Positioning psychotherapeutic method, I use the metaphor of our inner house, transformed into our inner home as a needed process for consciousness development. So, is there anything that you would like to add about your book or anything else? Ken, as if not, we will end up with the reading of your pointing out instructions for a real transformational tantric practice as you gracefully propose it in your “Finding Radical Wholeness” work. Thanking you dearly already for being here with us, for your time, dedication and love to Consciousness development and therefore Evolution. You know that I/we love you enormously. So, if you want to add something or just read for us the Tantric practice, please.

KEN: No, I'll go ahead and just start reading.

Start of the quote

“When beginning sexual activity (and this can be straight, gay, lesbian, trans, bi, or any other form), begin by resting in the Witness, since we’re focusing on Bliss.

Make sure that, as the Witness, your relationship to your body is exactly the same as your relationship to your partner’s body…You can check if you’re Witnessing correctly by making sure that as the Witness, your relationship to objects arising “in here” in the interior, is exactly the same as your relationship to objects arising “out there” in the exterior.

…You are not identified with any objects at all, …nonetheless, begin to take any specific feelings of pleasure or bliss, no matter where they originate, and directly identify them with the Witness.  That is, “feel” the pleasure and then identify those two sensations -the immediate feeling of pleasure or bliss and the feeling of the pure Witness.  Allow that pleasure to begin to see the world…, Witness the world… So, as any pleasure or bliss arises, identify your own Knowing awareness with it, and then… “Bliss is touching my partner”, “Bliss is making love”, and so on. Tibetan Buddhist call the Witness an “ongoing knowingness”. The “knowingness” is the cognitive part, and the “ongoing” is the always ongoing ever-present or eternal part…The Witness is a pure Knower, not anything known…The idea is simply to get the two “parts” of the Witness together -the knowing (or cognitive) part and the feeling (or freedom/blissfulness part).   And this is just a warm-up for the main event.

 

As orgasm approaches, relax your body into its present feelings and prepare to take those intense feelings…and directly apply them to the Witness…Feel that orgasmic bliss to be one with the Witness itself…In other words, use the small bliss of sexual release to remind you of, evoke, and even enhance the Big Inclusive Bliss that is already present in the very nature of the Witness itself. You are using the intensity of a small temporal sexual bliss to point to and evoke a timeless, ever-present Big Bliss…that stretches to infinity. That small bliss will eventually come to an end; that Big Bliss will not…As the temporal, sexual bliss fades, keep the Bliss in memory and continue to apply it to the Witness.  Integral Tantra calls this an “orgasm memory”.

 

…And you can do this orgasm memory right now…by remembering the intense bliss of an orgasm.  Then apply that blissful feeling to the Witness and look at the world through…that cognitive Blissfulness.

 

For most people the intensity of the bliss of conventional orgasm is, at least to begin with, significantly greater than the Big Bliss of the Witness Freedom.  Thus, when you practice transferring the feeling of sexual bliss to the feeling of the Witnessing Self, it will feel like it is enhancing or magnifying the feeling of ever-present Bliss…and its (nirvanic) Freedom. As you begin to vibrate more with the Bliss with a capital B, its original intensity will indeed eventually overtake and outshine that of finite sexual bliss. And, frankly, when that happens, many people stop having ordinary orgasms, because they are such a letdown, and do nothing but waste bioenergy…Using sexual bliss to recognize, remember, and enhance the Big Bliss or Spiritual Awareness is an application of tantric principles.

 

The same thing applies …to Big Love and the loving oneness of sexual union.  We want to use the immediate feelings of sexual unity and the warm, caring, loving feelings of oneness that arise during sex to remind us of, evoke, and enhance the Big Love that arises from the radical Fullness of a pure One Taste.  These two loves are indeed connected -the love that is present in sexuality is a stepped-down version of the timeless Loving Oneness that is ultimate Spirit.

 

…As you engage in sex , if you are in One Taste to some degree, then everything that is arising will already feel like a texture of your own Being, a modification of your own Awareness, and you are all that…You want to pay particular attention, within that all -embracing Big Space, to the feelings of warm connection, deep care, and loving embrace, and particularly to any of the feelings of warm, loving oneness or loving union with your partner…as they will be already arising withing the even larger Space of a timeless Loving Oneness if you are already in One Taste Awareness.

 

…To summarize, begin by using the small relative, finite, loving union of sexual oneness to remind you of, evoke and enhance the ever-present Loving Oneness of your own nondual Awareness.  During sex, whenever you feel the intensity of any sort of loving touch, care, tenderness, or, especially, loving unity or oneness, focus on that feeling of oneness and apply it to the Fullness of One Taste… “I love you so much I am you” …Just think on your feelings of being one with your partner and then expand those feelings to embrace the entire universe… “I love it All! Because I am it All!... Go from thinking and feeling that you are making love with your partner to thinking and feeling you are making Love with the entire World.  Recognize that you’re fully One with all of it.

 

…The Loving Fullness of One Taste is always already doing this right now anyway, and so you can actively search in your awareness for that Loving Radiance that is already overflowing and embracing the entire universe in the Oneness of a radical Love  -and hence recognize your own every-present One Taste, directly arising as your own headless state of Unity, which is now a Loving Unity…There is literally nothing arising anywhere that I don’t deeply Love -not a single thing, anywhere.

 

Notice how Bliss and Love fit together and what each brings to the conjunction.  When I add Love to Bliss for a Loving Bliss (or Bliss infused with Love), the sense of Bliss -which include variations such as deep Joy or a core Happiness- expands out of itself and begins to embrace the entire world…It wants the world to be Happy, because now it Loves the world.  Loving Bliss is a Bliss that embraces, enfolds and enwraps the entire world, an ecstatic Bliss that is in Love with the whole world and all of its inhabitants and in all of its ups and downs, joys and sorrows, amusements and sadnesses. Bliss united with Love is no longer detached and oblivious; it’s absolutely All-Embracing …bringing an ecstatic Joy or Happiness in the midst of it all… There is not just a Wholeness… but the Happy Wholeness of a Blissful Love…In fact, the more often you use Integral Tantra, the more likely you will be to Wake Up, and Wake Up to a truly spiritual Wholeness” End of the quote.

 

RAQUEL: I always say: “Reality is the orgasm of the spirit”. I have always felt that even before I knew what Tantra was. It was some intuitive feeling and now I agree 100% with everything you say.

 

KEN:  There you go! That's because you're deeply involved.

 

RAQUEL: I really thank you very much, Ken. And I thank you for your kindness with your time and for this wonderful interaction we've had for this interviews you have given us. And also, for all the wisdom you give us with your books.

 

KEN: Well, thank you, very much and thank you for the work you put in to this interview. You did a lot of investigating and a lot of typing and a lot of copying. I deeply appreciate it.

RAQUEL: I love you much, Ken and I look forward to our next interview in the 14th of February 2026. Okay?

 

KEN: Sure, bye for now.