And I'm glad to be here.
RAQUEL
You're the creator of the Integral Theory, named by many as the "Einstein of Consciousness" with more than 28 books published, cited as the most widely translated essays' writer in America.
KEN
Right.
RAQUEL
You've been translated to 30 languages. That's a lot!
KEN
That's right.
RAQUEL
How are you today, Ken?
KEN
I'm just fine. Thank you.
RAQUEL
Off the record, Ken, I want to introduce a question from your translator in Spanish, David Gonzalez-Raga.
KEN
Okay.
RAQUEL
He beg me to ask you about something, and even though he was out of the time that I set to receive questions for you, I feel we may give him entry if you agree to do so, for being such a special person.
KEN Okay. Sure.
RAQUEL
Thank you. So, this "0" Question is: What's your take on the Palestinian's genocide and also which is the perception that you have about Trump and "Trumpism"? Like for example in Spain with the President Sanchez, they call this political stage: "Sanchism".
KEN
Well, I think the Palestinian question is a very difficult one. I mean, they, the Palestinian people had a chance to vote in who they wanted to head them and they voted in Hamas. Hamas has been in charge of Palestine for something like 18 years and they haven't done anything good for the country that I can tell. Hamas still does insist on it's actually part of their governmental documents, so much so, that they insist on genocide for Israel. Thus, when we start talking about who's committing genocide, we have to be very careful.
If Israel retaliated by taking genocidal actions against Palestine, it'd be hard to blame them since they have their fighting a group that has already sworn and has written documents saying: "we want the genocide of Israel". That's what they've kept on saying and what it means "from the water to the sea, Palestine will be free", it means to get rid of Israel. So, I always when we look at Palestine versus Israel type of situation, I always try to think of what it looks like from both sides. I mean, that's an Integral approach in itself. But it's very difficult because most people in America tend to choose one side or the other. And so, they are the ones that will call what Israel is doing to Palestine, a Palestinian's genocide. But they won't mention the fact that Palestine is already sworn to commit genocide on Israel. They just forget that. And I think that's not good. I'm not taking one side or the other. I'm not taking Israel's side. When I point out that Israel's side is generally not being given its fair do in any conversation between the two sides. So, recent events in Palestine have just reconfirmed my feeling that there's a fundamental imbalance going on between how these two sides are discussed. And I think that's very unfortunate.
RAQUEL
Yes, very unfortunate imbalance, having in mind that even though it's true that Hamas has said that they wanted to get rid of Israelites or Israel, the imbalance on the number of deaths and killings and the humanitarian problems that they have created -not letting the wounded people or the sick people to receive help or give them food or other atrocities- is humongous. I mean that I don't see that as a very balanced situation neither, given that the civil population is not the guilty one, let's say, in order to receive all that horrible treatment. Even, they have signed some kind of "peace" among them and Israel has kept on bombing!
KEN
Well, Israel has a standing order that when they're going to bomb an area that includes civilian people they announce the times they're going to bomb so civilians can get out of the way. So, that doesn't sound very much like a real genocide to me. Maybe they've stopped doing that and that would be unfortunate but I know for a fact that they had that situation in place for many many years. They would simply announce: "we're going to bomb from 8 a.m. to noon and from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m." and the civilians could clear out if they wanted to. So, that doesn't sound like a real genocide to me. What they're doing recently I haven't followed that actually.
RAQUEL
I see, well what they have been doing you know it's very unfortunate because it really appears as a genocide because of the imbalance on the number of victims that Palestine has had which it's not even at all on the opposite side. So, even though you are making the analysis of what Hamas has said at the beginning and has been telling for 10 years, is not balanced with the force, fury and meanness that they have put on the Palestine population. That's why it's the number of people dead and the devastation of the strip in which they live -because they are really living in a strip of earth- that make it very imbalanced and it's been too much and that's the reason why many people, internationally, are naming it as "genocide".
KEN
Israel does not have very many friends internationally, so I would expect all of Israel's haters to call what they're doing as genocide whether it is or isn't, but let me ask you this, if there were a group of people that swore that their sole aim is to commit total genocide on you what would be the fair response to that? Sure you shouldn't in fact keep killing them until they're all dead since if any of them are alive they're going to try to kill you. What's fair?
RAQUEL
Oh, but one thing is to talk and another thing is to do, Ken, don't you think?
KEN
Well sure, but if you're the Palestinians, the Hamas inside has already spoken they want genocide for Israel and they're not going to stop until they get it, so Israel that has got a fairly intelligent mind in terms of how to fight, has decided that all we can do is wipe out that other side since all they want to do is completely commit genocide on us, so we're going to go in with everything we have until we blast them off the face of the earth if that's necessary. That's the only way to get them to stop talking about genocide. The only way is to kill them, well, who's to say what's fair?
RAQUEL
Let's talk about Trump, how do you see Trump and the people that follows and voted for him and all these things he does, how do you see all that?
KEN
Well you can hate Trump but you can't hate the 50% of the people in America that voted for him, so you can just get that out of your mind unless you really do want to commit genocide on all Republican voters, in which case that puts you in league with Hamas and Hezbollah and other fun genocidal seeking people! I've always felt about Trump two very different ways, because he's really two very different people. On the one hand he's first and foremost an anti-woke politician. He doesn't like Wokism and nobody integral really likes Wokism. It's just a ridiculous form of exaggerated one-sided attack thoughts and I've always appreciated Trump's anti-wokism. Then on the other hand there's a Trump who has a very obvious very deep and very sincere malignant narcissism and malignant narcissism was a term that was introduced by Erich Fromm and it's considered the most serious mental disorder on the anti-social side of disorders and Trump unfortunately has a horrible case of that. Virtually every psychiatric oriented psychologist that I've heard talking about Trump has literally called him a narcissist and if you know anything about DSM 4 or 5 mental illness categorizations you'll recognize malignant narcissism as the worst of the anti-social pathologies and that's what Trump has. So on the one hand he is very funny because he tells a lot of anti-woke jokes and stuff like that but on the other hand he'll slip in to this very narcissistic attitudes and doings.
I mean, I sat down one day with a pen and pad to listen to him give a speech and I wanted to just note how many sentences had a narcissistic slant to them and I gave up about half of the way through because I couldn't keep track of them all because almost everything he said was narcissistic, so he's always saying. "well we've got the best this so-and-so there's nothing like it in the history of America and we are number one and aren't we great?". I mean he's just pathetic and that's why people hates him. He's a perfect projection magnet because people see that malignant narcissism and it riles up any latent narcissism that they have in them and then they project that onto him and end up hating him.
I don't think we've seen a president that had so many people going out of their way to criticize him or attack him. I agree with most of all of those attacks in everything they say, but he has gotten rid of a lot of this woke nonsense and I really appreciate him for that. I've always had this sort of split-minded feeling about Trump. I really appreciate his anti-wokeness but I really dislike his malignant narcissism. It even gets me riled up and I just don't have very much malignant narcissism but he can draw it out of me just because I'm going to project whatever I do have onto him because he's a magnet for those projections and that's just always been a disaster with Trump.
RAQUEL
Yeah, and what about what he's doing with other nations, and what he's doing with Mexicans, and the anti-immigrants campaign he's carrying on and the matter with the anti-drug boats shootings and the matter with Greenland and Venezuela, how do you see all those things?
KEN
Well they're part of his malignant narcissism! I mean, no president that I can recall in my 70 plus year lifespan, I don't remember a president that would just verbally attack other politicians or other countries or the leaders of other countries and just say they're a failed politician they're a rotten to the core they're no good.
RAQUEL
It's true he said it about the French president !
KEN
Yeah yeah, it's horrifying to me. I mean where is diplomatic courtesy if nothing else? I mean we have general rules of discourse among world leaders and the first rule is: don't go badmouthing them just because you're this or that. It just doesn't register to a malignant narcissist like Trump. He's just: "I'm not doing anything wrong". Oh please!
RAQUEL
And regarding the people that follows him, Ken? This Trumpism? All these people that follow him and that have his same ideas, which to my point of view the ones that follow him go beyond Republicans or non Republicans, in the sense that they are fine as well as Democrats and yet Trumpism goes beyond all that. So, don't you think that Trumpism is making that the polarization of the American society is even more accute and harsh?
KEN
Yeah, I think so and you're right that not all Republicans like Trump. I mean, I would say at least 30 to 40% of Republicans hate Trump just as much as anybody else in America hates them you just can't get around it and so the Democrats and Republicans are fairly united in their dislike of Donald Trump although in this last election I think people when you're faced with a malignant narcissist you generally have one of two responses: you either just hate him totally or you listen to it so often you just get tired of it and just don't care. You just sort of start sealing it out and you don't pay any attention to it and that's definitely what Trump has done with the people.
RAQUEL
You know what I do Ken? In many occasions it happens to me the same with Trump than with Netanyahu and other people which are doing negative things, like Putin, for example. When I see them instead of hating them or putting on them my mirroring (giving them the negative I have inside) no, what I do is send them love, send them positive energies because I say to myself: "everyone is sending them negative energies, so if there it's a wave effect that gets to them, what they're receiving is more negativity on top of the one they already have, so I'm going to do my little contribution to positivity and I'm going to send them some positive energy to see if that brings some light to their hearts and souls".
KEN
Have you done that with Trump?
RAQUEL
Yes
KEN
That's good, then I believe that you're telling me the truth when you say that you send these nice things out, especially if you've managed to do that for Trump
RAQUEL
I've done it not because I agree with him. I do it just because not adding more negativity into his negativity and see if that positive energy let's call it "light", may open a crack that may enter into his brain and heart.
KEN
Right and it will also stop you from mirroring.
RAQUEL
Yes, for sure. So let's go with the First Question on the record: How can we integrate all the developmental theories there are? Because even though they may not be Integral Theories there are many other developmental theories, so how could we integrate them all?
KEN
Well, I of course have attempted to do so if you look at the book "Integral Psychology" that I wrote. In the back I have charts of over a hundred developmental models and I list all of the stages that each of those hundred models present. Then in the book itself I give a way to tie them all together. That's sort of what my main attempt has been to do, it's to integrate all the various major models of development that we have and I think I've done a fairly good job.
I've divided those models into five major classes of wholeness that we can see: Waking Up Growing Up, Opening Up Cleaning Up and Showing Up and each of those are very different types of Wholeness. We have to recognize the differences but also look for the commonalities that will allow us to bring them all together. I found several. All of the models have four quadrants for example, so I put that down as a major component of my integrative model and I distinguished between States of Consciousness and Structures of Consciousness and that's a very important distinction. For example, Waking Up it consists basically of States of Consciousness and Growing Up consists basically of Structures of Consciousness.
I would recommend if people is going to read a book, to read my recent one which is called "Finding Radical Wholeness" as I think it's the best book I've wrote and since I've done over 30 books, there's a fair amount of competition! I really think it's a terrific book. So I recommend to start with that book.
RAQUEL
Sure, and remember that we've made two wonderful interviews about it that people may also listen and see in YouTube as a complete summary of it or even read the polished transcription in English or the translation into Spanish in my own blog. I do highly recommend that book as it is absolutely great!
Following with the 2nd Question: Looking ahead, what inner quality or capacity do you believe human beings must most urgently cultivate in this accelerating complexity in order to participate consciously in the next phase of Evolution?
KEN
Start thinking systemically or integrally and if that means to use my work, use my work; or if you have some other way you want to pull everything together, then go right ahead but what's very clear is that Second Tier which is Teal and Turquoise for me is crucial. Developmentalists themselves call them the "Paradigmatic" and "Cross-paradigmatic" stages. "Paradigmatic" which is Teal and is the first of the major two integral stages of development, it's called so because it's unifying the multiculturalism that Green introduced and Green is coming right after Orange and Orange is the rational logical stage of development which it always tends to produce universal similarities. That's very much what Thomas Kuhn called the "paradigm" and so many Developmentalists call that stage "the paradigmatic stage". What it does is to produce universal singularities.
Orange doesn't have Hindu Chemistry and Buddhist Chemistry and Christian Chemistry, it just has Chemistry, period. There's one form of Chemistry and it's the same for everybody universally, uniformly. What Green does is it looks at those massive universal systems and it says: "yeah but there's Germany has some important truths and they don't fit into any of those systems and France has some important truths and they don't fit in any of those systems and Norway has some important truths that they don't fit in any of those systems" and so Green produces what's called a "multicultural worldview" because it looks at all the different cultures and finds important but different truths and all of them -if we're searching for truth ourselves- should incorporate all of these different truths but what Green can't do is it can't unify all of those different truths, so it produces a Pluralistic or Postmodern or Multicultural worldview.
Then, Teal comes along and here and now from 8 to 10% of the population is in Teal, which is very good. When the leading edge hits around 10% it tends to cause a flip in the entire culture, although the entire culture doesn't come from that 10%. But when it is the Culture itself who reaches the 10%, like in the United States in the 1960s when people reached Green, then there's a flip, like we passed from Modernism and Rationality to Postmodernism and Multiculturalism. What Multiculturalism couldn't do is unify all of these different multicultural truths that Green spotted and so it tended to produce polarization and division and separation and fragmentation and all of the bad things that started happening in the late 60s and early 70s. The good thing that happened that came from Green was of course the Civil Rights Movement because Green reached out to all of these truths that were coming from all these minorities and all these separate cultures and it tried to at least include their importance even though it didn't know how to actually bind them all together. Today about 23% of the population is in Green so it's gone quite beyond that. It's firmly the major leading edge of the Western world and it has come with all of its problems, comes with its fragmentation, its polarization and its wokeism. Thus, Teal came along and when Teal first entered the picture it was around 5 to 7% percent of the population, so it was just getting a foothold and now it's around 8 to 10% percent, so it's getting close to that 10%, and when that happens, we're going to have a widespread understanding that we want to think systemically or integrally and that's what Teal can do.
Teal can take all of those multicultural truths and bring them together so Teal for example, looked at Biology and looked at Chemistry and said: " well, wait a minute those can be brought together" and then it sees: "Biochemistry"! And that was really a profound discovery. That's what Teal has tended to do. Teal would generally bring together two or three of these different multicultural truths that Green had previously discovered. Green introduced so many different paradigms that it couldn't unite, that even Teal was sort of overwhelmed, and so it was up to Turquoise to take over. Turquoise came in and looked at all of the massive number of paradigms that Green had created and it started drawing them all together and if you want an example of that, my work is a perfect example of one of those attempts to unify all of these different separations.
RAQUEL
Oh that's why you say that the best quality that we may better develop is to be systemic in our way of thinking and seeing things, which would be the integration of all these different consciousness!
KEN
Yes and notice the difference! Where Teal has 8 to 10% of the population and Green has about 25% of the population, the number at Turquoise is 0,5 % of the population! That's nothing, that's a very small amount; although in a country of 300 million people it does add up but it's not huge and yet that is the direction that Evolution is moving.
Therefore if people want to be part of that evolutionary movement they'll start thinking systemically, they'll start thinking integrally and if they want to use my work they're more than welcome to do so. I'll be glad to let the music play!
RAQUEL
Would you say that this 0,5% on the Turquoise wave thinking is aligned or would you put it in parallel to what Hanzi Freinacht calls Metamodernism?
KEN
Well Metamodernism, I have a little bit of trouble with Metamodernism, simply because they took the Integral Metatheory and renamed it and made some minor unnecessary changes in it and I just find it frankly a rip off of my work without hardly even acknowledging that they've done it. When they do talk about Integral Theory they almost always screw it up. Metamodernism is not a very profound Integral Theory this is not so. So you wouldn't parallel Metamodernism with a Turquoise level no, not really.
Metamodernism it's attempting to come from Turquoise but it's bungling it up badly mostly because it's so desperately misunderstanding and misinterpreting the Integral Model, as the Integral Model has studied Turquoise inside out, as it has every major level of development and so we know how Turquoise looks like and we make sure our model looks exactly like Turquoise and it does so. What Metamodernism has done is ripped off Turquoise or ripped off the Integral Model and misunderstood it; then they butchered Turquoise.
RAQUEL
I understand Ken and I agree, and at the same time I think that he just names things differently and also adds some things. He has copied Integral Theory a lot, no doubt and yet Freinacht really talks about you in his main known book -even though is true he doesn't put you in a very nice place - although he, sincerely reckons that he has taken a lot from you and from Spiral Dynamics.
Anyway, let's go with the 3rd Question: Today we observe a lack of Showing Up, Openness and Growth in the population; more and more ethnocentric and nationalistic attitudes in people and a lack of respect for one another, animals and mother nature so what is your message of hope in this situation?
KEN
The message of hope is that Turquoise is going to increase from 0.5% to 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6% within probably a decade or two and as we move up in the Turquoise scale, we are going to see what Clare Graves called -when talking about the emergence of the Second Tier Stages- a "monumental leap in meaning", as the flip was absolutely monumental when seeing all those First-Tier Stages, including Green, going up to Second Tier. In Spiral Dynamics there are six of them, in my model there are six to eight, but each of those First Tier Stages share one thing in common, they each think that they have the only correct world view and everybody else is either wrong or stupid or infantile or confused but they have it right. The reason Clare Graves said: "we find a monumental leap in meaning" as we move from First Tier to Second Tier" is because every Second Tier Stage recognizes that all of those previous stages are important, if for no other reason than their actual steps to where we are now. So of course, you don't want to poo poo them or look down on them. That would just be suicidal among other things.
The good news is that more and more population moves to both Teal and from Teal to Turquoise and I said that Teal is often called "paradigmatic" and Turquoise is called "cross paradigmatic" because what Turquoise does is, it takes all of the paradigms, not just two or three like Biology and Chemistry, but all of the paradigms -that Green spread out- and it attempts to draw all of them together into a "cross paradigmatic" reality, including all known paradigms. It ties them together and that's one of the things that I do, for example. That means we look for ways to bring Sociology, Philosophy, Psychology and History all together because that's an important series of paradigms and we're going toward "cross paradigmatic". Not very many people think that way, they just don't. As a matter of fact, only 0.5% of the population thinks that way and that's not huge! We're working on it though!
RAQUEL 4th Question
Integral Theory has always framed reality as an evolutionary process of matter, life, mind and spirit unfolding through increasing complexity and death. Today however we seem to be traversing a convergence of global crisis, ecological collapse, political fragmentation, epistemic computing and rapid technological acceleration, so from your current perspective how do you understand the evolutionary movement humanity is in right now?
KEN
Well we are starting to see a subtle increase in systemic courses given at colleges. We know that almost every major college in this country has at least one teacher who literally teaches Integral Theory and that's a very encouraging situation because for everyone teacher teaching 30 or 40 students you're going to have those 30 or 40 students carrying it out and that's going to be very very good news for the "cross paradigmatic" thinkers.
We're not undergoing ecological collapse because we have made substantial advances in global warming for example and there's actually a couple books that I've seen out there explaining how they are taking these measures that are helping curb global warming and I know it's not a common knowledge. A lot of people get on the alarmist side of ecological events of course and they've been doing that literally ever since I can remember. I remember being in 5th grade and seeing a big headline -although the fear of then was a new Ice Age was coming, not Global Warming but a new Ice Age! And it was headed this way: "we're all going to be dead by 1980". Paul Ehrlich in his "Population bomb" book wrote that the country was not going to be around in 1980 as we're all going to starve to death because the population bomb was just going to crush us! So there's that type of mentality in the background of most ecological statements and you just have to make allowances for that and sort of brush it aside The books that do that have been given very careful and considerate explanations of what has actually been done to curb global warming since we're apparently not going to face a new Ice Age, so we have some clear codes already.
RAQUEL
And in relation to the above, has your view of Integral and of how Integral Theory maps about the real world's evolution have changed over the years? given how unpredictable and nonlinear and at times regressive global development has turned out to be; where do you see Integral Theory still holding strong and where has reality forced you to revise it or refine it?
KEN
Right, well since Evolution is occurring and I mean that it's occurred in the past and we see no reason that any of the forces driving Evolution is going to stop. None of those forces have stopped and since the past they've been producing Evolution, so there's every reason to believe that in the future they will continue to produce the same: Evolution. It might be slowed down in some ways, it might be speeded up in others but the forces are in existence and the forces are in play. I have to say that ever since I came up with my first version, Wilber I, of Integral Theory I have seen these forces continue to act in the world and again there have been some regressions where nations have gotten mad at each other or somebody like Trump's bad mouthed some other foreign leaders, I mean yeah granted that's all there and that's something to keep an eye on, yet the thing that we've had working for us is that these forces of Evolution have kept on going.
By the way the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis of Evolution is what most scientists today generally mean when they say "Evolution" but there's one way in which Darwinian Evolution has failed and it's failed miserably and that is that it's very good at predicting sort of micro evolutions, for example "finches". Darwin's studied finches very closely, "beaks" for example. He showed how different environmental forces would change the state of the beaks, subtle layers, color, subtlety and so on. Darwinian Evolutionary Theory covers those very minor changes. What it doesn't cover and what virtually every evolutionary biologist will agree with is that it doesn't cover large changes. It does not cover the emergence of entirely new species. To get that birds have different sort of colored wings and those colors can change because there're micro evolutions is great, but the actual growing of a wing and when it first occurred first of all, it's still not clear. This is the reason why Stephen J Gould a brilliant evolutionary psychologist and paleontologist, he basically said I don't buy the Darwinian Evolutionary Theory because it can't explain these major changes because these major changes occur in what it's called "punctuated equilibrium" and that's right! There are huge leaps and so you'd get the entire bone structure of a wing in that leap. There was no little minor Darwinian change! As a matter of fact Darwin didn't even understand mutations in his time.
The way the Neo Darwinian Synthesis attempted to explain it was that you get mutations in DNA or the genetic material and those mutations drive Evolution but the problem with that theory is that the vast majority of mutations are lethal and not only are they lethal in order to produce a real large structure, you need quantity. Let's take a horse, for example. At least 300 major mutations are needed to produce all of its structural changes and that's just not going to happen all at once because if you get 300 mutations at least 299 of them are going to be lethal and yet the horse won't come to life until all of them come into existence at the same time and nobody's ever heard of 300 healthy mutations occurring at the same place in the same time.
It's gotten so bad that just two years ago the British Royal Society which is the oldest largest and most influential scientific body in the world, they held a special meeting in London that was devoted to: "we've got to come up with a new theory for Darwinian evolution because Darwinian evolution does not work" and thousands of scientists from around the globe showed up there and they all gave their: "this has occurred and this has to occur". I also have my own theory that "this has to occur" to make evolutionary theory work and it's very simple actually because what they've noticed is that the difficulty is getting these big changes to come together because there's no force operating that wants to produce let's say 20 healthy mutations at the same place in the same time and so what I've done is, first of all, I pointed out that everything that evolves is a "holon" and the "holon" is the term invented by Arthur Koestler who was a genius. It means a whole that's a part of a larger whole and all things in the universe are "holons" or heaps. A heap is like a garbage heap, just things thrown together without any designing picture or big structure or anything like that. So "holons" are like any and all four quadrants as they are made of "holons" as the entire universe is made of "holons" or heaps.
If you just look at the Upper Right Quadrant you have quarks or "holons" that are parts of protons neutrons and electrons and protons and neutrons and electrons are each "holons" that are parts of atoms and atoms are "holons" that are parts of molecules and if you stop anywhere in that sequence and if you look at a molecule you can actually see, literally see, all of the atoms making up that molecule; so this isn't some abstract theory! Here you can see these "holons" becoming parts of larger "holons" and molecules come together to form single celled organisms and single celled organisms come together to form multi-cellular organism and inside a multi-cellular organism these molecules come together to form systems. In human being the nervous system, the digestive system, the muscular system, and so on.
All of those are forces that are still in existence but the one force that is not included in all of those is if you think of a "holon" as having four quadrants, there are four major forces that drive each "holon". There's a left and a right force and we call it Agency which drives an entity to form its own wholeness and there's Communion which drives it to become part of a larger whole and then in an upward direction, going towards more unity, there's a force that I've added and that I call: "self-organization" and several really well-known biological evolutionists have also included this "self-organization force"; the most famous is Stuart Kaufman of the very famous Santa Fe Institute, which is an Institute devoted to Systems Theory thinking. He points out that the only way we get "punctuated equilibrium" is through a leap in "self-organization", so there has to be that added force introduced into the evolutionary sequence, and I agree. That's what I call Eros and then the force opposite to Eros, I call Agape. Eros represent small "holons" driving towards bigger "holons" and Agape is a big "holon" embracing a smaller "holon". We find all four of these forces: Agency, Communion, Eros and Agape operating in the four different directions that a "holon" can move.
That's what we're going to get from future evolution. All of those forces are still in play including "self-organization", so we do have this drive towards increasing wholeness and that goes all the way up and all the way down. So that's my general take on Evolution now and what's working out and I'm tracking that from the very beginning of creating these various types of Integral models.
RAQUEL
Because of these Evolution, you were saying that your Integral Theory, if I understood well, has kept on evolving as Evolution itself has done?
KEN
That's right, that's right and I have done it intentionally as I saw what was happening in each evolutionary stage of growth and development. I was intentionally looking at exactly how do those transformations occur, what's actually occurring! This is what brought me to agree with Ernst Becker that the denial of death is one of the main drivers of human beings and because you see this on every stage of development I would say that you have Translation in the horizontal and you have Transformation in the vertical and I would say that as Translation breaks down and dies Transformation occurs and so each stage of development is marked by a type of death that permits the Transformation. I started looking for that and I could find it everywhere, when I started looking for it. It's typical of multiple intelligences if you actually start using them, you can see what they're meant to see, everywhere. I discovered this when I first encounter multiple intelligences.
Most of the pioneering Developmentalists didn't understand that we had multiple intelligences so each one of the pioneers selected their favorite multiple intelligence and they studied the development of that; so Piaget focused on cognitive development Kohlberg focused on moral development. Loevinger focussed on ego development, Maslow focused on motivational needs development and so on. Then in the 60s and 70s when multiple intelligences became well known I think it was through Howard Gardner's book called: "Multiple Intelligences". He was out of Harvard at the time when he did that and I also hadn't paid much attention to multiple intelligences because no psychologist had and that's why none of them realized them.
RAQUEL
They are sort of like your: lines of development , right?
KEN
That's right, so what I would
do is I would pick each week a different day of the week and I would select one
multiple intelligence out of a dozen
or so that had been proposed and I would just work with that one all day long. The first multiple
intelligence I chose was aesthetic
intelligence or the perception of
beauty, so I said: " okay today I am going to see beauty wherever I
look" and I started in the morning looking for beauty and I couldn't find
it anywhere, but as the day went on, by the early afternoon I was starting to
see beauty in quite a few places, like:
we're right on the edge of the Rocky Mountains and I would look at them and see
the snow cap mountains and it was just was so beautiful! And then maybe I would
see a person and I think: "oh that person's really beautiful" and by
the end of the day, I was seeing beauty everywhere, really everywhere! It was
like. " wow wow this look for it has permit me to see that it's here and there
and there", so I included it and added as the last type of Wholeness and I called it: Opening Up.
That was when we opened up to
all of our multiple intelligences
because they're really important and if you're not looking for Beauty you're
not going to see it, if you're not looking for Morality you're not going to see
it, if you're not looking for Ethics you're not going to see it, if you're not
looking for… and you're on and on… you're not going to see it! Therefore, you've got to Open Up to all of your dimensions of intelligence if you actually
want to be fully intelligent and whole. It was a different type of wholeness and what I also noticed is of
these five types of wholeness that I
had recommended and that people engage with is that, they each offered a type
of wholeness and yet this one was a
very different type of wholeness and
that really sort of took me off guard because I wasn't expecting that at all. I mean we hadn't studied multiple intelligences so how was I to know? But as I looked into
it and started comparing, what is this wholeness? how does this wholeness compare with Waking Up or Growing Up or Cleaning
Up or Showing Up? I found
that each of them offers a real wholeness
but it's a very different type of wholeness. So Waking
Up offers us almost all of what the world's mystical traditions talk about
the two truths we have. Two fundamental truths available to us, one
is Absolute truth which is an
infinite eternal all present truth and then we have a Relative truth which is water is H2O ( two hydrogen atoms one
oxygen atom) and that applies to all the truths in the relative world. Absolute truth is applicable to the
whole world so Absolute Truth is the
union of infinite with finite and Relative
Truth is just the truth that finite things have among each other so, that's
one type of wholeness. Then, we have Growing Up which is the major stages or
levels of development that each intelligence goes through. I often use Jean
Gebser's terms just because I become used to them but he labeled his major
stages: archaic magic mythic rational
pluralistic and integral and I agree with those but what kind of wholeness
are those?
Each stage in the developmental sequence transcend and includes its predecessor so what you're getting in each stage of development is a "holon" but the "holons" are getting bigger literally atoms are bigger than protons, molecules are bigger than atoms, single cell organisms are bigger than individual molecules, multicellular organisms are bigger than single cells and it just goes all the way up to the Tree of Life. So that's a different type of wholeness but it's a real wholeness and it's an important type of wholeness. It's a Relative wholeness but that doesn't mean it's not important.
As a matter of fact at about the same time that I finished my initial study of Developmental Psychology I had a spontaneous satori or spiritual unity experience I was about 13 or 14 at the time and what I had done is when I discovered Developmental Psychology it really blew me away I had no idea that I myself had gone through archaic to magic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral stages of development that just knocked me off my feet! I couldn't believe it but as I looked over it I retraced. I said: "yeah I have gone through all of that and as a matter of fact every human being alive has gone through those stages". When I had my mystical experience it was such a profound sense of unity and wholeness I was one with everything, one with the entire universe and so I immediately started looking around for where can I study this kind of stuff? And then I ran into Zen Buddhism and I was attracted to Zen initially.
I eventually became more taken
with Tibetan Buddhism but there's
still both forms of Mahayana Buddhism.
What really attracted me to Zen is it
only had one purpose and one purpose only and that was to get you to have a
mystical experience and, that was it! Once you had your mystical experience you
could leave it if you wanted, meaning, you've got it!!! I couldn't see anything
better, and I thought: "man, this is exactly the stuff I want". So I
started looking for Zen masters and I actually found many of them. This was in
the 60s, so-called: "psychedelics 60s" where everybody was interested
in consciousness for one reason or another and Zen masters from Japan were
pouring into America because so many kids wanted to study something that would
give them this mystical consciousness, mystical unity consciousness; this union with absolute truth.
I found several and ended up
studying with some of them but the one time that I remember specially was when
I first found the so-called: 10 Zen Ox
herding pictures. They are 10 frames or drawings showing the 10 major
stages of having a Waking Up
experience and I saw those 10 stages and what I had myself doing -when I was
studying Developmental Psychology- is
that I would take dozens of models of Developmental
Psychology -including over a hundred that I included in Integral Psychology- and what I would do
is, every time I would find a new developmental model, I would get those big
yellow legal pads and I would take one yellow sheet and just write down the
names of the stages that this model included, so Piaget would be: sensory motor intelligence, pre-operational intelligence, concrete
operational intelligence, formal
operational intelligence and systemic
intelligence. Thus, what I would do then with those yellow pages was to
tear them off and laid them on the floor. By the time I was done -because
eventually remember I had over a hundred developmental models- these yellow
pages were all over my apartment, I mean
I couldn't walk without stepping on them! And this was what I did each morning.
I would get up and before I
brushed my teeth or ate breakfast or got coffee or anything like that, I just
walked through the house and look at all of the names that I had written down,
because I was certain of around eight to ten names that almost all of the
models had; some version of these eight to ten stages I was looking for. So
when I got into Zen and found the 10 Zen
Ox Herding Pictures I thought: "hey they found my same 10 stages, I'm
going to be really famous for this discovery" and that's how I thought for
a while. Then the more I looked at it,
the more I realized they were really quite different that these stages of Waking Up, as it had to do with the first
person state of consciousness, with these different perspectives of
consciousness that are so common. We
actually give them names, we call them: first,
second, third person pronouns. For example, first person pronoun
represents the perspective of the person who's speaking so it's an I, me, mine
person pronoun, second person is the
perspective of the person being spoken to so that's you, yours, not mine, third person is the person or then being
spoken about, so what's fourth person?
Because there are some scales of these pronouns who go up to seven or eight
person perspectives, as Jane Loevinger, for example. She has studied stages of
ego development and she has seven or eight major stages that everybody goes
through in a full realm of ego development and she found that each one of her
stages added a broader perspective.
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