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Foreword by Tony Schwartz
Preface to the Second Edition
A Note to the Reader
Introduction
1. The Pattern That Connects
The Kosmos
Twenty Tenets: The Patterns That Connect
Agency and Communion
Transcendence and Dissolution
Four Drives of All Holons
Creative Emergence
Holarchy
The Way of All Embrace
2. The Secret Impulse
Higher and Lower
Depth and Span
Kosmic Consciousness
The Spectrum of Consciousness
3. All Too Human
Foraging
Horticultural
Agrarian
Industrial
4. The Great Postmodern Revolution
The Postmodern Watershed Two Paths in Postmodernity
On the Edge of Tomorrow
Transcendence and Repression
5. The Four Corners of the Kosmos
The Four Quadrants
Intentional and Behavioral
Cultural and Social
An Example
The Shape of Things to Come
6. The Two Hands of God
Mind and Brain
The Left- and Right-Hand Paths
The Monological Gaze: The Key to the Right-Hand Paths
Interpretation: The Key to the Left-Hand Paths
What Does That Dream Mean?
Social Science versus Cultural Understanding
Hermeneutics
All Interpretation Is Context-Bound
Nonhuman Interpretation
Spiritual Interpretation
brary
A Brief History of Everything
7. Attuned to the Kosmos
Propositional Truth
Truthfulness
Justness
Functional Fit
Conclusion: The Four Faces of Spirit
8. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful The Big Three
The Good News: Differentiation of the Big Three
The Bad News: Dissociation of the Big Three
The Task of Postmodernity: Integration of the Big Three
The Spiritual Big Three
PART TWO: THE FURTHER REACHES OF SPIRIT-IN-ACTION
9. The Evolution of Consciousness
Higher Stages of Development
Ladder, Climber, View
Basic Levels: The Ladder The Self: The Climber
A Fulcrum
New Worlds Emerge: Changing Views
Pathology
States and Stages
Flatland Religion Freud and Buddha
10. On the Way to Global: Part 1
The Primary Matrix
Birth Trauma
The False Self
Fulcrum-1: The Hatching of the Physical Self Fulcrum-2: The Birth of the Emotional Self Fulcrum-3: The Birth of the Conceptual Self
Every Neurosis Is an Ecological Crisis
Early Worldviews: Archaic, Magic, Mythic
Fulcrum-4: The Birth of the Role Self Paradigm Shifts
Satanic Abuse and UFOs
11. On the Way to Global: Part 2
Evolution versus Egocentrism
Fulcrum-4 (Continued): Life's Social Scripts Fulcrum-5: The Worlacentric or Mature Ego
Diversity and Multiculturalism
Fulcrum-6: The Bodymind Integration of the Centaur Aperspectival Madness
On the Brink of the Transpersonal
12. Realms of the Superconscious: Part 1
Where the Mind Leaves Offi
The Transpersonal Stages Fulcrum-7: The Psychic
Deep Ecology and Ecofeminism
The Enneagram and the Basic Skeleton Fulcrum-8: The Subtle Jung and the Archetypes
13. Realms of the Superconscious: Part 2
Fulcrum-9: The Causal
The Nondual
The Immediacy of Pure Presence
Enlightenment
PART THREE: BEYOND FLATLAND
14. Ascending and Descending
A Brief Summary
The Great Holarchy
This-Worldly versus Otherworldly
Wisdom and Compassion
God and Goddess
Two Different Gods
The Descended Grid
15. The Collapse of the Kosmos
The Dignity of Modernity
The Disaster of Modernity
Instrumental Rationality: A World of Its
The Fundamental Enlightenment Paradigm
No Spirit, No Mind, Only Nature The Voice of the Industrial Grid
16. The Ego and the Eco
Ego versus Eco
The Flatland Twins
The Ego's Truth
The Ego's Problem
The Ego and Repression
The Re-enchantment of the World
Back to Nature
The Eco and Regression
Paradise Lost
The Way Back Machine
The Great Battle of Modernity: Fichte versus Spinoza
17. The Dominance of the Descenders
Evolution: The Great Holarchy Unfolds in Time
Evolution: Spirit-in-Action
Glimmers of the Nondual
Always Already
The Fading of the Vision
The Dominance of the Descenders
The Internet
The Religion of Gaia
18. An Integral Vision
The Writing on the Wall
The Superman Self
The Great-Web Gaia Self
Beyond the Postmodern Mind
World Transformation and the Culture Gap
Environmental Ethics: Holonic Ecology
The Basic Moral Intuition
An Integral Vision
Afterword by Lana Wachowski and Ken Wilber
Appendix: The Twenty Tenets
Index
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PART ONE Spirit-in -Action
- 1 The Pattern That Connects
Q: So we'll start the story with the Big Bang itself, and then trace out the course of evolution from matter to life to mind. And then, with the emergence of mind, or human consciousness, we'll look at the five or six major epochs of human evolution itself. And all of this is set in the context of spirituality—of what spirituality means, of the various forms that it has historically taken, and the forms that it might take tomorrow. Sound right?
Kw: Yes, it's sort of a brief history of everything. This sounds altogether grandiose, but it's based on what I call "orienting general* izations," which simplifies the whole thing enormously.
Q: An orienting generalization is what, exactly?
K w: If we look at the various fields of human knowledge—from physics to biology to psychology, sociology, theology, and religion— certain broad, general themes emerge, about which there is actually very little disagreement.
For example, in the sphere of moral development, not everybody agrees with the details of Lawrence Kohlberg's moral stages, nor with the details of Carol Gilligan's reworking of Kohlberg's scheme. But there is general and ample agreement that human moral development goes through at least three broad stages.
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The human at birth is not yet socialized into any sort of moral system—it is "preconventional." The human then learns a general moral scheme that represents the basic values of the society it is raised in—it becomes "conventional." And with even further growth, the individual may come to reflect on his or her society and thus gain some modest distance from it, gain a capacity to criticize it or reform it—the individual is to some degree "postconventional."
Thus, although the actual details and the precise meanings of that developmental sequence are still hotly debated, everybody pretty much agrees that something like those three broad stages do indeed occur, and occur universally. These are orienting generalizations: they show us, with a great deal of agreement, where the important forests are located, even if we can't agree on how many trees they contain.
My point is that if we take these types of largely-agreed-upon orienting generalizations from the various branches of knowledge— from physics to biology to psychology to theology—and if we string these orienting generalizations together, we will arrive at some astonishing and often profound conclusions, conclusions that, as extraordinary as they might be, nonetheless embody nothing more than our already-agreed-upon knowledge. The beads of knowledge are already accepted: it is only necessary to string them together into a necklace.
Q: And so in these discussions we will build toward some sort of necklace.
K w: Yes, in a sense. In working with broad orienting generalizations, we can suggest a broad orienting map of the place of men and women in relation to Universe, Life, and Spirit. The details of this map we can all fill in as we like, but its broad outlines really have an awful lot of supporting evidence, culled from the orienting generalizations, simple but sturdy, from the various branches of human knowledge.
The Kosmos
Q: We'll follow the course of evolution as it unfolds through the various domains, from matter to life to mind. You call these three major domains matter or cosmos, life or the biosphere, and mind or
Connects I
the noosphere. And all of these domains together you call the "Kosmos.'
K w: Yes, the Pythagoreans introduced the term "Kosmos," which we usually translate as cosmos. But the original meaning of Kosmos was the patterned nature or process of all domains of existence, from matter to mind to God, and not merely the physical universe, which is usually what both "cosmos" and "universe" mean today.
So I would like to reintroduce this term, Kosmos. And, as you point out, the Kosmos contains the cosmos (or the physiosphere), the bios (or biosphere), psyche or nous (the noosphere), and theos (the theosphere or divine domain).
So, for example, we might haggle about where exactly it is that matter becomes life—or cosmos becomes bios—but as Francisco Varela points out, autopoiesis (or self-replication) occurs only in living systems. It is found nowhere in the cosmos, but only in the bios. It's a major and profound emergent—something astonishingly novel— and I trace several of these types of profound transformations or emergents in the course of evolution in the Kosmos.
Q: So in these discussions we're not interested in just the cosmos, but the Kosmos.
K w: Yes. Many cosmologies have a materialistic bias and prejudice: the physical cosmos is somehow supposed to be the most real dimension, and everything else is explained with ultimate reference to this material plane. But what a brutal approach that is! It smashes the entire Kosmos against the wall of reductionism, and all the domains except the physical slowly bleed to death right in front of your eyes.
Is this any way to treat a Kosmos?
No, I think what we want to do is Kosmology, not cosmology.
Twenty Tenets: The Patterns That Connect
Q: We can begin this Kosmology by reviewing the characteristics of evolution in the various realms. You have isolated twenty patterns that seem to be true for evolution wherever it occurs, from matter to life to mind.
Kw: Yes, that's right.
Q: Let's give a few examples of these twenty tenets to show what's
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involved. Tenet number 1 is that reality is composed of whole/parts, or "holons." Reality is composed of holons?
K w: Is that far out? Is this already confusing? No? Well, Arthur Koestler coined the term "holon" to refer to an entity that is itself a whole and simultaneously a part of some other whole. And if you start to look closely at the things and processes that actually exist, it soon becomes obvious that they are not merely wholes, they are also parts of something else. They are whole/parts, they are holons.
For instance, a whole atom is part of a whole molecule, and the whole molecule is part of a whole cell, and the whole cell is part of a whole organism, and so on. Each of these entities is neither a whole nor a part, but a whole/part, a holon.
And the point is, everything is basically a holon of some sort or another. There is a two-thousand-year-old philosophical squabble between atomists and wholists: which is ultimately real, the whole or the part? And the answer is, neither. Or both, if you prefer. There are only whole/parts in all directions, all the way up, all the way down.
There's an old joke about a King who goes to a Wiseperson and asks how it is that the Earth doesn't fall down. The Wiseperson replies, "The Earth is resting on a lion." "On what, then, is the lion resting?" "The lion is resting on an elephant." "On what is the elephant resting?" "The elephant is resting on a turtle." "On what is the . . . ?" "You can stop right there, Your Majesty. It's turtles all the way down."
Turtles all the way down, holons all the way down. No matter how far down we go, we find holons resting on holons resting on holons. Even subatomic particles disappear into a virtual cloud of bubbles within bubbles, holons within holons, in an infinity of probability waves. Holons all the way down.
Q: And all the way up, as you say. We never come to an ultimate Whole.
KW : That's right. There is no whole that isn't also simultaneously a part of some other whole, indefinitely, unendingly. Time goes on, and today's wholes are tomorrow's parts. . . .
Even the "Whole" of the Kosmos is simply a part of the next moment's whole, indefinitely. At no point do we have the whole, because there is no whole, there are only whole/parts forever.
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So the first tenet says that reality is composed neither of things nor processes, neither wholes nor parts, but whole/parts, or holons—all the way up, all the way down.
Q: So reality is not composed of, say, subatomic particles.
Kw: Of course not. To take that approach is profoundly reductionistic, because it is going to privilege the material, physical universe, and then everything else—from life to mind to spirit—has to be derived from subatomic particles, and this will never, never work.
But notice, a subatomic particle is itself a holon. And so is a cell. And so is a symbol, and an image, and a concept. What all of those entities are, before they are anything else, is a holon. So the world is not composed of atoms or symbols or cells or concepts. It is composed of holons.
Since the Kosmos is composed of holons, then if we look at what all holons have in common, then we can begin to see what evolution in all the various domains has in common. Holons in the cosmos, bios, psyche, theos—how they all unfold, the common patterns they all display.
Q: What all holons have in common. That is how you arrive at the twenty tenets.
K w: Yes, that's right.
Agency and Communion
Q: So tenet 1 is that the Kosmos is composed of holons. Tenet 2 is that all holons share certain characteristics.
K W : Yes. Because every holon is a whole/part, it has two "tendencies" or two "drives," we might say—it has to maintain both its wholeness and its partness.
On the one hand, it has to maintain its own wholeness, its own identity, its own autonomy, its own agency. If it fails to maintain and preserve its own agency, or its own identity, then it simply ceases to exist. So one of the characteristics of a holon, in any domain, is its agency, its capacity to maintain its own wholeness in the face of environmental pressures which would otherwise obliterate it. This is true for atoms, cells, organisms, ideas.
But a holon is not only a whole that has to preserve its agency, it is
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also a part of some other system, some other wholeness. And so, in addition to having to maintain its own autonomy as a whole, it simultaneously has to fit in as a part of something else. Its own existence depends upon its capacity to fit into its environment, and this is true from atoms to molecules to animals to humans.
So every holon has not only its own agency as a whole, it also has to fit with its communions as part of other wholes. If it fails at either—if it fails at agency or communion—it is simply erased. It ceases
Transcendence and Dissolution
Q: And that is part of tenet number I—each holon possesses both agency and communion. You call these the "horizontal" capacities of holons. What about the "vertical" capacities of holons, which you call "self-transcendence" and "self-dissolution?"
KW : Yes. If a holon fails to maintain its agency and its communions, then it can break down completely. When it does break down, it decomposes into its subhoions: cells decompose into molecules, which break down into atoms, which can be "smashed" infinitely under intense pressure. The fascinating thing about holon decomposition is that holons tend to dissolve in the reverse direction that they were built up. And this decomposition is "self-dissolution," or simply decomposing into subholons, which themselves can decompose into their subholons, and so on.
But look at the reverse process, which is the most extraordinary: the building-up process, the process of new holons emerging. How did inert molecules come together to form living cells in the first place?
The standard, glib, neo-Darwinian explanation of natural selection—absolutely nobody believes this anymore. Evolution clearly operates in part by Darwinian natural selection, but this process simply selects those transformations that have already occurred by mechanisms that absolutely nobody understands.
Q : For example?
K w: Take the standard notion that wings simply evolved from forelegs. It takes perhaps a hundred mutations to produce a func-
Connæts 23
tional wing from a leg—a half-wing will not do. A half-wing is no good as a leg and no good as a wing—you can't run and you can't fly. It has no adaptive value whatsoever. In other words, with a halfwing you are dinner. The wing will work only if these hundred mutations happen all at once, in one animal—and also these same mutations must occur simultaneously in another animal of the opposite sex, and then they have to somehow find each other, have dinner, a few drinks, mate, and have offspring with real functional wings.
Talk about mind-boggling. This is infinitely, absolutely, utterly mind-boggling. Random mutations cannot even begin to explain this. The vast, vast majority of mutations are lethal anyway; how are we going to get a hundred nonlethal mutations happening simultaneously? Or even four or five, for that matter? But once this incredible transformation has occurred, then natural selection will indeed select the better wings from the less workable wings—but the wings themselves? Nobody has a clue.
For the moment, everybody has simply agreed to call this "quantum evolution" or "punctuated evolution" or "emergent evolution"—radically novel and emergent and incredibly complex holons come into existence in a huge leap, in a quantum-like fashion—with no evidence whatsoever of intermediate forms. Dozens or hundreds of simultaneous nonlethal mutations have to happen at the same time in order to survive at all—the wing, for example, or the eyeball.
However we decide these extraordinary transformations occur, the fact is undeniable that they do. Thus, many theorists, like Erich Jantsch, simply refer to evolution as "self-realization through self-transcendence." Evolution is a wildly self-transcending process: it has the utterly amazing capacity to go beyond what went before. So evolution is in part a process of transcendence, which incorporates what went before and then adds incredibly novel components. The drive to selftranscendence is thus built into the very fabric of the Kosmos itself.
Four Drives ofAll Holons
Q: And that is the fourth "drive" of all holons. So we have agency and communion, operating "horizontally" on any level, and then
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"vertically" we have the move to a higher level altogether, which is self-transcendence, and the move to a lower level, which is self-disso. lution.
K W : Yes, that's right. Because all holons are whole/parts, they are subjected to various "pulls" in their own existence. The pull to be a whole, the pull to be a part, the pull up, the pull down: agency, communion, transcendence, dissolution. And tenet 2 simply says that all holons have these four pulls.
So that's an example of how the twenty tenets start. The rest of the twenty tenets look at what happens when these various forces play themselves out. The self-transcending drive produces life out of matter, and mind out of life. And the twenty tenets simply trace out all of these types of common patterns found in the evolution of holons wherever they appear—matter to life to mind, to maybe even higher stages. Maybe even spiritual stages, yes?
Q: So there is indeed some sort of unity to evolution.
K W : Yes, that would be part of the point. The continuous process of self-transcendence produces discontinuities, leaps, creative iumps. So there are both discontinuities in evolution—mind cannot be reduced to life, and life cannot be reduced to matter; and there are continuities—the common patterns that evolution takes in all these domains. And in that sense, yes, the Kosmos hangs together, unified by a single process. It is a uni-verse, one song.
Creative Emergence
Q : That one song you call Spirit-in-action, or God-in-the-making, which is a point want to come back to later. But for now, tenet number 3 states simply: Holons emerge.
K w: Yes. As we were saying, evolution is in part a self-transcend* ing process—it always goes beyond what went before. And in that novelty, in that emergence, in that creativity, new entities come into being, new patterns unfold, new holons issue forth. This extraordinary process builds unions out of fragments and wholes out of heaps. The Kosmos, it seems, unfolds in quantum leaps of creative emergence.
Connects
Q: Which is why one level cannot be reduced to its lower components, or why a holon cannot be reduced to its subholons.
K W : Yes. I mean, you can analyze the whole into its constituent parts, and that's a completely valid endeavor. But then you have parts, not the whole. You can take a watch apart and analyze its parts, but they won't tell you the time of day. It's the same with any holon. The wholeness of the holon is not found in any of its parts, and that puts an end to a certain reductionistic frenzy that has plagued Western science virtually from its inception. Particularly with the systems sciences, the realization has begun to sink into the scientific mind: we live in a universe of creative emergence.
Q: Although there are still reductionists around, the tide does seem to have turned. You hardly have to explain anymore why reductionism, in and by itself, is "bad." And nonreductionism means, in some sense, that the Kosmos is creative.
Kw: Amazing, isn't it? As "ultimate categories"—which means concepts that we need in order to think about anything else at all— Whitehead listed only three: creativity, one, many. (Since every holon is actually a one/many, those categories really come down to: creativity, holons.)
But the point is, as Whitehead put it, "The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty." New holons creatively emerge. Creativity, holons—those are some of the most basic categories that we need to think of before we can think about anything else at all!
So yes, that's tenet 3: holons emerge. And each holon has these four basic capacities—agency, communion, self-dissolution, self-transcendence—and so off we go, creating a Kosmos.
Q: This gets a little ahead of the story, so I don't want to pursue it too much right now. But you link creativity and Spirit.
K W : Well, what is creativity but another name for Spirit? If, as Whitehead said, creativity is an ultimate—you have to have it before you can have anything else—what is an "ultimate metaphysical ground" if not Spirit? For Spirit, I also use the Buddhist term "Emptiness," which we can talk about. But Spirit or Emptiness gives rise to form. New forms emerge, new holons emerge—and it's not out of thin air.
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We already saw that science agrees that self-transcendence is built into the very fabric of the universe. By any other name, what is that self-transcending creativity? Spirit, yes? Emptiness, creativity, holons. Q: There has also been a recent warming in some scientific circles to a more spiritual or idealistic reading of creation.
K w: In a certain sense. The Big Bang has made Idealists out of anybody who thinks. First there was absolutely nothing, then Bang! Something. This is beyond weird. Out of sheerest Emptiness, manifestation arises.
This is a nightmare for traditional science, because it puts a time limit on the silly chance mutations that were supposed to explain the universe. Remember the thousand monkeys and Shakespeare—an example of how chance could give rise to the ordered universe?
Q: Given enough time, the randomly typing monkeys would manage to type out a Shakespeare play.
K w: Given enough time! One computation showed that the chance for monkey power to produce a single Shakespeare play was one in ten thousand million million million million million million. So maybe that would happen in a billion billion years. But the universe doesn't have a billion billion years. It only has twelve billion years.
Wen, this changes everything. Calculations done by scientists from Fred Hoyle to F. B. Salisbury consistently show that twelve billion years isn't even enough to produce a single enzyme by chance.
In other words, something other than chance is pushing the universe. For traditional scientists, chance was their salvation. Chance was their god. Chance would explain all. Chance—plus unending time—would produce the universe. But they don't have unending time, and so their god fails them miserably. That god is dead. Chance is not what explains the universe; in fact, chance is what the universe is laboring mightily to overcome. Chance is exactly what the self* transcending drive of the Kosmos overcomes.
Q : Which is another way of saying that self-transcendence is built into the universe, or, as you put it, self-transcendence is one of the four drives of any holon.
K W : Yes, I think so. There is a formative drive, a telos, to the
Kosmos. It has a direction. It is going somewhere. Its ground is Empti-
Connects I 27
ness; its drive is the organization of Form into increasingly coherent holons. Emptiness, creativity, holons.
Q: Now the "religious creationists" have made quite a big deal out of this. They say it fits with the Bible and Genesis.
K w: Well, they have seized upon the increasingly obvious truth that the traditional scientific explanation will not cut it. Creativity, not chance, builds a Kosmos. But it does not follow that you can then equate creativity with your favorite and particular God. It does not follow that into this void you can postulate a God with all the specific characteristics that make you happy—God is the God of only the Jews, or only the Hindus, or only the indigenous peoples, and God is watching over me, and is kind, and just, and merciful, and so on. We have to be very careful about these types of limited and anthropomorphic characteristics, which is one of the reasons I prefer "Emptiness," which means unbounded or unqualifiable.
But the fundamentalists, the "creationists," seize upon these vacancies in the scientific hotel to pack the conference with their delegates. They see the opening—creativity is an absolute—and they equate that absolute with their mythic god, and they stuff this god with all the characteristics that promote their own egoic inclinations, starting with the fact that if you don't believe in this particular god, you fry in hell forever, which exactly reflects the state of mind of those who believe this brutal notion.
So we have to start simple, I think, and be very careful. There is a spiritual opening in the Kosmos. Let us be careful how we fill it. The simplest is: Spirit or Emptiness is unqualifiable, but it is not inert and unyielding, for it gives rise to manifestation itself: new forms emerge, and that creativity is ultimate. Emptiness, creativity, holons.
Let's leave it there for the time being, okay? We can come back to this topic as things unfold.
Holarchy
Q: Fair enough. So we just looked at tenet number 3, "Holons emerge." Tenet number 4 is: Holons emerge holarchically. Holarchy? K w: Koestler's term for hierarchy. Hierarchy today has a very bad
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reputation, mostly because people confuse dominator hierarchies with natural hierarchies.
A natural hierarchy is simply an order of increasing wholeness, such as: particles to atoms to cells to organisms, or letters to words to sentences to paragraphs. The whole of one level becomes a part of the whole of the next.
In other words, normal hierarchies are composed of holons. And thus, said Koestler, "hierarchy" should really be called "holarchy." He's absolutely right. Virtually all growth processes, from matter to life to mind, occur via natural holarchies, or orders of increasing holism and wholeness—wholes that become parts of new wholes—and that's natural hierarchy or holarchy.
Q : It's the dominator hierarchies that freak people out.
K w: With good reason, yes. When any holon in a natural hoiarchy usurps its position and attempts to dominate the whole, then you get a pathological or dominator hierarchy—a cancerous cell dominates the body, or a fascist dictator dominates the social system, or a repressive ego dominates the organism, and so on.
But the cure for these pathological holarchies is not getting rid of holarchy per se—which isn't possible anyway—but rather in arresting the arrogant holon and integrating it back into the natural holarchy, or putting it in its rightful place, so to speak. The critics of hierarchy—their names are legion—simply confuse these pathological holarchies with holarchies in general, and so they toss the baby with the bathwater.
Q : They claim in getting rid of hierarchies they are being holistic.
K w: Just the opposite. The only way you get a holism is via a holarchy. When holists say "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," that means the whole is at a higher or deeper level of organization than the parts alone—and that's a hierarchy, a holarchy. Separate molecules are drawn together into a single cell only by properties that supersede the molecules alone—the cell is holarchically arranged. And without holarchy, you simply have heaps, not wholes.
In other words, the so-called "holists" who deny holarchy are really "heapists." They're really reductionists in drag.
Q : But many feminists and many ecophilosophers claim that any sort of hierarchy or "ranking" is oppressive, even fascist. They say
onnects I
that all such value ranking is "old paradigm" or "patriarchal" or simply oppressive, and it ought to be replaced with a linking, not a ranking, worldview. They're extremely aggressive with this point; they hurl rather vicious accusations.
Kw: This is a bit disingenuous, because you can't avoid hierarchy. Even the antihierarchy theorists that you mention have their own hierarchy, their own ranking. Namely, they think linking is better than ranking. Well, that's a hierarchy, a ranking of values. But because they don't own up to this, then their hierarchy becomes unconscious, hidden, denied. Their hierarchy denies hierarchy. They have a ranking system that says ranking is bad.
Q: You call this a "performative contradiction."
K W : Yes, the point is that the antihierarchy stance is profoundly self-contradictory, which is also why these theorists all too often take on such a hypocritical stance. They have a hierarchy; it's just unconscious and poorly thought out. With this stealth hierarchy they attack all other hierarchies, and they are very pleased with themselves because they are "free" of all that nasty ranking. So they rancorously denounce others for doing precisely what they themselves are doing but won't admit. It's an altogether unpleasant affair.
Q : But hierarchy has been put to many abuses, as you yourself have explained at length.
K w: Yes, but the point is not to get rid of hierarchies or holarchies altogether—that's impossible. Trying to get rid of ranking is itself a ranking. Denying hierarchy is itself a hierarchy. Precisely because the Kosmos is composed of holons, and holons exist holarchically, you can't escape these nested orders. Rather, we want to tease apart normal holarchies from pathological or dominator holarchies.
Q: So holarchies really are inescapable.
KW : Yes, because holons are inescapable. All evolutionary and developmental patterns proceed by holarchization, by a process of increasing orders of wholeness and inclusion, which is a type of ranking by holistic capacity. This is why the basic principle of holism is holarchy: the higher or deeper dimension provides a principle, or a "glue," or a pattern, that unites and links otherwise separate and conflicting and isolated parts into a coherent unity, a space in which
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separate parts can recognize a common wholeness and thus escape the fate of being merely a part, merely a fragment.
So linking is indeed important, but linking is itself set within ranking and holarchy, and can exist only because of holarchy, which provides the higher or deeper space in which the linking and joining can occur. Otherwise heaps, not wholes.
And when a particular holon usurps its position in any holarchy— when it wants to be only a whole, and not also a part—then that natural or normal holarchy degenerates into a pathological or dominator holarchy, which by any other name is illness, pathology, disease—whether physical, emotional, social, cultural, or spiritual. And we want to "attack" these pathological hierarchies, not in order to get rid of hierarchy per se, but in order to allow the normal or natural hierarchy to emerge in its place and continue its healthy growth and development.
The Way ofAll Embrace
Q : Okay, here is what we have so far. The Kosmos is composed of holons, ail the way up, all the way down. All holons have four fundamental capacities—agency and communion, transcendence and dissolution. Holons emerge. Holons emerge holarchically.
K W : Yes, those are the first four tenets.
Q : So now we have tenet 5: Each emergent holon transcends but includes its predecessor(s).
K W : For example, the cell transcends—or goes beyond—its molecular components, but also includes them, obviously. Molecules transcend and include atoms, which transcend and include particles. . . .
The point is that since all holons are whole/parts, the wholeness transcends but the parts are included. In this transcendence, heaps are converted into wholes; in the inclusion, the parts are equally embraced and cherished, linked in a commonality and a shared space that relieves each of the burden of being a fragment.
And so yes, evolution is a process of transcend and include, transcend and include. And this begins to open onto the very heart of Spirit-in-action, the very secret of the evolutionary impulse.
-2 The Secret Impulse
Q: The secret impulse of evolution?
Kw: A molecule transcends and includes atoms. Transcends, in that it has certain emergent or novel or creative properties that are not merely the sum of its components. This is the whole point of systems theory and holism in general, that new levels of organization come into being, and these new levels cannot be reduced in all ways to their junior dimensions—they transcend them. But they also include them, because the junior holons are nonetheless components of the new holon. So, transcends and includes.
Q: So the higher has the essentials of the lower, plus something extra.
Kw: Yes, that's another way of putting it, which Aristotle first pointed out—all of the lower is in the higher but not all of the higher is in the lower, which is what invariably establishes hierarchy or holarchy. Cells contain molecules, but not vice versa. Molecules contain atoms, but not vice versa. Sentences contain words, but not vice versa. And it is this not vice versa that establishes a hierarchy, a holarchy, an order of increasing wholeness.
I
Higher and Loøer
Q: There is so much bitter argument over a level being "higher" or "lower" than another. And yet you give a simple rule for establish* ing higher and lower in any sequence.
K W : Well, take any evolutionary development, say, atoms to molecules to cells to organisms. This is a sequence of increasing whole* ness, increasing holons, each of which transcends and includes its predecessor. Now if, in a type of thought experiment, you "destroy" any particular type of holon, then all of the higher holons will also be destroyed, but none of the lower holons will be destroyed. And this simple thought experiment can help you spot what is higher, and what is lower, in any sequence.
So, for example, if you destroyed all the molecules in the universe, then all of the higher levels—cells and organisms—would also be destroyed. But none of the lower holons—atoms and subatomic particles—none of them would be destroyed.
Q : Yes, I see. So "higher" and "lower" organization is not merely a relative "value judgment."
K w: That's right. We're talking about levels of structural organization, and there is nothing arbitrary about that ho\archy. It is not an invention of patriarchal obnoxiousness or fascist ideology. If you destroy any particular type of holon, then all of the higher holons are also destroyed, because they depend in part on the lower holons for their own components. But the lower holons can get along perfectly well without the higher: atoms can exist just fine without molecules, but molecules cannot exist without atoms. A simple rule, but it quite clearly establishes just what is higher, and what is lower, in terms of any holarchy.
This rule works for any developmental sequence, for any hoiarchy—moral development, language acquisition, biological speciation, computer programs, nucleic acid translations. There are no exceptions, by virtue of the simple way that wholes depend upon parts, but not vice versa. And "not vice versa," as we were saying, is holarchy, or an order of increasing wholeness.
Q : This is how you demonstrate that the biosphere is higher than the physiosphere.
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K w: Yes, if you destroy the biosphere—that is, if you destroy all life forms—then the cosmos or physiosphere could and would still exist. But if you destroy the physiosphere, the biosphere is instantly destroyed as well. This happens because the biosphere transcends and includes the physiosphere, and not vice versa. And so yes, the physiosphere is a lower level of structural organization than the biosphere. That is the meaning of higher and lower organization. And the bios is higher, the cosmos is lower.
Q: In the same way, the noosphere is higher than the biosphere.
KW : In exactly the same way. The noosphere begins with the capacity to form any mental images, and this capacity begins with certain mammals, such as horses. But for this example, I'll confine the noosphere to more highly developed minds and human cultural productions, just to show what's involved—we get the same results either way.
The biosphere existed perfectly well for millions of years before human minds showed up, before the noosphere emerged. And if you destroyed that noosphere, the biosphere would and could still exist. But if you destroy the biosphere, then you destroy all human minds as well, because the biosphere is a part of the noosphere—and not vice versa. So yes, the biosphere is a lower level of structural organization than the noosphere. The noosphere transcends and includes the biosphere, it is not merely a part of the biosphere. That's rank reductionism.
Q: So the physiosphere is part of the higher wholeness of the biosphere, which is part of the higher wholeness of the noosphere, and not the other way around. KW: Yes.
Depth and Span
Q: But why do so many people picture it backward?
K W : Probably because people confuse size or span with depth. And people think that great span means great depth, and this is precise\y backward.
Q: So what exactly do "depth" and "span" refer to?
K W : The number of levels in any holarchy is referred to as its
depth, and the number of holons on any given level is referred to as its span.
Q: So if we say atoms have a depth of one, then molecules have a depth of two, cells a depth of three.
K W : Yes, along those lines. Exactly what we want to call a "level" is somewhat arbitrary. It's like a three-story house. We can count each floor as a level, which is what we usually do, so the house would have a depth of three—three levels. But we could also count each step in the stairs as a level. Maybe there are twenty steps between floors—we would then say that the house has sixty levels, or a depth of sixty.
But the point is that, although these scales are relative or arbitrary, the relative placements are not arbitrary. Whether we say the house has three levels or sixty levels, the second floor is still higher than the first floor. As long as we use the same relative scale, then no problems arise, just as we can use Fahrenheit or Celsius to measure water temperature, as long as we are consistent.
So we could say quarks have a depth of one, atoms a depth of two, crystals a depth of three, molecules a depth of four, and so on. The depth is real, no matter what relative scale we decide to use.
Q: So depth and span.
K w: What confuses people is that evolution actually produces greater depth and less span on succeeding levels. And people tend to confuse collective bigness or size or span with depth, and so they get the order of significance totally backward.
Q : Evolution produces greater depth, less span. That is actually tenet number 8 (we're skipping some of them). So could you give an example of this tenet?
K w: There are fewer organisms than cells; there are fewer cells than molecules; there are fewer molecules than atoms; there are fewer atoms than quarks. Each has a greater depth, but less span.
The reason, of course, is that because the higher transcends and includes the lower, there will always be less of the higher and more of the lower, and there are no exceptions. No matter how many cells there are in the universe, there will always be more molecules. No matter how many molecules in the universe, there will always be more atoms. No matter how many atoms, there will always be more quarks.
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So the greater depth always has less span than its predecessor. The individual holon has more and more depth, but the collective gets smaller and smaller. And since people think bigger is better, they tend to completely confuse the direction of significance, they invert the order of being. They turn reality on its head and end up worshipping bigger as better.
Q: A holon transcends and includes its predecessors—it has greater depth—but the population size of the greater depth becomes smaller. The so-called pyramid of development.
K w: Yes. Figure z-1 is from Ervin Laszlo's Evolution: The Grand Synthesis, which is generally considered to be a clear and accurate summary of the modern scientific view of evolution, such as it is. But you can see the pyramid of evolution very clearly. Where matter is favorable, life emerges; where life is favorable, mind emerges. (I would add, where mind is favorable, Spirit emerges.)
In the diagram, you can actually see that the vertical depth becomes greater, but the horizontal span becomes less. Interestingly, the perennial philosophy reached the same conclusion, in its own way.
Q: The perennial philosophy being . . . ?
K w: We might say it's the core of the world's great wisdom tradi-
relative abundance of systems (scale illustrative onEy)
FIGURE The realms of evolution. From Ervin Laszlo, Evolution: The Grand Synthesis (Boston: Shambhala, 1987), p. 5 5.
tions. The perennial philosophy maintains that reality is a Great Holarchy of being and consciousness, reaching from matter to life to mind to Spirit. Each dimension transcends and includes its junior dimension in a nested holarchy, often represented by concentric circles or spheres. This "transcend and include" is indicated in figure 2-2.
Each level includes its predecessor and then adds its own emergent qualities, qualities that are not found in the previous dimension. So each succeeding dimension is "bigger" in the sense of greater embrace, greater depth. And we will see that an individual holon's identity actually expands to include more and more of the Kosmos— precisely as shown in figure 2-2.
But since the actual span of the succeeding holons becomes less and less—the number of holons at each higher level becomes smaller—then this same diagram is often drawn in exactly the opposite fashion, as in figure 2-3. Greater depth means fewer holons reach that depth—means less span—and so the actual population size be-
FIGURE 2-2. Greater depth.
maya-kosha
matter
prana life
fnano mind
soul ananda
5
3
2
Sheath Body
. anna-maya„kosha (fnateriai)
2. prana-maya-kosha (vitality) sthula-sharira
3. mano-maya-kosha (rationality) sukshma-sharira
4. vijnana-rnaya-kosha (intuition) (subtle)
5. ananda.maya-kosha (bliss) karana-sharira
(causal)
Brahman-Arman
FIGURE 2-3. Less span.
comes smaller and smaller, as indicated in figure 2-3, which is the perennial philosophy's version of the pyramid of development.
Q: So we need to remember both of these progressions—greater depth, less span.
K W : Yes. In discussing evolution, perhaps we can keep both of these diagrams in mind. The first diagram indicates "transcend and include''—an actual increase in embrace, inclusion, identity, enfolding—which gets "larger" in the sense of "deeper": it contains or enfolds more and more levels or dimensions of reality internal to it, as part of its very makeup, its very being, its compound individuality, and so it is more significant: it signifies or indicates that more and more of the Kosmos is internal to it, just as a molecule internally contains atoms, actually enfolds them in its own being.
But the second diagram reminds us that the number of holons that actually realize these deeper dimensions becomes smaller and smaller. Figure 2-2 is depth, figure 2-3 is span. The one gets bigger, the other gets smaller. Greater depth, less span.
Kosmic Consciousness
Q: But the highest level—Spirit. Isn't Spirit everywhere? It's not a level, it's everywhere.
K w: Each level transcends and includes its predecessor. Spirit transcends all, so it includes all. It is utterly beyond this world, but utterly embraces every single holon in this world. It permeates all of manifestation but is not merely manifestation. It is ever-present at every level or dimension, but is not merely a particular level or dimension. Transcends all, includes all, as the groundless Ground or Emptiness of all manifestation.
So Spirit is both the highest "level" in the holoarchy, but it's also the paper on which the entire holarchy is written. It's the highest rung in the ladder, but it's also the wood out of which the entire ladder is made. It is both the Goal and the Ground of the entire sequence. I think this will become more obvious as we proceed.
Q: I don't want to get ahead of the story, but this also leads to an environmental ethics.
K W : Yes, the point of a genuine environmental ethics is that we are supposed to transcend and include all holons in a genuine embrace. Because human beings contain matter and life and mind, as components in their own makeup, then of course we must honor all of these holons, not only for their own intrinsic worth, which is the most important, but also because they are components in our own being, and destroying them is literally suicidal for us. It's not that harming the biosphere will eventually catch up with us and hurt us from the outside. It's that the biosphere is literally internal to us, is a part of our very being, our compound individuality—harming the biosphere is internal suicide, not just some sort of external problem.
So we can have a profoundly ecological view without being merely
ecological, or reducing everything to the simple biosphere. We need an approach that transcends and includes ecology—precisely because the noosphere transcends and includes the biosphere, which transcends and includes the physiosphere. We don't need an approach that simply privileges ecology in a regressive flattening to one-dimensional life, to the flatland web of life.
Q: But many ecophilosophers and ecofeminists refer to mystical oneness with all nature, to what Bucke called "cosmic consciousness," where all beings are seen in an equal light, with no hierarchy at all, no higher or lower, just the great web of life.
K W : Yes, that type of mystical experience of equality is common in the higher stages of human development.
But there are two very different issues here. Human identity can indeed expand to include the All—let's call it Kosmic consciousness, the unio mystica—just as in figure 2-2. Individual identity expands to Spirit and thus embraces the Kosmos—transcends all, includes all. And that is fine. But the number of humans actually realizing that supreme identity is very, very, very small. In other words, this very great depth has a very small span. As always, greater depth, less span.
But in that experience, the conscious identity is indeed an identity with the All, with the Kosmos. And in that identity, all beings, high or low, sacred or profane, are indeed seen to be perfect manifestations of Spirit, precisely as they are—no lower, no higher. The ultimate depth is an ultimate oneness with the All, with the Kosmos.
But this realization is not given equally to all beings, even though all beings are equally manifestations of Spirit. This realization is the result of a developmental and evolutionary process of growth and transcendence.
And the flatland web-of-life theorists simply focus on the equality of being and miss the holarchy of realization. They think that because a shrimp and an ape are both perfect manifestations of the Divine— which they are—then there is no difference in depth between them, which is reductionistic in the most painful and embarrassing fashion.
So we want our environmental ethics to honor all holons without exception as manifestations of Spirit, and also, at the same time, be able to make pragmatic distinctions in intrinsic worth, and realize that it is much better to kick a rock than an ape, much better to eat a carrot than a cow, much better to subsist on grains than on mammals.
If you agree with those statements, then you are acknowledging gradations in depth, gradations in intrinsic value—you are acknowledging a holarchy of value. Most ecophilosophers agree with those statements, but they can't say why, because they have a hierarchy that denies hierarchy—they have only the flatland web of life and bioequality, which is not only self-contradictory, it paralyzes pragmatic action and cripples intrinsic values.
The Spectrum of Consciousness
Q: Okay, I very much want to come back to all of that (in Part Three), but we need to stay on course. We were talking about the direction of evolution, the telos of the Kosmos, which is not random chance, but directionality.
K W : Evolution has a direction, yes, a principle of order out of chaos, as it is commonly phrased. In other words, a drive toward greater depth. Chance is defeated, meaning emerges—the intrinsic value of the Kosmos increases with each unfolding.
Q: That's actually tenet 12, which is the last tenet want to discuss. In that tenet, you give various indicators of directionality in evolution, which I'll just list. Evolution has a broad and general tendency to move in the direction of: increasing complexity, increasing differentiation/integration, increasing organization/structuration, increasing relative autonomy, increasing telos.
K W : Yes, those are some of the typically accepted—that is, scientifically accepted—directions of evolution. This doesn't mean that regression and dissolution don't occur—they do (dissolution is one of the four capacities of any holon). And it doesn't mean that every short-term development must follow those directions. As Michael Murphy says, evolution meanders more than it progresses. But over the long haul, evolution has a broad telos, a broad direction, which is particularly obvious with increasing differentiation—an atom to an amoeba to an ape!
But all of those scientific descriptions can generally be summarized as: the basic drive of evolution is to increase depth. This is the self-
transcending drive of the Kosmos—to go beyond what went before, and yet include what went before, and thus increase its own depth.
Q: Now you also tie this in with consciousness. Because you add, "the greater the depth of a holon, the greater its degree of consciousness. "
K w: Yes. Consciousness and depth are synonymous. All holons have some degree of depth, however minor, because there is no bottom. And with evolution, depth becomes greater and greater— consciousness becomes greater and greater. However much depth atoms have, molecules have more. And cells have more depth than molecules. And plants have more than cells. And primates more than plants.
There is a spectrum of depth, a spectrum of consciousness. And evolution unfolds that spectrum. Consciousness unfolds more and more, realizes itself more and more, comes into manifestation more and more. Spirit, consciousness, depth—so many words for the same thing.
Q: Since depth is everywhere, consciousness is everywhere.
K w: Consciousness is simply what depth looks like from the inw side, from within. So yes, depth is everywhere, consciousness is everywhere, Spirit is everywhere. And as depth increases, consciousness increasingly awakens, Spirit increasingly unfolds. To say that evolution produces greater depth is simply to say that it unfolds greater consciousness.
Q : You use "unfolds and enfolds."
K w: Spirit is unfolding itself in each new transcendence, which it also enfolds into its own being at the new stage. Transcends and includes, brings forth and embraces, creates and loves, Eros and Agape, unfolds and enfolds—different ways of saying the same thing.
So we can summarize all this very simply: because evolution goes beyond what went before, but because it must embrace what went before, then its very nature is to transcend and include, and thus it has an inherent directionality, a secret impulse, toward increasing depth, increasing intrinsic value, increasing consciousness. In order for evolution to move at all, it must move in those directions—there's no place else for it to go!
Q: The general point being. . . ?
K w: Well, several. For one, because the universe has direction, we ourselves have direction. There is meaning in the movement, intrinsic value in the embrace. As Emerson put it, we lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which by any other name is Spirit. There is a theme inscribed on the original face of the Kosmos. There is a pattern written on the wall of Nothingness. There is a meaning in its every gesture, a grace in its every glance.
We—and all beings as such—are drenched in this meaning, afloat in a current of care and profound value, ultimate significance, intrinsic awareness. We are part and parcel of this immense intelligence, this Spirit-in-action, this God-in-the-making. We don't have to think of God as some mythic figure outside of the display, running the show. Nor must we picture it as some merely immanent Goddess, lost in the forms of her own production. Evolution is both God and Goddess, transcendence and immanence. It is immanent in the process itself, woven into the very fabric of the Kosmos; but it everywhere transcends its own productions, and brings forth anew in every moment.
Q: Transcends and includes.
K w: Indeed. And we are invited, I believe, to awaken as this process. The very Spirit in us is invited to become self-conscious, or even, as some would say, superconscious. Depth increases from subconscious to self-conscious to superconscious, on the way to its own shocking recognition, utterly one with the radiant All, and we awaken as that oneness.
What do you think? Is that crazy? Are the mystics and sages insane? Because they all tell variations on this same story, don't they? The story of awakening one morning and discovering that you are one with the All, in a timeless and eternal and infinite fashion.
Yes, maybe they are crazy, these divine fools. Maybe they are mumbling idiots in the face of the Abyss. Maybe they need a nice understanding therapist. Yes, I'm sure that would help.
But then, wonder. Maybe the evolutionary sequence really is from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, each transcending and including, each with a greater depth and greater consciousness and wider embrace. And in the highest reaches of evolution, maybe, just maybe, an individual's consciousness does indeed touch infinity—a total embrace of the entire Kosmos—a Kosmic consciousness that is Spirit awakened to its own true nature.
It's at least plausible. And tell me: is that story, sung by mystics and sages the world over, any crazier than the scientific materialism story, which is that the entire sequence is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing? Listen very carefully: just which of those two stories actually sounds totally insane?
I'll tell you what I think. I think the sages are the growing tip of the secret impulse of evolution. I think they are the leading edge of the self-transcending drive that always goes beyond what went before. I think they embody the very drive of the Kosmos toward greater depth and expanding consciousness. I think they are riding the edge of a light beam racing toward a rendezvous with God.
And I think they point to the same depth in you, and in me, and in all of us. I think they are plugged into the All, and the Kosmos sings through their voices, and Spirit shines through their eyes. And I think they disclose the face of tomorrow, they open us to the heart of our own destiny, which is also already right now in the timelessness of this very moment, and in that startling recognition the voice of the sage becomes your voice, the eyes of the sage become your eyes, you speak with the tongues of angels and are alight with the fire of a realization that never dawns nor ceases, you recognize your own true Face in the mirror of the Kosmos itself: your identity is indeed the All, and you are no longer part of that stream, you are that stream, with the All unfolding not around you but in you. The stars no longer shine out there, but in here. Supernovas come into being within your heart, and the sun shines inside your awareness. Because you transcend all, you embrace all. There is no final Whole here, only an endless process, and you are the opening or the clearing or the pure Emptiness in which the entire process unfolds—ceaselessly, miraculously, everlastingly, lightly.
The whole game is undone, this nightmare of evolution, and you are exactly where you were prior to the beginning of the whole show. With a sudden shock of the utterly obvious, you recognize your own Original Face, the face you had prior to the Big Bang, the face of utter Emptiness that smiles as all creation and sings as the entire Kosmos— and it is all undone in that primal glance, and all that is left is the smile, and the reflection of the moon on a quiet pond, late on a crystal clear night.
3 All Too Human
Q: The superconscious is a little ahead of our story! We have basically just covered evolution up to the emergence of human beings, the blossoming of the noosphere. You point out that each of the major stages of the evolution of human consciousness also follow the twenty tenets. So there is an overall continuity to evolution, from physiosphere to biosphere to noosphere.
K w: Which makes sense, doesn't it? And as evolution moves into the noosphere, then—based on the work of numerous researchers, such as Jean Gebser, Pitirim Sorokin, Robert Bellah, Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Peter Berger, to name a few—we can outline the predominant "worldviews" of the various epochs of human development. These stages, these worldviews, may be summarized as archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and existential.
Q: Which you also correlate with the major stages of technological/economic development.
KW : Yes, which are: foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial, and informational. (You can see these on figure 5-2 on page 74 and on the spread preceding the title page.)
Q : In each of those stages, you outline the types of economic pro,
44
duction, the worldview, the modes of technology, the moral outlook, the legal codes, the types of religion . . .
K w: And here is where we also begin to look at the status of men and women in each of those stages. Because the relative status of men and women has varied tremendously across these stages, and the idea is to search for various factors that contributed to these changes.
Q: Which includes the "patriarchy."
K W : Well, yes. Based on the exciting work of recent feminist researchers, such as Kay Martin, Barbara Voorhies, Joyce Nielsen, and Janet Chafetz, we can fairly well reconstruct the relative status of men and women in each of these five or so major evolutionary stages of human development.
If we pull all of these sources together, we have: the five or six major stages of techno-economic evolution, as outlined, for example, by Gerhard Lenski; the relative status of men and women in each of those stages, as outlined by Chafetz and Nielsen and others; and the correlation with worldviews, as outlined by Gebser and Habermas.
Using these sources—and numerous others we needn 't go into—we can reach some fairly sturdy conclusions about the relative status of men and women in each of these stages, and, more important, we can isolate the factors that contributed to these differences in status.
Foraging
Q: Let's give a few examples here, to see exactly what you mean.
K W : In foraging societies (also called hunting and gathering), the roles of men and women were sharply delineated and sharply separated. Men, indeed, did most of the hunting, and women most of the gathering and child rearing. An astonishing 97 percent of foraging societies follow that rather rigid pattern.
But because there were few possessions—the wheel hadn't even been invented—there was no particular emphasis placed on either the male or female value sphere. Men's work was men's work, and women's work was women's, and never the twain shall cross—there were very strong taboos about that, especially about menstruating
46 1 Spirit-in-Action
women—but that didn't seem to be parlayed into any major sort of difference in status.
Because of this, these societies are eulogized by some feminists, but none of those feminists, think, would really enjoy the rigidity of the gender roles. Um, just the opposite, I think.
Q: These societies emerged when?
K w: Foraging societies first emerged somewhere between a million and four hundred thousand years ago. As Habermas points out, what separated the first humans from apes and hominids was not an economy or even tools, but rather the invention of the role of the father—what he calls "the familialization of the male." By participating in both the productive hunt and the reproductive family, the father bridged these two value spheres, and marked off the beginning point of specifically human evolution. Since the pregnant female did not participate in the hunt, this job fell to the male, whether he wanted it or not (mostly not, I would guess).
But with the familialization of the male, we would see the beginning of the single, great, enduring, and nightmarish task of all subsequent civilization: the taming of testosterone.
Fuck it or kill it, but now in service of the family man. This is very funny, don't you think? In any event, the tribal structure has this family or kinship lineage, and different tribes, with different kinship lineages, have very, shall we say, testy relations with each other. You are on the fucking side or you are on the killing side.
The "carrying capacity" of these early foraging tribes was around forty people. The average life span, Lenski reports, was around 22.5 years. We are, of course, talking about the original tribal structure, and not about indigenous peoples today, who have been subjected to hundreds of thousands of years of further types of various development. But the basic tribal structure itself means a small group based specifically on kinship lineage, and a foraging tribe means one whose subsistence is based on pre-agriculture hunting and gathering.
The ecomasculinists (deep ecologists) are particularly fond of this period, mostly because the ecomasculinists take what they think they like from these societies and ignore everything else, as if you can pick and choose.
Q: They like these societies because they were ecologically sound.
Kw: Some primal tribal societies were ecologically sound, and some definitely were not. Some tribes practiced cut and slash and burn, and some were responsible for the extinction of numerous species. As Theodore Roszak points out in The Voice of the Earth, a "sacred" outlook toward nature did not in any way guarantee an ecologically sound culture, although there is a certain antimodern outlook that likes to imagine so.
Men and women, everywhere and at all times, have despoiled the environment, mostly out of simple ignorance. Even the highly revered Mayan culture disappeared largely through depleting the surrounding rain forests. Modernity's ignorance about the environment is much more serious, simply because modernity has many more powerful means to destroy the environment. Tribal ignorance, on the other hand, was usually milder; but ignorance is ignorance, and is certainly nothing to emulate. The lack of means in foraging societies does not simply equate with the presence of wisdom.
So it's true that some people today eulogize the primal tribal societies because of their "ecological wisdom" or their "reverence for nature" or their "nonaggressive ways." But don't think the evidence supports any of those views in a sweeping and general fashion. Rather, I eulogize the primal tribal societies for entirely different reasons: We are all the sons and daughters of tribes. The primal tribes are literally our roots, our foundations, the basis of all that was to follow, the structure upon which all subsequent human evolution would be built, the crucial ground floor upon which so much history would have to rest.
Today's existent tribes, and today's nations, and today's cultures, and today's accomplishments—all would trace their lineage in an unbroken fashion to the primal tribal holons upon which a human family tree was about to be built. And looking back on our ancestors in that light, I am struck with awe and admiration for the astonishing creativity—the original breakthrough creativity—that allowed humans to rise above a given nature and begin building a noosphere, the very process of which would bring Heaven down to Earth and exalt the Earth to Heaven, the very process of which would eventually bind all peoples of the world together in, if you will, one global tribe. But in order for that to occur, the original, primal tribes had to
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find a way to transcend their isolated tribal kinship lineages: they had to find a way to go trans-tribal, and agriculture, not hunting, provided the means for this new transcendence.
Horticultural
Q: So foraging eventually gave way to agriculture. You point out that there are two very different types of farming cultures— horticultural and agrarian.
Kw: Yes, horticultural is based on a hoe or simple digging stick. Agrarian is based on a heavy, animal-drawn plow.
Q: Sounds like a very small distinction, but you point out how momentous it was.
K w: Quite extraordinary, really. A digging stick or simple hoe can be used quite easily by a pregnant woman, and thus mothers were as capable as fathers of doing horticulture. Which they did. In fact, about 80 percent of the foodstuffs in these societies were produced by women (the men still went off and hunted, of course). Small surprise, then, that about one-third of these societies have female-only deities, and about one-third have male-and-female deities, and women's status in such societies was roughly equal with men's, although their roles were still, of course, sharply separated.
Q: These were matriarchal societies.
K w: Well, matrifocal. Matriarchal strictly means mother-ruled or mother„dominant, and there have never been any strictly matriarchal societies. Rather, these societies were more "equalitarian," with roughly equal status between men and women; and many such societies did indeed trace ancestry through the mother, and in other ways have a "matrifocal" arrangement. As I said, about one-third of these societies had female-only deities, particularly the Great Mother in her various guises, and conversely, virtually every known Great Mother society is horticultural. Almost any place you see the Great Mother religion, you know there is a horticultural background. This began roughly around 10,000 BCE. in both the East and West.
Q: This is the favorite period of the ecofeminists.
K w: Yes, these societies and a few maritime ones. Where the ecomasculinists love the foraging societies, the ecofeminists are quite fond of horticultural, Great Mother societies.
Q: Because they lived in harmony with the seasonal currents of nature, and in other ways were ecologically oriented.
K w: Yes, as long as you perform that annual ritual human sacrifice to keep the Great Mother happy and the crops growing, all was well with nature. Average life expectancy, according to Lenski's research, about twenty-five years, which is pretty natural as well.
You see, it's the same problem as with the ecomasculinists, who eulogize the previous foraging tribes because they were supposed to be in touch with unadulterated nature. But what is "unadulterated nature"? The ecofeminists claim that these early farming societies were living with the seasonal currents of nature, in touch with the land, which was pure nature not interfered with by humans. But the ecomasculinists vociferously condemn farming of any sort as the first rape of nature, because you are no longer just gathering what nature offers; you are planting, you are artificially interfering with nature, you are digging into nature and scarring her face with farming technology, you are starting to rape the land. The heaven of the ecofeminists is the beginning of hell according to the ecomasculinists.
So yes, the ecomasculinists maintain, horticulture belongs to the Great Mother, and it was under the auspices of the Great Mother that the horrible crime of farming began, the massive crime that tore into the earth and first established human arrogance over the ways of the gentle giant of nature. And eulogizing this period is simply human arrogance at its very worst, the argument goes.
Q: You don't eulogize either foraging or horticultural, it seems.
Kw: Well, evolution keeps moving, yes? Who are we to point to one period and say everything past that period was a colossal error, a heinous crime? According to whom, exactly? If we really are in the hands of the Great Spirit or the Great Mother, do we really think She doesn't know what She's doing? What kind of arrogance is that?
In any event, we're three or four major technological epochs down the line, and doubt evolution will run backward for us, no matter how much we pray.
Q: You refer often to "the dialectic of progress."
K w: Yes, the idea is that every stage of evolution eventually runs
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into its own inherent limitations, and these may act as for the self-transcending drive. The inherent limitations create a type of turmoil, even chaos, and the system either breaks down (self-dissolution) or escapes this chaos by evolving to a higher degree of order (self-transcendence)—so-called order out of chaos. This new and higher order escapes the limitations of its predecessor, but then introduces its own limitations and problems that cannot be solved on its own level.
In other words, there is a price to be paid for every evolutionary step forward. Old problems are solved or defused, only to introduce new and sometimes more complex difficulties. But the retrogressive Romantics—whether the ecomasculinists or the ecofeminists—simply take the problems of the subsequent level and compare them with the accomplishments of the previous level, and thus claim everything has gone downhill past their favorite epoch. This is pretty perverse.
I think we all want to honor and acknowledge the many great accomplishments of past cultures the world over, and attempt to retain and incorporate as much of their wisdom as we can. But the train, for better or worse, is in motion, and has been from day one, and trying to drive by looking only in the rearview mirror is likely to cause even worse accidents.
Q: You point out that our epoch, too, will only pass.
K w: No epoch is finally privileged. We are all tomorrow's food. The process continues. And Spirit is found in the process itself, not in any particular epoch or time or place.
Agrarian
Q: I want to come back to that in a moment. We were talking about horticultural societies and the eventual shift to agrarian. Even though both are farming, this shift from hoe to plow was actually momentous.
Kw: Quite extraordinary. Where a digging stick can easily be handled by a pregnant woman, an animal-drawn plow cannot. As Joyce Nielsen and Janet Chafetz have pointed out, those women who attempt to do so suffer significantly higher rates of miscarriage. In other words, it was to women's Darwinian advantage not to plow. And
thus, with the introduction of the plow, a massive, absolutely massive shift in culture began.
First, virtually all of the foodstuffs were now produced solely by men. Men didn't want to do this, and they did not "take away" or "oppress" the female work force in order to do so. Both men and women decided that heavy plowing was male work.
Women are not sheep; men are not pigs. This "patriarchy" was a conscious co-creation of men and women in the face of largely brutal circumstances. For the men, this certainly was no day at the beach, and was not nearly as much fun as, gosh, big-game hunting, which men had largely to give up. Furthermore, according to researchers such as Lenski and Chafetz, the men in these "patriarchal" societies had it considerably worse than the women, according to any number of objective "life quality" scales, starting with the fact that men alone were conscripted for defense, and men alone were asked to put life in jeopardy for the State. The idea that the patriarchy was an ole boys club that was nothing but fun, fun, fun for men is based on extremely poor research heavily infected with an intense ideology.
For what we really learn from these various societies is that when the sexes are heavily polarized—that is, when their value spheres are sharply divided and compartmentalized—then both sexes suffer horribly.
Q : Which is what happened with the patriarchy?
Kw: The polarization of the sexes, yes. Agrarian societies have the most highly sexually polarized structure of any known societal type. This was not a male plot, nor a female plot for that matter, but was simply the best that these societies could do under the technological form of their organization at that time.
Thus, when men began to be virtually the sole producers of foodstuffs, then—no surprise—the deity figures in these cultures switched from female-oriented to almost exclusively male-oriented. Over 90 percent of agrarian societies, wherever they appear, have solely male primary deities.
Q: In the book you say, "Where females work the field with a hoe, God is a Woman; where males work the field with a plow, God is a Man."
K w: Well, that's a quick summary, yes. God and Goddess might
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have more profound and more transpersonal meanings—which we can talk about later—but for the average mode of human consciousness at that time, those mythic images usually represented much more prosaic realities. They represented, in many cases, the bedrock techno-economic realities of the given society: who put food on the table.
Q: Where God is a Man—this is one of the meanings of "patriarchy."
Kw: Yes, and patriarchy, father rule, is correctly named. And here we briefly touch bases with Marx: Because of the social relations that began to organize themselves around the basic forces of production—in this case, the plow—men then began to dominate the public sphere of government, education, religion, politics. And women dominated the private sphere of family, hearth, home. This division is often referred to as male production and female reproduction. Agrarian societies began to arise around 4000—2000 BCE, in both East and West, and this was the dominant mode of production until the industrial revolution.
Just as far-reaching was the fact that advanced farming created a massive surplus in foodstuffs, and this freed a great number of individuals—a great number of males—to pursue tasks other than foodgathering and food-creating, and now on a very large scale. That is, farming technology freed some men from production, but women were still largely tied to reproduction. This allowed a series of highly specialized classes to arise: men that could devote their time, not just to subsistence endeavors, but to extended cultural endeavors. Mathematics was invented, writing was invented, metallurgy—and specialized warfare.
The production of a surplus freed men, under the "kill it" part of testosterone, to begin building the first great military Empires, and across the globe, beginning around 3000 BCE, came the Alexanders and Caesars and Sargons and Kahns, massive Empires that, paradoxically, began unifying disparate and contentious tribes into binding social orders. These mythic-imperial Empires would, with the rise of rationality and industrialization, give way to the modern nation-state.
And likewise, with agrarian farming a class of individuals would be freed to ponder their own existence. And thus, with these great
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agrarian cultures came the first sustained contemplative endeavors, endeavors that no longer located Spirit merely in the biosphere "out there" (magical, foraging to early horticultural) and not merely in the mythic Heavens "up there" (mythology, late horticultural to early agrarian), but rather located Spirit "in here," through the door of deep subjectivity, the door of interior awareness, the door of meditation and contemplation. And thus arose the great axial sages,
whose . . .
Q: Axial?
K w: Karl Jaspers's term for this incredibly significant period in history, beginning around the sixth century BCE in both East and West, a period that produced the great "axial sages," Gautama Buddha, Lao Tzu, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Patanjali, Confucius, the sages of the Upanishads, and so forth.
Q: All men.
Kw: Well, agrarian is always all men. And one of the great tasks of spirituality in the postmodern world is to complement and balance this male-oriented spirituality with its correlative female forms. We don't want to simply toss out everything these great wisdom traditions have to teach us, because that would be catastrophic. It would be like saying we refuse to use the wheel because a man invented it.
But indeed, virtually all of these great traditions arose in an atmosphere where men spoke to God directly and women spoke to God only through their husbands.
Industrial
Q: I want to come back to that issue of male and female spirituality, because it involves what you call "Ascending" and "Descending" spirituality, or God and Goddess spirituality, and how we might balance these two approaches.
But first, to finish with agrarian and the shift to industrial. How does this relate to "modernity"?
KW : Both "modernity" and "postmodernity" are used in a bewildering variety of ways. But "modernity" usually means the events that were set in motion with the Enlightenment, from Descartes to Locke to Kant, and the concomitant technical developments, which
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moved from feudal agrarian with a mythic worldview to industrialization and a rational worldview. And "postmodernity" usually means, in the broadest sense, the whole sweep of post-Enlightenment developments, which also includes postindustrial developments.
Q: So we are at the beginning of modernity, the shift from agrar-. ian to industrialization. . . .
Kw: Industrialization, for all of its horrors and all of its nightmarish secondary effects, was first and foremost a technological means to secure subsistence not from human muscle working on nature, but from machine power working on nature. As long as agrarian societies demanded physical human labor for subsistence (plowing), those societies inevitably and unavoidably placed a premium on male physical strength and mobility. No known agrarian society has anything even vaguely resembling women's rights.
But within a century of industrialization—which removed the emphasis on male physical strength and replaced it with gender-neutral engines—the women's movement emerged for the first time in history on any sort of large scale. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women was written in 1792; it is the first major feminist treatise anywhere in history.
It is not that all of a sudden, women became smart and strong and determined after a million years of oppression, dupedom, and sheepdom. It is that the social structures had evolved, for the first time in history, to a point that physical strength did not overwhelmingly determine power in culture. Biology was no longer destiny when it came to gender roles. Within a mere few centuries—a blink in evolutionary time—women had acted with lightning speed to secure legal rights to own property, to vote, and to "be their own persons," that is, to have a property in their own selves.
Q: The data seem to support this view, correct?
K w: The empirical evidence presented by the feminist researchers that I mentioned indicates that, as Chafetz puts it, the status of women in late industrial societies is higher than in any other surplusproducing society in history—including the horticultural.
Women who vocally condemn late industrial (and informational) society and glowingly eulogize Great Mother horticultural societies are badly out of touch with massive amounts of evidence, or they very
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selectively choose a few nice items about yesterday, and ignore the rest of yesterday's nightmare, and compare that "Eden" with nothing but the very worst of modernity. This is a very suspect endeavor.
None of which means further gains aren't required in today's world, for both men and women. Remember, the polarization of the sexes is brutally hard on each. Men and women both need to be liberated from the horrendous constraints of agrarian polarization. Industrialization began this liberation, began to expand gender roles beyond biological givens—transcend and include—but we need to continue developing this freedom and transcendence.
Q: For example?
Kw: For example, when men are no longer automatically expected to be the primary producers and the primary defenders, we might see the average life expectancy of men rise a little bit more toward the female level. And see women less restricted to roles involving merely reproduction, or home and hearth. The brutalities were equal and shared, so the liberation will be equally shared and beneficial, think. If anything, the men have more to gain, which is why, in the United States, polls consistently showed that a majority of men favored the Equal Rights Amendment but a majority of women opposed it, so it didn't pass, unfortunately.
Q: What about industrialization and the eco-crisis? Surely that is one of the major downsides of modernity, of the "dialectic of progress. "
K W : Catastrophic. But it's an extremely tricky situation. The primary cause of any ecological devastation is, as we were saying, simple ignorance. It is only with scientific knowledge of the biosphere, of the precise ways in which all holons in the biosphere are interrelated, including the biological holons of the human being—it is only with that knowledge that men and women can actually attune their actions with the biosphere. A simple or sacred respect for nature will not do. A sacred outlook on nature did not prevent numerous tribes from despoiling the environment out of simple and innocent ignorance, and did not prevent the Mayans from devastating the rain forests, and it will not prevent us from doing the same thing, again out of ignorance.
Roszak points out that it is modern science, and modern science alone—the ecological sciences and systems sciences, for example—
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that can directly show us how and why our actions are corroding the biosphere. If the primal tribes knew that by cut and burn they would ruin their habitat and endanger their own lives—if they actually knew that with a scientific certainty—then they would at least have thought about it a little more carefully before they began their bio-destruction. if the Mayans knew that in killing the rain forests they were killing themselves, they would have stopped immediately, or at least paused considerably. But ignorance is ignorance; whether innocent or greedy, sacred or profane, ignorance destroys the biosphere.
Q : But the means have changed.
K W : That's the second point, indeed. Ignorance backed by primal or tribal technology is capable of inflicting limited damage. But the same ignorance backed by industry is capable of killing the entire world. So we have to separate those two issues—the ignorance and the means of inflicting that ignorance—because with modernity and science we have, for the first time in history, a way to overcome our ignorance, at precisely the same time that we have created the means to make this ignorance absolutely genocidal on a global scale.
Q: So it's good news, bad news.
K W : The predicament of modernity, yes. Finally, we know better. At the same time, if we don't act on this knowledge, then finally, we all die. Brings new meaning to the Confucian curse, "May you live in interesting times."
4 The Great Postmodern Revolution
Q: Now we just ran through the techno-economic base of each epoch. What about the corresponding worldviews?
Kw: The general point is fairly simple: different stages of consciousness growth present a different view of the world. The world looks different—is different—at each stage. As new cognitive capacities unfold and evolve, the Kosmos looks at itself with different eyes, and it sees quite different things.
For convenience, generally call these worldviews archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and existential, with higher stages possible. You can see these on figure 5-2.
Q: So these are different ways that we look at the world?
KW : Yes, but we have to be very careful here. This might seem to be splitting hairs, but it really is very important: it's not that there is a single, pregiven world, and we simply look at it differently. Rather, as the Kosmos comes to know itself more fully, different worlds emerge.
it's like an acorn growing to an oak. An oak isn't a different picture of the same unchanging world present in the acorn. The oak has com* ponents in its own being that are quite new and different from anything found in the acorn. The oak has leaves, branches, roots, and so
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on, none of which are present in the acorn's actual "worldview" or "worldspace." Different worldviews create different worlds, enact different worlds, they aren't just the same world seen differently.
The Postmodern Watershed
Q : understand the distinction, but it does seem a bit of hairsplitting. Why exactly is this distinction important?
K w: It's crucially important, because in many ways it's the great watershed separating the modern and postmodern approaches to knowledge. And we want to take into account this extraordinary revolution in human understanding.
And, in fact, there is simply no way to carry these types of discus, sions forward unless we talk about the momentous differences between the modern and postmodern approaches to knowledge. But it's not all dull and dry. In many ways, it's even the key to locating Spirit in the postmodern world.
Q: Okay, so modern and postmodern . . .
K W : You've heard of all the "new paradigm" approaches to knowledge?
Q: Well, only that everybody seems to want the new paradigm. Or a new paradigm, anyway.
K w: Yes, well, the old paradigm that everybody doesn't want is the Enlightenment paradigm, which is also called the modern paradigm. It has dozens of other names, all pronounced with scorn and disgust: the Newtonian, the Cartesian, the mechanistic, the mirror of nature, the reflection paradigm.
By whatever name, that paradigm is now thought to be hopelessly outdated or at least severely limited, and everybody is in an absolute dither to get the new and therefore postmodern, or post-Enlightenment, paradigm.
But in order to understand just what a postmodern paradigm might look like, we need to understand the beast that it is desperately trying to replace.
Q: We need to understand the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm.
K W : Yes. And the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm is
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known as the representation paradigm. This is the idea that you have the self or the subject, on the one hand, and the empirical or sensory world, on the other, and all valid knowledge consists in making maps of the empirical world, the single and simple "pregiven" world. And if the map is accurate, if it correctly represents, or corresponds with, the empirical world, then that is "truth."
Q: Hence, the representation paradigm.
KW : Yes. The map could be an actual map, or a theory, or a hypothesis, or an idea, or a table, or a concept, or some sort of representation—in general, some sort of map of the objective world.
All of the major Enlightenment theorists, whether they were holistic or atomistic or anything in between—they all subscribed to this representation paradigm, to the belief in a single empirical world that could be patiently mapped with empirical methods.
And please remember that—whether the world was atomistic or holistic is completely beside the point. What they all agreed on was the mapping paradigm itself.
Q: But what's wrong with that representation paradigm? I mean, we do it all the time.
Kw: It's not that it's wrong. It's just very narrow and very limited. But the difficulties of the representation paradigm are rather subtle, and it took a very long time—several centuries, actually—to realize what the problem was.
There are many ways to summarize the limitations of the representation paradigm, the idea that knowledge consists basically in making maps of the world. But the simplest way to state the problem with maps is: they leave out the mapmaker. What was being utterly ignored was the fact that the mapmaker might itself bring something to the picture!
Q: All of this reflecting and mapping left out the mapmaker.
K W : Yes. And no matter how different the various postmodern attacks were, they were all united in an attack on the representation paradigm. They all perfectly assaulted the reflection paradigm, the "mirror of nature" paradigm—the idea that there is simply a single empirical world or empirical nature, and that knowledge consists solely in mirroring or reflecting or mapping this one true world. All
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"post-Enlightenment" or "postmodern" parties agreed that this "mirror of nature" idea was utterly, hopelessly, massively naive.
Beginning especially with Kant, and running through Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida—all the great "postmodern" theorists—in all of them we find a powerful attack on the mapping paradigm, because it fails to take into account the self that is making the maps in the first place.
This self did not just parachute to earth. It has its own characteristics, its own structures, its own development, its own history—and all of those influence and govern what it will see, and what it can see, in that supposedly "single" world just lying around. The parachutist is up to its neck in contexts and backgrounds that determine just what it can see in the first place!
So the great postmodern discovery was that neither the self nor the world is simply pregiven, but rather they exist in contexts and backgrounds that have a history, a development.
Q: That evolve.
K w: That evolve, yes. The mapmaker is not a little disembodied, ahistorical, self-contained monad, antiseptic and isolated and untouched by the world it maps. The self does not have an unchanging essence so much as it has a history, and the mapmaker will make quite different maps at the various stages of its own history, its own growth and development.
So in this developmental process, the subject will picture the world quite differently, based not so much on what is actually "out there" in some pregiven world, but based in many ways on what the subject itself brings to the picture.
Q: Kant's "Copernican revolution": the mind forms the world more than the world forms the mind.
K W : Not in all ways, but in many important ways, yes. And Hegel then added the crucial point, the point that, in one way or another, defines all postmodern theories: the mind, the subject, can "only be conceived as one that bas developed."
Nietzsche, for example, would turn this into genealogy, the investigation of the history of a worldview that we simply took for granted, that we assumed was simply the case for people everywhere, but in
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fact turns out to be quite limited and historically situated. And one way or another, all postmodern roads lead to Nietzsche.
Q: So the overall point is . . .
KW : The subject is not some detached, isolated, pregiven, and fully formed little entity that simply parachutes to earth and then begins innocently "mapping" what it sees lying around out there in the "real" world, the "real" territory, the pregiven world.
Rather, the subject is situated in contexts and currents of its own development, its own history, its own evolution, and the "pictures" it makes of "the world" depend in large measure not so much on "the world" as on this "history."
Q: Yes, I see. And this relates to our present discussion, how?
Kw: Well, one of the things we want to do is trace the history of these worldviews. They are part of evolution in the human domain— which means, the various forms of Spirit-in-action as it unfolds through the human mind. At each of these stages, the Kosmos looks at itself with new eyes, and thus brings forth new worlds not previously existing.
Two Paths in Postmodernity
Q : So these worldviews develop.
K W : Yes. And the overall idea that worldviews develop—that neither the world nor the self is simply pregiven—that is the great postmodern discovery.
Faced with this discovery of "not pregiven," a theorist can then take one of two routes through this new and confusing postmodern landscape, where nothing is foundational.
The first, and probably most common, is to go the route of extreme constructivism—which is the strong version of "not pregiven." That is, because worldviews are not pregiven, you can claim that they are all arbitrary. They are simply "constructed" by cultures based on nothing much more substantial than shifting tastes.
So we have all these books with titles like the social construction of sex, the social construction of food, the social construction of labor, the social construction of clothing, and so on. I keep expecting to see something like the social construction of the large intestine.
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Everything is "socially constructed"—this is the mantra of the extremist wing of postmodernism. They think that different cultural worldviews are entirely arbitrary, anchored in nothing but power or prejudice or some "ism" or another—sexism, racism, speciesism, phaIlocentrism, capitalism, logocentrism, or my favorite, phallologocentrism. Wow! Does that puppy come with batteries or what?
Q: Do those approaches have any merit at all?
K w: They do. It's only that the strong constructivist approach is simply too strong, too extremist. Worldviews just aren't that arbitrary; they are actually constrained by the currents in the Kosmos, and those currents limit how much a culture can arbitrarily "construct." We won't find a consensus worldview, for example, where men give birth or where apples fall upward. So much for arbitrary worldviews. They are not "merely constructed" in the sense of totally relative and arbitrary. Even Derrida now concedes this elemental point.
A diamond will cut a piece of glass, no matter what words we use for "diamond," "cut," and "glass," and no matter what culture we find them in. It is not necessary to go overboard and deny the preexistence of the sensorimotor world altogether! And that sensorimotor world—the cosmos and the bios—constrains the worldviews "from below," so to speak.
Further, cultural construction is limited and constrained by the currents in the noosphere itself. The noosphere develops, it evolves. That is, it also follows the twenty tenets, and those currents most definitely constraint and limit the construction.
So in these and many other ways, the real currents in the Kosmos constrain worldviews and prevent them from being merely collective hallucinations. Worldviews, as we'll see, are anchored in validity claims, and these claims work because the currents are real.
Q: Isn't Foucault often associated with this extreme constructivism?
K w: Yes, he started down this road, only to find that it is a dead end.
Q: In what way?
K w: If the constructivist stance is taken too far, it defeats itself. It says, all worldviews are arbitrary, all truth is relative and merely cul-
ture-bound, there are no universal truths. But that stance itself claims to be universally true. It is claiming everybody's truth is relative except mine, because mine is absolutely and universally true. I alone have the universal truth, and all you poor schmucks are relative and culture-bound.
This is the massive contradiction hidden in all extreme multicultural postmodern movements. And their absolute truth ends up being very ideological, very power-hungry, very elitist in the worst sense. Foucault even called his own early attempts in this direction "arrogant," a point most of his American followers haven't grasped, as they continue to deny truth in order to impose their own will.
This extreme constructivism is really just a postmodern form of nihilism: there is no truth in the Kosmos, only those notions that men force on others. This nihilism looks into the face of the Kosmos and sees an unending hall of mirrors, which finally show it nothing but its own egoic nastiness reflected to infinity. And the hidden core of that nihilism is narcissism: truth is ignored and replaced with the ego of the theorist. This is a major movement in American universities!
Q: Extreme constructivism. So that is one path taken in postmodernity.
K w: Yes. That's the strong version, which is too strong, too constructivist.
The other is the more moderate approach, a more moderate constructivism, and the most common version of that is now developmental or evolutionary. In its numerous and quite varied forms—Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gebser, Piaget, Bellah, Foucault, Habermas.
This approach recognizes that world and worldview are not altogether pregiven, but rather develop in history. And so it simply investigates the actual history and unfolding of these worldviews, not as a series of merely arbitrary flailings-around, but rather as an evolutionary or developmental pattern, governed in part by the currents of evolution itself.
Q: Governed by the twenty tenets.
Kw: In my particular version of developmentalism, yes, but that's my particular take.
But the important point is, in most of these developmental or evo-
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lutionary approaches, each worldview gives way to its successor because certain inherent limitations in the earlier worldview become apparent. This generates a great deal of disruption and chaos, so to speak, and the system, if it doesn't simply collapse, escapes this chaos by evolving to a more highly organized pattern. These new and higher patterns solve or defuse the earlier problems, but then introduce their own recalcitrant problems and inherent limitations that cannot be solved on their own level—the same process of evolution we see in the other domains as well.
Q : You mentioned these worldviews as archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and existential, with the possibility of higher stages yet to come.
K w: Yes, that's one way to summarize them, in a very general fashion. We can discuss the specifics of these worldviews later, if you like. But for now, as I said, correlate these "mental" worldviews with the "material" modes of production at each stage of human evolution. So corresponding with those worldviews that you just mentioned, we have, respectively: foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial, informational. So I'll often refer to them conjointly as mythic-agrarian, or rational-industrial, and so on, understanding that there are all sorts of overlaps and hybrids (see figure 5-2).
Q : In a sentence . . .
K W : The worldview is the mind, the base is the body, of Spirit. These bodyminds evolve, and bring forth new worlds in the process, as Spirit unfolds its own potential, a radiant flower in Kosmic spring, not so much Big Bang as Big Bloom.
And at each stage of development the world looks different because the world is different—and there is the great postmodern revelation.
On the Edge of Tomorrow
Q : I have two technical questions. How exactly do the best of the postmodern approaches overcome the so-called Cartesian dualism?
K W : The representation paradigm was dualistic in this sense: the subject doing the mapping was not really a part of the world that was being mapped. Or so it was thought. The alien mapmaker simply stood back from the pregiven world and mapped it, as if the two entities had virtually nothing in common.
Most "new paradigm" approaches still fall into this dualistic trap, because it is a very, very subtle trap. Most new paradigm approaches think that simply getting a more accurate map will solve the problem. If we had a nice holistic and systems map, instead of a nasty atomistic and mechanistic map, that would heal the dualism.
But, as Hegel (among others) forcefully pointed out, that doesn't solve the real problem at all, but merely continues it in subtler ways. It still assumes that the thought process is so basically different from the real world that the thought process can either reflect that world accurately and holistically, or reflect it inaccurately and atomistically. But that belief is itself the hidden Cartesian dualism.
Rather, said Hegel, we must realize that thoughts are not merely a reflection on reality, but are also a movement of that very reality itself. Thought is a performance of that which it seeks to know, and not a simple mirror of something unrelated to itself. The mapmaker, the self, the thinking and knowing subject, is actually a product and a performance of that which it seeks to know and represent.
In short, thought is itself a movement of that which it seeks to know. It's not that there is a map on the one hand and the territory on the other—that's the nasty Cartesian dualism—but rather that the map is itself a performance of the territory it is trying to map.
This nondualistic approach doesn't deny the representation paradigm altogether; but it does say that at a much deeper level, thought itself cannot deviate from the currents of the Kosmos, because thought is a product and performance of those very currents. And the task of philosophy, as it were, is not simply to clarify the maps and correct their deviations from reality, but to elucidate these deeper currents from which thought couldn't deviate even if it wanted to!
Q: In simpler terms?
K w: In Zen there is a saying, "That which one can deviate from is not the true Tao." In other words, in some ways our knowledge is indeed a matter of correcting our inaccurate maps; but also, and at a much deeper level, there is a Tao, a Way, a Current of the Kosmos, from which we have not, and could never, deviate. And part of our
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job is to find this deeper Current, this Tao, and express it, elucidate it, celebrate it.
And as long as we are caught in merely trying to correct our maps, then we will miss the ways in which both correct and incorrect maps are equally expressions of Spirit.
Thus, the "new paradigm" approaches, such as the ecophilosophers, are constantly telling us that we have deviated from nature, which is true enough. But however true that is, it shows that these theorists have not understood the true Tao, from which we do not, and could never, deviate. And it was this much deeper truth that the genuine Nondual traditions, East and West, attempted to elucidate—which is the real overcoming of the Cartesian dualism!
think this will become clearer when we talk about higher levels of development, yes?
Q: Actually, that's my second technical question. If worldviews have evolved from archaic to magic to mythic to rational and existential, who's to say there aren't higher worldviews down the road?
K w: Yes, that's the whole point, isn't it? To paraphrase the man, "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your worldview."
Magic never in its wildest dreams thought that it would be trumped by mythic. And the mythic gods and goddesses never even vaguely imagined that reason could and would destroy them. And here we sit, in our rational worldview, all smug and confident that nothing higher will sweep out of the heavens and completely explode our solid perceptions, undoing our very foundations.
And yet surely, the transrational lies in waiting. It is just around the corner, this new beast, and it is very hungry. Every new stage transcends and includes, and thus inescapably, unavoidably, with rigid mathematical precision, the sun will dawn on a world tomorrow that in many ways transcends reason. . . .
And so, to quote another famous theorist, "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night."
Transcendence and Repression
Q: So how can you tell if there is any sort of advantage to one worldview or another?
Revolution
K w: Transcends and includes. As the higher stages of consciousness emerge and develop, they themselves include the basic components of the earlier worldview, then add their own new and more differentiated perceptions. They transcend and include. Because they are more inclusive, they are more adequate.
So it's not that the earlier worldview is totally wrong and the new worldview is totally right. The earlier one was adequate, the new one is more adequate. If it's not more adequate, then it won't be selected by evolution, it won't catch the currents of the Kosmos; it will go by the wayside, flotsam and jetsam on the shores of what might have been.
Of course, this doesn't mean that a "higher" worldview is without its own problems—just the contrary. Wherever there is the possibility of transcendence, there is, by the very same token, the possibility of repression. The higher might not just transcend and include, it might transcend and repress, exclude, alienate, dissociate.
And so, in following the emergence of worldviews, we have to keep a constant watch for possible repressions and dissociations that have occurred, and are still occurring, in the historical process.
The point is that the animal that can transcend can also repress—at any level. The Mayans had already moved from foraging to horticulture, and that meant not only that they could begin to bind various contentious tribes into a larger and solidified social structure—and not only that they could, via farming, free a class of priests to begin developing mathematics and astronomy and a sophisticated calendar—but also that they, in a way foragers never could, begin to deplete the rain forests. They transcended mere foraging, only to go too far and dissociate themselves in certain crucial ways from the biosphere, which was altogether suicidal.
They didn't differentiate and integrate, they dissociated and alienated. They didn't transcend and include, they repressed and denied. Since the biosphere is an internal component of the human holon, they secured their own destruction.
So this theme—transcendence versus repression—is an altogether crucial theme of historical development, and we want to watch carefully for signs of repression at each stage of human evolution, individ-
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ual and collective. And this includes, of course, the massive problems with rational-industrialization.
Q: So each new worldview faces its own grave problems.
K w' : Creates its own grave problems. The solution of the old problem is the creation of a new one—they come into being together, although the new problems usually surface only as the worldview approaches its own demise. This is the wonder, and this the nightmare, of worldviews.
And we are at the point where the mental, rational, industrial worldview is running into the grave problems inherent in its own organization. We have run up against our own limitations. We have met the enemy, and of course it is us. The modem is struggling to give way to the postmodern.
The phase-specific, phase-appropriate modern worldview, having served its purposes, is now living in its own fumes. We are breathing our own exhaust. And how we handle this, how we collectively handle this, will determine whether a new and more adequate worldview emerges to defuse these problems, or whether we are buried in our own wastes.
Spirit has run up against its own limitations at this stage in its unfolding. This extraordinary modern flower blossomed in its glorious spring, and now can do nothing but watch its own leaves fall dead on the ground of a rising tomorrow. And what indeed will bloom in that new field?
The Four Corners of the Kosmos
Q : So is it at least fair to say that you believe we are approaching the end limit of the rational-industrial worldview?
K w: Only if we are very careful about how exactly to interpret that. The rise of modernity—and by "modernity" I mean specifically the rational-industrial worldview, and roughly, the Enlightenment in general—served many useful and extraordinary purposes. We might mention: the rise of democracy; the banishing of slavery; the emergence of liberal feminism; the differentiation of art and science and morality (which I'll explain); the widespread emergence of empirical sciences, including the systems sciences and ecological sciences; an increase in average life span of almost three decades; the introduction of relativity and perspectivism in art and morals and science; the move from ethnocentric to worldcentric morality; and in general the undoing of dominator social hierarchies in numerous significant ways.
Those are extraordinary accomplishments, and the antimodernist critics who do nothing but vocally condemn modernity, while gladly basking in its many benefits, are hypocritical in the extreme, it seems to me.
On the other hand, the giddy promoters of modernity as nothing
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but a great progress report ignore the recalcitrant problems that modernity has never solved and likely can never solve.
Q: The inherent problems or limitations built into modernity.
K w: Built into the rational„industrial worldview, yes.
Q: So moving "beyond modernity''—going "postmodern''—requires what, exactly?
K w: Well, in simple terms, to transcend and include modernity—or rational-industrialization—would mean, for the transcend part, that we have to (1) be open to modes of consciousness that move beyond mere rationality, and (2) embed them in modes of technoeconomic structures that move beyond industrialization. In other words, a change of consciousness embedded in a change of institutions. Either one alone will not work.
Q : So, trans-rational and trans-industrial.
K w: Yes, remembering that both rationality and industry will be included as well, but now as mere components in a more balanced, more inclusive, more integrated stance that will incorporate—and limit—rationality and industry. What we might call sustainable rationality, sustainable industry.
But in some ways, rationality and industry, left to their own devices, have become cancers in the body politic, runaway growths that are malignant in their effects. They overstep their limits, overrun their functions, and drift into various dominator hierarchies of one sort or another. To transcend modernity is to negate or limit these overpowering facets, while including their benign and beneficial aspects. The coming transformation will transcend and include these features of modernity, incorporating their essentials and limiting their power.
And, of course, this new and wonderful transformation, which everybody seems to be yearning for, will nevertheless bring its own recalcitrant problems and brutal limitations. It will defuse some of the problems of rational-industrialization, which is wonderful, but it will create and unleash its own severe difficulties.
And so, if this is specifically what we mean by a coming transformation—as opposed to some wild utopian new age—then yes, I believe this transformation is definitely under way.
The Four Quadrants
Q: So part of the coming transformation will involve both a change in consciousness and a change in institutions.
K w: Part of it, yes. It will actually involve a new worldview, set in a new techno-economic base, with a new mode of self-sense, possessing new behavioral patterns.
Q: Okay, that gets us directly into what you call the four quadrants (see figure 5-1). But before we talk about these four quadrants, I'm curious, how did you arrive at this concept? I haven't seen it before, and I was wondering how you came up with it.
KW: You mean the mental steps I went through to arrive at the four quadrants?
•ntenor extenor
FIGURE 5-1. The four quadrants.
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K W : Well, if you look at the various "new paradigm" theorists— from holists to ecofeminists to deep ecologists to systems thinkers— you find that all of them are offering various types of holarchies, of hierarchies. Even the anti-hierarchy ecophilosophers offer their own hierarchy, which is usually something like: atoms are parts of molecules, which are parts of cells, which are parts of individual organisms, which are parts of families, which are parts of cultures, which are parts of the total biosphere. That is their defining hierarchy, their defining holarchy, and except for some confusion about what "biow sphere" means, that is a fairly accurate holarchy.
And likewise, orthodox researchers offer their own hierarchies. We find hierarchies in moral development, in ego development, in cognitive development, in self needs, in defense mechanisms, and so on. And these, too, seem to be largely accurate. We also find developmental holarchies in everything from Marxism to structuralism to linguistics to computer programming—it's simply endless.
In other words, whether it's realized or not, most of the maps of the world that have been offered are in fact holarchical, for the simple reason that holarchies are impossible to avoid (because holons are impossible to avoid). We have literally hundreds and hundreds of these holoarchical maps from around the world—East and West, North and South, ancient and modern—and many of these maps included the mapmaker as well.
So at one point I simply started making lists all of these holarchical maps—conventional and new age, Eastern and Western, premodern and modern and postmodern—everything from systems theory to the Great Chain of Being, from the Buddhist vijnanas to Piaget, Marx, Kohlberg, the Vedantic koshas, Loevinger, Maslow, Lenski, Kabbalah, and so on. I had literally hundreds of these things, these maps, spread out on legal pads all over the floor.
At first I thought these maps were all referring to the same territory, so to speak. I thought they were all different versions of an essentially similar holarchy. There were just too many similarities and overlaps in all of them. So by comparing and contrasting them all, I thought I might be able to find the single and basic holarchy that they were all trying to represent in their own ways.
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The more I tried this, the more it became obvious that it wouldn't work. These various holarchies had some undeniable similarities, but they differed in certain profound ways, and the exact nature of these differences was not obvious at all. And most confusing of all, in some of these holarchical maps, the holons got bigger as development progressed, and in others, they became smaller (I didn't yet understand that evolution produces greater depth, less span). It was a real mess, and at several points I decided to just chuck it, forget it, because nothing was coming of this research.
But the more I looked at these various holarchies, the more it dawned on me that there were actually four very different types of holarchies, four very different types of holistic sequences. As you say, I don't think this had been spotted before—perhaps because it was so stupidly simple; at any event it was news to me. But once I put all of these holarchies into these four groups—and they instantly fell into place at that point—then it was very obvious that each holarchy in each group was indeed dealing with the same territory, but overall we had four different territories, so to speak.
Q: These four territories, these four different types of holistic sequences, you call the four quadrants.
K W : Yes, you can see these in figure 5-1. In figure 5-2, I've added some examples. I must emphasize that this figure only gives a very few examples from each quadrant, but you can get the general idea.
So the question then became, how did these four types of holarchies relate to each other? They couldn't just be radically different holistic sequences. They had to touch each other somehow.
Eventually it dawned on me that these four quadrants have an incredibly simple foundation. These four types of holarchies are actually dealing with the inside and the outside of a holon, in both its individual and collective forms—and that gives us four quadrants.
Inside and outside, singular and plural—some of the simplest distinctions we can make, and these very simple features, which are present in all holons, generate these four quadrants, or so I maintain. All four of these holarchies are dealing with real aspects of real holons— which is why these four types of holarchies keep aggressively and insistently showing up on the various maps around the world.
FIGURE 5-2. Some details of the four quadrants.
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It appears that these are some very bedrock realities, these four corners of the Kosmos.
Intentional and Behavioral
Q: Perhaps a few examples.
K w: Okay. The four quadrants are the interior and exterior of the individual and the collective, which you can see in figures 5-1
We can start with the individual holon, in both its interior and exterior aspects. In other words, with the Upper Left quadrant and the Upper Right quadrant. Figure 5-3 is a little more detailed map of these two quadrants.
If you look at the Right Hand column first, you can see the typical holarchy presented in any standard biology textbook. Each level transcends and includes its predecessor. Each level includes the basics of the previous level and then adds its own distinctive and defining characteristiß, its own emergents. Each of these follow the twenty tenets, and so on.
But notice that these are all exterior descriptions—it's what these holons look like from the outside, in an objective and empirical manner. Thus, in a scientific text, you will find the limbic system, for example, described in detail—its components, its biochemistry, when
prehension atoms
irritability cells (genetic)
rudimentary sensation metabolic organisms (e.g., plants)
sensation protoneuronal organisms (e.g., coelenterata)
perception neuronal organisms (e.g., annelids)
perception]impulse neural cord (fish/amphibians)
impulse/emotion brain stem (reptiles)
emotion/image limbic system (paleomammals)
symbols neocortex (primates)
concepts complex neocortex (humans)
UPPER LEFT UPPER RIGHT
FIGURE 5-3. The interior and the exterior of the individual.
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and how it evolved, how it relates to other parts of the organism, and so on. And you will probably find it mentioned that the limbic system is the home of certain very fundamental emotions, certain basic types of sex and aggression and fear and desire, whether that limbic system appears in horses or humans or apes.
But of those emotions, of course, you will not find much description, because emotions pertain to the interior experience of the limbic system. These emotions and the awareness that goes with them are what the holon with a limbic system experiences from within, on the inside, in its interior. And objective scientific descriptions are not much interested in that interior consciousness, because that interior space cannot be accessed in an objective, empirical fashion. You can only feel these feelings from within. When you experience a sort of primal joy, for example, even if you are a brain physiologist, you do not say to yourself, Wow, what a limbic day. Rather, you describe these feelings in intimate, personal, emotional terms, subjective terms: I feel wonderful, it's great to be alive, or whatnot.
So in the Left Hand column, you can see a list of some of the basic types of subjective or interior awareness that go with these various objective or exterior forms listed in the Right Hand column. "Irritability"—the capacity to actively respond to environmental stimuli— begins with cells. Sensations emerge with neuronal organisms, and perceptions emerge with a neural cord. Impulses emerge with a brain stem, and basic emotions with a limbic system. And so on.
This is also a holarchy, but a subjective or interior holarchy. Each level also transcends and includes it predecessor, each follows the twenty tenets, and so on. And this Left Hand holarchy, like the Right Hand, is based on extensive evidence already available, which we can discuss if you want.
But the main point is that this Left Hand dimension refers to the inside, to the interior depth that is consciousness itself.
Q: You said earlier that depth is consciousness, or what depth looked like from within.
K w: Yes, exactly. The Left Hand is what the holon looks like from within; the Right Hand is what the same holon looks like from without. Interior and exterior. Consciousness and form. Subjective and objective.
Q: The Upper Right quadrant is the one we are most familiar with, simply because it is part of the standard, objective, empirical, scientific map.
K w: Yes, and we can assume it's accurate enough, as far as it goes. It gives the typical holarchy for individual holons described in objective terms: atoms to molecules to cells (early cells, or prokaryOtes, and advanced cells, or eukaryotes) to simple organisms (first with a neuronal net and then with a more advanced neural cord). Then to more complex organisms, reptiles to paleomammals to humans, the latter possessing a complex triune brain, which transcends and includes its predecessors, so that the triune brain has a reptilian stem and a paleomammalian limbic system, plus something new, a complex neocortex capable of abstract logic and linguistics and vision„logic (in figure 5-2, I have listed these more complex capacities as SFI, SF2, SF3, which I'll explain later).
We don't have to agree with the exact placement of everything in figure 5-3, but most people would agree that something like that is occurring.
Cultural and Social
Q: So that is the upper half of the diagram, the individual. There is now the lower half, the collective.
K w: Yes. Individual holons exist only in communities of similardepth holons. So we need to go through both of the columns in figure and find the types of communal holons that are always associated with the individual holons.
Q: And this communal aspect also has an interior and an exterior, which are Lower Left and Lower Right.
KW: Yes.
Q: You call these "cultural" and "social."
KW : Yes, "cultural" refers to all of the interior meanings and values and identities that we share with those of similar communities, whether it is a tribal community or a national community or a world community. And "social" refers to all of the exterior, material, institutional forms of the community, from its techno-economic base to
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its architectural styles to its written codes to its population size, to name a few.
So in a very general sense, "cultural" refers to the shared collective worldview and "social" refers to the material base of that worldview. (Of course, right now I'm just talking about how these appear in human holons; we'll discuss nonhuman in a moment.) Social means any objective, concrete, material components, and especially the techno-economic base, so you see these listed as foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial; and the geopolitical structures of villages, states, world federation, and so on. These are all examples of the exterior forms of the collective, as you can see in figure 5-2.
Q: I think that's straightforward enough. But let's look at nonhuman holons. We usually don't think of them as having a common worldview or common worldspace—a common culture.
K w: If consciousness is depth, and depth goes all the way down, then shared depth or common depth also goes all the way down— culture goes all the way down.
Q: I'm sorry?
K W : In other words, if holons share outsides, they share insides.
Q : Their "culture," as it were.
K w: Yes. By the culture or worldspace of holons, I simply mean a shared space of what they can respond to: quarks do not respond to all stimuli in the environment, because they register a very narrow range of what will have meaning to them, what will affect them. Quarks (and all holons) respond only to that which fits their worldspace: everything else is a foreign language, and they are outsiders. The study of what holons can respond to is the study of shared worldspaces. It's the common world that all holons of a similar depth will respond to. That is their shared culture.
Q: Okay, perhaps an example.
K w: Nonhuman cultures can be very sophisticated. Wolves, for example, share an emotional worldspace. They possess a limbic system, the interior correlate of which is certain basic emotions. And thus a wolf orients itself and its fellow wolves to the world through the use of these basic emotional cognitions—not just reptilian and sensorimotor, but affective. They can hunt and coordinate in packs through a very sophisticated emotional signal system. They share this emotional worldspace.
Yet anything outside that worldspace is not registered. I mean, you can read Hamlet to them, but no luck. What you are, with that book, is basically dinner plus a few things that will have to be spat out.
The point is that a holon responds, and can respond, only to those stimuli that fall within its worldspace, its worldview. Everything else is nonexistent.
Q: Same with humans.
KW : Same with humans. By the time evolution reaches the neocortex, or the complex triune brain, with its interior correlates of images and symbols and concepts, these basic worldspaces have become articulated into rather sophisticated cognitive structures. These worldspaces incorporate the basic components of the previous worldspaces—such as cellular irritability and reptilian instincts and paleomammalian emotions—but then add new components that articulate or unfold new worldviews.
Remember, the Kosmos looks different at each of these stages because the Kosmos is different at each of these stages. At each of these stages, the Kosmos looks at itself with new eyes, and thus brings forth new worlds not previously existing.
These cultural worldspaces are listed on the Lower Left. And you can see that they evolve from physical and vegetative and reptilian ("uroboric"—of the serpent) and limbic-emotional ("typhonic"), into more specifically hominid and then human forms: archaic, magic, mythic, rational, centauric (or existential), with possibly higher stages yet to come.
And these worldviews are correlated with the exterior forms of the social structures that support each of those worldviews and the individuals within them—again, all the way down. For example, from the prokaryotic Gaia system to societies with a division of labor (in neural organisms) to groups/families of paleomammals to the more human forms of: foraging tribes to horticultural villages to agrarian empires to industrial states to informational global federation. Which is the list to date, as reconstructed from available evidence. These are all listed on the Lower Right.
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Q: And these four quadrants are related to each other in exactly what fashion?
K w: In any fashion you want. Just don't reduce them one to another. I have some specific thoughts on this, but right now I don't want to push my own theory in this particular regard. I will settle for the orienting generalization that we simply cannot reduce these quadrants to each other without profound distortions and violent ruptures. So let us grant each of them a certain integrity, I think. Let's just say they interrelate, or they interact, or they each have correlates in the others. That's plenty to work with. When we talk about the different truths in each quadrant, I think you'll see what I mean.
An Example
Q: In that regard, you have used the example of a single thought, a single thought holon, and how it isn't really a "single" thought existing in itself—it has correlates in all four quadrants. I wonder if we could go through that example briefly.
K W : Okay. Let's say I have a thought of going to the grocery store. When I have that thought, what I actually experience is the thought itself, the interior thought and its meaning—the symbols, the images, the idea of going to the grocery store. That's Upper Left.
While I am having this thought, there are, of course, correlative changes occurring in my brain—dopamine increases, acetylcholine jumps the synapses, beta brainwaves increase, or whatnot. Those are observable behaviors in my brain. They can be empirically observed, scientifically registered. And that is Upper Right.
Now the internal thought itself only makes sense in terms of my cultural background. If I spoke a different language, the thought would be composed of different symbols and have different meanings. If I existed in a primal tribal society a million years ago, I would never even have the thought "going to the grocery store." It might be, "Time to kill the bear." The point is that my thoughts themselves arise in a cultural background that gives texture and meaning and context to my individual thoughts, and indeed, I would not even be able to "talk to myself" if did not exist in a community of individuals who also talk to me.
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So the cultural community serves as an intrinsic background to any individual thoughts I might have. My thoughts do not just pop into my head out of nowhere; they pop into my head out of a cultural background, and however much I might move beyond this background, I can never simply escape it altogether, and I could never have developed thoughts in the first place without it. The occasional cases of a "wolf boy"—humans raised in the wild—show that the human brain, left without culture, does not produce linguistic thoughts on its own. The self is far from the autonomous and self-generating monad the Enlightenment imagined.
In short, my individual thoughts only exist against a vast background of cultural practices and languages and meanings, without which I could form virtually no individual thoughts at all. And this vast background is my culture, my cultural worldview, my worldw space, which is the Lower Left.
But my culture itself is not simply disembodied, hanging in idealistic midair. It has material components, much as my own individual thoughts have material brain components. All cultural events have social correlates. These concrete social components include types of technology, forces of production (horticultural, agrarian, industrial, etc.), concrete institutions, written codes and patterns, geopolitical locations (towns, villages, states, etc.), and so on. And these material, social, empirically observable components—the actual social system—are crucial in helping to determine the types of cultural worldnew.
So my supposedly "individual thought" actually has at least these four facets, these four aspects—intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social. And around the circle we go: the social system will have a strong influence on the cultural worldview, which will set limits to the individual thoughts that I can have, which will register in the brain physiology. And you can go around that circle in any direction you want. The quadrants are all interwoven. They are alk mutually determining. They all cause, and are caused by, the other quadrants.
Q: Because all individual holons have these four facets.
Kw: Yes, every holon has these four aspects, these four quadrants. It is not that an individual holon exists in one or another of these quadrants. It is that every individual holon has these four quadrants, these four aspects to its being. It's like a diamond with four facets, or four faces.
Of course, these four facets become very complicated and intermixed, but there are at least these four. These four are the minimum that we must use to understand any holon. And this especially holds for higher transformation, for higher states of consciousness, as I guess we'll see.
The Shape of Things to Come
Q: We started this discussion by talking about transformation in general, and any possible coming transformation in particular.
K w: This transformation is already proceeding, with or without you and me, but if we want to get on board, if we want to consciously find these evolutionary currents operating in our own being as well—if we want to consciously join Spirit-in-action—then the four quadrants can help us orient ourselves more effectively, can help make us more conscious of what is already the case anyway, of currents already flowing around us and through us and in us.
We could say that Spirit manifests as all four quadrants. Spirit isn't just a higher Self, or just Gaia, or just awareness, or just the web of life, or just the sum total of all objective phenomena, or just transcendental consciousness. Rather, Spirit exists in and as all four quadrants, the four compass points, as it were, of the known Kosmos, all of which are needed to accurately navigate.
So what we will want to talk about, I suppose, is how this coming transformation—and the higher spiritual stages—will appear and manifest in all four quadrants. What is a higher Self? What is higher brain functioning? What is the transformation of the body as well as of the mind? What is a higher or deeper culture? How is it embedded in wider social systems? What is more profoundly developed consciousness? How is it anchored in new social institutions? Where is the sublime?
What would all of this look like? How can we help it along in all of these quadrants, and not just focus on Self, or just Gaia, or just the World Federation? For all of these will emerge together, or they will emerge not at all.
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Q: It's a package deal.
Kw: It's a package deal. Higher or deeper stages of consciousness development show me deeper and wider patterns in self, in individual behavior, in culture, and in society—intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social—all four quadrants.
If we don't take all of those into account, then I think they'll start the transformation without us. The transformation will occur, is occurring, but we'll be sitting in our favorite quadrant, explaining to people why we have the new paradigm, and transformation will sail on without us. We will abort our own full-quadrant participation in forces that are already in play. We will go limping into the future, all puzzles and grins, and these wider currents will not be activated in our own being. We'll be driftwood on the shore of this extraordinary stream. We will mistake our crutches for liberation, we will offer our wounds to the world, we will bleed into the future all smiles and glory. It will never work.
6 The Two Hands ofG0d
Q: The truth will set you free. But you started to suggest that each quadrant has a different type of truth!
K W : Yes, but that's actually good news. By understanding these different truths, and acknowledging them, we can more sympatheticany attune ourselves to the Kosmos. The final result might even be an attunement with the All, might even be Kosmic consciousness itself. Sound far out? Maybe not. Maybe very simple. But I think first we need to understand these various truths, so they can begin to speak to us, in us, through us.
These truths are behind much of the great postmodern rebellion. They are the key to the interior and transcendental dimensions; they speak eloquently in tongues of hidden gods and angels; they point to the heart of holons in general, and invite us into that interior world; they are antidote to the flat and faded world that passes for today. We might even say that these four types of truth are the four faces of Spirit as it shines in the manifest world.
Q: Tell me it's not complicated.
K W : More fun than a human should be allowed to have. But there is a very simple way to shake all of this down and summarize it; so it soon enough becomes very, very simple. 84
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In the meantime, figure 6-1 (page 86) is a small sampling of different theorists who have plugged in to a particular quadrant with its particular truth. It'll help if we discuss some examples of each.
Mind and Brain
Q: Okay, start with this. You have the mind—your lived experience, images, symbols, feelings, thoughts—listed on the Upper Left— and the brain on Upper Right. So you're saying that mind and brain are not the same.
Kw: We can grant that they are intimately related. But for the moment, we must also grant that in many important ways they are quite different. And we have respect those differences, and try to account for them.
For example, when brain physiologists study the human brain, they study all of its objective components—the neural makeup, the various synapses, the neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine, the electrical brainwave patterns, and so on. All of those are objective or exterior aspects of the human being. Even though the brain is "inside" the human organism, the brain physiologist knows that brain only in an objective and exterior fashion.
But you yourself can't even see your brain as an object, unless you cut open your skull and get a mirror. That's the only way you can see your brain. But you can see and experience your mind directly, right now, intimately and immediately. The mind is what your awareness looks like from within; your brain is simply what it looks like from without, from the outside.
Q: And they don't look the same at all.
K w: No. Your brain looks like a big crumpled grapefruit. But your mind doesn't look like that at all. Not even vaguely. Your mind looks like your direct experience right now—images, impulses, thoughts. Perhaps we will ultimately decide that mind and brain are actually identical, or parallel, or dualist, or whatever, but we have to start with the undeniable fact they are phenomenologically quite different.
Q: But what about the idea that they really are the same thing, and we just haven't figured out how to show this?
LEFT HAND PATHS RIGHT HAND PATHS
• interpretive • Monological
Hermeneutic • Empirical, positivistic
• Consciousness • Form
Freud
C. G. Jung
Aurobindo
Plotinus
Gautama Buddha B. F. Skinner
John Watson
John Locke Empiricism
Behaviorism Physics, biology, neurology, etc.
Thomas Kuhn
Wilhelm Dilthey
Jean Gebser
Max Weber
Hans-Georg Gadamer Systems Theory
Talcott Parsons Auguste Comte
Karl Marx
Gerhard Lenski
FIGURE 6-1. Some representative theorists in each quadrant.
K w' : Let's look to an expert on the brain itself—say, a brain physiologist. The brain physiologist can know every single thing about my brain—he can hook me up to an EEG machine, he can use PET scans, he can use radioactive tracers, he can map the physiology, determine the levels of neurotransmitters—he can know what every atom of my brain is doing, and he still won't know a single thought in my mind.
This is really extraordinary. And if he wants to know what is going
on in my mind, there is one and onky one way that he can find out: he must talk to me. There is absolutely no other way that he, or anybody else, can know what my actual thoughts are without asking me, and talking to me, and communicating with me. And if I don't want to tell you, then you will never know the actual specifics of my individual thoughts. Of course, you can torture me and force me to tell—but that's the point: you force me to talk.
So you can know all about my brain, and that will tell you nothing about the specific contents of my mind, which you can find only by talking to me. In other words, you must engage in dialogue, not monologue—you must engage in intersubjective communication, and not simply study me as an object of empirical investigation—as an object of the empirical gaze—which will get you nowhere.
As we will see in greater detail as we go along, all of the Right Hand dimensions can indeed be accessed with this empirical gaze, this "monological" gaze, this objectifying stance, this empirical mapping—because you are onky studying the exteriors, the surfaces, the aspects of holons that can be seen empirically—the Right Hand aspects, such as the brain.
But the Left Hand aspects, the interior dimensions, can only be accessed by communication and interpretation, by "dialogue" and "dialogical" approaches, which are not staring at exteriors but sharing of interiors. Not objective but intersubjective. Not surfaces but depths.
So can study your brain forever, and I will never know your mind. I can know your brain by objective study, but I can only know your mind by talking to you.
The Left and Right Hand Paths
Q: This takes us directly to the differences between the Left and Right Hand paths.
Kw: Yes. From virtually the inception of every major knowledge quest, East and West alike, the various approaches have fallen into one or another of these two great camps, interior versus exterior, Left versus Right. We find this in psychology (Freud vs. Watson), in sociology (Weber vs. Comte), in philosophy (Heidegger vs. Locke), in
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anthropokogy (Taylor vs. Lenski), in linguistics (hermeneutics vs. structuralism)—and even in theology (Augustine vs. Aquinas)!
Occasionakly you find an approach that emphasizes both the Left and Right Hand dimensions, which of course would be my recommendation, but mostly you find a bitter war between these two equally important, but rarely integrated, approaches. So I think it's crucial to understand the contributions that both of these paths have made to our understanding of the human condition, because both of them are absolutely indispensabke.
And, as we'll soon see, it's virtually impossible to understand higher and spiritual developments without taking both of these paths into account.
The Monological Gaze: The Key to the Right Hand Paths
Q: Let's take them one at a time. The Right Hand paths . . .
K w: Everything on the Right Hand, all the aspects on the Right half of figure 5-2, are objects or exteriors that can be seen empirically, one way or another, with the senses or their extensions—microscopes, telescopes, photographic equipment, whatnot. They are all surfaces that can be seen. They all have simple location. You don't have to talk to any of them. You just observe their objective behavior. You look at the behavior of atoms, or cells, or populations, or individuals, or societies, or ecosystems.
Q : You also call this "monological."
K w: Yes, ail the Right Hand aspects are basically monological, which means they can be seen in a monologue. You don't have to try to get at their interiors, at their consciousness. You do not need a dialogue, a mutual exchange of depth, because you are looking only at exteriors.
If you are getting a CAT scan of your brain, the lab technicians will talk to you only if it's unavoidable. "Would you mind moving your head over here, dearie?" The technicians couldn't care less about your interior depths, because they only want to capture your exterior surfaces, even if those exteriors are "inside" you—they're just more objects. When the lab technicians take this objective picture of your brain, do they see the real you? Do they see you at all?
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No, you are being treated merely as an object of the monological gaze, not as a subject in communication—which is what makes empirical medicine so dehumanizing in itself. The lab technician just wants your Right Hand, not your Left Hand, not your consciousness, your feelings, your meanings, your values, your intentions, your hopes, your fears. Just the facts, ma'am. Just the exteriors. And that's fine. That's completely acceptable. That's your brain.
But you can never, and will never, see a mind that way.
Q: Feminists are always complaining about being the object of the male gaze.
Kw: It's the same thing. Women often complain about being made into an object, a sexual object, in this case, of the male gaze. But it's the same general phenomenon, the same monological gaze: you are reduced from a subject in communication to an object of observation, a slab of meat, an object with no depth. "He never talks to me." And women understandably react to this. Men, on the other hand, are reduced to passive objects whenever they have to ask for directions, and of course, they'd rather die on the spot.
There is nothing wrong with these Right Hand and empirical and scientific paths; it's just that they are not the whole story. Living life only according to the Right Hand is like living life perpetually under the gaze of a kab technician. It's all empiricism, all monological gaze, all behaviorism, all shiny surfaces and monochrome objects—no interiors, no depth, no consciousness.
I don't want to get too much ahead of the story, but we can now briefly mention that the downside of the Enlightenment paradigm was that, in its rush to be empirical, it inadvertentky collapsed the Left Hand dimensions of the Kosmos into the Right Hand dimensions—it collapsed interior depths into observable surfaces, and it thought that a simple mapping of these empirical exteriors was alk the knowledge that was worth knowing. This left out the mapmaker itself—the consciousness, the interiors, the Left Hand dimensions—and, a century or two later, it awoke in horror to find itself living in a universe with no value, no meaning, no intentions, no depth, no quality—it found itself in a disqualified universe ruled by the monological gaze, the brutal world of the lab technician.
And that, of course, began the postmodern rebellion.
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Interpretation: The Key to Left Paths
Q: That's part of our next discussion (see chapter 7). We were talking about the differences between the Left and Right Hand paths.
K W : Yes, as we were saying, if you look at figure 5-2, every holon on the Right Hand can be empiricalky seen, one way or another. They all have simple location, because these are the physical-material correlates of all holons. And so with every Right Hand aspect, you can physically point right at it and say, "There it is." You can put your finger right on them, so to speak. There is the brain, or there is a cell, or there is the town, or there is the ecosystem. Even subatomic particles exist as probabilities of being found in a given location at a given time!
But nothing on the Left Hand can be seen in that simple fashion, because none of the Left Hand aspects have simple location. You can point to the brain, or to a rock, or to a town, but you cannot simply point to envy, or pride, or consciousness, or value, or intention, or desire. Where is desire? Point to it. You can't really, not the way you can point to a rock, because it's largely an interior dimension, so it doesn't have simple location.
This doesn't mean it isn't real! It only means it doesn't have simple location, and therefore you can't see it with a microscope or a telescope or any sensory-empirical device.
Q: So how can these interior depths be accessed or "seen"?
K W : This is where interpretation enters the picture. All Right Hand paths involve perception, but all Left Hand paths involve interpretation.
And there is a simple reason for this: surfaces can be seen, but depth must be interpreted. As you and I talk, you are not just looking at some surface, some smiling face, some empirical object. You want to know what's going on inside me. You are not just watching what I do, you want to know what I feel, what I think, what's going on within me, in my consciousness.
So you ask me some questions. "What's happening? What do you think about this? How do you feel about this?" And I will tell you some things—we will talk—and you have to figure out what I mean, you have to interpret what mean. With each and every sentence, you
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have to interpret the meaning. What does he mean by that? Oh, I understand, you mean this. And so on.
And there is no other way to get at my interior except by interpretation. We must talk, and you must interpret. This is absolutely unavoidable. Even if you were a great psychic and could totally read my mind, you would still have to figure out what my thoughts mean— you still have to interpret what you read.
Q: Very different from the monological gaze.
K w: Yes, this is entirely different from simply staring at some surfaces with simple location and reporting what you see, whether those surfaces are rocks or cells or ecosystems or brain components. Depth does not sit on the surface waiting to be seen! Depth must be communicated, and communication must be interpreted.
Just so, everything on the Left half of figure 5-2 requires some sort interpretation. And interpretation is absolutely the only way we can get at each other's depth.
So we have a very simple distinction between the Right and the Left: surfaces can be seen, but depth must be interpreted.
Q: That's a clear distinction!
K W : Yes. And this is precisely why, as we'll see, the Right Hand paths are always asking, "What does it do? " whereas the Left Hand paths are always asking, "What does it mean?"
And this is incredibly important, because it gives us two very different approaches to consciousness and how we understand consciousness. There are important contributions to be made by both of these paths, but they must be carefully integrated or balanced. And this in turn will determine how we approach the higher stages of consciousness development itself, in both individual and collective transformation—it will bear directly on our spiritual evokution.
We are deaking, so to speak, with the Right and Left Hands of God, of how Spirit actually manifests in the world, and to fully grasp that manifestation, we definitely need both hands!
What Does That Dream Mean?
Q: Perhaps some examples of these two paths. Start with psy-
K w: Psychoanalysis is basically an interpretive or Left Hand approach, and classical behaviorism is a Right Hand or empirical approach.
In psychoanalysis, the title of Freud's first great book says it all: The Interpretation of Dreams. Dreams are an interior event. They are composed of symbols. The symbols can only be understood by interpretation. What does the dream mean? And one of Freud's great discoveries was that the dream is not incoherent, but rather it possesses a meaning, a hidden meaning that can be interpreted and brought to light.
So the simplest way to summarize Freud is that the "talking cure"—the dialogue cure!—not monokogicak, but dialogical—means that we must kearn to interpret our own depths more adequately. We are plagued by symptoms, such as anxiety or depression, that are baffling to us. Why am I so depressed? What is the meaning of this? And thus, in the course of psychoanalysis, I will learn to look at my dreams, or at my symptoms, or my depression, or my anxiety, in a way that makes sense of them. I will learn how to interpret them in a way that sheds light on my own interior.
Perhaps I will find that I have a hidden rage at my absent father, and this rage was disguised as symptoms of depression. had unconsciously misinterpreted this anger as depression. And so in therapy, I will learn to reinterpret this depression more accurately; I will learn to transkate "sad" as "mad." I Wilk get in touch with this angry aspect of my own depth, an aspect that had tried to hide from myself by misinterpreting it, mistranslating it, disguising it.
And the more adequately I interpret my depth—the more I can see that "sad" is really "mad"—then the more my symptoms will ease, the more the depression will lift. I am more faithfully interpreting my inner depths, and so those depths stop sabotaging me in the forms of painful symptoms.
Q: So that's an example of an interpretive or Left Hand approach for individuals. That's an Upper Left quadrant approach.
K W : Yes. And it applies not just to psychoanalysis. All "talking therapies''—from aspects of cognitive therapy to interpersonal therapy to Jungian therapy to Gestalt therapy to transactional analysis— are alk fundamentally based on this single principle, namely, the
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attempt to find a more adequate interpretation for one's interior depth. A more adequate way to find the meaning of my dreams, my symptoms, my depths, my life, my being.
My life is not simply a series of flatly objective events laid out in front of me like so many rocks with simple kocation that I am supposed to stare at until I see the surfaces more clearly. My life includes a deeply subjective component that I must come to understand and interpret to myself. It is not just surfaces; it has depths. And while surfaces can be seen, depths must be interpreted. And the more adequately I can interpret my own depths, then the more transparent my life will become to me. The more clearly I can see and understand it. The less it baffles me, perplexes me, pains me in its opaqueness.
Q: So what about the individual therapies that aim at the Upper Right quadrant? What about the exterior approaches to the individual?
K w: The Upper Right quadrant approaches, such as behaviorism or biological psychiatry—at their extreme, they want absolutely nothing to do with interpretation and depth and interiors and intentions. They couldn't care less about what's going on "inside," in the "black box." Many of them don't even think it exists. They are interested solely in observable, empirical, exterior behavior.
So with behaviorism, you simply find the observable response you want to increase or decrease, and you selectively reinforce or extinguish it. Your interiors are of no consequence; your consciousness is not required. With behaviorism, the therapist will engineer operant conditionings that will reinforce the desired response and extinguish the undesirable ones.
Similarly, with purely biological psychiatry, the therapist will administer a drug—Prozac, Xanax, Ekavil—that wikl bring about a stabilization of behavioral patterns. Many psychiatrists will administer the drug within the first consultation, and then just periodically check with you, say once a month, to make sure it's having the desired effect. Of course, some medical psychiatrists will engage in a bit of the talking cure, but many don't, and we are giving "pure examples" of the Upper Right.
And with this pure biological psychiatry, as with pure behaviorism, your presence is not required. That is, there is no attempt to get at
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the meaning of the symptoms. There is no extensive interpretation of your predicament. There is no attempt to increase your own selfunderstanding. There is no attempt to explore your interior depths and come to a clearer understanding of your own being.
Q: Nonetheless, take it that you are not condemning these exterior approaches in themselves.
K W : No, that would miss the point from the other direction. Every holon has these four aspects, these four quadrants. Empiricism and behaviorism are a superior approach to the exteriors of holons. They are basically correct as far as they go. I fully endorse them as far as they go.
The problem, of course, is that they don't go very far. And thus you often have to condemn them in the same breath, because they usually deny not only the importance but the very existence of the other quadrants. You are depressed, not because you lack values or meanings or virtues in your life, but because you lack serotonin, even though stocking your brain to the hilt with serotonin won't do a thing to develop your values.
In other words, my depression can be interiorly caused by an absent father, the exterior correlate of which might be a low level of serotonin in my brain, and Prozac can to some degree correct that serotonin imbalance. Which is fine, and sometimes extremely helpful. But Prozac will not in any way help me to understand my interior pain, to interpret it in a way that it takes on meaning for me and helps me to become transparent to myself. And if you are not interested in that, if you are not interested in understanding your own depth, then Prozac akone will suit your purposes.
But if you desire to see into your own depths and interpret them more adequately, then you will have to talk to somebody who has seen those depths before and helped others interpret them more adequately. In this intersubjective dialogue with a therapeutic helper, you will hold hands and walk the path of more adequate interpretations, you will enter a circle of intersubjective depth, and the more clearly you can interpret and articulate this depth, the less baffling you will become to yourself, the clearer you will become to yourself, the more transparent you will be.
And eventually, as we'll see, you might even become transparent to
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the Divine, liberated in your own infinite depth. But in any event, none of this, at any level, will open to you if you insist on hugging only the surfaces.
Social Science versus Cultural Understanding
Q: What about the collective? What about Lower Left and Lower Right approaches? The cultural and social? One is interpretive, the other is empirical?
K w: Yes. Like psychology, sociology has, almost from its inception, divided into two huge camps, the interpretive (Left Hand) and the naturalistic or empirical (Right Hand). The one investigates culture or cultural meanings, and attempts to get at those meanings from within, in a sympathetic understanding. The other investigates the social system or social structures and functions from without, in a very positivistic and empirical fashion. And so, of course, the former asks, What does it mean?, the latter, What does it do?
Q: Take them one at a time.
K w: Understanding the cultural meanings is an interpretive affair. You have to learn the language, you have to immerse yourself in the culture, you have to find out what the various practices mean. And these are the hermeneutic cultural sciences—Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Karl-Otto Apel, Charles Taylor, Thomas Kuhn, to name a prominent few.
These approaches all involve sympathetic resonance, sharing, talking—they are dialogical, interpretive. They want to get at the interior meaning, and not just the exterior behavior. They want to get inside the black box. They want to get at the Left Hand dimensions. And the only way you can get at depth is via interpretation.
But the empirical social sciences mostly want to study the behavior of societies in a detached fashion: the birthrates, the modes of production, the types of architecture, the suicide rates, the amount of money in circulation, the demographics, the population spread, the types of technology, and so on—all exterior behaviors, no interior intentions. Most of those statistics can be gathered without ever having to talk to any of the cultural natives. No nasty black boxes here.
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So these approaches are mostly monological, empirical, behavioral. You are looking at the behavior of a "social action system," you are not inquiring into the interior meaning or depth of the culture. And to the extent that you do investigate meaning or values, you make them almost totally subservient to the social system. And these are the standard positivistic, naturalistic, empirical social sciences— August Comte, Karl Marx, Talcott Parsons, Niklas Luhmann, Gerhard Lenski, and so on.
Q: You give an example of the Hopi Rain Dance. About how the Left and Right Hand approaches differ.
Kw: The Left Hand approach, the interpretive approach, wants to know what is the meaning of the Rain Dance? When the native peoples engage in the Dance, what does it mean for them? Why do they value it? And as the interpretive investigator becomes a "participant observer," then he or she begins to understand that the Rain Dance is largely a way to celebrate the sacredness of nature, and a way to ask that sacredness to bless the earth with rain. And you know this is so because this is what you are told by the practitioners themselves as you continue your attempts at mutual understanding.
The Right Hand paths want little to do with this. They look instead at what the function of the Dance is in the overall behavior of the social system. They are not so much interested in what the natives say the meaning is. Rather, they look at the behavior of the Dance in the overall observable system. And they conclude that the Dance, despite what the natives say, is actually functioning as a way to create social cohesion in the social action system. In other words, the Dance provides social integration.
Q : As I understand it, you are saying both are correct.
KW : Yes. They are the Left and the Right Hand approaches to the same communal holon. The Left Hand seeks to understand what the Dance means, its interior meaning and value, which can only be understood by standing within the culture. And the Right Hand seeks to understand what the Dance does, its overall function in the observable behavior of the social system, which can only be determined by standing outside the system in a detached and impartial fashion. Left and Right Hand paths.
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Hermeneutics
Q: Interpretation is the meaning of "hermeneutics."
Kw: Yes. Hermeneutics is the art and science of interpretation. Hermeneutics began as a way to understand interpretation itself, because when you interpret a text, there are good ways and bad ways to proceed.
In general, the Continental philosophers, particularly in Germany and France, have carried on the interpretive aspects of philosophy, and the Anglo-Saxon philosophers in Britain and North America have shunned interpretation and focused mostly on pragmatic and empiricanalytic studies. This old war between the Left and the Right Hand
This is why Thomas Kuhn caused such an uproar with his notion of paradigms—the idea that "objective scientific theories" are actually sunk in background contexts that govern their interpretations. And why Charles Taylor caused a sensation with the publication of his seminal essay, "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man," which demonstrated that background contexts of interpretation are necessary to understand cultural movements. This could only be shocking to Anglo-Saxon philosophers, whose paradigm of knowledge is the monological gaze: I see the rock.
So even though "hermeneutics" is a fancy word, please remember it. It's the key to the entire Left Hand dimensions. The Left Hand is composed of depth, and interpretation is the only way to get at depth. As Heidegger would say, interpretation goes all the way down. And mere empiricism is virtually worthless in this regard.
Q : But empiricists say interpretation is not objective and thus not "really real."
KW : It's like studying Hamlet. If you take a text of Hamlet and study it empirically, then you will find that it is made of so much ink and so much paper. That's all you can know about Hamlet empirically—it's composed of seven grams of ink, which is made of so many molecules, which have so many atoms—all of the things you can find in the Upper Right quadrant.
But if you want to know the meaning of Hamlet, then you have to read it. You have to engage in intersubjective understanding. You have to interpret what it means.
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True, this is not a merely objective affair. But neither is it subjective fantasy. This is very important, because empiric-scientific types are always claiming that if something isn't empirically true, then it isn't true at all. But interpretation is not subjective fantasy. There are good and bad interpretations of Hamlet. Hamlet is not about the joys of war, for example. That is a bad interpretation; it is wrong.
Q: So there are validity criteria for interpretations.
K w: Yes. The fact that the Left Hand dimensions have this strong interpretive aspect does not mean they are merely arbitrary or ungrounded, or that they are nothing but subjective and idiosyncratic fantasies. There are good and bad interpretations, felicitous interpretations and false or distorted interpretations, interpretations that are more adequate and those that are less adequate.
And this can be determined by a community of those who have looked into the same depth. As I said, the meaning of Hamlet is not "Have a nice day." That interpretation can be easily rejected by a community of those who have read and studied the text—that is, by a community of those who have entered the interior of Hamlet, by those who share that depth.
Even if you bring your own individual interpretations to Hamlet, which is fine, those interpretations are grounded in the realities and contexts of your actual lifeworld. Either way, the point is that interpretation does not mean wildly arbitrary!
This interpretive knowledge is just as important as empirical knowledge. In some ways, more important. But, of course, it's a bit trickier and requires a bit more sophistication than the head-banging obviousness of the monological gaze. But there is, alas, a type of simple mind that believes only those things with simple location actually exist, even though that belief itself does not have simple location. Well, duhhhhhhh . . .
All Interpretation Is Context-Bound
Q : You point out that the crucial feature of interpretation is that it is always context-bound.
K w: Yes. The primary rule of interpretation is that all meaning is context-bound. For example, the meaning of the word "bark" is dif-
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ferent in the phrases "the bark of a tree" and "the bark of a dog." The important point is that the context helps determine which interpretation is correct.
And that context itself exists in yet further contexts, and so off we go in the "hermeneutic circle." The reason, of course, is that there are only holons, and holons are nested indefinitely: holons within holons, contexts within contexts, endlessly.
So all meaning is context dependent, and contexts are boundless. And this makes interpretation a very slippery game. Derrida and the deconstructionists, of course, have made much of this "sliding" nature of meaning. In their extreme forms, the deconstructionists simply deny meaning altogether, which is perfectly self-deconstructing—just another example of extreme constructivism spinning into pure nihilism.
We needn't spin with them. Nested holons—contexts forever— simply means that we always need to be sensitive to background contexts in understanding meaning. And the more of these contexts we can take into account, then the richer our interpretations will be—all the way up, all the way down.
Nonhuman Interpretation
Q: So this interpretive component applies to nonhumans as well? It applies to nonhuman holons?
K w: If you want to know their interiors, yes, absolutely. If you want to get at the interior of any holon, what else are you going to do?
When you interact with your dog, you are not interested in just its exterior behavior. Since humans and dogs share a similar limbic system, we also share a common emotional worldspace ("typhonic"). You can sense when your dog is sad, or fearful, or happy, or hungry. And most people interact with those interiors. They want to share those interiors. When their dog is happy, it's easy to share that happiness. But that requires a sensitive interpretation of what your dog is feeling. Of course, this is not verbal or linguistic communication; but it is an empathic resonance with your dog's interior, with its depths,
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with its degree of consciousness, which might not be as great as yours, but that doesn't mean it's zero.
So you empathically interpret. And the dog does the same with you—you each resonate with the other's interior. In those moments, you share a common worldspace—in this case, a common emotional worldspace. You, of course, will elaborate it conceptually, which a dog can't do. But the basic emotions are similar enough, and you know it. You interpret your dog's interior feelings, and relate with those feelings. That's the whole point of getting a dog, isn't it?
Of course, the lower a holon, or the less depth it has, then the less consciousness it has, the less interior it has—and the less you can easily interpret and share. Of course, some people get on famously with their pet rocks, which I suppose shows you something.
Q: So because both you and the dog share some sort of common background—in this case, the emotional workdspace—then you can interpret each other to some degree.
K w: That's right. The common worldspace provides the common context that allows the interpretation, the sharing. As we said, all interpretation requires a context, and in this case, it is the context of the emotional worldspace, which is the common culture we share with dogs.
Of course, we also share all lower worldspaces—the physical (such as gravity), the vegetative (life), the reptilian (hunger). Since we also contain a reptilian stem, we can also share with lizards, but it becomes less fun, doesn't it? Down to pet rocks, with shared mass and gravity. Less depth, less to share. Really, all you and your pet rock can share is, you fall at the same speed.
Q: So when we reach specifically human contexts . . .
KW : Yes, when it comes specifically to humans, then in addition to the earlier backgrounds—cellular, reptilian-stem, mammalian-limbic—we also have complex cognitive and conceptual and linguistic backgrounds. And we ground our mutual interpretations in these common cultural backgrounds (the Lower Left). There is no other way for communication to occur.
Q : And these backgrounds evolve.
K w: Yes, all four quadrants evolve, all follow the twenty tenets. With respect to the cultural background—the Lower Left quad-
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rant—we saw it evolve in humans from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to existential, on the way to possibly higher worldviews. And each of these worldviews governs the types of ways that we can interpret the Kosmos.
So how indeed will you and I interpret the Kosmos? Will we interpret it magically? Will we interpret it mythically? Will we interpret it rationally? Or start to go transrational altogether?
But you can start to see why there isn't simply a pregiven world just lying around waiting to be idiotically reflected with the monological gaze.
Q : No wonder the human sciences have always divided into these two camps, Right Hand versus Left—surfaces can be seen, but depth must be interpreted.
Spiritual Interpretation
Q: But how is interpretation important in spiritual transformation or spiritual experience?
K W : Give an example.
Q: Say I have a direct experience of interior illumination—a blinding, ecstatic, mind-blowing experience of inner light.
Kw: The experience itself is indeed direct and immediate. You might even become one with that light. But then you come out of that state, and you want to tell me about it. You want to talk to me about it. You want to talk to yourself about it. And here you must interpret what this deep experience was. What was this light? Was it Jesus Christ? Was it Buddha-mind? Was it an archetype? An angel? Was it an alien UFO? Was it just some brain state gone haywire? What was it? God? Or a piece of undigested meat? The Goddess? Or a food
You must interpret! And if you decide it was some sort of genuine spiritual experience, then of what flavor? Allah? Keter? Kundalini? Savikalpa-samadhi? Jungian archetype? Platonic form? This is not some unimportant or secondary issue. This is not some theoretical hair splitting. This is not some merely academic concern. Quite the contrary. How you interpret this experience will govern how you approach others with this illumination, how you share it with the world,
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how you fit it into your own self system, and the ways you can even speak about it to others and think about it yourself. And it will determine your future relation to this light!
And like all interpretations—whether of Hamlet or of the inner light—there are good and there are bad interpretations. And in this interpretation, will you do a good job or a bad job?
In other words, even if this experience of light was transmental, or beyond words altogether, still you are a compound individual. Still you are composed not only of this spiritual component—which is perhaps what the light was; you are also composed of mind and body and matter. And mentally you must orient yourself to this experience. You must interpret it, explain it, make sense of it. And if you can't interpret it adequately, it might very likely drive you insane. You will not be able to integrate it with the rest of your being because you cannot adequately interpret it. You don't know what it means. Your own extraordinary depth escapes you, confuses you, obscures you, because you cannot interpret it adequately.
Q: So interpretation is an important part of even spiritual or transmental experiences.
Kw: Yes, definitely. Many people today are having just these types of spiritual or transmental experiences—experiences from the higher or deeper stages of consciousness evolution. But they don't know how to interpret them. They have these extraordinary intuitions, but they unpack the intuitions in a very inadequate fashion. And these inadequate interpretations abort further transformation, derail it, sabotage it.
Q : So examples of "bad" interpretations would be, what? How can we tell if an interpretation is bad?
K W : Remember, one of the basic rules of interpretation is that all meaning is context-bound. So in any attempt to interpret these types of spiritual experiences, we want to make sure that the context against which we interpret the experience is as full and complete as possible. In other words, we want to make sure that we have checked our interpretation against all four quadrants. We want an "all-quadrants" view, an interpretation from the context of the Kosmos in all its dimensions.
What is happening now is that many people are trying to interpret
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these experiences based on the realities of just one quadrant—and sometimes just one level in one quadrant! This devastates the other quadrants and cripples the fullness of the interpretation, cripples the fullness of the experience itself.
Q: For example?
K W : Many people interpret these spiritual experiences basically in terms of only the Upper Left quadrant—they see the experience in terms of a higher Self, or higher consciousness, or archetypal forms, or enneagram patterns, or care of the soul, or the inner voice, or transcendental awareness, and so forth. They tend to completely ignore the cultural and social and behavioral components. So their insights are crippled in terms of how to relate this higher Self to the other quadrants, which are all interpreted rather narcissistically as mere extensions of their Self. The new age movement is full of this type of Self-only interpretation.
Others see these experiences as basically a product of brain states—the Upper Right. They attempt to interpret these experiences as coming solely or predominantly from theta brain wave states, or massive endorphin release, or hemispheric synchronization, and so on. This also completely devastates the cultural and social compo nents, not to mention the interior states of consciousness itself. It is hyperobjective and merely technological.
Others—especially the "new paradigm" ecological theorists— attempt to interpret these experiences mostly in terms of the Lower Right quadrant. The "ultimate reality" for them is the empirical web of life, or Gaia, or the biosphere, or the social system, and all holons are reduced to being merely a strand in the wonderful web. These approaches devastate the interior stages of consciousness development, and reduce all Left Hand components to Right Hand strands in the empirical web. This totally mistakes great span for great depth and therefore collapses vertical depth to horizontal expansion. This results in various forms of what has correctly been called ecofascism.
Others attempt to interpret these experiences merely in terms of collective cultural consciousness and a coming worldview transformation—the Lower Left quadrant. This overlooks what individual consciousness can do at any given point, and denies the importance
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of social structures and institutions in helping to support and embed these experiences. And so on.
Q: All of which tend to be very partial.
K W : All of these "one-quadrant" interpretations have a moment of truth to them, and an important moment at that. But because they don't adequately include the other quadrants, they cripple the original experience. They unpack this spiritual intuition very poorly, in very fragmented terms. And these fragmented interpretations do not help facilitate further spiritual intuitions. Fragmented interpretations tend to abort the spiritual process itself.
Q: So the point is. . . .
KW : Since Spirit-in-action manifests as all four quadrants, then an adequate interpretation of a spiritual experience ought to take all four quadrants into account. It's not just that we have different kevels—matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit—but that each of these manifests in four facets—intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social.
This all-level, all-quadrant view becomes especially important as we look at the higher or deeper stages of human growth and development—at the further stages of consciousness evolution and community unfolding. If there is indeed a transformation in our future, it lies in these higher or deeper stages, and these can only be accessed in their richness and fullness if we honor and appreciate the different types of truth that will unfold to set us free.
So the whole point, I think, is that we want to find ourselves in sympathetic attunement with all aspects of the Kosmos. We want to touch the truth in each of the quadrants. And we begin to do so by noticing that each speaks to us with a different voice. If we listen carefully, we can hear each of these voices whispering gently their truths, and finally joining in a harmonious chorus that quietly calls us home.
From attunement to atonement to at-onement: we find ourselves in the overpowering embrace of a Kosmic sympathy on the very verge of Kosmic consciousness itself.
But we must listen very carefully.
7 Attuned to the Kosmos
Q: We must listen very carefully. You mean, to all four types of truth.
Kw: Truth, in the broadest sense, means being attuned with the real. To be authentically in touch with the true, and the good and the beautiful. Yes?
And that implies that we can also be out of touch with the real. We can be lost, or obscured, or mistaken, or wrong in our assessments. We can be out of touch with the true, out of touch with the good, out of touch with the beautiful.
And so a collective humanity, in the course of its evolution, has discovered, through painful trial and error, the various ways that we can check our attunement with the Kosmos. Various ways to see if we are in touch with truth or lost in falsity. Whether we are honoring the good or obscuring it. Whether we are moved by the beautiful or promoting degradation.
Humanity, in other words, has painfully learned and labored hard to fashion a series of validity claims—tests that can help us determine if we are in touch with the real, if we are adequately attuned to the Kosmos in all of its rich diversity.
Q: So the validity claims themselves . . .
IOS
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K W : The validity claims are the ways that we connect to Spirit itself, ways that we attune ourselves to the Kosmos. The validity claims force us to confront reality; they curb our egoic fantasies and self-centered ways; they demand evidence from the rest of the Kosmos; they force us outside of ourselves! They are the checks and balances in the Kosmic Constitution.
Q: So perhaps we could go around the four quadrants and very briefly summarize this. The four truths, what they are, and the tests for their validity.
K w: These are listed in figure 7-1. And once we briefly review these, I promise I'll give that very, very simple way to summarize them
Propositional Truth
Q: Is there an easy definition of "truth"?
K W : Most people take truth to mean representational truth. Simple mapping or simple correspondence. make a statement or a proposition that refers to or represents something in the concrete world. For example, I might say, "It is raining outside." Now we want to know if that is true or not. We want to know the validity or the "truth status" of that statement. So basically, we go and look outside. And if it is indeed raining, we say that the statement "It is raining outside" is a true statement.
Q: Or a true proposition.
K w: Yes. it's a simple mapping procedure. We check to see if the proposition corresponds with or fits the facts, if the map accurately reflects the real territory. (Usually it's more complicated, and we might try to disprove the map, and if we can never disprove it, we assume it is accurate enough.) But the essential idea is that with representational or propositional truth, my statement somehow refers to an objective state of affairs, and it fairly accurately corresponds with those objects or processes or affairs.
Q : So propositional truth basically deals with just the exterior or objective or Right Hand dimensions?
K w: Yes, that's right. Both the Upper Right and Lower Right quadrants contain the observable, empirical, exterior aspects of ho-
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INTERIOR EXTERIOR
Left Hand Paths Right Hand Paths
SUBJECTIVE
truthfulness sincerity integrity trustworthiness it OBJECTIVE
truth correspondence representation propositional
justness cultural fit mutual understanding rightness
INTERSUBJECTIVE It functional fit systems theory web structural-functionalism social systems mesh
INTEROBJECTIVE
FIGURE 7-1. Validity claims.
Ions. They all have simple location. These aspects can be easily seen, and thus with propositional truth, we tie our statements to these objects or processes or affairs. (This is also called the correspondence theory of truth.)
All of which is fair enough, and important enough, and I in no way deny the general importance of empirical representation. It's just not the whole story; it's not even the most interesting part of the story.
Trutffulness
Q: So an objective state of affairs—the brain, planets, organisms, ecosystems—can be represented with empirical mapping. These em1 08 |
pirical maps are all variations on ''It is raining." Objective propositions.
KW : Yes. But if we now kook at the Upper Left—the actual interior of an individual holon—then we have an entirely different type of validity claim. The question here is not, Is it raining outside? The question here is, When I tell you it is raining outside, am I telling you the truth or am I lying?
You see, here it is not so much a question of whether the map matches the objective territory, but whether the mapmaker can be trusted.
And not just about objective truths, but especially about interior truths. mean, you can always check and see if it is raining. You can do that yourself. But the only way you can know my interior, my depth, is by asking me, by talking to me, as we have seen. And when I report on my inner status, I might be telling you the truth, but I might be lying. You have no other way to get at my interior except in talk and dialogue and interpretation, and I might fundamentally distort, or conceal, or mislead—in short, I might lie.
So the way we tend to navigate in the Right Hand is by using the yardstick of propositional truth—or simply "truth" for short—but the way we navigate in the Upper Left is by using the yardstick of truthfulness or sincerity or honesty or trustworthiness. This is not so much a matter of objective truth but of subjective truthfulness. Two very different criteria—truth and truthfulness.
Q: So those are two different validity claims.
K W : Yes, that's right. And this is no trivial matter. Interior events are located in states of consciousness, not in objective states of affairs, and so you can't empirically nail them down with simple location. As we saw, they are accessed with communication and interpretation, not with the monological gaze.
And in this communication, I might intentionally lie to you. For various reasons, I might try to misrepresent my interior, I might try to make it appear to be something other than it really is. I might dash the entire Left Hand dimensions against the wall of deceitfulness. I might lie to you.
Furthermore, and this is crucial, I might lie to myself. I might try to conceal aspects of my own depth from myself. I might do this
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intentionally, or might do it "unconsciously." But one way or another, I might misinterpret my own depth, I might lie about my own interior.
And, in part, the "unconscious" is the locus of the all the ways I have lied to myself. I might have started lying to myself because of intense environmental trauma. Or maybe learned it from my parents. Or maybe had to do so as a defense mechanism against an even more painful truth.
But in any event, my unconscious is the locus of my insincerity, of my being less than truthful with myself, less than truthful about my subjective depth, my interior status, my deep desires and intentions. The unconscious is the locus of the lie.
Q: When we were talking about psychoanalysis and the interpretive therapies, you said their goal was to provide more truthful interpretations.
K w: Yes, that's exactly the same thing. The point of "depth psychology" and therapy is to help people interpret themselves more truthfully. The Left Hand, of course, is interpretation, and so it is no surprise that truthful or more adequate interpretation is the central therapeutic criterion.
The example we used was "sad" and "mad" about an absent father. What that means is that at some point early in my life, I started interpreting anger as depression. Perhaps was enraged at my father for not being around. This rage, however, is very dangerous for a child. What if this rage could actually kill my father? Perhaps I had better not have this anger, because after all I love my father. So I'm angry at myself instead. I beat myself up instead. I'm rotten, no good, wretched to the core. This is very depressing. started out mad, now Pm calking it sad.
One way or another, I have misinterpreted my interior, I have distorted my depth. have started calling anger "sadness." And I carry this lie around with me. I cannot be truthful with myself because that would involve such great pain—to want to kill the father I love—so would rather lie about the whole thing. And so this I do. My "shadow," my "unconscious," is now the locus of this lie, the focal point of this insincerity, the inner place that I hide from myself.
And because I lie to myself—and then forget it is a lie—then will
I
lie to you without even knowing it. I will probably even seem very sincere about it. In fact, if I have thoroughly lied to myself, will honestly think I'm telling the truth. And if you give me a lie detector test, it will show that I'm telling the "truth." So much for empirical tests.
Finally, because I have misinterpreted my own depth, I will often misinterpret yours. am cutting something off in my own depth—I am dissociating it, or repressing it, or alienating it—and so I will distort interpretations from that depth, both in myself and in others. My interpretations will be laced with lies, nested in insincerity. I will misinterpret myself, and I will often misinterpret you.
And you will probably notice this, notice that something is off base. will say something so wacky, you'll have to respond, "That's not what I meant!" And you will think to yourself, "Where on earth did he get that one?"
Q: So these various interpretive therapies, such as psychoanalysis or Gestalt or Jungian, help you to contact and more truthfully interpret your depths.
K w: Yes, exactly. The idea is not to make some sort of more accurate map of the objective world, but to relax your resistances and sink into your interior depths, and learn to report those depths more truthfully, both to others and—more important—to yourself.
And this allows your depth to begin to match your behavior. Your words and your actions will match up. That is, your Left will match your Right. You will "walk your talk." And your left hand will know what your right hand doeth. We generally refer to this as integrity. You have the sense that the person won't lie to you, because they haven't lied to themselves.
Of course, if you live in the world of the lab technician—the empiricist, the behaviorist, the systems theorist, the cybernetic scurrying, the monological madness—you don't particularly care about interior truthfulness, because you don't particularly care about interiors, period—not in their own terms, anyway. You just want monological truth, objective surfaces, empirical behavior, systems networks, and you don't care about interior depth and sincerity and truthfulness—in fact, there is nothing on the empirical maps that even vaguely corresponds with truthfulness!
Truthfulness, you see, doesn't have simple location, and it is not a merely empirical state of affairs, so it appears on none of the empirical maps. Not on a physicist's map, not on a biologist's map, not on a neurologist's map, not on a systems theory map, not on an ecosys„ tem map. It is a Left Hand, not a Right Hand, affair!
And yet in that Left Hand exists your entire lifeworld, your actual awareness, your own depth. And if you are alive to depth at all, you will come to know that depth in yourself and in others through truthfulness and sincerity and trustworthiness.
The essential point is that the way to depth is blocked by deceit, blocked by deception. And the moment you acknowledge interiors, you must confront the primary roadblock to accessing those interiors: you must confront deception and deceit.
Which is precisely why we navigate in this domain by truthfulness. And yes, that is what all Left Hand therapies work with. More truthful interpretations of your own inner depth.
Q: Different interpretive therapies do have different types of interpretations, however.
K w: Well, yes, and that's a long discussion. Perhaps I could just say that the different interpretive therapies differ primarily on how deep they are willing to go in their interpretations. Or how high they are willing to go. The Upper Left quadrant is, as we were saying, a spectrum of consciousness—a spectrum of levels of developmental awareness. And different therapies tend to plug into different levels of this spectrum, and use their favorite level as the basic reference point around which they will offer their interpretations.
As we saw, all interpretation is context-bound, and different therapies have their own favorite context within which they offer their interpretations. This doesn't mean that they are wrong, only that we have to identify their context, their favorite level. We have to situate their interpretations.
Freudians emphasize the emotional-sexual level; cognitive therapists emphasize the verbal; transpersonal therapists emphasize the spiritual. But they all primarily confront the distortions, the lies and self-deceptions with which we hide truthful aspects of these dimensions from ourselves—the kies and distortions that obscure our emotions, our self-esteem, our spiritual nature.
1 1 2 I Spirit-in -Action
Q: So a full-spectrum model would be a type of composite story, including all the various levels of the spectrum of conscious and the therapies that are most effective for each level.
K W : Yes, that is one of the tasks of a full-spectrum model, and many researchers are now hard at work on such a model (these are discussed in Part Two). An excellent introduction to this field is Paths beyond Ego, by Roger Walsh and Frances Vaughan.
But my basic point about these Left Hand or interpretive therapies is that, once we strip them of their exclusiveness or their single-level partialness, then they all have something very important to teach us. They all have something to tell us about the various layers of the self—of consciousness—and about the truthful interpretations that can help us access these various dimensions.
Because the amazing fact is that truth alone will not set you free. Truthfulness will set you free.
ustness
Q: What about the Lower Left quadrant?
K W : The crucial point is that the subjective world is situated in an intersubjective space, a cultural space, and it is this intersubjective space that allows the subjective space to arise in the first place. Without this cultural background, my own individual thoughts would have no meaning at all. I wouldn't even have the tools to interpret my own thoughts to myself. In fact, I wouldn't even have developed thoughts, I would be "wolf boy."
In other words, the subjective space is inseparable from the intersubjective space, and this is one of the great discoveries of the postmodern or post-Enlightenment movements.
So here, in the Lower Left, the validity claim is not so much objective propositional truth, and not so much subjective truthfulness, but intersubjective fit. This cultural background provides the common context against which my own thoughts and interpretations will have some sort of meaning. And so the validity criteria here involves the "cultural fit" with this background.
Q: So the aim of this validity claim is what, exactly? We have
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objective truth, we have subjective truthfulness, and we have intersubjective . . . what?
KW : The aim here is mutual understanding. Not that we necessarily agree with each other, but can we at least understand each other? Because if that can't happen, then we will never be able to exist in a common culture. Can you and I arrange our subjective spaces so that we see eye to eye? Can we find a common cultural background that allows communication to exist in the first place? Can we find a cultural fit, a common meaning, between ourselves? This must happen to some degree before any communication can occur at all!
Q: So the aim here is not so much the mapping of objective truth, and not simply being truthful, but reaching mutual understanding?
Kw: Yes. This has many, many aspects. You and I are going to have to agree on some sort of morals and ethics if we are going to live in the same space. And we are going to have to find some sort of common law. And we are going to have to find some sort of identity that overlaps our individual selves and shows us something in common, some sort of collective identity, so that we can see something of ourselves in each other, and treat each other with care and concern.
All of that is involved in this cultural fit, this background of common meaning and appropriateness and justness. I have been describing this background as if it were some sort of contract that you and I consciously form, like a social contract, and sometimes it is. Sometimes we simply reach mutual agreement about, for example, the voting age or the speed limit on the highway. That is part of cultural fit, of how we agree on rules and common meanings that allow us all to fit together.
But much of cultural fit is not a conscious contract; much of it is so deeply background that we hardly know it's there. There are linguistic structures and cultural practices so deeply contextual that we are still trying to dig them up and understand them (one of Heidegger's main themes). But the point is, wherever they come from, there is no escaping these intersubjective networks that allow the subjective space to develop in the first place!
What is so remarkable about mutual understanding is not that I can take a simple word like "dog" and point to a real dog and say, "I mean that." What is so remarkable is that you know what I mean
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by that! Forget the simple empirical pointing! Instead, look at this intersubjective understanding. It is utterly amazing. It means you and I can inhabit each other's interior to some degree. You and I can share our depth. When we point to truth, and we are situated in truthfulness, we can reach mutual understanding. This is a miracle. If Spirit exists, you can begin to look for it here.
Q: So this is cultural fit or justness.
Kw: Yes, common justness, goodness, rightness. How do we reach the common good? What is right and appropriate for us, such that we can all inhabit the same cultural space with some sort of dignity and fairness? How do we arrange our subjective spaces so that they mesh in the common intersubjective space, the common worldspace, the common culture, upon which we have all depended for our own subjective being?
This is not a matter of arranging objects in the space of simple location! It is a matter of arranging subjects in the collective interior space of culture.
This is not simply truthfulness, and not simply the true, but the good.
Q: So, as you say, cultural fit or justness includes all sorts of items, from ethics and morals and laws, to group or collective identities, to background cultural contexts, and so on.
K w: Yes, alk of which we have been summarizing as a common worldview or worldspace, which we also called "cultural," the Lower Left.
And remember, this cultural space exists for all holons, even though it might be simpler and less complex. So there is intersubjectivity woven into the very fabric of the Kosmos at all levels. This is not just the Spirit in "me," not just the Spirit in "it," not just the Spirit in "them"—but the Spirit in "us," in all of us.
And, as we will see when we return to environmental ethics, we want to arrive at a justness for all sentient beings: the deeper good for all of us.
Functional Fit
Q: What's the difference between Upper Right and Lower Right? You said they have a different validity claim.
K W : The Upper Right is exteriors of just individuals, the Lower Right is exteriors of systems. So the Upper Right is propositional truth in the very strictest sense: a proposition refers to a single fact. But in the Lower Right, the proposition refers to the social system, whose main validity claim is functional fit—how various holons fit together in the overall objective system.
Q: But doesn't the Lower Left also involve systems? You said that in cultural fit, it's how an individual fits with the whole cultural background. Isn't that also systems theory?
K w: No, it isn't, and the reason it isn't is basically the entire story of the postmodern revolt against Enlightenment modernity. In a sense, the entire post-Cartesian revolt points out dramatically why systems theory is just more Cartesian dualism in its worst aspects. Understanding why that is so is the very essence of the postmodern advance.
Q: Let's go into that, because it is certainly at odds with what the systems theorists themselves say. They say they are overcoming the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm.
K W : Just the opposite. The fundamental Enlightenment paradigm, as we have seen, was the representation paradigm—the mapping paradigm, the monological paradigm—and the systems theorists are just doing more of the same. They don't overcome it, they clone it.
It's true that both the Lower Right and Lower Left are dealing with 'systems" in the broad sense, because the entire lower half is the communal or the collective. But the Lower Left describes that system from within, from the interior. It describes the consciousness, the values, the worldviews, the ethics, the collective identities. But the Lower Right describes the system in purely objective and exterior terms, from without. It doesn't want to know how collective values are intersubjectively shared in mutual understanding. Rather, it wants to know how their objective correlates functionally fit in the overall social system, which itself has simple location.
So in systems theory you will find nothing about ethical standards, intersubjective values, moral dispositions, mutual understanding, truthfulness, sincerity, depth, integrity, aesthetics, interpretation, hermeneutics, beauty, art, the sublime. Open any systems theory text and
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you will find none of that even mentioned. All you will find are the objective and exterior correlates of all of that. All you will find in systems theory are information bits scurrying through processing channels, and cybernetic feedback loops, and processes within processes of dynamic networks of monological representations, and nests within nests of endless processes, all of which have simple location, not in an individual, but in the social system and network of objective processes.
All of which is true! And all of which leaves out the interiors in their own terms, the actual lived experiences and values and lifeworlds—it honors the Right Hand of the collective, but completely devastates the Left Hand.
Q: But why can't you simply say, as systems theorists do, that systems theory is the basic reality of which the subjective aspects are simply parts—all parts of the great web. That web covers everything, by definition.
KW : By exterior definition! That great web always has simple location! So with the systems approach, the split between the subjective and the objective is "healed" by reducing all subjects to objects in the "holistic" system. It reduces all subjective and intersubjective occasions to interobjective fit, functional fit, monological fit.
Well, that is the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm. This is why theorists from Taylor to Foucault to Habermas have pointed out that systems theory is just more of the same reductionistic nightmare—all of the Left Hand aspects are reduced to Right Hand descriptions in the great system, the great web.
Q: What you call subtle reductionism.
Kw: Yes, subtle reductionism. Gross reductionism we all know about: everything is reduced to atoms in the Upper Right. This is very gross. Subtle reductionism does not do that! In fact, it aggressively fights that! But it immediately gets caught in a subtle reductionism: all Left Hand aspects are reduced to their correlates in the Right Hand. The Right Hand has extensive functional fit and a systems view, so it appears that you are being very holistic and all-inclusive, but you have just gutted the interiors of the entire Kosmos, you have just perfectly ruined the lifeworld of all holons.
Objective systems within systems within systems—atoms are parts
of cells, which are parts of organisms, which are parts of ecosystems, which are parts of the biosphere, and so on. In other words, functional fit. The truth of the Lower Right is found in how the individual holons functionally fit into the holistic system, how each is a strand in the interrelated web, which is the primary reality. So the system theorist is always talking collective systems—Gaia, or ecosystems, or interrelated webs of interaction, or the web of life, or information flow charts as objectively mapped, or planetary federations and global networks, and so on. All in objective and monological terms.
All of which is true, but all of which totally leaves out the Left Hand dimensions. So the systems theorists admirably fight gross reductionism, but they are totally caught in the monological madness of subtle reductionism, which is the real root of the Enlightenment nightmare, as recent scholarship has made more than clear.
Q: Systems theory does claim to be a monological science.
KW : Yes, and we don't even argue with them. They are entirely correct. And that says it all.
Q: Is the difference between the Lower Left and cultural fit, versus the Lower Right and functional fit—would this be the same as the two approaches to the Rain Dance?
K W : Yes, very much. The Lower Left approach studies the community by becoming a participant observer, and attempts to understand it from within. Remember, the validity criteria in the Lower Left is mutual understanding. And this you attempt to do by becoming a participant observer. You enter the interior meaning of the community. And you understand this meaning only by understanding its cultural fit—by understanding what the meaning of the Dance is, based on how it fits into the vast background of cultural and linguistic meanings and practices. And the participant observer, the hermeneutic interpreter, might find that, as we said, the Dance is part of a sacred ritual with nature. That is its interior meaning, which you understand by immersing yourself in this cultural background which will give you the common worldspace or common context against which you can now make adequate interpretations.
Now the standard systems scientist, or standard systems theorist, is not primarily interested in any of that, in any of the interior meaning. Rather, systems theory is interested in the function that the
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Dance performs in the overall social system. What the natives say this Dance means is not so important. What is really important is that the Dance is part of an objective social system, and this objective system in many ways determines what the individual participants are doing. The real function of the Dance is to provide autopoietic selfmaintenance of the system. The Dance is thus part of the social system's attempt to maintain its social integration, its functional fit. It provides a common ritual around which social cohesion is organized. And this can be determined by observing the Dance from an objective stance, an "empirical" or positivistic stance—objective and monologiCal. You can even make a monological flow chart of it, which, believe me, is not how the natives experience the Dance at all!
Q: But I suppose that, again, you do not think that one of those approaches is right and the other wrong.
K w: They are both correct, in my opinion. One approaches the sociocultural holon from within, the other from without. One is how subjects fit together in cultural space—how you and I reach mutual understanding or intersubjectivity; the other is how objects fit together in physical space, in the total objective system, in interobjectivity. The one uses hermeneutics, or interpretation of interior depth; the other uses empirical-analytic observation, or objective analysis of observable behavior. "What does it mean?" versus "What does
Both are entirely valid; they are each the correlates of the other. They are, in fact, the Left and Right Hands of Spirit as it manifests in the collective. But, alas, these two academic disciplines don't get along too well with each other, a cat fight we might as well avoid.
Conclusion: The Four Faces of Spirit
Q: Okay, so we have four different quadrants, each with a different type of truth, a different voice. And each has a different test for its truth—a different validity claim, as shown in figure 7-1.
K W : Yes. All of these are valid forms of knowledge, because they are grounded in the realities of the four facets of every holon. And therefore all four of these truth claims can be redeemed, can be confirmed or rejected by a community of the adequate. They each have a
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different validity claim which carefully guides us, through checks and balances, on our knowledge quest. They are all falsifiable in their own domains, which means false claims can be dislodged by further evidence from that domain. (So let us gently ignore the claims of any one quadrant that it alone has the only falsifiable test there is, so it alone has the only truth worth knowing!)
And over the centuries and millennia, humanity has, by very painful trial and error, learned the basic procedures for these tests for truth.
Q: Which is why they're so important.
Kw: Definitely. These truths are the golden treasure of a collective humanity, hard won through blood and sweat and tears and turmoil in the face of falsity, error, deception, and deceit. Humanity has slowly and increasingly learned, over a million-year history, to separate truth from appearance, goodness from corruption, beauty from degradation, and sincerity from deception.
And ultimately, these four truths are simply the four faces of Spirit as it shines in the manifest world. The validity claims are the ways that we connect to Spirit itself, ways that we attune ourselves to the Kosmos. As we said at the beginning of this discussion, the validity claims force us to confront reality; they curb our egoic fantasies and self-centered ways; they demand evidence from the rest of the Kosmos; they force us outside of ourselves! They are the checks and balances in the Kosmic Constitution.
And so, following these paths to truth, we fit with the flow of the Kosmos, we are delivered into currents that take us outside of ourselves, beyond ourselves, and force us to curb our self-serving ways, as we fit into ever deeper and wider circles of truth. From attunement to atonement to at-onement: until, with a sudden and jolting shock, we recognize our own Original Face, the Face that was smiling at us in each and every truth claim, the Face that all along was whispering ever so gently but always so insistently: please remember the true, and please remember the good, and please remember the beautiful.
And so the whispering voice from every corner of the Kosmos says: let truth and truthfulness and goodness and beauty shine as the seals of a radiant Emptiness that would never, and could never, abandon us.
8 The Good, the True, and the Beautiful
Q: I want to move into the higher or transpersonal stages. But before we do that, you said there was a very simple way to summarize the four quadrants, their truths and validity claims—all of that, a simple way to summarize it!
K w: Yes. Here are the basic divisions: Everything on the Right Hand can be described in "it" language. Everything in the Upper Left is described in "I" language. And everything on the Lower Left is described in "we" language.
Q: I, we, and it. That's simple enough.
The Big Three
Q: These three languages are listed on the inside corners of figure 7-1 (page 107).
K w: Yes. It-language is objective, neutral, value-free surfaces. This is the standard language of the empirical, analytic, and systems sciences, from physics to biology to ecology to cybernetics to positivistic sociology to behaviorism to systems theory.
In other words, it is monological. It is a monologue with surfaces, with "its." It-language describes objective exteriors and their interre-
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lations, observable surfaces and patterns that can be seen with the senses or their instrumental extensions—whether those empirical surfaces are "inside" you, like your brain or lungs, or "outside" you, like ecosystems. Even information scurrying through channels can be described in it-language. Information, in fact, is defined as negative entropy, which is about as it-ish as you can get. Your presence is not required.
I-language, on the other hand, is your presence, your consciousness, your subjective awareness. Everything on the Upper Lzft is basically described in I-language, in the language of interior subjectivity. The subjective component of any holon is the I-component.
Of course, this "I" or self or subjectivity becomes greater with greater depth—there is more subjectivity in an ape than in a worm— but the point is, this I-component in any case cannot be described in it-language. That would convert the subject into a mere a object, and we all instinctively resist this, and resist it aggressively. Subjects are understood, objects are manipulated.
Q: The lab technician . . .
K w: Yes, that was one example. Your "I" is treated as an "it." Whether these objects are singular, or whether they are collective strands in the great and wonderful web, people instinctively know that this reduction is dangerous.
Q: And the third language?
K w: The third language, the we-language, is the Lower Left, the cultural or intersubjective dimension. The Upper Left is how "I" see the world; the Lower Left is how "we" see it. It is the collective worldview that we of a particular time and place and culture inhabit. These worldviews evolve, of course, and so we find archaic, magic, mythic, rational, which we have already briefly mentioned.
So at the very minimum, we have these three fundamental Ianguages, and they are quite different, addressing these different domains. And the failure to differentiate these languages has caused an enormous amount of confusion.
Q: You call these "the Big Three."
K w: Yes. The Big Three—this is just a simplified version of the four quadrants, since both Right Hand quadrants are objective exteri-
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ors or "its." So for simplicity's sake, the four quadrants can usually be treated as three, as the Big Three—I, we, and it.
So when we say that every individual holon has four quadrants— or, in simpler form, the Big Three—we also mean that every holon has these aspects or facets that can only be described in these different languages. And the reason we can't reduce any of these languages to the others is the same reason we can't reduce any of the quadrants to the others. So we can only describe a holon adequately and fully if we use all three languages, so as to describe all of its quadrants, and not simply privilege one quadrant or one language, which, of course, is what usually happens.
Q: So, the Big Three. You have pointed out an enormous number of correlations with these three—such as morals, science, and art; or Plato's the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
K w: Yes. Here are just a few of the various forms of the Big Three:
I (Upper Left): consciousness, subjectivity, self, and selfexpression (including art and aesthetics); truthfulness, sincerity.
We (Lower Left): ethics and morals, worldviews, common context, culture; intersubjective meaning, mutual understanding, appropriateness, justness.
It (Right Hand): science and technology, objective nature, empirical forms (including brain and social systems); propositional truth (singular and functional fit).
Science—empirical science—deals with objects, with "its," with empirical patterns. Morals and ethics concern "we" and our intersubjective world. Art concerns the beauty in the eye of the beholder, the "I." And yes, this is essentially Plato's the Good (morals, the "we"), the True (in the sense of propositional truth, objective truths or "its"), and the Beautiful (the aesthetic dimension as perceived by each "I").
The Big Three are also Sir Karl Popper's three worlds—objective (it), subjective (I), and cultural (we). And the Big Three are Habermas's three validity claims: objective truth, subjective sincerity, and intersubjective justness.
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And, of enormous historical importance, the Big Three showed up in Kant's immensely influential trilogy—The Critique of Pure Reason (objective science), The Critique of Practical Reason (morals), and The Critique ofJudgment (aesthetic judgment and art).
Dozens of examples could be given, but that's the general picture of the Big Three.
Q: Okay, I want to very briefly return to the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm—to the whole movement of "modernity" itself— and I want you to explain it in terms of the Big Three.
This is important, I think, because all of the "new paradigm" approaches claim to be overcoming the Enlightenment paradigm, and you keep saying that all of them are still thoroughly caught in it. You keep saying, for example, that systems theory is still following the Enlightenment paradigm. So, in terms of the Big Three, what was the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm?
K w: Oh, that part is fairly easy. The fundamental Enlightenment paradigm reduced all I's and all we's to mere its. The mainstream Enlightenment thought that all of reality could be captured in it-language, which alone was supposed to be "really real." So it reduced the Big Three to the big flat one of it-language. In other words, it reduced all of the Left Hand dimensions to their Right Hand correlates—subtle reductionism. Is this clear?
Q: It rejected consciousness and morals in favor of science?
K W : Yes, in a sense. But the best way to get a handle on the negative aspects of modernity and the Enlightenment is to first understand the positive contributions. Each stage of development, remember, has a "dialectic of progress''—in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news. And we have been stressing some of the bad news, but this really doesn't make much sense without first understanding the corresponding good news. So I'd like to briefly talk about that good news, or else we get caught in merely anti-modernist rhetoric, which goes nowhere.
The Good News: Differentiation of the Big Three
Q: Okay, out of curiosity, can this "good news" of modernity also be stated in terms of the Big Three?
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KW : Yes. According to theorists from Weber to Habermas, the good news of modernity was that it managed, for the first time in history, to fully differentiate the Big Three. That is, to differentiate art, morals, and science; or self, culture, and nature. These domains were no longer fused with each other, no longer syncretically fused and confused.
We moderns take this differentiation so much for granted that we tend to forget what was involved in the previous mythological worldview, where art and science and religious morals were all indiscriminately fused. Not integrated, just fused! Big difference.
Here is one of my favorite examples. This was a highly regarded and widely accepted "refutation" of Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter: "There are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head, through which the air is admitted to the tabernacle of the body, to enlighten, to warm, and to nourish it. What are these parts of the microcosm? Two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and a mouth. So in the heavens, as in a macrocosmos, there are two favorable stars, two unpropitious, two luminaries, and Mercury undecided and indifferent. From this and many other similarities in nature, such as the seven metals, etc., which it were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven."
Q: Seven bodily orifices means that there must be seven planets.
K w: Yes. In other words, the subjective space and the objective space are so poorly differentiated that what happens in one must govern what happens in the other. Likewise, the subjective and the cultural space were still poorly differentiated, so that if you disagreed with Church religion, with the cultural background, then you were not just a heretic, you were also a political criminal—you could be tried by the Church for heresy and by the State for treason, because these had not yet been differentiated!
In other words, in all of these cases, the I and the we and the it domains were not very clearly differentiated. It is not that they were integrated; they simply were not yet differentiated! Huge difference.
Now I realize that there are certain "new paradigm" theorists who want to see this mythic indissociation as some sort of holistic heaven, but I think not one of them would actually enjoy living in that atmosphere. Most of their "new paradigm" notions would be immediately
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charged with both heresy and treason—a situation for which mythic„ imperial cultures the world over devised numerous and unpleasant remedies. in other words, I think they are either not very informed or not very sincere about all this eulogizing of the previous mythic worldview.
Q: So the Enlightenment or modernity differentiated the Big Three for the first time.
K w: Yes, on any sort of large scale. Kant's three Critiques being the perfect example in this regard.
This was truly a quantum leap in human capacity. And this is why this extraordinary differentiation of the Big Three—the differentiation of art, morals, and science—has been called, by Weber and Habermas, the dignity of modernity, and agree entirely. "Dignity" because the I and the we and the it domains could pursue their own knowledge without violent intrusions, or even punishments, from the other domains. You could look through Galileo's telescope without being burned at the stake. And all of that was good news indeed.
This differentiation of the Big Three would have an enormous number of beneficial gains. Here are just a few:
• The differentiation of self (I) and culture (we) contributed directly to the rise of democracy, where each self had a vote and was not simply subsumed by the dominator mythic hierarchy of the church or state. The rise of the liberal democracies on a widespread scale.
• The differentiation of mind (I) and nature (it) contributed to the liberation movements, including the liberation of women and slaves, because biological might no longer made noospheric right. The rise of liberal feminism and abolition as widespread and effective cultural movements.
• The differentiation of culture (we) and nature (it) contributed to the rise of empirical science and medicine and physics and biology, because truth was no longer subservient to state and church mythology. The rise of ecological sciences. And on and on and on . . .
Q: So liberal democracy, feminism, the ecological sciences, the abolition of slavery—all part of the good news of modernity, and all
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related directly to the differentiation of the Big Three. So what about the bad news?
The Bad News: Dissociation of the Big Three
K w: We have seen that one of the twenty tenets is that evolution proceeds by differentiation and integration. The good news of modernity was that it learned to differentiate the Big Three; the bad news was that it had not yet learned how to integrate them.
So the dignity of modernity began to slide into the disaster of modernity: the Big Three didn't just differentiate, they tended to dissociate!
Which was very bad news indeed. Because they were dissociated— that is, because the Big Three were not harmoniously balanced and integrated—they were ripe for plunder by the more aggressive approaches of the it-domain.
And thus, for various reasons that we can talk about if you want, the rapid and explosive advances in the it-domain—the spectacular advances in the empirical and technical sciences—began to overshadow and overrun the advances in the and the we domains. Science began to crowd out consciousness and morals.
The great and undeniable advances in the empirical sciences from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment made it appear that all of reality could be approached and described in monological it-language, in objective scientific terms. And conversely, if something couldn't be studied and described in an objective, empirical fashion, then it wasn't "really real." The Big Three were reduced to the "Big One" of scientific materialism, scientific exteriors and objects and systems.
And so the it-approaches began to colonialize the I and the we domains. All knowledge had to be objective it-knowledge, and so ali of reality began to look like a bunch of its, with no subjects, no consciousness, no selves, no morals, no virtues, no values, no interiors, no depths. The Left Hand dimensions of I and we were collapsed into the Right Hand of the Big It.
Q: The Big Three collapsed into the Big One of flatland.
K w: Yes, exactly. And this project can initially seem to make a great deal of sense, precisely because every holon does indeed have an
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objective or Right Hand aspect! Every component on the Left Hand has its empirical and objective and Right Hand correlates (as you can easily see on figure 5-2). Even if I have an out-of-the-body experience, it registers some sort of changes in the empirical brain!
And since empirical and monological studies are infinitely easier than that messy interpretation and intersubjective hermeneutics and empathetic mutual understanding, it initially made all the sense in the world to restrict knowledge to the empirical domain, to the Right Hand dimensions. This is completely understandable, and even noble in its own way.
And this is what the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm did. The basic knowledge quest was for the rational Ego to simply map or mirror the entire world in it-language. What Rorty has aptly called "the mirror of nature."
Q: The mapping paradigm, the representation paradigm.
K W : Yes, which just happened to leave out the mapmaker and the interiors altogether. Interpretation is not required; the world is simply obvious and "pregiven." And you simply map this pregiven world, the world of simple location.
In this sweeping Enlightenment agenda, nature was held to be a perfectly harmonious and interrelated system, a great it-system, and knowledge consisted in patiently and empirically mapping this it-system in it-language.
And this great harmonious it-system, this perfectly "holistic" system, was the fundamental Enlightenment grid, the absolute bedrock of the radical Enlightenment.
Q: But the "new paradigm" theorists strongly maintain that what was fundamental about the Enlightenment paradigm was its atomism. And that they are going to overcome that by replacing it with holism, or systems theory.
K W : Yes, they do say that, and it is profoundly confused. It is extremely confused. I don't know who started that nonsense, but it is nonsense indeed.
Q: I've marked the section in the book where you introduce this topic, and I want to read it for the audience.
These flatland holists claim, for example, that the great "negative legacy" of the Enlightenment was its atomistic and divi-
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sive ontology. But atomism was not the dominant theme of the Enlightenment. As we will see in great detail—and as virtually every historian of the period has made abundantly clear—the dominant theme of the Enlightenment was the "harmony of an interlocking order of being," a systems harmony that was behind everything from Adam Smith's great "invisible hand" to John Locke's "great interlocking order" to the Reformers' and the Deists' "vast harmonious whole of mutually interrelated beings."
To give only a few examples now, Charles Taylor represents the virtually uncontested conclusion of scholars that "For the mainstream of the Enlightenment, nature as the whole interlocking system of objective reality, in which all beings, including man, had a natural mode of existence which dovetailed with that of all others, provided the basic model, the blueprint for happiness and hence good. The Enlightenment developed a model of nature, including human nature, as a harmonious whole whose parts meshed perfectly," and the "unity of the order was seen as an interlocking set calling for actions which formed a harmonious whole." As Alexander Pope would have it, speaking for an entire generation: "Such is the World's great harmony, that springs from Order, Union, full Consent of things; Where small and great, where weak and mighty, made to serve [each other], not suffer; strengthen, not invade; Parts relate to Whole; All served, all serving; nothing stands alone."
Already the Encyclopédie, bastion of Enlightenment thought, had announced that "everything in nature is linked together," and Lovejoy points out that "they were wont to discourse with eloquence on the perfection of the Universal System as a whole." (Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, pp. 131—32)
K w: Yes, the dominant theme of the Enlightenment was this great "web of life" conception, a great interlocking order of beings, each mutually interwoven with all others. There were indeed a few atomistic cranks, as there have been from Democritus forward. But they did not represent the dominant and central themes of the mainstream Enlightenment, as these scholars make abundantly clear.
Q: So what was the real "negative legacy" of the Enlightenment?
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K W : Well, as we were saying, this Enlightenment web-of-life conception was indeed holistic and interwoven, but it acknowledged only holarchies in the Right Hand dimensions. It did not acknowledge the holarchies in the Left Hand on their own terms. It collapsed the Big Three into the Big One—collapsed the interwoven I and we and it . . . into a flatland system of just interwoven its.
And so, of the Big Three of consciousness, culture, and nature, only sensory nature now was real, and all real knowledge must therefore be a mere reflection of that only reality. The reflection paradigm. The mirror of nature. The collapse of the Kosmos.
Systems theory isn't a cure for this negative legacy of the Enlightenment, it is an integral part of that nightmare!
Q: Part of flatland.
K w: Yes, what Mumford called the disqualified universe. It-language is essentially value-free, neutral. It has quantity, but no quality whatsoever. So if you describe everything in terms of quantities and objective exteriors and network processes and systems variables, then you get no qualitative distinctions whatsoever—you get the disqualified universe.
Remember, everything on the Right Hand has simple location, which can be bigger or smaller but never better or worse. Open-mindedness is better than narrow-minded bigotry, but a rock is not better than a planet. Because the Right Hand has some sort of physical extension, it can fairly easily be quantified and counted—I, 2, 3, 4, 5. You get amounts, not morals. And while seven might be larger than three, it is not better. And thus, if you start treating the entire world as an object—holistic or otherwise—you strip it of all value, guaranteed. You have disqualified the Kosmos.
And when you are done with that, and you pause to look around, you find to your utter horror that you are standing in a flat and faded universe, with no meaning, no depth, no interpretation, no beauty, no goodness, no virtue, and nothing sublime. Just a bunch of holistic its in functional fit.
Q: Whitehead's famous remark: "a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly. "
K W : Yes, to which he added, "Thereby, modern philosophy has
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been ruined." More to the point, the modern lifeworld has been ruined. Once you go from interior to exterior, from mind to brain, from compassion to serotonin, you go from value to valueless, from virtue to virtueless, from worth to worthless.
And if you think the great it-domain is the only reality, then you will maintain that all values and all virtues are "merely subjective." That is, they are personal choices not anchored in any sort of substantive reality. You will not see that depth is intrinsic to the Kosmos. You will not see that value is intrinsic to the Kosmos. You will not see that consciousness is intrinsic to the Kosmos.
All of that is lost, denied, erased from the shiny monochrome world that you now triumphantly inhabit. And once you have carefully scrubbed the Kosmos clean of consciousness and virtue and value, you should not be surprised if your own lifeworld starts to look completely hollow and empty. To complain about this state of affairs is like murdering your parents and then complaining you're an orphan.
This flatland reductionism is all the more insidious if you are a systems theorist, because you think you have covered all the bases in your great it-system. You think you have all of reality, you think have captured the whole, you think you are on the way to sanity, whereas you are literally out of your mind.
The Task of Postmodernity: Integration of the Big Three
Q: So overcoming the negative legacy of the Enlightenment means what, exactly?
K w: Well, to begin with, to overcome the negative aspects of the Enlightenment is not to replace monological atomism with monological holism, with flatland systems theory. Atomism and systems holism are both Right Hand reductionism, one gross, one subtle, but nonetheless.
Nor should we seek our solutions by regressing to mythic or magic indissociation of the Big Three, where self and culture and nature were not yet differentiated. We must preserve the dignity of modernity, even while we attempt to overcome the disaster of modernity. The dignity was differentiation; the disaster was dissociation.
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So if modernity managed to differentiate the Big Three on a widespread scale, it is up to postmodernity to integrate them. The very currents of evolution—the twenty tenets—demand this differentiation and integration, and we today are on the cusp of that demand.
Q: The demand of postmodernity.
KW : Yes. This does not mean that everything called "postmodern" is therefore an attempt at this integration. Much of postmodern thought is regressive, attempting to heal the differentiations and dissociations of modernity by regressing prior to the differentiation of the Big Three. This is often just regressive and narcissistic flailing about, which gives so much of "postmodernism" its selfcentric whine.
But the more authentic currents of postmodernity, as I use the term—from Hegel to Heidegger to Habermas to Foucault to Taylor— are trying to get some balance back into the picture, largely by trying to honor science and morals and aesthetics equally, and not simply reduce one to the other in an orgy of theoretical violence.
So that is exactly what we will want to watch for: ways to integrate mind and culture and nature in the postmodern world. Which is to say, ways to honor Spirit in all four quadrants, to recognize the four faces of Spirit—or simply the Big Three—and thus attune ourselves to, and situate ourselves in, and give blessings for: the Good, and the True, and the Beautiful.
The Spiritual Big Three
Q: This is where we begin to touch on spiritual themes. You have tied the Big Three into the notions of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Buddha was a great spiritual realizer, Dharma is the truth he realized, and Sangha is the community of those who are attempting this realization.
K W : Yes, those are the Big Three as consciousness evolution continues into the higher or superconscious or transpersonal domains. Of course, this is using the Buddhist terms; others will do as well.
Q: Let's briefly go over them one at a time.
K w: Figure 5-2 only lists some of the milestones in average or collective consciousness up to the present, up to modern rationality (marked "formop" and "vision-logic" in the Upper Left).
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But beyond those stages there lie transrational or transpersonal or more properly spiritual developments, which I suppose we'll talk about soon enough. And my point is that these higher developments also proceed in all four quadrants. Or, in simplified form, in the Big Three. This higher evolution occurs in the I, and the we, and the it domains.
And the ultimate I is Buddha, the ultimate We is Sangha, and the ultimate It is Dharma.
Q : For example .
K W : We can put this in several different ways.
When you are ultimately truthful with yourself, you will eventually realize and confess that "I am Buddha," I am Spirit. Anything short of that is a lie, the lie of the ego, the lie of the separate-self sense, the contraction in the face of infinity. The deepest recesses of your consciousness directly intersect Spirit itself, in the supreme identity. "Not I, but Christ liveth in me"—which is to say, the ultimate is Christ. This is not a state you are bringing into existence for the first time, but simply a timeless state that you are recognizing and confessing—you are being ultimately truthful when you state, "I am Buddha," the ultimate Beauty.
And the ultimate cultural fit or justness is, "We are all members of the Community of Spirit." All sentient beings—all holons in fact— contain Buddha-nature—contain depth, consciousness, intrinsic value, Spirit—and thus we are all members of the council of all beings, the mystical church, the ultimate We. Which is ultimate ethics, the ultimate Good.
And the ultimate objective truth is that all beings are perfect manifestations of Spirit or Emptiness—we are all manifestations of the ultimate It, or Dharma. Which is the ultimate Truth.
The ultimate I, the ultimate We, and the ultimate It—Buddha, San. gha, Dharma.
Q : This is why understanding the four quadrants, or just the Big Three, is so important for understanding higher or spiritual developments.
K w: I think so, yes. Spirit manifests in all four quadrants equally, and so all four quadrants (or simply the Big Three) ought to be taken
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into account in order for the realization of Spirit to be full and complete and unbroken.
Q: Buddha?
K w: Well, we haven't talked about these higher stages of the Upper Left quadrant, but the essential point is that they disclose deeper or higher stages of consciousness, to the point that the individual "I" discovers its prior identity with Spirit, however you wish to conceive that. The Buddhists would say that the individual "I" discovers its prior nature as Emptiness, so that the isolated and alienated "I" relaxes into the radically open and empty and transparent ground of all manifestation. The Sufis call it the Supreme Identity, the identity of the soul and Godhead. In Zen we have the True Self that is now self, or no individual self at all, this primordial Emptiness that is the transparency of all Form.
I don't really care right now how you wish to interpret that supreme identity. Whatever works for you. The evidence is simply that the individual self discovers a primordial and unqualifiabie Ground, so that its own self intersects the Ground of the Kosmos at large. The ultimate Self that is no-self: that is the Buddha-nature or Buddhamind in each and every holon, in each and every sentient being. The ultimate self, the ultimate I, is Buddha. That's Upper Left.
Q: Dharma?
K w: Dharma refers to Spirit as an objective fact, as an objective State of Affairs. The ultimate It of the Kosmos is the Dharma, the Truth, or objective isness or suchness or thusness of all holons. The very Condition of all conditions, the very Nature of all natures, the very Itness of all holons—this is the Dharma, the objective Truth, which is that all holons, just as they are, in their Itness, are perfect manifestations of Emptiness, of Spirit. And that is the ultimate Truth! Q : And Sangha?
K W : Sangha means gathering or community. It is the "we" of Spirit. In mystical Christian terms, it is the Church, the mystical communion of Christ. It is the intersubjective circle of realization, the culture of the Divine. The Lower Left.
The point is that, precisely because Spirit manifests equally in all four quadrants, or equally in the Big Three, then we can describe Spirit subjectively as one's own Buddha-mind—the "I" of Spirit, the
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Beauty. And can we describe Spirit objectively as Dharma—the "It" of Spirit, the ultimate Truth. And we can describe Spirit culturally as Sangha—the "We" of Spirit, the ultimate Good.
These four quadrants, or the Big Three, are all facets of Spirit, facets of Emptiness. When Emptiness manifests, it does so as subject and object, each of which can be singular or plural. And that gives us the four quadrants, or simply the Big Three. So Spirit can be described—and must be described—with all three languages, I and we and it.
And each of those domains evolves. Which means, each unfolds its spiritual nature more and more, and thus realizes its spiritual nature more and more. And in the uppermost reaches of that evolution, the and the We and the It increasingly become transparent to their own true nature. They each radiate the glory of the Ground that they are.
And in that radiant awareness, every becomes a God, and every We becomes God's sincerest worship, and every It becomes God's most gracious temple.
PART TWO
The Further Reaches of Spirit-in -Action
9 The Evolution of Consciousness
Q: I want to discuss the evolution of consciousness itself, from the lowest to the highest stages, the spiritual or transpersonal stages.
K w: These are the stages of the inward I, on its way to the supreme identity. From subconscious to self-conscious to superconscious—Spirit's own unfolding, the extraordinary arc of consciousness evolution, a flight of the alone to the Alone.
One of the simplified maps of this overall evolution is figure 9-1 (page 139). But let me first emphasize that we are now discussing just the Upper Left quadrant, the interior stages of consciousness evolution. So we are not discussing, for example, the correlative changes in the Upper Right quadrant. We aren't discussing changes in the brain stem, the limbic system, the neocortex, in brain wave patterns (alpha, beta, theta, or delta states), nor hemispheric synchronization, nor neurotransmitter imbalances with pathology, and so on.
Likewise, we aren't looking specifically at the larger cultural currents (Lower Left) or social structures (Lower Right) that are inseparable from individual consciousness development, even though these other quadrants are crucially important. What good does it do to adjust and integrate the self in a culture that is itself sick? What does
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it mean to be a well-adjusted Nazi? Is that mental health? Or is a maladjusted person in a Nazi society the only one who is sane?
All of those are crucial considerations. A malformation—a pathology, a "sickness''—in any quadrant will reverberate through all four quadrants, because every holon has these four facets to its being. So a society with an alienating mode of production (Lower Right)—such as slave wages for dehumanizing labor—will reflect in low self-esteem for laborers (Upper Left) and an out-of-whack brain chemistry (Upper Right) that might, for example, institutionalize alcohol abuse as self-medication. Similarly, a cultural worldview that devalues women will result in a tendency to cripple individual female potential and a brain chemistry that could definitely use some Prozac.
And so on around the four-quadrant circle. Cripple one quadrant and all four tend to hemorrhage. But in this discussion we'll temporarily ignore all that—ignore family therapy, ignore brain chemistry and brain states, ignore cultural and social analysis—so we can focus on the Upper Left quadrant itself.
But don't imagine those other quadrants are unimportant! In fact, we are fast approaching an understanding that sees individual "pathologies" as but the tip of an enormous iceberg that includes worldviews, social structures, and cultural access to depth. Individual therapy is not unimportant, but in many ways it's almost secondary. But for now, yes, we can definitely focus on the Upper Left.
Higher Stages of Development
Q: A brief summary of the Upper Left is given in figure 9-1.
K W : Yes. If you compare this with figure 5-2, you'll see that figure 5-2 goes up to "vision-logic," which is stage 6 in figure 9-1. The reason is that figure 5-2 only lists the stages of average consciousness up to this point in collective history. It doesn't list any of the higher or deeper stages shown in figure 9-1.
Q: So the immediate question is, does this mean that somebody who lived in the past, say in the mythic-agrarian age, did not have access to these higher stages?
K w: No, not at all. In any given era, some people are above the
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— causal
9 subde
psychic
6 — vision-logic
forrnaI-reRexive
(formop)
(conop)
phantasmic-emotional
FIGURE 9-1. The basic structures of consciousness.
average, some below. The Lower Left quadrant is simply the average level at that point.
Every society has a certain center of gravity, we might say, around which the culture's ethics, norms, rules, and basic institutions are organized, and this center of gravity provides the basic cultural cohesion and social integration for that society.
This cultural center of gravity acts like a magnet on individual dew velopment. If you are below the average level, it tends to pull you up. If you try to go above it, it tends to pull you down. The cultural center of gravity acts as a pacer of development—a magnet—pulling you up to the average expectable level of consciousness development. Beyond that, you're on your own, and lots of luck, because now the magnet will try to drag you down—in both cases, you're "outlawed."
Q: So there's a difference between average mode and most advanced mode for any culture.
Kw: Yes, that's right. For example, say that five hundred years from now an anthropologist is studying America, and comes across 40 1
the writings of Krishnamurti, and decides everybody in America was like Krishnamurti. This is silly, of course, but that is what many new age theorists are doing with past epochs. They take a representative of the most advanced mode of consciousness at the time—say, a shaman—and simply conclude that the average mode was also shamanic, that a hundred thousand years ago everybody was a shaman. Well, a hundred thousand years ago almost nobody was a shaman. A shaman—perhaps there was one per tribe—was a very rare and gifted soul, and most people did not share this shamanic awareness. In fact, most people were terrified of the power of the shaman, and they hadn't a clue as to the higher mode of awareness that the shaman accessed.
So yes, one of the things have tried to do, in looking at these past epochs, is first, to define the average center of gravity—archaic, magic, mythic, rational, existential—and second, to look carefully at the rare, elite, gifted individuals who rose above this average mode— often at great cost to themselves—and disclosed higher or deeper modes of awareness (the shaman, the yogi, the saint, the sage). These higher or deeper modes of awareness are indeed what we are calling, in figure 9-1, the psychic, the subtle, the causal, and the nondual levels of superconscious development.
Ladder, Climber, View
Q: Those four higher stages of development are what I want to discuss. But are all of these stages really as "ladder-like" as figure 9-1 presents them? Are they really that discrete?
K W : Figure 9-1 does look like a ladder, which has confused many people, who think that developmental models are rigidly "linear." But this is a misunderstanding of what developmental models attempt to do.
The best way to think of figure 9-1 is as a series of concentric circles or nested spheres, with each higher level transcending and including its predecessor. It is an actualization holarchy, each stage of which unfolds and then enfolds its predecessors in a nested fashion. Figure 9-1 is simply one slice of that concentric pie. You could draw the whole figure as concentric circles, which is exactly what we did in
Of
figure 2-2, if you recall. In fact, figure 9-1 is simply a slightly expanded version of 2-2: matter (sensorimotor), body (emotional and vital), mind (rep-mind to vision-logic), soul (psychic and subtle), and spirit (causal and nondual). And, as we will see, this great holarchy of consciousness is the backbone of the world's great wisdom traditions, found universally and cross-culturally.
But more important, these nine levels or nested circles only deal with, so to speak, one-third of what is actually going on with consciousness development. Even if we call figure 9-1 a "ladder," there is still the climber of the ladder, and there are the different views from each rung, none of which is a simple linear step-by-step process!
Q: So ladder, climber, view. Start with the ladder or the nested circles.
Basic Structures: The Ladder
K w: These are depicted in figure 9-1. These nine levels or circles are the basic structures of consciousness.
It's not necessary to remember of any of these stages, but for reference, figure 9-1 includes: sensation and perception (sensoriphysical), impulse and image (phantasmic-emotional), symbols and concepts (rep-mind, short for representational mind), concrete rules (rule/role mind, or "conop," short for concrete operational), formal-reflexive ("formop"), and vision-logic (integrative). And then to the higher or transpersonal stages of psychic, subtle, and causal. (The paper on which the diagram is written is the "highest" stage, which is not really a stage at all but the nondual and empty Ground of the whole display.)
We can discuss all of those in a moment. They are just a few of the major milestones in consciousness development. This list is by no means exhaustive, it's just a representative sample.
Q: Since these are actually nested spheres, why do you even draw them like a ladder?
Kw: The ladder metaphor is useful because it indicates that the basic components of consciousness do emerge in fairly discrete stages, and if you destroy a lower rung, all the higher rungs go with it. Where the ladder metaphor fails badly is that each higher stage does not
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actually sit on top of the lower stage but rather enfolds it in its own being, much as a cell enfolds molecules which enfold atoms. As I said, it's a nested holarchy. But I myself often use the ladder metaphor because I want especially to emphasize the levels of growth involved.
For example, in development, images emerge before symbols, which emerge before concepts, which emerge before rules, and so on (as shown in figures 5-2, 5-3, and 9-1). This order is irreversible. No amount of social conditioning can alter that sequence, and we know of no societies where that order is altered. It is holarchical, it is crosscultural, and there are no exceptions. Just as you must have words before you can have sentences, and you must have sentences before you can have paragraphs, so these basic holons build upon and incorporate their predecessors, which is why the order cannot be reversed: the higher rungs rest on the lower, and that is part of the usefulness of the ladder metaphor.
The self The Climber
Q: So those are the basic rungs in the ladder of awareness, or the holarchy of awareness.
K W : Yes. But that is not where the real action is, so to speak. Even if we rather crudely picture this development of basic structures as a "ladder," the real action involves the climber of the ladder. This climber is the self. Sometimes called the self-system. (Objectively, or in it-language, it is a self-system; subjectively, it is a person, a self, a self-sense. I use both.)
Q: So does this self or self-system have its own characteristics?
K W : Yes, the self, the climber, has specific characteristics and capacities that are not found on the ladder itself.
The reason is that the ladder is basically selfless—there is no inherent self-sense in any of its rungs. But the self appropriates these rungs, or identifies with them, and this generates various types of self-identity and various stages of self-growth, until the self falls off the ladder altogether in radical Emptiness—which is a bit ahead of the story. But the point is that the ladder and the climber of the ladder are quite different affairs!
As for the specific characteristics of the self, in Transformations
of Consciousness I list these as identification, organization, will or attention, defense, metabolism, and navigation.
It's not necessary to go into those, but I might mention that "navigation," for example, involves the four drives that all holons, including the self-holon, possess—namely, agency and communion, selftranscendence and self-dissolution (regression). At each rung in the self's growth and development, it has these four basic choices about which way to go in its development. Too much or too little of any of those four drives, and the self gets into pathological trouble, and the types of pathology depend upon which of the nine basic rungs the trouble occurs at.
Q: So as the self negotiates or climbs these basic rungs, things can go wrong at any rung or stage.
KW : Yes, the self might be climbing the ladder of expanding consciousness, but the crucial point is that it can lose an arm or a leg at any rung!
If something goes wrong at any stage in this developmental unfolding, aspects of the self can get damaged or "left behind." This "getting left behind" is called repression, or dissociation, or alienation. The self can lose an arm or a leg at any stage, and this loss results in a pathology that is characteristic of the stage at which the loss occurred.
So we see pathology go from psychosis to borderline to neurosis to existential to spiritual, depending upon where the "accident" occurred.
I'll give some concrete examples of this in just a moment. The point for now is that not only are these basic structures growing and evolving, but the self has to actually negotiate them, has to actually climb the developmental rungs of expanding awareness, and the self can take a bad step at any rung—and get very badly hurt.
A Fulcrum
Q: You call each of these steps a fulcrum.
Kw: Yes, based on the very important line of research by such theorists and clinicians as Margaret Mahler, Otto Kernberg, Heinz Kohut, and Gertrude Blanck and Robert Blanck, not to mention
Jung's pioneering work on individuation. A fulcrum simply describes 144 1
the momentous process of differentiation and integration as it occurs in human growth and development.
One of Yogi Berra's malapropisms was: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Well, a fulcrum is simply a crucial fork in the developmental road, and the self has to deal with that fork. How it does so, in each case, decides its subsequent fate.
Q: So nine basic structures means there are nine corresponding fulcrums or steps.
K w: Yes, that's right. The self must step up to each rung in the basic ladder, and that step is the fulcrum at that stage.
So every fulcrum has a 1-2-3 structure. One, the self evolves or develops or steps up to the new level of awareness, and it identifies with that level, it is "one with" that level. Two, it then begins to move beyond that level, or differentiate from it, or dis-identify with it, or transcend it. And three, it identifies with the new and higher level and centers itself there. The new rung is actually resting on the previous rungs, so they must be included and integrated in the overall expansion, and that integration or inclusion is the third and final subphase of the particular fulcrum. (These are summarized in fig. 9-2.)
So you can remember a fulcrum because ail of them have this same 1-2-3 structure: identify, dis„identify, integrate; or fusion, differentiation, integration; or embed, transcend, include.
LADDER CLIMBER VIEW
Basic rungs of aware- Climber of the basic Changing view of self
ness rungs and other at each
Once they emerge, Each step in the climb stage,
they remain in exis- is a fulcrum, including different:
tence as basic build- a 1-2-3 process of: self-identity
ing blocks or holons (1) fusion/identifi- self-needs
of consciousness cation
(z) differentiation/ transcendence
(3) integration/inclusion moral sense
FIGURE 9-2. Ladder, climber, view.
And if anything goes wrong with this I-z-3 process, at any rung, then you get a broken leg or whatnot. And the scar tissue of that disaster will depend on what the world looked like when you broke your leg. And generally, the lower the rung, the more severe the pathology.
New Worlds Emerge: Changing Views
Q: So we have the ladder and its basic rungs, and we have the self or the climber and its fulcrums—and that leaves the different views.
KW : Yes, at each rung in the developmental unfolding there is a different view of the world—a different view of self and of others—a different worldview. The world looks different—is different!—at each rung in the developmental unfolding. As we have constantly seen, different worldspaces, different worlds, come into being as consciousness evolves—there is not simply a pregiven world that is monologically reflected!
And here I would particularly emphasize that at each rung you get a different type of self-identity, a different type of self-need, and a different type of moral stance (see fig. 9-3). All of these are aspects of the different worlds that unfold at each rung or dimension of awareness.
So that's the thumbnail sketch. The ladder with its basic rungs of awareness; the climber with its fulcrums; and the different views of the world from each rung. Ladder, climber, view.
Q : So now some concrete examples.
K w: This model of consciousness development is based on the work of perhaps sixty or seventy theorists, East and West. Figure 9-3 gives three of them: Abraham Maslow, Jane Loevinger, and Lawrence Kohlberg. I tend to use them as examples simply because they are so well known.
Q: So ground this for me. Take the example of the rule/role mind, and run across the table for each of the columns.
Kw: The rule/role mind is the capacity that begins to develop in children around age seven or so. It is the capacity to form complex mental rules and to take social roles. The child begins to understand that he or she is not just a body with impulses and desires, but also a
LADDER CLIMBER VIEW
Basic Structure sensoriphysical
phantasmic-emotional Maslow (self-needs)
(physiological) Loevinger (self-sense)
autistic symbiotic beginning impulsive Kolberg (moral sense)
(premoral) o. magic wish
rep-mind impulsive self-protective I. preconventional 1. punishment/obedience
2. naive hedonism
rule/role mind belongingness conformist conscientious-conformist conventional 3. approval of others
4. law and order
formal-reflexive self-esteem conscientious individualistic 111. postconventional 5. individual rights
6. individual principles
vision-logic self-actualization autonomous integrated of conscience
psychic
subtle causal F-7 self-transcendence
self-transcendence self-transcendence Kohlberg has suggested a higher, seventh stage:
7. universal-spiritual
FIGURE 9-3. Some examples of ladder, climber, view.
social self among other social selves, and the child must fit into these sociocultural roles. This is a difficult and trying period.
So the example works like this. As the basic structure of the rule/ role mind emerges, the child's self will face that new rung of awareness. So it must negotiate the fulcrum at that level, the 1-2-3 process of stepping up to a new level of awareness. So it will first step onto that rung—it will identify with that rung, identify with that capacity to follow the rules and the roles. In other words, it will identify with the rule/role mind (that's phase 1 in the fulcrum).
So the self at this point is a rule/role self. That is its central identity. That is its basic self-sense. It has a sense of conforming with these rules and roles, and therefore, as you can see in Loevinger's column, the self-sense at this stage is conformist. And for the same reason, the basic need of the self at this stage is for belongingness, which you can see in Maslow's column. And the self's moral stance at this stage therefore centers on the conventional approval of others, which you can see in Kohlberg's column.
Q: So that's across the table—ladder, climber, view.
K w: Yes, basically. This is all terribly simplified, I hope you understand, but that's the general idea.
Q: And if development continues?
Kw: If development continues, then the self will eventually grow beyond these views, and expand its awareness once again. In order to do so, it has to step off its present rung, or dis-identify with it, or transcend it—this differentiation or transcendence is phase z of the fulcrum—and then identify with the next-higher rung—that's phase 3, which then begins the new fulcrum, and off we go again. Until, of course, developmental arrest sets in.
Q: Now about these changing views. They are generally stage-like themselves, correct? Loevinger and Kohlberg and Maslow give stages.
KW: Yes, but in a very general sense, which again has confused many critics. All developmentalists, with virtually no exceptions, have a stage-like list, or even a ladder-like list, a holarchy of growth and development—Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, Heinz Werner, Jean Piaget, R. Peck, Habermas, Robert Selman, Erik Erikson, J. M. Baldwin, Silvano Arieti, even the contemplative traditions from Plotinus to Padmasambhava to Chih-i and Fa-tsang. And they have this ladder 48 1
like holarchy because that is what fits their data. These stages are the result of empirical, phenomenological, and interpretive evidence and massive amounts of research data. These folks are not making this stuff up because they like ladders.
But there is an important point about these holarchies. Even in their stronger versions, such as Kohlberg's, the self at any given point in its development will tend to give around 50 percent of its responses from one level, 25 percent from a level above that, and 25 percent from a level below it. No self is ever simply "at" a stage. And further, there are all sorts of regressions, spirals, temporary leaps forward, peak experiences, and so on.
Q: So it's more of an average.
Kw: Yes, it's a little bit like what we were saying about cultures— they have an average center of gravity, with some of their members falling above, and some below, that center.
In the same way, the self-system has its own center of gravity, so to speak, which means some components of its own interior can be above, some below, its own average awareness. The climber of the ladder, in other words, is more like a blob than a discrete entity—it sort of slops along the basic spheres of expanding consciousness.
Pathology
Q: You said the self could get hurt at any rung—lose an arm or a leg.
K Yes, some aspects of the climber, the blob, can get stuck at lower rungs. And these little blobs get split off from the main blob and remain stuck at those lower stages.
Q : That's repression.
K w' : In the most general sense, yes. We can use the moral stages as an example.
As you can see in figure 9-3, the lower and earlier stages of moral development are egocentric, narcissistic, me-only-oriented. They tend to be very impulsive and very hedonistic. These are Kohlberg's preconventional stages. The middle stages are called conventional because, as we just saw, they tend to be very conformist—my country right or wrong. The higher stages are called postconventional, be.
cause they begin to transcend conventional or conformist modes and center instead on universal pluralism and individual rights. Higher than this are the "post-postconventional," or spiritual stages, which we'll get to in a moment.
Now if for various reasons there is some sort of repeated and severe trauma during the earlier stages—say, in the preconventional stages, during the first three or four years of life—then here is what tends to happen:
Since the center of gravity of the self is at this preconventional, impulsive stage, then aspects of that impulsive self can be split off or dissociated. If this dissociation is extremely severe, then self-development will come to a screeching halt. But more often than not, the self will simply *imp along down the road, dissociation and all. It will continue to develop, it will continue to climb the basic structures in expanding awareness, however haltingly or however wounded. It might bleed all over the place, but it keeps climbing.
But an aspect of the impulsive self has nonetheless been split off and dissociated. That split-off aspect does not continue the climb, does not continue to grow and develop. Rather, it sets up shop in the basement. And it has a moral worldview of stage 1, since in this example that is where the dissociation occurred. It remains at moral stage 1, even as the rest of the self continues to grow and develop. So this split-off aspect is completely narcissistic, egocentric, self-absorbed, and altogether impulsive. It continues to interpret the world within the categories available to it at that primitive or archaic stage.
As the main blob of the self glops on up the ladder, this little blob remains behind, sabotaging the main self with neurotic or even psychotic symptoms. The main blob is getting a higher and wider view of the world, but the little blob is committed to its self-only, narcissistic, archaic worldview, its preconventional impulses and needs.
And the intemal conflict between the main blob, which now might be at moral stage 3 or 4 or 5 . . . well, the internal conflict between the main blob and the little blob of stage can be devastating. This is not an external conflict; it is a civil war. And that, by any other name, is pathology.
And, as we'll see, one of the things we want to do in development is to help end these civil wars.
so I
Stages of Spiritual UQfolding
Q: But does this mean that a person has to negotiate all the lower levels—say, levels 1 though 6—before the higher or spiritual stages can unfold?
K w: Individuals can have a spiritual experience—a peak experience—at almost any stage of their growth. The basic structures, from the lowest to the highest, are structural potentials in every person's being. So you can tap into the higher dimensions under various conditions—moments of elation, of sexual passion, of stress, of dream-like reverie, of drug-induced states, and even during psychotic breaks.
But look what happens. Say a person is at Kohlberg's moral stage 3. And say they have an experience, an influx, of certain subtle-level phenomena—perhaps an intense interior illumination. This can prow foundly change a person's life and open them to new worlds, new dimensions, new modes of awareness.
And perhaps it can lead to an actual transformation or evolution or development in their consciousness. So if you give this person a moral-stage test, you might find that they have indeed transformed from moral stage 3 to. . . moral stage 4. There is nowhere else for them to go! These stages cannot be bypassed, any more than you can go from an atom to a cell and bypass molecules. So a person at moral stage 3 who has a profound spiritual experience might be motivated to move to the next stage—in this case, to stage 4. They do not, under any circumstances, go from stage 3 to stage 7.
The genuinely spiritual or transpersonal stages of development (Kohlberg's stage 7 and beyond) depend for their development upon all of the previous developments in stages 6, 5, 4, 3, and so on. Each of those stages contributes something absolutely essential for the manifestation of stage 7. And although a person can have a peak experience of a higher dimension, the person's self still has to grow and develop and evolve in order to permanently accommodate to those higher or deeper dimensions.
Q: You have a quote from Aurobindo: "The spiritual evolution obeys the logic of a successive unfolding; it can take a new decisive main step only when the previous main step has been sufficiently conquered: even if certain minor stages can be swallowed up or leaped
over by a rapid and brusque ascension, the consciousness has to turn back to assure itself that the ground passed over is securely annexed to the new condition; a greater or concentrated speed [of development, which is indeed possible) does not eliminate the steps themselves or the necessity of their successive surmounting. "
K w: Yes. One of the great problems with the field of transpersonal psychology was that, in its beginning, it tended to focus on peak experiences. You had the ego, which was very bad, and you had anything that was not the ego, which was very good. In fact, the view was often that anything that is not the ego, is God. So you had: ego, booooooooo . . . not-ego, yayyyyyy.
And so you got this type of one-step transformation model: you go from the divisive and analytic and rational and nasty ego, straight to the expansive and liberated and cosmic God consciousness. Get rid of ego, you have God. Anything, absolutely anything, that is not the ego, is God.
And now, of course, we know that many of the states that are not ego are actually a mess—they are pre-egoic, prerational, prepersonal nightmares. And thus many of the theories recommending not-ego are really recommending regression, not transcendence. The standard pre/trans fallacy, where pre-ego is confused with trans-ego simply because both are non-ego.
This naive notion of one-step transformation has now hooked up with a purely flatland worldview, so that "cosmic consciousness" has to come to mean simply that we go from the nasty Newtonian ego to the new-physics web-of-life one-with-Gaia self. We become one with flatland and we are enlightened and that saves the planet.
And, alas, it is nowhere near that simple. We don't go from an acorn to a forest in a quantum leap. There are stages in all growth, including human. These basic stages—I have listed nine of them, but that's just a summary—are based on massive amounts of empirical, phenomenological, interpretive, contemplative, and cross-cultural evidence. We are still refining these stages, and there are many questions that need to be answered. But this "one-step" transformation model is hopelessly naive.
So people can have spiritual experiences and peak experiences, but they still have to carry those experiences in their own structure. They
I
still have to grow and develop to the point that they can actually accommodate the depth offered by the peak experiences. They still have to go from acorn to oak if they are going to become one with the forest.
Flatland Religion
Q: So a peak experience is kind of a "peek" experience; you get a glimpse of dimensions you might not be able to hold.
KW : Yes. And there's a related problem, which is actually more devastating. The ladder can develop way ahead of the self's willingness to climb it. Technically, we say cognitive development is necessary but not sufficient for moral development.
This means, for example—and we all know cases like this—that a person can have access to level 5 rationality—they can be incredibly advanced intellectually—and still be at moral stage 1. Basically, a very bright Nazi. The ladder is much higher than the climber, who remains committed to the lower rungs. It's one thing to tap into a higher structure; quite another to actually live there!
And the same thing can happen with spiritual experiences. People can temporarily access some very high rungs in the ladder or circle of awareness, but they refuse to actually live from those levels—they won't actually climb up there. Their center of gravity remains quite low, even debased.
And if they are to live up to their spiritual experiences, then they will have to grow and develop. They will have to start the developmental unfolding, the holarchical expansion, the actual inhabiting of the expanding spheres of consciousness. Their center of gravity has to shift—to transform—to these deeper or higher spheres of consciousness; it does no good to merely "idealize" them in theoretical chit-chat and talking religion.
So you can have a very powerful peak experience or satori. But then days, weeks, months later—where do you carry it? What happens to this experience? Where does it reside? Your actual self, your center of gravity, can only accommodate this experience according to its own structure, its own capacity, its own stage of growth. Spiritual experiences do not allow you to simply bypass the growth and devel-
opment upon which enduring spiritual realization itself depends. Evolution can be accelerated, as Aurobindo said, but not fundamentally skipped over.
Q: There is such a resistance in "new paradigm" circles to this notion of stages.
KW: Yes, it's the same as the resistance to hierarchy or holarchy. Some of these objections are sincere and well-meaning, and we want to take these into account. But if you deny stages and holarchy, then you have to explain away the massive amounts of evidence that point to holarchical development, and that denial requires an aggressive ideology to explain why researchers keep finding these holarchies cross-culturally. I haven't seen any successful attempts to do this.
But some of the resistance is due to less sincere reasons. Many Americans don't like the idea of stages of anything, because we in America don't like the notion of degrees of depth. We are the living embodiment of flatland. The thought that somebody, somewhere, might be higher or deeper than me is simply intolerable.
So we prefer a "spirituality" that takes whatever level we are at, no matter how mediocre, and gives us a "one-step" process that will get us straight to God, instantly, like a microwave oven. The ego remains the one bad guy, and "God" or "Goddess" means simply a new conceptual view or paradigm that we can memorize and repeat like a mantra. The mapmaker learns a new map, and that is supposed to be transformation. In a flatland world, you need a flatland God.
So various flatland paradigms are giddily embraced, precisely because they do not demand actual transformation, just this "one-step" learning of the new paradigm, a sort of one-stop shopping. You just repeat that your being is one strand in the great web, and all is saved. And you aggressively deny there are any higher stages!
And so your salvation comes to mean the degree of passion you can demonstrate for embracing flatland. You have a hierarchy that denies hierarchy, and you hug and kiss the spokes of this brutal contradiction. Your "depth" comes to mean the extent to which you can deny depth altogether. You attack any notion of stages—because, not incidentally, the existence of higher stages might actually leave you "lower"—and you aggressively deny all holarchy, while you happily sing the praises of this monochrome nightmare.
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Q: I run into this antiholarchy prejudice all the time. It's very belligerent.
K w: The religion of flatland, like all exoteric religions, has a God and a Devil. And if you define your God as flat and nonholarchical, then holarchy must become the new Devil. And like most fundamentalist religions, this one has its Inquisitors, and they are a rather unpleasant lot.
Freud and Buddha
Q : So assuming that this consciousness holarchy exists—we were talking about the fact that higher stages can be sabotaged by repressions at the lower stages—the internal civil wars.
K w: Yes, I think so. If the self represses or dissociates aspects of itself, it will have less potential left for further evolution and development. And sooner or later, this will drag development to a halt.
I don't mean to quantify this in such a simple way, but as a crude example, say the self at birth has 100 units of potential. And say that in its early growth it dissociates a small blob at moral stage I—say it splits off 10 units of itself. It arrives at moral stage 2 with 90 units of its potential.
So the self is only 90 percent there, as it were. 10 percent of its awareness is stuck at moral stage 1, stuck in this little unconscious blob residing in the basement and using its 10 percent of awareness in an attempt to get the entire organism to act according to its archaic wishes and impulses and interpretations.
And so on, as growth and development continues. The point is that, by the time the self reaches adulthood, it might have lost 40 percent of its potential, as split-off or dissociated little selves, little blobs, little hidden subjects, and these little subjects tend to remain at the level of development that they had when they were split off.
So you have these little barbarians running around in the basement, impulsively demanding to be fed, to be catered to, to be the center of the universe, and they get very nasty if they aren't fed. They scream and yell and bite and claw, and since you don't even consciously know they are there, you interpret this interior commotion
1 5 S
as depression, obsession, anxiety, or any number of neurotic symptoms that are completely baffling.
Q: So this would sabotage higher growth as well.
Kw: Yes, the point is that these dissociated selves—these little hidden subjects that are clinging to lower worldviews—will take up a certain amount of your energy. Not only do they use energy themselves, your defenses against them use energy. And pretty soon, you run out of energy.
And yes, this will very likely sabotage higher or transpersonal development. Let's say it takes 65 units to get to the psychic or subtle level. If you only have 60 units left, you're not going to make it. This is why, in broad terms, we want to integrate Freud and Buddha, we want to integrate lower "depth psychology" with "height psychology. "
And, in fact, we are at an extremely auspicious moment in human evolution, because, for the first time in history, we have access to both Freud and Buddha. The profound discoveries of the modern West— the whole notion of a psychodynamic unconscious, which is really found nowhere else—these discoveries can be integrated with the mystical or contemplative traditions, both East and West, for a more "full spectrum" approach.
Q: The point of uniting Freud and Buddha is that if you've got 40 units of your consciousness trapped in the basement, you're not going to make it to the higher kevels, as a general rule.
K W : As a general rule. If you don't befriend Freud, it will be harder to get to Buddha.
So what we do with "depth" psychology—well, actually, that's misnamed. It's really shallow psychology, it's really dealing with the lowest and shallowest levels of the holarchy, but for just that reason, their narrow and narcissistic perspective can be so crippling.
But the point is, with "depth" psychology, we recontact these lower holons and expose them to consciousness, so that they can be released from their fixation and dissociation and rejoin the ongoing march of consciousness evolution. They can get with the program, as it were, and cease this backward, reactionary, anti-evolutionary pull from the basement of your awareness. They can be reintegrated with your main self, so that your central self might now have 70 or 80
1 56 1
units of its potential available to it, and with that energy it can then continue its growth into the transpersonal.
And if that happens, and transpersonal growth is engaged with great intensity, then at some point you will climb not just up the ladder, but off it. As Zen would say, you're at the top of a hundred-foot pole, and yet you must take one more step. How do you step off a hundred-foot pole? You take that step, and where are you?
When you step off the ladder altogether, you are in free fall in Emptiness. Inside and outside, subject and object, lose all ultimate meaning. You are no longer "in here" looking at the workd "out there." You are not looking at the Kosmos, you are the Kosmos. The universe of One Taste announces itself, bright and obvious, radiant and clear, with nothing outside, nothing inside, an unending gesture of great perfection, spontaneously accomplished. The very Divine sparkles in every sight and sound, and you are simply that. The sun shines not on you but within you, and galaxies are born and die, all within your heart. Time and space dance as shimmering images on the face of radiant Emptiness, and the entire universe loses its weight. You can swallow the Milky Way in a single gulp, and put Gaia in the palm of your hand and bless it, and it is all the most ordinary thing in the world, and so you think nothing of it.
- 10 On the Way to Global: Part 1
Q: We hear a lot about a "gkobak perspective" or "global awareness"—think globally, act locally. Most of the "new paradigm" approaches emphasize that we are living in a global village, a planetary network, and we need a global and systems map to reflect that global territory.
Kw: A global map is one thing. A mapmaker capable of living up to it, quite another.
A global perspective is not innate; the infant is not born with it; hominids did not possess it. A global perspective is a rare, elite, extraordinary perspective of great depth, and there are relatively few individuals who actually make it to that depth (greater depth, less span). So it is in understanding the evolution and emergence of global consciousness that we can actually begin to implement "new paradigms," if that is what is desired.
But there is absolutely nothing in the global or systems map about how this interior development in the mapmaker occurs. And yet that is by far the most important issue. So when the "new paradigm" folks push their global or systems map, it is actually of rather limited use— it's just a Right Hand map—and yet the crucial issue is the Left Hand i 57
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development: how to get individuals to develop up to the point where they can actually inhabit a global awareness in the first place.
It is then from within and beyond this global perspective that genuinely spiritual or transpersonal states emerge, as Spirit begins to recognize its own global dimensions.
Q: That's what I want to talk about. We discussed this in abstract terms—ladder, climber, view. But I would like to look at concrete examples of this development on the way to global, evolution toward the global I. Let's climb the entire ladder! Starting at the start.
The Primary Matrix
K w: For the moment, let's call birth the start. The infant at birth is basically a sensorimotor organism, a holon containing within it cells, molecules, atoms—transcending and including those subholons.
But the infant doesn't possess language, or logic, or narrative capacity; it cannot grasp historical time, or orient itself in interior psychological space. It is basically identified with the sensoriphysical dimension, or stage 1 in figure 9-1. As Piaget put it, "The self is here material, so to speak."
Of course, the self isn't actually or merely physical, but it is still predominantly oriented to the lowest and most basic dimension of all, the material and sensorimotor. In fact, the self is largely identified with the sensorimotor world, so much so that it can't even distinguish between inside and outside. The physical self and the physical world are fused—that is, they are not yet differentiated. The infant can't tell the difference between inside and outside—chair and thumb are the same.
This early fusion state is often called the "primary matrix," because it is the fundamental matrix that will be differentiated in subsequent development. It is also referred to as primary autism, primary narcissism, oceanic, protoplasmic, adualistic, indissociated, and so on.
We saw that every fulcrum is a 1-2-3 the self first identifies with that rung, or is in fusion with that rung; then it differentiates from or transcends that rung; then integrates and includes it.
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And this primary matrix is simply phase 1 of fulcrum„l. The self is in fusion with the sensorimotor world, both internal and external.
Q: This primary fusion is beyond the duality of subject and object?
K W : No, it's beneath it. Many Romantics like to see this primary fusion state as some sort of prefiguration of cosmic consciousness, mystical unity consciousness, nonduality, and so on. But this primary fusion state doesn't transcend subject and object; it simply can't tell the difference between them in the first place. It's primary narcissism, where the physical world is swallowed by the autistic self—the infant is all mouth, the world is all food. It's a physical affair.
There is nothing particularly spiritual about this state. It cannot take the role of other; it is locked into its own egocentric orbit; it lacks intersubjective love and compassion. Because it can't tell the difference between physical inside and physical outside, this fusion state is fairly "wide" but extremely shallow. There is nothing to impede it horizontally, but vertically it is stuck in the basement. And flatland theorists focus on this horizontal expanse—subject and obiect are one!—and thus they completely miss the crucial factor—there is no vertical expanse at all, and thus this state is not more free, but less free, than subsequent developments. This is the shallowest and most cramped consciousness you can imagine!
And finally, this early fusion state cannot take the role of other. That is, it doesn't have the cognitive capacity to put itself in the shoes of others, and see the world through their eyes—it is stuck in only immediate impressions of the sensorimotor dimension, profoundly narcissistic. So it can't display anything resembling actual love—you can't truly love somebody until you can understand their perspective and perhaps even choose to put it above your own. So there is no compassion here, no genuine love, no tolerance and benevolence and altruism.
So in many, many ways, this fusion state is the complete antithesis of genuine spiritual awareness and compassion and love. Yet some theorists are still quite taken with this massive narcissism and this complete lack of love and compassion, and they bizarrely see it as a prefiguration of heaven. I suppose they see in this intense narcissism 160 I
something that speaks to their own strong desires; a sign of our times, I suppose.
Birth Trauma
Q: What about the previous intrauterine state? Do you include that in your model?
KW : The evidence centering on the intrauterine state and the birth trauma is highly controversial. But I suspect some of it is legitimate, so I refer to these even earlier developments as fulcrum-o.
Like all fulcrums, it has that essential 1-2-3 structure: an initial fusion with the womb, then a painful process of differentiation (the actual birth trauma), then a period of consolidation and integration as a differentiated organism (post-uterine). At that point, the infant self has then begun fulcrum-I—it is now fused with the physical world in and around it.
Stan Grof has written extensively on these subphases of the birth process, which he calls the Basic Perinatal Matrices. Stan's research suggests that trauma at any of these subphases can result in a pathological complex. And conversely, under intense stress, or with certain types of meditation, or certain drugs, the self can regress to this fulcrum and relive its various subphases and traumas, which tends to alleviate the pathology. Stan's evidence is immensely suggestive, and if you are interested in this area, I highly recommend you start there.
The False self
Q: So a trauma in the birth process could form a pathological complex that would affect subsequent development.
K w: Yes, but that is just one example of a much more general phenomenon, which is that a trauma at any of the fulcrums can form a pathological complex which "infects" all subsequent development. As we were saying, the self can take a bad step at any of the nine or so fulcrums, and the type of pathology that results depends upon the rung where the accident occurred.
Q : How so?
K W : As the self steps up to each new rung in expanding aware-
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ness, it faces that 1-2-3 process at each rung. And something can go wrong in any of those subphases—in the fusion subphase, the differentiation subphase, the integration subphase. The self can remain in fusion, or remain stuck at that stage—we have a fixation, a subphase 1 problem. Or the self can fail in the differentiation or subphase 2 of the fulcrum—it can fail to differentiate cleanly and clearly, and so it fails to establish a responsible boundary at that level. Or the self can fail in the integration or subphase 3 of the fulcrum—it doesn't integrate and include the previous level, but alienates and dissociates and represses it. It doesn't transcend and include, it dissociates and represses.
Once this accident occurs—once we get a "subphase malformation" at any kevel—then this pathology forms a lesion in consciousness that tends to infect and distort all subsequent development. Like a grain of sand caught in a developing pearl, the malformation "crinkles" all subsequent layers, tilts and twists and distorts them.
Q: The climber has lost an arm or a leg.
K w: Yes, there are now aspects of the self's being that it doesn't own or admit or acknowledge. It starts to hide from itself. In other words, the self begins lying to itself. A false self system begins to grow over the actual self, the self that is really there at any given moment, but is now denied or distorted or repressed. Repression, basically, is being untruthful about what is actually running around in your psyche.
And thus the personal unconscious begins its career. And this unconscious is, in part, the locus of the self's lie. As we earlier put it, aspects of awareness are split off—"little blobs," little selves, little subjects, are forced into the subterranean dark. These little blobs remain at the level of development they had when they were split off and denied. They cease to grow. They remain in fusion with the level where they were repressed. They hide out in the basement, and the door to that basement is guarded by the lie.
So aspects of your potential, sealed off by the dissociation, begin eating up your energy and your awareness. They are a drain. They sabotage further growth and development. They are dead weight, the weight of a past age that should have been outgrown. But instead, protected and sheltered by the lie, they live on to terrorize.
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Q: And therapy would address that lie, or untruthfulness.
K w: Interpretive therapies—Freudian to Jungian to Gestalt to cognitive—they attack the lie, yes. In all the ways that we already discussed (see chapter 7).
Q: So as we run through the stages of expanding awareness, we want to watch these fulcrums for anything that can wrong, because that is what actually prevents the emergence of global awareness,
correct?
K w: Yes, that's the central point.
Fulcrum-I: The Hatching of the Physical Self
Q: So we left off this developmental story with fulcrum-I.
Kw: Yes, the self is in fusion with the sensorimotor world—the primary fusion state or primary narcissism. The self's identity is physiocentric, fused with the material dimension, with the physiosphere.
But somewhere around 4 months, the infant will begin to differentiate between physical sensations in its body and those in the environment. The infant bites a blanket and it does not hurt; bites its thumb and it does. There is a difference, it learns, between blanket and thumb. So it begins the differentiation phase of fulcrum-I, which is usually completed sometime in the first year, usually around 5—9 months, according to Margaret Mahler, a pioneer in this research.
She calls this the "hatching" phase—the physical self "hatches" out of this primary fusion matrix. (In other words, this hatching is phase 2 of fulcrum-I.) This hatching is the "real birth," so to speak, of the physical self.
Melanie Klein was particularly interested in this earliest of differentiations, as was Edith Jacobson, and René Spitz, not to mention Margaret Mahler. Interesting that women seem to have a particularly acute feel for these early developments, no?
Anyway, this hatching is the birth of the physical self. If the self fails in this differentiation—if it remains stuck or in fusion with the primary matrix—then it can't tell where its body stops and the chair begins. It is open to what is called adualism, which is one of the primary characteristics of psychosis. And that is why research consistently indicates that many of the really severe pathologies—psychosis,
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schizophrenia, severe affective disorders—have part of their etiology in problems with this early fulcrum, fulcrum-I. So we can start to see that a type of pathology is associated with the level at which the disruption occurs.
Q: Some of these are listed in figure 10-1 (page 164).
K W : Yes. With psychosis, there is severe reality distortion, marked especially by adualism, or the incapacity to establish even the physical boundaries of the self (fulcrum-I); there are often hallucinatory primary process images and thoughts; narcissistic delusions of reference; consciousness fails to seat in the physical body; thoughts of self and other are confused. There may also be an influx of subtle or transpersonal awareness, but this is fairly rare and is often badly distorted as well.
Fulcrum-2: The Birth of the Emotional Self
Q: But if all goes well with fulcrum-I?
K w: If this fulcrum is negotiated relatively well, then the infant will begin fulcrum-a, the emotional-phantasmic fulcrum. Because the infant has completed fulcrum-I, it has established the realistic boundaries of its physical self, but it still has not yet established the boundaries of its emotional self. So it can differentiate its physical self from the physical environment, but it still cannot differentiate its emotional self from the emotional environment. And this means that its emotional self is fused or identified with those around it, particularly the mother. (This is the initial fusion phase of fulcrum-2.)
And just as there was nothing "deep" or "profound" about the previous physical fusion state, there is nothing deep or profound about this emotional fusion state, even though it, too, sounds like a nice "holistic oneness with the world." But in fact, researchers are virtually unanimous in pointing out that this state is still extremely egocentric or narcissistic. As Mahler puts it, the self at this stage "treats the world like its oyster." Precisely because it cannot differentiate itself from the emotional and vital world around it, the infant self treats the world as an extension of itself—which is the technical meaning of "narcissism. "
So this type of severe narcissism—which is normal, not pathologi-
causal causal pathology formless mysticism subtle subtle pathology deity mysticism psychic psychic disorders nature mysticism
centauric (vision logic) F—6 existential pathology existential therapy
formal reflexive identity neuroses introspection
(formop) rule/role F—4 script pathology script analysis
(conop) rep-mind psychoneuroses uncovering techniques
phantasmic-emotionai narcissistic- structuring-building borderline techniques
sensoriphysicai psychoses physiological/ pacification undifferentiated or perinatal pathology intense regressive primary matrix therapies
Basic Structures Corresponding Characteristic Treatment Modalities
of Consciousness Fulcrums Pathologies
FIGURE 10-1. Structures of consciousness correlated with fulcrums, pathologies, and treatments.
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cal, at this stage—does not mean that the infant thinks selfishly about only itself, but on the contrary, it is incapable of thinking about itself. It is unable to differentiate itself from the world, the emotional world, and so it thinks that what it is feeling is what the world is feeling, that what it wants is what the world wants, that what it sees is what the world sees. It plays hide and seek in plain view; it thinks that if it can't see you, you can't see it; its own perspective is the only perspective in existence.
In other words, the self is here a purely ecological self, a biospheric self, a libidinal self, a natural-impulsive self. It is one with, in fusion with, the entire vital-emotional dimension of being, both internal and external. It is pushed and pulled by the currents of its vital life, and it does not differentiate itself from the ecological currents of existence. Its identity is biocentric or ecocentric, fused with the biosphere within and without.
And precisely because it is embedded in nature, in biology, in impulse, in the vital-emotional sphere, it cannot rise above that embed* dedness and see that its perspective is not the only perspective in existence. Biocentric is extremely egocentric, as we will constantly see. It might have a certain horizontal expanse, but very little vertical depth, which is why it is so altogether shallow and narcissistic (despite the use to which this emotional fusion has been put by numerous Romantics in a desperate search for any sort of "union").
Q: So the self at this stage has no sturdy emotional boundaries.
K W : Correct. Technically, we say self and object representations are still fused. This contributes to the general "magical" and narcissistic atmosphere that is so prevalent at this stage.
But somewhere around 15—24 months, the emotional self begins to differentiate itself from the emotional environment. Mahler actually calls this "the psychological birth of the infant." The infant is actually "born" as a separate emotional and feeling self at this stage. (The self has moved from the initial fusion phase of fulcrum-2 to the middle or differentiation phase.) The infant starts to wake up to the fact that it is a separate self existing in a separate world. It has hit the "terrible twos."
Q: Which is different from "hatching."
K Vv': Yes. Fulcrum-I is hatching, or the birth of the physical self.
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Fulcrum-2 is the birth of the emotional self. With fulcrum-2, a truly separate-self sense awakens, with all the joy and all the terror that involves.
Q: Many theorists take this as the beginning of alienation, of really profound alienation. They have called it the basic fault, the basic default, the basic dualism, the split between subject and object, the beginning of fragmented awareness. . . .
K w: Oh, yes, I know. An extraordinary amount has been read into this differentiation and the "loss" of the previous emotional fusion. It's supposed to be the ejection from a primal paradise, the beginning of massive alienation, the start of the human tragedy, the beginning of Paradise Lost. I think it also causes tooth decay, but I'm not sure.
The basic problem is that most of these theorists simply confuse differentiation with dissociation. Differentiation is an absolutely necessary and unavoidable part of all evolutionary growth and development, the counterpart to reaching higher integration. But these theorists look at any differentiation, not as prelude to higher integration, but as a brutal disruption of a prior and wonderful harmony, as if the oak were somehow a horrible violation of the acorn.
They then look back nostalgically to the days of wonderful acornness, prior to the differentiation, and wring their hands and gnash their teeth and moan the loss of paradise. They dramatically overidealize this primitive lack of differentiation. Just because the self is not aware of suffering does not mean it has a positive presence of spiritual bliss. Lack of awareness doesn't mean presence of paradise!
Q : But the Romantics assume otherwise about this early lack of differentiation. They read many positive virtues into it, so they must see the loss of this fusion as lamentable.
K W : Yes, they confuse fusion with freedom. It's just the opposite. Fusion is imprisonment; you are dominated by all that you have not transcended. But of course that transcendental growth is difficult and perilous and painful.
The manifest world is a brutal place, and as humans become aware of this, they suffer. The manifest world, the world of samsara, is an alienated and alienating place. And as the infant becomes vaguely
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aware of that, it suffers horribly. And yes, this is painful, but it's called waking up.
It's like frostbite disease. First there is no feeling at all; everything seems fine, you're in a paradise of no pain. You're diseased, you just don't know it. Then it thaws out, and feelings and emotions emerge, and it hurts like hell. These theorists confuse "hurts like hell" with "creates the disease."
No, fulcrum-2 is simply starting to wake up to the disease of samsara. To the fact that, as a separate and sensitive emotional being, you are open to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. You are going to be put into a world of pain and suffering and nightmarish hell, and you have two, and only two, choices: retreat to the prior fusion, the prior frostbite, where there was no awareness of this alienation, or continue growth and transcendence until you can transcend this alienation in spiritual awakening.
But the retro-Romantic theorists simply eulogize the prior frostbitten state, and see that as a prefiguration of the Divine awakening, as being itself a type of unconscious Heaven. But the fusion state is not unconscious Heaven, it's unconscious Hell. With fulcrum-2, that hell becomes conscious, that's all. It's a big advance.
Q: Even though fulcrum-2 is a rather "unhappy" development.
K W : Bittersweet, yes. But the previous state is the state of numbness, not nonduality; ignorance, not bliss. My dog doesn't writhe in angst either, but liberation does not consist in reawakening dog consciousness. Or a "mature form" of dog consciousness.
No, when we awaken as a separate emotional self, with all the joy and afl the terror that involves, we have actually transcended the previous fusion state. We have awakened to some degree. We have gained more depth and more consciousness, and that has its own intrinsic value, intrinsic worth. But, like all stages of growth, there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. The dialectic of progress.
Q: So if everything goes relatively well at this fulcrum-2?
Kw: Well, let me first say that if things go poorly at this fulcrum— that is, worse than the normal mess this fulcrum is anyway—then the self either remains in fusion at this emotionally narcissistic stage (the so-called narcissistic personality disorders), or the differentiation
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process begins but is not resolved and there is some sort of dissociation (the so-called borderline disorders). We find exactly this general classification and etiology in Kohut, Masterson, Kernberg, Mahler, Stone, and Gedo, to name a few.
In either case, there are no realistic emotional boundaries to the self. In the narcissistic and borderline syndromes, the individual therefore lacks a sense of cohesive self, and this is perhaps the central defining characteristic of these pathologies. The self either treats the world as an extension of itself (narcissistic), or is constantly invaded and tortured by the world (borderline). This level of pathology is called borderline because it is borderline between psychosis and neurosis. It's sometimes called "stably unstable." The growing self has taken a painful spill at the second big fork in the road.
Fulcrum-3: The Birth of the Conceptual Self
Q: But if all goes well at fulcrum-I?
K W : If all goes relatively well, then the self is no longer exclusively identified with the emotional level. It begins to transcend that level and identify with the mental or conceptual self, which is the beginning of fulcrum-3 and the representational mind.
The representational mind is similar to what Piaget called preoperational cognition. As I use it, the rep-mind consists of images, symbols, and concepts. You can see all of these listed on figure 5-3, for example.
Images begin to emerge around 7 months. A mental image looks more or less like the object it represents. If you close your eyes and picture a dog, it looks pretty much like a real dog. That's an image. A symbol, on the other hand, represents an object but does not look like the object at all, which is a much harder cognitive task. The symbol "Fido" represents my dog, but it doesn't look like my dog at all. Symbols emerge during the second year, usually with words like "ma" or "dada," and develop very rapidly. Symbols dominate awareness from 2 to 4 years, roughly.
At which point concepts begin to emerge. Where a simple symbol represents a single object, a concept represents an entire class of objects. The word "dog" represents all dogs, not just Fido. An even
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harder task. Concepts dominate awareness from 4 to 7 years. Of course, these are all basic structures, so once they emerge in awareness, they will remain as basic capacities available to consciousness.
But it is when concepts emerge that a particularly mental self, a conceptual self, begins to emerge. When the self begins to identify with this conceptual mind, we have fulcrum„3. The self is now not just a bundle of sensations and impulses and emotions, it is also a set of symbols and concepts. It begins to enter the linguistic world, the noospheric world, and this, to put it mildly, changes everything. It has gone from the physiosphere of fulcrum-I to the biosphere of fulcrum-2, and now it begins to especially enter the noosphere with fulcrum-3.
Every Neurosis Is an Ecological Crisis
Q: What would you say is the single most important thing about this new linguistic self?
K W : This new self exists in the noosphere, and the noosphere can repress the biosphere. Individually, this produces neurosis; collectively, ecological crisis.
In other words, the linguistic world is indeed a net-v world, a new worldspace. Here the self can think of the past and plan for the future (it is temporal and historical); it can begin to control its bodily functions; it can begin to picture things in its mind that are not actually present in its senses. Because it can anticipate the future, it can worry and suffer anxiety, and because it can think about the past, it can feel remorse and guilt and regret. All of these are part of its new worldspace, the linguistic world, the noosphere.
And precisely because it exists in this new and wider world, the conceptual mind can repress and dissociate its lower impulses. That is, precisely because the noosphere transcends the biosphere, it can not only transcend and include, it can repress and distort and deny. Not just differentiate, but dissociate. Both individually and at large. Individually, neurosis; at large, ecological crisis.
Q: For the moment, stick with the individual, or we'll get way off base.
KW : On an individual level, the result of the noosphere repressing
the biosphere is called psychoneurosis, or simply neurosis. The mind can repress nature, both external nature (eco-crisis) and internal nature (libido).
Psychoneurosis—or just neurosis—in the technical sense means that a fairly stable, cohesive, mental self has emerged, and this mental-conceptual self (the ego) can repress or dissociate aspects of its bodily drives or impulses, and these repressed or distorted impulses— usually sexual or aggressive—therefore appear in disguised and painful forms known as neurotic symptoms.
In other words, every neurotic symptom is a miniature ecological crts*s.
Q: So it's interesting that repression proper and the classical neuroses come into being with fulcrum-3.
K W : In a general sense, yes. You see, in the previous borderline conditions, repression proper is not so much in evidence—the self isn't strong enough to repress anything! The self can't repress its emotions, but rather, it is completely overwhelmed by them, lost in them, flooded by them. There's no "repressed unconscious" to dig up because there is no extensive repression in the first place, which is why these conditions are often referred to as "pre-neurotic."
So therapies aimed at the borderline conditions (fulcrum-2) are actually known as structure building therapies—they help the fragile self to differentiate and stabilize and build structure, as opposed to the uncovering therapies of the neurotic level (fulcrum-3), which aim at relaxing the repression barrier and recontacting the impulses and emotions and felt-sense that the stronger neurotic self has repressed. In fact, one of the aims of structure-building therapy is to get the borderline "up to" a capacity for repression!
Q: So neurosis is an improvement!
K W : Yes, and then you have to deal with that. The point is, as Vailant demonstrated, the defense mechanisms themselves exist in a hierarchy of development. A typical fulcrum-I defense mechanism is projective identification, where self and other are largely undifferentiated. Typical fulcrum-2 defense mechanisms include splitting and fusion (fusion of self and object representations and a splitting of allgood and all-bad objects). Repression proper is typical of fulcrum-3 defense mechanisms, and this is said to eventually give way to the
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"healthiest" defense of all, sublimation—which is just a psychoanalytically decontaminated word for transcendence.
Q: So defense mechanisms are holarchically arranged.
Kw: Well, sure. And defense mechanisms, when operating naturally and normally, are like a psychological immune system. They help maintain the integrity and stability of the self boundary, and they toss out any invaders that threaten the self system.
But, as always, there can be too much of a good thing. Defense mechanisms can become an auto-immune disorder—the self starts tacking itself, eating itself up. The defending army turns into a repressive state police. The self starts defending against pain and terror by incarcerating its own citizens. It seals off its own potential. It closes its eyes. It starts to lie. No matter what the "level" of this lie—from splitting and fusion and projection to repression and reaction formation and displacement—the self hides from itself, lies to itself, becomes opaque to itself.
In place of the actual self, there grows up the false self. Beginning as early as fulcrum-I (some would say fulcrum-o), the fledgling and growing self can begin to distance itself from aspects of its own being, aspects that are too threatening, too painful, or too disruptive. It does so using the defense mechanisms available to it at its own level of development. The psychotic lie, the borderline lie, the neurotic fie. And the "unconscious" in the most general sense is simply the locus of the running lie—the layers of deception, layers of insincerity, hiding the actual self and its real potentials.
Q: So what happens to this false self?
K W : The false self—at whatever level—might simply remain in charge for a lifetime, as the individual limps through a life of internal insincerity. More often than not, however, the false self will at some point collapse under its own suffocating weight—there is a "breakdown"—and the individual is then faced with several choices: rest and recover and then resume the same false self-trajectory; drug the dilemma out of awareness; behaviorally reinforce actions that avoid the problem; or take up an investigation into the life of the lie, usually with a therapist who will help you interpret your interior intentions more truthfully.
Q: The interpretive or Left Hand therapies.
K w: Yes. In a safe environment, surrounded by empathy, congruence, and acceptance, the individual can begin to tell the truth about his or her interior without fear of retribution. And thus the false self—at whatever level—tends to lose the reason for its existence. The lie—the resistance to truthfulness—is interpreted, and the concealed pain and terror and anguish disclose themselves, and the false self slowly burns in the fire of truthful awareness. The truthful interiors are shared in an intersubjective circle of care and compassion, which releases them from their imprisonment in deception and allows them to join the ongoing growth of consciousness—the beauty of the actual self shines through, and the intrinsic joy of the new depth is its own reward.
Now we've only discussed the first three fulcrums and the pathologies that develop up to those points—psychosis, borderline, neurosis. But the same general phenomenon is operative throughout development, even into the higher and transpersonal domains. At whatever level of development, we can exist as the actual self in sincerity, or the false self in deception. And the different levels of the lie are the different levels of pathology.
Early Worldviews: Archaic, Magic, Mythic
Q: That takes us up through fulcrum-3—the first three major levels of consciousness growth, each of which has a different worldview.
K w: Yes. A worldview, as we were saying, is what the Kosmos looks like from a particular rung of consciousness. When you have only sensations and impulses, what does the Kosmos look like to you? We call that archaic. When you add images and symbols, what does the Kosmos look like then? Magic. When you add rules and roles, and what does the Kosmos see? A mythic world. When formal operational emerges, what do you see? A rational world. And so on.
Q: Why don't you briefly summarize the early worldviews, and then we can move on to higher developments.
K w: "Archaic" is sort of a catch-all phrase. It loosely represents all the previous stages up to the hominid. Archaic is the general worldview of fulcrum-I. It's basically a sensorimotor worldview. Q: And magic?
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K w: As images and symbols begin to emerge, around the time of fulcrum-2, these early images and symbols are not differentiated clearly from the objects they represent. Thus, it seems that to manipulate the image is to actually change the object. If I make an image of you and stick a pin in the image, something bad will actually happen to you. The child lives in this world of magical displacement and condensation. Very "primary process." Very magical.
Likewise, because self and other are not well differentiated, the child populates its world with objects that have mental characteristics—the magical worldview is animistic. And I'm not talking about some sort of sophisticated panpsychic philosophy. It's very crude and very egocentric. The clouds move because they are following you, they want to see you. It rains because the sky wants to wash you off. It thunders because the sky is angry at you personally. Mind and world are not clearly differentiated, so their characteristics tend to get fused and confused, "magically." Inside and outside are both egocentric, narcissistic.
Q : What about mythic?
K W : As development moves into fulcrum-3, the child begins to understand that it cannot itself magically order the world around. It keeps hiding under the pillow, but people keep finding it! Something is not working here. Magic doesn't really work. The self can't really order the world around magically and omnipotently. But it thinks perhaps somebody else can, and so crashing onto the scene come a pantheon of gods and goddesses and demons and fairies and special forces, all of which can miraculously suspend the laws of nature for various, often trite and trivial, reasons. The child will ask its parents to turn the yucky spinach into candy. The child doesn't understand that the material world doesn't work like that.
But in the meantime the child develops a very complex mythological worldview, which is populated with all sorts of egocentric forces that are imagined to order the world around, and all of them are focused on the ego of the child. Whereas, in the previous magical phase, the infant thought that it itself could alter the world by the right word-magic, now it has to spend its time trying to appease the gods and demons and forces that can alter the world, often for the worse. Egocentric power gives way to egocentric prayer and ritual.
There is a constant "bargaining" with these forces: if I eat all my dinner, the nice force will make my toothache go away.
This mythic worldview begins with the rep-mind and continues into the next major stage, the rule/role mind, and then dies down with the rational worldview, which realizes that if you want to change reality, you must work at it yourself: nobody is going to magically or mythically save you without a corresponding growth.
You can see these general correlations in figure 5-2. Worldviews are listed in the Lower Left, because they collectively govern individual perceptions within their horizon. (Whether magic or mythic possesses any genuinely spiritual aspects, we will discuss later. See chapter 11.)
Fulcrum-4 The Birth of the Role Self
Q: All right, so that brings us to fulcrum-4. The basic structure you have listed as the "rule/role" mind.
K w: Yes. This is roughly what Piaget called concrete operational cognition ("conop"), which emerges around age 6—7 on average, and dominates awareness until roughly age 11—14. "Concrete operational" sounds very dry and arid but is actually very rich and powerful. It involves the capacity to form mental rules and to take mental roles. And—this is crucial—the child finally learns to take the role of other.
There is a famous experiment, by Piaget and Inhelder, that first spotted this very clearly. I'll give a simplified version. If you take a ball colored red on one side and green on the other, and you place the ball between you and the child, and then ask the child two questions—"What color do you see?" and "What color am I seeing?"— preoperational children will answer both questions the same. That is, if the child is looking at the green side, he will correctly say he sees green, but he will also say you are seeing green. He doesn't know that you are seeing the red side. He can't put himself in your shoes, or see the world through your eyes. The child is still locked into his own perspective, which is still very egocentric, very preconventional, very selfcentric.
But the concrete operational child will correctly say, "I see green, you see red." The child at this stage can take the role of other. And
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this is a huge step on the way to global, on the way to being able to take a worldcentric perspective. The child is not yet fully there, but it is continuing to move in the right direction, because it is beginning to see that its view is not the only view in the world!
So its entire moral stance switches from a rather egocentric or preconventional stance to a conventional and often highly conformist stance—"my country right or wrong" and "law and order" stage. You can see this in figure 9-3.
Paradigm Shifts
Q: A change in view.
Kw' : It's an entire change in worldview—a paradigm shift, if you like—and as with the three previous rungs, or the three previous paradigm shifts, this involves a profound change in self-identity, in moral sense, and in self-needs, to mention a few. These changing views are all listed in figure 9-3.
Q: So each of the nine stages of consciousness evolution is actually a paradigm shift.
K W : In a broad sense, yes. Consequently, the typical adult in our culture has already undergone a half-dozen or so major paradigm shifts, worldview shifts—from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to existential, or thereabouts. You and I have already undergone these revolutions in consciousness, and although we might not remember any of the specifics, researchers on the scene report psychological earthquakes.
We tend to seal these earthquakes out of awareness. There are a lot of very funny stories about this. If you take children in the preoperational stage, and—right in front of their eyes—pour the water from a short glass into a tall glass, and ask them which glass has more water, they will always say the tall glass has more, even though they saw you pour the same amount from one glass to the other. They cannot "conserve volume." Certain "obvious" things that we see, they do not and cannot see—they live in a different worldspace. No matter how many times you pour the same amount of water back and forth between the two glasses, they will insist the tall glass has more. So much for the "pure" and "undistorted" perception of children.
If a few years later, after concrete operational awareness has emerged, you repeat this experiment, the kids will always say that both glasses have the same amount of water. They can hold volume in their mind and not be confused by its displacements. They have an internal rule that automatically does this (a concrete operational rule). And if you show them a videotape from the earlier period, where they were saying that the tall glass has more water, they will deny it's them! They think you've doctored the videotape. They simply cannot imagine somebody being so stupid as to think the tall glass has more water.
So they underwent this massive paradigm shift, and not a bit of it remains in awareness. The self will now reinterpret every single event of its previous life history from the perspective of the new worldview. It completely rewrites its history from within the new and higher paradigm.
So they—so all of us—will retroactively reread the earlier events in our life from this new perspective, and we tend to imagine that is the perspective we had from the start. When we think of ourselves at age 4 or 5, we think of the people around us at that time—our parents, our siblings, our friends—and we picture what they were thinking about us, or how they felt about certain things, or what was going through their minds, when in fact we could actually do none of that at the time! We could not take the role of other at that age. So we are automatically (and subconsciously) "retro-reading" our entire life from the perspective of a recently emerged worldview, and imagining all of this stuff was present from the start!
Needless to say, this totally distorts what was actually occurring in the earlier periods. Memory is the last thing you can depend on to 'report" childhood. And this leads to all sorts of problems. Romantics imagine childhood is a wonderful time where you see the world just like you do now, only in a marvelously "spontaneous" and "free" fashion. Archaic is nondual paradise in the nonegoic core, magic is holistically empowered wonderfulness, mythic is alive with spiritual powers, and gosh it's all so marvelous and free. Whereas they, the Romantics, with access to the higher worldview of reflexive awareness, are simply reading all sorts of wonderful nonsense back into a
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period which, if they could actually see it (on videotape, for example), they would deny any reality to it at all!
Satanic Abuse and UFOs
Q: So can you recover childhood memories in any sense?
K w: The impressions of various childhood events are certainly present, sort of like bruises in the psyche. And these impressions retain the worldview of the level that was present when they were laid down—usually archaic or magical.
But when these impressions are recalled by adults, the impressions themselves are thoroughly interpreted in terms of the higher worldview now present. And then all sorts of present-day concerns can be injected back into these original impressions, and it vividly appears that these concerns were there from the start. It doesn't seem like you are reinterpreting these early impressions, because that is done subconsciously or preconsciously, and so you only see the conscious result of this extensive reworking.
In certain intense states of regression—with certain therapies, certain meditative practices, certain drugs, certain intense stresses—these original impressions can be accessed (precisely because the higher paradigm is temporarily decommissioned), but even then, a few seconds or a few minutes later, the higher worldview returns, and people begin extensive retro-reading of these impressions. And we have to be very careful about that.
Q: Satanic ritual child abuse?
KW : Well, that's one example. Never mind that the FBI has found not one scrap of evidence of ritual child murder, even though thousands of people are claiming such. There ought to be corpses all over the backyards of this country. But these folks honestly and deeply believe this has happened to them. They do not feel that they are making this up. These impressions present themselves with vivid certainty. They will easily pass lie detector tests. The reworking has taken place subconsciously.
Samsara is a brutal place. Samsara, metaphorically, is a realm of ritual abuse. It is inherently a mechanism of terror. And people need to cope with this nightmare. One of the simplest ways is to imagine that this ritual abuse had a specific cause in your own personal history. So you search your childhood "memories," and eventually, with a little help from a friendly therapist, sure enough: there's mom with a butcher knife. The original impression is probably true enough: mom had a knife, she was carving the Thanksgiving turkey, and that impression is real. But it gets reworked, and now you're the turkey.
Q: Alien abduction? UFO abduction? These stories all have a very similar structure. The same events keep happening. There's the abduction, the medical experiments and anal probe and semen collection, the sending back to earth, often with a message for humanity. And it really alters these people's lives.
K W : I think the original impressions might go back to fulcrumz or fulcrum-I or even fulcrum-o. But again, they get dramatically reworked. Maybe even some archetypal or Jungian material gets activated—Jung thought UFOs were actually projected archetypes. The UFO anal probe: where Freud meets Jung.
Many people are sincere in their beliefs about it. Perhaps even some higher or spiritual material gets injected into the impressions. But the impressions themselves retain a very narcissistic worldview. Imagine: humanity is about to enter a new phase, guided by a massive new alien intelligence. And of all the people in the entire world, you are chosen to carry this message. In fact, the aliens are collecting semen or ova from you because they are inseminating a new race, beginning a new race. And you are to be the father of this new race, the mother of this new race. The new saviors are coming, a new virgin birth is required.
You can't get much more narcissistic and egocentric than that. Some very deep fulcrum-2 (or earlier) material is being reactivated, in my opinion, and then injected with present-day adult "messages" about saving Gaia and healing the planet—which is all very nice, but it can't hide the primal scene in all of these fantasies: you are the center of the new world, the father or the mother of a new and higher race.
So it's an original and real enough impression, reworked and iniected with adult material, so that it presents itself with a genuine and frightening vividness, and it retains the essential worldview of fulcrum-2 (or earlier)—namely, its intense narcissism—but then is re-
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worked, often with the aid of a kindly and helpful therapist, into a powerful paradigm of world salvation, courtesy of you.
Q: No spiritual components at all?
K w: We haven't talked much about any of the higher stages, but it's always possible that some genuinely transpersonal or spiritual dimensions are temporarily "peek-experienced" and then translated downward into terms that will both satisfy the fulcrum-2 fixation and fit the "world-saving" paradigm fabricated by the client, often in collusion with the therapist. All of which presents itself as vividly real and undeniable. As we said, these folks will, and often do, pass a lie detector test, because they are sincere in their beliefs, and their therapists are equally sincere, and neither has spotted the lie, the deep reworking that converts impressions into realities.
The therapists investigating these phenomena had a real opportunity to make pioneering observations on new forms of hysterical syndromes emerging as a sign of our troubled times,. but by and large they lost that opportunity by allowing the vividness of the impressions to persuade them that they were dealing with ontological realities. They converted phenomenology into ontology. At the very worst, they were propelled by their own deep narcissism: I am therapist to the new race. At the very least, they became facilitators in the mass hysteria, and this has understandably thrown the whole profession into turmoil and bitter self-recrimination.
I suspect ritual satanic child abuse and UFO abduction are both powerful examples of what happens to spiritual realities in a culture chat denies spiritual realities—casualties on the way to global, souls washed ashore on an island of cultural insincerity.
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