==
===
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
==
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
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
of 09
— 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
142
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
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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
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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
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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.
11 On the Way to Global: Part 2
Q: We were discussing the interior transformations that occur "on the way to global," and all of the problems that can prevent the emergence of this global awareness.
K W : Yes, and we had reached the point where there is a paradigm shift from preconventional to conventional modes of awareness— from fulcrum-3 to fulcrum-4, which is especially evidenced in the capacity to take the role of other. And in this shift we see a continuing decrease in egocentrism. In fact, the overall direction of development in humans—the telos of human development—is toward less and less egocentnc states.
But this is true in general. The archbattle in the universe is always: evolution versus egocentrism. The evolutionary drive to produce greater depth is synonymous with the drive to overcome egocentrism, to find wider and deeper wholes, to unfold greater and greater unions. A molecule overcomes the egocentrism of an atom. A cell overcomes the egocentrism of a molecule. And nowhere is this trend more obvious than in human development itself.
Evolution versus Egocentrism
Q: So evolution is a continual decline of egocentrism.
K w: Yes, a continual decentering. Howard Gardner gives a per-
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fect summary of the research in this area, and I want to read a short quote from him, because it pretty much says it all.
He begins by pointing out that development in general is marked by "the decline of egocentrism." He reports: "The young child is totally egocentric—meaning not that he thinks selfishly only about himself, but to the contrary, that he is incapable of thinking about himself. The egocentric child is unable to differentiate himself from the rest of the world; he has not separated himself out from others or from objects. Thus he feels that others share his pain or his pleasure, that his mumblings will inevitably be understood, that his perspective is shared by all persons, that even animals and plants partake of his consciousness. in playing hide-and-seek he will 'hide' in broad view of other persons, because his egocentrism prevents him from recognizing that others are aware of his location. The whole course of human development can be viewed as a continuing decline in egocentrism. . . ."
Q: So narcissism or egocentrism is greatest at fulcrum-I and then steadily declines?
K w: Yes, exactly. Because differentiation is at its least, narcissism is at its worst!
This selfcentrism lessens somewhat as the infant's identity switches from physiocentric to biocentric—from fulcrum-I to fulcrum-2. The child does not treat the physical world as an extension of itself, because physical self and physical world are now differentiated. But the emotional self and emotional world are not yet differentiated, and so the entire emotional world is an extension of the self: emotional narcissism is at its peak. The biocentric or ecological self of fulcrum2 is thus still profoundly egocentric. What it's feeling, the world is feeling.
This narcissism is lessened, or declines once again, with the emergence of the conceptual self (fulcrum-3). The self is now a conceptual ego, but that ego still cannot yet take the role of other, so the early ego is still largely narcissistic, preconventional, egocentric.
So sometimes summarize this declining narcissism as going from physiocentric to biocentric to egocentric, with the understanding that all three are egocentric in the general sense, but less and less so. And the whole egocentric perspective undergoes yet another radical shift
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with the emergence of the capacity to take the role of other. At which point egocentric shifts to sociocentric.
Fulcrum-4 (Continued): Life's Social Scripts
Q: In other words, fulcrum-4.
K W : Yes. At this stage, what becomes crucially important for me is not how I fit with my impulses, but how fit with my roles, my group, my peer group, or—a bit wider—how I fit with my country, my state, my people. am now taking the role of other, and how I fit with the other is crucially important. I have decentered once again, differentiated once again, transcended once again—my ego is not the only ego in the universe.
So this sociocentric stance is a major transformation—or paradigm shift—from the previous and especially egocentric stances of the first three fulcrums. But notice: with fulcrum-4, care and concern are expanded from me to the group—but no further! If you are a member of the group—a member of my tribe, my mythology, my ideology— then you are "saved" as well. But if you belong to a different culture, a different group, a different mythology, a different god, then you are damned.
So this sociocentric or conventional stance tends to be very ethnocentric. Care and concern are expanded from me to my group, and there it stops.
So I also call this conventional or sociocentric stance by the term mythic-membership. The worldview of fulcrum-4 is still mythological, and so care and concern are extended to believers in the same mythology, the same ideology, the same race, the same creed, the same culture—but no further. If you are a member of the myth, you are my brother, my sister. If not, you go to hell.
In other words, I can decenter from my ego to my group, but I cannot yet decenter my group. My group is the only group in the universe. I cannot yet move from sociocentric and ethnocentric to a truly worldcentric or universal or global stance—a decentered, universal, pluralistic stance. But I am getting there, slowly! am on the way to global, with each stage in this journey marked by a profound decentering, a lessening of egocentrism, a lessening of narcissism, a
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transcendence of the shallower and a disclosure of the deeper. Decentering, transcendence, decreasing egocentrism—so many words for the same thing, the same telos of evolution.
And, in fact, the postconventional or global or worldcentric stance is the next fulcrum, fulcrum-5.
Q: Okay, so let's finish with fulcrum-4 first. Identity switches from egocentric to sociocentric.
K W : Yes. The self is no longer relating only or primarily to its body and its immediate impulses, but is also ushered into a world of roles and rules. The self will have all sorts of scripts, or learned roles and rules, which it will have to play out.
Most of these scripts are useful and absolutely necessary—they are the means whereby you pull yourself out of yourself and into the circle of intersubjective culture, the circle of care and concern and relatedness and responsibility, where you begin to see in others your own expanded self, and extend care to each. You see the world through the eyes of the other, and thus find a wider consciousness that shines beyond the confines of the me and the mine.
But some of these scripts are distorted or cruel or maladaptive, and if something goes wrong with these scripts, we call this "script pathology." The person has all these false and distorted social masks and myths—"l'm a rotten person, I'm no good, I can never do any„ thing right"—all these cruel scripts that are self-defeating and injurious.
That are, in short, lies. These false scripts are the form of the lie at this level, and the false self lives by these social lies. It is not just out of touch with its emotions; it is out of touch with the self it could be in the cultural world—out of touch with all the positive roles it could assume if it didn't keep telling itself that it can't.
Q: Which is what cognitive therapists tend to work with.
Kw: Yes, and family therapy, and transactional analysis, and the hot new school of narrative therapy, to mention a few. It's not so much working back into the past and earlier fulcrums and trying to dig up and uncover some buried emotion or impulse, although that can definitely happen. It's more a case of directly attacking these false and distorted rules and scripts and games. These scripts are simply not true, they are not based on present evidence—they are lies, they
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are myths. They are anchored in a mythic disposition, which will not expose itself to rational evidence.
Aron Beck, for example, a pioneer in cognitive therapy, has found that in most cases of depression, people have a series of false scripts or beliefs, and they keep repeating these myths as if they were true. When we are depressed, we talk to ourselves in untruthful ways. "If one person doesn't like me, it means nobody will like me. If I fail at this particular task, it means I will fail at everything. If I don't get this job, my life is over. If she doesn't love me, nobody else will." And so on.
Now perhaps these false scripts got started at an earlier fulcrum, perhaps fulcrum-3 or fulcrum-2 or earlier. And a more psychoanalyticany oriented therapist (or an "uncovering therapist") might try to dig back to these earlier traumas and find out why the person is generating these myths (and even magical beliefs or archaic impulses).
But the cognitive therapist tends to simply attack the myths head on. The person will be asked to monitor their interior dialogue and look for these myths, and then expose them to reason and evidence. "Okay, if I don't get this job, I guess it doesn't really mean my life is over."
Q: Most typical therapy seems to work at this level.
K W : Pretty much. Most typical therapy—your general interpretive psychotherapist—will use an amalgam of fulcrum-3 and fulcrum-4 techniques. Most therapy is simply talking about your problems, and the therapist will be on the lookout for any distorting scripts that tell you that you are a rotten person, that you're no good, that you're a failure, and so on. A false self, built on myths and deceptions, has taken charge of your life. And the therapist helps you to uproot these false scripts and replace them with a more realistic interpretation of yourself, a more truthful interpretation of your interior, so that the false self can give way to the actual self.
These therapists might not use terms like "scripts" and "myths" and "narrative analysis" and so on, but that is generally what is involved on the fulcrum-4 side, the script pathology side. Myths cause symptoms; expose the myths to evidence, and the symptoms go away. The idea is, think differently, and you will start to feel differently.
But if it looks like there are some strong feelings or emotions or impulses that the person cannot deal with or acknowledge, then the therapist often tends to switch to an "uncovering mode." What are your feelings about this? What is your felt-sense? And the therapist might notice that there are certain feelings and impulses that you are not comfortable with—you have certain "buried emotions," and therapy then tends to work at uncovering these repressed emotions, by whatever name.
So typical therapy is usually an amalgam of fulcrum-4 script analysis and fulcrum-3 uncovering analysis, although the different therapists will bring a wide variety of tools and techniques to the process.
(Fulcrum-I pathologies are so severe they are usually handled by a medical psychiatrist, who prescribes medication. And fulcrum-2 is usually the province of therapists who specialize in structure-building techniques. These techniques have been pioneered by Kernberg, Kohut, Masterson, and Blanck and Blanck—often with reference to Margaret Mahler's groundbreaking research, which we briefly discussed earlier.)
Fulcrum-5: The Worldcentric or Mature Ego
Q: Which brings us to fulcrum-s.
KW : Around the age of years in our culture, the capacity for formal operational awareness emerges (this is "formop" on figure 5-2). Where concrete operational awareness can operate on the concrete world, formal operational awareness can operate on thought itself. It's not just thinking about the world, it's thinking about thinking. This is not nearly as dry and abstract as it sounds!
There's also a classical experiment that Piaget used to spot this extremely important emergence or paradigm shift or worldview shift. In simplified version: the person is given three glasses of clear liquid and told that they can be mixed in a way that will produce a yellow color. The person is then asked to produce the yellow color.
Concrete operational children will simply start mixing the liquids together haphazardly. They will keep doing this until they stumble on the right combination or give up. In other words, as the name implies, they perform concrete operations—they have to actually do it in a concrete way.
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Formal operational adolescents will first form a general picture of the fact that you have to try glass A with glass B, then A with C, then B with C, and so on. If you ask them about it, they will say something like, "Well, I need to try all the various combinations one at a time." In other words, they have a formal operation in their mind, a scheme that lets them know that you have to try all the possible combinations.
Q: That still sounds pretty dry and abstract to me.
K W : It's really quite the opposite. It means the person can begin to imagine different possible worlds. "What if" and "as if" can be grasped for the first time, and this ushers the person into the wild world of the true dreamer. All sorts of idealistic possibilities open up, and the person's awareness can dream of things that are not yet, and picture future worlds of ideal possibilities, and work to change the world according to those dreams. You can imagine what yet might be! Adolescence is such a wild time, not just because of sexual blossoming, but because possible worlds open up to the mind's eye—it's the "age of reason and revolution."
Likewise, thinking about thought means true introspection becomes possible. The interior world, for the first time, opens up before the mind's eye; psychological space becomes a new and exciting terrain. Inward visions dance in the head, and for the first time they are not coming from external nature, nor from a mythic god, nor from a conventional other, but, in some strange and miraculous way, they come from a voice within.
And this means one other very important thing. Because you can think about thinking, you can start to judge the roles and the rules which, at the previous stage, you simply swallowed unreflexively. Your moral stance moves from conventional to postconventional. (See figure 9-3.) You can criticize your own conventional society. Because you can "think about thought," you can "norm the norms." You might end up agreeing with the norms, or you might disagree with them. But the point is, you can scrutinize many of them. You are no longer merely identified with them, and so you have some critical distance from them. To some degree, you have transcended them.
This, of course, is the 1-2-3 process as it moves from fulcrum-4 to fulcrum-5. You start out, at fulcrum-4, in fusion with the conventional roles and rules—you are identified with them, merged with them (and thus utterly at their mercy, a true conformist). Then you begin to differentiate or transcend them, gain some freedom from them, and move to the next higher stage (fulcrum-5), whereupon you will still have to integrate these social roles—you can still be a father without being lost in that role. But you have in general moved away from, or differentiated from, an exclusive identity with your sociocentric roles, and you particularly begin to scrutinize the rightness or appropriateness of your sociocentric and ethnocentric perspectives, which previously you would not—and could not—even question.
In short, you have gone from sociocentric to worldcentric. Another decline in narcissism. Another decentering, another transcendence. You want to know what is right and fair, not just for you and your people, but for all peoples. You take a postconventional or global or worldcentric stance. (And, just as important, you are getting very close to a genuinely spiritual or transpersonal opening.)
So, in this transformation from sociocentric to worldcentric, the self decenters once again: my group is not the only group in the universe, my tribe is not the only tribe, my god is not the only god, my ideology is not the only ideology. I went from egocentric to ethnocentric by decentering my ego into the group; now go from ethnocentric to worldcentric by decentering my group into the world.
This is a very difficult transformation! But when it succeeds (which is fairly rare: greater depth, less span), then we have the first truly universal or global or worldcentric stance.
For the very first time in all of consciousness development and evolution, we have a worldcentric and global perspective. What a long journey!—what a rocky road!—this precious path to global.
And just as important, all further and higher developments will have this worldcentric platform as their base. It is an irreversible shift. Once you see the world in global perspectives, you cannot prevent yourself from doing so. You can never go back.
And thus Spirit has, for the first time in evolution, looked through your eyes and seen a global world, a world that is decentered from the me and the mine, a world that demands care and concern and compassion and conviction—a Spirit that is unfolding its own intrinsic value and worth, but a Spirit that announces itself only through
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the voice of those who have the courage to stand in the worldcentric space and defend it against lesser and shallower engagements.
Diversity and Multiculturalism
Q: Which relates directly to the moral stance. I mean, that's why it's called postconventional, right? Where conventional morality is sociocentric, postconventional is worldcentric, based on principles of universal pluralism.
Kw: Yes, that's right.
Q: Is this the same as multiculturalism?
K w: Well, we have to be very careful here. Multiculturalism does indeed emphasize cultural diversity. But this fulcrum-5 stance is a very rare and very elite and very difficult accomplishment. Look at all the ground we have covered in order to get to this worldcentric stance!
Now you yourself might indeed have evolved from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric perspectives, and so you will easily understand that all individuals are to be accorded equal consideration and equal opportunity, regardless of race, sex, or creed. From this stance of universal pluralism, you are genuinely multicultural and postconventional. The problem is, most individuals that you treat with universal coverage do not share your universalism. They are still egocentric or ethnocentric to the core. So you are extending universal consideration to individuals who will absolutely not extend the same courtesy to you.
So typical multiculturalists are thrown into a series of very bizarre contradictions. To begin with, they claim to be non-elitist or antielitist. But the capacity for postconventional and worldcentric pluralism is a very rare, very elite accomplishment. One survey found that only 4 percent of the American population actually reach this highly developed stage. So multiculturalism is a very elite stance that then claims it is not elitist. In other words, it starts to lie about its own identity, and this will lead it down some very murky roads.
Q: For instance?
K w: Multiculturalism does embrace the very noble drive to treat individuals equally and fairly, from a decentered and worldcentric perspective—everybody is equal in that sense—but it then confuses that high stance with the fact that getting to that high stance is a very rare accomplishment. It ignores the getting there, the developmental process that allowed it to embrace universal pluralism in the first place. So it then extends the results of that development to individuals who have not gotten to that stance themselves, and who are therefore perfectly willing to take your nice universal pluralistic stance and wipe their shoes all over it.
The multicults therefore naturally but confusedly say that we have to treat all individuals and all cultural movements as being completely equal, since no stance is better than another. They then cannot explain why Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan should be shunned. If we are really multicultural and all for diversity, how can we exclude the Nazis? Isn't everybody equal?
The answer, of course, is that no, not every stance is equal. Worldcentric is better than ethnocentric, which is better than egocentric, because each has more depth. The Nazis and the KKK are ethnocentric movements based on a particular mythology of race supremacy, and from a worldcentric perspective we judge them to be inferior stances.
But the typical multiculturalist cannot allow this judgment, because they confusedly deny distinctions between moral stances altogether—all stances are equal, no judgments allowed!
And so what happens, of course, is that they simply tend to become completely intolerant of those who disagree with them. They know that they have a noble stance, which in part they certainly do, but because they don't understand how they got there, they simply try to force their view down everybody's throat. Everybody is equal! No moral stance is better than another! And so off we go with vicious intolerance in the name of tolerance, with censorship in the name of compassion, with we-know-best thought police and mindless political correctness—with a bunch of elitists trying to outlaw everybody else's elitisms. It would be hilarious if it weren't so fundamentally wretched. Q: So is this related to the pathology of this stage?
K W : I think so, yes. Once you start to go worldcentric, once you begin scrutinizing your culture, and perhaps distancing yourself from its sociocentric or ethnocentric prejudice, and you strike out on your own—once you do that, then who, exactly, are you? Without all the
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old and comfortable roles, who are you? How can you fashion your own identity? What do you want from life? What do you want to be? Who are you, anyway? Erikson called this an "identity crisis," and it is perhaps the central "un-ease" or "dis-ease" of this fulcrum.
And the multicults are in a massive identity crisis. Since their official stance is that elitism of any sort is bad, but since their actual self is in fact an elite self, then they must lie about their actual self—they must conceal, distort, deceive.
So they go from saying everybody should be judged fairly, in a nonethnocentric way, to saying that everybody should not be judged at all, that all moral stances are equivalent. Except their stance, of course, which is superior in a world where nothing is supposed to be superior at all (oops). So they have an elite stance that denies its own elitism—they are lying about their actual identity. They have a false self system. And that is an identity crisis.
That is a typical fulcrum-5 screw-up, a pathology of the adolescent mind—still caught in a variation on the fulcrum-5 dissociation that is the disaster of modernity, still claiming to have overcome and subverted it, but still perfectly trapped in it, and thus still forced into massive self-deception.
Q: It's very spooky. It's Orwell's newspeak and thought police. But it seems to be fairly pervasive. The universities have all but been hijacked by it.
K W : Yes, American universities today seem to specialize in it. All this is actually doing is contributing to the retribalization of America, by encouraging every egocentric and ethnocentric fragmentation and grievance politics, the politics of narcissism. All stances are equal means every preconventional and ethnocentric shallowness is given encouragement. The country is facing its own identity crisis, we might say, but I suppose that's another discussion.
Fulcrum-6: The Bodymind Integration of the Centaur
Q: Which brings us to the last major "orthodox" stage, or the highest stage most conventional researchers tend to recognize.
K W : Yes, fulcrum-6. The basic structure at this stage is visionlogic, which you can see on several figures, including 5-2 and 10-1.
Vision-logic or network-logic is a type of synthesizing and integrating awareness. Formal operational awareness is synthesizing and integrating in many important and impressive ways, but it still tends to possess a kind of dichotomizing logic, a logic of either/or, rather like Aristotelian logic.
But vision-logic adds up the parts and sees networks of interactions. When employed in a merely objectifying or Right Hand fash„ ion, it produces objective systems theory in general. But when it is the basis of actual interior transformation—which is not covered by systems theory! and which is very rare!—then it supports an integrated personality. When the self's center of gravity identifies with vision-logic, when the person lives from that level, then we tend to get a very highly integrated personality, a self that can actually inhabit a global perspective, and not merely mouth it.
So the highly integrative capacity of vision-logic supports an equally integrated self. Which is why I call the self of this stage the centaur, representing an integration of the mind and the body, the noosphere and the biosphere, in a relatively autonomous self—which doesn't mean isolated self or atomistic self or egocentric self, but rather a self integrated in its networks of responsibility and service.
Q: You have often used John Broughton's research on this particular stage, although he's not very well known.
K w: Well, several researchers have looked at this stage very carefully—Loevinger and Selman and Habermas and Erikson and Maslow, for example. But I have always liked the summary of Broughton's research: at this stage, "mind and body are both experiences of an integrated self."
That says it all in a very succinct fashion. First of all, the self at this stage is aware of both the mind and the body as experiences. That is, the observing self is beginning to transcend both the mind and the body and thus can be aware of them as objects in awareness, as experiences. It is not just the mind looking at the world; it is the observing self looking at both the mind and the world. This is a very powerful transcendence, which we will see intensify in the higher stages.
And second, precisely because the observing self is beginning to transcend the mind and the body, it can for just that reason begin to integrate the mind and body. Thus, "centaur."
I Spirit-in -Action
So in this fulcrum, we have the same 1-2-3 process that we see in every other fulcrum, namely, initial fusion, differentiation, and integration. In this case, there is the initial identification with the formal mind (of fulcrum-5). The observing self then begins to differentiate from the mind and to see it as an object. Since it is no longer exclusively identified with the mind, it can integrate the mind with the other components in awareness, with the body and its impulses. Hence, centaur—mind and body are both experiences of an integrated self.
Aperspectival Madness
Q: You also call the centaur the existential level.
K w: Well, at this stage you are really, as it were, on your own, at least at this point in evolution. You no longer have blind faith in the conventional roles and rules of society. You are no longer ethnocentric and sociocentric. You have moved deeply into a worldcentric
space, where . . .
Q: This stage is also worldcentric?
K w: All stages at and beyond formal operational (fulcrum-5) are worldcentric or global—they all have a foundation of postconventional and universal perspectivism. The higher or deeper stages simply disclose more and more of this worldcentric freedom as it moves into deeper and genuinely spiritual domains.
Which is a bit ahead of the story. At the centaur level, the existential level, you are no longer egocentric or ethnocentric. You have moved deeply into a worldcentric space, where, as the multicults demonstrate, you can slip and take a very bad spill in this new freedom.
Q: You call this new freedom "aperspectival."
K W : Jean Gebser's term, yes. Vision-logic adds up all the different perspectives, and therefore it doesn't automatically privilege any one perspective over the others—it is aperspectival. But as you begin to take all the different perspectives into account, it gets very dizzifying, very aperspectival, very disorienting.
And you can get very lost in this new aperspectival awareness of vision-logic, because all perspectives start to become relative and in193
terdependent; there is nothing absolutely foundational; no final place to rest your head and say, I've got it!
But the fact that all perspectives are relative does not mean that no perspective has any advantage at all. That all perspectives are relative does not prevent some from still being relatively better than others all the time! Worldcentric is better than ethnocentric is better than egocentric, because each has more depth than its shallower predecessors.
But forgetting that, and focusing merely on the relativity of perspectives, throws you into aperspectival madness, a dizzifying paralysis of will and judgment. "It's all relative, so there is no better and worse, and no stance is better than another." Overlooking the fact that that stance itself claims to be better than the alternatives—the standard performative contradiction. The multicults occasionally rise to this level of vision-logic, usually to succumb instantly to aperspectival madness, which they sell to nice, unsuspecting students.
The aperspectival space of vision-logic simply means that Spirit is looking at the world through infinitely wondrous perspectives; it does not mean it has gone blind in the process. This is simply a further decentering, a further transcendence, another spiral in the evolution against egocentrism.
On the Brink of the Transpersonal
Q: So that's part of the good news of this existential or centauric stage.
K w: Yes. One of the characteristics of the actual self of this stage (the centaur) is precisely that it no longer buys all the conventional and numbing consolations—as Kierkegaard put it, the self can no longer tranquilize itself with the trivial. The emergence of this more authentic or existential self is the primary task of fulcrum-6.
The finite self is going to die—magic will not save it, mythic gods will not save it, rational science will not save it—and facing that cutting fact is part of becoming authentic. This was one of Heidegger's constant points. Coming to terms with one's mortality and one's finitude—this is part of finding one's own authentic being-in-the-world (authentic agency-in-communion).
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The existentialists have beautifully analyzed this authentic self, the actual centauric self—its characteristics, its mode of being, its stance in the world—and most important, they have analyzed the common lies and bad faith that sabotage this authenticity. We lie about our mortality and finitude by constructing immortality symbols—vain attempts to beat time and exist everlastingly in some mythic heaven, some rational project, some great artwork, through which we project our incapacity to face death. We lie about the responsibility for our own choices, preferring to see ourselves as passive victims of some outside force. We lie about the richness of the present by projecting ourselves backward in guilt and forward in anxiety. We lie about our fundamental responsibility by hiding in the herd mentality, getting lost in the Other. In place of the authentic or actual self, we live as the inauthentic self, the false self, fashioning its projects of deception to hide itself from the shocking truth of existence.
fully agree with all of that analysis, as far as it goes. Because, from my own point of view, not only is this type of existential authenticity important for its own sake, it is a prerequisite for entering the transpersonal not burdened with myths, or magical expectations, or egocentric and ethnocentric exaltations.
Q : But there is such a grim atmosphere in these existential writers. K w: Yes, this is classically the home of existential dread, despair, angst, fear and trembling, sickness unto death—precisely because you have lost all the comforting consolations!
All of which is true enough, but because the existentialists recognize no sphere of consciousness higher than this, they are stuck with the existential worldview, which limits their perceptions to within its horizon.
So they make it something of a point of honor to embrace drab existential nightmares with dreadful seriousness. And if you claim there are any modes of awareness that go beyond existential angst, then you must be lapsing into death-denial, immortality projects, inw authenticity, bad faith. Any claim of a higher horizon is met with icy stares, and the heinous charge of "inauthentic!" comes drearily to rest upon your head. If you smile, you're probably being inauthentic, because you have broken the sacred circle of the unendingly drab.
Q: Stuck in the centaur, identified with the centaur and its existential worldview—that's the fusion phase of fulcrum-6.
K w: I think so. And that existential embeddedness becomes your point of reference for all reality. The more angst you can display, the more you can gnash your teeth as an example of cosmic insanity, then the more authentic you are. It might also help to drive a few nails into your forehead, as a sort of reminder. But in any event, never, never, never let them see you smile, or that will divulge your inauthenticity.
The whole point of the existential level is that you are not yet in the transpersonal, but you are no longer totally anchored in the personal—the whole personal domain has started to lose its flavor, has started to become profoundly meaningless. And so of course there is not much reason to smile. What good is the personal anyway—it's just going to die. Why even inhabit it?
This concern with meaning, and with its pervasive lack, is perhaps the central feature of fulcrum-6 pathologies, and with existential therapy.
But the interesting point is that the centaur, by all orthodox standards, ought to be happy and full and joyous. After all, it's an integrated and autonomous self, as you can see in figure 9-3. Why, by all standards, this self ought to be smiling all the time. But more often than not, it is not smiling. It is profoundly unhappy. It is integrated, and autonomous, and miserable.
It has tasted everything that the personal realm can offer, and it's not enough. The world has started to go flat in its appeal. No experience tastes good anymore. Nothing satisfies anymore. Nothing is worth pursuing anymore. Not because one has failed to get these rewards, but precisely because one has achieved them royally, tasted it all, and found it all lacking.
And so naturally this soul does not smile very much. This is a soul for whom all consolations have gone sour. The world has gone flat at exactly the moment of its greatest triumph. The magnificent banquet has come and gone; the skull grins silently over the whole affair. The feast is ephemeral, even in its grandest glories. The things on which I once could hang so much meaning and so much desire and so much fervent hope, all have melted into air, evaporated at some strange point during the long and lonely night. To whom can I sing songs of
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joy and exaltation? Who will hear my calls for help sent silently into that dark and hellish night? Where will I find the fortitude to withstand the swords and spears that daily pierce my side? And why even should I try? It all comes to dust, yes?, and where am I then? Fight or surrender, it matters not the least, for still my life goals bleed quietly to death, in a hemorrhage of despair.
This is a soul for whom all desires have become thin and pale and anemic. This is a soul who, in facing existence squarely, is thoroughly sick of it. This is a soul for whom the personal has gone totally flat. This is, in other words, a soul on the brink of the transpersonal.
12 Realms of the Superconscious: Part 1
Q: We can now move into the transpersonal stages, the superconscious domains. We left off development at the centaur. You described this as the observing self becoming aware of both mind and body, and thus beginning to transcend them.
K w: Yes, even orthodox research confirms this, and we gave severa! examples, from Broughton to Loevinger. By the time of the centaur, the observing self can witness or experience both the mind and the body, in a general sense, which means it is indeed beginning to transcend them in some important ways. As consciousness evolution continues, it discloses more and more depth—or height—to this observing self. What is this observing self? How deep, or how high, does it actually go?
And the answer given by the world's great mystics and sages is that this observing self goes straight to God, straight to Spirit, straight to the very Divine. In the ultimate depths of your own awareness, you intersect infinity.
This observing self is usually called the Self with a capital S, or the Witness, or pure Presence, or pure awareness, or consciousness as such, and this Self as transparent Witness is a direct ray of the living
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Divine. The ultimate I is Christ, is Buddha, is Emptiness itself: such is the startling testimony of the world's great mystics and sages.
Where the Mind Leaves Off
Q: So is this Witness an emergent?
K w: Not exactly, because consciousness is not an emergent. This Self or Witness was present from the start as the basic form of awareness at whatever stage of growth a holon happened to be—it was present as prehension, as sensation, as impulse, as emotion, as symbols, as reason—but it becomes increasingly obvious as growth and transcendence matures. In other words, this Witness, this consciousness as such, is simply the depth of any holon, the interior of any holon. As we said, depth is consciousness, and depth goes all the way down. But as depth increases, consciousness shines forth more notice-
In humans, by the time of the centaur, this observing Witness has shed its lesser identification with both the body and the mind—it has transcended and included them—and so now it can simply witness them, which is why "both mind and body are experiences of an integrated self."
Q: It is beginning to transcend them.
K W : Yes. There is nothing occult or spooky about any of this. We have already seen identity shift from matter to body to mind, each of which involved a decentering or a dis„identifying with the lesser dimension. And by the time of the centaur, consciousness is simply continuing this process and starting to dis-identifr with the mind itself, which is precisely why it can witness the mind, see the mind, experience the mind. The mind is no longer merely a subject; it is starting to become an object. An object of . . . the observing Self, the Witness.
And so the mystical, contemplative, and yogic traditions pick up where the mind leaves off. They pick up with the observing Self as it begins to transcend the mind, as it begins to go transmental or supramental or overmental. Or transrational, transegoic, transpersonal.
The contemplative traditions are based on a series of experiments
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in awareness: what if you pursue this Witness to its source? What if you inquire within, pushing deeper and deeper into the source of awareness itself? What if you push beyond or behind the mind, into a depth of consciousness that is not confined to the ego or the individual self? What do you find? As a repeatable, reproducible experiment in awareness, what do you find?
"There is a subtle essence that pervades all reality," begins one of the most famous answers to that question. "It is the reality of all that is, and the foundation of all that is. That essence is all. That essence is the real. And thou, thou art that."
In other words, this observing Self eventually discloses its own source, which is Spirit itself, Emptiness itself. And that is why the mystics maintain that this observing Self is a ray of the Sun that is the radiant Abyss and ultimate Ground upon which the entire manifest Kosmos depends. Your very Self intersects the Self of the Kosmos at large—a supreme identity that outshines the entire manifest world, a supreme identity that undoes the knot of the separate self and buries it in splendor.
So from matter to body to mind to Spirit. In each case consciousness or the observing Self sheds an exclusive identity with a lesser and shallower dimension, and opens up to deeper and higher and wider occasions, until it opens up to its own ultimate ground in Spirit itself.
And the stages of transpersonal growth and development are basically the stages of following this observing Self to its ultimate abode, which is pure Spirit or pure Emptiness, the ground, path, and fruition of the entire display.
The Transpersonal Stages
Q: So these stages . . . there are, what, several stages in this transpersonal growth?
KW : Yes, that's right. In looking at these higher stages, we have a rather small pool of daring men and women—both yesterday and today—who have bucked the system, fought the average and normal, and struck out toward the new and higher spheres of awareness. In this quest, they joined with a small group or sangha of like-spirited souls, and developed practices or injunctions or paradigms that
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would disclose these higher worldspaces—iniunctions or paradigms or interior experiments that would allow others to reproduce their results and therefore check and validate (or reject) their findings. And they left us their maps of this interior journey, with the crucial proviso that simply memorizing the map will not do, any more than studying a map of the Bahamas will replace actually going there.
So we take all these various maps and paths left by the great contemplative traditions, East and West, North and South, and we compare and contrast them (which demands that we practice many of them as well! This is a Left Hand endeavor for participant observers, not merely a Right Hand representation for academic chitchat). Some paths are more complete than others; some specialize in a particular level; some leave out certain levels; some divide particular levels into literally dozens of sublevels.
From this cross-cultural comparison, grounded in practice, we attempt to create a "master template" that gives a fairly comprehensive and composite map of the various higher levels of consciousness that are available to men and women. These are higher basic structures present as potentials in all of us, but awaiting actual manifestation and growth and development.
Q: So how complicated do these higher maps get?
K w: Well, some traditions are so sophisticated they have literally hundreds of minute divisions of the various stages and components of consciousness development. But, based on the state of present research, it is fairly safe to say that there are at least four major stages of transpersonal development or evolution.
These four stages I call the psychic, the subtle, the causal, and the nondual (you can see these in figure 9-1 ; the nondual is the paper on which the diagram is drawn, which I'll explain in a moment). These are basic structures, and so of course each of them has a different worldview, which call, respectively, nature mysticism, deity mysticism, formless mysticism, and nondual mysticism.
Q : Now in what sense are these actually stages?
K w: The basic structures themselves are fairly discrete, identifiable levels. Their worldviews are very specific, and they differ from each other in important and easily identifiable ways—each has a dif-
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ferent architecture with different cognitions, which support a different self-sense, different moral stances, different self-needs, and so on.
But, as always, the "ladder" is not where the real action is. The real action is the climber of the ladder—the self-system—and the fulcrums that are generated with this climb. And the self, as we said, can be all over the place. It can have a peak experience of a higher level, only to fall back into its actual and present self-stage. Conversely, a taste of the higher levels can so disrupt the self that it regresses to earlier fulcrums, fulcrums at which there is still some sort of fixation or repression or unfinished business. As egoic translation starts to wind down, these earlier "stick-points" jump out.
Q: So the actual growth of the self in the transpersonal stages is not linear in any sort of rigid sense.
Kw: No, it's not. The fact that the higher basic structures, like all basic structures, are ladder-like—which means concentric spheres or nested holarchy—doesn't mean that growth through them is ladderlike. There are all sorts of ups and downs and spirals.
Nonetheless, the self's center of gravity will tend to organize itself around a predominant higher basic structure. It will tend to identify its center of gravity with this structure; this will be its "home base''— its major fulcrum—around which it will organize most of its perceptions, its moral responses, its motivations, its drives, and so on. Thus, its center of gravity tends to shift through these higher basic structures with an averagely identifiable sequence.
Q: The traditions themselves usually give various stages.
Kw: Yes, the traditions themselves know this. They all have their stages of growth and development; they know the characteristics of each stage; they can spot progress and they can spot regression. And, as Aurobindo and Plotinus and Da Avabhasa have pointed out, although one can indeed speed up development through these stages, they cannot fundamentally be bypassed. You can peak-experience ahead, jump ahead, but you will have to make up the ground later, integrate and consolidate it later. Otherwise you get too "top„heavy," so to speak—you are floating upward and upward, with no grounding and no connection to the lower structures, to the mind and body and earth and senses.
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Fulcrum-7.• The Psychic
Q: So the first of these transpersonal stages, the psychic.
K w: As I use it, the psychic level simply means the great transition stage from ordinary, gross-oriented reality—sensorimotor and rational and existential—into the properly transpersonal domains. Paranormal events sometimes increase in frequency at the psychic level, but that is not what defines this level. The defining characteristic, the deep structure, of this psychic level is an awareness that is no longer confined exclusively to the individual ego or centaur.
Q: A few examples, perhaps.
K w: At the psychic level, a person might temporarily dissolve the separate-self sense (the ego or centaur) and find an identity with the entire gross or sensorimotor world—so-called nature mysticism. You're on a nice nature walk, relaxed and expansive in your awareness, and you look at a beautiful mountain, and wham!—suddenly there is no looker, just the mountain—and you are the mountain. You are not in here looking at the mountain out there. There is just the mountain, and it seems to see itself, or you seem to be seeing it from within. The mountain is closer to you than your own skin.
By any other terms, there is no separation between subject and object, between you and the entire natural world "out there." inside and outside—they don't have any meaning anymore. You can still tell perfectly well where your body stops and the environment begins— this is not psychotic adualism or a "resurrection in mature form" of psychotic adualism. It is your own higher Self at this stage—fulcrum7—which can be called the Eco-Noetic Self; some call it the OverSoul or the World Soul. This is the fusion phase of fulcrum-7. You are a "nature mystic."
Q : But this seems like such an abrupt switch—from the individual centaur to an identity with all of nature, as it were. I don't see the smooth evolutionary progression here.
K W : Actually, it's not much of a jump at all. I think people get confused because we say identity moves from the "individual" bodymind to the "whole world," which does indeed look rather abrupt.
But that's not what happens. Look at what is actually involved. At the worldcentric centaur, one's awareness has already moved from an
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identity with the material dimension (fulcrum-I) to an identity with the biological dimension (fulcrum-2) to an identity with a mental self (fulcrum-3). That early mental self, like the previous two fulcrums, is very egocentric and narcissistic.
But with fulcrum-4, identity switches from egocentric (or selfbound) to sociocentric (or group-bound). Here your awareness already transcends its merely individual aspects. Your very awareness, your very identity, is based upon cultural roles and collective identities and shared values. It is no longer a body identity, it is a role identity.
Thus, when you say, I am a father, I am a mother, I am a husband, I am a wife, I work at this job, I value this goal—those are already trans-body identities. Those already move beyond the individual body and its sensations, and into a circle of intersubjective roles and values and goals. Most of the items that you call your "self" are not egocentric at all, but cultural and sociocentric. When you feel your "self," you are actually feeling a circle of intersubjective events, and you exist in that cultural circle, you do not exist merely inside your skin. You have decentered, transcended, a merely body-bound identity. You can't even think who you are without existing in this cultural circle, and that circle already goes way beyond your skin boundary!
With rationality and fulcrum-5, your identity decenters or expands once again, this time transcending any merely ethnocentric or sociocentric identity, and finding instead a postconventional or worldcentric identity. You actually identify yourself from a global perspective. You can no longer exist as, or identify yourself as, an ethnocentric being. It pains you to be merely ethnocentric. You are embarrassed by ethnocentric talk. You have again decentered, transcended. Your actual identity floats through, and exists by virtue of, a worldcentric or global awareness, an identity in the circle of all human beings.
It's only a small step further to actually experience your central identity, not just with all human beings, but all living beings. The global or worldcentric awareness simply steps up another notch, escapes its anthropocentric prejudice, and announces itself as all sentient beings. You experience the World Soul.
Worldcentric to World Soul is thus a fairly modest step, considering what has already happened in the expansion of conscious identity.
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It's a simple and natural continuation of the evolutionary process of transcend and include, unfold and enfold. Each emergence is a decentering, a transcendence, that finds more of the "external world" to actually be "internal," or part of its very being.
Molecules awoke one morning to find that atoms were inside them, enfolded in their very being. And cells awoke one morning to find that molecules were actually inside them, as part of their very being. And you might awake one morning and find that nature is a part of you, literally internal to your being. You are not a part of nature, nature is a part of you. And for just that reason, you treat nature as you would treat your lungs or your kidneys. A spontaneous environmental ethics surges forth from your heart, and you will never again look at a river, a leaf, a deer, a robin, in the same way.
This sounds very weird and far out—until you have that experience. You might ask the Apollo astronauts about it.
Q: So it really is a rather natural progression.
K W : Very much so. As I said, this looks like a radical rupture— centaur to world—because we tend to think of the individual centaur as being a single body-bound awareness. But the only stage where awareness is actually and merely body-bound is fulcrum-2. Every stage past that is already quite beyond a mere bodily identity!
And nothing but trouble has come from trying to define this transpersonal awareness as a "single-step" transformation from the "skin, encapsulated ego" to the nice World Soul. That is not a single-step process—that is at least a seven-step process! There are at least seven fulcrums, seven massive paradigm shifts, involved in getting you to a realization of this World Soul!
Deep Ecology and Ecofeminism
Q: The deep ecologists make quite a deal out of this deeper Self, this Eco-Noetic Self.
K w: Yes, and in that particular regard I am a big fan of their work. They have an important message for the modern world: to find that deep Self that embraces all of nature, and thus to treat nature with the same reverence you would extend to your own being.
But here is where I believe they get into a great deal of trouble:
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they take this experience of the Eco-Noetic Self, the World Soul, and they reduce it to the Lower Right quadrant, to "we're all strands in the great web"—empirical holism, Right Hand holism, functional fit—which totally guts the interior dimensions. These theorists reduce the Kosmos to a monological map of the social system—which they usually call Gaia—a flatland map that ignores the six or seven profound interior transformations that got them to the point that they could even conceive of a global system in the first place.
Consequently, this otherwise true and noble intuition of the EcoNoetic Self gets collapsed into "we're all strands in the great web." But that is exactly not the experience of the Eco-Noetic Self. In the nature-mystic experience, you are not a strand in the web. You are the entire web. You are doing something no mere strand ever does— you are escaping your "strandness," transcending it, and becoming one with the entire display. To be aware of the whole system shows precisely that you are not merely a strand, which is supposed to be your official stance.
So, "explaining" this experience in systems or "web-of-life" terms is a very poor way to interpret it. Ecomasculinists prefer systems theory terms; ecofeminists generally despise systems theory as being masculine and abstract, and prefer instead eco-sentimentalism and relationship terms: both are equally grounded in the monochrome world of simple location.
But once you've committed that flatland reductionism, you start to think that the way to transform the world is to simply get everybody to agree with your monological map, forgetting the six or seven interior stages the mapmaker actually had to go through in order to get to this point where you can agree in the first place.
Q : Similar to the multicults.
K W : Yes, like the multicults, you forget all the stages of transcendence that got you to this noble point, and so not only do you bizarrely condemn transcendence itself (the actual path!), you simply collapse all those stages into an incredibly simplistic "one-step" transformation: agree with my Gaia map, and you will be saved. And so like many of the multicults, these folks become incredibly belligerent and intolerant, claiming that all the strands in the web are equally important, but despising the strands that disagree with them.
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So instead, we need to take into account the interior dimensions—we have to take into account the Left Hand and not just the Right Hand. We have to take into account linguistic and cultural backgrounds, methods of interpretation, the many stages of consciousness evolution, the intricate stages of moral development and decentering, the validity claims of truthfulness and sincerity and justness, holarchical degrees of depth, the hierarchy of expanding self* identity and methods of transcendence—all of those are Left Hand dimensions, and none of those items are found on the monological and Right Hand Gaia map!
And for just that reason, you won't find a decent discussion of any of those factors in any books on deep ecology, ecofeminism, or ecophilosophy. But without those factors you'll never make it to the New World, because you won't know how to get people into the boat and on their way.
Q: So the experience of the Eco-Noetic Self might be very genuine, but it is unpacked or interpreted in an inadequate fashion.
K W : I think so. And we want to rescue this profound intuition of the Eco-Noetic Self and its Community of all beings by giving it perhaps a more adequate interpretation, based on all four quadrants of manifestation, and not based on reducing all quadrants to the Lower Right or "Gaia." Pushing that reductionistic "new paradigm" map as the central aspect of transformation simply diverts attention away from the Left Hand dimensions where the real transformation is occurring. As such, more often than not these approaches completely sabotage and derail actual transcendence and transformation, and simply encourage the various fragments to retribalize at their own level of adaptation, no matter how shallow. Any egocentric person can sell a Gaia-centric map.
Q : So the point would be, remember the Left Hand path!
K W : Yes, very much so. We don't want to get caught in a holistic map of flatland. As we saw, that holistic flatland map is the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm. That is subtle reductionism. That collapses the Left into the Right. That reduces all I's and we's to interwoven its; collapses all interior depths into exterior span; collapses all values into functional fit; reduces all translogical and all dialogical to monological. That is the great holistic web of interwoven its, all of which have simple location! And that is utter, utter flatland.
In all of those ways and more, most ecotheorists are entirely faithful to the Enlightenment agenda. I know they say that they have a radically new paradigm, but it's actually two or three centuries old now. It didn't work then, it won't work now. It did not provide transformation then, it will not do so now. These "eco-holistic" approaches have been promising transformation for a few centuries now, and they have never delivered. This has got to be the longest transformational foreplay in history.
And yikes, they're still at it. Perhaps they have a genuine intuition of this Eco-Noetic Self—I believe some of them do. But they tend to collapse it into flatland and monological Right Hand terms, which does not promote global transformation but rather encourages retribalization and regressive fragmentation in consciousness. And so these often turn out to be very preconventional approaches that covertly encourage egocentric consciousness, which their maps do not let them spot because their maps contain none of this.
The Enneagram and the Basic Skeleton
Q: I want to come back to all of that when we discuss flatland and the religion of Gaia (see Part Three). But we were talking about the Eco-Noetic Self, and you said it is one of the forms of this psychic level of consciousness development. What are some others?
K w: What all of the psychic-level developments have in common is that they have one foot in the gross, ordinary, personal realm and one foot in the transpersonal realm. And so, however different these various psychic phenomena seem, they do share a specific deep structure, which involves the beginning transcendence of gross-oriented reality, the transcendence of the ordinary body and mind and culture.
Some of these transcendental phenomena include preliminary med* itative states; shamanic visions and voyages; arousal of kundalini energy (and disclosure of the whole psychic anatomy of subtle channels, energies, and essences); overwhelming feelings of the numinous; spon-
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taneous spiritual awakenings; reliving of deep past traumas, even the birth trauma; identification with aspects of nature—plant identification, animal identification—up to an identification with all of nature (cosmic consciousness, nature mysticism, and the World Soul).
Q : How do you know those phenomena actually exist?
K W : As the observing Self begins to transcend the centaur, deeper or higher dimensions of consciousness come into being, and a new worldview or worldspace comes into focus. All of the items on that list are objects that can be directly perceived in this new psychic worldspace. Those items are as real in the psychic worldspace as rocks are in the sensorimotor worldspace and concepts are in the mental worldspace.
If cognition awakens or develops to this psychic level, you simply perceive these new objects, as simply as you perceive rocks in the sensory world or images in the mental world. They are simply given to awareness, they simply present themselves, and you don't have to spend a tot of time trying to figure out if they're real or not.
Of course, if you haven't awakened psychic cognition, then you will see none of this, just as a rock cannot see mental images. And you will probably have unpleasant things to say about people who do see them.
Q: So the psychic level is simply a broad space, a worldspace, within which a vast array of different phenomena can occur.
K W : Yes, which is true of any worldspace. These basic structures of consciousness that am outlining, from the lowest to the highest, are really just the skeleton of a very rich and complex reality. And there is much important work to be done in fleshing out this skeleton—in the lower as well as higher domains.
Take, for example, the work of Martin Gardner on multiple intelligences—the idea that development involves not one capacity but many relatively independent capacities (from musical to artistic to mathematical to athletic, and so on), which think is quite right. We can plot the depth of those developmental capacities as well. They will fall within the same basic structures of consciousness development, but they are nonetheless relatively separate talents that unfold
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with their own logics, as it were. None of that is denied; in fact, I very much support those approaches.
If you look at figure 9-1 (page 139), you'll see that each of the basic structures continues outward in a curved line of ongoing development. So just because sensorimotor cognition, for example, is listed as level 1 does not mean that its development simply stops with level 2. On the contrary, as the sensorimotor dimension is taken up and enfolded in higher development, some extremely advanced sensorimotor skills can emerge. That there is a "psychic side of sports," for example, is now widely acknowledged. As Michael Murphy has documented, many great athletes and dancers enter some very profound psychic spaces, and this translates into almost unbelievable performances.
Q: How do different personality types fit in the spectrum of consciousness?
K w: Most typologies are types of character formations that can and do occur on all of the levels (except usually the end limits). The simplest and best known is probably introverted and extroverted. These are not levels of consciousness, they are types that occur on every level. So you can be at level 4, for example, and be an introvert or an extrovert.
Q : How about the Enneagram?
K w: The same. The Enneagram divides personality into nine basic types. These nine types are not levels of consciousness. They are personality types that exist on all levels of consciousness. So what you have are nine types on each of the nine or so major levels of consciousness—and you can start to see what a truly multidimensional and full-spectrum model looks like.
As the personality begins to grow and develop, during the first three fulcrums, it tends to settle into one of these nine Enneagram types, depending largely on the self's major defense mechanism as well as its major innate strength. These types persist and dominate consciousness until roughly fulcrum-7, or the beginning of the transpersonal domain, where they begin to transform into their correlative wisdom or essence.
Q: Which means what, exactly?
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K W : The idea is based on the central tantric notion, found from Sufism to Buddhism, that if you enter a lower state or even a defiled state with clear awareness, then that state will transform into its corresponding wisdom. So if you enter passion with awareness, you will find compassion. If you enter anger with awareness, you will find clarity. And so on. The traditions give various accounts of these transformations, but you can see the general point, which I think is quite valid. And with higher development, the Enneagram types likewise begin to unfold their corresponding essence or wisdom.
The Enneagram does not cover subtle dimensions very well, and it does not cover the causal at all. But it does incorporate these beginning transpersonal wisdoms, and so it can be a very powerful tool in the right hands. The Enneagram itself was largely created by Oscar Ichazo. Helen Palmer has done much work with it, and Don Riso has recently begun to use the different Enneagram types in conjunction with the spectrum of consciousness, which I would certainly support. Hameed Ali's "Diamond Approach" has its roots in the Enneagram and Sufism, but adds its own distinctive and useful tools and perspectives.
Right now the Enneagram is being popularized in America and used as a new psychological parlor game—"Want to find your Self? Take a number!' '—which is very unfortunate.
Q : So at their best, types and levels cover horizontal and vertical— both important.
K w: Yes. On the higher levels themselves, I might give the example of Roger Walsh's treatment of shamanism. Walsh accepts the basic levels of psychic/subtle, causal, and nondual, and he uses that as a type of vertical scale. He then adds a very sophisticated horizontal scale that analyzes a dozen variables on each of those levels, from ease of control to arousal to emotional affect to the ability to concentrate. He thus arrives at a multidimensional grid for the analysis of transpersonal states, and this grid has enormously advanced our knowledge of the field.
So those are all examples of how to flesh out this basic skeleton that I am presenting. And the fact that we are focusing on the evolution of just this skeleton does not mean these other aspects aren't equally important.
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Fulcrum-8: The Subtle
Q: So as this general evolution continues from psychic to subtle. ?
K w: "Subtle" simply means processes that are subtler than gross, ordinary, waking consciousness. These include interior luminosities and sounds, archetypal forms and patterns, extremely subtle bliss currents and cognitions (shabd, nada), expansive affective states of love and compassion, as well as subtler pathological states of what can only be calked Kosmic terror, Kosmic evil, Kosmic horror. As always, because of the dialectic of progress, this subtle development is most definitely not just a day at the beach.
But this overall type of mysticism we call deity mysticism, because it involves your own Archetypal Form, a union with God or Goddess, a union with saguna Brahman, a state of savikalpa samadhi, and so on. This union or fusion with Deity—union with God, by whatever name—is the beginning or fusion phase of fulcrum-8.
This is not just nature mysticism, not just a union with the gross or natural world—what the Buddhists call the Nirmanakaya—but a deeper union with the subtler dimensions of the Sambhogakaya, the interior bliss body or transformational body, which transcends and includes the gross or natural domain, but is not confined to it. Nature mysticism gives way to deity mysticism.
Q: Are any of these higher levels fully present in human beings prior to their emergence? Are they lying around waiting to emerge?
K W : Fully formed, no. The deep structures of these higher levels are present as potentials in all human beings, as far as we can tell. But as these deep potentials unfold, their actual surface structures are created and molded by all four quadrants. That is, the surface structures are created and molded by intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social patterns.
The classic example is that a person has an experience of intense interior illumination, a subtle-level illumination (perhaps in a neardeath experience). A Christian might see it as Christ or an angel or a saint, a Buddhist might see it as the Sambhogakaya or bliss body of Buddha, a Jungian might see it as an archetypal experience of the
Self, and so on. As we said, all depth must be interpreted, and these
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interpretations are not possible without a whole set of background contexts which provide many of the tools with which the interpretation will proceed. One's own individual background, one's cultural background, and one's social institutions will all have a hand in interpreting this depth-experience. This is unavoidable.
So these higher structures are not like fully formed little treasure chests buried in your psyche, waiting to pop to the surface. The deep structures are given, but the surface structures are not, and the experience itself involves an interpretive component, which cannot proceed without various backgrounds—and those backgrounds do not exist merely in your psyche!
But if we reject that pregiven extreme, it doesn't mean we have to fall into the opposite error of extreme constructivism. The basic reality of this subtle experience of interior illumination is not simply or arbitrarily constructed by culture, because these experiences occur cross-culturally, and further, in many cases the cultural background officially denies or prohibits these experiences, and yet they still happen all the time anyway.
So just because these experiences have an interpretive component does not mean they are merely cultural creations. When you watch the sun set, you will bring interpretations to that experience as well— perhaps romantic, perhaps rational, each with a cultural coloring, but that doesn't mean that the sun ceases to exist if your culture disappears!
No, these are ontologically real events. They actually exist. They have real referents. But these referents do not exist in the sensorimotor worldspace, they do not exist in the rational worldspace, they do not exist in the existential worldspace. So you can find evidence for them in none of those worldspaces! Rather, they exist in the subtle worldspace, and evidence for them can be plentifully found there.
Jung and the Archetypes
Q: Now you mentioned this subtle level as being an archetypal level, but I know that by "archetype" you don't mean Jungian archetype.
K w: That's right. This is a very complex topic, and I don't think
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we have time to do it justice. But I might say that, for the most part, the Jungian archetypes are basic, collectively inherited images or forms lying in the magic and mythic dimensions of human awareness, and these should in no fashion be confused with the developments in the psychic and subtle domains.
Q: The Jungian archetype is. . . ?
KW : The typical Jungian archetype is a basic, inherited image or form in the psyche. These basic or primordial images represent very common, very typical experiences that humans everywhere are exposed to: the experience of birth, of the mother, the father, the shadow, the wise old man, the trickster, the ego, the animus and anima (masculine and feminine), and so on.
Millions upon millions of past encounters with these typical situations have, so to speak, ingrained these basic images into the collective psyche of the human race. You find these basic and primordial images worldwide, and you find an especially rich fund of them in the world's great myths.
Since the rudimentary forms of these mythic images come embedded in the individual psyche, then when you have an encounter with, say, your own mother, you are not just encountering your own particular mother. You also have this archetype or basic image of millions of years of mothering stamped into your psyche. So you are not just interacting with your mother, you are interacting with the world Mother, with the Great Mother, and this archetypal image can therefore have an impact on you that is way out of proportion to anything your actual mother may or may not do to you.
So in classical Jungian analysis, you have to analyze and interpret, not just your own individual unconscious—the specific events that happened to you in your own life, with your own mother and father, your own shadow, and so on—you also need to analyze and interpret this collective level of archetypal material.
Perhaps, for example, you have activated the Devouring Mother archetype; maybe it has nothing to do with your actual mother; maybe she is for the most part loving and attentive; and yet you are horrified of being engulfed in relationships, devoured by emotional closeness, torn apart by personal intimacy. Maybe you are in the grip, not of your actual mother, but of an archetype. And this might
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especially show up in dreams: maybe a big black spider is trying to eat you.
So one of the things you might want to do, as you analyze this collective archetypal level, is study the world's great mythologies, because they are repositories of the earlier and typical (and therefore archetypal) encounters, including the mothering one in general. In other words, this will give you a background against which to interpret these primordial images, and so you will be able to more sincerely and truthfully approach these images and interpret them more clearly in yourself. You will be able to differentiate from their choking grip on your awareness, and then integrate them more carefully in your life. And there is much truth to all of that, I think.
Q: So Jungian archetypes tend to be repositories of basic, collective, typical encounters of the human race in general.
K W : For the most part. And as far as it goes, I am in substantial agreement with those Jungian archetypes. I am in almost complete accord with most of that Jungian perspective, and in that specific regard I consider myself a Jungian.
But the crucial point is that collective is not necessarily transpersonal. Most of the Jungian archetypes, as I said, are simply archaic images lying in the magic and mythic structures. They exert a pull on awareness from the level of fulcrums 2, 3, and 4. There is nothing transrational or transpersonal about them. It is important to come to terms with these "archetypes," to differentiate them and integrate them (transcend and include), but they are not themselves the source of a transpersonal or genuinely spiritual awareness. In fact, for the most part they are regressive pulls in awareness, lead weights around higher development—precisely what has to be overcome, not simply embraced.
The point is, just because something is collective does not mean it is transpersonal. There are collective prepersonal structures (magic and mythic), collective personal structures (rational and existential), and collective transpersonal structures (psychic and subtle). Collective simply means that the structure is universally present, like the capacity for sensation, perception, impulse, emotion, and so on. This is not necessarily transpersonal; it is simply collective or common. We
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all collectively inherit ten toes, but if I experience my toes, I am not having a transpersonal experience.
Q: But what about the enormously popular books like Jean Boten's Goddesses in Everywoman and Gods in Everyman? They are definitely based on mythological motifs or archetypes, and those are spiritual, aren't they?
K W : Depends on what you mean by "spiritual." If you mean "transpersonal," no, I don't think those books are particularly transpersonal. I like those books, incidentally, but there is precious little in them that is actually transpersonal or genuinely spiritual. In those books, there is a wonderful presentation of all the "archetypal" gods and goddesses that are collectively inherited by men and women, from the steadiness and patience of Hestia to the sexuality and sensuality of Aphrodite to the strength and independence of Artemis. But those gods and goddesses are not transpersonal modes of awareness, or genuinely mystical luminosities, but simply a collection of typical and everyday self-images and self-roles available to men and women. They are simply self-concepts (fulcrum-3) and self-roles (fulcrum-4) that represent common and typical potentials available to men and women pretty much everywhere.
And those mythic roles are very useful in this sense: Perhaps, as a woman, you are not aware of your own capacity for strength and independence. Perhaps you need to be more in touch with the Artemis in you. By reading the various Artemis myths and stories, you can more easily access this archetypal level in your own psyche, and thus bring forth that potential in your own life. This is terrific.
But this is not transpersonal. This is just a mythic-membership role, a persona, a type of ego relation. It is not trans-egoic. Collective typical is not transpersonal. Part of the massive spiritual anemia in this country is that something as prosaic as getting in touch with the strong Artemis ego in you is called transpersonal or spiritual. It's rather sad, actually.
Q: So are any of the Jungian archetypes transpersonal or transrational ?
Kw: Most Jungian archetypes, the mythic archetypes, are preper„ sonal or at least prerational (magical and mythic). A few Jungian archetypes are personal (ego, persona), and a few are vaguely
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transpersonal (wise old man, the Self, mandala). But those "transpersonal" archetypes are absolutely anemic compared to what we actually know about the transpersonal domains.
Take, as only one example, the eighteen stages of actual transpersonal growth outlined in the Mahamudra tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. These are extraordinarily detailed descriptions of the stages of evolution of higher and transpersonal awareness. And none of those stages appear in any of the world's classical myths. You will not find those stages in Zeus or Hector or Little Red Riding Hood.
The reason is, those eighteen stages of contemplative unfolding actually describe very rare, nontypical, nonordinary, transpersonal growth through the psychic and subtle and causal domains—they do not describe, nor do they spring from, typical and common and everyday experiences, and so they are not found in the archaic and magic and mythic structures, and therefore they show up in none of the world's typical mythologies. Hera and Demeter and Goldilocks, and Artemis and Persephone and Hansel and Gretel, never attempted these stages! And therefore you never find these higher stages in Robert Bly, James Hillman, Edward Edinger, Marie-Louise von Franz, Walter Odajnyk, or any of the Jungian revivalists.
Q: This has caused a great deal of confusion in religious studies, because for a long time Jung was the only game in town. If you were interested in both psychology and spirituality, then you were a Jungian.
K W : Pretty much. The Jungian mythic archetypes are real enough, and they are very important, as I said. But Jung consistently failed to carefully differentiate the archetypes into their prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal components, and since all three of those are collectively inherited, then there is a constant confusing of collective (and "archetypal") with transpersonal and spiritual and mystical.
And so today, Jung tends to stand for a very regressive movement in psychology. Consciousness is simply divided into two great domains: personal and collective. And the tendency is then to take anything collective and call it spiritual, mystical, transpersonal, whereas most of it is simply prepersonal, prerational, preconventional, regress:ve.
So we have some very popular theorists who, tired of the burdens
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of postconventional and worldcentric rational perspectivism, recommend a regressive slide into egocentric, vital-impulsive, polymorphous, phantasmic-emotional revival—in other words, they recommend the fulcrum-2 self. They call this fulcrum-z self the "soul." They would like us to live from this level. This is painful. We are looking for Spirit in precisely those approaches that do not transcend the ego but merely prevent its emergence in the first place.
Q: So the "real" archetypes are, what?
Kw: From the Neoplatonic traditions in the West, to the Vedanta and Mahayana and Trikaya traditions in the East, the real archetypes are subtle seed-forms upon which all of manifestation depends. In deep states of contemplative awareness, one begins to understand that the entire Kosmos emerges straight out of Emptiness, out of primordial Purity, out of nirguna Brahman, out of the Dharmakaya, and the first Forms that emerge out of this Emptiness are the basic Forms upon which all lesser forms depend for their being.
Those Forms are the actual archetypes, a term which means "original pattern" or "primary mold." There is a Light of which all lesser lights are pale shadows, there is a Bliss of which all lesser joys are anemic copies, there is a Consciousness of which all lesser cognitions are mere reflections, there is a primordial Sound of which all lesser sounds are thin echoes. Those are the real archetypes.
When we find those types of statements in Plotinus or Asanga or Garab Dorje or Abhinavigupta or Shankara, rest assured that those are not simply theoretical hunches or metaphysical postulates. Those are direct experiential disclosures issuing directly from the subtle dimension of reality, interpreted according to the backgrounds of those individuals, but issuing from this profound ontological reality, this subtle worldspace.
And if you want to know what these men and women are actually talking about, then you must take up the contemplative practice or injunction or paradigm, and perform the experiment yourself. These archetypes, the true archetypes, are a meditative experience, and you cannot understand these archetypes without performing the experiment* They are not images existing in the mythic worldspace, they are not philosophical concepts existing in the rational worldspace; they are meditative phenomena existing in the subtle worldspace.
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So this experiment will disclose these archetypal data, and then you can help interpret what they mean. And by far the most commonly accepted interpretation is, you are looking at the basic forms and foundations of the entire manifest world. You are looking directly into the Face of the Divine. As Emerson said, bid the intruders take the shoes off their feet, for here is the God within.
- 13 Realms of the Superconscious: Part 2
Q: You said that with the archetypes, you are looking into the Face of the Divine, the first Forms of the Divine. Most modern researchers reject all of that as "mere metaphysics" at best, none of which can be verified.
K w: First, you yourself must perform this experiment and look at the data yourself. Then you can help interpret it. If you don't perform the experiment—the meditative injunction, the exemplar, the paradigm—then you don't have the data from which to make an interpretation.
If you take somebody from the magic or mythic worldview, and you try to explain to them that the sum of the squares of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the hypotenuse, you won't get very far. What you are doing cannot be seen in the empirical world. It doesn't have simple location. And yet you are correct. You are performing an experiment in interior awareness, and your mathematical results can be checked by all those who perform the same interior experiment. It's very public, very reproducible, very fallibilist, very communal knowledge: its results exist in the rational worldspace and can be readily checked in that space by all who learn the expertment.
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Just so with any of the other interior experiments in awareness, of which meditation is one of the oldest, most tested, and most reproduced. So if you're skeptical, that's a healthy attitude, and we invite you to find out for yourself, and perform this interior experiment with us, and get the data, and help us interpret it. But if you won't perform the experiment, please don't ridicule those who do.
And by far the most common interpretation of those who have seen this data is: you are face to face with the Divine.
Fulcrum-9: The Causal
Q: You mentioned that these subtle or archetypal Forms issue directly from Emptiness, from the causal, which is the next stage, fulcrum-9.
K w: When, as a specific type of meditation, you pursue the observing Self, the Witness, to its very source in pure Emptiness, then no objects arise in consciousness at all. This is a discrete, identifiable state of awareness—namely, unmanifest absorption or cessation, variously known as nirvikalpa samadhi, jnana samadhi, ayin, vergezzen, nirodh, classical nirvana.
This is the causal state, a discrete state, which is often likened to the state of deep dreamless sleep, except that this state is not a mere blank but rather an utter fullness, and it is experienced as such—as infinitely drenched in the fullness of Being, so full that no manifestation can even begin to contain it. Because it can never be seen as an object, this pure Self is pure Emptiness.
Q: That's all very abstract. Could you be more concrete about
K W : You are aware of yourself in this moment, yes?
Q: I think so.
K W : So if I say, Who are you? , you will start to describe yourself—you are a father, a mother, a husband, a wife, a friend; you are a lawyer, a clerk, a teacher, a manager. You have these likes and dislikes, you prefer this type of food, you tend to have these impulses and desires, and so on.
Q : Yes, I would list all the things that I know about myself. K W : You WOUId list the "things you know about yourself." K W : All of those things you know about yourself are objects in your awareness. They are images or ideas or concepts or desires or feelings that parade by in front of your awareness, yes? They are all objects in your awareness.
KW : All those objects in your awareness are precisely not the observing Self. All those things that you know about yourself are precisely not the real Self. Those are not the Seer; those are simply things that can be seen. All of those objects that you describe when you "describe yourself" are actually not your real Self at all! They are just more objects, whether internal or external, they are not the real Seer of those objects, they are not the real Self. So when you describe yourself by listing all of those objects, you are ultimately giving a list of mistaken identities, a list of lies, a list of precisely what you ultimately are not.
So who is this real Seer? Who or what is this observing Self?
Ramana Maharshi called this Witness the I-I, because it is aware of the individual I or self, but cannot itself be seen. So what is this I-I, this causal Witness, this pure observing Self?
This deeply inward Self is witnessing the world out there, and it is witnessing all your interior thoughts as well. This Seer sees the ego, and sees the body, and sees the natural world. All of those parade by "in front" of this Seer. But the Seer itself cannot be seen. If you see anything, those are just more objects. Those objects are precisely what the Seer is not, what the Witness is not.
So you pursue this inquiry, Who am I? Who or what is this Seer that cannot itself be seen? You simply "push back" into your awareness, and you dis-identify with any and every object you see or can see.
The Self or the Seer or the Witness is not any particular thought—I can see that thought as an object. The Seer is not any particular sensation—l am aware of that as an object. The observing Self is not the body, it is not the mind, it is not the ego—I can see all of those as objects. What is looking at all those objects? What in you right now is looking at all these objects—looking at nature and its sights, look-
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ing at the body and its sensations, looking at the mind and its thoughts? What is looking at all that?
Try to feel yourself right now—get a good sense of being yourself— and notice, that self is just another object in awareness. It isn't even a real subject, a real self, it's just another object in awareness. This little self and its thoughts parade by in front of you just like the clouds float by through the sky. And what is the real you that is witnessing all of that? Witnessing your little objective self? Who or what is that?
As you push back into this pure Subjectivity, this pure Seer, you won't see it as an object—you can't see it as an object, because it's not an object! It is nothing you can see. Rather, as you calmly rest in this observing awareness—watching mind and body and nature float by—you might begin to notice that what you are actually feeling is simply a sense of freedom, a sense of release, a sense of not being bound to any of the objects you are calmly witnessing. You don't see anything, you simply rest in this vast freedom.
In front of you the clouds parade by, your thoughts parade by, bodily sensations parade by, and you are none of them. You are the vast expanse of freedom through which all these objects come and go. You are an opening, a clearing, an Emptiness, a vast spaciousness, in which all these objects come and go. Clouds come and go, sensations come and go, thoughts come and go—and you are none of them; you are that vast sense of freedom, that vast Emptiness, that vast opening, through which manifestation arises, stays a bit, and goes.
So you simply start to notice that the "Seer" in you that is witnessing all these objects is itself just a vast Emptiness. It is not a thing, not an object, not anything you can see or grab hold of. It is rather a sense of vast Freedom, because it is not itself anything that enters the objective world of time and objects and stress and strain. This pure Witness is a pure Emptiness in which all these individual subjects and objects arise, stay a bit, and pass.
So this pure Witness is not anything that can be seen! The attempt to see the Witness or know it as an object—that's just more grasping and seeking and clinging in time. The Witness isn't out there in the stream; it is the vast expanse of Freedom in which the stream arises. So you can't get hold of it and say, Aha, I see it! Rather, it is the Seer, not anything that can be seen. As you rest in this Witnessing, all that you sense is just a vast Emptiness, a vast Freedom, a vast Expanse—a transparent opening or clearing in which all these little subjects and objects arise. Those subjects and objects can definitely be seen, but the Witness of them cannot be seen. The Witness of them is an utter release from them, an utter Freedom not caught in their turmoils, their desires, their fears, their hopes.
Of course, we tend to identify ourselves with these little individual subjects and objects—and that is exactly the problem! We identify the Seer with puny little things that can be seen. And that is the beginning of bondage and unfreedom. We are actually this vast expanse of Freedom, but we identify with unfree and limited objects and subjects, all of which can be seen, all of which suffer, and none of which is what we are.
Patanjali gave the classic description of bondage as "the identification of the Seer with the instruments of seeing' '—with the little subjects and objects, instead of the opening or clearing or Emptiness in which they all arise.
So when we rest in this pure Witness, we don't see this Witness as an object. Anything you can see is not it. Rather, it is the absence of any subjects or objects altogether, it is the release from all of that. Resting in the pure Witness, there is this background absence or Emptiness, and this is "experienced," not as an object, but as a vast panse of Freedom and Liberation from the constrictions of identifying with these puny little subjects and objects that enter the stream of time and are ground up in that agonizing torrent.
So when you rest in the pure Seer, in the pure Witness, you are invisible. You cannot be seen. No part of you can be seen, because you are not an object. Your body can be seen, your mind can be seen, nature can be seen, but you are not any of those objects. You are the pure source of awareness, and not anything that arises in that awareness. So you abide as awareness.
Things arise in awareness, they stay a bit and depart, they come and they go. They arise in space, they move in time. But the pure Witness does not come and go. It does not arise in space, it does not move in time. It is as it is; it is ever-present and unvarying. It is not an object out there, so it never enters the stream of time, of space, of birth, of death. Those are all experiences, alk objects—they all come,
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they all go. But you do not come and go; you do not enter that stream; you are aware of all that, so you are not caught in all that. The Witness is aware of space, aware of time—and is therefore itself free of space, free of time. It is timeless and spaceless—the purest Emptiness through which time and space parade.
So this pure Seer is prior to life and death, prior to time and turmoil, prior to space and movement, prior to manifestation—prior even to the Big Bang itself. This doesn't mean that the pure Self existed in a time before the Big Bang, but that it exists prior to time, period. It just never enters that stream. It is aware of time, and is thus free of time—it is utterly timeless. And because it is timeless, it is eternal—which doesn't mean everlasting time, but free of time altogether.
It was never born, it will never die. It never enters that temporal stream. This vast Freedom is the great Unborn, of which the Buddha said: "There is an unborn, an unmade, an uncreate. Were it not for this unborn, unmade, uncreate, there would be no release from the born, the made, the created." Resting in this vast expanse of Freedom is resting in this great Unborn, this vast Emptiness.
And because it is Unborn, it is Undying. It was not created with your body, it will not perish when your body perishes. it's not that it lives on beyond your body's death, but rather that it never enters the stream of time in the first place. It doesn't live on after your body, it lives prior to your body, always. It doesn't go on in time forever, it is simply prior to the stream of time itself.
Space, time, objects—all of those merely parade by. But you are the Witness, the pure Seer that is itself pure Emptiness, pure Freedom, pure Openness, the great Emptiness through which the entire parade passes, never touching you, never tempting you, never hurting you, never consoling you.
And because there is this vast Emptiness, this great Unborn, you can indeed gain liberation from the born and the created, from the suffering of space and time and objects, from the mechanism of terror inherent in those fragments, from the vale of tears called samsara.
Q: can get a brief taste of that as you talk about it.
K w: Most people can connect fairly quickly with the Witness. Living from that Freedom is something else.
Q: How does that Witness relate to the causal unmanifest?
Kw: The Witness is itself the causal unmanifest. It is itself pure Emptiness. And if, as a yogic endeavor, you actually keep inquiring intensely into the source, into the pure Subjectivity of this Seer, then all objects and subjects will simply cease to arise at all. And that would be nirvikalpa or cessation—an actual yogic state, a discrete state (it is, in fact, the fusion phase of fulcrum-9). This is pure formless mysticism—all objects, even God as a perceived form, vanish into cessation, and so deity mysticism gives way to formless mysticism.
Because all possible objects have not yet arisen, this is a completely unmanifest state of pure Emptiness. What you actually "see" in this state is infinite nothing, which simply means that it is too Full to be contained in any object or any subject or any sight or any sound. It is pure consciousness, pure awareness, prior to any manifestation at all—prior to subjects and objects, prior to phenomena, prior to hoIons, prior to things, prior to anything. It is utterly timeless, spaceless, objectless. And therefore it is radically and infinitely free of the limitations and constrictions of space and time and objects—and radically free of the torture inherent in those fragments.
It is not necessary to pursue the Witness in that particularly yogic fashion, but it can be done, and it does point up the unmanifest source of the Seer itself. This is why many traditions, like Yogachara Buddhism, simply equate Emptiness and Consciousness. We needn't get involved in all the technical details and arguments about that, but you get the general point—the Witness itself, pure Consciousness itself, is not a thing, not a process, not a quality, not an entity—it is ultimately unqualifiable—it is ultimately pure Emptiness.
Q: Why is it called the "causal"?
K W : Because it is the support or cause or creative ground of all junior dimensions. Remember that we saw, as Whitehead put it, that "the ultimate metaphysical principle is the creative advance into novelty." Creativity is part of the basic ground of the universe. Somehow, some way, miraculously, new holons emerge. I say out of Emptiness, but you can call that creative ground whatever you want. Some would call it God, or Goddess, or Tao, or Brahman, or Keter, or Rigpa, or Dharmakaya, or Maat, or Li. The more scientifically oriented tend to prefer to speak simply of the "self-transcending" capacity of the universe, as does Jantsch. That's fine. It doesn't matter. The point is, stuff emerges. Amazing! Miraculous by any other name.
Emptiness, creativity, holons—and that is exactly where we started our account in chapter 1. These holons arise as subject and object, in both singular and plural forms—that is, the four quadrants—and they follow the twenty tenets, which is simply the pattern that manifestation displays as it arises, a pattern that is a potential of Emptiness, a potential of the Dharmakaya, a potential of the Godhead. And with that pattern of twenty tenets, off we go on the evolutionary drive of holons returning to their source.
That pattern embodies a creative drive to greater depth, greater consciousness, greater unfolding, and that unfolding ultimately unfolds into its own infinite ground in pure Emptiness. But that Emptiness is not itself an emergent, it is rather the creative ground, prior to time, that was present all along, but finally becomes transparent to itself in certain holons that awaken to that Emptiness, to that Spirit, to that groundless Ground.
That same Emptiness, as Consciousness, was present all along as the interior depth of every holon, a depth that increasingly shed its lesser forms until it shed forms altogether—its depth goes to infinity, its time goes to eternity, its interior space is all space, its agency is the very Divine itself: the ground, path, and fruition of Emptiness.
The Nondual
Q: So this causal unmanifest—is it the absolute end point? Is this the end of time, the end of evolution, the end of history? The final Omega point?
K W : Well, many traditions take this state of cessation to be the ultimate state, the final end point of all development and evolution, yes. And this end state is equated with full Enlightenment, ultimate release, pure nirvana.
But that is not the "final story," according to the Nondual traditions. Because at some point, as you inquire into the Witness, and rest in the Witness, the sense of being a Witness "in here" completely vanishes itself, and the Witness turns out to be everything that is witnessed. The causal gives way to the Nondual, and formless mysticism
gives way to nondual mysticism. "Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form."
Technically, you have dis-identified with even the Witness, and then integrated it with all manifestation—in other words, the second and third phases of fulcrum-9, which leads to fulcrum-10, which is not really a separate fulcrum or level, but the reality or Suchness of all levels, all states, all conditions.
And this is the second and most profound meaning of Emptiness—it is not a discrete state, but the reality of all states, the Suchness of all states. You have moved from the causal to the Nondual.
Q: Emptiness has two meanings?
K w: Yes, which can be very confusing. On the one hand, as we just saw, it is a discrete, identifiable state of awareness—namely, unmanifest absorption or cessation (nirvikalpa samadhi, ayin, jnana samadhi, nirodh, classical nirvana). This is the causal state, a discrete state.
The second meaning is that Emptiness is not merely a particular state among other states, but rather the reality or suchness or condition of all states. Not a particular state apart from other states, but the reality or condition of all states, high or low, sacred or profane, ordinary or extraordinary.
Q: We already discussed the discrete state; now the Nondual.
Kw: Yes, the "experience" of this nondual Suchness is similar to the nature unity experience we earlier discussed, except now this unity is experienced not just with gross Form out there, but also with all of the subtle Forms in here. In Buddhist terms, this is not just the Nirmanakaya—gross or nature mysticism; and not just the Sambhogakaya—subtle or deity mysticism; and not just the Dharmakaya— causal or formless mysticism. It is the Svabhavikakaya—the integration of all three of them. It is beyond nature mysticism, beyond deity mysticism, and beyond formless mysticism—it is the reality or the Suchness of each, and thus integrates each in its embrace. It embraces the entire spectrum of consciousness—transcends all, includes all.
Q: Again, rather technical. Perhaps there's a more direct way to talk about Nondual mysticism?
K W : Across the board, the sense of being any sort of Seer or Wit*
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ness or Self vanishes altogether. You don't look at the sky, you are the sky. You can taste the sky. It's not out there. As Zen would say, you can drink the Pacific Ocean in a single gulp, you can swallow the Kosmos whole—precisely because awareness is no longer split into a seeing subject in here and a seen object out there. There is just pure seeing. Consciousness and its display are not-two.
Everything continues to arise moment to moment—the entire Kosmos continues to arise moment to moment—but there is nobody watching the display, there is just the display, a spontaneous and luminous gesture of great perfection. The pure Emptiness of the Witness turns out to be one with every Form that is witnessed, and that is one of the basic meanings of "nonduality."
Q: Again, could you be even more specific?
KW : Well, you might begin by getting into the state of the Witness—that is, you simply rest in pure observing awareness—you are not any object that can be seen—not nature, not body, not thoughts— just rest in that pure witnessing awareness. And you can get a certain "sensation" of that witnessing awareness—a sensation of freedom, of release, of great expanse.
While you are resting in that state, and "sensing" this Witness as a great expanse, if you then look at, say, a mountain, you might begin to notice that the sensation of the Witness and the sensation of the mountain are the same sensation. When you "feel" your pure Self and you "feel" the mountain, they are absolutely the same feeling.
In other words, the real world is not given to you twice—one out there, one in here. That "twiceness" is exactly the meaning of "duality." Rather, the real world is given to you once, immediately—it is one feeling, it has one taste, it is utterly full in that one taste, it is not severed into seer and seen, subject and object, fragment and fragment. It is a singular, of which the plural is unknown. You can taste the mountain; it is the same taste as your Self; it is not out there being reflected in here—that duality is not present in the immediateness of real experience. Real experience, before you slice it up, does not contain that duality—real experience, reality itself, is "nondual." You are still you, and the mountain is still the mountain, but you and the mountain are two sides of one and the same experience, which is the one and only reality at that moment.
If you relax into present experience in that fashion, the separate self-sense will uncoil; you will stop standing back from life; you will not have experience, you will suddenly become all experience; you will not be "in here" looking "out there' '—in here and out there are one, so you are no longer trapped "in here."
And so suddenly, you are not in the bodymind. Suddenly, the body, mind has dropped. Suddenly, the wind doesn't blow on you, it blows through you, within you. You are not looking at the mountain, you are the mountain—the mountain is closer to you than your own skin. You are that, and there is no you—just this entire luminous display spontaneously arising moment to moment. The separate self is nowhere to be found.
The entire sensation of "weight" drops altogether, because you are not in the Kosmos, the Kosmos is in you, and you are purest Emptiness. The entire universe is a transparent shimmering of the Divine, of primordial Purity. But the Divine is not someplace else, it is just all of this shimmering. It is self-seen. It has One Taste. It is nowhere else. Q: Subject and object are nondual?
K w: You know the Zen koan, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Usually, of course, we need two hands to clap—and that is the structure of typical experience. We have a sense of ourselves as a subject in here, and the world as an object out there. We have these "two hands" of experience, the subject and the object. And typical experience is a smashing of these two hands together to make a commotion, a sound. The object out there smashes into me as a subject, and I have an experience—the two hands clap together and experience emerges.
And so the typical structure of experience is like a punch in the face. The ordinary self is the battered self—it is utterly battered by the universe "out there." The ordinary self is a series of bruises, of scars, the results of these two hands of experience smashing together. This bruising is called "duhkha," suffering. As Krishnamurti used to say, in that gap between the subject and the object lies the entire misery of humankind.
But with the nondua} state, suddenly there are not two hands. Suddenly, the subject and the object are one hand. Suddenly, there is nothing outside of you to smash into you, bruise you, torment you.
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Suddenly, you do not have an experience, you are every experience that arises, and so you are instantly released into all space: you and the entire Kosmos are one hand, one experience, one display, one gesture of great perfection. There is nothing outside of you that you can want, or desire, or seek, or grasp—your soul expands to the corners of the universe and embraces all with infinite delight. You are utterly Full, utterly Saturated, so full and saturated that the boundaries to the Kosmos completely explode and leave you without date or duration, time or location, awash in an ocean of infinite care. You are released into the All, as the All—you are the self-seen radiant Kosmos, you are the universe of One Taste, and the taste is utterly infinite.
So what is the sound of that one hand clapping? What is the taste of that One Taste? When there is nothing outside of you that can hit you, hurt you, push you, pull you—what is the sound of that one hand clapping?
See the sunlight on the mountains? Feel the cool breeze? What is not utterly obvious? Who is not already enlightened? As a Zen Master put it, "When I heard the sound of the bell ringing, there was no I, and no bell, just the ringing." There is no twiceness, no twoness, in immediate experience! No inside and no outside, no subject and no object—just immediate awareness itself, the sound of one hand clapping.
So you are not in here, on this side of a transparent window, looking at the Kosmos out there. The transparent window has shattered, your bodymind drops, you are free of that confinement forever, you are no longer "behind your face" looking at the Kosmos—you simply are the Kosmos. You are all that. Which is precisely why you can swallow the Kosmos and span the centuries, and nothing moves at all. The sound of this one hand clapping is the sound the Big Bang made. It is the sound of supernovas exploding in space. It is the sound of the robin singing. It is the sound of a waterfall on a crystal-clear day. It is the sound of the entire manifest universe—and you are that sound.
Which is why your Original Face is not in here. It is the sheerest Emptiness or transparency of this shimmering display. If the Kosmos is arising, you are that. If nothing arises, you are that. In either case, you are that. In either case, you are not in here. The window has shattered. The gap between the subject and object is gone. There is no twiceness, no twoness, to be found anywhere—the world is never given to you twice, but always only once—and you are that. You are that One Taste.
This state is not something you can bring about. This nondual state, this state of One Taste, is the very nature of every experience before you slice it up. This One Taste is not some experience you bring about through effort; rather, it is the actual condition of all experience before you do anything to it. This uncontrived state is prior to effort, prior to grasping, prior to avoiding. It is the real world before you do anything to it, including the effort to "see it non-
So you don't have to do something special to awareness or to experience in order to make it nondual. It starts out nondual, its very nature is nondual—prior to any grasping, any effort, any contrivance. If effort arises, fine; if effort doesn't arise, fine; in either case, there is only the immediacy of One Taste, prior to effort and non-effort alike.
So this is definitely not a state that is hard to get into, but rather one that is impossible to avoid. It has always been so. There has never been a moment when you did not experience One Taste—it is the only constant in the entire Kosmos, it is the only reality in all of reality. In a million billion years, there has never been a single second that you weren't aware of this Taste; there has never been a single second where it wasn't directly in your Original Face like a blast of arctic air.
Of course, we have often lied to ourselves about this, we have often been untruthful about this, the universe of One Taste, the primordial sound of one hand clapping, our own Original Face. And the nondual traditions aim, not to bring about this state, because that is impossible, but simply to point it out to you so that you can no longer ignore it, no longer lie to yourself about who you really are.
Q: So this nondual state—does this include the duality of mind and body, of Left and Right?
KW : Yes. The primordial state is prior to, but not other to, the entire world of dualistic Form. So in that primordial state there is no subject and object, no interior and exterior, no Left and no Right. All of those dualities continue to arise, but they are relative truths, not
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absolute or primordial truth itself. The primordial truth is the ringing; the relative truth is the "I" and the "bell," the mind and the body, the subject and the object. They have a certain relative reality, but they are not, as Eckhart would say, the final word.
And therefore the dilemmas inherent in those relative dualisms cannot be solved on the relative plane itself. Nothing you can do to the "I" or the "bell" will make them one; you can only relax into the prior ringing, the immediacy of experience itself, at which point the dilemma does not arise. It is not solved, it is dissolved—and not by reducing the subject to the object, or the object to the subject, but by recognizing the primordial ground of which each is a partial reflection.
Which is why the dilemmas inherent in those dualisms—between mind and body, mind and brain, consciousness and form, mind and nature, subject and object, Left and Right—cannot be solved on the relative plane—which is why that problem has never been solved by conventional philosophy. The problem is not solved, but rather dissolved, in the primordial state, which otherwise leaves the dualisms just as they are, possessing a certain conventional or relative reality, real enough in their own domains, not but absolute.
The Immediacy of Pure Presence
Q : Are there any orthodox or mainstream Western philosophers who recognize nonduality?
K W : I always found it fascinating that both William James and Bertrand Russell agreed on this crucial issue, the nonduality of subject and object in the primacy of immediate awareness. I think this is very funny, because if you can find something that these two agreed on, it might as well be coming straight from God, so I suppose we can embrace nonduality with a certain confidence.
Russell talks about this in the last chapters of his great book, A History of Western Philosophy, where he discusses William James's notion of "radical empiricism." Now we have to be very careful with these terms, because "empiricism" doesn't mean just sensory experience, it means experience itself, in any domain. It means immediate prehension, immediate experience, immediate awareness. And William James set out to demonstrate that this pure nondual immediateness is the "basic stuff" of reality, so to speak, and that both subject and object, mind and body, inside and outside, are all derivative or secondary. They come later, they come after, the primacy of immediateness, which is the ultimate reality, as it were.
And Russell is quite right to credit James with being the first "mainstream" or "accepted" philosopher to advance this nondual position. Of course, virtually all of the mystical or contemplative sages had been saying this for a few millennia, but James to his eternal credit brought it crashing into the mainstream . . . and convinced Russell of its truth in the process.
James introduced this nondual notion in an essay called "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" And he answered that consciousness does not exist, which has confused many people. But his point was simply that if you look at consciousness very carefully, it's not a thing, not an object, not an entity. If you look carefully, you'll see that consciousness is simply one with whatever is immediately arising—as we saw with the mountain, for example. You as a subject do not see the mountain as an object, but rather, you and the mountain are one in the immediacy of the actual experience. So in that sense, consciousness as a subjective entity does not exist—it's not a separate something that has an experience of a separate something else. There is just One Taste in the immediateness of experience.
So pure experience is not split into an inside and outside—there is no twiceness, no twoness, about it! As James characteristically put it, "Experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity."
And notice that duplicity has the meaning of both "twoness" and "lying. " The twoness of experience is the fundamental lie, the primordial untruthfulness, the beginning of ignorance and deception, the beginning of the battered self, the beginning of samsara, the beginning of the lie lodged in the heart of infinity. Each and every experience, just as it is, arrives as One Taste—it does not arrive fractured and split into a subject and an object. That split, that duplicity, is a lie, the fundamental lie, the original untruthfulness—and the beginning of the "small self," the battered self, the self that hides its Original Face in the forms of its own suffering.
Small wonder that D. T. Suzuki, the great Zen scholar, said that
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James's radical empiricism (or nondual empiricism) was as close as the West had gotten to "no-mind" or Emptiness. That's perhaps too strong, but you get the point.
Russell had a rather thin understanding of the fact that the great contemplative philosopher-sages—from Plotinus to Augustine to Eckhart to Schelling to Schopenhauer to Emerson—had already solved or dissolved this subject/obiect duality. But aside from that misunderstanding, Russell introduces James's great accomplishment in a very clear fashion:
The main purpose of this essay ["Does 'Consciousness' Exist?"] was to deny that the subject-object relation is fundamental. It had, until then, been taken for granted by philosophers that there is a kind of occurrence called "knowing," in which one entity, the knower or subject, is aware of another, the thing known or the object [the "two hands" of experiencel. The knower was regarded as a mind or soul; the object known might be a material object, an eternal essence, another mind, or, in self-consciousness, identical with the knower. Almost everything in accepted philosophy was bound up with the dualism of subject and object. The distinction of mind and matter and the traditional notion of "truth," all need to be radically reconsidered if the distinction of subject and object is not accepted as fundamental.
To put it mildly. And then Russell adds, "For my part, am convinced that James was right on this matter, and would on this ground alone, deserve a high place among philosophers."
Q: So they both caught a glimpse of nonduality.
K W : I think so, yes. It's fairly easy to catch at least a brief glimpse of nonduality. Most people can be "talked into it," as we were doing a moment ago, and at least get a little taste of it. And I think this is exactly what William James did with Bertrand Russell, in person, which is what Russell himself reports. Right after he says, "I am convinced that James was right on this matter," Russell adds, "I had thought otherwise until he persuaded me of the truth of his doctrine." I think James just pointed it right out to him! See the mountain? Where is your mind? Mind and mountain . . . nondual!
Q: So they were onto a taste of Zen? A taste of the Nondual?
K w: Well, a glimmer, a taste, a hint of the nondual—this is easy enough to catch. But for the Nondual traditions, this is just the beginning. As you rest in that uncontrived state of pure immediateness or pure freedom, then strange things start to happen. All of the subjective tendencies that you had previously identified with—all of those little selves and subjects that held open the gap between the seer and the seen—they all start burning in the freedom of nonduality. They all scream to the surface and die, and this can be a very interesting period.
As you rest in this primordial freedom of One Taste, you are no longer acting on these subjective inclinations, so they basically die of boredom, but it's still a death, and the death rattles from this liberation are very intense. You don't really have to do anything, except hold on—or let go—they're both irrelevant. It's all spontaneously accomplished by the vast expanse of primordial freedom. But you are still getting burned alive, which is, gosh, just the most fun you can have without smiling.
Fundamentally, it doesn't matter what type of experience arises— the simple, natural, nondual, and uncontrived state is prior to experience, prior to duality, so it happily embraces whatever comes up. But strange things come up, and you have to stay with this "effortless effort" for quite some time, and die these little deaths constantly, and this is where real practice comes into view.
Neither James nor Russell did this, and it clearly shows in both of their philosophies. Russell announces that he completely agrees that the subject and the object are derivative to primordial awareness. And then, in his own life, he promptly goes right back to identifying with the derivative subject, with the derivative self, with the little rational mind, and he constructs his analytic philosophy based on this lie, based on this duplicity. What good is that? He doesn't have a clue where this nondual state will actually lead.
Even James doesn't penetrate into this primordial state with much profundity, and so his radical empiricism degenerated very rapidly into sensory phenomenalism, which collapses into Right Hand empiricism and pragmatism—an extremely disappointing development,
American to the core. Although this certainly doesn't detract from the amazing first steps that he took.
Enlightenment
Q : You said nonduality doesn't reject dualism on its own level.
K w: No, that would miss the point completely. These dualisms— between subject and object, inside and outside, Left and Right—will still arise, and are supposed to arise. Those dualities are the very mechanism of manifestation. Spirit—the pure immediate Suchness of reality—manifests as a subject and an object, and in both singular and plural forms—in other words, Spirit manifests as all four quadrants. And we aren't supposed to simply evaporate those quadrants— they are the radiant glory of Spirit's manifestation.
But we are supposed to see through them to their Source, their Suchness. And a quick glimpse won't do it. This One Taste has to permeate all levels, all quadrants, all manifestation. And precisely because this is the simplest thing in the world, it is the hardest. This effortless effort requires great perseverance, great practice, great sincerity, great truthfulness. It has to be pursued through the waking state, and the dream state, and the dreamless state. And this is where we pick up the practices of the Nondual schools.
Q : Does "Enlightenment" mean something different in these schools?
K W : Yes, in a sense. There are two rather different schools about this "Enlightened" state, corresponding to the two rather different meanings of "Emptiness" that we discussed.
The first takes as its paradigm the causal or unmanifest state of absorption (nirvikalpa, nirodh). That is a very distinct, very discrete, very identifiable state. And so if you equate Enlightenment with that state of cessation, then you can very distinctly say whether a person is "fully Enlightened" or not.
Generally, as in the Theravadin Buddhist tradition and the Samkhya yogic schools, whenever you enter this state of unmanifest absorption, it burns away certain lingering afflictions and sources of ignorance. Each time you fully enter this state, more of these afflictions are burned away. And after a certain number and type of these
entrances—often four—you have burned away everything there is to burn, and so you can enter this state at will, and remain there permanently. You can enter nirvana permanently, and samsara ceases to arise in your case. The entire world of Form ceases to arise.
But the Nondual traditions do not have that as their goal. They will often use that state, and often master it. But more important, these schools—such as Vedanta Hinduism and Mahayana and Vairayana Buddhism—are more interested in pointing out the Nondual state of Suchness, which is not a discrete state of awareness but the ground or empty condition of all states. So they are not so much interested in finding an Emptiness divorced from the world of Form (or samsara), but rather an Emptiness that embraces all Form even as Form continues to arise. For them, nirvana and samsara, Emptiness and Form, are not-two.
And this changes everything. In the causal traditions, you can very definitely say when a person is in that discrete state. It is obvious, unmistakable. So you have a clearly marked yardstick, so to speak, for your Enlightenment.
But in the Nondual traditions, you often get a quick introduction to the Nondual condition very early in your training. The master will simply point out that part of your awareness that is already nondual. Q: How, exactly?
K w: Very similar to when we were talking about the Witness, and I sort of "talked you into" a glimpse of it; or even further with the nondual One Taste of you and the mountain. The Nondual traditions have an enormous number of these "pointing out instructions," where they simply point out what is already happening in your awareness anyway. Every experience you have is already nondual, whether you realize it or not. So it is not necessary for you to change your state of consciousness in order to discover this nonduality. Any state of consciousness you have will do just fine, because nonduality is fully present in every state.
So change of state is not the point with the Nondual traditions. Recognition is the point. Recognition of what is always already the case. Change of state is useless, a distraction.
So you will often get an initiation taste, a pointing out, of this
Nondual state that is always already the case. As I said, think this is
exactly what James did with Russell, in a small way. Look at immediate awareness closely, and you will see that subject and object are actually one, are already one, and you simply need to recognize it. You don't have to engineer a special state in which to see this. One Taste is already the nature of any state, so pretty much any conscious state will do.
Q: It's simply pointed out.
K W : Yes. You've seen those silly newspaper puzzles, something like, "There are fifteen Presidents of the United States hidden in this picture of the ocean. Can you spot all fifteen?"
Q: The comedian Father Guido Sarducci has a joke on those— "Find the Popes in the Pizza."
KW: We'll get in trouble here! Maybe we better stick with Presidents, who are used to being blankly humiliated.
The point in these games is that you are looking right at ail the faces. You already have everything in consciousness that is required. You are looking right at the answer—right at the Presidents' faces— but you don't recognize them. Somebody comes along and points them out, and you slap your head and say, Yes, of course, I was look* ing right at it.
Same with the Nondual condition of One Taste. You are looking right at it, right now. Every single bit of the Nondual condition is fully in your awareness right now. All of it. Not most of it, but absolutely all of it is in your awareness right now. You just don't recognize it. So somebody comes along and simply points it out, and you slap your head—yes, of course, I was looking right at it all along.
Q: And this happens in the training?
K w: Yes. Sometimes right at the beginning, sometimes down the line a bit, but this transmission is crucial.
But the central point we were discussing is that, because this Nondual condition is the nature or suchness of any and all states—because this Emptiness is one with whatever Forms arise—then the world of Form will continue to arise, and you will continue to relate to Form. You will not try to get out of it, or away from it, or suspend it. You will enter it fully.
And since Forms continue to arise, then you are never at an end point where you can say, "Here, I am fully Enlightened." In these traditions, Enlightenment is an ongoing process of new Forms arising, and you relate to them as Forms of Emptiness. You are one with all these Forms as they arise. And in that sense, you are "enlightened," but in another sense, this enlightenment is ongoing, because new Forms are arising all the time. You are never in a discrete state that has no further development. You are always learning new things about the world of Form, and therefore your overall state is always evolving itself.
So you can have certain breakthrough Enlightenment experiences—satori, for example—but these are just the beginning of an endless process of riding the new waves of Form as they ceaselessly arise. So in this sense, in the Nondual sense, you are never "fully" Enlightened, any more than you could say that you are "fully educated." It has no meaning.
Q: Some of these Nondual traditions, particularly the Tantra, get pretty wild.
K w: Yes, some of them get pretty wild. They are not afraid of samsara, they ride it constantly. They don't abandon the defiled states, they enter them with enthusiasm, and play with them, and exaggerate them, and they couldn't care less whether they are higher or lower, because there is only God.
In other words, all experiences have the same One Taste. Not a single experience is closer to or further from One Taste. You cannot engineer a way to get closer to God, for there is only God—the radical secret of the Nondual schools.
At the same time, all of this occurs within some very strong ethical frameworks, and you are not simply allowed to play Dharma Bums and call that being Nondual. In most of the traditions, in fact, you have to master the first three stages of transpersonal development (psychic, subtle, and causal) before you will even be allowed to talk about the fourth or Nondual state. "Crazy wisdom" occurs in a very strict ethical atmosphere.
But the important point is that in the Nondual traditions, you take a vow, a very sacred vow, which is the foundation of all of your training, and the vow is that you will not disappear into cessation— you will not hide out in nirvana, you will not evaporate in nirodh, you will not abandon the world by tucking yourself into nirvikalpa.
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Rather, you promise to ride the surf of samsara until all beings caught in that surf can see that it is just a manifestation of Emptiness. Your vow is to pass through cessation and into Nonduality as quickly as possible, so you can help all beings recognize the Unborn in the very midst of their born existence.
So these Nondual traditions do not necessarily abandon emotions, or thoughts, or desires, or inclinations. The task is simply to see the Emptiness of all Form, not to actually get rid of all Form. And so Forms continue to arise, and you learn to surf. The Enlightenment is indeed primordial, but this Enlightenment continues forever, and it forever changes its Form because new Forms always arise, and you are one with those.
So the call of the Nondual traditions is: Abide as Emptiness, embrace all Form. The liberation is in the Emptiness, never in the Form, but Emptiness embraces all forms as a mirror all its objects. So the Forms continue to arise, and, as the sound of one hand clapping, you are ali those Forms. You are the display. You and the universe are One Taste. Your Original Face is the purest Emptiness, and therefore every time you look in the mirror, you see only the entire Kosmos.
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