Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V

      "Okay," Joan said, as she closed her notebook and walked to the front of the stage. "One last item, it won't take long. But it's very important. If you look at the psychological systems of the great wisdom traditions--from contemplative Christianity to Vedanta to Sufism to Buddhism to Neoconfucianism to Taoism to Shamanism--you will find a strange, glaring deficiency: you might find levels of consciousness as they appear in an individual (such as the 5 koshas or the 9 vijnanas or the 10 sefirot)--but you will not find anything resembling the levels or stages that were discovered by Clare Graves, Jane Loevinger, Carol Gilligan, Robert Kegan, and so on. Why this serious lack in systems that claim to cover the entire spectrum of consciousness from matter to mind to spirit? They are clearly leaving something out; does that mean their systems are incapable of producing liberation or enlightenment?

      "First, why do they lack an understanding of the types of stages presented by, say, Clare Graves and Spiral Dynamics?

      "The answer is actually fairly simple, and it has to do with the types of research used in each case. In the meditative traditions, for example, you basically sit on a cushion and watch the contents of the mind. As meditation deepens, different contents tend to arise, often moving from gross contents (objects of the senses and mental representations of them) to subtler contents (visions, illuminations, bliss) to very subtle or causal contents (vast formlessness, consciousness without an object). The traditions have left various types of detailed phenomenologies of subjective consciousness, including a catalog of its many elements and the various phenomenal stages that some of them undergo (e.g., gross contents to subtle contents to causal contents). These are essentially first-person accounts (or first-person phenomenologies) that are then checked with other first-person accounts within that culture or subculture to see if they have any similarities.

      "Western psychological researchers have often used an entirely different type of research, one that focuses not just on subjective phenomena but on intersubjective phenomena in large populations across time. In this research, you don't look at an individual mind, you look at a group of people; you pose a problem to them (you ask them, for example, 'Is it okay if a poor man steals medicine that will help save his sick wife?'); and then you record all the different types of answers that people give. You then look to see if there are types or classes of similar answers (in this case, there are: researchers have found that responses to this question generally fall into at least three major types, often called preconventional, conventional, and postconventional). You then follow these individuals over the years, and you find that if somebody gives response #2, they might move to response #3, but they will almost never move to response #1. That is, these 3 responses constitute a stage sequence. You then test these stages in different groups of people, and if you continue to get the same responses, you are justified in saying, 'This type of moral response develops through at least 3 major stages, preconventional to conventional to postconventional, at least in the people tested so far.' It appears that, based on available evidence, some types of stages apply only to a single individual; some to families; some to subcultures; some to cultures; and a few stages hold cross-culturally.

     "We might conjecture that the reach of various waves is connected with their more widespread repetition setting up morphogenetic grooves or Kosmic habits which are then available to more holons, with the broader the repetition the wider the reach. At one end of that spectrum would be Kosmic habits universally available to all holons of a given class; at the other end, habits peculiar to a single holon.

     "Of the various wave sequences discovered by developmental psychology, exactly which are universal is hard to tell in all cases; but that some of them are universal has never been doubted by serious researchers. For example, take the cognitive capacity to form images, symbols, concepts, and rules. An image is a mental sign representing an entity via resemblance (e.g., a mental image of my dog looks more or less like my real dog); a symbol represents an entity by denoting it (e.g., the word or symbol "Fido" represents or denotes my dog, but does not look like my dog--a harder cognitive task than images); a concept represents an entire class of entities (e.g., the word "dog" refers to all dogs, not just Fido--a harder task still); and a rule is a mental operation using images, symbols, and concepts--which is even harder (a rule might involve, say, how to add three dogs and two dogs to get five dogs).

     "Those four general tasks, as far as we can tell, are available to all healthy human beings in all cultures. We simply do not know of a single culture that cannot form images, symbols, concepts, and rules. Of course, not all cultures have the same types of concepts and rules, but all cultures recognize classes of events (e.g., earth, wind, water, fire), and all cultures have rituals that show sophisticated operations and mental rules.

     "Moreover, since each task builds upon its predecessor, those tasks emerge in a sequence that cannot be changed by environmental, social, or behavioral conditioning. No amount of cultural conditioning can make rules emerge before images and symbols (rules operate on images and symbols, and you cannot have operations if there is nothing to operate on). In other words, wherever we find all four of these capacities, they form a true stage sequence , like atoms, molecules, cells, organisms; or like letters, words, sentences, paragraphs. You simply cannot form paragraphs before sentences, or sentences before words. And this is true cross-culturally--it is literally true for all cultures, at least as far as we can tell.

     "So, as I said, no serious researcher ever has doubted that some types of stage sequences are universal. (Of course, the denial of universal waves, or universal anything, is a standard agenda of leftist pomo theorists, but it is executed only by positing an extensive meta-theory of knowledge, a meta-theory that itself is claimed to be 100% true for all cultures at all times--e.g., it is claimed that all knowledge is contextual, all knowledge is interpretative, all knowledge is culturally bound, there are no universal or absolute truths, etc. This meta-theory is not held to be true for just some cultures, so that some cultures have relative truth and some cultures have absolute truth; nor is this meta-theory itself open to interpretation, nor is there any pluralism in it at all: rather, this meta-theory is claimed to be cross-culturally, universally, absolutely, 100% true. Thus, not even pomo relativists really doubt that there are universals present in all cultures. The question is, what types of universals are actually there? Developmentalists attempt to answer this question by careful research into various groups of individuals, from subcultures to cultures to cross-cultures, and they have found that some very general sequences--such as images, symbols, concepts, rules--are found in every culture that has been studied. The pomo theorists, on the other hand, maintain that the only cross-cultural givens, or the only true universals, are the ingredients in their particular meta-theory of knowledge, such that every human being should accept the pomo meta-theory as the one and only correct way to view all cultures. [See Sidebar F for a discussion of the hidden absolutism in the pluralist's agenda.] This is a domineering agenda that has, after three decades, finally run its course and is now rather exhausted; so it is very encouraging that at this time, the existence of the various types of universals has been taken out of the hands of ideology and put in the hands of research and evidence.)

      "Now, that type of careful research is what is what James Mark Baldwin did, and Clare Graves, and Jane Loevinger, and Robert Kegan, and dozens of other researchers who have enormously enriched our understanding of the mind by outlining the many types of capacities that undergo stages of growth, development, and evolution, and they have done so in most cases based on extensive research.

      "But one thing is certain: you can sit on your meditation cushion for 50 years, and you will never see any of those types of stages. You will never see or observe a thought that says: 'This is a stage-5 moral response,' or 'This value is a stage-blue value,' or 'The self observing the stream of dharmas is at a green-meme stage.' In other words, you will never discover the important types of waves occurring in your consciousness that were discovered by these modern psychological researchers. Because the only way you can do that is to take entire groups of people, pose a dilemma to them, see how they respond, and then track those responses over a long period of time. What you are looking at, in other words, are not subjective patterns but intersubjective patterns (and their interobjective behaviors). In fact, you are looking not so much at the Upper Left but at the Lower Left, not individual interiors but collective interiors. Naturally, these two can never be separated, but different types of research can better access these different dimensions, and it is only the intersubjective developmental approaches that have been able to get at these particular types of stages of consciousness. And that is why you do not find them in any contemplative or shamanic or meditative tradition anywhere in the world.

      "(A small but important technical point: these intersubjective stages have been investigated using two major approaches, both of which are needed: an interobjective investigation that looks at these stages from a third-person or exterior perspective, and attempts to outline the syntax or structure of these stages as they unfold: this is the province of genealogy, developmental structuralism, genetic epistemology, and evolutionary systems theory. The other approach looks at these stages from within, using a second-person collaborative inquiry of subjects at the particular wave of consciousness as they reach, or attempt to reach, mutual understanding: this is hermeneutics proper, which attempts to describe the shared interiors and semantics of inter-subjects: not, how can you describe these stages in an exterior fashion, but what do they look like from within when you are actually there? The most comprehensive of the hermeneutic schools is genealogical hermeneutics in its many forms, which follows these waves from within as they unfold in the asymmetry of time's arrow, and attempts to give not just exterior descriptions of the syntax and structure of these waves but an evocative resonance of the interior felt-meaning or semantics of these waves, or what they look like from within their own horizon--Jean Gebser was a master of this; Charles Taylor and Hans-Georg Gadamer brought it to near perfection. The first major approach is interobjective, the second is intersubjective--and my point is that you need them both. For convenience sake, I refer to both of them as 'intersubjective,' but these important differences should not be overlooked. This topic is explored at length in Sidebar I : 'Integral Methodological Pluralism.')

      "Because the wisdom traditions did not undertake this specific type of research, they do not possess an understanding of these types of stages, and therefore there is nothing in all of the Buddhist teachings that will tell me if my center of gravity is, say, at the red or blue or green meme. Or at Jane Loevinger's impulsive, conformist, individualistic, or integrated waves of development. Or at Bob Kegan's, or Carol Gilligan's, or Jan Sinnott's, or Cheryl Armon's, or Deirdre Kramer's....

      "That, indeed, is a glaring deficiency. To tie this in with our present topic, if there is nothing in the wisdom traditions, including Buddhism, that would let me see if I am at, say, green, then there is likewise nothing that would let me spot when I have slipped into a pathological version of green: namely, boomeritis. And therefore there is little in Buddhism or any other spiritual tradition that would or could help me directly to get over one of the great epidemics of our time.

     "In fact, if my own center of gravity is green, then I might start identifying Buddhism with the green meme itself and even its boomeritis forms, since I will interpret most of the meditative states that I have through the green meme. As we earlier discussed, I might have numerous profound and completely authentic states of spiritual awareness, but I will tend to interpret them through the general stage of my own development, namely green in this case. (See Sidebar F for several examples of this.) If so, then extreme pluralism and deconstructive postmodernism will start to look like a fine explanation of the meaning of Emptiness; I might write a paper on deconstruction as a new approach to Shunyata; Derrida and Dogen will start to look wonderfully similar; Foucault and Fa-tsang are somehow saying much the same thing; and come to think of it, wasn't Buddha a patriarchal, hierarchical, marginalizing, sexist swine?

     "Oh dear. The point is simply that the great wisdom traditions, unexcelled in showing us some of the phenomenal (or first-person) stages of individual subjective consciousness as it unfolds from subconscious to self-conscious to superconscious, are nonetheless ill-equipped to show us the intersubjective stages that consciousness assumes as it manifests in its interactive, communal, or collective forms. And because the traditions are ill-equipped to spot these stages, they are ill-equipped to spot pathologies in them: and thus they are poorly suited to diagnose, let alone cure, the great nightmare called boomeritis....

     "Worse than that, many of the wisdom traditions in our culture have actually succumbed to it: boomeritis Buddhism is born. And boomeritis shamanism, boomeritis ecology, boomeritis New Age, boomeritis paganism, boomeritis spirituality in general.... (See Sidebar H : 'Boomeritis Buddhism.')

     "Does this mean that the great contemplative traditions, like Buddhism, are partial and limited? I'm afraid so, yes--but then, so is any system that we could ever come up with, including ours. Even if we produce what we feel is a perfectly integral model at this time, a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, a million years from now, our 'complete system' will look something like a flea on the elephant of the system that the future will disclose. Of course our systems are always partial, and of course new ones will always dwarf our discoveries. But we persist in attempting to be as integral as we can be at this time, because even a little bit of wholeness is better than none at all.

     "Does this mean that I can't get any sort of Enlightenment if I only use Buddhist meditation? Actually, no, it does not mean that. Let me be more specific. Buddhism--and all great contemplative traditions--offer meditation with form (gross or subtle) that eventually gives way to meditation without form (or the causal unmanifest). Both forms of meditation are important and should be included, but it is meditation in the pure formless state (nirvana, nirvikalpa, Ayn, formless Godhead) that is said to constitute the Great Liberation, because when you discover that you are Consciousness-without-an-object--or pure Emptiness--then you are freed from the torture and torment that all objects inflict, partial and finite and lacerating as they are.

     "Of course, once you have awakened to the pure Emptiness of the I AM state, then that Emptiness is perfectly integrated and united with the world of all Form, such that Emptiness and Form are truly 'nondual.' At that point, but not before, you are indeed one with the Earth, but only because you have found formless Heaven. Both are crucially important.

     "Perhaps we could put it this way: In discovering formless Emptiness, you become FREE. Free, because you realize that what you are in reality is not in any way limited to the finite manifest realm. When you discover the Original Face that you had before the Big Bang, you are infinitely, radically, wildly free from all possible limitation, boundaries, manifestation, constriction. This is why nirvana, or formless release, is always said to be the Great Liberation.

     "But that is not the entire story, is it? Because once you discover nirvana or the formless, and once you actually push through it, then you further discover that nirvana and samsara are 'not two.' That is, the formless Self is actually one with the entire world of Form in ever-present One Taste. At that point, you are not merely Free, you are FULL. You are saturated by the entire Kosmos which is your own Body of Form. Having found nirvana or FREEDOM, you now find that nirvana and samsara are together eternally in a FULLNESS that is none other than the love that moves the sun and other stars.

     "Both Freedom and Fullness, or Emptiness and Form, are integral aspects of the ever-present Nondual. But if you have one without the other, a lopsided moment greets you each day. If you have only Emptiness, only Freedom, you are divorced from the body and its earth and its radiant vitality (you are a mere Ascender). If you have only Fullness, you are not merely one with the body and earth, you are fused with them, attached to them, bound to a series of finite objects that you confuse with infinite spirit (you are a mere Descender). Obviously, if you are identified with body and earth, you cannot find the Original Face that existed before the Big Bang. In other words, becoming 'one' with the Earth before finding Emptiness is merely a type of immersion in phenomenal experience, which is very prevalent now in the many spiritual movements that equate oneness with the gross realm with nonduality.

     "But as for the great formless Emptiness itself, it does not evolve, develop, or even exist in time. It has no moving parts, so it can't break down, nor can it be improved: there's nothing, literally, to improve. So if you discover pure Emptiness right now--and the great traditions can most certainly show you how to do that--then it will be the same Emptiness that those smarty-pants future folks will be discovering as well.

     "In other words, in the two components of Enlightenment, Buddhism (or any of the great wisdom traditions) can definitely show you how to find infinite FREEDOM. And having found that Freedom now, one is Free eternally. Find the Great Liberation right now--by discovering that you are Empty consciousness-without-an-object--and you are Free for all time.

      "But when that Freedom becomes one with the world of Form, we must then ask: what is the nature of the world of Form at that moment? If I have my Great Liberation at the time of, say, Gautama Buddha, then the world of Form does not include computers, the internet, a man on the moon, an understanding of neurophysiology, the discovery of intersubjective stages, and so on. In other words, although my formless Freedom is perfect, the world of Form as it existed two-thousand years ago lacks many things that are in today's world of Form.

      "Put bluntly, while the Formless is timeless, the world of Form evolves . The world of Form grows, changes, develops, evolves. As Whitehead often pointed out, the world of evolution, the world of Form, is marked by novel emergence --new things come into being with the unfolding of time. In healthy development, in fact, there is an increasing complexification--an increasing differentiation-and-integration--and thus the world of Form becomes fuller and fuller and fuller. Atoms to molecules to cells to organisms: the world of Form becomes Fuller , as evolution unfolds and embraces more and more realities.

      "(Of course, the world of Form can also become Sicker, precisely because there are more and more realities to screw up. But here, of course, we are focusing on the positive sides of evolving Form.)

      "Therefore, compared with the Enlightenment that I might achieve two-thousand years ago, the Enlightenment that I might achieve today can be Fuller--even though it will never be Freer. The formless Freedom of the Great Liberation is the same, but there are simply more and more things in the world of Form to be one with.

      "This is where a more integral spirituality enters the picture. In an integral or AQAL approach, we cannot really improve on the Emptiness or the Freedom; we are simply trying to be more adequate to the world of Form at this time--we are working to insure a Fuller expression and celebration of the Emptiness that you are in any event, and we do so by trying to offer more comprehensive and more integral maps of the world of evolving Form, so that, being more aware of all of these manifest potentials, you can embrace them with the love and compassion borne of fierce Emptiness. [See the discussion about this 'evolutionary Enlightenment' between Andrew Cohen and KW in the latest issue of What Is Enlightenment ?]

     "Thus, find formless Enlightenment now, you have found it for all time, because the Formless is radically prior to time itself. And you can certainly do that right now with Buddhism (or any of the great causal traditions). But how will you express that Enlightenment? What Forms will it be one with? What vehicles will it embrace? Will it be an integral embrace or a fragmented one? And will it be temporary or permanent?

     "I had a spiritual teacher, with much enlightened wisdom (i.e., alive to the Formless), who nevertheless believed, based on his tradition, that smoking one cigarette was equal to killing a hundred people. Which, due to a misspent youth, puts me somewhere alongside Pol Pot as a mass murderer. You see, even if you are Enlightened in that sense (numerous experiences of causal satori and Freedom), you still have a relative body with a relative mind existing in the relative world. Will your mind be adequate, or lost in ancient myths and prejudices? Will it be comprehensive to the times? Will it be as compassionate, as all-inclusive, as integral and as Full as it can be? Or will it be partial, prejudiced, perhaps even shot through with boomeritis?

      "So we try to use an integral model in order to express Enlightenment (Freedom) through the most comprehensive vehicles that we can (Fullness), which includes an embrace of body, feeling, earth, the feminine, the lunar, the diffuse (in addition to, not instead of, logic, thinking, the masculine, the solar, the focal). All of those more comprehensive identities help to make our realization, not Freer, but Fuller.

      "Our particular version of that Fuller approach we call AQAL. But please notice: 'all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states' refers to the manifest realm or the world of Form. In other words, for us, the Nondual--which is defined as 'Emptiness plus all Form'--means 'Emptiness plus AQAL.' But in and by itself , the world of Form, the world of AQAL, is merely the world of illusion.

     "IF the world of Form is realized to be one with Spirit, then that Form (or AQAL) is indeed seen as the radiant manifestation of the pure Emptiness of the Great Perfection, and as such, the entire world of Form is simply the radiant Body of your own Consciousness. But if one is merely immersed in the world of Form, identified with the body and the earth and the manifest realm, one is indeed lost in the Cave of Shadows, hugging finite objects in the hope of finding Freedom. One confuses kissing the shadows with finding the Light.

     "In other words, on the other side of nirvana (or on the other side of the realization of Emptiness), the manifest realm is indeed (and always has been) the radiant Body of Buddha. But on this side of nirvana, the manifest realm is merely the prison of samsara. You might find a type of Fullness here, but you will never be Free. And thus what fullness you find will torture you to death, here in the passing shadows and searing pain of samsara.

     "So why do we spend so much time mapping out all these quadrants, all these levels, all these lines, all these states, if, in themselves, they are nothing but the illusions that are our prison? Well, if you were in prison and you wanted to get out, wouldn't it help to have a floor plan of the prison?

     "That's what an AQAL map is: it is the most accurate, most complete floor plan of samsara that we can find, the most comprehensive map of the prison, useful precisely because studying it will better help you to plan your escape from this mess altogether. (And yes, it is an escape from the shadows that paradoxically resides in embracing the shadows with such passionate equanimity that they yield the light that was hiding not beyond them, but within and beyond them: the causal gives way to the nondual as Emptiness and Form unite in the Heart, and Heaven and Earth become One Taste. The problem with a mere Earth embrace is that it can find no beyond of any sort, and thus indeed is stuck only with shadows.)

     "Just as important, a more integral map of the prison will let you more easily spot that architectural mess called boomeritis. Sticking with our simple metaphor, there are at least four quadrants, or four major rooms, in the prison of samsara. And the Zen master who is helping you escape from the prison usually doesn't know about some of those rooms (the Lower-Left quadrant, or the intersubjective stages researched by, e.g., Spiral Dynamics), and therefore he or she will leave a bunch of prisoners--aspects of your own relative, manifest personality--stuck in those rooms, fixated in those rooms, one of whose walls is covered with graffiti that says: boomeritis slept here.

     "And boomeritis is still sleeping here: because its existence is unsuspected, boomeritis continues to dominate the relative personality, even if Emptiness otherwise saturates your being and you have had many profound satoris. On the Freedom side, you might be very Free, but on the Fullness side, you are stuck with boomeritis.

     "You will continue to interpret your higher and highest states of consciousness using the general developmental wave of your own conventional mind, which very well might be the green meme, and even the mean green meme, so that boomeritis will haunt your life, skewing your insides in ways that you just can't quite figure out: all this meditation, and something is still wrong....

     "Can a person with a bad case of boomeritis reach permanent realization or permanent Enlightenment (as opposed to passing states or temporary satori)? In my opinion, no; and I think the evidence here agrees. You can, as we have repeatedly seen, have numerous satoris, altered states, meditative states, or peak experiences of Emptiness (the causal and even the Nondual). That is, you can have numerous authentic satoris. But the way you convert those temporary states into permanent traits is by developing through the waves of consciousness in a stable fashion. If your center of gravity is caught at green, circling in an endless stream of boomeritis, then it will be very hard to move permanently to yellow, turquoise, and third tier. You will have a glitch in your center of gravity, as it orbits its own shadow and fails to reach escape velocity from the planet Ego.

     "There are many teachers, in many traditions--Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Neopagan, Feminist, Pluralist, Shamanic, Transpersonal--that have had numerous profound satoris, kenshos, unio mystica states, luminous raptures, embodied revelations--but their conventional personalities are still structured by boomeritis. With every good intention--and their intentions are often solid gold--they end up equating the ultimate truth of Nonduality with the relative truths of the green meme, and there the sad story commences. If and when green goes sour, which it often does in Boomer culture, then the nightmare begins, because now God/dess and Spirit and Buddha are on the side of boomeritis. Some examples of this are given in a lecture called, appropriately enough, Boomeritis Buddhism [Sidebar H], so if you're interested, please drop by.

     "But my point is that the tangled web of boomeritis spirituality is almost impossible to untie; the knots in consciousness are so dense, so encouraged by cultural pressure, so supported by social consensus, that it takes something of a heroic effort to shake them off and get on about your own evolution. Even worse, because virtually none of the various spiritual approaches--yesterday or today--possess an understanding of intersubjective waves, then there is little in any of today's spiritual approaches to help directly dislodge boomeritis.

     "Fortunately, there has lately been a shift in the samsaric winds: the MGM has run its course, boomeritis is starting to recognize that what it called liberation might be just another room in the prison, and sensitive souls everywhere are again looking for a genuine Light on the other side of their selves.

     "How to begin? Perhaps a good place to start is by getting a better floor plan of the prison. Get an integral map--or a map that is as integral as today's age can recognize. Of course, in the opinion of us at IC, it should at least include all the quadrants, levels, lines, and states. You don't have to obsessively memorize them all or know every boring detail--although you're welcome to do so--but simply familiarize yourself with enough of the general contours to make sure that you are taking all of your subpersonalities in all four rooms of the prison and getting the heck out of there--so that you then can embrace them all with passionate equanimity, and not merely identify with some of them to the exclusion of others.

     "In a more integral approach, many of the things that you have learned from the psychological systems of the great spiritual traditions are still true enough, it's just that they are largely dealing with the Upper-Left quadrant. They are still true as far as they go, and you can continue to mine that extraordinary wisdom. But you can also add the insights from the other quadrants--especially the Lower Left and Lower Right--and thus begin to take advantage of things like Spiral Dynamics, Carol Gilligan, Robert Kegan, Jane Loevinger, and so on.

     "And that is the final reason, the real reason, to adopt a more integral approach--not so that you can become Freer, but that you can become Fuller. An AQAL map reminds us of places in ourselves that we might not yet have touched; potentials we might not yet have tapped; areas to which love and compassion can yet be brought--so that my eternal Freedom can become Fuller and Fuller the more that I can love, the more that I can embrace, the more that I can honor in the Kosmic Consciousness that is ever-present yet ever-unfolding.

     "In that ever-present Light, samsara isn't a prison, it is the direct manifestation of a radiant Spirit overflowing with a Love that not even infinity can contain, a wildly reckless Passion that manifests entire galaxies so that it will have someone to love, that constantly exalts the Beloved in Kosmic hymns of relentlessly mad and lunatic praise, hymns that appear to mere mortals as the cascading rain, the sheltering sky, the whispering winds, but are really nothing but the infinite insanity of a Spirit that loves so intensely that the entire Kosmos arises to bear witness....

     "More sure-footedly tiptoeing through the rooms of your despair, you might one day--perhaps very soon--awaken to find that the entire drama of the separate self was simply the worst dream of your entire Kosmic life, and that you can, once again, breathe in and dissolve the worlds easily, breathe out and create them all over again, just... like... that!, timeless radiance to timeless radiance, magnificent howl of eternal release, ever present and always shining, even now whispering its name in the gentle winds that softly sing around you, if you listen very, very carefully...."

Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V