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Introduction to the third volume of The Collected Works of Ken Wilber
I
have, for convenience, divided my overall work into four general phases.
Phase-1 was Romantic (a "recaptured-goodness" model), which posited
a spectrum of consciousness ranging from subconscious to self-conscious to
superconscious (or id to ego to God), with the higher stages viewed as a return
to, and recapture of, original but lost potentials. Phase-2 was more
specifically evolutionary or developmental (a "growth-to-goodness"
model), with the spectrum of consciousness unfolding in developmental stages or
levels. Phase-3 added developmental lines to those developmental
levels--that is, numerous different developmental lines (such as
cognitive, conative, affective, moral, psychological, spiritual, etc.)
proceeding in a relatively independent manner through the basic levels of the
overall spectrum of consciousness. Phase-4 added the idea of the four
quadrants--the subjective (intentional), objective (behavioral),
intersubjective (cultural), and interobjective (social) dimensions--of
each of those levels and lines, with the result being, or at least attempting
to be, a comprehensive or integral philosophy.
The works of these phases form a fairly coherent whole. It is not so much that one
period was rejected and replaced by its successor, but that the works of each
period remain, in my opinion, largely valid, and the succeeding works simply
add new material, not erase old. Each phase was relatively true but partial,
and had much of its partialness corrected by subsequent additions (or so I
trust). Even the works of phase-1, if their occasional Romanticisms are
removed, contribute useful foundation stones for this particular edifice.
The material in this volume is from a full-fledged phase-2. One of the main tasks
of phase-2 was to explore the implications of a developmental and evolutionary
view of psychology, religion, philosophy, and the human condition in general;
and likewise attempt to expose certain fallacies that result from a failure to
take a sufficiently developmental view into account. As such, the works in
this volume are still, in my opinion, some of the most important I have done.
None of them has received quite the attention, or caused quite the controversy, as
"The Pre/Trans Fallacy," so perhaps I should begin my commentary
there. I discovered the pre/trans fallacy by looking at my own mistakes. By
looking, that is, at why the Romantic viewpoint seems at first to make so much
sense--and why almost everybody seems to start their study of spirituality
with a Romantic viewpoint--and yet it cannot handle the actual data and
evidence of phylogenetic and ontogenetic development. The general Romantic
view is fairly straightforward: infants, and dawn humans, start out immersed in
an unconscious union with the world at large (and the pure
Self)--peacefully embedded in a type of primal Paradise (either a literal
earthly Eden, a foraging ecological wisdom, or an infant fusion "with the
mother and the world in bliss"). Through subsequent development, this
primal paradise is necessarily lost as the rational-ego emerges from this
primal Ground, breaks and fragments this "nondissociated" state,
and creates thereby a world of sin, suffering, ecological catastrophe,
patriarchal brutality, and general malevolence. But the self (and humanity)
can drop its overly analytic, divisive, and fragmented stance by returning to,
and recapturing, the wholeness of the original embeddedness (but now in a
mature and conscious form, or on a higher level). The original wholeness, now
combined with analytic capacities, will result in a renewed heaven-on-earth,
ecologically sound and balanced, and usher in a liberated nondissociated
consciousness, which is spiritual in the deepest and truest sense.
As I explained in the introduction to volume 2, I started writing both
The Atman Project and Up from Eden in order to prove that Romantic
conception. If nothing else, it cannot be said that I do not understand that view,
or that I have never had any sympathy for it. I was, in phase-1, its most ardent fan.
But the more I tried to make the Romantic orientation explain the actual evidence, the
more dismally it failed. During a long period of intellectual anguish, I slowly abandoned
a strictly Romantic stance (while keeping some of its more durable truths), and moved to
adopt the only view that seemed to me to be able to impartially handle the
great preponderance of evidence--and that was a developmental or
evolutionary model.
In tracing out my early, fervent embrace of Romanticism, I was able to reconstruct
what I believe are the intellectual errors that lead to that embrace--and
they are all summarized by "the pre/trans fallacy." The PTF simply
says: in any recognized developmental sequence, where development proceeds from
pre-x to x to trans-x, the pre states and the trans states, because they are
both non-x states, tend to be confused and equated, simply because they appear,
at first glance, to be so similar. Prerational and transrational are both
nonrational; preconventional and postconventional are both nonconventional;
prepersonal and transpersonal are both nonpersonal, and so on. And once we
confuse pre and trans, then one of two unfortunate things tends to happen: we
either reduce transrational, spiritual, superconscious states to prerational,
infantile, oceanic fusion (as did Freud); or we elevate infantile, childish,
prerational states to transcendental, transrational, transpersonal glory (as
the Romantics often did). We reduce trans to pre, or we elevate pre to trans.
Reductionism is well-understood; elevationism was the great province of the
Romantics.
The Romantics, and me in phase-1. The overwhelming preponderance of evidence
points to the fact that infants (and early hominids) did not exist in a
transrational heaven, but in a prerational slumber. The awakening of the
rational, self-conscious ego out of this prerational, prereflexive slumber did
indeed involve a painful awakening to the horrors of the manifest world, but
that awakening was not a fall from a previous superconscious state, but the
growth up and out of a subconscious immersion. The subconscious immersion is
already fallen--it already exists in the manifest world of hunger,
pain, finititude, and mortality--it just hasn't the awareness to fully register
those painful facts. Likewise, the rational ego, far from being the height of
ontological alienation, is actually half-way through the growth to
superconscious awakening. (The ego isn't actually in the lowest hell, it
just feels like it, much as frostbite doesn't really hurt until the
affected part starts to warm up.)
But the Romantics, correctlyrealizing that Spirit is beyond mere rationality,
and correctly realizing that the rational-ego stands outside of, and even resists,
nondual Spiritual consciousness, then made the classic elevationist PTF: they assumed
the prehistorical slumber in Paradise was the primal whole out of which humanity fell, and
back to which humanity must return, in order to usher in a transrational heaven. And that
deeply regressive view of human potentials would set the stage for all of the well-known
downsides, even horrors, of Romanticism: an obsession with self and self-feelings (regressing
from worldcentric to sociocentric to egocentric), hedonistic amorality (regressing from
postconventional compassion to conventional care to preconventional impulse)--all of which
claimed to be "beyond reason," whereas most of it was simply beneath it.
All of that became obvious to me as I reconstructed my own mistakes. And all of
that I worked out in the concept of the pre/trans fallacy. The idea itself was
initially presented in The Atman Project, which was the first major statement
of phase-2; and it was worked out in detail in the essay "The Pre/Trans Fallacy," which
was included in the book Eye to Eye (which is included in this volume).
In the almost twenty years since its publication, two types of criticism have
constantly been leveled at the pre/trans fallacy. The reductionists
aggressively attack it for allowing the existence of any
transrational, transpersonal states (they are still ever so busy reducing all
trans states to sneaky insurrections of infantile, prerational silliness). And
elevationists indignantly attack it, often vitriolically, for claiming that
infants and children (and dawn humans) are only prerational, without access to
any sort of spiritual or transpersonal states. Both of these attacks are
exactly what one would expect to happen if the PTF were true; still, both sides
have presented my view as much more rigid than it ever was.
First, with the reductionists, I do not think that all, or even most, of those states
that claim to be transpersonal or spiritual are actually that. Speaking as an
authority on the topic, I can say that the human capacity for self-delusion is
too enormous to take all such claims at face value. A highly critical,
occasionally skeptical, and sometimes even polemical attitude must be our
constant companion on the road to any sort of truth. The commodity most
lacking in spiritual circles seems to be, indeed, a healthy skepticism,
possibly because it is confused with lack of faith, a stance which, if
understandable, is deeply misguided. Nonetheless, against the reductionists,
I--and a colossal amount of crosscultural evidence--refuse to dismiss
all transpersonal, transrational, mystical states, as if they were only
irritating irruptions from an infantile, primordial slime.
With the elevationists, I can agree, to a point, that various types of spiritual or
transpersonal states are available to infants (and dawn humans), nor have I
ever denied that. I will first address infants, and then the earlier stages of
human evolution.
In particular, I see two major types of spiritual access in infants. One, what I
have called "trailing clouds of glory," which refers to all the deeper psychic (or soul)
awareness that the individual brings to this life and which is therefore present in some
sense from conception forward (however you wish to construe that--as reincarnation, or
simply as deeper potentials present from the start). Hazrat Inayat Khan probably put it
best: "The crying of an infant is very often the expression of its longing for the angelic
heavens [through which it has just passed on its way to earthly birth--what the Tibetans call
the rebirth bardo]; the smiles of an infant are a narrative of its memories of heaven and of
the spheres above." Notice that these potentials are not something that are part of the
infantile stage itself--they are lingering impressions from other, higher spheres.
(And therefore, what is recaptured in enlightenment is not the infantile structure
itself, but the actual higher spheres! The Romantic notion that the infantile self is
itself a primordial paradise remains therefore deeply mistaken.)
Two, the infant also has access to what I refer to as the three major states of
consciousness: gross (waking), subtle (dreaming and deeper psychic), and causal
(deep sleep, pure Witness, primordial Self). The early self (prenatal,
perinatal, neonatal, infancy, and early childhood) has various types of access
to all of those spiritual states (because it wakes, dreams, and sleeps). But
so does the adult. In other words, the infantile state, in this regard, does
not have access to something spiritual that is then lost or denied to the adult.
(The strictly Romantic view is, again, significantly off the mark.)
So does the infantile self have access to any sort of "spiritual awareness" that is actually
lost in subsequent development but can be regained in higher states of
spiritual awakening? In a limited sense, yes: the trailing clouds of glory (whether in
their prenatal, perinatal, neonatal or later forms). But, to repeat, those "trailing
clouds" are primarily a lingering contact or impression of higher, transpersonal,
transrational levels; they are not potentials that are structurally part of the
infantile self, so that, in recontacting these higher levels in subsequent development, it
is not a regression to infancy that is occurring, but a progression to, and
rediscovery of, the higher levels themselves. The fetal and infantile self does not live in
perfect nirvana,[1] beyond all suffering and pain and decay;
it lives immersed in samsara, with all its hunger, pain, passing pleasure, screams and
occasional smiles--but it carries with it, buried in its bosom, the higher levels of its
own potential evolution (and the higher states of subtle and causal consciousness), which it
can permanently contact and bring into full consciousness only when its own
development moves from prerational to rational to transrational.
Of course, any of the lower, prerational potentials (e.g., various protoemotions,
prana, emotional-sexual impulses) can themselves be repressed during early
childhood development, and if that occurs, then, as I have strongly maintained all along,
successful therapy generally involves regression in service of the ego (in order to recontact
and reintegrate these lost or repressed facets). Moreover, if this repression is severe,
it can slow or even completely cripple higher development into transpersonal and
superconscious states. In that case, there needs to occur a spiraling return
to early structures: a regression in service of ego (to repair the early,
prerational trauma), and then a progression in transcendence of ego (having
repaired the prerational damage, the self can more easily move from rational to
transrational adaptation). So once again, even in this spiral of
return-and-transcend, what is being contacted is not itself a higher state, but
a lower state badly damaged and in need of repair. The Romantic view is again
considerably off the mark.
Finally, the pre/trans fallacy says that in any recognized developmental sequence,
pre and trans are often confused. It does not say, childhood is nothing but
pre. As I just explained, there are types of transient access to spiritual
states even in the infantile self. Rather, the pre/trans fallacy is meant to
call attention to the massive types of confusion that occur even in fully
recognized developmental sequences. For example, researchers from Piaget to
Kohlberg to Gilligan agree that moral judgment moves from preconventional to
conventional to postconventional modes. The pre/trans fallacy simply says
that, given this recognized sequence, preconventional and postconventional are
often confused, simply because both are nonconventional. And we have to look
no further than the general New Age movement to find abundant evidence of
preconventional impulse being confused with postconventional liberation;
prerational self-absorption being confused with postrational freedom; preverbal
hedonism confused with transverbal wisdom. Alas, it is almost always the
Romantic orientation, with its sincere but deeply confused elevationism, that
drives the entire display, with self-obsession elevated to Self-realization,
divine egoism exalted as divine liberation, and rampant narcissism paraded as
transcendental freedom. But the important nugget of truth contained in the
Romantic intuition is that, indeed, we have fallen from a union with Spirit (a
union found, not in the dregs of an infantile past, but in the depths of the
timeless present), and we can indeed regain that spiritual union--but
only if we grow in a transcendence of ego, and not simply recapture an
infantile self. (For an extensive discussion of childhood spirituality, see
Integral Psychology.)
What, then, of the earlier stages of human development? And not just the dawn state
of perhaps a million years ago, but also the early stages of tribal foraging
and village horticulture? Are we arrogantly to pronounce them "inferior"? And are we
really to claim they had no access to transrational, transpersonal spirituality? Romantic
theorists bristle at the thought that anyone would so callously pronounce whole epochs to
be "inferior" or "lacking in genuine spirituality." And rightly so. But then, I have never
even remotely claimed such.
To begin with, however, let us note that the Romantics who get so indignant about
those two claims ("inferiority" and "lacking true spirituality") make exactly those
claims themselves--not about foraging tribes, but about you and me. The general
anthropological Romantic claim is that original tribal consciousness (during the
period Gebser calls "magical") was "nondissociated," a type of harmony and
wholeness of self, culture, and nature. The Romantic theorists agree that this
magical structure was prereflexive and prerational (in the sense of
pre-formal-operational thinking as a central organizing principle of society;
the society was instead organized around prereflexive nondissociated
consciousness). But, they claim, far from being a "lower" development, this prereflexive
consciousness was balanced, holistic, ecologically sound, and deeply spiritual. But,
they continue, with the eventual rise of egoic-rationality (through several stages), this
nondissociated state was brutally repressed, fragmented, and destroyed, and in
its place was a nightmare called modernity, which is marked, first and foremost, by
dissociated consciousness, which carries alienation, fragmentation, and shallow
(if any) spirituality. In other words, in its place are you and I: we moderns are all,
with a few exceptions, judged to be living in dissociated consciousness, an inferior,
fragmented state, lacking a genuine spirituality. This Romantic view thus condemns literally
hundreds of millions of modern people as having inferior consciousness and lacking a
deep spirituality. So the first thing we should note is that charges of "inferiority" and
"lacking spirituality" drop from the lips of these Romantics with an alarming ease and
frequency. It is a very harsh system of ranking and value judgements that these Romantics
have embraced, and it would do well for all of us to soften such brutal blows.
My view of the early tribal magical structure is, I believe, more nuanced. But
let me first emphasize that I am talking about the original, prehistorical,
tribal, foraging mode of perhaps 200,000 to 20,000 years ago (a similar case
can be made with the horticultural mode of 10,000 to 3,000 years ago). Indigenous peoples
living today are people living today; they have continued to undergo their own
development for hundreds of thousands of years, and their exact relationship to prehistoric
tribes is far from clear; moreover, they are usually inextricably intermixed with other
cultures and modes. No, I am referring to the structure of the original, prehistorical,
magical-foraging mode, to the extent we can reconstruct it.
To begin with, any society is a collection of individuals who themselves are at
very different levels of development. At the same time, as I pointed out in
Up from Eden, any given culture has something like a "center of gravity," or
an average mode of consciousness, around which conventional, everyday realities
are organized. The Romantics agree that the average mode of early tribes was
"magical" (in the nonpejorative sense of prereflexive and nondissociated) and the average
mode of modernity is egoic-rational (which is usually meant pejoratively, but doesn't
affect our main point about the average mode). I further suggested that in addition to
the average mode, there is the most advanced mode, the mode displayed by those souls
who were the most developed in any particular domain. During the magical foraging times,
this definitely appears to have included the shamans, who, I forcefully argued, were the
first great explorers of the genuinely transpersonal, spiritual domains. At the very
least, these souls directly experienced the deeper psychic dimension of the human potential,
evidenced in an extraordinarily sophisticated nature mysticism, journeys to upper- and
under-world domains, actual psychic capacities, and--again at the very least--a unitive
consciousness with the entire realm of nature. In Up from Eden I spent an entire
chapter extolling these remarkable, authentic, and deeply spiritual feats.
At the same time, scholars of the shamanic state, such as Roger Walsh, have
pointed out that, although there might have been exceptions, the typical
shamanic voyage did not include, for example, extended periods of absorption in
the purely formless realm (causal cessation). In other words, by criteria that
are acceptable even to shamanic advocates, the shamanic voyage did not include
the causal domain. And therefore, at the very least, shamanic spirituality was
not a path that traversed the entire transpersonal realm.
If, on the other hand, one performs (as Up from Eden did) a historical analysis
on the succession or emergence of spiritual states accessed by the typical forms of the
most advanced consciousness in each general epoch (magic to mythic to mental), one
generally finds a succession of transpersonal states that move from shamanic (psychic)
to saintly (subtle) to sagely (causal), with each of the succeeding states having access
to their predecessors, but not vice versa--a true mark of a holarchy of development.
The advanced mode of the magical-foraging era was thus most definitely alive to
profound realms of authentic spiritual development, even if we cannot
believably claim that shamanism itself exhausted the entire terrain. To
return, then to the average mode: What of the actual nature of the
prereflexive, nondissociated consciousness, or the "magical structure" of the average
mode of foraging consciousness? Was it a truly integrated, holistic, harmonious whole?
The magical structure, no doubt, was an extraordinary mode of consciousness; if
nothing else, it inhabited the first men and women who evolved beyond the great
apes and hominids, and although some people will insist on seeing this as an
insult to apes, it was a colossal evolutionary advance by almost any scale of
judgment. Still, the question is whether it actually integrated
self, culture, and nature, or whether it had not yet fully differentiated them
in the first place. By calling this magical structure
"nondissociated," the Romantics completely beg the question, avoid
the issue. The great, glorious, catch-all prefix "non" always
stands as a warning of a pre/trans fallacy begging to be made. For the real
question is, not whether this structure was "nondifferentiated,"
but was this structure pre-differentiated or was it truly trans-differentiated?
"Nondissociated" can easily apply to both (which is exactly how it
hides its sweeping PTF).
Approaching the question in this more precise fashion, the answer is more obvious. The
magical structure was largely predifferentiated. On this, scholars from across
a wide spectrum of approaches are in general agreement. Jean Houston,
following Gerald Heard, calls this the pre-individual and proto-individual
period (that is, archaic to magic). Duane Elgin refers to them as constricted
consciousness and awakening (proto) consciousness. Habermas and his
colleagues, who conducted extensive research reviews, calls them
preconventional and predifferentiated. Robert Bellah, tracing religious
evolution, calls them primitive and archaic (predifferentiated action systems).
Neumann called them pleromatic, uroboric, and pre-individuated. This does not
mean stupid, confused, or imbecilic; it means that various subjective,
objective, and intersubjective domains were not approached in fully
differentiated terms. Some see this as a good thing; others as a problem; but
there is general agreement on the actual nature of the structure itself.
The broad conclusion: with the magical structure, the self, culture, and nature
still lay interfused with each other. They were not integrated, for they had
not yet separated, differentiated, and crystallized out from each other. This
predifferentiation is what gives the magical structure its, well, magical
charm, and makes a it a misunderstood magnet for those who actually desire a
transdifferentiated integration for the modern world. But the actual situation
of the foraging mode was, apart from its many wonders, something less than an
integrated paradise. Because the I, the we, and the it were as yet poorly
differentiated, advances in each domain were hindered. Average life span was
less than three decades; political systems were focused on body-bound kinship
lineages; slavery was sporadic but by no means nonexistent; warfare had already
begun; and sexual exploitation was definitely not unheard of. It is, in
its complete contours, a consciousness that no Romantic I know would actually
want to inhabit.
The fact that magic could be taken up and into mythic, and that mythic could be
taken up and into the mental, is a development that--ideally--would
carry the extraordinary accomplishments of each mode forward, building on their
strengths, curtailing their partialness, and building together a more
embracing, inclusive, encompassing future. Ideally, of course, is never the
case, and cultural evolution has as often been the history of brutalities,
repressions, oppressions, and worse, as human evolution sometimes progressed,
sometimes brutalized, its way toward tomorrow. Up from Eden was a chronicle
of the undeniable advances, and the even more undeniable brutalities.
But the general point of phylogenetic evolution, as of ontogenetic, is that whenever
the wisdom of a previous stage is forgotten, a pathology results. In A Brief History
of Everything I outlined the major "lessons" that each age of humanity managed to
learn, and the point here is that the great foraging lesson was: Spirit is interwoven
with earthbody, which is our blood, our bones, our foundation, our support. We of the
modern West have forgotten that lesson, and we are therefore in the grips of a global
pathology that very well might kill us all.
That the Romantics want us to remember that incredibly important lesson is very much
to their credit, and in that specific regard, I am a staunch Romantic. But
when they go quite beyond that and dubiously inject characteristics into the
magical structure--when they claim transdifferentiated integration for
what most scholars would see as predifferentiated structures; when they claim
the shamanic voyage was a complete path across the transpersonal; when they
claim that the mental structure itself is intrinsically pathological; and when
they toxically condemn millions upon millions of people to living in an
inferior state compared with magical indissociation--perhaps we might not
wish to follow them.[2]
In addition to "The Pre/Trans Fallacy," Eye to Eye contained nine major essays
exploring the implications of a full-spectrum model of human growth and development. The
overall spectrum of consciousness, as outlined in The Atman Project,
contained almost two dozen basic levels (which are simply an elaboration of the
Great Nest of Being, matter to body to mind to soul to spirit). I usually
condense these into nine or ten major levels, and sometimes use even fewer,
such as the traditional five I just gave (which are essentially the same five
the Vedanta uses), and sometimes only three: body, mind, and spirit (or gross,
subtle, and causal). The essay "Eye to Eye," which opens the book
named after it, uses the simple three (the eye of flesh, the eye of mind, and
the eye of contemplation), and suggests how even that simple scheme can shed
considerable light on many recalcitrant philosophical and psychological
dilemmas. "The Problem of Proof" carries this discussion forward,
and presents what amounts to a full-spectrum empiricism: sensory experience,
mental experience, and spiritual experience, all of which are equally
experiential, and thus all of which can be carefully validated using evidence
that is open to confirmation or rejection by a community of the adequate.
"A Mandalic Map of Consciousness" presents a summary of the overall spectrum
of consciousness, and "Development, Meditation, and the
Unconscious" outlines five major types of "the" unconscious,
and points out why these distinctions are crucial for understanding everything
from the nature of development to the form and content of meditation. In my
opinion, this outline of five different types of unconscious processes is an
important contribution. One of the main conclusions is that meditation is not
primarily a way to dig back into, or uncover, prerational impulses, but rather
a way to carry development or evolution forward into transrational and
superconscious states.
The next two essays ("Physics, Mysticism, and the New Holographic
Paradigm" and "Reflections on the New Age Paradigm") are both
attempts to point out what I believe are certain fallacies contained in those
popular approaches, fallacies that, once again, I understood well by making
most of them myself. I think it is of paramount importance, in trying to
understand other theorists, to start by getting into a state of strong
sympathetic resonance with what they are trying to say. I always try to assume
the other's position until I feel I could argue it successfully in debate. Then, and
only then, do I step back and intensely scrutinize it. If it fails in any major
way, according to whatever wisdom I can muster, then I try to criticize it from
a position of past sympathy. Even in the occasional polemical pieces I have
written, I have rarely written polemically against any view that I did not
myself once embrace; and, like a reformed smoker, am occasionally insufferable
for my condemnations. Many critics therefore assumed that I simply had a blind
prejudice against these ideas and lacked the slightest compassion for their
existence, whereas these critiques actually came out of an urgent desire to
share mistakes that I myself had made. These two essays are prime examples of
such. I stand by every conclusion in both of them, and only hope they can help
to stem a certain regressive and elevationist tide that continues to dominate,
as it always has, spiritual studies.
"Legitimacy, Authenticity, and Authority in the New Religions" came out of a series of
seminars on the new religions, dealing with ways that we might be able to
discriminate between dangerous cults (such as Jonestown and Synanon) and more
beneficial movements (such as Zen or Kabbalah). This piece was written at the
same time I did A Sociable God (which is contained in this volume), and suggests
why and how a developmental view can help adjudicate authentic vs. inauthentic religious
involvement. "Structure, Stage, and Self" marked the first formal statement of
phase-3 theorizing, so I will address that in a moment. And "The Ultimate State of
Consciousness" returned, yet again, to the monotheme of all my writing: Always Already
Truth. It is not uncommon for me, once I have devoted much of a book to the importance
of development, to end on the theme of that which can never be reached by development
or evolution at all, and that is the primordial Ground of Being, a Ground that, being the
Condition of all conditions and the Nature of all natures, is always ever-present, and
therefore could no more be reached or attained than we could attain our feet.
A Sociable God is an interesting book, I believe, for several reasons. To begin
with, I wrote all of it in one fevered weekend. On a Friday afternoon I promised someone
that I would have something soon, and on Monday morning put the manuscript in
the mail. The entire book has a very terse, abstract, spartan, enormously
condensed and crystalline style, for perhaps obvious reasons. It came out of a
very intense intellectual space, and it conveyed ideas that I still believe are
deeply important. It outlines the general spectrum of consciousness, focusing
primarily on worldviews (archaic, magic, mythic, mental, psychic, subtle,
causal, nondual). It then gives nine different ways that the word "religion" is commonly
used, and points out that, at the very least, we need to distinguish between horizontal
legitimacy (or how well a given religion provides meaning, integration, and value
on a particular level) and vertical authenticity (or how well a given religion promotes
transformation to higher levels altogether). Most religious scholars, in confusing these two
scales, have seen the loss or disruption of a lower-level engagement that happened to be
highly legitimate, and mistaken that for a loss of spiritual sensibilities altogether,
when in fact it was often part of a larger movement to a more authentic stance.
The classic example is the loss of the hegemony of a mythic-membership religion
with the rise of modernity, which was not actually the loss of a transrational
spirituality and its replacement by the devil of rationality, but was mostly
the growth beyond prerational modes to rational modes on the way to
the transrational. In this larger evolutionary view, the rational denial of
God contained more Spirit than the mythic affirmation of God, for the simple
reason that it contained more developmental depth. It was more authentic, even
if it was occasionally less legitimate--it was a sick version of a higher
level, compared to the previous healthy version of a lower level, so as we
attempt to redress the ills of modernity, let us not forget the higher
potential contained therein.
The criteria for depth--and the scale of adjudication used in A Sociable God
(as in all of my works)--is holistic embrace: how much of the Kosmos can a
given structure internally contain? Put objectively, how many types of holons does a
particular self-organizing system contain in its own makeup? Put subjectively, how much
love (Agape) is built into a structure? A quark is enfolded in an atom; an atom is enfolded
in a molecule; a molecule into a cell; a cell into an organism. In each case, the holon gains
more depth, because it lovingly embraces more of the Kosmos in its own makeup. Likewise
with human holons: when my identity and sympathy expands from me to my family;
from my family to friends, communities, even nations; from nations to all of
humanity; and from humanity to all sentient beings without exception: what have
I done?, except take more and more souls into my own, and increased thereby my
own depth, by moving increasingly out of me and into the Kosmos at large, until
what I call my "self" and what I call the "Kosmos" are one and the same undeniable Fact, and
the Love that moves the sun and other stars now moves me just as well; and we are all embraced
in a gentle compassion that knows no others nor outsiders, that refuses fragmentation and cannot
remember sorrow's many names.
That scale--from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to Kosmic--is a scale of holistic
embrace, and that scale is the one used in A Sociable God to adjudicate the authenticity
of various cultural and religious engagements. Each higher embrace does not mean that
individuality is increasingly obliterated, but that it is increasingly enlarged. A person
who extends sympathy and caring from his own ego to his family, and from his family to his
community, has not impoverished his self, but enriched it. Just so, to expand one's identity
and sympathy from tribe to multi-tribe nation, and from nation to all humanity, and from humanity
to all sentient beings--is simply to find a deeper Self in the midst of wider embraces. Kosmic
consciousness is not the obliteration of individuality, but its consummate fulfillment, at which
point we can speak of Self or no-self, it matters not which: your Self is the Self of the entire
Kosmos, timeless and therefore eternal, spaceless and therefore infinite, moved only by a radiant
Love that defies date or duration.
That holarchy, or nest of increasingly holistic judgements, has been central to
every work I have ever done, starting with Spectrum; and of course it was as well the
backbone of A Sociable God, which was written right at the beginning of the
eighties--right at the beginning, that is, of the aggressive colonization of all cultural
studies by the extreme postmodernists. It would be a long time--almost two decades,
really--before anybody could breath the word "hierarchy" and not be lynched in "liberal"
academia; before anybody could murmur the phrase "is better than" and not be brought before the
postmodern tribunal and publicly branded a traitor to the cause. For the core of extreme
postmodernism was the notion that all values are culturally relative; all realities are
socially constructed; all truth is a subjective preference in the face of an essentially
truthless world. Unfortunately, all of those statements are said to be true for all people
and for all cultures, without exception. In other words, the extreme postmodernists were
guilty of exactly the horrible sins they viciously accused everybody else of: they
pronounced a long list of universal truths, but with the further embarrassment that their
universal truths were all self-contradictory. They claimed it was universally true that there
are no universal truths, that it is a cultural invariant that there are no cultural
invariants, that it is objectively true that there is no objective truth whatsoever. They
claimed, in fact, that their position was superior in a world where nothing was supposed to
be superior at all. Critics would eventually spot this duplicity and give it a technical
moniker--"the performative contradiction"--but others would simply call it by its
simpler name, hypocrisy.
And now, two decades later, as cultural studies itself awakens to a colossal
hangover--an entire generation of scholarship largely lost in performative
contradictions--in narcissism and nihilism as a postmodern tag team from
hell--we are in a position to pick up exactly where holistic hierarchies
and value judgements left off: with ways of determining how to make sane,
compassionate, and caring judgements based on degrees of depth, on degrees of
love, on degrees of inclusion and holistic embrace. Pick up, that is, where
numerous treatises, including A Sociable God, left off.
A Sociable God and Up from Eden are the books of phase-2 that particularly
explored cultural worldviews. I would later (in phase-4) come to call this the Lower Left
quadrant (the spectrum of collective or cultural consciousness, morals, worldviews, etc.).
The Atman Project had already attempted to outline the Upper Left quadrant (the
individual spectrum of consciousness). What both Up from Eden and A Sociable God
further accomplished, I believe, was to tie these two quadrants together, and to
believably show that individual and cultural are inextricably bound by patterns of relational
exchange. That is, the human being is a compound individual, compounded of matter, body,
mind, soul, and spirit (to use the simple five levels). Each level of the compound individual
is actually a system of mutual exchanges with elements at the same level of development
in the exterior world: matter with matter (physical food consumption), body
with body (sexual procreation), mind with mind (symbolic communication), and so
on. At every level, in other words, the subjective world is embedded in vast
networks of intersubjective or cultural relationships, and vice versa, not as
an afterthought or a voluntary choice, but as an inescapable pregiven fact. As
I would later put it, agency is always agency-in-communion.
It is common to look at social evolution in terms of the various modes of
techno-economic production, moving from foraging to horticultural to agrarian
to industrial to informational (what I would call the Lower Right quadrant, or
social systems). By supplementing that analysis with a focus on worldviews
(which move correlatively from archaic to magic to mythic to mental to global),
[3] A Sociable God was able to make a series of
predictions that have held up quite well. One was that the breakdown of the civil
religion (as discussed by Robert Bellah) would leave American culture open to several
trends, including a retrenchment and even resurgence of fundamentalist religion, as well
as a regression to narcissistic New Age agendas and intense self-absorption. It's not
hard to find corroborative evidence for both of those in today's culture. But
another, riskier prediction involved the fact that beyond the rational-egoic
level is the first stage of transrationality, namely the psychic level, which
supports a panenhenic, shamanic, nature mysticism. The prediction was that the
most widespread, popular themes of a newly emerging spiritual orientation would
therefore involve shamanic, panenhenic, nature mysticism and Gaia worship,
focused on ecological consciousness and gross realm unity. More than I
imagined, this has become the case. On the one had, this is altogether
salutary, coming just in time, one hopes, to help stem a certain ecological
catastrophe wrought, not by modernity per se, but by typical human greed, a
greed which--most definitely present from the time of archaic foraging,
but which at that time had not the means to express itself globally--finally found a
way, by hijacking the fruits of modernity, to make itself suicidal on a global scale.
Alas, with this resurgence of nature mysticism has also come the standard,
correlative distrust of all higher mystical states, including deity mysticism
and formless mysticism. These are, as always, misinterpreted by panenhenic
enthusiasts to be "other-worldly" and therefore supposedly
anti-earth, anti-Gaia, and anti-ecological, whereas they actually transcend and
include all of those concerns. But the nature mystics have come armed with
venomous words for souls who seek yet deeper and higher occasions, and I
believe it will be decades before this particular fury runs its unpleasant
course.[4]
A Sociable God was also pioneering, in my opinion, in that it introduced a
psychological model of structures, states, and realms. A person at almost any stage
or structure of development (such as magic, mythic, rational) can have a temporary peak
experience of any of the transpersonal realms (psychic, subtle, causal), and
this gives us a grid of nine or more types of spiritual experiences. I
outlined these different types of altered states or spiritual experiences
(e.g., a magic, mythic, or rational peak experience of a psychic, subtle, or
causal realm), and pointed out why these distinctions are crucial in
understanding religion and religious experience. This "three-dimensional" model was, at
the time, a novel integration of research on psychological structures (e.g., Piaget,
Kohlberg, Gebser) and states of consciousness (e.g., Tart), and it has remained a central
aspect of all subsequent phases of my work (phases 2, 3, and 4). A crucial conclusion
was that higher development involves not just altered states but permanent
traits--that is, the necessity of converting temporary peak experiences
into permanent transpersonal structures. (See Integral Psychology for an-depth
discussion of this model.)
Toward the end of this period I began, not so much to question the evolutionary model,
as to appreciate both its strengths and its weaknesses. In particular, studies
in developmental psychology were already starting to suggest that development
does not proceed in a linear monolithic fashion through a series of discrete
ladder-like stages. Rather, overall development seems to consist of numerous
different developmental lines or streams (such as cognitive, moral, affective,
psychological, and spiritual) that progress in a relatively independent fashion
through the basic spectrum of consciousness. If we simplify the spectrum of
consciousness as going from preconventional to conventional to postconventional
to post-postconventional waves, and if we use affects or feelings as an example
of a particular stream, then we have preconventional affects (e.g.,
narcissistic rage, impulse gratification), conventional affects (belongingness,
care, concern), postconventional affects (universal love, global altruism), and
post-postconventional affects (transpersonal compassion, love-bliss, ananda).
Likewise with cognition, morals, needs, self-identity, psychological
development, and spiritual development (considered as a separate line), among
many others.
Each of these developmental lines or streams traverses the same basic levels or
waves, but each does so in a relatively independent fashion, so that, for
example, a person can be at a very high level of cognitive development, a
medium level of interpersonal development, and a low level of moral
development, all at the same time. This shows how truly uneven and non-linear
overall development can be. A massive amount of research continued to
demonstrate that the individual developmental lines themselves unfold in a
sequential manner--the important truth discovered by developmental
studies. But since there are at least two dozen different developmental lines,
overall growth itself shows no such sequential development, but is instead a
radically uneven and individual affair. Moreover, at any given time a
particular individual might show much growth in one stream (say,
psychological), while showing little or no growth in others (say, spiritual).
None of this could be explained by a phase-2 model, but all of it made perfect
sense according to phase-3.
Although I abandoned the strictly linear or "ladder-like" view of
development by 1981, I am criticized to this day for presenting a rigidly
linear view of development, where, it is alleged, psychological development
must be fully complete before spiritual development can even begin. I never
held that rigid a view even in phase-1, and I certainly abandoned anything
remotely like that almost two decades ago. So I never know quite how to
respond to these charges, other than to point out that they are untrue. But
then, I have had a hand in this, as I sometimes continue to talk simply of
"levels of development" as an introductory simplification (as I did
in A Brief History of Everything); but still, one would hope that scholars in
particular would view my work as a whole and correctly report my actual view. In the
meantime, I have, with some chagrin, served as a foil for numerous theorists who vocally
attack the clunk-and-grind ladder view of phase-2, and then triumphantly present a phase-3
model to correct my wicked ways. Brant Cortright is merely the most recent in
a long line of theorists who loudly announces that my linear view of development is
hopelessly outdated, and that the new breakthrough paradigm is one of relatively independent
developmental lines running parallel to each other, not on top of each other. I'm almost
certain I've heard that somewhere before.
Well, in any event, I first presented that phase-3 model in "Ontogenetic
Development: Two Fundamental Patterns" (Journal of Transpersonal Psychology
, 1981), which appeared in Eye to Eye as "Structure, Stage, and Self"
(included herein). The "two patterns" in the original title referred to the
difference between the enduring basic structures (the major levels or waves in the
spectrum of consciousness), and the transitional lines or streams that make their
way through the basic levels. This understanding was implicit even in The Atman
Project, where on several occasions I stated that "Although I have placed
side-by-side such items as cognitive development, moral development, and ego
development, I do not at all mean to equate them.... Loevinger, for one,
thinks ego development is independent of psychosexual development. Kohlberg
has shown that intellectual [cognitive] development is necessary but not
sufficient for moral development. And so it goes, with all sorts of various
developmental lines running parallel, independent, and/or correlative with all
sorts of other developmental lines." That was written in 1978, during
phase-2; but by 1981, with phase-3, I made all of those distinctions very
explicit, and began to carefully present these different threads as the
relatively independent streams that they are, while also continuing to
emphasize the universal nature of the general waves in the overall spectrum of
consciousness itself.
This move to phase-3 invalidated very few of the actual propositions of phase-2; it
simply set them in a larger context. The pre/trans fallacy, for example, still
applied to any developmental sequence, but it was now understood that there are
many such sequences, so that a person could be preconventional in one line,
conventional in another, and postconventional in yet another. The PTF was
still valid, but one had to be sure one had a single developmental line each
time one applied it. This changed none of the conclusions of phase-2, but
opened them up to even richer elaborations.
From the beginning of phase-1 to the end of phase-2--from 23 years old to about
31 years old--I was living in various small apartments in Lincoln,
Nebraska; was happily married to Amy Wagner; had left graduate school in
biochemistry and was working as a dishwasher at the Red Rooster Restaurant; was
meditating daily (with frequent retreats); and reading/writing at a terrifying
rate. The last two years of that period saw a great burst of activity--
The Atman Project, Up from Eden, and A Sociable God were
all completed, plus many of the seminal essays in Eye to Eye.
By the end of that period, Amy and I had amicably split after ten
almost-always happy years (we simply grew in different directions), and I was
on my way to Boston to try to salvage an integrative journal that Jack
Crittenden and I had cofounded. Phase-2 was over, phase-3 was about to begin.
But I would always look back on the Lincoln years as my true education in all those
things that mattered most.
[1] Elevationists often use, as a counterexample
to disprove this statement, the existence of tulkus or reincarnated buddhas: fully
enlightened beings who remain conscious through all the stages of bardo, infancy, and
childhood. Well of course a fully enlightened being is an exception to the rule, but
that is a trivial example, because fully enlightened beings are an exception to every rule.
[2] What about the final claim of certain sophisticated
Romantics?, namely, that even if the magical structure is a less developed structure of
consciousness (predifferentiated and not transdifferentiated), nonetheless a truly integral
structure would result if the naturic wholeness of the magical structure was
combined with the rational structure of modernity. I agree that would be a
welcome integration, but it would simply be an integration of prerational and
rational; it would not be profoundly transrational. Rather, that integration
(of all previous structures) is exactly what the integral-aperspectival
(centauric) structure is supposed to accomplish (according to Gebser, myself,
and others). Moreover, the magical structure itself is not the only structure
other than rationality that is supposed to be included in the integration:
there are the entire realms of mythic-horticultural and mythic-rational-agrarian, all of
which Romantic-tribalists generally despise. Finally, even if we toss in the most
advanced mode (shamanism), this is, as we saw, a partial and limited approach to
the overall transpersonal. From almost any angle, the foraging structure simply
cannot perform the Herculean feats the Romantics demand of it, but rather remains a
very important but very limited mode.
[3] It was Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
that first specifically laid out the correlations of the Lower Left quadrant
(archaic, magic, mythic, rational, vision-logic) and the Lower Right quadrant
(foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial, informational) and further
correlated those quadrants with the others. A Sociable God did not specifically
discuss the Lower Right quadrant, and Up from Eden tended to treat Lower Left
and Lower Right as one dimension. It would be in phase-4 that these various distinctions
and correlations were made. But A Sociable God and Up from Eden
laid a foundation by correlating Upper Left and Lower Left in terms of a
specific analysis of levels of structural organization and relational exchange.
[4] For an elucidation of the new Person-Centered Civil
Religion, with its panenhenic outlook, see One Taste, Sept. 23 entry.
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