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Overview

      Although structuralism is only part of an integral methodological pluralism, it is nonetheless clearly an important part, at least on a par with phenomenology, hermeneutics, and systems theory, but elevated to a special importance by virtue of its emancipatory interests and holistic capacities.

     Its paradigms and social practices continue to energize the important work of researchers such as Howard Gardner, Carol Gilligan, Juan Pascual-Leone, Susann Cook-Greuter, Michael Commons, Francis Richards, Jenny Wade, Kurt Fischer, Don Beck, Patricia Arlin, Jan Sinnott, Deirdre Kramer, Gisela Labouvie-Vief, Cheryl Armon, Robert Kegan, among many others. (Integral Psychology presents a very brief overview of around 100 of the most important models with a structural dimension.)

      And the general conclusions of adequate structuralism? Both subjective psyche and intersubjective culture contain regularities, patterns, songs, or Kosmic habits. None of these can be easily spotted by phenomenology, empiricism, systems theory, hermeneutics, ecology, action inquiry, or collaborative inquiry, but can be spotted by studying individual or cultural responses over time (a third-person investigation of first-person realities that, if successful, moves from responses to classes to stages to structures). These structures or patterns of being-in-the-world are marked by wholeness, transformation, and closure.)²⁹

      What follows is an outline of the findings of adequate structuralism in both the subjective and intersubjective realms: explorations in zone #2 of the indigenous perspectives available to sentient beings—the look of a feeling, the patterns of the interiors, an outside survey of the songs of the heart (known finally only by singing them ourselves).

A. Structure/Stages in Individuals

      Recurrent patterns and melodies, rhythms and songs in human consciousness, that have unfolded, evolved, and developed over time: in the human psyche, there appear to be at least a dozen major developmental lines or streams—different types of songs, if you will—including cognitive, moral, interpersonal, affective/emotional, needs, self-identity, object relations, and values. We will start with a look at these developmental streams.

Developmental Lines or Streams of Consciousness

      Lines or streams can be legitimately conceptualized in any number of ways. Cognitive scientists and linguists (operating more on the third-person side of the street) tend to view them as independent modules that have evolved to cope with different environmental challenges: there is a linguistic module, a kinesthetic module, a cognitive module, and so on—all of which evolved under natural selection pressures (for us, tetra-evolved). Howard Gardner refers to these as "multiple intelligences" (musical intelligence, cognitive intelligence, mathematical intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, etc.).

     Gardner, however, also incorporates the paradigm of adequate structuralism into his research, and thus he points out that these different intelligences, modules, or streams evolve or develop through a series of levels, stages, or waves. Waves and streams are terms Gardner himself made popular; he and his students at Harvard have done important structural research that suggests that each of the streams that he has identified, even though they develop relatively independently, nonetheless move through the same basic stage/levels or waves, a conclusion I share, and a conclusion we will return to below ("Basic Levels of Consciousness").

      However we conceive of these multiple intelligences, here is what they amount to.

     Sit a person in a room and ask her to describe what she sees—that is, ask her to describe "what is." Of what is, or of the things she is now aware of, which does she think are beautiful? Of the things she is now aware of, which does she value the most? Of the things she is now aware of, which does she identify with her self or her identity? Of the things she is now aware of, if there is a moral dilemma, what does she think she should do under the circumstances?

      An awareness of what is, is cognition (e.g., Piaget, Kegan, Fischer). Of the things a person is aware of, she might value some (Graves), she might identify with some (Loevinger), she might need some (Maslow), she might have to choose between some (Gilligan, Kohlberg), she might have to interact with some (Selman, Perry), and so forth.

      In other words, the cognitive stream represents the types of answers that people give to the question, "What is?" The values stream represents the types of answers that people give to the question: "Of what is, what do I value most?" The self-identity stream: "Of what is, what is 'I' or 'me'?" Needs: "Of what is, what do I require?" Morals: "Of what is, what should I do?"³⁰

      It appears that life presents a series of questions to us, and we have evolved or developed capacities, modules, or intelligences that respond to these different types of challenges. Each of those challenges represents a different type of situation demanding a different and appropriate type of response (different songs for different occasions). How and why those different types of responses evolved is open to much debate; that they exist is not. And those different types of responses are essentially what researchers refer to as "modules," "intelligences," or "streams."³¹

      Many pioneering developmental psychologists focused on only one of these lines or streams and studied its waves or stages. As suggested above in parentheses, Piaget especially studied cognition; Maslow, needs; Gilligan, morals; Graves, values; Loevinger, self-identity, and so on. They all concluded that, at least for the populations of humans that they investigated, these developmental lines do indeed proceed through various developmental levels or stages, not as rigid rungs but enveloping spheres (which is why the term "waves" is better than "levels," although both terms are common).

      If we put all of their research together to get a better picture, the conclusion is that the individual psyche contains many relatively independent capacities, modules, intelligences, or streams; because these develop relatively independently, a person can be at a very high level in, say, the cognitive line, at a medium level in the self-identity line, and at a low level in the moral line, which makes individual development a wildly idiosyncratic affair. Even though the modules themselves might unfold in specific stages, the sum total of the modules is a mess, and certainly does not unfold in anything like a stage sequence. This overall phenomena is referred to as "levels and lines" or "waves and streams," and it is perhaps one of the more enduring disclosures of adequate structuralism.

     This is often indicated on a psychograph, such as the one shown in figures 4 and 5, which can be summarized as: through the overall spectrum of levels, waves, or orders of consciousness, there proceed numerous different and relatively independent lines or streams of consciousness.

     As noted, Howard Gardner has done research suggesting that however different the streams or intelligences, they proceed through the same basic waves, stages of development, or orders of consciousness (although often at very uneven rates). Robert Kegan, among others, has found essentially the same thing. James Mark Baldwin was the first to put this finding front and center, suggesting that the three major developmental lines (cognitive-scientific, moral-ethical, and aesthetic-artistic—representing "it," "we," and "I," resp.), all proceed through the same generalized levels of consciousness (which he, in a truly pioneering theoretical effort—almost a century ago—called prelogical, quasi-logical, logical, extra-logical, hyper-logical, trans-logical, and unity consciousness).

Figure 4. Simple Psychograph

     AQAL metatheory, drawing on these and other sources (East and West, premodern and modern), suggests the following overview. If you look at figure 5, you will see five major developmental lines or streams (cognitive, moral, self, values, needs). As is often the case, Western psychologists have studied several of the lines in their lower and intermediate stages or waves, but not in their higher stages (a major exception being the altogether extraordinary Baldwin, and his contemporary, William James, although James studied mostly states, not stages, which, frankly, is the easier of the two, since states can be investigated in the present using phenomenology and hermeneutics, and do not have to be followed over time, a laborious task involving structuralism, which was pioneered by Baldwin).

Figure 5. 10 levels in 5 lines
(click here to enlarge)

      Therefore, in the various lines, I have often added two or three higher stages based on other reputable sources. For example, in the cognitive line, Aurobindo gave one of the best (and certainly most compelling) presentations of a full spectrum of cognition (using "cognition" in the broadest sense as "consciousness of what is"). Aurobindo gave the stages in this cognitive stream as: sensorimotor, vital-emotional, lower mind, concrete mind, logical mind, higher mind, illumined mind, intuitive mind, overmind, and supermind. Piaget, on the other hand, studied cognitive levels up to around what Aurobindo calls the logical mind. Above that lay the potential emergents of something like the higher mind (vision-logic), illumined mind, intuitive mind, overmind, and supermind (although I believe they are tetra-enacted and are not metaphysical pregiven structures).³² In figure 5, I have therefore used some of Piaget's terms for the lower levels and Aurobindo's terms for the higher levels (with the understanding that all of these are four-quadrant products, not pregiven archetypes).

      In the needs line, the great pioneer Abraham Maslow followed in Baldwin's footsteps and attempted to elucidate a full spectrum of motivation and needs, and thus Maslow definitely included the needs of the higher and further reaches of human nature (e.g., the needs for self-actualization and self-transcendence, as shown in fig. 5, which are, along with the other needs, what Maslow called "prepotent," which means they show a wave-like emergence). But his research was not very specific in those higher waves, since fewer individuals reach them and thus studying them is extraordinarily difficult, although Maslow found abundant evidence for their general existence. (Maslow has been a favorite whipping boy of boomeritis theorists—e.g., Richard Tarnas, Jorge Ferrer—but he is, by any balanced assessment, one of the three or four greatest psychologists America has ever produced.) In the Graves values line, I have added three suggested stage-waves to those of Spiral Dynamics; in the self-identity line, three stage-waves to those of Loevinger; and also three higher waves in the morals line, in order to cover a more complete spectrum of consciousness.

     But, of course, all of this is simply by way of illustration; there is nothing fixed about any of those suggestions (and certainly nothing ontological about any of the structures: they are probability spaces, at most. When and if they emerge at large, they will be tetra-enacted and tetra-evolved, they will not fall fully formed from the sky). Likewise, the exact number of developmental lines (and the number of levels in any of the lines) are issues that can only be decided by ongoing structural research. To date, there appears to be at least two dozen relatively independent developmental lines, streams, or modules (including Howard Gardner's six or so multiple intelligences): cognitive, musical, kinesthetic, linguistic, moral, mathematical, interpersonal, values, needs, defenses, self-identity, role-taking, ideas of the good, spatial-temporal perception, creativity, among others—but again, this is a decision for ongoing structural research.

     At this time, the integral psychograph of AQAL metatheory appears the only viable model that accommodates the most amount of evidence from the most number of those researchers, and thus the integral psychograph is the simplest way to summarize the results of extensive zone-#2 research in the human psyche.

Developmental Levels or Waves of Consciousness

     As we move from the developmental lines to the developmental levels in those lines, we face two very common confusions, even among adequate structuralists. The first has to do with the nature of levels or stages; the second, with using the levels in one line to talk about levels in other lines. I will devote this and the next section to clarifying some of these difficult issues.

      For AQAL metatheory, a "level," "wave," or "stage" is simply an abstract measure of development in any actual line, stream, or module. As such, even as a probability wave, levels do not exist in themselves; they are simply degrees of something. Take, for example, degrees of temperature. We can take an actual phenomenon—such as the amount of heat in a liquid—and create any number of arbitrary ways to measure that amount. Three common measurement scales are Fahrenheit, Celsius, and Kelvin. If we use Fahrenheit, we say that water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212 degrees; if we use Celsius (or centigrade), we say water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100 degrees. Which is right?

      Both of them, of course; it is simply a matter of convention which we use. What is concretely real is the actual heat or energy in the water; but there are an almost infinite number of ways to measure it, divide it up, and represent it. Fahrenheit finds 180 degrees or mini-stages between freezing and boiling; Celsius finds 100 mini-stages between freezing and boiling; both are fine, and both can be used to indicate the amount of heat in a liquid, solid, or gas, as long as you and I agree on which scale we are using.

     Likewise, the developmental levels are abstract measures of the concrete realities that are unfolding in the lines themselves. There are all sorts of ways to measure and indicate those levels, but there is no one "correct" number of levels or stages in any of the lines (any more than we can say Fahrenheit is right and Celsius is wrong).

      And one thing we particularly cannot do is use the way the "levels" are formulated in one line to refer to the "levels" in the other lines. (This stream absolutism is as common as it is theoretically problematic.) For example, one of the levels in the (Piagetian) cognitive line is formal operational cognition (or formal rationality). This formal rationality can be used to adopt or support orange values, or blue values, or red values (among others)—which means that the values line and the cognition line are not the same thing. We cannot say that a person is using "orange cognition," because "orange" refers to the structure of the values themselves, not the structure of the cognition adopting those values.

      (If you ask an adult who is at the red level in the values line to explain why red values are important, you will often get a very thoughtful and rational explanation of why the world is a very dangerous, raw, red place; these individuals make excellent firemen, test pilots, astronauts, and so on—some of whom score genius IQ in the cognitive line. In other words, cognitive line and values line are indeed relatively independent, as summarized in the psychograph. That is why technically we cannot say "orange cognition," but must say formop cognition adopting orange values.)

      Likewise, we cannot say "orange morals," nor "orange self," nor "orange needs," because all of those other lines are not only relatively independent of values, but the concrete characteristics of those other lines are also quite different. For example, terms that are used in the moral line include "preconventional," "conventional," and "postconventional" (those are the 3 stages we examined earlier with Carol Gilligan). But, strictly speaking, you cannot use those terms to refer to the cognitive line (or any other line), because formal operational thought, for example, can adopt several different levels of morals. A person can be at the formal operational level of cognition yet be at moral stage 1, moral stage 2, or moral stage 3.³³ Thus, somebody using formal rationality can in fact have a preconventional moral sense (e.g., Nazi doctor), a conventional moral sense (e.g., fundamentalist preacher), or a postconventional moral sense (e.g., classical liberal), all of whom can be at the same cognitive level of development.

      In other words, "levels/stages" are measures of something actually occurring in one of the lines; therefore, when those actual occurrences are formulated and some of their stages suggested, those stages necessarily are composed of the phenomena in those particular lines, and thus very terms of the stages themselves (and their proposed deep structures) adequately fit only the particular line or stream of which they are measures. This is why the common terms that were developed for the morals stream (e.g., "punishment-obedience," "good boy-nice girl," "social contract") do not exactly match those of the cognitive stream ("preoperational," "concrete operational," "formal operational") which do not match those of the self stream ("symbiotic," "protective," "conscientious," "individualistic") which do not match those of the values stream ("sociocratic," "multiplistic," "relativistic," etc.).

      Of course, there are many important ways that those streams overlap (which we will investigate in a moment), but the important point for now is that the very structures of the stages in the various streams were proposed using the actual phenomena of those streams, and thus the structures of the levels of one line simply do not fit with the structures of the levels of other lines. To try to force them to do so is what got Piaget in trouble: he tried to say that the structures of the cognitive stream were the only operative structures, and all the other structure-stages fit within the cognitive, which subsequent structuralism has demonstrated to be an inadequate formulation. There are many different types of songs in the psyche, and to force all of them to be variations on the same melody is, to put it mildly, unwarranted.

      Many of the great pioneering structuralists got caught in this unfortunate, if understandable, confusion. They used a particular research methodology or paradigm to spot a particular type of song or human response to environmental challenges (needs, values, identities, morals, etc.). They then constructed a plausible stage sequence in that particular module. They then used those specific stages and built an entire psychological system around the stages taken from only that stream. It's not that you can't do that (many of these early systems were quite elaborate, e.g., Graves). It's simply that you are building a total system based on two shaky foundations: one, you are postulating stages based on partial capacities of the overall the human bodymind (since no stage-conception whatsoever can capture everything); two, you are then extrapolating from those partialities to the entire psyche, thus excluding other capacities that might be captured by different stage-perspectives, and thus you are creating a second partiality on top of the first.

      (This stream absolutism is simply an occupational hazard of pioneering structuralism. We of today can avoid these missteps, not because we are smarter but because we can look at all of their results—dozens of different developmental maps—and thus see a larger picture made possible by all of their combined efforts, something obviously not available to those intrepid pioneers. We attempt to avoid this absolutism with the simple reminder called "levels and lines"—many different lines, many different levels, and hold all of these conceptions very, very lightly.)

How Many Waves in the Ocean?

      It is useful to keep in mind, then, that streams and waves are relatively arbitrary constructions. Not even a cognitive scientist thinks that if you cut open the brain you will find a discrete little clump of neurons called "the linguistic module" or "the cognitive module" or the "needs module," let alone that they clunk through rigid rungs of development.

      This entire game of structuralism is really is like sitting on the beach and saying, "How many waves are there in the ocean?" Structuralists are individuals sitting the bank of a great River, like the Amazon, and watching its waves and streams cascade. They then attempt to look for any patterns in those waves and streams—any recurrent or stable eddies in the River—and they formulate those patterns. But all that really means is that if you stand exactly where that structuralist stood and look at the River from that angle, you will see those same waves and streams. Move ten meters down the River and look again, and guess what?

      At the same time, stable patterns are stable patterns, the very stuff of Kosmic karma. When we say that these stage-conceptions have arbitrary elements to them (like degrees or inches), this is not to say that there isn't something out there called hot water or a stack of wood or a stable eddy in the River. As noted, some of the stable patterns in the Kosmos—from atoms to molecules to bacteria—are billions of years old, essentially unchanged in their structure or agency. In the human psyche, the Kosmic habits of many of the early-to-intermediate waves in the various streams have been laid down for so long that they are relatively unchanging habits available as potentials to humans everywhere. In the cognitive stream, most of the waves up to formal operational ("formop") appear available to humans cross-culturally (this does not mean that all humans develop to that level, only that they inherently have the potential to do so). In the values stream, the waves up to around orange appear cross-culturally available to most humans (and certainly up to red or blue). In the moral line, most of the waves up to level 4, and so on. The older the wave, the more enduring the Kosmic habit it has become.

     (Notice that, even though these are psychological structures, they are not merely psychological, in that they have an existence apart from any individual psyche and thus are trans-individual in that sense. I will pursue this important notion in an endnote and contrast it with traditional metaphysics.)³⁴

      On the other hand, levels and waves higher than formop (cognition), higher than green (values), and higher than conscientious and individualistic (self-sense) are at this moment in evolution extremely rare (less than 2% of the world's population).

     This does not mean that individuals cannot pioneer into these higher potentials (converting higher altered states into enduring traits/structures), only that those structures are as yet lightly formed, consisting only of the faint footprints and gossamer trails of highly evolved souls who have pushed ahead, leaving gentle whispers of the extraordinary sights that lie before us if we have the courage to grow. These are higher potentials and nonordinary states, but not yet higher stages that have emerged at large—they have not yet become structures settled into stable Kosmic habits (which means that none of them reflect pregiven and pre-existing ontological levels, planes, axes, etc.). The evidence simply does not support that interpretation of peak experiences; and thus, following Occam's razor, AQAL metatheory proceeds without it.³⁵

      Take, for example, Aurobindo's level or stage of the intuitive mind. If we coordinate his speculations with concrete psychological research, we might say—to use the rough correlations with Spiral Dynamics and Loevinger as suggested in figure 5—that his "logical mind" is at approximately the same level as orange/green, his "higher mind" is yellow/turquoise, his "illumined mind" is coral, and his "intuitive mind" is what we are calling lavender. Research by Jane Loevinger and her associates suggests that the percentage of the adult population that is stably at the equivalent of turquoise (i.e., not as a temporary peak experience or nonordinary state but as an enduring trait or permanent competence) is 0.5%, which means that today, 0.005 of the population has a center of gravity at turquoise values, the integrated self, and the higher mind. Those stably at lavender (or the intuitive mind) are probably 1/100 ^th of that, or 0.00005 of the population. It might be one or two centuries or more before that "level" emerges on any sort of widespread scale.

      So what do you think the intuitive mind will look like several centuries from now when it emerges on a larger scale? It's absolutely impossible to say, wouldn't you agree? And it is impossible to say because it is not a pregiven, fixed, metaphysical, archetypal, ontologically pre-existing structure/stage, but rather represents a higher state potential that Aurobindo, in his own extraordinary and pioneering growth and evolution, pushed into (and gave form to) based on his own four-quadrant psychograph (combined with the general trans-individual features of the higher states, not stages).³⁶

     This is why the number of people who will experience "the" intuitive mind in the same way that Aurobindo did will likely never be more than a few hundred, if that (namely, those who follow his specific paradigm or yogic practice, within the same localized AQAL milieu, and thus push into this higher potential in a very specific way, converting it into an actual higher stage for the more evolved in that specific community of practice, or the relatively few number of people practicing the actual particulars of Aurobindo's paradigm and consequently enacting a similar, higher worldspace in a stable fashion). Even then, the higher intuitive mind is not a pre-existing structure lying around and waiting to descend fully formed on people, but is being co-created by the community of practitioners who first begin crystallizing those particular potentials.³⁷

      Likewise—and even more so—if and when that higher potential begins to actually emerge on a larger scale several centuries from now, it will be molded—given form and substance and structure—by massive and presently unpredictable events in all four quadrants; it will not plop down from the sky already fully baked, nor will it arrive in the specific form enacted by Aurobindo.

      Let me give one last example. If you look at the traditional Great Chain, a modified form of which Aurobindo is presenting, you will notice that most of its versions have only 2 or 3 levels higher than turquoise (Plotinus, e.g., has world soul and nous). But centuries and millennia from now, those higher dimensions—which are not pregiven levels but simply higher potentials—will almost certainly crystallize as 5 or 10 or even more actual levels/structures/stages. Look at what has already happened: the "level" that both Vedanta Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism refer to as "mano" (manomayakosha, manovijnana) actually turned out, in the course of historical unfolding, to contain at least 5 or 6 actual levels/stages (e.g., purple, red, blue, orange, green). Each of the two higher levels in the Vedanta (e.g., vijnanamayakosha and anandamayakosha) will also, almost certainly, end up crystallizing in at least 5 or 6 different levels themselves, meaning that, a millennium from now, there might be 10 or more actual stage/structures higher than turquoise that have become stable Kosmic habits available to humans around the world. The reason that is, indeed, these higher potentials are not fully baked pies in the sky, but rather are tetra-enacted and tetra-evolve as their potentials begin to crystallize in the manifest, already-existing world.

      What we try to do with AQAL metatheory is accept the fewest number of postulated pies in the sky (or metaphysical entities), because sooner or later that metaphysical baggage will backfire (as it already has—rather badly—in the eyes of the modern and postmodern mind). That metaphysical baggage—of pre-existing, pregiven, archetypal, unchanging, independently existing, non-physical, meta-physical levels and structures and realms and planes—has almost entirely discredited a spiritual worldview in today's thought leaders, when all that has actually been discredited is the old interpretative framework, not the ever-present realities. The primary task of an Integral Post-Metaphysics is to polish the PR of those realties by updating the framework, or refurbishing the gift wrap in which they are offered to today's world. This is why Aurobindo's metaphysics—and essentially all metaphysics—has to be completely reconstructed and moved into an AQAL, or postmodern integral, formulation.

     (As a secondary and delicate issue, it appears that metaphysical interpretations might even slow growth and evolution into these higher potentials, which is why the actual "integral yoga" of Aurobindo seems to have relatively few adepts considering its otherwise significant potential. Be that as it may, what Integral Post-Metaphysics is questioning is not the realization of the these great sages, but their interpretive frameworks, because all of the various interpretive frameworks—including AQAL—are but transitory footnotes in the winds of ongoing evolution, and all that is required is that each age update the framework as best it can in order to accord more fully with Spirit's own unfolding displays. And in the modern and postmodern world, that framework can only be post-metaphysical).

The Basic Levels or Waves of Consciousness

      We come now to what is surely the most intriguing question—and confusion—raised by adequate structuralism. We briefly mentioned earlier that several researchers, such as James Mark Baldwin, Robert Kegan, and Howard Gardner, have suggested that, however different the developmental streams, they nonetheless traverse the same general levels, waves, or orders of consciousness. At this point, of course, we have to be extremely careful, because we just saw that the actual nature or structure of the stages/levels/waves in one stream cannot legitimately be used to adequately categorize the stages/levels/waves in other streams. What I am now about to suggest does not violate that methodological given.

      Here is the difficult question, not often addressed even by structuralists: if you look at figure 5, what does the vertical axis on that graph represent? In figure 5, the basic "levels" are simply numbered from 1 to 10 on the y-axis. In the other parts of the graph, you can see the names of the specific levels/stages in each of the developmental lines; those specific levels have names reflecting some of the concrete realities in those lines (e.g., formal operational, pluralistic, impulsive, conformist, etc.). But what does the vertical axis itself—the "1 to 10"—represent?

      In AQAL metatheory, the vertical axis represents basic levels of consciousness (or levels of awareness), but with an important twist: the levels of consciousness are nothing in themselves but are simply the degrees or inches of the various streams. In other words, the levels of consciousness are not levels of a particular and separate stream, but a measure of the degree of awareness in any particular stream. In that sense, the levels of consciousness are indeed like degrees, inches, or kilograms: measures that do not exist in themselves, or by themselves, but are simply measures of concrete realities. As meters measure distance or degrees measure heat, levels of consciousness measure the amount of awareness or consciousness present in any specific stage/level/wave in any of the streams.

     But those basic levels do not exist in themselves, any more than degrees or inches do. "Degrees," "inches," and "kilograms" are not running around out there in the world. We don't wake up and say, "I can't build a house today because I ran out of inches," or "I can't make hot coffee this morning because I ran out of degrees." The same is true with the basic levels of consciousness: they are measures of the concrete realities unfolding in the lines, but not something running around on their own.

      "I have six meters of wood." The "levels of consciousness" is the "six meters" part, not the "wood" part. That is why a level of consciousness is always a level of something that is appearing or manifesting: a level of moral responses, a level of needs, a level of values. Consciousness is not a phenomena but the space in which phenomena appear, and therefore "levels of consciousness" simply means levels of the phenomena appearing. And when the specific stages or levels of those streams are specified, they are always in the terms of that actual stream. I simply cannot say, "Today I have seven kilograms." I can say, "Today I have seven kilograms of water," and seven kilograms of water is NOT the same as seven kilograms of wheat, which is NOT the same as seven kilograms of copper. However, they all weight seven kilograms. The vertical axis in figure 5 is "kilograms of awareness," if you will, and that abstract measure can be used across lines because it is not itself a line (because it does not itself exist).

      This is why "levels of consciousness," as used in AQAL metatheory, can avoid stream absolutism. With reference to seven kilograms of water, wheat, and copper: if I am caught in "copper stream absolutism," I will try to say that copper is the one basic reality or element, and therefore seven kilograms of wheat is really just a rearrangement of seven kilograms of copper. That is what stream absolutism does. It says, "Seven kilograms of cognition is what is really being measured in seven kilograms of morals." It equates cognition and morals because both can weight seven kilograms. What is the same is the seven kilograms, but kilograms themselves cannot be defined using cognitive terms or moral terms, right?

      Same with the basic levels of consciousness. They are what all concrete streams have (or can have) in common, and what they all have in common is something that cannot be defined or described using any of the specific streams themselves.

     Another useful analogy I often use is altitude up a mountain. Let's say you have a mountain that is 10,000 meters high. There are, say, four main paths up this mountain—one going up the north, east, south, and west face (those paths represent the lines or streams). Each of those paths or lines has a very different view of the world. You cannot describe the northern view using the same perceptions that define the eastern view. But there is nonetheless a sense in which a person going up the north face and a person going up the east face can both be at 3000 meters, or both be at 5000 meters, or both be at 7000 meters, and so on. If a person is at 3000 meters on the north slope, it is the same height—the same 3000 meters—as somebody on the east slope, even though virtually everything else about the views is quite different.

      The individual paths are the actual streams, modules, or capacities; the altitude is the level or degree of consciousness in any stream. The actual levels/structures/stages/waves in a particular stream/line/path cannot be defined or accurately described using the views from the other paths. But there is a sense in which we can say that a particular path is at 3000 meters, or 5000 meters, or 8000 meters, and so on; that is a genuine measure of how far up the mountain, or along the path, you have gone. But if you want to give the actual structure of a view or perception at 4000 meters in any path, you can only do so using the views from that path, and thus the actual contours of the north path and the east path will be as different as wheat and copper.

     What this means—and was very much intended to mean—is that consciousness is not an entity, thing, process, or capacity. Consciousness is not itself a stream, line, module, function, or intelligence—it is not any thing or event or process of any sort. Consciousness is rather the opening or clearing in which things and events arise. A "level of consciousness" is simply a measure of the types of things and events that can arise in the first place; a measure of the spaciousness in which a world can appear; a degree of openness to the possibilities of the Kosmos; a sweep of the horizons within which phenomena can manifest; a measure of the awareness inhabiting each perspective, moment to moment to moment.

     This in keeping with the Madhyamaka/Yogachara schools of Buddhism, which point out that, if consciousness is to be conceptualized at all, it is a pure Emptiness, devoid of specific characteristics, but allowing specific characteristics to arise in the manifest world; and with William James, who pointed out that "consciousness does not exist," by which he did not mean that we don't possess something like awareness, but that awareness is aware of things and events and is therefore not itself a thing or event. There are phenomena in consciousness, and if we must conceptualize consciousness, it is not itself a phenomena but the space in which phenomena appear. This is why nobody has ever been able to satisfactorily define consciousness—it doesn't exist, but is the space in which things exist. And a "level of consciousness" is a measure of the spaciousness of the space in which in they exist.

     Generally speaking, it is best to simply number these levels—whether using 3, 5, 7, 10 levels or more—because any name, word, or term implies a characteristic that, ultimately, tends to be misleading. It's almost impossible to think of a term for, say, level 3, that isn't taken from one of the specific levels in an actual stream (and therefore really is not applicable to levels in the other streams). Still, for practicalities, we often have to refer to a general level of consciousness by using the names of some of the levels in a particular stream of consciousness. Thus, for the basic and empty levels of consciousness themselves, I am often forced to use terms such as "postconventional, conventional, postconventional"; or sometimes the cognitive terms (preop, conop, formop, higher mind, overmind); or the Spiral Dynamics terms (red, blue, orange, green, etc.)—but I trust that it is now clear why doing so is a technically incorrect shortcut.³⁸

     In light of the above, it's certainly easy to see how stream absolutism can get started. For example, in figure 5, you can see that level 5 (or "5000 meters") in the values line is orange, while in the cognitive line it is formop. It is the "same height" of those two structure-stages (on the mountain of empty consciousness) that allows the levels in one line to vaguely be used to represent levels in the other lines. This is why it is common for people to use terms from the actual levels in one line to refer to the actual levels in other lines—and thus say things like, "This person is using postconventional cognition," or "This person has blue morals," or "This person has self-actualization values," or "This person has green cognition," when none of those statements are technically correct.

      (When theorists use the research from one stream, such as values or cognition, and attempt to construct a comprehensive psychology by extrapolating those findings across what are actually other lines, they usually proceed by first expanding the definition of the levels in that line to include more and more characteristics, and eventually end up including so many characteristics in one line that the line itself has actually become meaningless. For example, if you start with the cognitive stream, and identify, say, 6 major levels of cognition, which you then want to turn into a comprehensive developmental model, you will say, "Each of these cognitive levels also has a sense of time and a sense of space; and each level has a different sense of self; and each level handles death differently; and it has a different type of morals; and oh, yes, it has different needs, and...." And all of a sudden you have tried to account for a dozen different developmental lines by making all of them variations on your original line: wheat and water are all claimed to be variations on copper. But we have compelling empirical evidence that those characteristics are in many ways multiple intelligences that do not develop lockstep: it's "levels and lines" in many ways. What happens as you try to expand your original line to account for all the other lines is that you end up defining your line as something that underlies, or is the hidden code, for everything: it underlies morals, needs, fashion styles, self sense, worldviews, etc. etc. etc.—but that which accounts for all of those things cannot itself be any of those things: and thus you have just sneaked in the notion of empty levels of consciousness, which is all that I am talking about, but you have done so under a false pretense, namely, that this is somehow ALL based on your original research into a particular developmental line, which is simply not true.)

     In short, for AQAL metatheory, the basic levels of consciousness are a measure of the "amount" of awareness or consciousness in any line, but consciousness itself is nothing; it is not a presence but an absence, an opening, a clearing, a space of perspectives, within which phenomena arise. You can't have more or less of consciousness, but you can have more or less phenomena allowed to arise in consciousness. When the entire Kosmos arises in your consciousness, that is Kosmic consciousness—the top of the mountain, so to speak (except there is no top, only an infinitely receding horizon that nonetheless gets bigger and bigger the more that you can love).

      In figure 5, I have presented 10 empty levels, meters, or degrees of consciousness. In Integral Psychology, I used 16 basic levels.³⁹ The number of levels is Celsius and Fahrenheit. We can arbitrarily say there are 10 major levels up the mountain, or 5, or 3. Moreover, we can measure them using meters, feet, miles, etc. Usually you need 10 or 12 levels to cover most of the important bases in a full-spectrum model. The charka-system, however, gives a quite useful 7-level scheme. Sometimes, for much simpler uses, 5 or even 3 levels will do—again, as long as we realize what we are doing with these mere maps of the paths up the mountain: they are third-person maps of first-person realities, and in order to actually see those views, you must climb the mountain yourself, not memorize the maps.

      (In an endnote, I will include a more detailed summary of "levels of consciousness" for those new to AQAL.)⁴⁰

      The emancipatory interest of such endeavors is often obvious: pioneers who have gone further up the mountain often return and tell us of their adventures, and invite us to traverse that higher path with them. They tell of us the higher potentials that are Freer and Fuller expressions of our own birthright. Faced with such higher maps, we generally have two responses: we can get irritated, or we can get climbing.

      One last point: levels/structures/stages/waves are not everything. They cover an important part of the psyche, but are not the whole story. For example, in addition to stages of consciousness, there are also states of consciousness, most of which show no particular developmental sequence (and are therefore sometimes modeled more on systems theory for the third-person side of the street, which is fine if done carefully; if not, it usually leads to metatheoretical turmoil, especially since systems theory itself has no first-person side of the street and therefore quickly treats first-person holons as equivalent to third-person artifacts, which is why systems theory is almost always involved in subtle reductionism). Further, there are unconscious and subconscious processes, some of which possess discernible structure/stages and some of which do not, and so on. And—most important of all—structures and states themselves are still third-person descriptors, which can under no circumstances replace the first-person methodologies of phenomenology, hermeneutics, meditation, and other zone #1 paradigms, which disclose interior realities by acquaintance, not merely by description: by feeling, not by looking; by walking, not by talking; by climbing the mountain, not selling the maps.