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One Taste, The Journals of Ken Wilber
Waves and Streams of Consciousness
Sunday, November 16
Brant Cortright's
Psychotherapy and Spirit just arrived, and it is quite disappointing, not least of which
for the way it badly misrepresents my work. In The Eye of Spirit, I divide my work into four main phases: wilber-1 was
Romantic; wilber-2 was basically the Great Chain understood in developmental terms (a model
first presented in The Atman Project); wilber-3 goes considerably further and suggests
that there are numerous different developmental lines that progress relatively
independently through the various levels of the Great Chain (a model first presented in
Transformations of Consciousness and fleshed out in The Eye of Spirit and
especically Integral Psychology); and wilber-4 sets those levels and lines in the
context of the four quadrants (the psychological component of wilber-3 and wilber-4 are
essentially the same, so I often refer to my latest psychological model as wilber-3, with
the understanding that it is simply the Upper-Left quadrant of wilber-4).
Cortright is still dealing with wilber-2, not wilber-3 (let alone wilber-4), which is
unfortunate. He anachronistically insists on seeing my position as a monolithic, single
spectrum model, a clunky step-ladder affair where you have to complete psychological
development before spiritual development can occur. This misperception is so
common--and inaccurate--that it led Donald Rothberg to go out of his way to
emphasize, when summarizing my present (wilber-3) model: "Development
doesn't somehow proceed in some simple way through a series of a few comprehensive stages
which unify all aspects of growth.... The [different] developmental lines may be in
tension with each other at times, and some of them do not show evidence, Wilber believes,
of coherent stages.... There might be a high level of development cognitively, a medium
level interpersonally or morally, and a low level emotionally. These disparities of
development seem especially conditioned by general cultural values and styles." In
other words, through the levels or waves of the spectrum of consciousness, various
developmental lines or streams proceed relatively independently, so that you can be
at a high level of development in some lines, medium in others, and low in still
others.
The central inadequacy of Cortright's book is that he doesn't seem to grasp the basic
issues of psychological and spiritual development. First of all, I make it very clear in
The Eye of Spirit that you can think of these as two separate lines of
development--the psychological and the spiritual--so that spiritual development can
indeed occur alongside of psychological development (as I will explain in a moment).
Cortright fully acknowledges that I say this, and then proceeds to completely ignore it.
His discussion makes it clear that he has failed to grasp the central, haunting issue: even
if spiritual development is a separate line (or lines), how can you define it? If
spiritual development is a separate line of development (in addition to other lines, such
as cognitive, moral, motivational, kinesthetic, affective, etc.), then you must be able to
define the spiritual line in terms that do not include cognitive insight, morals,
motivations, needs, ethical commitments, or affective love and compassion-- because
all of those already have their own separate lines of development. If
"spirituality" is a separate line of development, you have to be able to
describe it in specific, distinctive terms, which Cortright does not credibly do--a
defect that cripples his entire approach. I happen to believe that some aspects of
spiritual development refer to higher stages of various lines (such as higher affects or
transpersonal love, higher cognition or transrational awareness, etc.), and that some
aspects of spiritual development are themselves a separate, distinct line (such as concern
and openness)--but you must spell these out carefully before you make grand
pronouncements about "spiritual" development.
For example, even if we say that the higher stages of the various developmental lines are
"spiritual," and the lower stages are "personal" or "psychological"--which many
transpersonalists do--nonetheless, in my model (wilber-3), the various lines themselves
develop relatively independently, and therefore a transpersonal or spiritual stage of
development in one line (say, cognition) can occur simultaneously with a personal or
psychological stage in another line (say, morality)--so that "spiritual" and
"psychological" growth, in the various developmental lines, are occurring alongside of
each other, and not stacked on top of each other like so many bricks (which Cortright
maintains is my view). The idea that any of these lines must be fully completed before
another can begin is silly--not even wilber-2 maintained that rigid a schedule.
Cortright, in a truly odd section of the book, says that my "middle levels" of
development--concrete operational, formal operational, and vision-logic, as they have
their own correlative self-pathologies--simply do not exist. If I understand him
correctly, he thinks they can all be reduced to one level. Yikes. The evidence for the
existence of these stages is massive, and all I have done is to suggest that wherever there
is a real stage, there is something that can go wrong at that stage--hence the levels
of pathology through these very real stages of development. Cortright ignores all of this
evidence, and then moves into a politically correct broadside at my
suggestion--following a vast amount of clinical evidence--that many forms of
psychosis have a developmental (and/or genetic) lesion in the earliest stages of
development. In a cookie-cutter fashion, I am lambasted for my moral insensitivity, as the
author preens and prompts us to remember how wonderfully high-minded and moral he is. This
is by far the most unbecoming section of the book.
Cortright's understanding of the world's great wisdom traditions seems pale, sometimes
completely lacking; and the fact that he clearly misrepresents some of these traditions
bodes poorly for the book as a whole. A few examples: Cortright says that the stage
conception I present doesn't work for meditative development--e.g., "The Buddhist
literature is full of many, many examples of people directly realizing the impersonal
emptiness of the nondual." In fact, there are virtually no cases of such. He might have
in mind the Zen mondos, where, after a brief and pithy exchange with a Zen Master, a
student gets "total satori." But as any Zen teacher will tell you, that exchange occurred
after an average of six years or so of intensive meditation, which itself proceeds through
stages (e.g., the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures).
Cortright tries to give several examples to support his case, and they are all
demonstrably inaccurate. "Ramana Maharshi, whom Wilber holds out as an exemplar of nondual
realization, emerged directly into the nondual experience without 'passing through' either the
psychic or subtle stages." In fact, Ramana's awakening was, as he clearly reported, a
three-day ordeal, culminating in a thirty-minute climax, in which he passed through savikalpa
samadhi (psychic and subtle forms) and nirvikalpa and jnana samadhi (causal formlessness), only
then to awaken to sahaja (pure One Taste or nondual Suchness). That Cortright so
confidently and cavalierly misreports this crucial event is typical, I'm afraid, of his
reporting in general. He similarly misreports Aurobindo's model, and that of Vajrayana.
He mentions Aurobindo as an "exemplar of this tradition," the tradition that, according to
Cortright, does not believe in a specific sequence of spiritual development, overlooking
Aurobindo's explicit statement that "The spiritual evolution obeys the logic of a
successive unfolding; it can take a new decisive main step only when the previous main step
has been sufficiently conquered: even if certain minor stages can be swallowed up or leaped
over by a rapid and brusque ascension, the consciousness has to turn back to assure itself
that the ground passed over is securely annexed to the new condition; a greater or
concentrated speed [which is indeed possible] does not eliminate the steps themselves or
the necessity of their successive surmounting." (Aurobindo, The life
divine, II, 26).
Cortright likewise implies that Vajrayana Buddhism doesn't acknowledge these inherent
developmental dimensions, thus over-looking the only in-depth study ever done on this
topic--that by Daniel P. Brown, who carefully analyzed over a dozen major texts of
Mahamudra meditation, only to find that they all, without exception, subscribe to a
specific-stage model of development (stages that fit rather precisely what I have defined
as psychic, subtle, causal, and nondual, as demonstrated in Transformations of
Consciousness). Brown and Engler then tested this stage-conception against the typical
Chinese meditative tradition, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, and the vipassana tradition,
and found that, in every case, it held up consistently. Cortright cheerfully ignores all
of this evidence.
When it comes time to summarize the field of transpersonal therapy, Cortright incredibly
sets up wilber-2 as the "old paradigm," and then presents wilber-3 as the "new paradigm,"
while identifying my model as wilber-2 only. Well, what can I say?
Cortright gives the new paradigm as follows: "All of this points to a view where
psychological and spiritual development are composed of multiple, complex developmental
pathways that sometimes intermingle, interpenetrate, and overlap, while other times remain
discrete and more obviously separate. Sometimes growth is psychological, sometimes growth
is spiritual, and at other times both are occurring together." That is precisely the
wilber-3 model, as I just explained. Wilber-3 identifies over a dozen separate
developmental lines, such as cognitive, moral, affective, love, concern, attention,
self-identity, defenses, interpersonal, artistic, and kinesthetic--some of which
themselves are spiritual, and some of whose higher stages are spiritual--which allows
us to track these various overlapping developments, all of them organized and coordinated
by the self. Cortright triumphantly presents a watered-down version of this wilber-3 model
as the new breakthrough paradigm--but the version he offers lacks a real grasp of the
developmental evidence, and especially lacks a sensitivity as to how we are honestly going
to define "spirituality" in terms that do not merely repeat other developmental lines. (He
likewise completely ignores the work of Jenny Wade, gives a strangely skewed interpretation
of Hameed Ali, etc.)
Cortright fully embraces Huston Smith's Great Chain of Being, yet he rejects the so-called
"monolithic" spectrum of consciousness, failing, apparently, to realize that they are
basically identical. But what I have tried to do, with reference to the Great Chain, is go
one step further and suggest that there are different developmental lines (or streams) that
unfold independently through the different levels (or waves) of the Great Chain, and that
only by recognizing that fact--levels and lines--can we integrate Eastern wisdom
with Western knowledge. The four quadrants--or simply the Big Three of I, we, and
it--are some of the most basic lines or streams, each of which develops through
the levels or waves of the Great Chain (body to mind to soul to spirit). Cortright thinks
that this "levels and lines" concept terribly complicates the picture, whereas in fact it
enormously simplifies a massive amount of data; and he thinks it confuses and weakens the
Great Chain, whereas in fact it salvages it.
Here is a simple way to picture wilber-3, which involves the integration of the
levels of the Great Chain with various developmental lines moving through
those levels (or streams through those waves). Let's use a simple version of the Great
Chain, with only four levels (body, mind, soul, and spirit); let's use only five lines
(there are almost two dozen); and let's make spirituality both the highest
development in each line and a separate line of its own, to cover both common
definitions (see figure 5).
Figure 5. The Integral Psychograph
Since "hierarchy" upsets many people, let's also draw that hierarchy in the way that it is
actually defined, namely, as a holarchy (see figure 6). This is the identical concept,
but some people are more comfortable with nice feminine circles (I prefer them myself,
because they so clearly show the "transcend and include" nature of the Great Nest of
Being).
Figure 6. The Integral Psychograh as a Holarchy
The point of both of those diagrams--what I call an "integral psychograph"--is that
you can track the different developmental lines (or streams) as they move through the
various levels (or waves) of the Great Nest. You can be at a higher, transpersonal, or
"spiritual" level in several lines, and at a lower, personal, or "psychological" level in
others, so that both spiritual and psychological development overlap--and the separate
spiritual line(s) can be relatively high or low as well.
All of these streams and waves are navigated by the self (or the self system), which has to
balance all of them and find some sort of harmony in the midst of this melange. Moreover,
something can go wrong in any stream at any of its waves (or stages), and therefore we can
map various types of pathologies wherever they occur in the psychograph--different
types of pathologies occur at different levels or waves in each of the lines.
Even though we can say, based on massive evidence (clinical, phenomenological, and
contemplative), that many of these developmental streams proceed through the waves in a
stage-like fashion, nonetheless overall development does not proceed in a
specific, stage-like manner, simply because the self is an amalgam of all the various
lines, and the possible number of permutations and combinations of those is virtually
infinite. Overall individual growth, in other words, follows no set sequence
whatsoever.
Finally, as suggested in the nested diagram (figure 11-2), because each senior dimension
transcends but includes (or nests) the junior dimension, to be at a higher wave does not
mean the lower waves are left behind. This is not (and never has been) based on a ladder,
but on the model of: atoms, molecules, cells, and organisms, with each senior level
enfolding or enveloping the junior--as Plotinus put it, a development that is
envelopment. So even at a higher level, "lower" work is still occurring
simultaneously--cells still have molecules, Buddhas still have to eat.
That's wilber-3 in a nutshell. While I'm on that topic, I'll give one last example of why
I believe that this type of wilber-3 model is an improvement on the traditional Great Chain
model (or wilber-2), which contains the various levels of Being but does not fully
understand how and why different lines develop through those levels. Huston Smith,
we have seen, accurately summarizes the traditional Great Chain as body, mind, soul, and
spirit (correlative with realms he calls terrestrial, intermediate, celestial, and
infinite). That model is fine as far as it goes, but the trouble is, it starts to fall
apart under further scrutiny, and it often collapses under the avalanche of modern
psychological research.
To begin with, the traditional Great Chain tends to confuse the levels of Being and the
types of self-sense associated with each level. For example, mind is a level of the
Great Chain, but the ego is the self generated when consciousness identifies
with that level (i.e., identifies with mind). The subtle is a level of the Great Chain,
the soul is the self generated when consciousness identifies with the subtle. The
causal/spirit is a level in the Great Chain, the True Self is the "self" associated with
that level, and so on. So the sequence of levels in the Great Chain should be body, mind,
subtle, and causal/spirit, with the correlative self stages of bodyego, ego, soul, and
Self--to use the very simplified version. Although I often use the traditional
terminology (body, mind, soul, spirit), I always have in mind the difference between the
actual levels (body, mind, subtle, causal) and the self at those levels (bodyego, ego,
soul, Self).
Here is where some of these distinctions start to pay off (and the usefulness of the move
from wilber-2 to wilber-3 becomes more obvious). The traditions generally maintain that
men and women have two major personality systems, as it were: the frontal and the
deeper psychic. The traditional Great Chain theorists (and wilber-2) would simply
say that the frontal is the self associated with the body and mind, and the deeper psychic
is associated with the soul, which would indeed be a type of ladder arrangement. But the
frontal and the deeper psychic seem much more flexible than that; they seem to be, not
different levels, but separate lines, of development, so that their development occurs
alongside of, not on top of, each other. We can graph this as shown in figure 7 (for
which I have reverted to a more accurate 6 levels).
Figure 7. The Development of the Frontal (or Ego), the Deeper Psychic (or Soul), and the Witness (or Self)
The frontal being is the gross-oriented personality--in the widest sense, what
we mean by "ego," or the personality that is oriented outwardly to the sensorimotor world.
The frontal being begins its developmental line or stream with material conception,
continues through the emotional-sexual or pranic stages, into the mental stages, and fades
out at the psychic. Frontal development represents the evolution of the self (or
self-identity) through the lower-to-intermediate waves of the Great Nest of Being.
According to the traditions, while the frontal personality is that which develops in this
life, the deeper psychic is that which develops between lives. It is, in the very widest
sense, what we mean by the word "soul." At any rate, the deeper psychic is said to be
present sometime from conception to mid-term; in fact, some research suggests that
prenatal, perinatal, and neonatal memories do in fact exist, and since these cannot be
carried by the frontal personality and the gross brain (since they have not developed), the
traditions would maintain that these memories are being carried by the deeper psychic being
and are later lost as frontal development gets under way and submerges the early psychic
being. Likewise, past-life memories, if they are genuine, would be carried by the deeper
psychic. Nonetheless, it is not necessary to believe in either prenatal memory or past
lives in order to acknowledge the deeper psychic self, which is primarily defined by
its access to higher consciousness, not by its access to past lives.
Although the deeper psychic is present from birth (or mid-prenatal), it plays a modest role
until the necessary frontal development finishes its task of orienting (and
adapting) consciousness to the gross realm. As the frontal personality begins to fade, the
deeper psychic being comes increasingly to the fore. Just as the frontal personality
orients consciousness to the gross realm, the deeper psychic orients consciousness to the
subtle realm. And, as we saw, the self associated with the subtle realm is the "soul,"
which is why "deeper psychic" and "soul" are generally synonymous. But the deeper psychic,
even though its roots are in the subtle realm per se, nonetheless has a development that
reaches down to some of the earliest stages, culminates in the subtle, and disappears at
the causal.
Already we can begin to see the advantage of making the frontal and the deeper psychic not
discrete levels but overlapping lines; not different waves but often parallel streams. We
can go one step further and note that there is a last major "personality," that of the
Self, associated with the causal, but also, like the others, having developments that reach
down into earlier stages. In other words, we can usefully treat the Self as a separate
line or stream of development, even though its basic orientation is the causal.
The Self, or the transpersonal Witness, is not--like the ego or the soul--a
"personality," since it has no specific characteristics whatsoever (it is pure Emptiness
and the great Unborn), except for the fact that it is an Emptiness still separate from
Form, a Witness still divorced from that which is witnessed. As such, the Self or Witness
is the seat of attention, the root of the separate-self sense, and the home of the last and
subtlest duality, namely, that between the Seer and the seen. It is both the highest Self,
and the final barrier, to nondual One Taste.
Nonetheless, the power of Witnessing is the power of liberation from all lower domains,
and the Witness itself is present, even if latently, at all previous stages. Each
developmental stage "transcends and includes" its predecessor, and the "transcend" aspect,
in every case, is the power of the higher to be aware of the lower (the soul is aware of
the mind, which is aware of the body, which is aware of matter). And in each case, the "is
aware of" is simply the power of the Witness shining through at that stage.
Although the Witness is present as the power of transcendental growth at every stage, it
comes to its own fruition in the causal realm. As the ego orients consciousness to the
gross, and the soul orients consciousness to the subtle, the Self orients consciousness to
the causal. While all of them have their root dispositions in specific realms or waves
of the Great Nest, they also have their own lines or streams of development, so they often
overlap each other, as indicated in figure 11-3. And this is what I think so many
meditation teachers and transpersonal therapists see in themselves and their clients,
namely, that ego and soul and Spirit can in many ways coexist and develop together,
because they are relatively separate streams flowing through the waves in the Great Nest of
Being. And there can be, on occasion, rather uneven development in between these
streams.
We all know fairly enlightened teachers (alive to the Unborn) who nonetheless still have
"big egos," in the sense of strong, forceful, powerful personalities. But the presence of
the ego is not a problem; it all depends upon whether the person is also alive to
higher and deeper dimensions. As Hubert Benoit said, it is not the identification with the
ego that is the problem, but the exclusive nature of that identification. When our
self-identity expands beyond the ego, into the deeper psychic, then even into the Unborn
and One Taste, the ego is simply taken up and subsumed in a grander identity. But the ego
itself remains as the functional self in the gross realm, and it might even appropriately
be intensified and made more powerful, simply because it is now plugged into the entire
Kosmos. Many of the great enlightened teachers had a big ego, a big deeper psychic, and a
very big Self, all at once, simply because these are the three functional vehicles of the
gross, subtle, and causal domains, and all three vehicles were appropriately intensified in
the great awakened ones.
Now--and this is what tends to confuse people--although the various developmental
lines often overlap each other, and in no specific sequence, the individual lines or
streams themselves usually have their own invariant, universal, developmental sequence
--namely, to the extent that they unfold into consciousness, they must negotiate
the levels or waves in the Great Nest, and in an order that is given by Nest itself. For
example, we have substantial evidence that cognition, morals, affects, kinesthetic skills,
and interpersonal capacity, to name a few, all develop through preconventional,
conventional, and postconventional waves (see Integral Psychology for extensive
references). In other words, the various streams seem to move through the levels in the
Great Nest in a fashion that is determined by the universal Great Nest itself. Although
all sorts of regressions and temporary leaps forward are possible, the empirical fact
remains as Aurobindo said: individual streams obey the law of a successive unfolding
(undulating through the waves of the Great Nest itself).
At the same time, I repeat: even though all developmental lines (including the frontal, the
deeper psychic, and the capacity for witnessing) follow their own stages, the overall
mixture of lines does not. The "overall self" is a juggling of some two dozen different
developmental lines, and thus each individual's unfolding will thus be a radically unique
affair.
[Note: My overall psychological model consists of waves, streams, self, states, and
realms. The above entry discusses mostly waves and streams. For a more complete discussion,
including altered states of consciousness and realms of consciousness, see Integral
Psychology, forthcoming in volume 4 of the Collected Works.]
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