Interview with Ken Wilber you haven't read

Well, maybe you have. I posted some of this on Integral Naked a year or so ago, but not the whole thing. It is an interview with KW in the Anthropology of Consciousness Journal, by the Amer. Anthro. Assoc.
In it KW makes the point that I've made a few time about the problems of taking the idea of fixed stage development with no cultural variation. That is, judging other cultures with the same stage development lens that we would our own. This is done by the majority of people who study AQAL, I think because it doesn't have a culture concept. But, KW is fully aware of the issue it seems. Actually it seems like a non-issue with him.

Interview

Anthropology, Consciousness, and Spirituality:

A Conversation with Ken Wilber

Grant Jewell Rich

Pettengill Hall

Bates College

4 Andrews Rd.

Lewiston, ME 04240

optimalex@aol com

Abstract

This is an interview with author Ken Wilber, whose work on consciousness over

the last twenty-five years has been tremendously influential. His work blends

“Eastern” and “Western” approaches and has influenced scholars in psychology,

philosophy, and religion, as well as in anthropology. His work on transpersonal

psychology is especially well-known, and his first book, The Spectrum ofConsciousness,

arguably marks the beginning of transpersonal studies. Frances Vaughan has referred

to Wilber's work as the “work of genius.” Daniel Goleman once listed Wilber among

the “ranks of the grand theorists of human consciousness” including “Ernst Cassirer,

Mircea Eliade, and Gregory Bateson.” Wilber discusses the scope of the consciousness

problem as well as contributions to the field that anthropologists might be well suited

to make. Key words: consciousness, theory, interview, relativism.

Rich: You've written volumes on the theme of consciousness. For example in your

books Integral Psychology and Theory of Everything you develop comprehensive

models of consciousness that seek to integrate Eastern and Western ways of thinking,

ancient and modern models of thought, and you've examined consciousness at every

level from the atomic to the psychological to the sociological to the spiritual. First

off, how do you define the scope of consciousness?

Wilber: It's one of those interesting things consciousness, because an aspect of it is

first person, so it's something you can't really describe or define very well. Because

part of it is experiential it's like saying how would you define a sunset, or how do you

define a tasty piece of apple pie, or how do you define making love and so on. I think

it's one of the difficulties of the field in that we want to, on the one hand, try to be

fairly scientific about our approach to consciousness, and science tends to study

things which are merely objects: rocks, trees, ecosystems, and so on. So it can give

you pretty good objective definitions of objects, but when a part of what you're

studying is subjective, then it gets a little slipperier, and that is certainly the case with

consciousness. If you look back at the traditions, on the one hand, and by traditions

I mean the great wisdom traditions or the spiritual traditions, on the one hand

consciousness is part of our own individuality. But most of the traditions maintain

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44 Anthropobgy of Consciousness 112(2)]

that consciousness has a component that runs right into spirit and spirit itself being

all transcending, all encompassing, is itself unqualifiable. Ultimately you can't really

define it. You can't define that which is common to all things or the ground of all

things. So, it's kind of a long-winded way of saying that a good deal of consciousness

is hard to define. Rather like pornography, [laughing] you know it when you see it,

or in this case feel it, I suppose, and that's what we're doing. We can study an awful

lot through the aspects of consciousness. We can look at levels of consciousness or

waves of consciousness, or developmental lines of consciousness. So we go at it that

way, by coming up with this large catalog of all the various types and modes and

aspects of consciousness.

Rich: You're well known for stage levels and stage theories of consciousness. How

do you define a stage?

Wilber: That's another area that it is problematic. On the one hand, it's true that

I do study some of the stages of consciousness but I don't think all aspects of

consciousness exist in stages. The model that I often present is sometimes summarized

as “all quadrants, all levels, all lines, and all states.” We can talk about what these

mean if you want, but the general idea is that one of those four has to do with levels

of consciousness or stages of consciousness. This is based not on theoretical issues

so much as it is based on empirical research. I'm particularly thinking about the

number of developmental psychologists studying aspects of developmental psychology

including cognitive development, moral development, linguistic development, and

so on. So, any integral theory of consciousness wants to at least look at the evidence

for stages and then try to see if there isn't some sort of felicitous way you can fit stage

conceptions into an overall model. Then you immediately run into criticisms of

stage conceptions particularly by the relativistic pluralists who don't believe in the

idea.

Rich: Might there be a different pace, order, or endpoint for the stages in different

cultures or in different periods of history ? Often scholars note problems or limitations

with stage theories. Kubler-Ross did wonderful work on the stages of dying [denial,

anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance]- but recent evidence suggests people go

through the stages in a variety of orders and sometimes at the same time. Another

example would be Kohlberg's work on moral development—in the US there is some

evidence that many people do proceed through the stages as he describes—however,

evidence from other cultures suggests that there are different criteria for moral

behavior, and that a person viewed as moral in a certain culture may not necessarily

score high on Kohlberg's stages.

Wilber: Well, what we're looking at here, again it depends on what you mean by

a stage and how specific or narrow you try to define that. On the one hand, if you

back up very very far, and define a stage in an extremely broad conception, very few

people would disagree. For example in the human mind, we have images, we have

symbols, we have concepts, and we have rules. Those are very general types of

cognitive capacities. All cultures seem to have the capacity to form images, symbols,

concepts and rules. The exact nature of them differs from culture to culture but the

capacity itself, as far as we can tell, is present in all known cultures. Moreover, those

Sep/Dec 2001 A Conversation with Ken Wilber 45

four entities that I just listed do emerge in a sequence that cannot be changed by

social conditioning, so nobody has found rules emerging before images, ever. So,

some stage conceptions in fact are uncontested and thats important to realize.

Usually, the pluralistic relativists want to come in and say all stage conception is

relative and thats simply factually incorrect. So, the question becomes, stages do

exist, we need to look very carefully at whether the stages we're looking at exist in

a single individual, in a single community, in a single culture, in several cultures, or

whether the stages are universal. I think a much more balanced approach to stage

conception is to say: we have evidence for stages in all those categories. Some stages,

like Kohlbergs, might be confined to particular cultures. Other stages, such as the

ones I gave in cognitive development are universal. So, if you go through and try to

map all of the various stage conceptions, then you can get a better idea about which

ones are cross-cultural, and which ones are more isolated. But taking either extreme

and saying there are no stages, period, or taking the other sort of Piagetian extreme,

and saying everybody goes through the same stages—1 think both of those are

incorrect.

Rich: Can you give an example of a theory where a person, in a particular stage

model, might skip stages or go backwards? You gave the example of the Piagetian

cognitive development theory, its a theory where a person typically does not skip

stages or go backwards, but then you also alluded to the fact that there might be stage

models for which that is not the case.

Wilber: Yes, it s a very broad conception of the general stage approach. What we're

trying to look M is just very simply taken from the model of growth systems in all of

nature. Virtually every organic system we're aware of has aspects that undergo

development, and these developments tend to appear, they're not rigid clunky sorts

Anthropology of Consciousness [12(2)]

of affairs, they tend to appear in stable patterns of unfolding. Whether you're looking

at an acorn growing into an oak, or even stellar systems, stellar evolution and stellar

development. In animal forms, you see basically stages of unfolding. So the idea is,

aren't some aspects, not all aspects, but some aspects of the human being also organic

and developmental? The answer appears to be yes, but beyond that again, you have

to go down and look at the various types of stages, see what empirical evidence there

is for them. Some things called stages appear merely to be cultural learning

mechanisms. The question again is in a real stage sequence certain requirements

have to be met. For example, atoms to molecules to cells to organisms, that's a true

stage conception in that none of those stages can be skipped. Nobody has ever gone

from atoms to cells and skipped molecules, nor can those stages be reversed, nor can

they emerge in an order that can be altered by environmental conditioning. So that's

kind of a primal example of stage conception, and there are certain types of

fundamentals in the human psyche that are very broad but that emerge into those

same types of sequences, because each stage is built of the components of its

predecessors, like images, symbols, concepts and rules. Other things called stage

conceptions don't hold up with that kind of rigor. What I appreciate about the

relativists is their concern that a particular ethnocentric stage conception might be

used as a model against which other cultures would be judged to be inferior, and

nobody wants to do that, and I certainly agree with that. But in their zeal to protect

other cultures, shall we say, I think they've thrown their baby out with the bath water.

A lot of important broad developmental ways of consciousness do appear to be crosscultural

and far from forming a kind of judgementalism that ranks other cultures

inferior, it actually is a way to find certain common elements across cultures that bind

people together. As for uneven development, that's a very complex issue, but I

present a summary of it in Integra/ Psychology.

Rich: In the past few decades, and you've alluded to this, there has been much talk

about cultural relativism and postmodernism. Are there limits to this approach to

the world?

Wilber: Which approach?

Rich: We can take cultural relativism first.

Wilber: I think part of the difficulty is that in order to maintain the stance of cultural

relativism, you have to use certain criteria that you are implicitly claiming are not

relative. This is the so-called performative contradiction. The idea is that, for

example, the cultural relativists are making a series of very strong claims that they

claim are true for all cultures. For example, they claim that truth is imbedded, that

there are no context-free truth claims, that there are therefore no universal truth

claims, and yet all of those claims contradict their own premises. So, in order to

consistently maintain relativism, you have to set up a language and a meta-language.

For your meta-language, you claim universal validity, and for everybody else's, you

claim it's culturally bound. That's a performative contradiction. Philosophically, I

think the cultural relativists have been handed a series of very, very strong defeats at

the hands of people like Jurgen Habermas and Charles Taylor and John Searle and

several others. All those theorists are quick to point out that a great deal of cultural

Sep/Dec 2001 A Conversation with Ken Wilber 47

knowledge is in fact context bound, relative, pluralistic and so on. But certain aspects

of cultures and certain truth claims about cultures themselves transcend cultures.

We have to be honest about both sides of those, and I think find a better mixture

between a pure universalism on the one hand which is pretty discredited, and a pure

relativism on the other hand which is also discredited, and a kind of universal

pluralism or a relativism set in the context of certain universal truth claims seems to

be the only really balanced way to approach it.

Rich: Well, in one view, I guess if you were a radical cultural relativist you could argue

that a really, really bad guy, like Hitler, for instance, trom the vantage point of his own

cultural world view and his own cultural setting, could be considered to be doing a

moral justice in the world. Hitler believed he was improving the world, as awful as

that seems to others. To take another example, recently in psychology there has been

much activity in the field of so-called “positive psychology” - the study of happiness,

wisdom, health, creativity, human decency and so on. Do you think there is a danger

in such a movement of limiting our notion of the good life to what a few dozen US

academic psychologists [studying almost exclusively middle-class US college students]

view as the good life?

Wilber: That's certainly one of the big problems, and one of the things that I've tried

to do in my own work is to avoid as much of that as possible. In other words, to avoid

a certain provincialism masquerading as universal good is to first try to do as complete

a mapping of consciousness states as possible. One might do this, in other words, by

looking at all the cultures that we have some sort of knowledge about, and looking

at the states of consciousness that they would report as best we can possibly

understand them. Obviously to some degree we're outsiders, and we try to take up

a stance of sympathetic hermeneutic understanding, and we map out these hundreds

and hundreds of possible psychological, spiritual consciousness states, and from that

we develop a very broad cartography. Of course it will never be complete, though you

try to make it as complete as you can. From that broad cartography of consciousness,

you can then stand back and say okay, here are dozens of things that men and women

over the centuries have considered good, or the good life. So if I'm going to come

in and say happiness consists of, or wisdom consists of, a, b, or c, then I at least better

have this whole cartography in mind, because I might be excluding something very,

very important. So, we may look at this broad cartography, and then try to say, here

are certain common elements that many cultures seem to really value, and ask, 'do

we have access to those states of consciousness in our own culture, and if not, why

not'? If certain academic psychologists are going around saying this is positive

psychology i/you agree with what makes me happy [laughing], then we can go, okay,

that's a big problem!

Rich: Right. What in your theory then, and you've written about this to some

extent, what is the ultimate state of consciousness? Is this the same thing for all

people, in all places, in all historical epochs?

Wilber: It's certainly not the same for all people in all places at all times. It's not even

really the same for a few people in a few places in a few times. But what you do have,

let me put it this way, if you map out all those states of consciousness as I describe to

Anthropology of Consciousness 112(2)]

the best of your ability, and then you look at sort of this overall map of possible

consciousness states that men and women have reported, and you just take it as a

phenomenology, you don't take it as, it has to be empirically true, then certain

patterns suggest themselves about these states of consciousness and certain values

tend to suggest themselves about those states of consciousness. I'll give you one

example, If you look at certain aspects of consciousness that do tend to undergo

development, not in rigid linear clunk-and-grind stages, but more sort of fluid and

flowing waves of unfolding, again more like an acorn unfolds into an oak, a general

way to summarize it is that it seems to be in part an expansion of identity with higher

stages of development. One way of summarizing it is to say that consciousness seems

to expand from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric modes. Egocentric means

just that, basically my consciousness is described, and my world is described, in first

person terms. I'm not aware, I can't take the role of other, I'm not aware of other's

selves outside of my own egoic dispositions. That seems to expand into an

understanding that there are other selves, so I move from egocentric to sociocentric

or ethnocentric. If development continues I can understand that there's just not my

group or my tribe, or my country right or wrong, there are other countries other tribes,

other peoples, other sentient beings for that matter, and I expand my identity from

identifying with just my tribe, or just my nation or just my group, to a sympathetic

understanding or identity with other human beings. Then I attempt to treat other

human beings with certain fairness or decency or even a quality or certain honoring

of other human beings regardless of race, color, creed, and disposition. There's

nothing in those states themselves that necessarily says that one is better than the

others, but if you look at cultures that have access to all three of those, and you look

at the people that are generally considered to be the wise women and wise men of

those cultures, they tend to value worldcentric over ethnocentric, and they value

ethnocentric over egocentric. That to me suggests that there are certain types of

values that can be read off of this large cartography of consciousness. Again, we have

to be very careful not to be provincial or to give a very narrow definition. Stage

conceptions work universally only if they're given in these very broad brush strokes

and that makes some people uncomfortable because they want to give a very precise

narrow definition of a stage and I don't think that's possible. I think that just doesn't

work very well. Of the very meticulous description of stages from Piaget's to

Kohlberg's, on the meticulous aspects of their descriptions, those don't tend to hold

up very well. But the broad aspects they're talking about, there does seem to be crosscultural

validity in some of the things that they're trying to get across.

Rich: Certainly your theory is so broad and encompassing, with “Eastern” and

“Western” and historical and modern perspectives and so on and so forth, that to pick

out a little inaccuracy here and there does a disservice to the whole enterprise and

really isn't fair, in my view, but if you were to talk about, say, about the egocentric level

of self certainly that's something that varies cross-culturally, the conception of self.

In fact some cultures will argue, and some religions will argue, that the notion of self

is different than the “mainstream” US self. Could you address that issue a little bit

perhaps, like the Buddhist conception of self or, the self-concept or the lack of selfconcept

in some Asian cultures?

Sep/Dec 2001 A Conversation with Ken Wither 49

Wilber: There tends to be two different ways that you can approach that because

there are at least two very different definitions of self or ego or what those terms mean.

It's on the one hand, a culturally specific definition as you suggest, mainly that what

many Westerners mean by a self or an ego is the product of basically the Western

enlightenment and it's sort of analytic distancing. The favorite dirty word of the last

two decades is Cartesian and that sort of dualistic Cartesian disembodied self is what

nonetheless many modern Western philosophers mean by the self and that certainly

is not present in other cultures [laughing] fortunately, although there are aspects

about it that are probably positive. It's not just a bad thing. The notion of Western

enlightenment casting nothing but a mass of crippling errors is silly I think. It had

positives and it had negatives. One of the positives is that it evolved a conception

of worldcentric or universal fairness regardless of race, color, sex, or creed. The down

side is that the differentiation went into dissociation and we have sort of the mind

body problem and the downside to Cartesian philosophy. That self is not what I mean

when I talk about evolution going from self-centric to ethnocentric to worldcentric.

That's very specific culturally, a specific kind of self. Another difficulty is that if you

look at any of the developmental sequences as they occur in East or West, there is

another way to talk about these three broad stages, the use of the terms preconventional,

conventional, and post-conventional. Although those terms were

sometimes used by Kohlberg, they really go back to James Mark Baldwin and some

of the first great evolutionary theorists of consciousness. In a sense it just states

essentially that a child is born, has not yet been socialized or acculturated and is

therefore by definition pre-conventional. At some point the child learns, or there

emerges in the child's psyche, or it socially mimics, whatever theory you wish, it

internalizes its cultural ethics, morals, background, knowledge, and becomes

conventional, and by definition ethnocentric, meaning bound to its own cultural

way of looking at things. If development continues, East or West, a capacity to some

degree to distance oneself from a culture and to norm the norm or develop some

capacity for critical self-reflection tends to arrive again in the East and the West. The

Buddhists take that to its ultimate conclusion, because each stage of consciousness

unfolding is a lessening of egocentrism, meaning you can take more and more

perspectives, the more consciousness evolves and unfolds. So another way to

describe those three stages again is to say, first person, second person, and third person

perspectives are understood, and what the Buddhists in a sense do, is they add a fourth

stage to that. Once you've developed a normal adult ego, which in Buddhism means

a center of self that organizes the relative stream of consciousness, once that's

developed you can actually transcend it in what could be called post-worldcentric,

or the fourth major wave of development, that according to Buddhism finally and

once and for all transcends any egoic partiality or narrowness, or any identification

with the personal body-mind, so in a sense, the Buddhist notion of selflessness or

egolessness still presupposes the development of an ego. They have a very specific

cartography of that development. They just don't stop with the Western Cartesian

ego. The Buddhist philosophers take it to the next stage, which transcends even that.

Rich: Let's talk about stage development and evolution and regression, using

creativity as an example. There are some Freudian theories of creativity that suggest

that eminent creators may regress to earlier stages of development, have insights in

Anthropology of Consciousness [12(2)J

this child-like state, and then come back to a mature level of ego development to edit

and revise their creative products. I guess another, different model of creativity would

say you would jump up from your typical level of ego development to a higher level

of consciousness, maybe to a post-conventional or post-worldcentric level, and then

come back down to the ego plane to edit and revise.

Wilber: They're not necessarily mutually exclusive, which is why I try to stress that

even if we talk about developmental stages in terms of broad waves of consciousness

unfolding, that doesn't mean that everything that's going on in childhood is only a

lower level so to speak. What it simply says is when we do recognize a developmental

sequence, development generally means unfolding of deeper wider more complex

and sophisticated organizations. In that sense, earlier stages of development tend to

lack certain of the higher capacities that senior stages have. It doesn't mean they're

unimportant. It doesn't mean they don't have their own function. But the other

point is that there could be also other things going on in childhood, and I'll give you

just a very quick example. We've been talking about broad stages, three or four waves

of consciousness that many cultures East and West fully recognize. But in addition

to stages, there's that other item I mentioned when I said all quadrants, all waves, all

streams, and all states, and that's the fourth one, all states. Because while the stages

of consciousness tend to unfold in a given pattern, in a given sequence, states of

consciousness don't, and both of them are important and both of them have a very

strong role to play in human experience, in particular human spiritual experiences.

All human beings are given at least three major states of consciousness and we're all

familiar with those, waking, dreaming and deep sleep. According to Vedanta

Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, and many of the neo-Platonic sects in the West,

these three broad realms correspond basically to what would be called matter, mind,

and spirit. Again, it's not to say they're separate, or they're radically distinct, but just

that these are access to deeper states of consciousness. The fact is infants, and all

human beings wake, dream and sleep, so according to this theory, all human beings

have some sort of access to the material realm, to the mental or soul realm, and the

spirit realm, because all humans wake, dream and sleep. So you can have an altered

state or peak experience of these gross, subtle or causal states at any stage of

development, and that's where it gets interesting I think. Well to finish the first

point, a child generally does have a little bit more playful access to the dream realm,

although the child will interpret that playfulness through the stage which the child

is at, mainly egocentric, pre-conventional, and narcissistic. That's why no matter

how playful and “creative” a child can be, a three year old child still cannot take the

role of other and so won't have a developed sense of, for example, compassion or

mutual love. Of course, it can in some sense love its parents and love its friends and

so on, but it can't take the role of other. It can't really understand the other person's

perceptions from within. Therefore, you can't really have fully developed love or

compassion. So, by saying that we have both states and stages, I think we can take

sort of the best of both of these models, and by putting them together start to get a

little comprehensive overview of what's possible. One of the first things you can do

is actually create a grid of various types of spiritual experiences that are possible by

realizing that a person at a pre-conventional wave of development, at the conventional

wave, at the post-conventional wave, and at the, let's just call it transcendent wave

Scp/Dcc 2001 A Conversation with Ken Wilber 51

for the moment» that a person in any of those four stages or waves can have an

experience of grdss waking, subtle dreaming, or causal formlessness of deep sleep. So,

that little simple £rid right there gives us twelve types of spiritual experiences. There

are abundant tofefens of those twelve types that you can find in a large number of

cultures. I won't say all cultures because when we push back two hundred thousand

years or so things start to get very dim. At that point you just have to be more cautious

about what you say. But certainly in the past twenty thousand years or so, there are

cultures that tend to have access to most of those types, those twelve types that I

describe.

Rich: In your writing, you allude to the ability of a person at a given stage to pop up

to another stage occasionally. You discuss the idea that people can have peak

experiences or flow experiences at each stage. This idea is relatively unique to you,

I think. Could you expand on that idea?

Wilber: The general notion is that if we're talking about a stage conception in the

strict sense, you can't peak experience a higher stage. For example, in the Piaget,

cognitive line, a person in preoperational cannot have a peak experience at the

formal operational. It would be like saying an atom has a peak experience of a cell.

Each higher stage in a true stage sequence is made of its previous stages. That's why

we can't skip real stages and this led to difficulty because it was pretty obvious that

if you look at some of the early and primal cultures, that certain of the shamans, for

example, were clearly having some very high states of consciousness even though the

cultures themselves might not be at a very high stage of cultural interaction. This

led to a series of very intense debates because the pluralists in this case rightly I think

wanted to say you can't judge these cultures as inferior, that's just not fair, and it's

ethnocentric and it sucks. You had some very high states going on, and particularly

in the shamanic states, these are very subtle and occasionally causal states of

consciousness. How dare you say that they're inferior? Other people like Jurgen

Habermas would come along and say, all that might be so, but if you actually look at

the legal modes of interaction at kinship and kinship lineage modes of interaction,

many of these cultures are clearly at the pre-conventional to conventional stage of

unfolding and by an intrinsic developmental logic, that's not being forced upon them

by Westerners. The only way I think you can combine both of those, because I think

both of them are true, is not pick one of them and throw the other one out, but to

realize that anybody and any culture at any given stage of development can have

access to these altered states. So that allows very, very profound peak experiences to

occur literally at any wave of unfolding. So in a sense, the best of all possible worlds,

would be cultures that make available as many stages of growth as possible and also

sanction as many states of consciousness as possible. It might be under a certain, how

shall I say, bounded circumstances. For example, we can't have everyone running

through the streets having mystical experiences twenty-four hours a day. Obviously

that's not going to work, but within reasonable limits, an “ideal” culture would want

to have full access to stages of consciousness and full access to states of consciousness.

What I find happens a lot with some of the primal and original cultures is that they

had wonderful access to many states of consciousness but not very good access on

stages. The modern world at least in its legal and political institutions has moved

52 Anthropology of Consciousness [12(2)]

from ethnocentric to worldcentric. The Western enlightenment ended slavery,

introduced feminism, and did introduce rights that eventually extended to slaves,

women, children and even animals on occasion. So the Western world has done

relatively well on helping us get a few more developed stages, but in the process the

down side is that it threw out many states of consciousness that it judged to be premodern,

which for it meant pre-rational, which for it meant childish, infantile and

stupid. That's one of the main problems in my view with the limitations of Western

culture. The problem is not that it developed into a worldcentric stage with the

enlightenment, which it did, in many ways it was good, it's that it threw out many

of these altered states, number one, and therefore number two, the Western

enlightenment didn't realize that there were yet higher stages of consciousness

development which would take it into the transcendent or transpersonal, as a

permanent adaptation and not merely as a passing state. That would be what the

Buddhists do for example, that is that they tear into that fourth or transcendental

stage.

Rich: Do you think we could legally mandate or legally prescribe cultural conditions

which might promote ultimate states of consciousness or is that again something

that's a dangerous path to go down?

Wilber: It's probably a dangerous path to go down. It appears that almost the only

thing that you can do, under these circumstances, is advocacy and to the degree that

you can, education. I've sort of been struck time and time again by that fact that when

it comes to these higher stages of consciousness development which are transrational,

transpersonal, transcendent, and spiritual, and certain states of consciousness which

also have a spiritual feeling to them, that people that have had these experiences are

very comfortable with them because they've seen what they're like, they know that

they're real, they know that they're conveying some sort of profound information.

Maybe they don't interpret it too well, and it comes out looking a little silly on

occasion, or maybe they interpret it in very profound philosophical ways. The fact

is purely that they've had the experiences or they haven't. Those that haven't, there's

almost nothing you can say that will convince them of the legitimacy or authenticity

of higher stages and of certain altered states. And mandating them or legislating

them, I don't think would work, but in the mean time we could just simply say here's

a broad cartography of what men and women have experienced cross culturally over

the ages, and you know [laughing] where are you on this map, how many of these have

you experienced ? How many would you like to experience? How many of these would

you like to outlaw? [both laugh]

Rich: Exactly. Well, let's see, you remind me now of Sigmund Freud's book Future

of Illusion in which Freud is just adamant that he can't discover spiritual or 'oceanic'

feelings within himself, no matter what he reads or who talks to him. He's just

convinced that anyone who believes in higher powers or spiritual things is cognitively

and emotionally immature. And this leads me to the question that many times it

appears, and you've written about this, that people confuse pre-conventional and

post-conventional types of experiences and this idea that perhaps that some people

haven't had peak or transcendent experiences. Of course, one option would be to

Sep/Dec 2001 A Conversation with Ken Wilber 53

send them to a weekend seminar on consciousness or what not and see if they have

a peak or spiritual experience. Can we help people along their way to higher states

of consciousness or is that a lost cause?

Wilber: It's certainly not a lost cause, and I think what happens if you look at cultures

around the world, is two things stand out. One is that with very few exceptions most

cultures that we're aware of have some access to altered states and higher stages of

consciousness. Two, the number of people who actually experience these higher

stages is really rare. I tend to find that people who overlook either one of those tend

to draw some, I think, unfounded conclusions about what was going on in the past

and what's going on today. A lot of writers talk as if fifty thousand years ago every

human being alive was a shaman and was immersed in non-dissociated consciousness

and was enlightened and one with everything that was arising and I don't think so.

Rich: “Ancient good, modern bad,” that's how I summarize that view [laughing].

Wilber: [laughing] and then every modem person you know, is cut off from anything

resembling spirituality, is a dry, desiccated, Cartesian hack, and I don't think that's

true either. But the fact is the number of people in any culture, including Buddhist

cultures that have pursued higher stages and higher states, is very small. I would say

easily less than a tenth of one percent of the population at any given time. Possibly

not for tribal cultures because usually there are only forty people within a tribe. The

ecological carrying capacities of most primal tribes is forty to sixty people, and maybe

one was a shaman and maybe one of ten shamans was any good. So it's a very rare

pursuit. What I find a little bit encouraging is that particularly within the baby boom

generation and with a whole lot of people that did inhale, that they got some sense

of something else going on so that gave them at least fresher eyes to re-examine other

cultures for any hidden treasures or higher states or stages that might be available to

men and women here and now. And I think that's actually pretty good. Look at the

number of people in this country, America, that are at least theoretically studying

some of these issues—it's actually you know, it's getting up there. It's still small, it's

still less than one percent, but relatively speaking there's a certain resurgence of

interest in this and I think all we can continue to do is good scholarship on the one

hand, pointing things out. I think that research into both stages and states also helps.

It's not accidental, I don't think, in this country virtually every single stage theorist

has looked at howe

Re: Interview with Ken Wilber you haven't read

however many stages they present, you know four, five, six, eight,

whatever, and they've all said what if there's a ninth stage? Because that's exactly

right, you know [laughing], why stop at eight? Lawrence Kohlberg postulated stage

seven, which is universal spiritual experience. Jane Loevinger's theory had eight

stages or so, and her main student, Suzanne Cook-Greuter has continued to refine

Jane Loevinger's highest stage, which she called integrated, and Suzanne Cook-

Greuter has found two or three substages in that one. Then again note the highest

of those is a unative mystical experience. Those kinds of things tend to carry a little

bit of weight because they're based on empirical research, with very careful, very

sober scholars, and there's a certain intrinsic logic to the unfolding of these higher

waves. And so that tends to help on the one hand. On the other hand the simple

cataloging of states of consciousness that are possible and then asking the embarrassing

Anthropology of Consciousness 112(2)]

question why out of a hundred, let's say, does this culture sanction four? What's that

all about? And these kinds of things slowly eat away at the common conception that

there are only three or four states of consciousness. Most altered states of consciousness

are bad and bad for you [laughing] and that the real state of consciousness is more or

less what the world looks like on a bleak Monday morning as you're driving to work.

Anything other than that is not allowed [laughing].

Rich: Right [laughing]. The depressing view. You were talking about the rarity of

spiritual and transcendent experiences, particularly at the very high levels.

Wilber: Let me just qualify that briefly. Everybody has a fleeting experience or so.

What I was saying more is the people that really pursue it to reach those higher stages

is a permanent accomplishment or permanent adaptation. That's always usually less

than one percent of the population.

Rich: Okay. The developmentalist Bernice Neugarten studied middle age and

talked about the notion of on-time vs. off-time development. For instance, in the

US in the 1950s completing one's education in one's twenties, getting married and

starting a career next, and beginning a family by one's late twenties, was the norm,

in Neugarten's terms, on time. On-time development ruffles few feathers. Cultural

leaders or innovators, including great religious leaders and creative people, in my

view, often exhibit off-time development. They are avant-garde, and before their

time, or at least not in sync with their time and place. A person who is a shaman who

is at one of these higher stages of consciousness or higher levels of consciousness

while his or her peers might not be may face certain obstacles and pressures.

Wilber: Historically it has been pretty unpleasant [laughing]. I think Peter Berger

did a wonderful series of studies on what he termed nihilation and therapia and you sort

of see it in most cultures. There is a conventional background series of beliefs, norms,

rules of behavior, and so on and if you deviate from those, a whole series of forces

swing into play to help straighten you out, and this is not necessarily a bad thing, not

in all ways. I think a lot of us Boomers brought up in the sixties, we want nothing

but freedom and anything that ties us down ought to be deconstructed. The fact is

that societies do have to survive, and they do have to form some sort of cultural

bonding, some degree of cohesion as a group and as a group consciousness in order

to survive. And when somebody breaks that law then they're outlawed, and Berger

referred to that as nihilation because it threatens the death of the culture. The outlaw

threatens the culture's cohesion. So, culture will come up one way or the other with

therapy, therapia that will help straighten the poor outlaw out. I've suggested just in

keeping with those aspects of consciousness that are developmental, that the way you

want to refine that theory is to point out that there is not really an outlaw. There's

something you might call pre-law and post-law or translaw, and in a certain sense the

idea that if somebody is pre-law that culture does have something of a right to help

therrt get up to embrace the law. But once you've done that you can go post-law, you

can transcend the law. You can pull a Thoreau, which is fantastic but when you do

that then you put yourself in the outlaw translaw position, and then therapia comes

after your ass. Whether it's Christ or Giordano Bruno or any of the translaw seers and

visionaries it's pretty unpleasant.

Sep/Dcc 2001 A Conversation with Ken Wilber 5 5

Rich: Right. Well if you look at some of these translaw individuals like Martin

Luther King, or Gandhi or what not, who are going beyond what is the black letter

law, whose values do we pick? How do we know that person's values are the best or

the correct [laughing] values to have?

Wilber: That's exactly where I think the positive aspects of the universalist position

swings into play. Because it's meant to answer exactly that question. So if you have

for example, somebody who is in an ethnocentric culture oh let's pick one that's not

too controversial, say, the Nazis [laugh], and you are in a sense going translaw, which

I think probably the greatest example of that was Thomas Mann, who started exit as

well known, quite the national socialist, and very much ethnocentric, very much

blood and soil, very much romantic in the traditional sense, and through a very

difficult period moved from ethnocentric to a higher stage of development called

worldcentric and post-conventional. He argues the universal rights of men and

women and used that against the Nazis and probably became the strongest German

anti-Nazi voice over a two-decade period. The same thing happens if you look at any

of the outlaws that we admire—they're all translaw. They're all moving basically

from an ethnocentric to worldcentric or higher. That includes Martin Luther King,

that includes Thoreau in his own way. That certainly includes Gandhi. We can't,

it's very hard to justify their actions on relativistic terms. Because the relativist has

to substitute for universal truth or goodness a provincial and parochial contextually

bound solidarity. See that's the only thing they can anchor their agreement in. Since

there's no empirical truth, there can only be social solidarity. When somebody breaks

that solidarity, it's very hard for them to come up with standards that can justify

breaking a cultural solidarity. Universalists can do that, and while we don't want to

just have a universalist position, I think that's an aspect of universalism and an aspect

of universal broad stages of growth that helps us identify whether a person is moving

in a translaw and therefore justifiable direction.

Rich: Okay, let me switch directions a little bit. What are the limits if any to

reductionism ? E.O. Wilson, in his book Consilience, what may be viewed as his theory

of consciousness, seems to argue that eventually all types of knowledge may be linked

together by reducing higher systems [say psychology] to lower systems [say biology]

to even lower systems [say chemistry]. Put another way, can we reduce the study of

happiness to the study of dopamine, the study of warring societies to the study of

individual personality? Or is that just a lost cause?

Wilber: Yeah, that's one of the longest rhetorical questions that I've been asked [both

laugh]. I think the wonderful thing about the human genome project is that they

came up with only thirty thousand genes. Everybody was hysterical about this

[laughing] you can't do squat with thirty thousand genes [laughing]. You can hardly

build a decent game of checkers, it's pretty ridiculous. So now they are very very quick

to say, oh well no that's not where the action is, the action is in protein assembly unit,

that's where over two million proteins [laughing] come into play. None of which is

specified in the genome, none of it. And if you can't get it out of the genome, you

can't go lower for Christ's sake, [laughing]. Oh we can't find it in the genome, let's

look in it for atoms, and I don't think so. Reductionism is, there will always be people

56 Anthropology of Consciousness [12(2)J

who want to do that and I think the motives are in many ways honorable. If you look

at what empirical science has managed to do, despite all the criticisms that it has

gotten, its accomplishments are really rather extraordinary. It has added thirty or

forty years of lifespan to virtually everybody on the planet, put a person on the moon,

medicine, quantum physics, I mean it's really rather extraordinary. And it did so by

coming up with ways to ground its truth point. Unlike poetry or music or art, which

are also important, but science had its own thing to do, and they did it quite well. So

there are always good men and women like Wilson that want to continue that

goodness, as they understand it. So they want to extend scientific materialism

basically indefinitely. At that point I think their noble mode runs into their own

egocentric power drive. I think there's a down side to that which is I don't like your

state of consciousness; I don't like any other states of consciousness. My state, my

stage is the only truth and that's silly. So I think it's a mixture of very, very positive

motives and a shadow side, an under belly side, which looks like to me like a bit of

a power drive.

Rich: Let's switch gears again. In Marriage of Sense and Soul, your book on the

relationship of science and religion, you offer a number of arguments that in part aim

to reconcile these two ways of thinking. Huston Smith wrote that, “no one—not

even Jung—has done as much as Wilber to open up Western psychology to the

durable insights of the world's wisdom traditions.” In this book you note thatscience

can't be reconciled with religion if: one, science says the interior always may be

merely reduced to objective subparts and two, if science claims even if there are 'other

ways of knowing' they cannot be verified. Can you expand and clarify this idea?

Wilber: Let's start with number one and remind me if we don't get to number two.

The basic idea of the way science is generally practiced is that it looks for objective

data and it goes beyond that to claim that anything that isn't objective data is in some

sense not real. And that certainly means consciousness or our experience of the

interior because there's no way to objectify that there's no easy way to get a ruler on

it there's no way to frankly reduce that to DNA or molecules or chemistry. That

consciousness somehow doesn't have the same kind of fundamental reality. That

these good old rocks and dirt and all those things that you can see and get your hands

on and that's been extrapolated sometimes into a vicious attack on consciousness

itself or the belief in interiors, the belief that there is anything resembling higher

interiors whether those are stages or states of consciousness. They would just deny

higher states of consciousness or higher stages of consciousness. They deny

consciousness. They deny all the lower intermediate states and everything else. And

my simple point was that, if you actually look at the way that science is done, and most

philosophers of science are pretty clear about this, most of the fundamentals of

science aren't derivable from empirical objects. There are a whole set of conceptual

tools and apparatus, everything from differential calculus to Boolean algebra, none

of which have empirical correlates, no one has ever seen a square root of a negative

one running around out next to rocks and trees, and this entire elaborate interior

conceptual apparatus is used to deny the reality of interior apparatus. And again it's

a performative contradiction. It presupposes in the strongest way possible exactly

that which it claims cannot exist and that's part of the inherent fallacy of scientism

Sep/Dec 2001 A Conversation with Ken Wither 5 7

as opposed to science. So the first thing you want to try to point out is that an

enormous amount of the truth claims that science brings to the world aren't

empirical. They're interior and have to do with logic and mathematics and all sorts

of interior structures of consciousness that mathematicians are pretty unanimous on

cannot be derived from empirical or sensory objects. So the first thing you want to

try to do is to loosen up their insistence that anything interior is not ultimately real.

If that's the case then science is gone. The second thing was okay maybe there are

interiors. Okay. Oops, right [laughing], but only my interior. We happen to be logical

and mathematical and not your crummy interior. So what I was trying to say is if we

agree that nobody really thinks there's such a thing as the scientific method. If you

look back at what science does there are certain things that most scientific endeavors

have in common and I pointed out that there are really three of them, and these aren't

meant to be exclusive. One is most science has, starts out with, some sort of

injunction. If you want to know this, do this. If you want to know if a cell has a

nucleus learn to cut the cell stain them, and put them under a microscope and so on.

Actually what Thomas Kuhn meant by paradigms, was an example of something you

do in order to bring forth experiences or data, if you will. So the first strand of most

is an injunction. The second strand is some sort of apprehension or experience or

illumination. If you do strand number one, you look down the microscope or you

drop two objects off the leaning tower of pizza [laughing]… If you do that, you will

hear something or see something or register something, some sort of experience will

result from that injunction and that's the data. And as William James pointed out

data just means direct experience. And so you do the experiment the method the

injunction, number one, number two you get some sort of data, some sort of research,

some sort of result, some sort of experience, and then three and that's the part actually

strand two is the part that the empiricists put a lot of stress on. We have to have

evidence for science that's what good science comes down to. And then the third

strand though, which is stated in various ways, is that we do want to have some sort

of communal confirmation or rejection. We should try to have those first two strands

repeated by other people if they get the same results which repeated over and over

again and we never find any contra meaning results then we accept that as more or

less, you know, scientific fact. Or at the very least, it's a theory that is looking very

promising. And if a theory sticks around for a century or two and if nobody can ever

find anything disagreeing with it then it gets to become a law. And that's kind of all

I basically said was if you look at those three strands and you look at any of the

meditative or shamanic or contemplative endeavors that explore the interior, the

best of them follow those three strands. They all have some sort of injunction. I'll

use Zen Buddhism as an example. They have some sort of an injunction in Zen—

its called Zazen. It's a type of sitting meditation that trains the mind to look at subtler

and sublffer aspects of the mind's own processes and that's the injunction, you must

do this you must perform this experiment if you want to know what we're talking

about. The second stage is you do that, and by any intense training getting a PhD

in science, for example. Doing that and taking three or four years of real practice

before you can master the stuff. If you do that, you complete the training, and brain

washing does not work [laughing], just intense, grueling discipline. If you do that

you'll get a series of apprehensions, a series of data, a series of experiences that will

Anthropology of Consciousness [ 12 (2)J

start to register in your awareness. The biggest one is called Satpri. It's an actual

change in stage or state of consciousness that shows you aspects of reality previously

unseen at lower stages of consciousness. You then compare your apprehensions to

others who have completed the first two strands. You can have communal

confirmation and rejection. This is a refined process. Any old experience you have

is not acceptable. Why ? Because there's a lineage of some thousand of years, of some

hundreds of thousands of men and women going through the trajning and looking

very carefully at the data. There are criteria for good data and there are definitely

criteria for bad data. The bad data are falsified and falsifiable. So itfc consonant with

Karl Popper's notions. So I just basically suggested that on those two points that you

brought up, one, even science would have to acknowledge there are interior truths

that are not merely objective and empirical and two, you investigate those interiors

using generally speaking a broadly kind of scientific endeavor. And therefore that

ought to ease the alarm scientists hear when we talk about states pf consciousness.

Rich: I think what you're saying is to attempt to be as objective as possible about the

subjective?

Wilber: I think that's fine, I think that's a fine way to put it, and I need to point that

out because sometimes when I point that out critics think that I'm saying that the

scientific method should cover all the bases as well and that's not true because there

are other aspects of interior states of consciousness that are more expressive and

aesthetic and would fall under art and that there are more moral an^ inner subjective

and would fall under, well, ethics. The point is that a general scientific enterprise can

disclose a great deal of data on these interior domains being, as you said, as objective

about the subjective as possible. Of course it can be done. Mathematicians do it all

the time and so do Zen Buddhists.

Rich: I guess some psychologists would argue they are objective abjput the subjective

too when they ask people for their self reports on questionnaire after questionnaire.

Wither: Oh yeah, any sort of introspective psychology deals witrj this. Any sort of

hermeneutics deals with this. We're talking about interpretation of non-empirical

realities and there's just no conceivable reason that these interior realities are going

to be stripped of their reality in service of trying to reduce everything to dirt and rock

and atoms.

Rich: I just have a few more questions and these relate to anthropplogy. How might

anthropology with its field methods, observations, and intervjew methodology

contribute to the study of consciousness?

Wilber: I think the real and wonderful service that it can and has done, particularly

in the past two decades, is to bring a real understanding of pluridimensional alternate

realities. And the studies of these, on their own terms. It doesn't mean that we also

can't take as part of what we're doing, there's no reason we can't alsq take an objective

stance. Look at for example the use of systems theory to look at r\pw cultures range

their organization based on self-organizing patterns of autopoejic maintenance.

There's nothing wrong with that. It's one way to conceptualize it. But the other way

is from within in a hermeneutic stance, a sympathetic understand jng. So we ask not

Sep/Dec 2001 A Conversation with Ken Wither 59

only what does it do, but what does it mean. And that's incredibly valuable because

it's adding to that cartography of consciousness that I'm talking about. What we're

really doing in a certain sense is like the human genome project, only this is sort of

the human consciousness project. It's a mapping of every state, stage, wave, twitch

of consciousness available to men and women with the understanding that new ones

are emerging all the time. Once we have this really large cartography, then a couple

of things happen that I think anthropology could start to look at as sort of its next

stage if you will, or its next phase. And that is what we do have this big cartography

all these wonderful rich multicultural variations of human consciousness in its types,

in its modes, in its expressions. Once we have that large cartography, do patterns start

to present themselves among that cartography? And that's where I think we'll start

to find an interesting blend of universalists and contextualist approaches. By taking

the best of both of these I think a very exciting discovery will await anthropology, and

it will be a blend of sort of the modern approach to anthropology, which is a rigid

universalistic stage conception, made famous by Comte as basically religion to

philosophy to science for his big three stages and all the lower stages are primitive and

stupid and idiotic and his wonderful highest stage sits on top of it all. That's clearly

not the way to go. But the extreme reaction to that produces the opposite, which is

that there's nothing but relativistic cultural local knowledge. And there's no crosscultural

commonalities. That's clearly too far in its own extreme, this view. I think

the next phase of anthropology will be finding some way to integrate the best of the

modern and post-modern and for that matter the pre-modern. I think using a

judicious blend of stages and states and types and a general phenomenological

mapping of all the potentials of human consciousness will allow some of these

patterns to start to stand out. And I think that's going to be very exciting.

Rich: Where does anthropological knowledge fit into the quadrants of your theory?

Wilber: It depends on the type of anthropology that you're doing. The two broad

approaches that I talked about which number one is studying societies from an

external stance, an objective stance trying to look at things from type of money, birth

rate, death rate, suicide rate, building code, linguistic signifiers, syntax structures and

so on. That's what I call the lower right quadrant. That's looking at the outside and

social systems' objective entities. They do have objective aspects to them. They can

be studied to some extent that way including certain stages. For example foraging

to horticultural, to agrarian, to industrial, to informational, nobody contests those

stages, those are genuine stages of unfolding. We never find the reverse. We never

find one happening by itself without the others. Each of them actually incorporates

ingredients of its predecessor. But just looking at that from an objective external

stance is the lower right quadrant. The lower left quadrant, which is inner subjective

and shared interiors, I call that cultural instead of social. That tends to be

hermeneutic approaches, those that tend to map the modes and styles and interactions

but have made some attempt to get an empathetic feel from within of what is going

on, and not just distancing yourself in a sort of detached above it all fashion. Mary

Daly has discussed this, Jurgen Habermas has a version also of both exteriors and

interiors, and I think that's increasingly going to come to the fore. Just as we can

combine the best of universalism and the best of contextualism, we combine the best

60 Anthropology of Consciousness [12(2)]

of hermeneutics with the best of systems theory. We don't have to constantly pick

sides and say that one is right and that other one is totally wrong.

Rich: If you could create your own dream team to study consciousness, what fields

would you want to include?

Wilber: Late night talk-show hosts [both laugh].

Rich: Ah, a good way to close the interview [laughs].

Wilber: And any comedian on Broadway. I think any cartoonist in the New Yorker.

I think those three would be where I'd sort of start, [laughing] When it comes to lists

I always forget the most important things. It's like people at the Academy Awards

who always forget to thank the directors [laughing].

Rich: [laughing] All right. Well, I won't make you do that, but as a final question,

what are you currently working on? Do you have any future plans? I know I've seen

talk about the Integral Institute and so on.

Wilber: I am working on the Integral Institute. What we're trying to do there is that

we're starting out with a relatively small number of people, which is we've got about

three or four hundred people. Which on the one hand is a large number of people,

but for an association, it's pretty small. We're starting with that small number

because what we're trying to do eventually is include as many people, as many

scholars and researchers and writers as we can who are interested in these types of

integral approaches that we've been discussing. Approaches that want to include for

example, both stages and states of consciousness, include both universal and

contextualist approaches to anthropology and consciousness and sociology. To

include basically what I would call all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states. So for

the first couple of years we're keeping it relatively small while we work out

infrastructure, get our funding and so on, and then we hope to simply open the doors

and have some sort of international organization of people who are interested in this.

So that's certainly one of the things that I'm working on. And then I just finished

a horrible novel called Boomeritis and that will completely ruin my life.

Rich: You say it's the flipside to Theory of Everything I guess.

Wilber: And so that will be coming out and bring me untold embarrassment and

grief. When you write non-fiction you try to somehow expose the world, but when

you write fiction you only expose yourself [both laugh].

Note

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Daphne Gomez-Mena for her aid in transcription.

References

Wilber, Ken

1998 The Marriage of Sense and Soul. New York: Broadway Books.

2000a Integral Psychology. Boston: Shambhala.

2000b A Theory of Everything. Boston: Shambhala.