a conversation with ken wilber

8/8/2019 A Conversation With Ken Wilber

1/18

InterviewAnthropology, Consciousness, and Spirituality:A Conversation w ith Ken Wilber

Grant Jewell RichPettengill HallBates College4 Andrews Rd.

Lewiston, ME 04240optimalex@aol comAbstract

This is an interview with auth or K en Wilber, whose work on consciousness overth e last twen ty-five years has been tremen dou sly influential. His work blend s"Eastern" and "Western" approaches and has influenced scholars in psychology,philoso phy , and religio n, as well as in anthrop ology . His work on transp erson alpsychology is especially w ell-kno wn , and h is first boo k, The Spectrum ofConsciousness,arguably m arks the beg inning of transpersonal studies. Frances Vaugh an ha s referredto Wilber's work as th e "work of genius." Dan iel G ole m an o nce listed Wilber am ongthe "ranks of the grand theorists of hu m an consciousness" including "Ernst Cassirer,Mircea Eliade, and Gre gory B ateson." W ilber discusses th e scope of th e consciousnessproblem as well as con tribu tion s to th e field th at an thropologists m ight be well suitedto make. Key words: consciousness, theory, interview, relativism.

Rich: You've w ritten volum es on th e them e of consciousness. For exam ple in yourbooks Integral Psychology and Theory of Everything you develop comprehensivemod els of consciousness th at seek to integrate Eastern and W estern ways of think ing,an cien t and m od ern m odels of tho ug ht, and you've exam ined consciousness at everylevel from t he a tom ic to the psychological to th e sociological to th e spiritual. Firstoff, how do you define the scope of consciousness?Wilber: It's on e of those intere sting thing s consciousness , because an aspect of it isfirst pe rson , so it 's so m eth ing you ca n't really describe or define very well. Becausepa rt of it is ex pe rien tial it's like saying how would you define a sunset, or how do youdefine a tasty piece of apple pie, or how d o you define m akin g love and so on . I thin kit's one of the difficulties of the field in that we want to, on the one hand, try to befairly scientific about our approach to consciousness, and science tends to studythin gs wh ich are merely objects: rocks, trees, ecosystems, and so on . So it can giveyou pretty good objective definitions of objects, but when a part of what you'restudying is sub jective, t h en it gets a little slipperier, and t h at is certainly th e case w ithconsciousn ess. If you look back at the tradition s, on th e on e han d, and by traditionsI mean the great wisdom traditions or the spiritual traditions, on the one handconsciou sness is part of our ow n individuality. But most of the traditions m ain tainAnthropology ofConsciousness 12(Z):43-6O. Copyright 2001 American Anthropological Associat43


2/18

44 Anthropobgy of Consciousness 112(2)]th at consciousness has a com po nen t th at runs right into spirit and spirit itself bein gall transcen din g, all encom passing, is itself unqu alifiable. U ltim ately you ca n't reallydefine it. You ca n't define th at w hich is com m on to all thin gs or th e groun d of allthi ng s. So , it's kin d of a long-w inded way of saying th at a good deal of consciousn essis har d to define. R ath er like porno graphy, [laughing] you kno w it w he n you see it,or in this case feel it, I suppose, and that's wh at we're doing . W e ca n study an awfullot thro ug h t h e aspects of consciousn ess. W e can look at levels of consciou sness orwaves of consciousness, or developm ental lines of consciousness. So we go at it thatway, by coming up with this large catalog of all the various types and modes andaspects of consciousness.Rich: You're well kn ow n for stage levels and stage theories of consciousness. Howdo you define a stage?Wilber: T ha t's anot he r area th at it is prob lem atic. O n th e on e ha nd , it 's true thatI do study some of the stages of consciousness but I don't think all aspects ofconsciousness exist in stages. Th e m odel tha t I often prese nt is sometimes summ arizedas "all quadrants, all levels, all lines, and all states." We can talk about what thesem ean if you wa nt, b ut th e gene ral idea is th at o ne of those four has to do w ith levelsof cons ciousn ess or stages of consciou sness. T hi s is based no t on th eor etical issuesso m uc h as it is based on em pirical research . I'm particularly think ing abo ut thenu m be r of dev elop m ental psychologists studying aspects of dev elopm ental psychologyincluding cognitive development, moral development, linguistic development, andso on . So , any integ ral theo ry of consciousness w ants to at least look at th e ev idencefor stages and th en try to see if there isn 't some sort of felicitous way you can fit stagecon ceptio ns into an overall m odel. T he n you immediately run into criticisms ofstage con cep tions particularly by the relativistic pluralists w ho do n't believe in theidea.Rich: M igh t th ere be a different pac e, order, or end po int for th e stages in differentcultu res or in different periods of history ? O ften scholars no te prob lems or limitation sw ith stage theo ries. Kubler-Ross did wonderful w ork on th e stages of dying [denial,anger, bargaining, depression, accep tance]- but rece nt eviden ce suggests people gothro ug h th e stages in a variety of orders and sometimes at the same tim e. A no th erexamp le would be Kohlberg's work on moral deve lopm ent in the U S there is someevid ence th at m any people do proceed throu gh th e stages as he describes however,evidence from other cultures suggests that there are different criteria for moralbehavior, an d th at a person viewed as moral in a certain culture may no t necessarilyscore high on Kohlberg's stages.Wilber: Well, what we're looking at here, again it depends on what you mean bya stage and h ow specific or narrow you try to define th at. O n the o ne h an d, if youback up very very far, and define a stage in an extrem ely broa d co nc ep tio n, very fewpeop le would disagree. For exam ple in the hum an m ind, we hav e images, we hav esymbols, we have co nce pts, and we hav e rules. T ho se are very general types ofcog nitive cap acities. All cultures seem to have th e capacity to form images, symbols,con cep ts and rules. T h e exact natur e of them differs from c ulture to culture but thecapacity itself, as far as we ca n tell, is present in all kno w n cultures. M oreover, tho se


3/18


4/18

Anthropology of Consciousness [12(2)]of affairs, they tend to appear in stable patterns of unfolding. W hether you're lookingat an acorn growing into an oak, or even stellar systems, stellar evolution and stellardevelopment. 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 organicand developmental? The answer appears to be yes, but beyond that again, you haveto go down and look at the various types of stages, see what empirical evidence thereis for them . Some things called stages appear merely to be cultural learningmechanisms. The question again is in a real stage sequence certain requirementshave to be met. For example, atoms to molecules to cells to organisms, that's a truestage conception in that none of those stages can be skipped. Nobody has ever gonefrom atoms to cells and skipped molecules, nor can those stages be reversed, nor canthey emerge in an order tha t can be altered by environmental conditioning. So that'skind of a primal example of stage conception, and there are certain types offundamentals in the human psyche that are very broad but that emerge into thosesame types of sequences, because each stage is built of the components of itspredecessors, like images, symbols, concepts and rules. Other things called stageconceptions don't hold up with tha t kind of rigor. W hat I appreciate about therelativists is their concern tha t a particular ethnocentric stage conception might beused as a model against which other cultures would be judged to be inferior, andnobody wants to do that, and I certainly agree with that. But in their zeal to protectother 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 cross-cultural and far from forming a kind of judgementalism that ranks other culturesinferior, it actually is a way to find certain common elements across cultures tha t bindpeople together. As for uneven developm ent, that's a very complex issue, but Ipresent a summary of it in Integra/ Psychology.Rich: In the past few decades, and you've alluded to this, there has been much talkabout cultural relativism and postmodernism. Are there limits to this approach tothe world?Wilber: Which approach?Rich: We can take cultural relativism first.Wilber: I think part of the difficulty is tha t in order to maintain the stance of culturalrelativism, you have to use certain criteria that you are implicitly claiming are notrelative. Th is is the so-called performative contradiction. The idea is tha t, forexample, the cultural relativists are making a series of very strong claims th at theyclaim are true for all cultures. For example, they claim th at truth is imbedded, tha tthere are no context-free truth claims, that there are therefore no universal truthclaims, and yet all of those claims contradict their own premises. So, in order toconsistently 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, youclaim it's culturally bound. That's a performative con tradic tion. Philosophically, Ithin k the cultural relativists have been handed a series of very, very strong defeats atthe hands of people like Jurgen Habermas and Charles Taylor and John Searle andseveral others. All those theorists are quick to point out th at a great deal of cultural


5/18

Sep/Dec 2001 A Conversation with Ken Wilber 47knowledge is in fact co nt ex t bo und , relative, pluralistic and so on . But certain aspectsof 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 mixturebetw een a pure universalism on th e one hand wh ich is pretty discredited, and a purerelativism on the other hand which is also discredited, and a kind of universalpluralism or a relativism set in the c on tex t of certa in un iversal truth claims seems tobe the only really balanced way to approach it.Rich: W ell, in on e view, I guess if you were a radical cu ltural relativ ist you could argueth at a really, really bad guy, like Hitler, for in stan ce, trom th e van tage p oi nt of his ow ncultural w orld view an d h is ow n cultural setting, could be considered to be doing am oral justice in th e wo rld. H itler believed he was imp roving th e world, as awful asth at seems to others . To take ano the r exam ple, recently in psychology there has beenm uc h ac tivity in th e field of so-called "p ositive psychology" - th e study of hap pine ss,wisdom, he alth , creativity, hum an d ecency and so on. Do you think there is a dangerin such a m ov em en t of limiting our notio n of the good life to wh at a few dozen U Sacadem ic psychologists [studying almost exclusively middle-class U S college stud ents]view as the good life?Wilber: T ha t's certainly on e of the big problems, and on e of th e things th at I 've triedto do in my own work is to avoid as m uch of th at as possible. In oth er w ords, to avoida certain prov incialism m asquerading as univ ersal good is to first try to do as com pletea map ping of consciousness states as possible. O n e m ight do this, in oth er w ords, bylooking at all the cu ltures th at we hav e some sort of know ledge about, and lookingat the states of consciousness that they would report as best we can possiblyund erstand th em . Ob viously to some degree we're outsiders, and we try to take upa stance of sym pathetic herm eneu tic un derstanding, and we map out these hundred sand h un dre ds of possible psycho logical, spiritual consciousness states, and from th atwe develop a very broad cartograph y. Of course it will nev er be com plete, though youtry to make it as com plete as you can. From tha t broad cartography of consciousness,you can th en stand back and say okay, here are dozens of things tha t m en and wo me nover th e centu ries hav e considered good, or the good life. So if I 'm going to com ein and say hap pin ess co nsists of, o r wisdom co nsists of, a, b, or c, then I at least betterhav e this w hole cartography in m ind, because I m ight be excluding som ethin g very,very imp orta nt. So , we may look at this broad cartography, and th en try to say, hereare certain common elements that many cultures seem to really value, and ask, 'dowe have access to those states of consciousness in our own c ulture, and if no t, whynot'? If certain academic psychologists are going around saying this is positivepsychology i/you agree w ith wha t makes me happy [laughing], th en we can go, okay,that 's a big problem!Rich: Righ t. W h at in your theory then, and you've writ ten about this to someextent, what is the ultimate state of consciousness? Is this the same thing for allpeople, in all places, in all historical epochs?Wilber: It's cer tainly n o t t h e same for all peo ple in all places at all t imes. It's no t eve nreally th e sam e for a few peo ple in a few places in a few tim es. But wh at you do h av e,let m e pu t it this way, if you m ap ou t all tho se states of consciousn ess as I describe to


6/18

Anthropology of Consciousness 112(2)]the best of your ability, and then you look at sort of this overall map of possibleconsciousness states that men and women have reported, and you just take it as aphenomenology, you don't take it as, it has to be empirically true, then certainpatterns suggest themselves about these states of consciousness and certain valuestend to suggest themselves about those states of consciousness. I'll give you oneexample , If you look at certain aspects of consciousness that do tend to undergodeve lopment , not in rigid linear clunk-and-grind stages, but more sort of fluid andflowing waves of unfolding, again more like an acorn unfolds in to an oak, a generalway to summ arize it is th at it seems to be in part an expansion of identity w ith higherstages of dev elop m en t. O n e way of summ arizing it is to say th at con sciousness seemsto expand from egocentric to ethn oce ntric to worldcentric modes. Eg ocentric meansjust th at , basically my consciousness is described, and my w orld is described, in firstperson terms. I'm not aware, I can't take the role of other, I'm not aware of other'sselves outside of my own egoic dispositions. That seems to expand into anun der stan ding th at there are oth er selves, so I mo ve from egocen tric to sociocentricor e thn ocen tr ic . If developmen t cont inues I can und erstand tha t there's just no t mygroup or my tribe, or my cou ntry right or wrong, there are other co untries othe r tribes,oth er peoples, oth er sentien t beings for that matter, and I expand my identity fromidentifying with just my tribe, or just my nat ion or just my group, to a sympatheticunderstanding or identity with other human beings. Then I at tempt to treat otherhu m an beings w ith certain fairness or decency or even a quality or certain honoringof other human beings regardless of race, color, creed, and disposition. There'sn o t h i n g in those states themselves tha t necessarily says tha t one is better than theothers , but if you look at cultures tha t hav e access to all thre e of those, and you lookat the people that are generally considered to be the wise women and wise men ofthose cultures, they tend to value worldcentric over ethnocentric, and they valueethn ocen tr ic over egocentric . T ha t to me suggests that there are certain types ofvalue s tha t can be read off of this large cartog raph y of conscio usness. A ga in, we haveto be very careful not to be provincial or to give a very narrow definition. Stageconceptions work universally only if they're given in these very broad bru sh strokesand th at m akes some people uncom fortable because they wa nt to give a very precisenarro w d efinition of a stage and I don 't think that 's possible. I think that just doesn'twork very well. Of the very meticulous description of stages from Piaget's toKohlberg's, on the meticulous aspects of their descriptions, those don't tend to holdup very well. But th e broad aspects they're talkin g abo ut, the re does seem to be cross-cultural 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"W estern " and historical and mo dern perspectives and so on an d so forth, th at to pickout a little inaccuracy here and there does a disservice to the whole enterprise andrea lly isn't fair, in my view, bu t if you were to talk ab ou t, say, abo ut the ego centric levelof self certainly that's something that varies cross-culturally, the concept ion of self.In fact som e cultures w ill argue, and som e religions will argue, tha t the no tio n of selfis different th an the "mainstream" US self. Could you address that issue a little bitperhaps, like the Budd hist con cep tion of self or, the self-concept or the lack of self-concep t in some Asian cultures?


7/18

Sep/Dec 2001 A Conversation with Ken Wither 49Wilber: There tends to be two different ways that you can approach that becausethere 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 whatmany Westerners mean by a self or an ego is the product of basically the Westernenlightenment and it's sort of analytic distancing. The favorite dirty word of the lasttwo decades is Cartesian and that sort of dualistic Cartesian disembodied self is whatnonetheless many modern Western philosophers mean by the self and that certainlyis not present in other cultures [laughing] fortunately, although there are aspectsabout it that are probably positive. It's not just a bad thing. The notion of Westernenlightenment casting nothing but a mass of crippling errors is silly I think. It hadpositives and it had negatives. One of the positives is that it evolved a conceptionof worldcentric or universal fairness regardless ofrace, color, sex, or creed. The downside is that the differentiation went into dissociation and we have sort of the mindbody problem and the downside to Cartesian philosophy. That self is not what I meanwhen 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 youlook at any of the developmental sequences as they occur in East or West, there isanother way to talk about these three broad stages, the use of the terms pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional. Although those terms weresometimes used by Kohlberg, they really go back to James Mark Baldwin and someof the first great evolutionary theorists of consciousness. In a sense it just statesessentially that a child is born, has not yet been socialized or acculturated and istherefore by definition pre-conventional. At some point the child learns, or thereemerges in the child's psyche, or it socially mimics, whatever theory you wish, itinternalizes its cultural ethics, morals, background, knowledge, and becomesconventional, and by definition ethnocentric, meaning bound to its own culturalway of looking at things. If development continues, East or West, a capacity to somedegree to distance oneself from a culture and to norm the norm or develop somecapacity for critical self-reflection tends to arrive again in the East and the West. TheBuddhists take that to its ultimate conclusion, because each stage of consciousnessunfolding is a lessening of egocentrism, meaning you can take more and moreperspectives, the more consciousness evolves and unfolds. So another way todescribe those three stages again is to say, first person, second person, and third personperspectives are understood, and what the Buddhists in a sense do, is they add a fourthstage to that. Once you've developed a normal adult ego, which in Buddhism meansa center of self that organizes the relative stream of consciousness, once that'sdeveloped you can actually transcend it in what could be called post-worldcentric,or the fourth major wave of development, that according to Buddhism finally andonce and for all transcends any egoic partiality or narrowness, or any identificationwith the personal body-mind, so in a sense, the Buddhist notion of selflessness oregolessness still presupposes the development of an ego. They have a very specificcartography of that development. They just don't stop with the Western Cartesianego. The Buddhist philosophers take it to the next stage, which transcends even that.Rich: Let's talk about stage development and evolution and regression, usingcreativity as an example. There are some Freudian theories of creativity that suggestthat eminent creators may regress to earlier stages of development, have insights in


8/18

Anthropology of Consciousness [12(2)Jthis child-like state, and then come back to a mature level of ego development to editand revise their creative products. I guess another, different model of creativity wouldsay you would jump up from your typical level of ego developm ent to a higher levelof consciousness, maybe to a post-conventional or post-worldcentric level, and thencome back down to the ego plane to edit and revise.Wilber: They're not necessarily mutually exclusive, which is why I try to stress tha teven if we talk about developm ental stages in terms of broad waves of consciousnessunfolding, that doesn't mean that everything that's going on in childhood is only alower level so to speak. W hat it simply says is when we do recognize a developmentalsequence, development generally means unfolding of deeper wider more complexand sophisticated organizations. In tha t sense, earlier stages of developm ent tend tolack certain of the higher capacities that senior stages have. It doesn't mean they'reunim portant. It doesn't mean they don't have their own function. But the otherpoint is tha t there could be also other things going on in childhood, and I'll give youjust a very quick example. We've been talking about broad stages, three or four wavesof consciousness tha t many cultures East and West fully recognize. But in additionto stages, there's tha t other item I mentioned when I said all quadrants, all waves, allstreams, and all states, and that's the fourth one, all states. Because while the stagesof consciousness tend to unfold in a given pattern, in a given sequence, states ofconsciousness don't, and both of them are important and both of them have a verystrong role to play in hum an experience, in particular human spiritual experiences.All human beings are given at least three major states of consciousness and we're allfamiliar w ith those, waking, dreaming and deep sleep. According to VedantaHinduism, 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 justthat these are access to deeper states of consciousness. The fact is infants, and allhum an beings wake, dream and sleep, so according to this theory, all human beingshave some sort of access to the material realm, to the mental or soul realm, and thespirit realm, because all humans wake, dream and sleep. So you can have an alteredstate or peak experience of these gross, subtle or causal states at any stage ofdevelopm ent, and that's where it gets interesting I think. Well to finish the firstpoint, 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 childis at, mainly egocentric, pre-conventional, and narcissistic. That's why no matterhow playful and "creative" a child can be, a three year old child still cannot take therole of other and so won't have a developed sense of, for example, compassion ormutual love. Of course, it can in some sense love its parents and love its friends andso on , but it can't take the role of other. It can 't really understand the other person'sperceptions from within. Therefore, you can't really have fully developed love orcompassion. So, by saying tha t we have both states and stages, I think we can takesort of the best of both of these models, and by putting them together start to get alittle comprehensive overview of what's possible. One of the first things you can dois actually create a grid of various types of spiritual experiences that are possible byrealizing that a person at a pre-conventional wave of development, at the conventionalwave, at the post-conventional wave, and at the, let's just call it transcendent wave


9/18

Scp/Dcc 2001 A Conversation with Ken Wilber 51for the moment that a person in any of those four stages or waves can have anexperience of grdss waking, subtle dreaming, or causal formlessness of deep sleep. So,that little simple rid right there givesus twelve types of spiritual experiences. Thereare abundant tofefens of those twelve types that you can find in a large number ofcultures. I won't say all cultures because when we push back two hundred thousandyears or so things start to get very dim. At that point you just have to be more cautiousabout what you say. But certainly in the past twenty thousand years or so, there arecultures that tend to have access to most of those types, those twelve types that Idescribe.Rich: In your writing, you allude to the ability of a person at a given stage to pop upto another stage occasionally. You discuss the idea that people can have peakexperiences 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 thestrict 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 theformal 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 itsprevious stages. That's whywe can't skip real stages and this led to difficulty because it was pretty obvious thatif you look at some of the early and primal cultures, that certain of the shamans, forexample, were clearly having some very high states of consciousness even though thecultures themselves might not be at a very high stage of cultural interaction. Thisled to a series of very intense debates because the pluralists in this case rightly I thinkwanted to say you can't judge these cultures as inferior, that's just not fair, and it'sethnocentric and it sucks. You had some very high states going on, and particularlyin the shamanic states, these are very subtle and occasionally causal states ofconsciousness. How dare you say that they're inferior? Other people like JurgenHabermas would come along and say, all that might be so, but if you actually look atthe 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 ofunfolding and by an intrinsic developmental logic, that's not being forced upon themby Westerners. The only way I think you can combine both of those, because I thinkboth of them are true, is not pick one of them and throw the other one out, but torealize that anybody and any culture at any given stage of development can haveaccess to these altered states. So that allows very, very profound peak experiences tooccur 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 alsosanction as many states of consciousness as possible. It might be under a certain, howshall I say, bounded circumstances. For example, we can't have everyone runningthrough the streets having mystical experiences twenty-four hours a day. Obviouslythat's not going to work, but within reasonable limits, an "ideal" culture would wantto 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 theyhad wonderful access to many states of consciousness but not very good access onstages. The modern world at least in its legal and political institutions has moved


10/18

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 donerelatively well on helping us get a few more developed stages, but in the process thedown side is that it threw out many states of consciousness that it judged to be pre-modern, which for it meant pre-rational, which for it meant childish, infantile andstupid. That's one of the main problems in my view with the limitations of Westernculture. The problem is not that it developed into a worldcentric stage with theenlightenment, which it did, in many ways it was good, it's that it threw out manyof these altered states, number one, and therefore number two, the Westernenlightenment didn't realize that there were yet higher stages of consciousnessdevelopment which would take it into the transcendent or transpersonal, as apermanent adaptation and not merely as a passing state. That would be what theBuddhists do for example, that is that they tear into that fourth or transcendentalstage.Rich: Do you think we could legally mandate or legally prescribe cultural conditionswhich might promote ultimate states of consciousness or is that again somethingthat's a dangerous path to go down?Wilber: It's probably a dangerous path to go down. It appears that almost the onlything that you can do, under these circumstances, is advocacy and to the degree thatyou can, education. I've sort of been struck time and time again by that fact that whenit comes to these higher stages of consciousness development which are transrational,transpersonal, transcendent, and spiritual, and certain states of consciousness whichalso have a spiritual feeling to them, that people that have had these experiences arevery comfortable with them because they've seen what they're like, they know thatthey'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 onoccasion, or maybe they interpret it in very profound philosophical ways. The factis purely that they've had the experiences or they haven't. Those that haven't, there'salmost nothing you can say that will convince them of the legitimacy or authenticityof higher stages and of certain altered states. And mandating them or legislatingthem, I don't think would work, but in the mean time we could just simply say here'sa broad cartography of what men and women have experienced cross culturally overthe ages, and you know [laughing] where are you on this map, how many of these haveyou experienced ? How many would you like to experience? How many of these wouldyou like to outlaw? [both laugh]Rich: Exactly. Well, let's see, you remind me now of Sigmund Freud's book Futureof 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 justconvinced that anyone who believes in higher powers or spiritual things is cognitivelyand emotionally immature. And this leads me to the question that many times itappears, and you've written about this, that people confuse pre-conventional andpost-conventional types of experiences and this idea that perhaps that some peoplehaven't had peak or transcendent experiences. Of course, one option would be to


11/18

Sep/Dec 2001 A Conversation with Ken Wilber 53send them to a weekend seminar on consciousness or what not and see if they havea peak or spiritual experience. Can we help people along their way to higher statesof consciousness or is that a lost cause?Wilber: It's certainly not a lost cause, and I think what happens if you look at culturesaround the world, is two things stand out. One is that with very few exceptions mostcultures that we're aware of have some access to altered states and higher stages ofconsciousness. Two, the number of people who actually experience these higherstages is really rare. I tend to find that people who overlook either one of those tendto draw some, I think, unfounded conclusions about what was going on in the pastand what's going on today. A lot of writers talk as if fifty thousand years ago everyhuman being alive was a shaman and was immersed in non-dissociated consciousnessand 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 anythingresembling spirituality, is a dry, desiccated, Cartesian hack, and I don't think that'strue either. But the fact is the number of people in any culture, including Buddhistcultures that have pursued higher stages and higher states, is very small. I would sayeasily less than a tenth of one percent of the population at any given time. Possiblynot for tribal cultures because usually there are only forty people within a tribe. Theecological carrying capacities of most primal tribes is forty to sixty people, and maybeone was a shaman and maybe one of ten shamans was any good. So it's a very rarepursuit. What I find a little bit encouraging is that particularly within the baby boomgeneration and with a whole lot of people that did inhale, that they got some senseof something else going on so that gave them at least fresher eyes to re-examine othercultures for any hidden treasures or higher states or stages that might be available tomen and women here and now. And I think that's actually pretty good. Look at thenumber of people in this country, America, that are at least theoretically studyingsome of these issuesit's actually you know, it's getting up there. It's still small, it'sstill less than one percent, but relatively speaking there's a certain resurgence ofinterest in this and I think all we can continue to do is good scholarship on the onehand, pointing thingsout. 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 theoristhas looked at 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 exactlyright, you know [laughing], why stop at eight? Lawrence Kohlberg postulated stageseven, which is universal spiritual experience. Jane Loevinger's theory had eightstages or so, and her main student, Suzanne Cook-Greuter has continued to refineJane 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 highestof those is a unative mystical experience. Those kinds of things tend to carry a littlebit of weight because they're based on empirical research, with very careful, verysober scholars, and there's a certain intrinsic logic to the unfolding of these higherwaves. And so that tends to help on the one hand. On the other hand the simplecataloging of states of consciousness that are possible and then asking the embarrassing


12/18

Anthropology of Consciousness 112(2)]question why out of a hundred, let's say, does this culture sanction four? What's thatall about? And these kinds of things slowly eat away at the common conception thatthere are only three or four states of consciousness. Most altered states of consciousnessare bad and bad for you [laughing] and that the real state of consciousness is more orless what the world looks like on a bleak Monday m orning as you're driving to work.Anything other than tha t is not allowed [laughing].Rich: Right [laughing]. The depressing view. You were talking about the rarity ofspiritual 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 tha t really pursue it to reach those higher stagesis a permanent accomplishment or permanent adaptation. That's always usually lessthan one percent of the population.R ich : Okay. Th e developmentalist Bernice Neugarten studied middle age andtalked about the notion of on-tim e vs. off-time developm ent. For instance, in theU S in the 1950s completing one's education in one's twenties, getting married andstarting a career next, and beginning a family by one's late twenties, was the norm,in Neugarten's terms, on time. On-tim e development ruffles few feathers. Culturalleaders or innovators, including great religious leaders and creative people, in myview, often exhibit off-time developm ent. They are avant-garde, and before theirtime, or at least not in sync with their time and place. A person who is a shaman whois at one of these higher stages of consciousness or higher levels of consciousnesswhile his or her peers might no t be may face certain obstacles and pressures.W ilber: Historically it has been pretty unpleasant [laughing]. I think Peter Bergerdid a wonderful series of studies on what he termed nihilation and therapia and you sortof 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 forcesswing in to play to help straighten you out, and this is no t necessarily a bad thing, no tin all ways. I thin k a lot of us Boomers brought up in the sixties, we want nothingbut freedom and anything that ties us down ought to be deconstructed. The fact isthat societies do have to survive, and they do have to form some sort of culturalbonding, some degree of cohesion as a group and as a group consciousness in orderto survive. And when somebody breaks tha t law then they're outlawed, and Bergerreferred to tha t as nihila tion because it threatens the death of the culture. T he outlawthreatens the culture's cohesion. So, culture will come up one way or the other withtherapy, therapia tha t will help straighten the poor outlaw out. I've suggested just inkeeping w ith those aspects of consciousness th at are developm ental, th at the way youwant to refine tha t theory is to point out tha t there is not really an outlaw. There'ssomething you might call pre-law and post-law or translaw, and in a certain sense theidea that if somebody is pre-law that culture does have som ething of a right to helptherrt get up to embrace the law. But once you've done th at you can go post-law, youcan transcend the law. You can pull a Thoreau, which is fantastic but when you dothat then you put yourself in the outlaw translaw position, and then therapia comesafter your ass. Whether it's Christ or Giordano Bruno or any of the translaw seers andvisionaries it's pretty unpleasant.


13/18

Sep/Dcc 2001 A Conversation with Ken Wilber 5 5Rich: Rig ht. W ell if you look at some of thes e translaw individuals like M arti nLu ther King, or G an dh i or w hat no t, w ho are going beyond w hat is the black letterlaw, wh ose values do we pick? H ow do we kn ow th at person's values are the best orthe correct [laughing] values to have?W ilbe r: Th at 's exactly wh ere I thin k t he positive aspects of the universalist po sitionswings into play. Because it's m ea nt to answer exactly th at questio n. So if you ha vefor exam ple, somebody wh o is in an ethn oc ent ric cultu re oh let's pick one that 's n ottoo co ntro vers ial, say, th e Nazis [laugh], and you are in a sense going translaw, w hic hI think probably the greatest example of that was Thomas Mann, who started exit aswell known, quite the national socialist , and very much ethnocentric, very muchblood and soil , very much romantic in the traditional sense, and through a verydifficult period moved from ethnocentric to a higher stage of development calledwo rldcentric and post- con ven tion al. He argues the universal r ights of m en andwo men and used that against the Nazis and probably becam e the strongest G erm ananti-N azi voice over a two -deca de period. T h e same thi ng hap pen s if you look at anyof th e outlaw s th at we ad m ire the y're all translaw. Th ey 're all mo ving basicallyfrom an ethn oc en tri c to worldc entric or higher. T ha t includes M artin Luther King,tha t includes Th ore au in his ow n way. T h at certainly includes G an dh i. W e can' t ,it's very hard to justify their actions on relativistic terms. Because the relativist hasto substitute for universal truth or goodness a provincial and parochial contextuallybou nd solidarity. See that 's the only thing they can anc hor their agreement in. Sincethere's no em piric al tru th , th ere can only be social solidarity. W h e n somebod y breaksthat solidarity, it 's very hard for them to come up with standards that can justifybreak ing a cul tura l solidarity. Un iversalists can do th at , and w hile we do n't wa nt tojust ha ve a universalist po sitio n, I th in k th at's an aspect of universalism and a n aspectof unive rsal broad stages of grow th th at he lps us identify w he the r a person is mov ingin a translaw and therefore justifiable direction.Rich: Oka y, let me switch directio ns a little bit. W h a t are the limits if any toreduct ionism ? E.O . W ilson , in his book Consilience, wh at may be viewed as his theoryof consc iousn ess, seems to argue tha t even tually all types of know ledge may be linkedtogether by reducing higher systems [say psychology] to lower systems [say biology]to eve n lower systems [say che mis try]. Put an ot he r way, ca n we reduce t he study ofhappiness to the study of dopamine, the study of warring societies to the study ofindiv idua l personality? O r is th at just a lost cause?Wilber: Yeah, tha t's o ne of th e longest rhetor ical questio ns th at I 've bee n asked [bothlaugh]. I th in k th e wonderful th ing about the hum an gen om e project is th at theycam e up wi th only thir ty thou sand g enes. Everybody was hysterical about this[laughing ] you ca n't do squat wit h thirty tho us and genes [laughing]. You can hardlybuild a de ce nt gam e of che cke rs, it's pretty ridicu lous. So now they are very very qu ickto say, oh well n o tha t's n o t whe re the ac tio n is, th e actio n is in pro tein assembly un it,that's where over two million proteins [laughing] come into play. None of which isspecified in th e gen om e, n on e of it. A n d if you ca n't get it ou t of th e geno m e, youcan't go lower for Christ 's sake, [laughing]. Oh we can't find it in the genome, let 'slook in it for ato m s, and I do n't t hi nk so. Re du ctio nism is, the re will always be peo ple


14/18

5 6 Anthropology of Consciousness [12(2)Jwh o want to do that and I thin k th e mo tives are in many ways ho no rable . If you lookat what empirical science has managed to do, despite all the criticisms that it hasgo tten , its accom plishm ents are really rather extraordinary. It has added thirty orforty years of lifespan to virtually everybody on th e plan et, put a person o n th e m oon ,m ed icin e, qu an tum physics, I m ean it's really rath er extraordin ary. A n d it did so bycom ing up w ith ways to ground its truth po int. U nlik e poetry or music or art, wh ichare also im po rtant, b ut science had its own thin g to do , and th ey did it qu ite well. Sothere are always good men and women like Wilson that want to continue thatgood ness, as they u nderstand it. So they w ant to exten d scientific materialismbasically indefinitely. A t tha t po int I thi nk their noble mode runs into their ownego centric power drive. I thi nk there's a dow n side to tha t wh ich is I do n't like yourstat e of consciou sness; I do n't like any oth er states of consciousn ess. My state, mystage is th e on ly tr ut h and that's silly. So I thin k it's a m ixtur e of very, very positivem otiv es an d a shadow side, an und er belly side, wh ich looks like to me like a bit ofa power drive.Rich: Let's switch gears again. In Marriage of Sense and Soul, your book on therelatio nsh ip of science an d religion, you offer a num ber of arguments t ha t in part aimto reconcile these two ways of thinking . Hu ston Sm ith wrote that , "no one noteven Junghas done as much as Wilber to open up Western psychology to thedurab le insights of th e world's wisdom trad itions." In this book you note thats cien ceca n 't be recon ciled w ith religion if: on e, science says th e interio r always may bemerely reduced to objective subparts and two, if science claims even if ther e are 'oth erways of kn ow ing ' they ca nn ot b e verified. C an you expa nd a nd clarify this idea?Wilber: Let's start with nu m ber o ne and remind m e if we do n't get to numb er two.T h e basic idea of the way science is generally practiced is th at it looks for objectivedata and it goes beyond th at to claim th at any thing th at isn't objective data is in somesense not real. A nd th at certainly means consciousness or our experience of theinter ior because th ere's no w ay to objectify th at there's no easy way to get a ruler onit there's no way to frankly reduce th at to D N A or molecules or chemistry. T ha tconsciousness someh ow doesn't have the same kind of fundam ental reality. T ha tthes e good old rocks and dirt an d all thos e thing s tha t you ca n see and g et your handson and that 's been extrapolated sometimes into a vicious attack on consciousnessitself or the belief in interiors, the belief that there is anything resembling higherinterio rs wh eth er th ose are stages or states of consciousn ess. T he y w ould just denyhigh er states of consciousn ess or high er stages of consciou sness. T he y denyconsciousness. Th ey deny all the lower interm ediate states and ev erything else. A ndmy simple po int w as th at, if you actually look at th e way th at scien ce is do ne , and mostphilosophers of science are pretty clear about this, most of the fundamentals ofscience a ren't derivable from empirical objects. T he re are a wh ole set of concep tualtools and apparatus, everything from differential calculus to Boolean algebra, noneof w hich hav e em pirical correlates, no o ne h as ever seen a square root of a negativeone running around out next to rocks and trees, and this entire elaborate interiorco nc ep tua l appara tus is used to deny th e reality of interio r appar atus. A n d ag ain it'sa perform ative co ntr ad ictio n. It presupposes in th e stronge st way possible exactlyth at w hich it claims can no t exist and that 's part of the inh ere nt fallacy of scientism


15/18

Sep/Dec 2001 A Conversation with Ken Wither 5 7as opp osed to science . So the first thin g you w ant to try to po int ou t is th at anenormous amount of the truth claims that science brings to the world aren' tem pirical. Th ey 're interior and hav e to do with logic and ma them atics and all sortsof interior structures of consciousness that m athem atician s are pretty unanim ous onca nn ot b e derived from em pirical or sensory objects. So the first thi ng you w ant totry to do is to loosen u p their insisten ce th at a ny thin g interior is no t ultimately real.If tha t's the case the n scien ce is gon e. T h e second th ing was okay maybe the re areinteriors. O kay. O op s, r ight [laughing], bu t only my interior. W e ha pp en to be logicaland m ath em ati cal and no t your crumm y interior. So wh at I was trying to say is if weagree that nobody really thinks there's such a thing as the scientific m et ho d. If youlook back at wh at scienc e does the re are certa in thing s that m ost scientific endea vorshave in com mo n and I poin ted o ut th at the re are really three of the m , and these aren ' tm ea nt to be exclusive. O n e is mo st science has, starts out w ith, some sort ofinju nc tion . If you wan t to kn ow th is, do this. If you wa nt to know if a cell has anucleus learn to cut th e cell stain th em , and put them under a microscope and so on.Actually w hat T ho m as K uh n m ean t by paradigms, was an example of som ething youdo in order to bri ng forth ex per ien ces or da ta, if you will. So th e first stran d of m ostis an in junc tion. T h e second strand is some sort of apprehen sion or experience orillum ina tion . If you do stran d num ber on e, you look dow n the microscope or youdrop tw o objects off th e leanin g tow er of pizza [lau ghin g].. . If you do tha t, you w illhear so m ethin g or see som ethin g or register som ething, some sort of experience w illresult from tha t inju nctio n and that 's the data. A nd as W illiam James poin ted o utdata just me ans direct exp erience. A nd so you do the experim ent the me tho d theinjunc tion, nu m ber on e, num ber two you get some sort of data, some sort of research,som e sort of result, som e sort of exp erien ce, and t h en thre e and th at's th e part actuallystrand two is th e part th at th e empiricists pu t a lot of stress on . W e have to ha veeviden ce for science that 's w hat good science comes dow n to. A nd the n th e thirdstrand th ou gh , wh ich is stated in various ways, is th at we do wa nt to hav e some sortof com m un al confirm ation or rejection. W e should try to hav e those first two strandsrepeated by other people if they get the same results which repeated over and overagain and we neve r f ind any contra m eanin g results the n we accept tha t as more orless, you kno w, scientific fact. O r at th e very least, it's a theo ry th at is lookin g veryprom ising. A n d if a theo ry sticks around for a cen tury or two and if nob ody ca n e verfind a ny th ing d isagreeing with it th en it gets to becom e a law. A nd that's kind of allI basically said was if you look at those three strands and you look at any of themeditative or shamanic or contemplative endeavors that explore the interior , thebest of th em follow thos e three strands. Th ey all ha ve some sort of inju nct ion . I 'lluse Zen Bu ddhism as an exam ple. Th ey hav e some sort of an injun ction in Zen its called Zazen. It's a type of sitting m ed itat ion th at train s the m ind to look at subtlerand sublffer aspects of th e m ind's ow n processes and tha t's the inju nct ion , you mu stdo this you must perform this experiment if you want to know what we're talkingabo ut. T h e second stage is you do tha t, and by any intense training getting a Ph Din scie nc e, for ex am ple . D oin g tha t and tak ing thre e or four years of real pra cticebefore you ca n m aster the stuff. If you do that, you com plete th e trainin g, and brainw ash ing does no t work [laughing], just intense , grueling discipline . If you do th atyou 'll get a series of app rehe nsio ns, a series of data , a series of expe riences th at will


16/18

Anthropology of Consciousness [ 12 (2)Jstart to register in your awareness. The biggest one is called Satpri. It's an actualchange in stage or state of consciousness that shows you aspects of reality previouslyunseen at lower stages of consciousness. You then compare your apprehensions toothers who have completed the first two strands. You can have com munalconfirmation and rejection. This is a refined process. Any old experience you haveis no t acceptable. Why ? Because there's a lineage of some th ousa nd of years, of somehundreds of thousands of men and women going through the trajning and lookingvery carefully at the data . There are criteria for good data and there are definitelycriteria for bad data. The bad data are falsified and falsifiable. So itfc consonant withKarl Popper's notions. So I just basically suggested tha t on those two points that youbrought up, one , even science would have to acknowledge there are interior truthsthat are not merely objective and em pirical and two, you investigate those interiorsusing generally speaking a broadly kind of scientific endeavor. And therefore thatought to ease the alarm scientists hear when we talk about states pf consciousness.Rich: I thin k what you're saying is to attempt to be as objective as possible about thesubjective?Wilber: I think that's fine, I think that's a fine way to put it, and I need to point tha tout because sometimes when I point that out critics think that I'm saying that thescientific m ethod should cover all the bases as well and that's not true because thereare other aspects of interior states of consciousness that are more expressive andaesthetic and would fall under art and that there are more moral an^ inner subjectiveand would fall under, well, ethics. The point is that a general scientific enterprise candisclose a great deal of data on these interior domains being, as you said, as objectiveabout the subjective as possible. Of course it can be done. Mathematicians do it allthe time and so do Zen Buddhists.Rich: I guess some psychologists would argue they are objective abjput the subjectivetoo when they ask people for their self reports on questionnaire after questionnaire.Wither: O h yeah, any sort of introspective psychology deals witrj this. Any sort ofhermeneutics deals with this. We're talking about interpretation of non-empiricalrealities and there's just no conceivable reason tha t these interior realities are goingto be stripped of their reality in service of trying to reduce everything to dirt and rockand atoms.Rich: I just have a few more questions and these relate to anthropplogy. How mightanthropology with its field methods, observations, and intervjew methodologycontribute to the study of consciousness?Wilber: I think the real and wonderful service that it can and has done , particularlyin the past two decades, is to bring a real understanding of pluridimensional alternaterealities. And the studies of these, on their own terms. It doesn't mean th at we alsocan't take as part of what we're doing, there's no reason we can't alsq take an objectivestance. Look at for example the use of systems theory to look at r\pw cultures rangetheir organization based on self-organizing patterns of autopoejic maintenance.There's nothing wrong with that. It's one way to conceptualize it. But the o ther wayis from within in a hermeneutic stance, a sympathetic understand jng. So we ask no t


17/18

Sep/Dec 2001 A Conversation with Ken Wither 59only what does it do, but what does it mean. And that's incredibly valuable becauseit's adding to that cartography of consciousness that I'm talking about. What we'rereally doing in a certain sense is like the human genome project, only this is sort ofthe human consciousness project. It's a mapping of every state, stage, wave, twitchof consciousness available to men and women with the understanding that new onesare emerging all the time. Once we have this really large cartography, then a coupleof things happen that I think anthropology could start to look at as sort of its nextstage if you will, or its next phase. And that is what we do have this big cartographyall 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 startto present themselves among that cartography? And that's where I think we'll startto find an interesting blend of universalists and contextualist approaches. By takingthe best of both of these I think a very exciting discovery will await anthropology, andit will be a blend of sort of the modern approach to anthropology, which is a rigiduniversalistic stage conception, made famous by Comte as basically religion tophilosophy to science for his big three stages and all the lower stagesare primitive andstupid and idiotic and his wonderful highest stage sits on top of it all. That's clearlynot the way to go. But the extreme reaction to that produces the opposite, which isthat there's nothing but relativistic cultural local knowledge. And there's no cross-cultural commonalities. That's clearly too far in its own extreme, this view. I thinkthe next phase of anthropology will be finding some way to integrate the best of themodern and post-modern and for that matter the pre-modern. I think using ajudicious blend of stages and states and types and a general phenomenologicalmapping of all the potentials of human consciousness will allow some of thesepatterns 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 broadapproaches that I talked about which number one is studying societies from anexternal stance, an objective stance trying to look at things from type of money, birthrate, death rate, suicide rate, building code, linguistic signifiers, syntax structures andso on. That's what I call the lower right quadrant. That's looking at the outside andsocial systems' objective entities. They do have objective aspects to them. They canbe studied to some extent that way including certain stages. For example foragingto horticultural, to agrarian, to industrial, to informational, nobody contests thosestages, those are genuine stages of unfolding. We never find the reverse. We neverfind one happening by itself without the others. Each of them actually incorporatesingredients of its predecessor. But just looking at that from an objective externalstance is the lower right quadrant. The lower left quadrant, which is inner subjectiveand shared interiors, I call that cultural instead of social. That tends to behermeneutic approaches, those that tend to map the modes and styles and interactionsbut have made some attempt to get an empathetic feel from within of what is goingon, and not just distancing yourself in a sort of detached above it all fashion. MaryDaly has discussed this, Jurgen Habermas has a version also of both exteriors andinteriors, and I think that's increasingly going to come to the fore. Just as we cancombine the best of universalism and the best of contextualism, we combine the best


18/18

6 0 Anthropology of Consciousness [12(2)]of he rm ene utics with th e best of systems theory. W e do n't ha ve to co ns tant ly picksides and say th at o ne is right and tha t oth er on e is totally w rong.R ic h : If you could create your own dream team to study consciousness, wha t fieldswould you want to include?W ilbe r: Late nig ht talk-show hosts [both laugh].R ic h : A h , a good way to close th e interview [laughs].Wilber: A n d an y com edian o n Broadway. I thi nk any cartoonist in the Ne w Yorker.I thin k those thre e would be where I'd sort of start, [laughing] W h en it com es to listsI always forget the m ost im po rtant things. It's like people at the Acad em y A wardswho always forget to thank the directors [laughing].Rich: [laughing] All right. W ell, I w on't m ake you do tha t, but as a final que stion,w hat are you curren tly w orking on? Do you hav e any future plans? I kno w I've seentalk about the Integral Institute and so on.Wilber: I am w orking on the Integral Insti tute. W ha t we're trying to do there is tha tw e're starting ou t w ith a relatively small num ber of peop le, which is we've got abou tthre e or four hund red people. W hic h o n th e one han d is a large num ber of people,bu t for an association, it's pretty small. W e're starting with that small num berbecause what we're trying to do eventually is include as many people, as manyscholars and researchers and writers as we can who are interested in these types ofintegral approach es tha t we've been discussing. A ppro ache s that wa nt to include forexample, both stages and states of consciousness, include both universal andcon textu alist app roaches to anthrop ology and consciousness and sociology. Toinclud e basically wh at I would call all quad ran ts, all levels, all lines, all states. So forthe first couple of years we're keeping it relatively small while we work outinfrastructure, get our funding and so on , and th en we ho pe to simply open th e doorsand hav e some sort of inter na tion al organization of peop le who are interested in this.So that 's certainly o ne of th e things that I 'm w orking on . A n d th en I just finisheda horrible novel called Boomeritis and that will completely ruin my life.Rich: You say it's the flipside to Theory of Everything I guess.W ilber: A nd so tha t will be com ing out and bring me untold em barrassment andgrief. W h en you write non-fiction you try to someho w expose the world, but wh enyou write fiction you only expose yourself [both laugh].Note

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Daphne Gomez-Mena for her aid in transcription.ReferencesWilber, Ken1998 T he Marriage of Sense and Soul. New York: Broadway Books.2000a Integral Psychology. Boston: Shambhala.2000b A Theory of Everything. Boston: Shambhala.

a conversation with ken wilber

Documents