Becoming a Multidimensional Thinker - Ken Wilber

In Western Philosophy for example we have the good the true and the Beautiful and everybody's heard of the good the true and the Beautiful and they're always mentioned as three but why are they three they're three because they each represent a first or second or third person [Music] perspective okay Ken welcome to the Show nice to be here to get started one of the things I wanted to ask you is when and how did you realize that you were developing a theory of everything and was this your intention whenever you left juk University yeah um

it wasn't really a a a terribly self-conscious desire or goal but ever since I was about 15 or sometimes even earlier I I mean I Remember in like their fourth or fifth grade when we started getting report cards I got all A's and I was looking at it and I was going well that's interesting is geography mathematics chemistry biology and and they're all A's but why are they all separate I mean why do I have an A in this thing and an A in this thing and then what's the difference between this thing and this

thing they should all fit together and I remember that becoming a Really burning question for me is how do they all fit together and as I continued going through school I continued asking that question and then I remember um M I got on to studying developmental psychology and that is now it's it's a very recognized discipline very widespread there are dozens of major modelers and contributors to Child and Adolescent and adult behavior and what they all found is that everybody Goes through a series of stages of development and of course they each give them a

different name so there's like preconventional conventional postconventional uh Chan gster probably gave them some of the most colorful names he called them the archaic stage the magic stage the Mythic stage the rational stage the pluralistic stage and the integral or integrated stage and and the more I looked at that the more it became a obvious that each One of those stages of development had a different worldview it looked at the world differently so it wasn't just that chemistry was different from biology it was different from algebra it was different from music it was that each

of those went through an archaic stage a magic stage a Mythic stage and when they were at those stages they all looked essentially similar so if you had a magic View the world and Magic is a very Very early stage it's right after the archaic stage so it's a fairly primitive stage and at that stage the mind is not yet fully differentiated from the world around it so the word you use to represent a thing is not clearly differentiated from the thing itself so if you change the word it's sometimes called word magic then you

actually change the F so in in Voodoo for example if you make a doll that looks like a person and You stick a pen in the doll which represents the person so it's a word or symbol for the person and you stick a pen in the doll you'll actually make the person sick that's what you believe that's what word magic believes so whether you're doing algebra or chemistry or biology or history and you're at the magic stage you'll tend to use you word magic and so when you put all of those stages together you got

all of the Worldviews that were possible and that struck me as profoundly important because here is a way you could see how everything actually fit into one holistic big picture um and when I came up with that I became sort of semi obsessed with developmental models and I actually did a book called integral psychology where I took over a hundred developmental models from around the World and I put them in charts in the back of the book and what's amazing is you can see each of the stages and how they resemble each of the other

models version of the stages so one might call the Mythic stage conformist another would call it conventional another would call it concrete operational um and these were you can just see a hundred similar stages in the back of the book in these charts um so That that sort of started dawn on me when I was like 14 or 15 and then right at that same time or when I was maybe 15 to 16 I had a profound Spiritual Awakening uh Enlightenment experience what Zen calls a Satori and it was really sort of new to me

but the essence of a sator is that you feel you're one with everything you're looking At and so you're one with the entire universe and that's the classic mystical experience a Oneness with the ground of all being Christians of course call it a Oneness with God or more commonly godhead because they don't want godhead or this ground of all being confused with a particular Jehovah person that's clearly a myth like Zeus or Apollo or AF Di and they all live in this place called Olympus and Jehovah all live he lives in this place called heaven

but That's all nonsense and so the mystics generally speak about godhead which is a head of God oread of that Mythic Ness um and so I eventually ran across this writer called DT Suzuki who was a writer from Japan and he was a basic Zen fairly accomplished Zen student or even Zen master himself and so he wrote books like with titles like essays in Zen Buddhism which was a three volume set of books a quite substantial treatment of Zen Buddhism and as I read that I kept Running across this word sator and I of course

this the whole concept was new to me even though i' recently had a sator like experience what DT Suzuki was telling me is that that was a real experience and that was the entire aim of Zen Buddhism is you practice you meditated to get a Satori and you weren't a real Zen Buddhist until you had a Satori and so I realized hey I'm a Zen Buddhist I I get this this now makes Sense um and I then looked at the Zen models of what they themselves were doing and the very famous one is called the

10 xan Ox hering pictures and there s the ax represents your real mind what Suzuki roshi not to be confused with DT Suzuki Suzuki roshi was a very famous zen master who came to America and started the Zen Center of San Francisco and he wrote books like Zen M beginers mind he was enormously influential and had a Tremendous number of students including myself um and but um the 10 Zen oxf foring pictures the ox represents what Suzuki roshi call bigm which is the mind that's one with everything and there's only one big mind in the

entire world you have the same big mind as I have it's the same as saying your real self is the same as my real self we're both have this witness that looks at when we're aware of Ourself like right now if you're aware of yourself I'm aware of myself that's a small self that's the self you can look at that's a self you can be aware of that's an object but it's not the real subject it's like who is looking at this small self who is aware of this small self of mine well that's a

big self that's a real self that's a Brahman Atman that's God and wow that's my big M and when I realize that I've got a Satori and I'm an honest gods and Buddhists I mean this is all working out great and so but I made a big mistake stake at that point because I just looked at the 10 stages of the 10 Ox herting pictures and I confused those with the stages of development that the developmental psychologists use so I saw archaic magic Mythic rational pluralistic and integral as being a version of the 10 Zen

oering pictures but that's not it at all so for example the a e Zen oerting picture is Just an empty circle it's a nothingness it's it's a vast void a vast emptiness and that's a very high Zen achievement to realize as Buddhism has the Ultimate Reality is an emptiness it's not it's void of any particular thing but it includes all things it's the ground of all being and that itself can't be qualified IED or characterized it's empty because any word that you and I might use is makes sense only in terms of its Opposite but

godhead doesn't have an opposite it's all inclusive and so you can't even use the word all inclusive because that even makes sense only if it's contrasted with all exclusive and that God's not all exclusive he's all inclusive except he's not all inclusive is isn't really an inclusive enough term so the best thing is to have no ideas about God at all and then you just rest in your pure awareness which is your big one So I had written several books up to that point um as I aged and went on into my early 20s and

when I was 23 I sat down to actually write my first book and it was called the spectrum of Consciousness and the idea was that each of these stages of Developmental Psychology was like a band in a spectrum they were different colors of the same stuff the same electromagnetic Source But they were expressing themselves through different worldviews or different colors and I strangely managed to avoid making any comparison with all of the mystical Traditions all of which I found had models that were very similar to the 10 Zen Ox hering pictures because all of them

had the same goal which is discovery of your true self of godhead of bigmind of Oneness with the absolute entire universe and I I was astonished To find that just like all the developmental models psychological models were similar virtually all of the same stages in the mystical Traditions were similar so we had two different things going on here and I would eventually call the mystical Traditions the traditions of waking up and the developmental psychology traditions the traditions of growing up so that was when I first really started using the term integral and I Referred to

what I was doing as integral psychology because what I was doing was pointing out the importance of the fact that human beings wherever we look around the world and for however long we look in history have always had two different versions of going up or waking up and if you look at the mystical religious Traditions which are almost always the first versions of the religion because a waking up experience Is what's known as a first person experience and the first person means um the person who is speaking the Viewpoint of the person who is speaking

so that's an i a me a mind something like that then there's a second person which is the person being spoken to so that's a pronoun like you or thou um and then third person is the person or thing being spoken about so that's a he she they them it or its And as I was writing this um book at that time which was sort of my major breakthrough book and it was called sex ecology spirituality and it's a monster it's a big 800 page monster of a book um but that's why I started to

realize that there was a difference between waking up and growing up and they didn't really fit together at all you could be at virtually any stage of waking up and be at any any stage of growing up they they just Didn't grow together they were usually quite different most people in the west H can be highly developed in the model of growing up so they can be at a rational pluralistic or even integral stage of development but virtually none of them have had a mystical experience they haven't gotten very far in the T and hurting

pictures um they haven't found the ox they their Big M um and So I started at that point I would get um I noticed that these stages when it came to the growing up model that the stages of growing up had um well there were at least four different models generally different models of growing up and it turns out that they were referring to first person second person And third person viewpoints of the stages of growing up and that's what I eventually called the four quadrants and now I recognized what the four quadrants were as

I was looking at all these different models of growing up they somehow sounded like they were vaguely going talking about the same stages but they were somehow really different like archaic magic Mythic rational pluralistic integral that sort Of sounds like an interior something that you would think or a world view would have but there were several stages in third person that were like um geard linsky's stages of technoeconomic development and these are very real stages they the archaic stage the hunting and Gathering stage the Horticultural stage which means agriculture done with a simple digging stick

or a hoe then there's the agrarian stage which is agriculture done with a Heavy animal drawn plow and that came considerably after the Horticultural stage and then after The Agrarian stage was the Industrial stage and then after the industrial stage was the informational stage now those are all very real stages and I included them in my overall scheme but they weren't at all the same as archaic magic Mythic rational uh pluralistic or integral um and so I started to take each developmental scheme that I became aware Of I would write one of them down on

those big yellow sheets of legal paper and I would spread them out on the floor and I eventually had basically a hundred of these Yellow Pages spread all over my apartment floor I mean just covered in and each day I would walk by and I'd say okay what's the how are these related to each other because they even though they're very different some of them are are very different Sounding like Horticultural agrarian industrial informational and archaic magic Mythic rational um they do seem that they're covering similar types of of advancement or Evolution um and one

day it just dawned on me that several of these were dealing with an individual interior um like archaic magic Mythic rational pluralistic integral those turn out to be the stages of for example Cognitive growth that we go through and these were later verified by P studies and he called them natural intelligence pre-operational intelligence concrete operational intelligence formal operational intelligence and then systemic intelligence um and so as I looked at all of my Hundred pages about half of them were stages of interior development and half of them are stages of exterior development like our agricultural Styles

But those weren't to be confused with the same identical stages is our interior psychological iCal or cognitive growth and so that gave me the first major distinction which was inside versus outside or interior versus exterior and when I finally got the second set of opposites that gave me four quadrants this interior uh I I wrote them all down on one sheet of paper and they turned out to be just four Quadrants like that and the upper the leftand quadrants were all interior stages and the right hand quadrants are all exterior stages and about a month

later I was still looking at these because I I wasn't just happy with them being divided into two major different groups and it dawned me that about half of them we're also dealing with a singular or individual developmental hon what I called holon um by that time I was using Author kesler's invented the term holon and he said everything in the universe is a hoon and a whole a holon is a hole that's also a part of a larger hole so a whole letter is part of a whole word whole word is part of a

whole sentence whole sentence is part of a whole paragraph whole paragraph is part of a whole book or magazine or something like that um so this gave me four quadrants the upper quadrants were all Singular or individual holons the upper left was an interior of a single organism an individual organism so a single human being or or single dog or single worm it didn't matter that was represented by the upper left quadrant and that was where um gser terms primarily apply an individual human being goes through stages that are first archaic then magic and word

magic then Mythic Zeus Apollo and so on then rational mathematics Logic algebra and so on and then pluralistic which is a postmodern multiplistic set of worldviews and then those are drawn together at the highest stage the integral stage um so the upper right was the objective individual view of a single ho on so you those went from quarks to atoms to molecules to cells to Multicellular animals and that was entire tree of life going from amphibians to fish to reptiles to mammals to humans primates to humans and then humans themselves on their upper left went

through AR AIC magic Mythic rational pluralistic and integral forms of development um and then the lower quadrants were the collective or the plural so Um so you'd have like systems theory would work with the lower right quadrant because that's the plural of atoms molecules cells organisms and so on they come together into like multicellular animals come together in ecosystems and they always exist there's always a plural every individual comes together with under other individuals of its type and so atoms come together to form molecules molecules come together to form multi- Molecular cells cells come together

to form multicellular organisms organisms come together into families families come together into species groups and so on so that's the lower right and then the lower left is the plural of the individual Interiors so that's what we call culture is a multi listic collection of our individual interiors that comes together to form an Inner subjective cultural condition um so that's also any group contains an i and a u so that's a second person the upper left is the first person the interior of an i or me or mine and then lower left includes second person

you and both the right hand quadrants are exterior objective its so a single atom is an it um a single ecosystem a single planet um planets form When large molecular surfaces come together and then they form a huge planet and then planets come together into solar systems and solar systems come together in the galaxies and so on um so that was when I actually had a picture of what a truly integral framework looked like and I thought it was very interesting that they did represent first person singular second person it's also singular but I and

you come Together to form a we or an us or an ours and then third person is an it or a he or she or they or them or an it or an its and um I thought that was interesting because these two different Polar Opposites the inside and the outside the interior and the exterior and the singular or individual and the plural or Collective all of those first second third person pronouns were present in every major language That humans develop because words were representing real things and so the pronouns were first person pronoun second

person pronoun and third person pronouns and every language had examples of all of those and of course there you could go to fourth person and there's actually Jane linger who has developed the most widely used model of developmental psychology which she calls ego development and She actually found that each of her major stages of development she has seven eight or nine of these stages each of them added a another person perspective so she has first through seventh person perspectives that are each coming off of one of these seven major stages of growing up um and

that gave it a real sense of universality for me because I could see that these three or four quadrants and because both of the exterior quadrants Are exterior its there sometimes the singular upper right quadrant of atoms molecules cells um are treated as the same third person it so whether you have a planet or a star or Galaxy that's generally they're all treated as third person its so I sometimes call those three the first second third person The Big Three because they're found everywhere in Western Philosophy for example we have The good the true and

the Beautiful and everybody's heard of the good the true and the Beautiful and they're always mentioned as three but why are they three the three because they each represent a first or second or third person perspective so the good represents how am I supposed to morally treat you the second person so it's the first to second person relationship so that's the lower left quadrant the true represents General speaking objective Truth of Science and science mostly deals with the right-and quadrants things that can look at objectively and impartially and therefore truthfully and the Beautiful beauty is

in the eye the first person of the perspective and so the good the true and the Beautiful are the second person the third person and the first person realities and that really sort of started bringing the whole world together for me because every one of Those perspectives were found in every single language that we had ever developed and the languages that we developed were because we had different words that represented real things so a tree represented a real tree a mountain represents a real mountain and so on and a first person pronoun represents a real

existing reality called I we or I me or mine and that's in the singular version and then its plural version is this inner subjective cultural we or us or Ours um and then third person it represents any truly object as an object separated from a subject so every right hand hold on is separated from the left left hand hole on but all hoons and this is a assumption I came to make and is part of integral Theory every holon has four quadrants or the big three so according to Whitehead for example even an atom has

an interior which whad call Prehension which means feeling so every atom has a small ounce of Consciousness a small small amount of feeling or small amount of awareness even a quark and an atom have an interior of prehension so each of them have a first person and they are themselves third person its with a firsters prehension and naturally atoms come together they come together to form molecules so they have a s their senses of prehension are drawn together Together and so a molecule is a plural of an atom and so the atoms individual eye prehensions

are interwoven in a big molecular wave um so that started to draw the framework into a truly reality representing framework so we have the four quadrants upper quadrants are individual lower quadrants are collective or plural and each of those has a leftand quadrant an interior And a rightand quadrant an exterior now if you look at those that means each one of those has a different type of epistemology and therefore a different type of ontology so the epistemology for the upper left eye we call that introspection and it's a form of knowledge where we look within

we introspect and we report what we see we report all the objects we see in our subject and That's basically known as introspection the lower left the we space the I plus u is known the study of that is called hermeneutics which means the Art and Science of interpretation and we mostly know interpretation when we interpret one language into another when we interpret German in French terms or French terms in English terms that's what hermeneutics means um but it also means you and I right now are interpreting What we each other say and that's because

we're interacting in this lower left quadrant we formed a we space as we talk talk um and so that's a very real different epistemology the rightand quadrants all have what's known as well the upper right the individual it has what's called empiricism which is sensory of objective knowledge and empiricism is thought to be the sort of one especially real epistemology so we say we want empirical truth we mean we Want science scientific truth we want it confirmed we want evidence for this belief and the sequence in the upper right quadrant quarks to atoms to molecules

to cells to multicellular organisms is thought to be a really real series of events whereas empiricists always question the reality of Interiors they question the reality of introspection it's not a real knowledge it's not real like an external atom or molecule is although what they Overlook is Whitehead and many Western philosophers who generally call Pan psychist Viewpoint that even an atom has prehension it has an interior friend so don't don't knock Down Interiors too fast and you'll erase all atoms from existence all atoms have preh mention they have a little spark of awareness a little

spark of Consciousness and that incidentally answers one of the most difficult problems in Western philosophy which is often called the Hard problem and it's the relation of so-called mind and body well mind is a spark of Consciousness and body is the exterior matter that it appears in and the answer is every rightand quadrant has a leftand quadrant because they all fit together and so a really sorry but a really good way that I heard in your book I think it was the the history of everything um you you give the example of meditation a really

way that I find that helpful was like to Talk about you know on the left quadrant there you have the subjective internal experience with the person deeply in the meditative state but then also in the right quadrant you've got the the neural coret of someone if you put them in an FM or ice scer you can actually see um that activity happening you know that's right and that's a the that's a very good example of the upper right and upper left quadrant because many people of course many present day scientists Maintain that the mind is

actually just the brain and the brand is is it well it looks like a crumped grapefruit and it's about that big and you can actually cut your head open and see it as an object because it's an upper right sensory object and you can see it it's right there and anybody else watching that operation can also see your brain so it's a real object it's a real upper right reality um but Those objective reality have electronic States they have Alpha States beta States Theta States and Delta States uh Delta state is a pure formless deep

dreamless sleep State and when you're in that state which by the way is an upper left quadrant phenomena because you're it's something that your subjective mind mind is going through and the mind doesn't look like the brain your mind doesn't look like a crumpled Grapefruit you can't see your mind like you can see your crumpled grapefruit brain the mind is only known by introspection you have to actually look within and then you'll see mental thoughts and ideas and images and states of Consciousness you'll see a deep dreamless formless State when you're in deepam of sleep

when you're in a Theta State you're actually dreaming the real images going across your mind when your brain is in a Theta State but the brain itself is not experiencing a deep or a a dream state that's your mind the brain is experiencing a actual feta electronic State and that state can be seen objectively it can be measured objectively that's what we do with the EKG um electrocardio um e EG Electro enil graph and where they put electrodes on your forehead and your head and they measure the Electronic patterns that the brain is actually going

through and that's all correct that's all brain States they're not mind States mind states are also happening that are correlated with those brain States but they're happening on the interior you can only see those you can't the EEG won't measure what you're dreaming it won't tell you what you're dreaming at all it'll just tell you that there's a dream state going on and to know what that dream state is you have To see it from within you have to look within and of course that's what you your mind is aware of what you're dreaming so

when you wake up you can often remember what you were dreaming because you can actually see it and remember it um but otherwise the mind is going through stages of development from aric to Magic to Mythic to rational the pluralistic to integral and that's something that you can see by looking within And it's not easy because you generally have to know what the stage is and what it's like and what it's made of so for example if you study developmental psychology and you learn what an archaic mental state looks like and you learn what a

a magical stage looks like and you learn what a Mythic stage looks like then when you move from the magic stage to the Mythic stage you will know that when you look within you want to look for Mythic forms you look for Zeus Apollo Mount Olympus and so on and when you see those you'll recognize the Mythic stage of development that you're at but you won't be able to see any reason if you're only at the Mythic stage you're not yet at the rational stage but when you move into the rational stage you'll start to

think logically you'll be able to do mathematics you be able to do algebra and you'll see how these algebraic symbols fit together in Equations and all of that you can see by looking within you can't put an electro inogram on your head and see any mathematical equations they just they're not in the upper right quadrant so they can't be electrically spotted but those those are two very good examples of how very different quadrants nonetheless always go together even though they don't look like each other they don't sound like each other they don't smell like each

Other they don't taste like each other um and that's a very real important pie of information because you can do the same thing with each upper quadrant and its lower quadrant so every time you find a Planet you're going to find molecules but a molecule is not a planet a planet is a collective exterior lower right phenomenon as is a star as is a solar system they're all made of collective hoons come together to form these larger holes Ken I think it'd be really cool now to like whenever the penny dropped for me on on

what the four quadrants is it made me realize that you can almost take any phenomenon in the universe and you will see it then in multiple Dimensions you'll see you'll see incredible depth to it because you're seeing from these these four different perspectives right but it seems that as human beings we have a tendency if we're not aware of this to sort of usually have one Quadrant that we might stick to for example a materialist scientist might stick to the the top right someone who's really into psychology and spirituality top left for example right so

what I was wanting to ask you in this conversation is how can understanding this or how can the four quadrant help us understand something like let's say something like Council culture like how you can that be a provide a useful lens on something Like Council culture yeah well cancel culture itself is a subjective attitude that cancels whatever is supposed to be true so it's an upper left quadrant phenomena but every upper left phenomena has corresponding phenomena in the lower and right hand quadrants so this cancelling impulse that we generate with our brain comes together it

to form an inter subjective plural lower left Phenomena and that is the sum total of the whole cancer culture cancer culture that's what we call cancer culture is several different Minds all having a cancelling attitude coming together and communicating this cancelling subjective judgment that they've made and while they're all doing that they have a lower well they have an upper right brain State that is um a beta or an Alpha Brain state which are the states that the company actual thinking in the brain and so if if we did an electro enphr on somebody who's

practicing a leftand cancel culture then we would see the corresponding brainwave patterns um and of course if you're a neuroscientist you'll think that's the what that's real that's what's causing this cancel culture but it isn't I mean When you cancel somebody you're not going well beta altitude beta altitude beta altitude on you that this is not happening it's cancel you you're wrong your faults all upper left Sensations or awarenesses and then in the lower right we still have to have some form of collective communication and that's why cancel culture came into existence only with the

computer and forms of social Communication and all of those social forms of communication are lower right objective plural or Collective events they're all transmitted through electrical wires they all show up on computer screens that's all they are in the lower right is a series of computer Communications but without those computer computer Communications we wouldn't have any cancel culture we never had it before computers and we wouldn't have it if computers all Disappeared and all electrical forms of communication vanished and and that's the important part because you can find different schools of Western thinking that each

believe just one quadrant alone is real we call that quadrant absolutism but there are people that think that all that we're communicating through these computers is our brain wave patterns that's what's getting trans ferred into electrical patterns and Those are what our cancer culture really consists of it's just all these electrical Communications that we can measure um objectively because they're all in the right hand quadrants but they're not I mean it's clearly not just an electrical series of impulses it's thoughts and ideas and feelings especially feelings it's a very negative feeling space and you're getting

very negative about a person and you're gonna just cancel them I mean you're gonna Erase their existence which means basically you're gonna attack their upper left quadrant and you'll do that by thinking everything that their upper left quadrant has ever produced by way of a thought you're going to deny you're G to attack it and so you're upper left quadrant is at war with their upper left quadrant and that can occur only because there are three other quadrants that are involv and if you're an Electrical neurologist you'll just believe it's the upper right quadrant some

neurologist course believe that that the upper right exists only as a part of some collective state so a single computer doesn't contribute to communication unless there's actually a computer network uh and and so my computer is transmitting to your computer through electrical Network and that's true but that doesn't mean it's only that Electrical Network it's still uh consists of a collective culture and an individual mind and all of those have to be operating at the same time in generally the same place or nothing happens including cancer culture do you so you mentioned earlier about stages

of development do you feel that or do you think that someone who is further along these stages like at a higher stage they can more flexibly move between the different Quadrants yes um and you can actually only get a good really good understanding of the four quadrants from the integral stage of develop velopment which is why I call it integral psychology or integral Theory um and although you can you can understand the words that are used at starting at the magic to Mythic stage you can understand somebody can explain to you well your belief in

Zeus exists in one place and while you're thinking That your brain is undergo and you'll hear all those words and you'll sort of understand them but you won't really get how they all fit together and what they're all actually doing until you get to the rational stage and then from there you'll tend to move to a postmodern stage which is pluralistic and that's what postmodernism is is a series of pluralistic ideas um but the problem with pluralism is each of those individual Ideas the pluralistic mind can't actually fit them together into a single framework because

that takes the thinking about well how does this piece go with this piece go with this piece go with this piece and that's what integral thinking does is also called systemic thinking because it can think of whole systems and how each of their parts contribute to the whole system so and integral point of view can see the validity in all perspectives yes whereas Previous ones can't yes previous ones can sort of have a thought about what that might mean but their thinking is limited to Magic forms or Mythic forms or simple rational forms or even

pluralistic forms um and pluralism in a sense even though it's higher than rationality it's more fragmented than rationality because what it does is rationality tends to form think in terms of universal systems so whenever we're thinking rationally about a country we Think of it as a system connected with other countries and so on um but pluralism so effectively divides up rational systems into their subcomponents it can really only picture those subcomponents as separate individual parts and it can't figure out how they go together but that's what rational and that's what integral thinking does integral thinking

looks at all the parts and immediately sees how they all fit together so when I was Looking at through all my Hundred yellow pages on the floor I fortunately was using integral thinking because I could see how they fit together or how they didn't fit together and that eventually gave me the inside and the outside of an individual and a collective and those turned out to be universally present quadrants or realities and they all intimately fit together and that creates of itself a very integrated system of thinking and that's why when we people Use integral

Theory they create things like integral art integral history integral biology integral chemistry integral philosophy integral business integral religion integral spirituality because they they have categories that all fit together You' there's even like an integral Psychotherapy there's some interesting work been done in that field too um I've heard you say elsewh k that it only takes 10% of a population to Take on uh a worldview for it to sort of to become widespread so that's what happened in the in the Enlightenment and right uh with the rational the rational worldview so I wanted to ask you

we've only got five minutes left so just before we wrap up um how close do you think we are to reaching that 10% and what what's what's the world going to look like whenever we do we do reach it yeah well one of the first things that will happen when we Reach 10% of the population capable of thinking integrally and that might be a fairly long time because according to Jane levenger's model of her seven to nine stages of development her ninth stage is what I call turquoise integral thinking um and although the previous and

and they're both part of what I call Second Stage because there's a previous stage to turquoise integral that is called teal and it's about 5 to 7% of the Population right now but the highest turquoise integral fully integral stage is only 0.5% of the entire population is at an integral stage of the development so that's not encouraging and that could take um in order to get to 10% it could take 50 years it might even take a hundred years um as best as we can track it what happens now is most integral truly integral thinkers

end up being Professors at universities um if you take a study of the population of professors that have integral turquoise modes of thinking you'll get um close to 10% um so but those aren't growing at a terribly fast rate we I mean professors are sort of a steady group of people um and we're not seeing them Skyrocket and their development um so um I'm always sort of ambivalent about how I think of The future um one thing is for certain we will get to an integral stage of development because these forces of evolution that drove

I mean think about it we started at an archaic stage of cellular almost development and we went from there there were forces that drove us into create a magical stage and that meant that through all of our dozen or so intelligences we have cognitive intelligence emotional intelligence aesthetic intelligence Spiritual intelligence business intelligence all of those had to develop magic forms in order for us to truly evolve into a widespread worldwide magic culture and it was a very magic culture and we still see remnants of that magic culture in cave art because cave art is has

numerous pictures but they're often drawn over each other because they don't understand the perspectives separate things and so all of our cave art has Pictures of buffalo on top of Buffalo on top of Buffalo or antelopes on top of antelopes on top of antelopes and the archaeologists who discovered this they they describe it as magical painting because they realize sort of because they themselves went through a magical stage once in their childhood they still have vague memories of what it's like and so they recognize magic when they see it and they actually call it vast

majority of them call it magic pain pain Um and there are caves around the world that are famous for their magical painting and then and then that same Force which we call a force of Aeros which is transcend and include transcend means you go beyond and you make a hole that's greater than the previous hole but this greater hole transcends and includes the previous hole just like atoms transcend and include quirks they actually they're Real quirks inside of real atoms and then real atoms are transcended and included by real molecules but if you look at

a real molecule it's just a bunch of atoms and they're all still there but some force force them to come together and join each other to make a huge molecule and something made those molecules come together and an absolute Miracle of evolution occurred when a cell wall fell around all of those molecules now you could still see each Of those molecules inside a cell but a cell transcended went beyond a molecule and it could do things that molecules couldn't they could mitotically divide and reproduce themselves for example where no molecule does that and then these

cells came together into multicellular animals and each of those plants or animals could do things that individual cells couldn't they could create photosynthesis for example or they develop muscular systems and they Could walk and run and of course chase down their food and eat it um and then those animals also got increasingly complex and more talented so we go from anbian to fish to um reptiles that when when the amphibians crawled on land they formed reptiles uh and the reptiles still didn't have warm blood they were all cold blooded um and then warm blooded mammals

succeeded the reptiles and they could also do things like fly and um Some of them could actually form what's called paleo symbols or some mammals like great apes could actually form primitive types of thought processes um and then that evolved into various grades of human beings and until here we are reflecting on every stage we've gone through because we're that sophisticated in our thought processes and the people that thought that up were all at integral stages they were one of the 0.5% like Darwin who is thinking integrally and that's why they came up with all

of these various stages to the whole system of evolution and if you think about it that's remarkable that going through this little brain of ours are these complex mental symbols it is just amazing um and we're g to keep going and when we get to integral one of the main things that's going to happen is almost all forms of warfare will Stop because Warfare is generated by Magic and Mythic stages almost entirely and historians have calculated that because humans spent so much time at those early stages that it actually comes out to for every one

year of Peace humans have gone through 13 years of war and that's just alarming well all of that when the integral thinking has Permeated the culture and that happens when we get 10% of the population actually at integral that doesn't mean everybody's at integral but somehow integral thoughts and symbols tend to permeate and just sort of sift through the whole culture so people most people will know be able to describe even if they can't fully picture it they'll they'll know what integral thinking means and they'll know that it binds things together and they won't be

able To think fully inly but they'll be able to be aware of what it is um and what it is is it's not magic and it's not Mythic and therefore it's not war likee it just wouldn't think of going to war with somebody it like you and I talking now we neither one of us had a thought about going to war with the other person while we were talking because we're both ingly communicating and there's just no thought of War at all well I I think this is a this is a Hopeful note to end

on I would love to arrange a part two at some stage because there's about hundred things I didn't get to ask you today but um if you're up for it I would love to arrange a part two and where can people find like there'll be a lot of people listening this conversation and maybe want to do a deeper dive after and like where would be a good starting point for the for getting learning more about your work uh Probably the book that I've got coming out in a month or so it's called finding radical wholeness

and what it does is it goes through the entire integral model which in addition to waking up and growing up components has cleaning up opening up and showing up components the showing up components means showing up for all four quadrants to make sure we're using all the methodologies that we have available because each of those forms of Empiricism uh or methodology knowing knowledge creation creates or sees a different type of object so you have the objective Interiors in the upper right you have the subjective Interiors in the upper left you have the inter subjective Interiors

in the lower left and the inter objective exteriors in the lower right and so um it lays out each of those waking up growing up a chapter with each Of each of them cleaning up cleaning up is by the way the making whole of a mind that we've otherwise split and divided and repressed various aspects that we're uncomfortable with this is generally a recent discovery most people credit Sigman Freud with sort of really diving into this and making it a sort of scientific um approach um but he was dealing primarily with the upper left quadrant

And when we split something off from the upper left and we make it an object and push it into our unconscious it basically becomes an it so we'll say the anxiety it overcomes me or the obsession it controls me and Freud himself recognized the these quadrants because he was asked what does this new psychoanalysis of yours do and according to his translator Freud said where ego where libido was or where ID was let ego be and ID was Latin for It and the ego was Latin for the ey so what Freud and what and he

Freud always used those terms he never once used the term ID or ego for himself didn't use those terms his translator James stroy introduced those terms into Freud because they were Latin and he thought it made Freud quote sound more scientific if he was using a Latin term so when what Freud said was where it was there I shall become it the split off repressed it the It um becomes one re integrated reunited with the odd and James stroy translated those is where it was their ego shall be but what for it said was where

it was there I shall become those are exactly the terms you and I have been talking about this whole time is the it third person split off and repressed and when they're repressed we can only know them as because they're not part of I anymore they become a third person a split off he she they them or it which is the General term that we use for our unconscious processes like I said we said the anxiety it overcomes me or the fear it overtakes me or the hunger I can't control it or my lust stat

I can't control it um and so Freud founded this methodology of introspecting and looking Within and that's a very important methodology we said introspection is how we know the upper left and that's what Freud himself introduced was a form of random Associative introspection say whatever comes into your mind but that means look into your mind and see what's coming into it and so that is a form of introspection um so we go the book goes through cleaning up which is the term I use for any forms of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis we generally talk about cleaning

up our mess our its um and then opening up which is a wholeness that's created when we recognize that we have multiple intelligences not just Cognitive thinking but we have emotional intelligence spiritual intelligence aesthetic intelligence moral intelligence and all of those think in different ways and so they're called multiple intelligences and psychologists generally say that there are between eight and 12 multiple intelligences but if you spend time just reading through a list of them and then each time you read a type of intelligence you look for it in yourself So when you read about aesthetic

intelligence you realize that you can look at things as being beautiful and some things are more beautiful than another and you'll go through stages of recognizing that beauty or spiritual stages the tenen oerting pictures are classic spiritual stages of development as are any of the stages Christian Mystics come up with uh and those all most all Trace back the Plato who introduced the Transcendental sphere of forms or archetypal ideas and they come down and project themselves to create objects that we know by naming them basically um and so uh and and then it goes through

showing up and then each time after it introduces a chapter introducing each of these times of creating wholeness it talks about a radical wholeness or a big wholeness or a full wholeness and that's when we bring together and realize we Have the capacities to create waking up wholeness growing up wholeness opening up wholeness cleaning up wholeness and a showing up wholeness and we talked today about waking up and growing up and showing up and so maybe next time we can talk about cleaning up and opening up and then we'll have a complete full big Hess

I'd love to I'd love to and I can't wait to read the book as well so um I'll be in touch about arranging part two for this and hopefully hopefully I can get The book before then and I'll have a good read and then I'll pled to askas you about all right so Ken it's been an absolute pleasure I want to wish you the best with your continued efforts to get inter integral Theory to the 10% of the population thank you and we'll talk soon all right okay I appreciate it bye-bye thank you for listening

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