AN UNPRECEDENTED COMPLEXITY

WIE: But it's the foundation for a transformation to higher levels of consciousness. Moreover, the transformation you have just been describing from third to fourth order, from the socialized to the self-authoring mind, is what enables us to live successfully in a changing pluralistic society. This relates to a question that I have about our rapidly changing present moment. Dee Hock, a leader in organizational change, told us that "life is eternal becoming, or it's nothing." In other words, he's saying that change is the very nature of life. So, because of the rapidity of change in our lives, we're all under a different kind of pressure than human beings have experienced before. What effect does our current historical context, which is characterized by change in a way that is different from ever before, have on our development?

RK: In my book In Over Our Heads, I'm basically addressing a rather similar question, which is: What is the nature of the mental demands that modern life makes on us adults? If you think of the culture itself as a school in which every adult is compulsorily enrolled and the subjects of the school are our various roles (spouse, parent, worker, etc.), then what you find, over and over again, is a demand for a particular order of consciousness that is of unprecedented complexity. The order of complexity that is actually being demanded is probably pretty close to the GREEN meme [see article on Spiral Dynamics, "The Never-Ending Upward Quest," in this issue], or what I have just called the self-authoring mind or fourth order consciousness. In fact, I think if we are to overcome the tribal hostilities and the big lesions in the human family, then more and more people need to develop fourth order, self-authoring consciousness. That is the modal growing edge of the species as a whole.

However, some people who think a lot about consciousness and transformation see the fundamental growing edge as the move beyond the GREEN level to a recognition of the limitations of one's own self system, which in my lingo would be a move to the fifth order or the self-transforming self. This is a very important transformation that some small, very small, percentage of the human population is working on. But the data across a number of studies suggest that a majority of even well-advantaged, well-positioned adults haven't yet reached even the self-authoring mind, fourth order consciousness. This means that they do not have the capacities that would enable them to thrive within today's increasingly pluralistic world that requires individuals to exercise a kind of authority that, throughout human history, human beings have never had to do. In fact, pooling lots of different studies, we found that 58 percent of a composite sample of people, who were middle-class and most likely had the great advantages, had not reached the self-authoring level or what would be a pretty good correspondence to the GREEN meme in Beck's system.

WIE: So, this is 58 percent of a selected sample who have not reached the self-authoring level, or the GREEN meme. What about in the population as a whole?

RK: Among a composite sample of people from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds in the U.S., 79 percent have not reached the fourth order. This means that 21 percent of the sample reached the self-authoring level or beyond. And only a tiny percentage of people in the studies are beyond the fourth order.

WIE: So what about that tiny percent of people beyond self-authoring, or fourth order—what are the characteristics of the next, fifth order of consciousness?

RK: When you get to the edge of the fourth order, you start to see that all the ways that you had of making meaning or making sense out of your experience are, each in their own way, partial. They're leaving certain things out. When people who have long had self-authoring consciousness come to the limits of self-authoring, they recognize the partiality of even their own internal system, even though like any good system, it does have the capacity to handle all the "data," or make systematic, rational sense of our experience. In the Western world, we often call that "objectivity." But just because you can handle everything, put it all together in some coherent system, obviously doesn't make it a truthful apprehension—or truly objective. And this realization is what promotes the transformation from the fourth to the fifth order of consciousness, from the self-authoring self to what we call the self-transforming self. So, you start to build a way of constructing the world that is much more friendly to contradiction, to oppositeness, to being able to hold on to multiple systems of thinking. You begin to see that the life project is not about continuing to defend one formation of the self but about the ability to have the self literally be transformative. This means that the self is more about movement through different forms of consciousness than about the defending and identifying with any one form.

WIE: I think Don Beck would call your fifth order of consciousness a move to the Second Tier, which is an evolutionary transformation that takes us beyond survival mode to a more integral perspective on life.

RK: Yes. And it is also important to keep in mind that in this move from the fourth to the fifth order, from self-authoring to self-transforming, you have very important distinctions between those who are in the earlier process of that transition and those in the later stages—who have actually achieved the fifth order. So, there's a critical distinction between on the one hand, a negative postmodernism that is all about trashing any ideological form, which is only deconstructive and is all about a fatigue with and critique of the ideological, and on the other, what I call a more reconstructive postmodernism that is not just about trashing. When you get to the other side of this four to five shift, and you've moved to this more reconstructive or transformative side, then there's a whole capacity for reconnecting to these ideologies and recognizing that each of them is partial. You're building relationships among them rather than holding on to one and projecting the other. It's a much more positive spirit.


GOD & THE FRONTIERS OF DEVELOPMENT

WIE: For my last few questions, I'd like to step back from where we are now developmentally to look more at the motivation behind and future possibilities of human transformation. First, a fundamental question: What drives the movement of development?

RK: Well, that's a very good question essentially for getting at what a person's beliefs are. I can give you a domesticated answer that has a certain surface integrity to it. Something like: Organisms organize, that is their nature, and they are drawn to experiences of discrepancy in order to give them form. We have all kinds of good empirical evidence that shows how we seek to give order to things. And so you could posit that there is a "drive" within living forms, including humans, to shape reality and create ever more satisfactory connections or relationships to the universe. So a given truce is a good enough way of putting the world together for a certain period of time, because we not only put the world together that way, we then defend it. But this domesticated response still begs the heart of your good question. It's like pulling a rabbit out of a hat and just saying, "There is this drive."

So, then you have to ask, well, what's the source of this "drive"? Now you really are asking a religious question about what is the nature of life itself, or energy itself, this intelligent energy that forms and re-forms itself. At another level, I could just as happily answer the question by saying God. God moves all this—where God is the name of the ceaseless, restless, creative flow of energy in the universe. I'm Jewish by upbringing so that's my first lens. I also feel very attached to many Eastern approaches, but my introduction to anything spiritual was as a Jew. There's a very central prayer in the Jewish liturgy that has to do with declaring that God is One. Echad. One. And what that means to me today is a transcendent affirmation that this intelligent energy, this restless, creative flow that we can follow within any one single life, is actually something in which the universe as a whole participates. It's really one energy that's running through the whole thing. It's not something we share, so much as it is something that shares us.

If you ask me about ultimate motives, I would say that it's all going somewhere. The process by which each living thing in the universe organizes and reorganizes itself—which is transformation—is a process by which each living piece, or part, is, in a certain way, better recognizing its true nature. And this is a declaration of faith here—its true nature is ultimately its participation in a single intelligent whole. Prayer is sometimes described as an expression of our dependence on this force that is bigger than ourselves. And that may be so, but our own transformation is an expression of God's dependence on us. That's what we are called to do, what the universe needs of us. And each living thing in the universe has the opportunity, through the process of transformation, to move toward a more complex form. This creates a trajectory that you start to see reflected in both Eastern and Western conceptions of higher stages of consciousness, a convergence of thought that has to do with forms of increasing complexity that move you toward a summit of complexity, or a summit of this special simplicity that recognizes the whole.

WIE: So, from this, then, what is ultimate human maturity?

RK: Well, it's a big risk to think about maturity as only the highest state of complexity or something that's just entirely within each person, decontextualized from the world in which one lives. Maturity has something to do with the fit between the person and the nature of the demands of the surround. Otherwise, the question of what is full maturity is essentially tautological with the question of what is most complex. The most complex would just be the most mature, by definition. But I think maturity is a more interesting and more psychosocial phenomenon. So, for example, if you were living in the eighteenth century, in a traditional homogeneous culture in which there is no real need to be able to stand over against the culture, I would call a person fully mature who is able to be a responsible member of the tribe and internalize the beliefs of that tribe.

Also, you have to think about what it means to actually be more complex than what your culture is currently demanding. You have to have a name for that, too. It's almost something beyond maturity, and it's usually a very risky state to be in. I mean, we loved Jesus, Socrates, and Gandhi—after we murdered them. While they were alive, they were a tremendous pain in the ass. Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr.—these people died relatively young. You don't often live a long life being too far out ahead of your culture.

WIE: For my last question, I'd like to ask you a little about what we are exploring here in our community, because we have been wondering about the developmental implications of what we are discovering together. What we are finding is that when a group of individuals come together as One, and in surrender to that intelligent energy that you described as animating the One, something miraculous happens. It feels almost like a call from the future, a glimpse of another level of development or evolution. It seems to lead to the emergence of a collective spiritual being—something beyond just a group of individuals sharing an experience. This emergence, which our teacher Andrew Cohen has called Evolutionary Enlightenment, has the potential for combining the most radical autonomy—what you might call ultimate self-authoring—with profound communion. Our experience suggests that the individuals involved move beyond a focus on individual survival to another order of collective being that is neither traditional hierarchy nor pluralism.

RK: Well, this is a delicious taste of something. Or, to some, a worrisome narrative that sends up alarms. When you follow the story of development, you can already see there's a rhythm in it. And your description has a lot of music in it that I think is very resonant. The elements seem to be present that one would need to orchestrate an intelligent conversation about these kinds of things, or to begin to get a picture of them. If you just follow the logic of the rhythm, it's going to lead to something like what you've described, where those are the kinds of words that you have to use—union and oneness, autonomy and communion, and connection.

To my mind, the big question is: What does it actually mean? You know, what does it actually mean to live it or to experience it, as opposed to just talking about it? Do we actually have the language to speak about it? Because language has all these constraints built into it, where much of the language we use may make it impossible to talk about these notions of union and oneness. But I know your own work is not just talking about it, it's about the practice of it and how one brings it about. And, in a certain way, that's where the "proof of the pudding" all rests.

Now I think what you're describing are post fifth order apprehensions. It's hard enough, at least for me, to fully grasp the fifth order. And this is language about a development that I think most people are either never going to be at the edge of, or, if they are, it's going to be much later in their lives. But I do think that it's worth thinking about ways of being more receptive to the momentary glimpses of these other ways of constructing the world, which I think people do have. In Abraham Maslow's work in the sixties, he created a space for people to talk about experiences that just did not fit in with their normal way of understanding themselves, the kind of experiences that we tend, therefore, to discredit or just leave out. And he was saying that maybe those are little messages from our future. We have all kinds of ways of screening out these little messages that come from the future. It's not a future that none of us have actually been in, but a future that every one of us probably has been in that is outside the ways we construct reality. If we can find ways to actually start listening to these messages even though we cannot quite make them fit in to our current way of constructing the world, they might be of enormous value.