KW: That's exactly right. I really do believe that is the case. And it's mutually supportive, in a sense, to have people's own inner realization and experience confirm that. Because it's certainly my own realization, but it's also obviously the product of a kind of philosophical orientation. And now we're thinking through what some of these things mean in conjunction with your own spiritual practice and spiritual awareness.

AC: Before I'd become familiar with your ideas on this topic, I had assumed that these levels and potentials I was intuiting already existed. And then I realized, "No, they exist as potentials and therefore don't yet actually exist because not enough individuals have reached that level of development."

KW: That's just how I see it. And this understanding allows us to get rid of an enormous amount of metaphysical and ontological baggage that not only is not needed but that completely prejudices the spiritual orientation in the eyes of the modern and postmodern world. You see, the modern and postmodern world has developed very powerful arguments for why those merely ontological and metaphysical structures don't exist. And they don't. But you can still derive every single thing you need for a fully integral spirituality without using that baggage.

So using the levels defined by Spiral Dynamics as examples, we can say that once the lower levels emerge—beige and purple and red and blue and orange and green—once they emerge and take on structure and become Kosmic habits, then they exist independent of individuals. So in today's world, the structures of those lower levels are so old that every infant has to go through those stages. There is no getting around them—they are just there. So they become real, and that means in a very concrete, not metaphysical, way, as actual levels of development among real human beings in a real world. And so these levels or structures, right up to around turquoise, are, in fact, fairly fixed. And the older they are, the more they're a Kosmic habit, and the harder it is to break them.

But when you get up around turquoise and coral,* those levels are just now lightly getting formed. So that's where evolution's edge is right now—at turquoise and coral—and it's frothy and it's creative and it's emergent. And everything we do right now is going to contribute to how those levels are laid down as Kosmic habits.

AC: Right.

KW: So that's very interesting. And then there are even higher levels, but those are just vast potentials in the subtle and causal and nondual domains.

AC: That's what is so thrilling about this and what makes it infinitely more satisfying than the traditional take on all this—the shocking recognition that we are actually creating these levels of consciousness, and of course, in an evolutionary context, we are desperately needed to do it. It ain't going to happen by itself because they don't yet exist!

KW: Absolutely.

AC: And what could make the meaning of the spiritual impulse more clear than the recognition of the necessity for our own conscious participation in the evolution of consciousness itself? What could make more sense and be more compelling for the awakening human on an emotional, intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual level than this? If we assume that these levels already exist, we are completely leaving out of the picture the all-important role that we have to play in the actual creation of these levels. And that's the most thrilling part of all this—because the purpose of human incarnation is revealed in the most obvious way when one realizes, "It is up to me."

KW: Yes, it really is co-creation because right at that frothy, foaming, chaotic, emerging edge of spirit's unfolding is where leela, the creative play, is. And all that's required, of course, is that whatever emerges has to transcend and include its past because those are past forms of spirit. Molecules emerge, they transcend and include atoms, atoms include quarks, and so on. So we have to embrace the past, and that's called love. But looking at it the other way, you're bringing down that creative edge every time you have these kinds of experiences.

AC: Exactly. Speaking of bringing down the creative edge, there's something profound I've noticed, and also that some of my students have experienced, that I'd like to tell you about. When one is actually engaging with the evolution of consciousness in the way we've been discussing, there is literally the sense that—God, I don't know what metaphor to use to describe this, but—it's almost as if a thing (if we can call consciousness a thing) is being "cooked" by the individuals who are consciously realizing it. In fact, as those individuals would move in and out of this state of conscious realization, it seemed like it was informing them and they were informing it. And then at a later point in time, when they awakened to it again, it literally seemed as if the thing—consciousness itself—had moved forward, evolved.

KW: I believe that's exactly how it happens.

AC: I've had this kind of experience for a long time, but recently, many of my students have described having the same recognition collectively. They realize that when they give attention to this thing, it begins to inform them and they evolve as a result, and when they return to it, they find that a mysterious moving forward has occurred in the thing itself. So in this one can actually intuit—you can't quite say see because it's on a more subtle level than that—but whatever consciousness is, you can almost see that it is evolving in just the way that we've been speaking about.

KW: That's exactly right. You can do a thought experiment where you think back fifty thousand years, where everybody's at a much earlier stage of development, sort of beige and purple. Purple is the leading edge at that time, and yet there are small groups of people that start to have an experience of the next level, which would be red. And red at that moment is not fully formed, so there are still a lot of different ways that red can go. And all it has to do is transcend and include purple and beige—it's fixed in that sense because its past has to be carried along to some degree. But at that creative edge, large parts of red could have gone in any number of different directions. And I'm sure that as the first pioneers in consciousness pushed into red, they were having just the kinds of experiences you described. They would sort of touch into it and then come back, and go, "Wow, what was that?" And then they'd go and touch it again and come back. And then eventually it starts to flow, it comes out, it sediments down. And the more people have that experience, the more it becomes a Kosmic habit available to other human beings, who then begin to move into that domain. And then ten thousand years later, it's become such a Kosmic habit that people have no choice at that point. They automatically evolve through red on the way to the next level, blue—that's just the way it is. Later on, at the leading edge of creative evolution, people at blue are starting to have experiences of orange. That was a very exciting time—it was called the Western Enlightenment (with previews of that emergence in early Greece when the bright boys down there pushed into orange and higher). So I think that's exactly what happens. You know, a thousand years from now, they'll be looking back on all this as "that kindergarten stuff" that we were pushing into back then.