ANDREW COHEN: What I want to explore with you today is the moral predicament of our time, and how that relates to our spiritual aspirations.

KEN WILBER: That sounds great.

COHEN: Here in the West, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is a profound lack of moral context, not only for us boomers, but also for the X and Y generations. And I think this is perhaps the biggest issue that all of us who are interested in development, transformation, and enlightenment need to come to terms with.

We have all emerged in this world in the postmodern cultural context—a time when there is no traditional moral, ethical, philosophical, or spiritual framework for our own existence. Indeed, we entered the picture when the old structures were being rejected. And to a large degree, we have set ourselves free from them, but as of yet, we haven't really found anything to replace them. Our generation and those that have followed have experienced more freedom—personal, philosophical, political, religious—than any group of people ever, anywhere. There have never been so many who have had this incredible liberty to experiment—to think in whatever way they want, to do anything they want, to say anything they want. But the significant issue here, I think, is that a human being has to have reached an unusually high degree of maturity to actually be able to handle the kind of freedom that so many of us were given simply because of the time in which we were born. And most of us haven't handled it very well because we haven't had enough maturity. So we're in an incredible time when the largest group of individuals at the highest level of development is in a transitional phase. The old has been rejected, but as yet, we haven't really found a new narrative, a new moral, ethical, philosophical, and spiritual context in which to live our lives—one that will enable us to handle the freedom that we've been given and help us to make sense of our own experience.

Now, there have been many of us who responded to this lack of context in our own lives by pursuing Eastern philosophy and its promise of higher consciousness. And as a result, many have tasted higher states, glimpsed nondual awareness, experienced moments of enlightenment. As you yourself have said many times, dramatic spiritual episodes like these have a very profound impact on a soul level, especially if the experience is a deep one. But, as we have discussed in the past, pure experience in and of itself is not what's most important. What matters is how we interpret these experiences.

WILBER: Yes, that's right—what's important is the interpretive context in which the experiences are occurring.

COHEN: So here we are in postmodern America, up to our necks in a culture of narcissism, devoid of an authentic moral framework for making value distinctions. What happens when an individual has an enlightenment experience in this context? Let's say they taste nonduality, glimpse emptiness, are overwhelmed by fullness, see that all is One and One is all. They experience the truth beyond good and evil, beyond opposites. But how is that extraordinary experience going to help them navigate this complex, ever-evolving, ever-changing world system that we are all a part of?

WILBER: In other words, if the ultimate truth is beyond good and evil, how do we navigate in the world of good and evil?

COHEN: Exactly. Now, this is what has happened for so many of us, and I think it's obviously going to happen to the younger generations if something doesn't begin to change: When we had these enlightenment experiences, when we experienced the nondual state, we concluded, "Oh, the ultimate truth is beyond differences, is beyond good and evil." That's what our most profound spiritual experiences reveal to us. But because they occur in the context of a culture that is having a lot of difficulty making value distinctions anyway, these experiences end up lacking any kind of moral weight and, therefore, lack the power to create a real moral framework for our lives.

WILBER: They end up reinforcing the postmodern cultural narcissism that I call "boomeritis"*—bizarrely.

COHEN: That's the whole point. In the past, when these experiences were being pursued in a premodern, traditional context, there was already a very strong moral, ethical, philosophical, and spiritual framework in place that told us how to interpret them. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, because we have not created new maps, it's confusing as to what the moral, ethical, and philosophical context for the highest spiritual experiences actually is. Because of this, as you said yourself, enlightenment experiences inadvertently reinforce the plague of boomeritis.

WILBER: Yes. Rampant relativism, rampant pluralism, inability to make choices—all of that gets reinforced for all the wrong reasons, and it appears to have the sanction of Buddha dharma!

COHEN: I think this is one of the reasons why a lot of people are very confused about higher-state experiences.

WILBER: Yes, I agree. And I agree very strongly with what you said earlier, that, to put it crudely, there's satori [awakening] and there's how you interpret satori, or your experiences. What interpretive context do you have to hold this experience? Because after all, you might feel that you're one with everything, and that's fine—in a very profound sense that's your always-given condition, and a satori, a kensho, an awakening is a recognition of that ever-present state—but once you recognize that, how do you carry it? Charles Manson said, "If all is one, nothing is wrong." Now, is that how we are going to carry our satori?

COHEN: Some teachers do say that kind of thing.

WILBER: That's exactly the problem. So the general approach that I take, and that you and I share a similar view on, is that we want realization plus an integral interpretation of it. Almost every time you and I talk, we come back to this—the extraordinary importance of the context, the interpretation, that you frame these experiences in. Because as rare and precious as the experiences are, if you don't have an adequate unfolding of them, they can lead to just as much harm as they can good on many occasions.

COHEN: Yes. So we have to recognize that spiritual experience alone is not enough. Because the context for personal experience for our generation is narcissism, a personal psychological context in which there simply is no moral imperative. And most of the people who are teaching this stuff are products of our own generation and so are stuck in this position themselves. Or, if they are Easterners, they usually represent a premodern cultural context with a moral worldview that has almost nothing to do with the postmodern, twenty-first-century world we're living in.

WILBER: And they're often a little naïve—they assume we're going to share the same moral background and then they're shocked when things fall apart.

A BROKEN MORAL COMPASS

WILBER: Another important thing to talk about is: What does moral judgment mean, especially in this postmodern era—the era of what I call "aperspectival madness," of rampant pluralism and relativism, where nothing can be said to be better or worse than anything else. The traditions are pretty straightforward. There are three pillars of spiritual growth and development, and they're sila, dhyana, and prajna. Sila is moral foundation, ethical foundation, that's number one; then dhyana, meditation; and then prajna, awakening or realization. It's the calamity you've discussed, the calamity of our generation, that we've come to think that you're morally good if you don't make judgments. But that's exactly wrong. You're morally good if you make the right kind of judgments. And you have to learn how to make wise judgments in order to make moral decisions. But what we do, because we understandably don't want to marginalize anyone or unfairly judge, is to say, therefore, don't judge at all. And so we stand back with no moral compass, no judgments, no discriminating wisdom, and basically the whole show goes to hell because of that. So in the midst of saying that nothing is better or worse than anything else, even on a relative plane, if you then have an experience of satori or kensho or oneness, it reinforces your broken moral compass. And this broken moral compass, combined with your realization, is what you call spirituality.

COHEN: It's a profound point.

WILBER: Oh, it's a nightmare.

COHEN: This is a point I've been trying to make for years—that satori can be an anti-evolutionary event unless it takes place in an appropriate ethical, moral, and philosophical context. It can literally retard or stunt development and growth.

WILBER: Yes, it tends to—unless it's part of an ongoing transformative practice, and that means an integral practice. Because without a decent interpretation, context, or understanding, it sort of cements you at wherever you are.

COHEN: Precisely.

WILBER: So you have to be very careful about that. And we have a lot of semi-enlightened schmucks running around because they got sealed in their schmuckiness when they got this sense of oneness. A great deal of certainty comes with that experience, a kind of unshakable foundation—all of which is just great! It's an opening to understanding this ever-present, literally absolute condition. But there's a relative condition as well, and human beings are a mixture of both radical emptiness and relative form. And the traditions are really clear that you have absolute truth and you have relative truth and you have to honor both of those.

COHEN: Right.

WILBER: And so absolute truth is beyond good and evil, but relative truth has good and evil. And in the relative world, you're supposed to choose good and avoid evil—Buddha was very clear on that one. In the absolute world, you transcend both of them. Now, what we've done is to confuse the two, and we think that because the absolute is beyond good and evil, therefore in the relative world, we should make no judgments at all. And that is already to capitulate to an immoral action in the relative world. You're already reinforcing immoral action when you do that.

COHEN: That's true. And that's occurring in a consciousness where the degree of narcissism—self-obsession and self-concern—is probably unprecedented in human history.

WILBER: The narcissism is the scary part. It might be the worst part because as we've discussed before, when people say, "You shall make no judgments whatsoever," what it really means is, "Nobody's allowed to judge my egoic self-contracted activities as being bad or wrong or inadequate." And so that gives the ego the ultimate safe haven against spiritual realization.

COHEN: Right. And that extreme narcissism is too often the only compass by which we are actually making judgments.

WILBER: Yes. Because "what's true is what's true for me." And that's unchallengeable.

COHEN: It's the last stand of the narcissist.

WILBER: We can take a simple scheme of human moral development from the work of Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg found through very extensive research that human beings go through three broad stages of moral development or moral evolutionary unfolding. And they're called preconventional, conventional, and postconventional, or egocentric, ethnocentric, and worldcentric. For example, an infant doesn't have the capacity to make moral decisions in any articulate way—so it's egocentric. "What's right is what's right for me, and to hell with everybody else." That's the classic narcissistic stance. Then the child grows and enters a peer group, so now "what's right is what's right for my group"—that's ethnocentric. Now, ethnocentric, of course, has become a dirty word, but it's actually a move up from "what I say is right" to "what my group says is right." As individuals continue to grow and develop, they move from ethnocentric to worldcentric. They try to judge people regardless of race, color, creed, sex, and so on. They try to make their moral judgments more evenhandedly, more fairly, and more compassionately. And these stages emerge in an order that can't be reversed and each one is higher than its predecessor. Each one is a wider sphere of care and concern and responsibility.

Now the problem is, as we were saying earlier, that even if you're at a worldcentric stage of development but you're caught up in the postmodern pluralistic misunderstanding that nothing is better or worse than anything else, it leaves you open to egocentric invasion. In other words, if nothing is higher or lower, then anything I do is right. There can be no challenge to what I'm doing. That leaves us without any traction whatsoever. That is a broken moral compass in the worst possible sense, and that's kind of what we have in this cultural creative, rampant pluralistic, rampant relativistic orientation. And it's even inherently self-contradictory, because when people apply this pluralism, which claims there are no hierarchies, they're making a hierarchical judgment—they're claiming that their judgment is better than others'. So that's the sort of rampant self-deception that is called morality in our culture.

COHEN: It's called higher morality!

WILBER: It is called higher morality. So what we're trying to do, in a sense, is to say, "Yes, lower forms of judgments, judging people based on ethnocentric criteria—is wrong. We should strive for this higher, postconventional, or worldcentric stage of development." That lends itself to an evolutionary, integral moral understanding. And that, I think you and I would agree, is the sila, the moral foundation, upon which both meditation and realization rest.

COHEN: Right.

WILBER: And without that moral foundation, you're not going to get true meditation and true awakening. You could have a quick satori, but it's going to degenerate into an egocentric or narcissistic self-promotional expressive truth. That's the absolute catastrophe that passes for spirituality in so much of our present age, which is just what we've been saying—an experience of the absolute can reinforce your narcissistic inclinations if you don't have this moral context in which to hold it.

*Characterized by its "strange mixture of high intelligence and self-absorbed narcissism," boomeritis is Wilber's term for the cultural and psychological disease typified by the baby-boom generation. As the first generation to implement a multicultural, egalitarian worldview, the boomers created a postmodern context in which the beliefs and freedoms of the individual were given utmost respect, often indiscriminitely—making it a welcome home for egotism and self-indulgence.