NEGATE AND PRESERVE

COHEN:I'm sure we both agree that we're talking about the same thing when we refer to your “transcend and include” and my “transcend and exclude.” But it might be helpful for us to clarify the distinction between the two because they're two parts of the evolutionary equation. And in the context of evolutionary development, when we say transcend and include, it emphasizes one side of the equation, and when we say transcend and exclude, it emphasizes the other side of the equation. Obviously the whole equation includes both.

WILBER: It's true. We are very close in terms of embracing both including and excluding. And as I mentioned in our last dialogue, there's a wonderful phrase from Hegel that everybody quotes: “To supersede”—and for us that might mean to transform—“to supersede is to negate and to preserve.” And that's what I call “transcend and include.” But transcend can mean negate. In other words, when you transcend something, you're leaving something behind; you're excluding something in a certain sense. And you're also including, and so the question is, What are you including and what are you excluding?

COHEN: Exactly.

WILBER: This has been a central preoccupation of mine theoretically for at least two decades, and I actually wrote a paper called “Two Patterns of Transcendence.” And the two patterns were inclusion and exclusion. In other words, “What is included in development and what's excluded?” The briefest way to explain it is to use the seven chakras as an example. Let's just say the seven chakras are seven stages of development and they represent levels of energy and levels of consciousness.

One of the things that happens in development is that you're going through these seven stages—and again, it's not linear; there are all sorts of ups and downs, but for now we want the simplest explanation possible. When you're at stage one, you're identified with the energy at stage one. So if you're identified with the first chakra, it's the first month of life, and you're all mouth. The world is all food. It's the material level. You're identified with matter. When you move to stage two, you move up to the second chakra and you identify with the emotional, sexual energies that start there, and then you disidentify with an exclusive attachment to material or food. So you're no longer at the oral stage. In other words, you're no longer identified merely with food, but you still have to eat. So you include chakra one, but you exclude an exclusive identity with chakra one.

So now you're at chakra two and you're exclusively identified with chakra two. You're in a libidinal self. You're all emotional, sexual vitality and energy, and you're actually identified with that. When you move to chakra three, you don't get rid of sex and breath and élan vital but you get rid of an exclusive identity with them. You get rid of an exclusive worldview that comes merely from having a second chakra. That worldview is magical, very similar to the purple meme in Spiral Dynamics terms, for example. And then you move to chakra three, whose worldview is like the red meme; it's now a kind of magic/mythic worldview, which is starting to get very powerful and egocentric. And that's the classic third chakra power.

When you move to the fourth chakra, you move beyond an exclusive identity with chakra three, but you don't get rid of chakra three energy. You still have a third chakra. You still have intentionality. You still have willpower, etc. But now you're exclusively identified with the heart chakra, which means you begin to extend love from yourself. The first three chakras are egocentric, but in the fourth, you extend love from yourself to your family or your tribe or your group. So it's ethnocentric. It's a step up. Now you're identified with your group, and “my country, right or wrong,” etc. But it's the beginning of an expansion of love.

When you move to the fifth chakra, you disidentify with the exclusive attachment of the fourth chakra, but you don't get rid of the fourth chakra. So you start to see the point?

COHEN: Yes. What you're describing is human/cultural development in relationship to the chakra system.

WILBER: I'm using that as an example of any developmental scale that has stages or levels.

COHEN: And how would this example illustrate the problems and challenges that often accompany evolutionary development?

WILBER: If you have an attachment to the first chakra, then you have an oral attachment. You're a compulsive eater; you haven't died to the first chakra, you haven't died to your exclusive attachment to it. If you are attached to the second chakra, then you have symptoms of sexual attachment or obsession that you haven't let go of. If you haven't let go of chakra three, then you remain egocentric, you're power crazed; you haven't died to your exclusive identity with chakra three, and so on.

So what you're wrestling with as a teacher, as a master, as a guru in this sense is that you are trying to get people to die to their attachment to any of the chakras while letting them use the functional energy of the chakras. Does that make sense?

COHEN: Definitely.

WILBER: What happens in development is that certain basic functions emerge with each new stage. And when they first emerge, you're exclusively identified with them.

COHEN: Yes. At first you're exclusively identified with each level, and then as you evolve, your identification—as you would say, your “center of gravity”—moves to the next level and yet includes all the preceding levels.

WILBER: Exactly. You keep the basic energy, the basic competence, the basic structures—those remain in awareness and those remain functioning. But you lose, you die to, your attachment to those structures. So even a Buddha who is, let's say, in the seventh chakra, can still have sex, still has a second chakra, still has to eat, still breathes, etc. Do you see what I mean?

COHEN: Are you sure? (laughs) I know some Buddhists who might disagree with you!

WILBER: Well, it doesn't change in any way even if you have attained a rainbow body and can travel through space. The same principles will still apply. But we're talking about just standard normal development for most normal Buddhists, even enlightened Buddhists. I've yet to meet a Buddha who wasn't eating—and often—Big Macs when nobody was looking! (laughter) So what happens in development is that we have to negate and to preserve. What are preserved are the basic functions, the capacities, the energies, the competencies that each stage brings into being. And what is negated is your egoic attachment to them.

And so you want people to be stable at some of the higher stages. But at any stage of growth, you have to die to your attachment at the previous stage. All of the seven levels of growth are seven deaths. Each death has to be suffered consciously. And if you don't die to a stage, then you remain fixated to it and that's called pathology.