TRANSCEND & INCLUDE

How does significant change occur? Must the old and familiar be completely rejected for a new possibility to be born? In their seventh dialogue, Wilber and Cohen explore what it means to actualize our far-reaching human potential while embracing the multidimensional complexity of the evolutionary process itself.

ANDREW COHEN: I just got back from the Parliament of the World's Religions in Barcelona where I had a really wonderful experience. It was a transformative event for me personally. I met many spiritual teachers, religious leaders, social activists, and university professors—inspired, passionate, caring, open-hearted individuals—from just about every different background you could imagine. The feeling of goodwill was infectious and it created an atmosphere that was quite uplifting. At the airport in Boston, on our way there, I met a woman who described her experience at the previous Parliament in Cape Town six years ago as “my first experience of heaven.” While I wouldn't go quite that far, the fact that so many different people from so many different backgrounds, cultures, faiths, beliefs, and even, dare I say, levels of development could come together in such a spirit of sharing and inquiry is remarkable.

The most enlightening conversation I had there was with Dirk Ficca, the executive director of the Parliament. When we were speaking about the gathering there and what it was that he was trying to accomplish, he stated unequivocally that his principal interest in creating the Parliament was to influence “the mainstream.” He divided the spiritual/religious world into three categories: fundamentalists, mainstream, and progressives. He said that the fundamentalists, no matter what tradition they come from, are never going to be interested in either coming together with others or moving forward. Then he said that the progressives—people like us, who are in the minority—are already doing both those things but that we, relatively speaking, exist in our own bubble. He made clear that it is only in reaching the mainstream—those in the traditions who are neither fundamentalists nor progressives—that significant change in the world religious body could occur. That made a big impression on me because, as you know, in my own work, I have mainly been focused on pushing the very edge of our spiritual potential. I have always been convinced that pushing the edge will, in its own way, affect the whole in the long run. And while that may be true, the fact is, as Dirk made clear, that unless that middle group begins to move forward, no matter how much progress a few of us pushing into the frontiers may make, we are all going to go down with the ship!

KEN WILBER: Definitely. And you can look at it in a very straightforward way. That is, once you introduce a developmental context to our understanding, it's both very encouraging and very pessimistic at the same time. Because seventy percent of the world's population is at an ethnocentric level of development or lower. And that means what Spiral Dynamics would call the blue meme, or magic and mythic, or lower. And that's where the fundamentalists and the traditionalists basically are. So that's number one. What he means by “mainstream” tends to be very similar actually to the orange meme, or rational-scientific. Because what the mainstream often represents is an attempt to take the fundamentalist magic and mythic dogmas and modernize them—put them into a modern framework. And the modern mainstream churches tend to be an expression of that.

COHEN: And if we can get the mainstream moving, it doesn't matter how slowly, as long as they're moving forward, it means that as a whole we can move forward together in the most important way.

WILBER: And Dirk is quite right, I think, that the mainstream is an extremely pivotal factor and faction in getting that ethnocentric, preconventional, scary kind of fundamentalist religion to move into the modern and postmodern world. Now, the progressives are pluralistic or integral or higher, but that's less than two or three percent of the world population. But if we can't get to the mainstream in religion, then there's about seventy percent of the world that's going to continue to be a real problem. And I think that's why things like the Parliament of the World's Religions are very important. But at best, that is a pluralistic, postmodern, green-meme organization. So in terms of where the mainstream action is, I think he is pretty accurate. But it is not integral. I would say that it is mainstream indeed, but integral is the leading edge, that cutting two or three percent.

COHEN: Certainly. But you know, while I was there, in spite of how bad things so often seem these days, the sense of camaraderie and brotherhood fueled a kind of passionate excitement about what's possible—and that's mainly what my attention was drawn to. In any case, all we can do is everything that we honestly can do—and if we're doing the right thing, we'll experience the ecstatic glory underlying the entire process, no matter what happens in the end.

WILBER: Definitely!

COHEN: As I said before, most of my own attention has been devoted to pushing the edge of consciousness development, focused mainly on that two or three percent that you are referring to (which in my own work is probably a lot less than a half percent!). And I've not really been all that engaged with those dimensions that didn't directly relate to that edge. This is why going to the Parliament was such a transformative event for me. I rediscovered, in a deeper way, that we're all part of a vast developmental process that is inherently whole. And it's become obvious to me that any avoidance or denial of that wholeness inevitably and profoundly inhibits our ability to see clearly and therefore to respond in the most beneficial way possible.

In your own work as an integral philosopher, you've always emphasized that, as we evolve and develop from one level to another, it's necessary to transcend and also to include what has come before. And in my work as a spiritual teacher, I have very clearly made a distinction between your statement—“transcend and include”—and my own version, which is that, as we evolve and develop from one level to another, we must “transcend and exclude” what has come before so that we will be free to reconfigure ourselves at a higher level. I'm still convinced that's true, but as a result of my recent experience, I must admit that my view on this is changing and maturing. I realize that it's possible to embrace a wide variety of worldviews, opinions, and spiritual perspectives without compromising one's own evolving edge.

WILBER: Yes, they're really not mutually exclusive at all.

COHEN: Indeed, and the living significance of what “transcend and include” is all about became part of my ongoing experience at the Parliament. I met so many wonderful, big-hearted, compassionate people who care so deeply about the evolution and development of our world and of our consciousness. That awakened me to the fact that being focused only on the edge of human potential itself is an approach that is less than whole. I had never met so many different kinds of people who I felt I was able to relate to with the best part of my own humanity, at a real heart level and also at the level of mind. I think it was a maturing experience for me because, as I said, I realized I didn't in any way have to compromise my own position in the process of engaging with and learning from so many others who were also trying to uplift the consciousness of this same world.

WILBER: That's great. I think that's profound. It's a process of maturing. Richness always continues to unfold.

COHEN: And at the same time, as we aspire to evolve to higher and higher levels of development, we go through this continuous process of dissolution and reintegration. In this process of evolution and transcendence, we constantly need to be willing to let go of, or exclude, old ways of seeing and thinking: our fixed philosophical positions, worldviews, self-concepts, etc. And in my own work with people, it's one of the most challenging aspects of actual development because it's the ultimate threat to the ego. The only thing that actually enables real evolutionary, which means vertical, development is that courageous willingness to let go at the deepest level of our sense of who we are.

WILBER: It's always called a death. Every tradition calls it a death and it's not a metaphor.

COHEN: That's the absolutely terrifying, completely exhilarating truth of evolution at the level of consciousness in real time!

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.

TRANSCEND AND EXCLUDE

COHEN: Even though, as we agreed before, the complete picture of evolutionary development includes both transcending and including and transcending and excluding—including is going to have a slightly different emphasis than excluding. For example, when Jesus said, “Let the dead bury the dead,” that to me was a clear expression of “transcend and exclude” that was passionate, ferocious, uncompromising—an unrestrained expression of the evolutionary impulse that cares not for the past but is only interested in creating the unknown future right now and in every moment.

WILBER: Yes, to me it's like saying, let this old worldview die; let ethnocentric die. It's supposed to die. The exclusivity is supposed to die.

COHEN: And it's significant that for many of us twenty-first-century, postmodern, extreme narcissists, our ego—or our highly developed sensitive self-sense—is far more threatened by the notion of exclusion than it would be by the notion of inclusion.

WILBER: Yes, I agree.

COHEN: Because it implies that we have to be ready and willing to die now for the future to be born in all its glory.

WILBER: Indeed, and it also implies that there are things that in a strong sense are not to be included. And the things that are not to be included are those things that exclude in the bad sense of restricting and attaching. That's sort of the paradox. When you're exclusively identified with chakra one, then you're really at moral stage one, which is “what's right is what I feel, so f—- you.” That's supposed to die when you move to moral stage two. That's what's excluded. That's what's supposed to be negated and let that dead bury that dead. Because you can't get more inclusive structures without excluding less inclusive structures.

COHEN: Exactly.

WILBER: The postmodern sensitive self does have trouble with the fact that a lot of those things have to be let go of. And so egocentric and ethnocentric very much have to die.

COHEN: The big challenge is that the liberated passion behind the statement, “let the dead bury the dead,” is very—

WILBER:—ruthless.

COHEN: Yes, ruthless and uncompromising.

WILBER: Any of us who are growing are being ruthless with our lesser selves. And if we're not, then we're not really loving our higher self. They go together.

COHEN: Yes. And we have to be ruthless with ourselves so we can reconfigure all of our old and familiar ways of relating to the lower chakras and everything that they represent. It's recontextualizing how we relate to everything that's come before in order to become a living manifestation of a really new stage of development. It's a Herculean task.

WILBER: It is Herculean. And given where the mass of human consciousness is today, it's really staggering we've come this far. But there's obviously still quite a ways to go.

COHEN: I always feel like we're just getting started.

WILBER: I know! You know that politically incorrect joke that I use, which is, “The pioneer is the guy with all the arrows in his back.”

COHEN: That phrase is more than familiar to me! (laughter)

WILBER: It's true for all of us though. It's true for human beings for the last fifty thousand years. We all have arrows in our back if we're pushing at all against the envelope.

COHEN: That's right.

WILBER: And we counterbalance that with the Great Perfection, as you well know. Everything is radically perfect in its own condition as it's arising moment to moment—but that's on the nirvana side. On the samsara side, it's a f—-ing mess. So I'm sometimes amazed that we're moving as far as we are.

COHEN: But as we've agreed in the past, we want to balance the nirvana side with the evolutionary impulse that is always striving to manifest that Great Perfection in the manifest realm . . . at higher and higher levels of development.

WILBER: Exactly. And the great Plotinus was very much aware of the two different types of development we've been speaking about—the include and exclude, or the preserve and the negate. So therefore when I'm fully awakened, my first chakra is functioning in the material world but is not egocentrically contracted; my emotional, sexual energies are functioning but they're not egocentrically contracted; my intentionality and my heart and my throat and my brain are all functioning, still present, but they're not egocentrically contracted and they're not a vehicle for my egoic aggrandizement.

COHEN: That's the ultimate challenge.

WILBER: The ultimate challenge. And so what we're trying to do is to remain functional at all of our levels, with all those basic capacities, but not egoically contracted. And that's where ruthless tough love has to come in because we have to die to those attachments.

TOUGH LOVE

WILBER: Another way of understanding tough love is to negate and to preserve: to negate means to get tough; to preserve means to still love. In other words, as we've been saying, it's a ruthless kind of love that holds on to the crucial components of consciousness—all the seven chakras are included. But the self that's identified exclusively with them is ruthlessly killed. It's slain. That's the job of the teacher or the higher self in yourself. It's the ultimate ruthless love.

COHEN: Yes, that higher self is what I call the authentic self. The authentic self is the awakened evolutionary impulse, and it cares only for the evolution of consciousness itself—it literally does not recognize the fears and desires of the ego. It's the heart of the guru, the awakened mind of the true teacher, and the fearless passion of our own already liberated Self. And as we identify less and less with the ego, we are able to experience the living glory of it, the liberated passion of the authentic self coursing through our very own veins. And its nature is always too much—as you said, ruthless.

WILBER: Sometimes people can really misunderstand the ruthless part of the tough love.

COHEN: Right, and they often do.

WILBER: But it's a pure expression of a love that has to negate the lesser in order for the greater to shine. And I think that that sort of tough love can be misunderstood.

COHEN: And often is.

WILBER: And even though none of us is perfect, I think at good moments in your teaching, at good moments in my own writing, at good moments in Mike Murphy's work, and that of any of the integral people, there's a kind of ruthlessness that, when it's done well, is really a sort of lovingkindness.

COHEN: When it's authentic, it's speaking directly from a revelation or a clear seeing of a higher level and it's imploring . . . it's imploring everybody to come.

WILBER: That's a good way to put it. It is imploring.

COHEN: Yes, literally.

WILBER: There's always a very strong footnote that says, “Check it out yourself and see.” We're not trying to impose this on anybody. But there is a bigger space. And it's calling us to have a look from this bigger space because there's so much more room—

COHEN: Oh, yes. And that's where the glorious future lies.