A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION

COHEN: Yes. And yet I think that even today, when people have nondual or enlightenment experiences, how those experiences are interpreted is going to depend on how free or informed one is, cognitively or intellectually. Even in our postmodern culture, enlightenment experiences are still often interpreted in a way that tends to overemphasize transcendence, which reflects a premodern worldview. And more often than not, the result is that this inadvertently opposes the evolutionary perspective.

WILBER: And as you yourself have said, and I completely agree, the interpretation is as important as, or more important than, the experience. So what we're saying is that it's at least necessary that you do have the sahaj or nondual realization. In other words, this is not a realization that is going to be available to you if you're merely doing nirvikalpa or unconditional emptiness. You're not going to get into evolutionary spirituality if you're doing that. And if you're doing merely samsaric immersion and paganism, you're not going to get into it either because you're not going to have an understanding of the ground of being. A nondual realization of the union of emptiness and form is necessary, but not sufficient, to understand evolutionary spirituality. Two other things have to come into play. One is the actual stage that you are at—and we can look at that using Spiral Dynamics or any of the stage conceptions we've talked about before. You can have these state experiences at any stage—

COHEN:—and you will interpret them according to that stage of development.

WILBER: That's right. So in order to get to an evolutionary spirituality, you have to have a stage that's at least integral or higher. In Spiral Dynamics, that means the yellow or turquoise meme; in Robert Kegan's system, that means the fifth order of consciousness.

COHEN: And it obviously gets even more complex than that.

WILBER: Right—there's another thing. And that is that once you're at that stage, the second prerequisite is you have to have a framework that's integral or adequate to all the facts known at that time. And that will include an understanding of levels and lines, evolutionary unfolding, and so on. If you have all that in your mental repertoire, then those three things together will tend to give you an experience of this evolutionary panentheism.*

COHEN: Right, but that recognition can also occur intuitively even if you don't necessarily have that kind of mental model. I sure didn't.

WILBER: That's right. But as you said, the evolutionary model helps you flesh it out.

COHEN: Absolutely. Dramatically.

WILBER: Yes, and it actually gives resonance to the awakening experience. Your interpretive framework is like that box on the back of a guitar. The actual strings are causing the sounds of the music, but the bigger that resonance box, the nicer the sound that comes out of it. And enlightenment still comes from the spiritual strings, but the interpretation is the box behind it, and the bigger that is, the more resonant and full the sound is.

COHEN: And the more one actually recognizes and appreciates how true that is, the more dramatic, or literally mind-blowing are the implications. Because again, even those who are highly developed at a cognitive level often have a lot of trouble appreciating how much our interpretive framework influences the way we perceive reality.

NO ONE UP THERE

COHEN: For example, I was recently giving a series of talks in Europe, and I found myself reminding everybody, “There's no one up there!” And even though most of the people I was speaking to were quite sophisticated, a palpable wave of fear went through the audience. It's amazing how many of us postmodern highly educated individuals still, in our heart of hearts, cling to premodern superstitious notions of a mythical God in the sky. When it comes to those spiritual concepts that we have embraced to help us interpret our life experience, how many of us are holding onto outdated ideas that no longer make any sense? It's fascinating to see how frightened even very sophisticated people are of letting go of premodern notions of a mythical God.

Finally, I made the obvious point that whoever HE, SHE, or IT is, that is ultimately who WE are. And of course, that recognition is entirely dependent upon us letting go of a God in the sky. Two thousand years ago, Jesus said, “I and the Father are one.” Apparently, we still haven't gotten the message.

WILBER: (Laughs) Well, it's really true that people have this strange relationship in terms of how they interpret reality. And the fact is that in many cases, the interpretation we have creates our reality. In any event, that's sort of the message of the postmodernist. But people, I think, are sometimes a little suspicious when they hear this. They'll tell you, “Wait a minute. That's more of that head-tripping cognitive stuff.” And they'll explain that if you could just feel, if you could just have a direct experience, you'd realize it doesn't have anything to do with all that conceptual stuff. But then you ask them, “Let's say you have an interior luminosity, a light brighter than a thousand suns, and you're drenched in love and being and consciousness and bliss and so on. Is that Jesus or is that Buddha? Is that an angel? What are you experiencing?” And they'll stop. And you can say, “You see, you have ideas about this. Now let's really talk about what it is. I'm not gainsaying the experience. That's fantastic. But was that light there all the time? Did you just notice it? Did it come into being? Is it brighter or less bright—or is it the way you interpret it? Did it have a thousand arms because Avalokiteshvara does? I'm just curious . . . ”

And so it becomes clear that at least half of what we call a spiritual experience is all the ways we interpret it. And there are better and worse ways to do that. There are fuller and more cramped ways to do it. There are integral and less integral ways. And what you find is that the more integral the interpretations, the fuller the experience actually becomes.