COHEN: Right.

WILBER: You've always been working on the intersubjective plane; you're trying to pull intersubjectivity up. We've talked about that so much—you have an authentic self, an I, and you have this intersubjective dialogue that you're doing in which you're pulling on that intersubjective plane. I am always sensitive to listening to you talk about that because I think it is an important part of what you do.

COHEN: Yes. And the reason it's so important is because I'm thinking about the future in terms of our evolution as a species. Our current highly developed level of individuation and our capacity to experience higher states are obviously not enough. As we go to higher levels, there's going to be a need for the emergence of a self that transcends and includes individuality. That's when the I and the we become one, not just as an intersubjective state experience but as an individual and collective stage of development, which would literally be a new world.

WILBER: Yes. Intersubjectivity is not just a state; in other words, the four quadrants arise all the way up and all the way down. As soon as you step out of the unborn, you have four quadrants, and then the question is: How high or how close to the unborn do you want yourself to be? As soon as you step out of the unborn onto the leading edge, if you are really in touch with that ever-present dimension, then you have an authentic self, which is beyond ego and in a sense is beyond individuality. It's right on the edge of the unborn, just to use a clumsy geographical metaphor. So, because there are always four quadrants, what should arise right on the edge of the unborn is the authentic self in relation with other authentic selves. It's always intersubjective. There's never a self without an intersubjective dimension.

COHEN: Exactly.

WILBER: But at lower levels, at an egoic stage, you have egos locked in intersubjectivity with other egos.

COHEN: That's called hell. (Laughs)

WILBER: (Laughs) Well, yes, but you know, fifty thousand years ago it was heaven; it was a big advance.

COHEN: It was a new emerging self sense.

WILBER: Yes, exactly. Today's heaven is tomorrow's hell—that's evolution. So the way I see what you're talking about, again just in theoretical terms, is that there is the stage of evolution that we could call the mental egoic self, which for a while was the leading edge. Now it's really yesterday's news, but people can't get to the next leading-edge stage—which would be an authentic self that goes beyond ego and beyond individuality—without actually transcending it. But maybe a billion years from now, the authentic self will be the thing that the evolutionary pioneers are trying to overcome.

COHEN: Right.

WILBER: But today it is the leading edge. So as I would conceptualize it, what you're doing as a guru is acting as an authentic self trying to get partnership in intersubjectivity with a we that is also authentic selves. And I think that's why you have to push against not just an ego but an intersubjective world of egos. That's where the carpet burn comes from.

COHEN: Exactly. That's what I meant in terms of dealing with ego at a deeper level. When you are working with an individual, you just have to deal with the individual resistance, but when you're working at a more impersonal or collective level, you're dealing with a much deeper resistance that transcends even the individual. You see, what changes at that level is that the point is not the individual's development; it's a much larger context that needs them. It's not about their personal process anymore; it's about a vast emergent potential that is utterly dependent upon them.

WILBER: I hear you. And let me toss one other thing out that I wanted you to think about a little bit. If you just sort of play with this it might be helpful; I think you'll start to see examples of it as you work as a teacher. There are two things that somebody who is working with evolution, in other words, higher growth, is confronted with. Let's take, for example, an individual transitioning between two stages of development. Just for the sake of argument, I'll use teal and turquoise in my system, which could be level five and level six in any eight-level scheme. And let's say that turquoise is kind of the leading edge. So what somebody at teal is going to be faced with are two similar but different types of tasks. One is, they can be immersed in higher states—states that are higher than their present stage can adapt to. It's part of real practice to somehow find access to those states, because they push against your ego and accelerate growth. The best way has always been in the good company of a guru, satsang in the real sense. Failing that, meditation, or Self-power, takes a tad longer but can nonetheless plunge you into those beyond-yourself states. But when you come out, you're going to come out to your own stage, and you're going to have to start working on it. There is a second thing, though, another kind of growth, or pushing against you, that occurs. The next higher stage is going to start to push against you—for example, turquoise is going to push against your teal. These are two similar but different kinds of growth. And I think what is going to be very interesting is to watch how stages and states occur and how they push against the ego. I think they might be kind of different tasks that individuals have to undertake, and I think embracing “Right View” is part of the second task, related to the next stage, and satsang is part of the first, related to higher states. Does that make sense?

COHEN: Yes. You know, one of the problems with the experience of higher states is that the postmodern “sensitive self” just gets drunk on the ecstasy of them and concludes, “Oh, aren't I wonderful!” That's one of the big problems—if one isn't careful, they can actually strengthen the ego instead of pushing against it. That's why when people experience those states in my company and proclaim how clearly they are suddenly seeing everything, I always say, “So does that mean you're going to change now?”

At the Growing Tip

COHEN: Another thing I had wanted to discuss with you was in relationship to what we've been calling the authentic self, which is the evolutionary impulse becoming aware of itself at the level of consciousness. This is really the focus of my teaching these days. What I tell people, based on my own experience and understanding of it, is that the authentic self is a function of consciousness that acts in the world but exists in another dimension beyond the world simultaneously. And the question I've been thinking about has to do with the fact that the authentic self seems to be both a state and a stage at the same time.

WILBER: Well, I think I have an answer to that question. My opinion is that yes—what you're calling the authentic self, just in generalized terms, is both a state and a stage. In other words, when you're at the leading edge of evolution, the authentic self is the leading stage, but you can also plunge people into it as a state, because you can have a type of authentic-self experience at several stages and get a taste of it. In terms of my developmental system, just for the sake of argument, the authentic self is the self at the indigo stage and it's also the state self that's causal, if you know what I mean. So it is a state that can be experienced at different stages, but it's also the actual laying down, or sedimentation, of the leading edge as a stage. Does that make sense?

COHEN: Yes—so it is both. That's what it feels like.

WILBER: That's what happens, but it happens only at the growing tip. It doesn't happen anyplace else.

COHEN: Awakening to the authentic self feels like being on a highway that is vibrating, constantly moving forward, that keeps calling us to itself: “You have to get on this, get with this, get into this, this is it . . .”

WILBER: I use a similar metaphor: that you're riding a locomotive and laying down railroad tracks at the same time.

COHEN: Yes, exactly! That's terrific.

WILBER: The authentic self railroad! And let me just say one more thing—in ways that we don't quite understand, I think the leading edge that's both a state and a stage probably happens in about a dozen different developmental lines. In other words, if you take an athlete like Tiger Woods, for example, he's pushing the kinesthetic line right into indigo, so he is like an authentic self in this line. And I think that he would tell you he knows when he's in his authentic self. The same thing can happen in the musical line with great musicians, or in the cognitive line. For example, take Kurt Gödel who at twenty-three years old came up with the Incompleteness Theorem in mathematics. He was right at indigo in the cognitive line, and I think he would tell you he knows when he's in his authentic self. But of course, people like this can come out and be absolute assholes in other areas, because this is just how evolution is. We're an incomplete project in so many ways.