ANDREW COHEN: When speaking about enlightenment, or the highest stages of human development, which you would call third tier, it's become absolutely clear to me that until one becomes firmly established at those higher levels oneself, access to them seems to be almost always dependent upon the experience of higher states of consciousness. What's often frustrating for me as a teacher is that it seems to be very difficult for most people to sustain the perspective that reveals itself during the experience of those higher states. We've spoken about this together many times, and it continues to be a ceaseless inquiry for me: What is the relationship between temporary states of consciousness and permanent stages of development, and what are the most effective ways to work with individuals to help them actually evolve?

For example, I often find that when I lead retreats, something miraculous occurs that has nothing to do with anyone making any effort. Suddenly we find ourselves swimming in a powerful fourth-dimension state that envelops us all simply because we showed up for this event. What happens in that supercharged atmosphere of awakened consciousness is that instantaneously, many individuals take quite a leap. They have a sustained experience of being awake to what you would call a causal level of depth, in an open-eyed nondual context, for many days at a time. Without making any effort, they get a taste of heaven. But I always insist that heaven is not enough. So once I get them there, I ask them to begin to think about their own humanity and the meaning of life in the context of the living depth that they have discovered. I have found that this kind of inquiry reveals a potential for conscious evolution like nothing else. Indeed, looking into the reality of the human experience from a higher state of consciousness dramatically deepens one's conviction in the possibility of a truly radical transformation. Of course, what the individual needs to do then is to use an important event like that as a source of inspiration. They need to begin to make the noble effort to see directly how conditioned and unconscious they usually are. Under their own steam, they need to face how profound is their own lack of freedom.

KEN WILBER: As always! And as they do that work, all their junk and all the shadow stuff comes up. But you know, the radiant graceful immersion in that causal, or nondual, dimension is something you can't get for effort or money. It's something that happens only in very rare circumstances; in this particular instance, it is a gift of satsang [audience with a guru]. The way it works is that there are these ever-present states, or dimensions, that we're just not plugged in to most of the time. We can plug in to them sometimes by grace, sometimes by skillful means, sometimes by sadhana [spiritual practice] and sometimes by satsang—whichever way we do it, these dimensions are right there, and when we relax into them or open to them or when they're energized in some sense, they just come pouring through in a certain radiant stillness. And of course, our development through stages tends to get accelerated in that atmosphere. But then we've still got to go back and do the goddamn work. And that's where you lose people, isn't it?

COHEN: Exactly. Because when it comes down to it, who really wants to change that much? That's precisely why, more and more, when I'm teaching, I bend over backwards to empower people with a perspective that ideally will enable them to sustain transformation beyond the experience of higher states. What that means, specifically, is that I strive to help people to gain a very clear understanding of the different dimensions of their own self in the context of an enlightened top-down, or third-tier, perspective. I want people, first of all, to have their own experiential recognition of the primordial emptiness that is the Ground of Being, the Self Absolute beyond time. Then secondly, I want them to experience what I call the authentic self, which is the evolutionary impulse, the creative spark behind the cosmos, becoming conscious of itself in the awakening human. Thirdly, and maybe most important of all, I want them to have the rare experience of being able to see the ego, or separate self-sense, from a truly objective vantage point. So my retreats are basically designed to expose people to these different dimensions of their own selves and to constantly bring them back to seeing the distinctions between them while they're in an expanded state of consciousness.

It's very powerful to see people who are completely new to the territory suddenly begin to speak with authority and conviction about these quite profound distinctions, based on their very own experience. Of course, they usually can't hold it on their own, but my job is to give them the direct experience of the territory and the perspective to understand what it means, so that they can begin to see for themselves what the Path is.

The X-Factor

WILBER: It's just so fascinating. The ground of all being, the ground of experience, isn't itself an experience—you just sort of get plunged into a recognition of its already-full nature. But I'm constantly struck by what happens when people come out of that state and lose it. As I've said before, what I want to do at some point is some really good psychometric research—set up a whole battery of tests before, during, and after a retreat and see who holds it and who doesn't. The scientist in me is just curious as hell to do that.

COHEN: The thing is, what you're talking about is what I would call the mysterious x-factor in human transformation. There's a part of this process that is always completely unpredictable—perhaps it has to do with karmic tendencies and other strange variables that are impossible to understand, things we just can't explain based on what we can see occurring in a single lifetime.

WILBER: Some people say that the universe contains “dark matter,” and who the heck knows what is going on down there . . . Maybe that's what you're working against!

COHEN: Sometimes it sure feels that way! Believe me, if I could only identify this x-factor, I would give everything that I own . . .

WILBER: I'm with you. I mean, this is the only thing that we have been talking about—in a sense we've been having this conversation for almost ten years now. Our dialogues are just variations on a theme, a single question: “If there is only God, how come people don't get it?” However you want to phrase it, that's the one discussion we've been having—variations on this same mono-theme of all mono-themes.

COHEN: With my own students, the real sticking point is that I want them to take responsibility, for the highest reasons, for that which they have already experienced. That's where all the reticence and ambivalence and the profound and intense resistance usually comes to the surface. A lot of people want to have higher-state experiences—they want to taste the ecstasy of eternity and the promise of the future in their own being. But I always say, “Now you have to own the implications of what it means to taste eternity, and you have to own the implications of what it means to become the evolutionary impulse as yourself, beyond ego.” And that's when a lot of people start to backpedal—suddenly they seem to lose their memories; they start stuttering; they forget how they ended up in such a predicament.

WILBER: (Laughs) Indeed!

COHEN: The ego is always profoundly ambivalent about truly evolving—unless it thinks it can be king or queen of the universe!

WILBER: Oh man, God bless the ego. We'd both be out of a job without it!

COHEN: (Laughs) It can be the toughest job in the world, though. There are individual and collective dimensions of ego, and in the work I'm doing, I'm digging into these structures in a way that includes but always transcends the individual. And that definitely makes it a lot more challenging for the individuals involved—including myself.

WILBER: But what an extraordinary adventure to be on, sort of riding right at the edge of this process, and watching it all unfold. It's a fascinating view, to put it mildly.

WILBER: I'm constantly reminded again and again of something you said in one of our recent dialogues, and I quote you on this all the time: that the interpretation of the spiritual experience is more important than the experience itself.

COHEN: Absolutely.

WILBER: It's how you hold it, how you own it. Getting dunked in it is easy, but now let me see you carry it, and let me see you carry it for the right reasons.

COHEN: That's why these days, I give far more importance to the clear and conscious cultivation of the vast perspective of the enlightened mind. And while, as I said before, the experience of higher states can reveal that perspective, I have also found it works the other way around. Interestingly enough, grasping the big picture can actually be a catalyst for the experience of higher states. In this way, the perspective itself becomes the vehicle that helps people's minds expand and hearts open rather than any particular experience.

WILBER: I don't want to draw too many parallels to the traditions, because Spirit moves on, but even in Dzogchen there's the ”View” or “Right View,” and they tell us that when you get Right View, it helps you get emptiness—ever-present, nondual, unborn, radical emptiness. And the View is just as important as that experience.

COHEN: Indeed—the grasping of new perspectives can generate a real and thrilling experience of freedom. This is something I've often found reading your work. Sometimes, when you refer to the Four Quadrants [see diagram], for example, you say they're “just a map,” but for this reason I feel they're much more than that.

WILBER: I don't mean it that way, but please go ahead—I want to hear.

COHEN: Well, for example, I've had several powerful insights just recognizing how deeply embedded I and most of us are in a materialistic, dualistic, Cartesian worldview, without even being aware of it. When one gets glimpses of the multidimensional or, in your words, tetra-integrated cosmos—that everything, as one, is emerging simultaneously in all four quadrants, it's nothing less than enlightening, which means that it can truly shatter a dualistic worldview.

WILBER: Yes, I agree. It deepens spiritual realization. And thank you for saying that, because I really do think that that framework does reach right up into the unmanifest. And when you come out of the unmanifest, having an integral framework deepens your spiritual realization. It doesn't matter who we are, we are brought up in a world where we are deeply conditioned from day one in what you call a Cartesian worldview, the whole subject-object mess, and people get one quadrant and not the others. So the fact of the matter is that there are these four dimensions—and I always say at least four, because there could be multiple dimensions . . . but there are at least these four fundamental ones. And what happens is that even as you mentally walk through them, like you say, it digs into dualistic ruts that you didn't know were there.

COHEN: Oh, absolutely.

WILBER: And it liberates, it causes satori, it causes spiritual realization.

COHEN: Without a doubt, because the way we think about our experience, consciously and unconsciously, determines everything. And it's interesting how this understanding and emphasis has naturally emerged as part of my own evolution.

WILBER: I agree—and frankly, it's been part of my own evolution too. I've tended to underplay both the role of an interpretative framework and the role of View. People tend to assume that I came at it the other way; that because I had written so much on this framework, I thought the framework was superimportant to realization. But I didn't. I'm basically an old Zen person, and I was taught to sit manifesting Buddha mind as shikantaza [a form of meditation meaning “just sitting”], and anything resembling concepts was just bad, bad, bad, and simply not the way it's done. So I came to this understanding myself quite late, in terms of even theoretically agreeing with it, let alone in my own particular spiritual practice. I earned this the hard way, in both the mental and supramental dimensions of my own realization, even in my own writing. I think that as you grow as a teacher, whether it's a guru teacher or a pandit teacher, it really is a matter of deepening the understanding of the central importance of View.

COHEN: Absolutely. With my own students, I feel this is the crux of the matter, because when people hold the View, they are going to be my partners, not my followers.

Partnership Beyond Ego

COHEN: You know, despite the postmodern self's passionate identification with being an autonomous individual, most people don't want to be truly autonomous and independent—especially in a supercharged context like the one that I create, where I really do want, in my own crazy way, to actually catalyze a new level of development.

WILBER: And they don't want to hold partnership with you in that?

COHEN: Well, of course, they want to, otherwise they wouldn't be here, but the question is, to what degree?

WILBER: What strikes me as interesting is what you said about partnership—partnership in the true View, on the other side of ego. In order to go into this, I want to speak more about what I really mean by the four quadrants, because you're right, they are not just some objective map that you look at. The system I've developed, which I call “integral post-metaphysics,” is based on the understanding that every occasion is without dimensions; it simply arises moment to moment, and yet it manifests itself. And when it does so, it simultaneously possesses an inside and an outside as well as an individual and a collective dimension. Taken together, this gives us the inside and the outside of the individual and the collective. You have to draw a boundary someplace, and then you've got an inside and an outside, and as soon as you have that, you have a singular and a plural, an I and a we. That's the four quadrants, and each moment unfolds in those dimensions. Does that make sense?

COHEN: Absolutely.

WILBER: And that's the beautiful part, that all these dimensions are the manifestation of the ever-present is-ness, and what the quadrants are is just a reminder that in the manifest world, we must always take those dimensions into account because they are there. But the paper on which the quadrants are written is the unconditional, the unborn. What it really means in very experiential terms is that moment to moment there is this ever-present is-ness, and yet as soon as you feel it, as soon as you locate yourself in it, there's an I.

COHEN: Yes. The minute you locate yourself, the whole world appears.

WILBER: Exactly. As soon as there is an I, there is an it or an object, and then there's a we; there is some resonance with some other subjectivity someplace. For example, you and I are resonating right now; we are each an I and we are forming a we, because we have some mutual understanding, and the telephone is an it. So there's an I, a we, and an it. Now what happens when you're working with evolutionary enlightenment—or probably with any spiritual practice, but certainly when you are on the leading edge like you are—is that when you are plunging people into a causal, or nondual, open-eyes, ever-present, non-effort state, then, as you were saying, their authentic self speaks. In other words, an I arises that is an authentic self. And it should arise in a community of other authentic selves. As soon as you emerge from that nondual state and locate yourself as a separate entity, you should be resonating with other selves that are at that same level. If not, you basically end up having to pull people up. That is what the guru does. The guru manifests as an I that is going to form a we with students and help pull their I up to that same level. That's the struggle that you're engaged in all the time. It's an uphill pull, so that when you resonate as an I, you can have a partnership, a we, that is more or less at the same level.

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.

COHEN: But what's so extraordinary about the authentic self in relationship to evolution and enlightenment is that the authentic self is egoless, and its relationship to life is always an unconditional, absolute, passionate positivity.

WILBER: I think that's in the self line. In other words, there are many lines of development, and the center of gravity, of course, is the self line. And so in what you're describing, the authentic self would not be in the cognitive line or the musical line but in the self line—if it really happens. And frankly, you know how rare it is.

COHEN: Yes, I certainly do.

WILBER: It's so hard for it to stick, for just the reasons we've been discussing. There are x-factors that I don't understand and you don't understand, and that perhaps nobody's ever going to understand, but the fact of the matter is, whatever those x-factors are, they're winning. But we're also making headway.

The self line is the actual source of I, the proximate I, the sense of I-ness, and at the very peak of that is I-I, the self beyond the self, the selfless ground. And that's available as a state of turiya [pure consciousness], but also as this stage that's somewhere in indigo or violet or someplace way up the scale like that. And what happens with a person who has it in the cognitive line or the kinesthetic line—like when Tiger Woods is really connecting with the golf swing and he knows it—he'll tell you that's where his authentic self is, and it is, temporarily. But that doesn't mean his center of gravity resides there.

COHEN: I agree with you. When I explain this to people, I always say that the creative impulse, no matter how it expresses itself, is the authentic self, but the highest level of its expression is the evolutionary impulse at the level of consciousness, the spiritual impulse, the urge that comes from consciousness itself to evolve or transcend itself.

WILBER: Yes.

COHEN: But in your model, you don't have what we're calling the authentic self—or at least not that I've seen.

WILBER: No. But what I've said, though, is that in the way you're describing it, it's a state and a stage, but it's a stage in the self line, in other words it's the indigo stage, the leading-edge stage, in the self line. It's a state experience because you can experience it at several different stages, so as you say, you can have people at amber or orange or green or teal or turquoise start speaking from the authentic self.

COHEN: Absolutely.

WILBER: But for the people who really click, their center of gravity is not orange, it's not green, it's not teal, it's not turquoise; it's someplace in that turquoise to indigo to violet zone—in other words, their self sense is actually at that level, and that's where the authentic self can stick.

COHEN: It makes a lot of sense.

WILBER: It does, doesn't it? When someone at that level has a state experience, it will stick longer and longer and longer. Whereas if they're at orange, for example, they'll have a state experience of the authentic self and they'll walk out a couple of weeks or months later, and they'll remember it. Something will have changed because it will help nudge them up toward green, but they won't be at indigo. Does that make sense?

COHEN: Very much. This is what I'm desperately working on. Because I'm convinced that when I get a stable minority of people who can hold the authentic self as a stage through all changing states and through the challenges of life, then something is going to happen that's going to make it much easier for other people to take that same leap.

WILBER: Well, yes—it's got to happen in all four quadrants, that means you have to have a we, you have to have a fellowship of the ring, a partnership of intersubjectivity at indigo. If you don't have that, it's just not going to stick.

You know, we're all still just infants in figuring this out, and my job as a pandit is to try to bring clarity to this in theoretical terms. And I think if you can see the authentic self as an indigo stage in that self line, but also a state, it can help you explain why “Goddamn it, I worked my ass off for that orange person and nothing really changed . . .”

COHEN: That's right.

WILBER: It gives a clarity, and it helps to see what is going on.

COHEN: Yes. In my work, when I'm challenged most by life and by the difficulties of what I'm trying to do, it often helps enormously to be able to see how certain things happen and understand what the causes are. It helps with the emotional challenge. The truth really does set you free.

WILBER: I think so, and I think it's part of a larger aspect of View. There's a whole series of frameworks and views, right up to View with a capital V, in the absolute sense you've been talking about. And all of those frameworks are really about getting straight, in a very positive sense, being able to hold this and manifest it while we really are still pioneers and always will be—half blind, just stumbling along, and God knows what is really going on out
there . . .

COHEN: That's exactly how I feel most of the time. If I'm in a teaching position, suddenly I seem to know everything, but actually my everyday experience is that I have no idea what is going on.

WILBER: That's why I think even that discussion on the authentic self is very helpful. And also because I know it's something that in your own particular practice you strive to embody. I mean, you talk about it with such passion, and it's obviously, like you said, your central teaching in many ways.

COHEN: Absolutely. The authentic self is our stepping stone to the future.

WILBER: And I think that seeing it in that sense really clarifies the message of the evolutionary impulse today, which is “Get indigo, people!” You know what I mean?