The Conveyor Belt

Cohen: One of the many things that deeply struck me about the book was the whole notion of what you call the “conveyor belt.”

Wilber: Let me briefly explain what I mean by the conveyor belt. I’ll start with a couple of statistics, using the general stages of consciousness we’ve talked about. And I’ll use the terms egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric, and Kosmocentric, which are general names for some of these developmental stages in a broad sweep.

If we look worldwide, about seventy percent of the world’s population is at an ethnocentric level of development or lower. That is to say, seventy percent of the world’s population is Nazis! And I say that with slight facetiousness but with all due seriousness. So if you ask, who owns the ideas of those ethnocentric beliefs? It’s the world’s religions. Ethnocentric corresponds to mythic in Jean Gebser’s terms. And the world’s great religions, because they began about two or three thousand years ago, are still the repositories of the magic and mythic elements of humanity. So that means they believe that Moses really did part the Red Sea, Lao Tsu really was nine hundred years old when he was born, and Jesus really was born of a biological virgin. These are all mythic elements, and religion is the only discipline that actually has grown men and women embracing magic and mythic elements.

Now that’s fine, but the problem is that in mythic/ethnocentric/blue meme/amber altitude religion, you also believe that your savior or your God is the only possible God. “There is one God; his name is Allah,” and so on. And if someone doesn’t believe in that God or his representative, then they’re basically cannon fodder. They’re an infidel, and you can kill an infidel. Not only is it not a sin—

Cohen: No, you go to heaven.

Wilber: It’s a career promotion! That’s the problem, whether it’s Allah or Buddha or anyone else. I mean, Aum Shinrikyo, the Buddhist terrorist group, put sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system. So this tendency hits any religious believer at the mythic stage of development.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that while the mythic or amber altitude parts of the world are owned by the world’s religions, as soon as you get to rational or orange altitude, science owns that part of the world. And there’s this huge gaping conflict between amber and orange, between mythic and rational, which creates
what I call a pressure cooker lid around the world. It’s a staggering problem. If you look at terrorism, for example, every one of the major religiously inspired terrorist acts of the last thirty or forty years, virtually without exception, came from mythic/ethnocentric/blue meme/amber altitude beliefs. And they all basically say the same thing: “The rational/modern/orange altitude world won’t make room for my religion.” And so they try to blow it up.

Now, not all forms of religion are mythic or ethnocentric. There are rational forms of religion and there are pluralistic forms of religion and so on. For example, there are rational or worldcentric forms of Christianity that were begun by Vatican II, which said “Not only Christianity has the way to salvation. Other religions might allow salvation.” That’s the movement from ethnocentric Christianity to worldcentric Christianity. You can still believe in Christ as a personal savior, as somebody who had a deep realization and whose consciousness you want to emulate, somebody you want to have as a living part of your life. That’s absolutely legitimate and fine.

And if the religious leaders were there to explain this, to say to the believers, “Look, it’s fine that you have this fervent belief in Jesus, or Jehovah, or Allah, or the Goddess, or Mary, or whoever you think is the only savior, but the Holy Ghost speaks in many different ways and sometimes appears in different forms to other people and they can find salvation too,”—even saying something like that, from an orange or worldcentric level, is going to defuse the hatred that the true believer has for every other human being on the face of the planet. And it’s up to religion and the leaders in religion to make that understood.

So the single greatest problem in the world today is that seventy percent of the population is trapped at ethnocentric or lower by the conflict between religion and modernity. Science and modernity sit on top of these large portions of the world’s traditional religions. And there’s this huge conflict that prevents people from taking their faith from amber into orange, or from mythic into rational, or from ethnocentric into worldcentric. So the religious leaders need to start to understand that religion can act as a conveyor belt—because it actually picks people up at archaic, magic, and mythic, it can help move them into rational, pluralistic, integral, and higher. Remember, everybody is still born at square one and has to develop through these great levels or waves of consciousness. There will always be people who believe in magic and mythic, and that’s okay. But religion can help act as a conveyor belt, moving them into the higher structures, and only religion can do that. So the conveyor belt is an idea for religion and its role in the modern and postmodern world that religion has not yet thought of, but I think it would be radical and revolutionary if it would get with the picture.

Cohen: Well, for that to happen though, the religious leaders themselves would have to evolve to at least rational and pluralistic levels, if not integral. They would have to have at least a worldcentric perspective in order to appreciate how radically and completely necessary this step was—so that this lid could be taken off seventy percent of the world’s population and they could move into the modern and postmodern world. Then we could really start to become one world instead of the old world versus the new world, the premodern world fighting the modern and postmodern world.

Wilber: That’s correct. They would have to reach at least the orange altitude—

Cohen: —to begin to appreciate why these higher interpretations of their own traditions would be essential, not only for world peace but for the very survival of our species.

Wilber: I don’t see any other way. What has to happen, in a sense, is a “Vatican II” move for all the world’s religions, an attempt to get up to that orange altitude. And of course, they can do it within their traditions. There are abundant kosher reasons in every major religion to move to at least a worldcentric understanding. But until that happens, you’re right. It’s “Nazis rule.” And good luck . . . So the conveyor belt really has to work around the world, to move masses of people from amber to orange, from mythic to rational. And in our circles, of course, the task is to move people from green into teal and turquoise, from pluralistic into integral.

Cohen: So the task at hand in our circles is to take this highly evolved, individuated self-sense that we have, with its extraordinary capacity for objectivity and self-reflexivity, and somehow free it from its own narcissistic self-adoration so that it can embrace a larger hierarchical or, as you would say, holarchical framework in an evolutionary and developmental context.

When I was visiting Israel a few months ago, I was thinking deeply about all this. It occurred to me that as we move up through the stages of development—as we go from amber Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, et cetera, to orange and green and up into second tier and beyond—the evolving self’s locus of identification, as it moves from worldcentric to Kosmocentric, would naturally begin to let go of any identity that was less than universal. It seems that one’s identity would move more and more toward a truly universal human self-sense and simultaneously move away from any notion of self that was less than that, including being a member of any historical tradition, whether it be Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, or anything else.

Wilber: Yes. Because then all that’s left to transcend is what the Buddhists call “lineage mind.” It’s “transcend and include.” You can still honor your lineage—that’s “include”—but you also have to transcend it.

Cohen: A Kosmocentric identity, as I understand it, is based upon the direct awakening to the authentic self or the evolutionary impulse, which (as you once pointed out) only begins to emerge somewhere between a worldcentric and Kosmocentric level of development.

Wilber: And there is yet no lineage of that, as you know.

Cohen: That’s the whole point because one is identifying with the creative impulse itself, which is ultimately the Kosmocentric self-sense as it is most authentically experienced. And there is no relative identity for that part of the self. So that would mean, therefore, that as humanity evolves into these higher levels—from orange to pluralistic to second tier and beyond, from worldcentric to a more Kosmocentric perspective—the leading edges would gradually fall away from any kind of lineage identity and become more and more identified with a truly universal self-sense beyond any kind of relative distinctions that had a mythological story. As you were rightly saying, there are higher and deeper and more profound and more inclusive interpretations of the myths that come from the great traditions. What I’m saying, though, is that eventually the myths themselves would be transcended altogether. Or, at least, the need to identify with them.

Wilber: Yes. Transcend and include.