Allan Combs

Bio & resources

We tend to think of the evolution of consciousness in terms of vertical metaphors. Over the long course of history, consciousness seems to strive upward toward an embrace of ever more refined and subtle heights. This view is reflected, for example, in the spiritual teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the writings of many contemporary spiritual thinkers. Other explorers of consciousness, such as Teilhard de Chardin and Jean Gebser, have emphasized the idea that consciousness strives toward increasing intensity: the path from amoeba to human being is marked by the growth of intensity rather than by gains in elevation. No doubt there is some truth in both of these views. My aim here, however, is to introduce a different metaphor for the evolution of consciousness, one that emphasizes breadth rather than height or intensity.

The idea is simple. Over the long course of history, and especially during the past century, a variety of dramatically different ways to experience reality have become common. These are clearly seen, for example, in science. I will explain in the paragraphs that follow.

The notion grows directly from integral philosopher Ken Wilber’s recent elaboration of his four-quadrant model. To briefly review the basics of the model, it categorizes the entire Kosmos into four quadrants. The two left quadrants represent our inner worlds of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and meaning; the two right quadrants represent the outer worlds of matter and energy. Each side is further divided into an upper quadrant of singular objects and processes and a lower quadrant of plural objects and processes. Thus, the upper-left quadrant represents the inner world of private experience that each of us knows directly, and the lower-left quadrant represents the many experiences and values we share with others. The upper-right quadrant represents individual objects and events in the objective world of outer reality, and the lower-right quadrant represents collections of objects and events.

In his recent book Integral Spirituality and elsewhere, Wilber enriches the division of the Kosmos in this way by noting that each quadrant also has its own kind of interiority. Consider the upper-left quadrant, for instance, which includes our reflections on our own thoughts and feelings. There is also a deeper interior to this quadrant that represents, for example, the unexamined flow of inner experience as it passes through consciousness during deep meditation or when we are drifting off to sleep.

The other quadrants exhibit deeper inner aspects as well. The upper-right quadrant, which represents individual objects and processes in the outer objective world, includes the human brain. But the deeper inner aspect of the brain enfolds the cognitive processes that take place within it. These cognitive processes are measured by various kinds of brain imagery and objective laboratory procedures but are often not experienced at all by the individual. Consider, for example, the unseen brain processes that guide our feet as we walk down a flight of stairs.

Now things get interesting when we realize that the above categories have not been with us forever. Before the 1641 publication of René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, even the basic distinction between the inside and the outside, that is, the left quadrants and right quadrants, does not seem to have been systematically recognized—at least not since late antiquity. Indeed, it is said that Descartes literally invented the notion of consciousness, and it is certainly true that before Descartes the word itself meant nothing like it does today; rather, it referred to a kind of moral knowledge, more akin to the word “conscience.” Even today the two words are the same in French.

From Descartes’ time until the turn of the twentieth century, science was conducted almost entirely from the outer perspective of the upper-right quadrant. In other words, it was concerned with individual material objects moving in external space. This includes Newton’s celestial mechanics as well as nineteenth-century efforts to understand the atom as a tiny solar system. In 1925, the young German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who had retreated to the treeless island of Helgoland to manage his hay fever, wrote the matrix equations that first represented the interior properties of matter, analogous to the inner cognitive processes of the brain.

Returning to our investigation of horizontal evolution, we note that the lower two quadrants, which represent inner and outer plurality, were surprisingly late to be explored. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that systems theorists began to examine the complexities of objective systems in the lower-right quadrant and that Niklas Luhmann and other European thinkers were breaking ground in the exploration of the deeper aspects of language and communication in this same quadrant. Surprisingly little was being done, however, to open up the deeper aspects of the lower-left quadrant, that is, mutual or shared experience. In the 1920s, the Israeli philosopher Martin Buber wrote I and Thou, examining the intersubjective depths of authentic human relationships. His pioneering ideas gained wide currency in the United States during the 1960s, but more for his emphasis on authenticity than for his recognition of the intersubjectivity experienced by two or more people sharing in authentic relationships.

Today, however, for the first time there seems to be growing interest in mutual intersubjective experiences. Several communities in the United States, for example, are experimenting with group consciousness and shared intelligence. Andrew Cohen’s spiritual community EnlightenNext, for instance, is systematically cultivating communal intelligence as the cutting edge of conscious evolution today. (The May–July 2004 issue of What Is Enlightenment? was dedicated to this topic.)

One interesting thing about communal consciousness is that it is not new at all but is reappearing here in a new form. The experience of being submerged in a group identity appears to have been a common aspect of hunting-and-gathering consciousness as it existed twelve or fifteen thousand years ago and beyond. The key feature of this ancient structure of experience, however, was that personal identity as we know it today had not yet developed at all, so individual identity was submerged in the identity of the group. Modern groups working consciously toward communal intelligence, on the other hand, are going in quite a different direction. The EnlightenNext community seems to be finding its way into a kind of shared intelligence that develops around problem-solving situations and does not involve the loss of individuality at all. Each person adds his or her own unique contribution to the ongoing problem-solving process.

This kind of shared consciousness seems to be a form of intersubjectivity that penetrates deep into the inner dimension of lower-left-quadrant shared experience. The fact that it is emerging in today’s world suggests that it may indeed be the cutting edge of the evolution of consciousness. I hope this proves to be the case. Vertical evolution, as essential and important as it is, is a long and slow process. Waiting for it to inch forward is painstaking and disconcerting in a world that needs immediate medical attention for a distressing variety of ills. Collective intelligence, as a new emergent reality appearing with significant power and in enough widely scattered communities of well-intended individuals, might actually provide Archimedes a place to stand from which a heavy world can be moved.

Allan Combs is a consciousness researcher, neuropsychologist, and systems theorist. He is a professor of transformative studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies and the author of over fifty articles, chapters, and books on consciousness and the brain, including The Radiance of Being (Minneapolis, MN: Paragon House, 2002).