A Four-Dimensional Framework

Wilber: I think that’s a really important series of points from somebody who has been on the frontlines fighting and working with people to transform. That’s why I think everything you have said is such an important kind of statement. Now, before you and I start knocking around some of these details, I’m going to take just a few minutes and give a very abbreviated summary of the framework through which I would look at something like this, which is, of course, the integral framework.

The basic idea, as we’ve often discussed, is that all human beings have at least four dimensions, and you have to have liberation in all four of these dimensions or it won’t stick in any of them. And we call these four dimensions the quadrants [see diagram]. The simplest way to think of them is the biological (upper right), the social (lower right), the cultural (lower left), and the psycho-spiritual (upper left). And in large part, what we’ve seen with the various liberation movements—including the women’s movement, the abolition of slavery, the untouchables in India, and so on through history—is that these have been ways to help people grow and stop enslavement of each other and themselves in these various dimensions.

So the biological or exterior of an organism is one of the four dimensions, and that’s what we call the upper-right quadrant. And then the upper-left is the interior of an individual organism and that’s the psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimension. And particularly when we look at psychology and spirituality, we look at two things: structures of consciousness and states of consciousness, which both have a hand in liberation. Then the two lower quadrants deal with the plural or communal aspect of humans, and that also has an exterior and an interior. The exterior, we call the social, the lower-right quadrant. That includes the actual infrastructures that have developed historically, for example, from foraging to horticultural to agrarian to industrial to informational. And what you find is that basically women are pretty much looked at as inferior to men in all agrarian structures. Wherever you find an agrarian structure, ninety-seven percent of them have an intensely polarized sexual hierarchy—what we call patriarchal. But with the coming of the industrial and then informational revolutions, physical strength was no longer so important for survival. With the industrial revolution, machines started to do the work that male bodies used to do, so then all of a sudden, women’s movements around the world started to emerge, first with the shift from agrarian to industrial and even more so with the shift to informational.

The lower left quadrant, the cultural, is the “we” dimension. It’s the mutual understandings we have—our morals, our ethics. It’s the interior of a group. While the social structure is what a group looks like from the outside, culture is what it looks like from the inside. And here, we also see unfolding or development of a series of worldviews, essentially, that go from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral. Again, we find that in structures that are lower than rational and pluralistic, women certainly seem to be, in a sense, enslaved. Now I don’t think that’s really the correct way to look at it from their point of view. But from our point of view, one sees that there certainly is no women’s movement or equal voting rights at that level. That kind of development happens only with the emergence of rational thinking and morals, and that shift parallels the social movement from agrarian to industrial.

The upper left quadrant is the interior of the individual. Again, we see a series of developments that can be summarized most easily as going from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to Kosmocentric.* And it’s in the movement from ethnocentric to worldcentric that women’s liberation comes into the picture.

So the point is that all of these dimensions are important. If we’re going to talk about women’s liberation, which would mean how a modern woman wishes to view her own liberation from constraints on her free choice, then in all four quadrants we have to be at a developmental level that moves from ethnocentric to worldcentric or higher. Otherwise, it just won’t stick. So I would say that what you’re looking at is particularly in the upper left, men’s and women’s psychological stages of growth—the way their egos, their minds, and their self-sense are formed. And you’re focusing on how differences in the biological organism, in the upper right, influence how male and female consciousness develops. And of course, you are also taking into account social structures and cultural structures that are part of that.

The women’s movement originally objected to even talking about biological universals. They felt, for example, that because the average woman is physically, muscularly weaker than the average man, it could be concluded that if the physical was the only dimension—if, as Freud is always quoted, “Biology is destiny”—then women are always going to be enslaved because they’ll always be weaker. So the postmodern women’s movement went too far to the other extreme and said, “There is no biological truth. Science is merely a fiction like anything else.” Well, that’s just wrong. We’ve realized that there are biological universals that even some feminists acknowledge have an enormous impact on social, cultural, and personal development. One of them is the simple fact that men, on average, have greater upper body strength, and they also have more physical mobility, because women can get pregnant. Testosterone looks at the world very differently than estrogen does. So these biological differences are one of the dimensions that need to be taken into account. And the contribution of the biological body to the formation of human consciousness is profound—the relation of the upper right quadrant to the upper left quadrant, to psychological and personal growth and development. So what we’re hearing from you is what you’ve learned as a spiritual teacher working with consciousness in the upper left, in particular, and with the intersubjective dimension, of course, in the lower left, about how men and women differ in terms of their own consciousness—in terms of both their authenticity and their capacity for enlightenment, based on their relationship to this upper right biological organism they’re saddled with.

We don’t want to overplay the biological differences, but they are there. And as long as you don’t make the physical dimension the whole picture, you can talk about its influence on a person’s consciousness without getting caught in reductionism. Whereas, if you don’t take it into account, you’ve just got a false picture, a narrow picture. This has been the problem with the postmodern women’s movement: If women, to use an exaggerated example, are told that there is simply no difference whatsoever between men and women, and men are told the same thing, and yet in certain fields of competition, like physical sports, men keep winning, that’s going to be devastating. That’s false information. That’s not how you liberate somebody, by telling them lies and pretending that it’s building self-esteem.

So from an AQAL (all-quadrant, all-level) perspective, the fact that men are out killing a bear and women are home tending the children is, at an early stage of development, almost a biological necessity. But as we grow and develop, of course, we have more degrees of freedom, and by the time we move from ethnocentric into worldcentric, then consciousness is free enough, if it chooses, to start shedding some of these structures and forms that have been appropriate at the early stages but are not appropriate now.

By the time people get to worldcentric levels of growth and development, what we’re looking at is a capacity to really start awakening. And there are two things that have to happen there. One, we have to identify the actual structures of the self, and two, we have to transcend them. So first of all, we have to have an absolutely transparent honesty: This is what I am—psychologically, biologically, socially, culturally. We have to be able to identify those things because, otherwise, they’re going to be unconscious. So it’s very important to have a teacher or somebody who has insight into this condition. And we just heard your observations, which are extremely helpful because they allow a man or a woman to recognize, “Oh, I can see those structures in me.” And as soon as we can do that, we’ve begun to transcend them—we’ve started to let go of them. That’s why I really appreciate teachers, like you and others, who are coming to what are really important insights to help us spot what’s going on with the ego in all four quadrants, in all four dimensions of our being, so we can drop it and just be authentic, and then be empty.

So that’s my little summary. I think women’s liberation does require at least this context—that unless you’re liberated in all four dimensions, it just won’t stick. And so what we’re doing here is trying to pioneer individual change, i.e., in the upper left, as breakthroughs in consciousness; if these are authentic breakthroughs, eventually they’ll become part of the lower left and lower right, part of cultural and social institutions. They’ll become part of political institutions. But evolution always pushes through in the individual. Individuals with new insights and new consciousness and new awareness are the growing tip of evolution. That’s as politically incorrect as you can get, so I’ll emphasize it and say it again, because it’s that true. Individuals with breakthroughs in consciousness are the growing tip of evolution. That’s why these experiments in consciousness are so important, the ones that you and other integrally informed, enlightened teachers are doing. That’s why I think it’s so damned exciting to get field reports, and I’m sure we will also start to hear from the women themselves about this. [See page 71.] So once again, what we’re doing here is trying to pioneer change first in the upper left, then it goes to our behavior in the upper right, then it goes to a cultural change in the lower left, and, finally, it gets institutionalized as a social infrastructure/mode of production in the lower right. The point is that all four quadrants have to stick. But it starts with these kinds of experiments in consciousness.

Cohen: That’s great. What you just laid out was a whole integral context in which to really be able to discuss these things—a background context for everything that I was speaking about. And I completely agree. I feel so strongly that our inner evolution, as you say, has to be reflected in all four quadrants. I’ve been appreciating this truth, which you have been patiently repeating for a long time, more than ever in recent months.

* In integral theory, the Pythagorean term Kosmos is used to denote the interconnected whole of all that is—encompassing the physical, biological, psychosocial, and spiritual dimensions of reality. Thus, to be Kosmocentric means to feel personally identified with, and responsible for, the multidimensional totality of existence.