Freedom or Fullness?

Wilber: In terms of this question of the different ways that male and female tend to manifest, there are what I refer to as four drives of all individual holons.** Whether it’s a molecule or a deer or a man or a woman, any individual holon has four different tendencies, two horizontal ones and two vertical ones, to speak metaphorically. The horizontal ones are agency and communion; the vertical ones are eros and agape, with eros being freedom and reaching upward to always transcend and agape being fullness and reaching downward to always embrace. And women, largely because of biological differences, although of course, cultural and political factors can play a part, tend to emphasize communion and agape, whereas men tend to emphasize agency and eros.

Cohen: Yes. I think that’s why I’ve noticed that the very notion of spiritual freedom is actually a concept that most postmodern women find harder to conceptually relate to than men do. Women seem to relate more to the desire for connection, wholeness, or fullness. But the idea of freedom, wanting to become free at an existential level, seems almost like an alien concept.

Wilber: Yes, indeed. Men tend to relate more easily to freedom, and women tend to relate to fullness. Cosmic consciousness for women is like . . . Infinite chocolate is the metaphor I use! Men are agentic and autonomous, and women are much more relational because of a largely biological set of givens, including the hormone oxytocin. When a woman’s baby is born, she has to be tuned in to every single emotional twitch and twinge of that child, and her body is geared to that. Males are not geared to that—we are geared basically toward wolf hunting in packs. As a matter of fact, emotions are a real negative for the first million years of evolution. If the bear is outside the cave, you don’t sit and talk about your feelings. You’re dinner if you do. So men tend to have, I say, two emotions! Women have twenty-eight emotions; men have forward and reverse. Emotions are just not their strong suit.

Cohen: But in relation to the whole notion of eros and agape, agency and communion, I do believe that as we reach integral and what you call super-integral or post-integral stages of development, these distinctions are going to become less distinct.

Wilber: Oh, I quite agree.

Cohen: Because as woman becomes liberated from the earth, from her primary role as bearer of children, her own capacity for agency and for autonomous creative response to life will begin to emerge. It will begin to awaken in her.

Wilber: Exactly. And men’s relational and agape capacity.

Cohen: At a certain point, men can even become more relational, to whatever degree they actually transcend these structures. As men begin to transform the much more primitive notions of the egoic individual self and begin to awaken to more transpersonal dimensions of who they are, their capacity for and interest in communion will spontaneously begin to emerge.

Wilber: I agree. But what’s so important about these distinctions and the ones that you’re making is that, as I often say, it’s really important to have a map of the prison if you want to get out. As you pointed out, because a lot of these structures are so deep in the unconscious, it takes a searchlight to even get near them. So having them pointed out is very important. But neither men nor women should get upset by these things, because they’re just suggestions on where to look. We’re not laying down laws—we’re saying have a look at this and see if it makes sense to you. If it does, then you’ve just gotten an enormous helping hand.

Cohen: Right. It’s so important. As I’ve been thinking a lot about this whole issue, I’ve become very aware that because we’re in this post-traditional, post-conventional context, nobody knows how to be anymore. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? How am I supposed to make sense out of the human experience? And for women outside of traditional structures, even more so than for men, it’s a much more insecure experience to really know how to be. I think a lot of women maybe aren’t necessarily conscious of it, but when you begin to think about it, there’s a much deeper and more profound sense of insecurity, because at least in traditional cultures, at their best, for many of the reasons that we were speaking about, women are protected.

Wilber: And everything is self-defined. The rules are very rigid, well understood, so women are well protected, in that sense. There’s no mystery, no confusion, no problem, at that stage anyway.

Cohen: So now, of course, in Western culture, as we move beyond postmodernity, all the older structures, at least for people who are evolving, are falling apart. And that’s going to make room for what’s new, but it also creates this tremendous sense of insecurity.

Wilber: I strongly agree. I’ve thought a lot about this as well, and I think it is harder on women. The really early stages of development are governed almost entirely by the biological body, and so those are pretty straightforward. They are driven by survival instincts and hunger and sex. And then when we reach the traditional stage of development, which we would call mythic membership or amber or conformist, things are also straightforward—because its thinking is so absolute and there’s usually one book that contains all the truth, whether it’s Mao’s Little Red Book or the Qur’an or the Bible. It’s very fundamentalistic, but things are safe there because the rules are obvious and because men are men and women are women. And then you get into industrial and post-industrial stages, and by the time you get to postmodern, nobody knows what the hell is going on. And then by the time you make the leap into integral, there are all sorts of things available to you.

Cohen: That’s right.

Wilber: But women are coming into this new stage with the perfume of relational being, because they have tended to define themselves in these earlier stages in terms of their relationships. And men, on the other hand, tend to define themselves in terms of their jobs, their work. So what happens in these new spaces—where there are no signposts—is that it is harder on women, because what are they supposed to relate to? And the answer, at this point, is Spirit. And so it’s a relationship to Being that a woman has to cultivate. And a man, of course, just has to relate to his own work, and of course, his work should be with Spirit. But it is harder for a woman because she has to switch that relational sense.

Cohen: Another significant factor in this, I think, is that women are so objectified by culture.

Wilber: By male culture.

Cohen: By male culture, which women also cocreate.

Wilber: That’s right. They internalize it.

Cohen: Yes, they internalize it. But because they are so objectified by culture, the narcissistic inclination to constantly be looking for their own image in the reflection of others is even more acute than it is for men. And that’s why it’s even more difficult for them to be able to stand free from any notion of self without feeling frightened about not knowing who they already are.

Wilber: Right. And again, it comes back to their own relationship to freedom, which they often interpret in terms of fullness. So one of the ways I say it is that every new higher state or stage has greater degrees of freedom and greater degrees of fullness. And one of the things that women have to understand, in my opinion, is that they are dropping one form of fullness—the relational being that they have known before—but only to find a greater fullness.

Cohen: Right. An “already-fullness.”

Wilber: An “already-given-fullness.” Yes, absolutely. The infinite chocolate that’s already here.

Cohen: Exactly. And that’s what some of the women I’ve been working with are beginning to find. It’s a fullness that is not really based in the personal sphere or in any of these previous structures. And that suddenly creates new potentials.

The Leading Edge

Wilber: I’m really fascinated with the actual first-person process that you have pioneered and that you and these women have particularly worked on. So I wonder if we want to talk about that a little bit more. What was it that shifted so dramatically last summer? How did it happen?

Cohen: Well, it was during an intensive in Spain. I was working in a very focused way with a group of my close women students from around the world. They were doing a lot of spiritual practice and then meeting together once a day. And the instructions I gave them were very simple: They had to hold formation—to be true to the intention that had brought them to that point, which was the intention to come together beyond ego—and not allow themselves, for any reason, to disintegrate and fall back into personal structures. I told them that all that mattered was to take one step forward together every day and hold formation and for each person to autonomously be responsible for the success of the group. Now, that sounds like a simple task, but for women it’s a big deal. The whole notion of holding your own place and holding formation with other people is more of a male way of thinking. Women don’t tend to think that way.

Wilber: That’s why there are so many all-male rock groups but very few female rock groups. It’s easy for men to hold a formation and do a group thing.

Cohen: I know. But if we want to create stable structures for the future, women also have to be able to hold formation.

Wilber: Understood.

Cohen: So on this intensive, we made it from day one, till day two, day three, day four, and as we got to day five, they each started to realize, “We can do this. I can do this.” And that’s really what changed everything. By the end of the ten days, they had all discovered a miraculous capacity to meet beyond ego that they had tenaciously been resisting for a ridiculous amount of time. They found this space of self-delight in which they could meet each other in a context of a kind of impersonal trust that they had never known before, that has now for them become the ultimate reference point and a source of profound strength and a much deeper integrity.

Wilber: Got it. That is an actual “we” structure! That’s a lower left cultural structure. It’s come into existence as a “we.” It’s not a state; it’s permanent. That’s what structures look like in the lower left. And it’s a new one. It’s a new and higher level or altitude, a higher center of gravity, coming from at least the subtle soul self that has also dropped the structures of first-tier stages, the biological, social, and cultural drag. That’s what’s so fascinating about it.

Cohen: I don’t know where this is all leading culturally, in terms of what it would mean to be a woman, or to be a man. But I’m convinced that only from this new structure, from the place these women are in, can we find out together, because it’s only from that kind of autonomy, authenticity, and liberated interest that anything truly new can emerge. Now we need to create the future together, because we don’t know what’s possible. So it’s very exciting. And the camaraderie that I feel now with these women and that they feel with me is of a completely different order. For women, even the relationship with a spiritual teacher is usually laden with the desire for personal affirmation. And I’m not interested in that. But women coming from this new state and structure can be real partners in creating new potentials in consciousness and culture, and nothing could be more thrilling than that.

Wilber: Right. So this “we” is starting to form. And that, as you said, I think quite appropriately, has become the ultimate reference point for them. That’s exactly how it works in this new intersubjective yoga at that altitude because in other words, they are plugging in to the lower left quadrant. Once you get post-postmodern, you’re really lost unless you find a new set of quadrants that are at the next highest level. That means a higher “I,” a higher “we,” and a higher “it.” They have found that higher we, and so they have a signpost now. And they have an example of a higher I in their teacher. They have maps. But what’s so important is to find that “we.” It’s buddha-dharma-sangha, and sangha is very important. You have this group of women in their authentic self and certainly at integral structures, but you can have an authentic self in an integral structure and still be weak in the interpersonal. So what they’re doing is having the “we” interpersonal match the altitude that they’re able to reach individually with you. That’s what’s so important because the formation of a “we” is an absolute necessity if any of this will ever become a political and social reality.

Cohen: Without the “we,” it is impossible to even know how to take the next step. That’s the foundation to build the future upon, to create a kind of structure at the leading edge. Obviously, it couldn’t be a mass movement or anything.

Wilber: No, it will become mass if it’s actually accurate. If it fits the Kosmic grooves, a thousand years from now, maybe forty percent of the population will be at this wave.

Cohen: Well, if evolution speeds up the way it has been, exponentially, I guess that would make sense.

Wilber: It might take ten thousand years. But look how far we came in two thousand. It’s pretty outrageous. That’s why there have to be pockets of experimentation on how we, meaning the “we” quadrant, the intersubjective dimension, the cultural dimension, can actually form new structures that will stick. The formation of this “higher we” actually starts to lay down a Kosmic habit, a Kosmic groove, in the structure of reality itself. If history is any guide, there could be a tipping point, an actual cultural revolution where a more integral form of steering or governance system would come into being, and it’s going to do so influenced by all these experiments that are working—to the extent that they are working. Incidentally, there aren’t very many right now. And that’s why, I think, some of the experiments that you and some of our friends have been trying are so important. It’s not narcissism to point out this simple fact that, historically, these leading edges have been tipping points and have steered decisions. So we’re obviously looking to see that happen, because it does mean more degrees of freedom and more degrees of fullness for men and women. That’s the whole point, it seems to me.

** A system (or phenomenon) that is a whole in itself as well as a part of a larger system.