ANDREW COHEN: In this issue we’re trying to bite into the tough nut of women’s liberation.

KEN WILBER: Oh dear!

Cohen: And I’m sure it’s very politically incorrect for two intellectual tough guys like you and me to get together and talk about women’s liberation! But who cares . . .

Wilber: I hear you. It used to be that only gays could discuss gays and only blacks could discuss blacks and only women could discuss women. But I hope that as our culture gets over the politically correct, hypersensitive stance that has limited so much discussion of these topics in the past, other types, like us, will be able to have humanly profound discussions about different types. While the politically correct stance may have been important in a certain sense, it’s been pushed too far, and that has had an extremely damaging effect on the humanities in general, because it fragments and it splinters and it sends everybody right back down to ethnocentric altitudes of development. It’s regressive. And so I think it’s perfectly okay that we respect differences, but it’s also okay for a couple of white guys to discuss women’s liberation and have something to say about it.

Cohen: Absolutely. You know, one thing that is interesting, which I only just realized recently, is that most women I meet have difficulty authentically relating to the concept of women’s liberation as something that is relevant to them. The fact is that most women from our generation or our generation’s children are already free. They have freedoms that women have never known or experienced throughout history. They can choose to do just about anything they want. They have sexual freedom, freedom of education, equal opportunity . . .

Wilber: Right. Precisely in some way because of the women’s liberation movement of the sixties, now that very notion has no meaning to young women.

Cohen: Yes. Political, social, and personal freedoms have courageously been won. So a lot of women who grew up in this context can’t really relate to the idea of not being free. But in a spiritual and evolutionary context, which is what my work is all about, I’ve come to understand that women’s liberation—a new women’s liberation—is of the utmost importance if we are ever going to truly effect a profound change in our own consciousness and culture at the leading edge.

So this is a topic that I have been extremely interested in for probably about twelve years. I have so much to say about it, I’m not really sure where to start. Maybe I should just go ahead and give a brief overview of my experience and thoughts on the subject and let you do the same, and then we can get into a discussion about it.

Wilber: Sounds good. I have a lot to say about it as well!

Discovering Primal Self-Structures

Cohen: So the reason that this subject is important to me is that I’m interested in the relationship between spiritual development and the evolution of culture. When I started teaching, I wasn’t particularly interested in women’s liberation or men’s liberation—I was only speaking about enlightenment itself. But quite early on, my focus shifted from the enlightenment of the individual to the enlightenment of the collective. Rather than emphasizing the personal experience of a higher state of consciousness, I became interested in what it would mean to engage with others in an enlightenment context—which means to come together in a higher consciousness beyond ego, beyond the personal sphere, beyond narcissistic self-concern. But when I began to encourage my students to explore this potential, I soon realized that men and women responded very differently to the challenge of meeting beyond the personal. The men found it relatively easy to at least taste this potential. But from my women students I experienced what I called a “visceral no,” a preconscious refusal, when I would speak to them about how important it was for them to come together with each other in this extraordinary way. And I soon realized it wasn’t a personal thing, and it wasn’t any particular individual. It seemed to be an impersonal, conditioned response to my asking them to look into what it would mean to come together in an egoless context.

So that was really my introduction to the fact that men and women face different challenges on the path to evolution beyond ego. When I started digging into this, I began to see that there are all kinds of obstacles that women particularly face that have to do with biological and cultural conditioning. There are, for example, many very primal reasons that women compete, consciously and unconsciously, that make it difficult for them to trust each other enough to let go of ego and just be together in a context that is not personal. Of course, women by nature are very relational—they can take care of their family, support their friends, and they do, it seems, hold the world together for us all—but if they are asked to come together and just be, they often experience a profound sense of panic.

I’ve thought a lot about where this seemingly irrational fear comes from. I’ve tried to imagine what it would be like, for example, to become aware, at a very young age, of the fact that half of your own species has the power to physically overwhelm you at any moment. What would it be like to feel that vulnerable? That’s an experience that a man almost never has. On an almost preconscious level, women experience a state of visceral biological vulnerability that is just not part of the male experience. When I started to really contemplate this, it became apparent to me that once a woman had realized that she was physically so vulnerable, she would just have to come up with a way to protect herself that wasn’t physical. So I realized—and of course I’m making generalizations here—that the ego structure or the self-structure in women, even more so than in men, is used as a defense mechanism—a means to self-protect, to manipulate, and to control.

This structure, which once served an important function, now inhibits, in a very fundamental way, women’s capacity for authenticity. A lot of this isn’t completely conscious, but women learn early on how to keep themselves emotionally and psychologically safe. For example, they seem to have an inner place they can retreat to when they want to protect themselves, where they just cannot be reached. And I can imagine this is a capacity that probably developed in women’s consciousness a long time ago so that even if she could be physically overwhelmed at any time, even if they could have her body, they could never have her soul. All women still have this place of retreat, which for most men I know just isn’t available. Another result of these primal defense structures is that women are often shape-shifters; they’re constantly changing their position and morphing to fit into the different situations they find themselves in, never quite willing to put all their cards on the table. Women create a world of appearances and manipulate their environment and other people in order to have their way and to get through life. It’s a completely different way to operate than the way men usually do. Men, in this sense, are more straightforward—it’s much easier to know who you’re dealing with. When you ask women to be straight and simple and nonmanipulative, they find it very difficult. And I don’t believe it’s because they’re cognitively incapable of being straight or that this shape-shifting is inherently part of their nature. I think it’s part of a defense structure in the self.

So when it comes to evolving beyond ego, the fact that the self-structure has these built-in defense mechanisms, which were originally born out of biological necessity, is something that women have to reckon with. When facing into the whole notion of enlightenment or emptiness of self, I think women are asked to give up a lot more than men. Of course, men are also terrified of transcending their own pride, narcissism, and arrogant self-importance—they also experience an existential fear of ego death or ego transcendence—but they don’t feel, on a visceral level, that “if I let go of my ego I’m physically going to die.” But I’ve realized that because of the survival-driven roots of the female ego structure, women often do feel—and this is not necessarily conscious—that “if I transcend my ego, I’ll have no way to protect myself,” which on a very deep emotional level translates as “I’m physically going to die.”

Wilber: So women would have to give up shape-shifting in order to discover emptiness, and that’s more threatening to them.

Cohen: And to discover authenticity. Emptiness as a state of being and authenticity as a self-sense.

Wilber: Understood.

Cohen: Another deep structure in women’s consciousness that is quite an obstacle to liberation beyond ego has to do with the relationship between sexuality and power. Again, I’ve tried to imagine what it would be like to be a girl who, when she reaches puberty, suddenly realizes that when she comes into a room, simply by raising her eyebrow or moving her shoulders, she can cause a wave to pass over men. What would it be like to know that you have that kind of capacity to manipulate others? What would it be like to suddenly feel this tremendous power over the other half of the race?

Wilber: The Eagles song has that line, “Pretty girls just seem to find out early how to open doors with just a smile.”

Cohen: Men have physical strength. Women have sexual power. What do men want? Men want sex. When a woman realizes that, she finds her own power. And that’s a lot of power to have in this world. Now, the sexual impulse is not a problem in and of itself, but it can become problematic in an enlightenment context, because to whatever degree the ego overidentifies with any particular aspect of ourself, in this case our sexual identity, the personality always distorts. If enlightenment is a natural state or a more authentic way of expressing our humanity, then the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is: What would be the most natural, most unselfconscious, most authentic way to relate to every aspect of life, including the sexual impulse? In order to find the answer, we certainly have to be willing to transcend compulsive identification with that dimension of our own nature. So for a woman to go beyond ego in an enlightenment context, her ego would have to cease to identify with her sexual power. That doesn’t mean she’d have to give up her sexuality or her sexual nature, but in order for her to find a completely different way to be herself, her ego, or narcissistic self-sense, would have to give up its attachment to that particular part of her self as a source of power.

Now that is a lot to ask. I’ve realized that men don’t necessarily have to pay such a high price when we’re speaking about going beyond ego. For a woman, if her ego has to give up this identification with sexuality as a source of personal power, she’s giving up almost everything she has. That’s like taking away a soldier’s only weapon. If her relationship to life was still fundamentally ego-based, not truly spiritual or soul-based, then she would feel that her source of power was being taken away. And why would a woman want to give that up? But if she’s truly committed to taking that next step into a deeper or higher liberation that sets a foundation for a new potential in the evolution of culture, these outdated defense structures have to be transcended.

So this “new women’s liberation” is a project that I’ve been working very hard on for quite a long time, and I believe that in the last year or so I have achieved a significant victory. I have a group of women I’m working with now who have finally taken that bold leap to come together beyond ego. I cracked this thing, for the first time really, last summer, and since that time, these women have started to simply delight in each other’s company in a way that is not the kind of thing women usually do. It sounds very simple, but it’s actually quite a profound shift. Women can share all kinds of personal places and spaces together, but to simply delight in being together in a profound level of trust and transparency and impersonal care is very rare indeed, as far as I know.

Wilber: What’s the major change? They’re together because they stopped doing what?

Cohen: Well, because a lot of the unconscious competitive structures were dropped. And so they found an empty, egoless space between them.

Wilber: And also, the authentic self of a woman would drop that shape-shifting.

Cohen: Absolutely. Because there’s nothing authentic about shape-shifting. It’s only about protecting the separate self—the manipulating self, the deceiving self, the self that just wants to have its own way and doesn’t give a damn about God or evolution or anything else.

Wilber: And which, I would add as a footnote, is actually appropriate and even healthy at lower levels of development.

Cohen: Of course. That’s how you survive in the jungle.

Wilber: Exactly. But when you get to higher waves of development, and particularly when what you call the authentic self is awakened, then these lower structures have to be dropped. Lower structures are formed really close to biological universals, because that’s the only thing driving you at those levels. So of course—and studies show this consistently—stereotypical qualities like men being macho and women being nesting really define lower stages of development, and they become less and less sharp and rigid the higher you go. You can develop to a point where you start to let go of these lower structures. But having state awakenings to pure self or pure emptiness or your absolute ever-present condition definitely requires dropping these structures. So that’s what, it seems to me, you’re working with: what a woman’s self has to do to get in touch with both the authentic self and the pure emptiness underneath even that.

Cohen: Right. And when that happens, there is literally a sheer delight. There is an ecstatic abandon, a deep and profound self-liberating trust in her relationship with her spiritual sisters. Now, the reason I think this is so important, in terms of the evolution of culture, is because most women still feel, consciously or unconsciously, that they need a man in order to be deeply whole or fulfilled. And usually women are competing against each other, in ways that obviously had to do with biological survival a long time ago. But when a woman finds this new kind of intimacy and trust with other women and discovers a deeper wholeness outside of the sexual dimension of life with all its inherent complexity, it puts her, I think, for the very first time, in an authentic position to begin to consider what it would really mean to be a truly liberated, self-authenticated woman in her relationship with the world, and also with men. Until she is no longer fundamentally needing, consciously or unconsciously, from men, I don’t think a woman is ever going to be in a position of true equality in relationship to men. It’s just not going to be possible because there are so many deep structures in all of us that originate in our biology and our cultural history. I feel that until at least a significant minority of men and women can free themselves from many of these biological imperatives and cultural habits, we’re not going to be in a position to begin to consciously explore what real equality is—if that word even makes sense in this context. Unless we can do this, we’ll never discover a new kind of authentic relationship, where there is an unusual degree of freedom, of informed and conscious choosing, that is determining what it means, in a post-postmodern enlightened context, to be a man, to be a woman, and to relate to each other.

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.

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.