Absolute Consciousness and Relative Consciousness

Wilber: Right. Well, I think you’ve touched on several very important points. I would start by saying that when it comes to consciousness, we can talk about absolute consciousness and we can talk about relative consciousness.

Spiritual traditions often make a distinction between absolute truth and relative truth, and they certainly do the same thing with consciousness. So absolute consciousness is indeed pure consciousness. It’s not a thing; it’s not an object; it’s not a mist. If you have to think about it at all, it’s a vast, open emptiness in which all objects arise. Moment to moment, right now, you’re aware of various things going on in the world. You’re aware of a table in front of you; you’re aware of a telephone; you might be sitting on your porch and looking outside, aware of clouds floating through the sky; you’re aware of mountains, streams. All of those are arising in your pure awareness. And enlightenment is the discovery of this pure openness, this pure, radical Ground of Being.

But that’s just the absolute component. What have become so important, as we have started to create an East-West integration, are the relative aspects of consciousness. And these relative aspects have to do with how you interpret that absolute experience of consciousness. What are the different ways of interpreting spiritual experience? For this we find that there are developmental components, or stages, associated with the types of shared values that we have as cultures and with the types of values and worldviews that we hold as individuals as well.

One of the easiest ways to understand these shared interpretations is through the names that were given to them by Jean Gebser, who was a real pioneer in the mid twentieth century in looking at the evolution of these relative structures of consciousness. He called the stages archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, integral, and higher. So you can have a full-blown satori, or consciousness experience, but depending on where you are in this developmental scale, you’ll interpret it according to different values. You can interpret it in a magical, or egocentric, fashion: “I and I alone have this pure consciousness.” You can interpret it in a mythic, or traditional, value structure, which is the next major stage, and believe that this experience is given just to one group, one people, or one chosen tribe. You can experience it in a modern, or rational, fashion. You can experience it in a pluralistic, or postmodern, fashion. And you can experience it in an integral, or post-postmodern, fashion. These are all relative aspects of consciousness. And what you and I are particularly looking at is the importance of a full enlightenment being an experience of both absolute and relative consciousness.

Cohen: That’s right.

Wilber: Both the absolute and relative dimensions bring something to the table. The experience of pure consciousness brings an understanding of radical freedom, openness, timelessness, eternity, and absolute reality, but that has to manifest itself. There’s spirit in action, and what that looks like depends on how you interpret it in the relative world. Interpreting that experience of consciousness in mythic terms will give you a traditional or even fundamentalist orientation. Interpreting it in modern terms will give you a scientific orientation. Interpreting it in terms of postmodern experience or structure will give you a pluralistic view of reality and of what consciousness is.

Right now, the leading edge of development itself, or the relative unfolding of consciousness, is starting to move from the pluralistic, postmodern stage into integral. That means that all of our values will start to get reshuffled and become more inclusive, more comprehensive, more superholistic. For example, the roles of men and women will start to expand. All the ways that we structure a culture, a society, will fundamentally change. And they will change based on both the absolute and the relative aspects of consciousness.

So we really have work to do in two dimensions. In the absolute dimension, we have to work first to discover this already free Self, this open, empty ground of ever-present awareness. Then in the relative dimension, we have to develop from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral. Both of these are very important aspects of a truly comprehensive approach to consciousness awakening. What we find, unfortunately, is that there are many teachers and approaches, from the East and the West, that center on just one or the other. What we find in a lot of New Age approaches to spirituality, for example, is just a focus on the now, on absolute consciousness, on the unmanifest, on the pure Ground of Being. And at the same time, in the West especially, what we too often find is just a focus on the relative aspects of reality and of consciousness, just a focus on evolution and growth and development, without any understanding of the Ground of Being, which is the support of all of that.

So you and I are trying to combine both of those dimensions—the absolute and the relative—and one of the phrases we use to cover these two fundamental spaces is “evolutionary enlightenment.” That means that as spirit manifests, its manifestations evolve, and the very nature of enlightenment itself is going to continue to evolve along with it. We don’t want a static enlightenment that works just with absolute consciousness, nor do we want a spiritless evolution that works just with the evolution of matter and doesn’t understand the role of the Ground of Being. We want to have an evolutionary enlightenment—one that understands spirit itself but also understands that spirit is unfolding in this world and as this world. The world that spirit has created is evolving.