The Birth of an Integral Culture

Wilber: Definitely. One of the things you have said so often is that the interpretation of a spiritual experience is as important, or more important, than the spiritual experience itself. That sounds kind of shocking at first, but the more you think it through, the more you realize it is exactly right on the money. So for example, somebody at the traditional, or mythic, stage of development who has an experience of pure consciousness will interpret it very, very differently than somebody would who is at the pluralistic, postmodern stage of development. Somebody at the traditional, or mythic, stage will interpret it in very concrete, literal terms and also as an experience that is given just to a particular path or mythology or chosen people, whereas somebody who’s experiencing the same pure consciousness or ground and is interpreting it from a pluralistic, postmodern, relativistic stage of development will see that it’s something that is available to all sentient beings in equal measure.

If we look at the culture wars, for example, they’re made up of the three middle stages of development in this value structure—traditional values versus modern values versus postmodern values. But an experience of consciousness per se, a satori experience, won’t necessarily help you choose among those value structures because they are all relative structures and relative interpretations. What you want is to develop to an integral stage of development, because that is the first stage that understands the relative importance of all of the previous stages. Everybody is born at stage one, at the archaic stage, and unfolds or develops from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic. All of those are called first tier because they all believe the same thing—that their values are the only real or important values in the world. When you make the leap to second tier, however—what Clare Graves called a “momentous leap” of value—then, for the first time, you realize that different people are coming from different stages of development and that all of those previous stages have a role to play. Part of what we want to do in order to construct an enlightened society is not just to get everybody having an experience of pure reality, not just to get everybody living in the power of now, but to find ways to have our culture governed by integral values, values that are truly comprehensive and truly all-embracing.

The integral structure is the value structure that is basically the truest to the real nature of absolute consciousness. So it’s only by having both an awakening to the absolute and its creative impulse and a development to integral that we get a true understanding of evolutionary enlightenment. With the emergence of the integral stage of development, we can see that the original creative impulse that goes all the way back to the big bang has been present in all of the stages of evolutionary unfolding. That impulse has gone through the entire tree of life and all the way up through human beings, through archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral stages and is now finally blossoming in the form of an urgent evolutionary enlightenment unfolding. That is experienced hand in hand with this Ground of Being, with this motionless, pure, formless emptiness. Only a culture that has an integral compass is going to be able to make room not just for practices that help you to realize absolute consciousness but also for practices that help you to develop through these relative stages of consciousness.

This is so important—not just as a theoretical issue and not just as a practical concern, but because the biggest conflict we’re up against right now, in terms of spiritual understanding, is between the pluralistic stage and the integral stage. The pluralistic stage, although it’s the highest of the first-tier stages, is still a stage that thinks its values are the only true values. The pluralistic stage hates rational values, hates traditional values, and hates archaic values, and yet it claims to be nonmarginalizing, multicultural, sensitive, and all-inclusive. And although it’s attempting to be all of those things, it’s not. It denies hierarchical development; it denies gradations of depth and awareness; it denies degrees of unfolding of consciousness from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to cosmocentric. All of those beliefs are actually hurting an evolutionary enlightenment. They’re actually slowing it down—

Cohen: They inhibit it.

Wilber: Yes. They inhibit an integral evolution. They did wonderfully up to their stage, and they were very important in overcoming some of the problems with traditional values and some of the problems with scientific materialism. All of those were handled beautifully by the pluralistic, or postmodern, stage. But now we’re ready for the next stage. We’re fighting to get an integral awareness to blossom. One of the things we have to constantly battle against and deal with is the number of people who are having an experience of the absolute but are interpreting it through flatland, pluralistic, postmodern terms because that cripples their further growth, and it also cripples their capacity to integrate all the previous stages of growth. That, of course, is what integral does. It takes all of that into account.

Cohen: What you’re saying is all too true. One of the very delicate dimensions of all this has to do with the actual process of taking this leap from the pluralistic stage to the integral stage and beyond. How exactly is that step taken? When individuals come on a retreat with me and spend some time in my company, for example, and also begin to see the world through the perspective that I’m sharing, it’s not difficult for them to have a powerful experience at the level of consciousness, and also for their cognition, their way of thinking, to be powerfully affected. I know that in the work you’re doing, the exact same thing happens. An individual awakens to a higher stage and a bigger, deeper, more comprehensive, and more inclusive worldview that is absolutely liberating and inspiring and gives so much confidence. But then the interesting and important question is: How can they make that new deeper and higher recognition their own? There’s a delicate process that happens where individuals can see, recognize, and understand many of the things that we have been speaking about, and yet unless it’s consciously pursued, it’s very easy for them to fall back to cognitive structures, values, and perspectives that they were holding, both consciously and unconsciously, before they awakened to higher and deeper evolutionary and integral values and perspectives. The most tricky and delicate part of this process is really about learning how to traverse this territory oneself, to make these bold steps forward with one’s own consciousness, with one’s own cognition, with one’s very own soul.

It’s an arduous, and even heroic, endeavor. It’s challenging. We’re talking about individuals making quite significant leaps forward in a very short period of time. And as we know, the whole evolutionary developmental process at the level of culture has sped up dramatically. On one hand, this leap from postmodern pluralism to an integral evolutionary worldview would seem like the obvious next step, but at the same time, in terms of our individual self-structures, it’s an enormous leap to be taken. That is the delicate part of all this, and it’s also very exciting. And what I’ve found is that if we’re trying to create a new consciousness and culture, it’s infinitely easier to do it together with other people who are inspired by the same vision and the same possibilities and potentials as we are. When we’re on our own, unless we are firmly established at this new stage, inevitably we’re going to fall back. That’s our habitual tendency. But when we cultivate relationships with other individuals and other groups of individuals who are sharing these higher values and perspectives and insights, it’s through sustaining those relationships that a new world is literally created. That’s when we begin to think together about life and what it means to be a human being in different ways, and then all the issues that we all have to deal with are brought into the light of the new perspective and have to be questioned and scrutinized. That’s how these new values are actually cocreated and codeveloped with other people who want to take this next step with us. We really need each other to do this.