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Ken Wilber – Folge 39 Part 1
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Ich wünsche allen Hörerinnen und Hörern meines Podcasts Seelengevögelt einen
wunderbaren Tag. Mein Name ist Veit Lindau, ihr Lieben. Die heutige Lektion hat es in sich,
sowohl von der geistigen Tiefe als auch von der Komplexität als auch vom Umfang. Es sind
nämlich tatsächlich fünf Teile geworden und deswegen ist es mir heute wichtig, eine kleine
Erklärung voranzugeben.
Ich arbeite jetzt seit 25 Jahren als Coach, als Trainer, als Autor und es gibt wohl kaum einen
anderen lebenden Menschen, der mich mehr inspiriert hat als Ken Wilber. Ken Wilber ist ein
westlicher Philosoph, für mich persönlich ein geistiger Titan, und er ist der Begründer der
integralen Landkarte, die heutzutage sehr vielen Experten aus verschiedensten Bereichen –
Meditationen, Psychotherapeuten, spirituelle Lehrer, Neurowissenschaftler, Systemforscher,
Soziologen, Mediziner, Künstlern – ermöglicht, erstens die Position ihrer Arbeit für den
Einzelmenschen aber auch für die gesamte Menschheit besser zu verstehen und gleichzeitig
eine Brücke zu schlagen in die Wissensbereiche anderer Experten.
Also für mich persönlich ist die Arbeit von Ken unglaublich wertvoll und deswegen hat mein Herz
hochgeschlagen, als er mir das Okay gegeben hat für ein Podcast-Interview. Und ich habe
damals gedacht, okay, okay, ich habe vielleicht 20, 30 Minuten, welche Frage packe ich da rein
und tatsächlich ist daraus ein berührendes, bewegendes, meinen Geist extrem erweiterndes
Drei-Stunden-Gespräch geworden.
Wir haben uns sehr bewusst entschieden, alle Lektionen zeitgleich zu veröffentlichen. Selbst
wenn ich mir vorstellen kann, dass manche von euch lieber eine nach der anderen in aller Ruhe
verdauen möchten, gibt es sicher auch Menschen, die sagen, nein, ich möchte mir gleich alles
reinziehen.
Also erwartet euch sehr persönliche Einblicke in Kens Leben, in den Beginn, den Ursprung der
integralen Philosophie. Ken spricht – ich weiß gar nicht, ob ich ihn irgendwo sonst einmal so
ehrlich, so berührend über seine Liebesgeschichte mit Treya sprechen höre – wir sprechen über
Liebe, über Wahrheit, über Politik, wir sprechen über den Stand der Menschheit in den heutigen
Tagen, über die kulturellen Kriege, die wir hier auch im deutschsprachigen Raum in Europa
haben, nicht nur in Amerika. Also es ist ein wirklich sehr tiefes, sehr reichhaltiges Gespräch. Ich
muss leider eine kleine Vorwarnung aussprechen, wir haben es natürlich in Englisch geführt.
Die Untertitel sind noch nicht raus, wir überlegen gerade, ob wir das Ganze noch
synchronisieren lassen. Also jetzt für diesen Augenblick ist es tatsächlich nur für Menschen, die
Englisch sprechen. Wenn es euch interessiert, also diejenigen, die jetzt nur Deutsch sprechen,
dann gebt uns doch mal ein kurzes Zeichen, damit wir wissen, wie stark das Interesse ist und
ob sich das lohnt.
Ihr findet die Episoden auf YouTube, auf iTunes, auf Spotify. Nun wünsche ich dir möglichst
entspanntes, waches Zuhören, lass deinen Geist öffnen, dehnen, wegblasen in eine größere
Dimension des Verständnisses von unserer Welt, von unserem Leben.
Viel Freude mit Ken Wilber.
Dear Ken, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you again. It’s really an honor
for me. Thank you. So you are considered by many people as one of the greatest living Western
philosophers. And I’m very, very happy that you give me the opportunity today, not only to speak
about your work, but also to speak about the person behind the work. Sure.
Your work, especially the integral philosophy, has stretched quite a lot of minds and has given a
lot of people like me, coaches, therapists, scientists, a very great opportunity to understand what
we are doing and to build a connection to other experts. So I’m very curious, Ken, when you
were a little child, a little boy, was there any kind of sign for your calling or were you already born
with a big head?
Yeah, I spent, I was very precocious, particularly when it came to science. So I mean, like I was
five or six years old and I was getting home chemistry sets and I had laboratories and I was
dissecting frogs and just, you know, the whole sort of scientific kind of orientation. And that
struck me as the very best approach to truth. I was fascinated by it. So I was reading really by
seven or eight, I was reading textbooks on organic chemistry and physical chemistry,
introductory quantum mechanics, all these kinds of things.
Some of the teachers in my schools began separating me out and giving me different tests from
the rest of the class because I was just too weirdly absorbed in this stuff and really seemed to
understand it well. And so that went on through high school and I was, I don’t want to sound like
this is bragging or tooting my own horn or anything like that, I’m just trying to give a description.
Description was this young kid who was just highly motivated to learn but also really just wanted
to connect with the world in any number of ways. So not only did I end up being valedictorian
through all four classes of high school, I was also in sports, I was elected student body president
twice, all that kind of stuff. And so I had no objections really to my childhood. Normal ups and
downs, but on balance, I was an only child.
My dad was in the Air Force, so we traveled around enormously. I actually went to four different
high schools in four different years. So I learned to make friends very quickly. And then I was
also really sad when we had to move, because then I would lose all those friends. And I would
sometimes just sort of cry for days for that. And all that went forward like that. And then when I
was around 17 or 18, and I was getting ready to go to Duke University in the medical program,
I started coming upon books that had to do with some of the eastern traditions of enlightenment
and awakening. I particularly read D.T. Suzuki’s essays in Zen Buddhism. And the response
after that was, it was this extraordinary stuff and things like satori, actual realizations of an
ultimate ground.
And for three days after reading those, there was a three-volume set. And for three days
afterwards, my response was, I was furious. I was just enraged. And the reason was, I kept
saying, why did nobody tell me this before?
Why did I go through my whole life and have no even awareness that this was there? You
certainly didn’t get this in Sunday school. And you certainly didn’t get it in your science courses.
And yet here was in essence saying, okay, all of that is relative truth.
That’s all very important. But there is also an ultimate truth. And we’re not just saying this is a
metaphysical postulate. You can have a direct immediate experience of this. You can have a
direct first-person realization.
And I was stunned. I was absolutely floored. And that just started a shift. I still had enormous
respect for science. And I still consider myself in some ways an essentially kind of scientific
thinker.
I want evidence. I want as much data as we can get to support it. But I also was opening up to
all of these other areas. And that became just an enormously almost obsessive kind of drive. I
began reading everything on all of Eastern traditions, Vedanta Hinduism, Neo-Confucianism,
Taoism, Zen Buddhism, on and on.
That got me into the whole Western mystical tradition, which I really didn’t know was there. And I
was just sort of absorbing that. That got me into philosophy in general and from there straight
into things like psychology, psychotherapy.
And I started doing a lot of these things. In other words, when I read about Gestalt Therapy, I’d
actually go out and find somebody that was doing it, and I practiced Gestalt therapy. When I
started studying Freudian psychoanalysis, I actually found a psychoanalytic therapist and
started doing psychoanalytic stuff with that.
I found Zen masters. I started practicing Zen very seriously. I was doing yoga, Tai Chi. It was
very interesting because I found something valuable in all of these approaches. The thing that
started to confuse me is that essentially, almost all of them fundamentally disagreed with each
other.
Something like psychoanalysis would say you have to strengthen the ego, and then something
like Zen would say you have to get rid of it. I knew that there was some truth to both of them, but
how could those fit together?
That became about 17 or 18, the driving question that began motivating me was not of all the
major approaches and disciplines that human beings have, not which one of those is right and
then all the others are wrong.
But literally, how can they all be right? They’re already occurring. They already exist together.
They’re already arising in this universe, so they have to fit together somehow, and I used to say
things like, well, there has to be some truth in all of them because no human brain is capable of
producing 100% error.
Or as I would put it, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. So there has to be some
goodies in this. So the question is, how can they all fit together? So may I ask you, in this time,
had you really quite close spiritual teachers that you could ask this kind of questions or you went
by your own?
Almost none of the teachers that I was studying with had ever asked that question and none of
them were pursuing it. They were still pursuing their own approach very sincerely. They were
gathering enormous amounts of evidence for it.
So none of it was just sort of taken on faith or anything like that. So in the very broad sense,
they had a kind of scientific attitude. Even Zen had a very sort of okay, first you have to actually,
I mean Zen followed what I would identify sort of the three great basic strands of good science
which is the first is you have to have an injunction, you have to have a Koan called a paradigm
and instead of the form, if you want to know this, do this.
And so that was what Kuhn meant by science having a paradigm. A paradigm wasn’t a super
theory that created facts, invented facts, it’s sort of the way it was used but it’s not the way Kuhn
meant. Kuhn got so upset with it being used that way because people were saying, well, all I
have to do now is just come up with my own paradigm and I have scientific proof. Kuhn was
going, ah. So he actually stopped using the term paradigm completely. He said, I’m like, you
know, and he started using the term exemplar. An exemplar meant an exemplary injunction. In
other words, it was a practice that you did when you did that practice, when you did that
experiment, when you did that action, it would bring forth experience and data and illumination.
And so then you would gather that data, that direct experience and that would help you form
your theories. And then just to check and make sure that you weren’t hallucinating, then you
would ask somebody else to repeat the experiment. If they got the same data then you know it,
you started to take it as being probably real. And all of these various types of approaches that I
was attracted to, all of them had some version of that. I mean, they were saying, okay, let’s try
this, let’s see if it works, we’re not telling you that you have to believe this on faith, we want you
to try it, see if it works for you, and so on.
But they were still disagreeing with each other. And so for several years, as I was pouring
through all of that, just asking the question, okay, how do these all fit together? How do these all
fit together?
And then one day it just sort of hit me that it wasn’t just that there was one consciousness and
everybody was finding different approaches to that one thing, but there was a whole spectrum of
consciousness, there was a whole series of bands or levels or waves of it.
And each of them, of course, had a different color or different qualities, and so on. It was one
rainbow, but it didn’t work out. still a spectrum, and each of these major schools were
approaching a different band in the spectrum.
So that’s how they could all be right. They were correct when they were addressing their own
band, but they screwed up when they tried to talk about other bands that they didn’t actually
experience themselves.
So you can check that other band, but you have to use its paradigm. You have to take the
injunction that’s going to put you in the vicinity of that cosmic address, and then you’ll be able to
experience that event.
But if not, you can’t see it. You don’t even know it’s there. So that was a big kind of breakthrough
for me. And when I was 23. Can I ask you about this? Because there’s one question bothering
me for years, you know?
I mean, if you get the integral theory, it totally makes sense. So I always was thinking, OK, was it
a kind of process or was it kind of one moment of enlightening experience? You know, I had
always this kind of image, Ken is standing in a big room.
He has all these different approaches in his mind, like in a very, very big room. And suddenly,
bam, you see the pattern. You know? Was it like this? Well, sure. I mean, any of the major
insights that I’ve had, they always are a type of light bulb going on, that kind of thing.
And it’s a fairly distinct sort of little miniature satori, just kind of how but there are all these things
leading up to that and the thing leading up to that that first sort of major insight for me was this
background question about okay how can these all have some degree of truth how can they all
be true but partial and that would lead eventually to even having to say things like okay if
everything is true but partial then how about something like a belief in Santa Claus or a belief in
the tooth fairy or we get more sophisticated and say how about Zeus how about Apollo how
about Aphrodite are those are those real and that would lead me eventually to the idea that
there wasn’t just this spectrum of consciousness,
but that the spectrum developed. And everybody was born at square one and then went on to
unfold through the structures and stages of consciousness that had evolved up to that time. And
you could actually track this over history.
So you had developmental geniuses like Jean Piaget tracking major world views that unfolded.
To give a variation on his model it was like from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to
pluralistic to integral.
And those turned out to be not just stages that humans have undergone in the broad history, but
they’re also once one of those stages is laid down then it becomes part of sort of a ground
unconscious for human beings.
So everybody born from that point on has all the stages that have emerged up to that point and
they all themselves started square one. So even today if we had an incredibly integral culture
that was driven through some very high integral stages, there’s still people born at square one
and they have to move through all of those.
And there’s no guarantee they’ll make it. And so that’s why we see we’ll probably talk about it a
bit more. But that’s why we see things like culture wars. Where culture wars are three very
different value systems.
Sometimes referred to as sort of traditional values, family values, often fundamentalist, religious
beliefs, that kind of, that’s one value structure, amber. And then another called orange, and
that’s more of the modern, rational, liberal enlightenment values.
It has a world-centric morality, not just an ethnocentric morality like amber does. And that was a
big change when human beings went through that historically. And then in the 60s, another
major stage started to emerge, which we call green, or pluralistic, relativistic.
It’s often called multicultural, or diversity and inclusivity and things like that. And these are three
different value structures and essentially they’re all at each other’s throats. And so that’s just a
good example of how for each of people in each of those major stages they have a set of values
and a set of motivations and a set of beliefs that are very, very real for them.
And then we have a next stage and its values are very real for it. And next slide, its values are
very real for it. And so even if you take something like Santa Claus, it’s real. Now for somebody
at Orange or Green, that’s not real.
But for somebody at Amber, it is. And so that’s how we can even fit those kinds of beliefs into a
framework that’s seeing that there’s some degree of truth, at least for people at a various stage.
And so that allows us to understand sort of the whole phenomenology of culture and individuals.
And it’s set in a broad evolutionary current where we keep sort of adding broader and more
inclusive stages and those get laid down. And if they work and they’re functional, then they’ll
become relatively permanent acquisitions of the human race.
And as the next generation is born, they’ll start at square one, they’ll go from archaic to magic,
they’ll move into mythic, they’ll move into rational, and then maybe pluralistic, and then maybe
make that leap to second tier, which is certainly where we’re at right now in terms of kind of the
leading edge, and most interesting aspects of what’s going on worldwide, culturally.
Yes, I want to come back for sure for what’s happening in the world right now, but right now I
would like to know, so when you came out with this, with 23, I cannot imagine that all the old
sophisticated teachers told you, oh, that’s great, now I understand everything.
Yeah, just the opposite. It was kind of funny because I had, well, when I was 23, I wrote up my
first book, which was about, you know, this spectrum of consciousness, that’s what it put all this
stuff together and explained these different dimensions, waves, levels of consciousness, each of
which fear the world quite differently. But my point was that the disciplines from all of these
bands of awareness are important, and we have to include them all if we really want to address
a full human being.
And really allow ourselves to develop a kind of wholeness that we can if we do something like
this. And so I always thought that if you had like three approaches, major approaches to a topic,
approach A, approach B, and approach C, and you showed how all three of those are absolutely
crucial to understand the picture, I always at first thought all three of them will love you, but they
all hate you,
because you just demonstrated they don’t have the one and only true approach, and they can’t
stand it because they hate all those other approaches. They spent their whole life dedicated to
just this one.
So it was a very mixed set of reviews to spectrum to the first book. And again, I really was just a
kid when that happened. But half of them, a little bit more than half really, were people who were
developing into these more integral stages of awareness, and they could see what seemed to
them anyway to be a really important contribution.
And so the reviews from those were just off the wall positive. I mean, just so hyperbolic, it was
ridiculous. But what I could see, even if I didn’t necessarily agree with the literal truth of what
they were saying, I could see that it had touched on this integral awareness, and they didn’t see
much of that, so they really appreciated seeing something like that.
But they would say, I heard everything from – Wilber’s written the best book on consciousness
since William James. Gene Houston said Wilber would do for consciousness what Freud did for
psychology. Half a dozen
people said Wilber’s like Hegel, he’s the, you know, da-da.
All the way back to, I’ve been this excited since I read Plato’s dialogue. I mean, it was just
outrageous comparisons. And then others were – I hate this, this is idiotic, this is a completely
stupid person, and it was wild.
But it kind of catapulted me into a certain kind of attention worldwide, and I started to get a lot of
people coming and visiting. They would all say the same thing, they’d knock on the door and
say, oh hi, I’m here to see your father.
I really was just a kid, I’m sorry, you’re looking for me, I apologize, but this is it. And so I just kept
forward with that type of attitude as I just continued to extend studies into more and more areas.
And ended up essentially doing kind of a book a year, and would bring it out in developmental
psychology with the Atman Project, and then looked at anthropology up from Eden, looked at
philosophy and eye to eye, and just that kind of stuff, just essentially trying to show how more
comprehensive, integral, inclusive approaches really were not only useful, but in some ways are
really mandatory for today’s world,
because that’s what was happening now is movement in that direction, and we would really
never be able to go back, we’d never have all those other disciplines out there, and they all fit
together, but I don’t want to know anything about that, I’m just going to take my one little thing
and call it the only real approach.
You just couldn’t do that with any sort of integrity anymore. So that’s sort of, and in that regard,
by the way, I look at myself as just one of many manifestations of this more inclusive
evolutionary stage that’s coming forth right now.
