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Ken Wilber – Folge 39 Part 3
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You know, it’s so, for me, I really think it’s very important that people can listen to this and see
this because sometimes I hear, oh, Ken Wilber, yes, he has a great mind, but it’s too much. But
when I read your books, I feel so much subtle love for mankind.
So thank you very much for your openness. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So Ken, I have to collect myself.
So when I ask you today, Ken, I mean, you have said it between the words, but I like to ask you
again, so what is love?
Sure. Because if you, I mean, I’ve started, I’ve written a couple of things and given a couple of
public presentations, and the material will be getting out more and more. But I call the topics the
feeling of enlightenment.
And often when we are looking at things like Satori or some sort of awakening or some sort of
enlightenment, which of course is only a part of an overall integral approach, but it’s an
important part.
Some people aren’t comfortable with having a spiritual dimension to their integral framework.
And frankly, if people don’t want to use it, it’s fine with me. Over the years, as I’ve tracked this,
about 50% of the people that end up using integral will include the spiritual components, and
about 50% leave those out.
And I understand why. The religion that’s out there is so sophomoric and mythic-literal and
childish and fundamentalist, and it’s pretty spooky. But on the spiritual side of the street and
what we call waking up, if you look at a lot of the essential maps of states of consciousness and
states of meditative development, you generally see some rough similarities in most of the great
traditions.
And one of the ones that I often use, I don’t think it’s the only one, but it gets the job done with
the least amount of factors required. And it’s a view that you find in both Vedanta Hinduism, and
it’s an identical view in Tibetan Buddhism.
So whenever you get Buddhism and Hinduism agreeing on something, that’s a good sign. And
then we can see it in some of the Neoplatonic traditions in the West. And they look at five major
states of consciousness that human beings have access to.
And they’re generally referred to as a gross state, and an example of that is usually given as the
waking state. And then there’s a subtle state, and one example of that is the dream state, for
example.
And then the third is the causal state. An example of that is deep, dreamless sleep, formless.
And then those are relative states because they all come and go, they’re all different from each
other. You generally can’t be in one and be in the other.
States tend to be like that. You can’t be drunk and sober at the same time. You can’t be stoned
and straight at the same time and that kind of thing. But then the other two states that are
mentioned in this five-state model, one is called Turia and one is called Turiatika in Sanskrit.
And in Sanskrit, Turia literally just means the fourth. It’s called that very unimaginatively,
because there are the first three states, gross, subtle, causal, that’s three, and then, well, the
fourth. So they just call it the fourth, that’s Turia.
But then there’s Turia, and then there’s beyond Turia, so the ultimate state, Turiatita. And these
are held to be absolute states. So we have these three relative states and two absolute states.
The absolute states, unlike the relative states, are actually said to be ever-present.
They’re always present, whether you know them or not, and they are sort of a core of human
overall awareness and consciousness. They have, ultimately, two aspects of the same ground of
being.
But there are two different aspects, you can think of them as two steps to ultimate or two
dimensions of an ultimate, but there are some differences. So what Turia is, is a minute ago we
were talking about just that pure self that isn’t any object, and it’s just a pure awareness that
stands back and just witnesses everything equally.
And so it stands as things like, I see that mountain, but I’m not that mountain. I see this table,
but I’m not this table. I have sensations, but I’m not those sensations. I have feelings, but I’m not
those feelings.
I have thoughts, I’m not those thoughts. So what am I? Okay, I’m just this pure witnessing
awareness that itself can’t be seen. If you see anything, that’s just another object. So it’s just the
vast emptiness, radically free of any objects, any phenomena, sometimes called emptiness, the
abyss, and so on.
Now, that’s described usually just like that, in what would sort of be a little bit more kind of
cognitive terms. But it turns out it also has a feeling that goes with it. And the feeling is one of,
well, first of all, we said that there’s one of the qualifying characteristics of this just pure
witnessing is a freedom.
And the feeling of that freedom is just a radical release. The traditions refer to it actually as
ananda, almost bliss. It’s an ecstatic letting go of everything. And because you’re no longer
stuck in anything, you no longer exist as a mortal, finite, suffering thing. Just like if you’re getting
released from prison after 20 years of being falsely accused and stuck in prison, then you get
out and you walk outside and you’re like,
ah, so you have this great happiness and joy. So usually Turia has freedom and the feeling of
that freedom is some sort of happiness or joy or even bliss or ecstasy. And so that freedom is
one of the reasons that things like enlightenment or awakening are always described as an
emancipation.
You actually are just free of anything that binds you, um, and so that’s a witness and it’s
standing back from everything as a witness. So it’s neti neti. I’m not this, I’m not that, and so
that’s its radical freedom. So bliss is the feeling of the freedom of the witness. And so that’s kind
of, that’s what feeling goes with that state. Now, as you move from just pure witnessing into
Turiatita, the fifth and highest state, then all of a sudden the witness isn’t just standing back and
just letting everything arise without any judgment.
It’s not for or against anything. The ozone hole arises. It’s just aware of it. Somebody wins a
lottery and gets ten billion dollars. It’s just aware of it. No positive or negative judgment. But
again, this is a witness of radically everything that’s arising. But all of a sudden, as you move to
the next state, the witness itself starts to let go and it just becomes one with everything that it’s
witnessing. So it’s no longer a sense of, oh, there’s the mountain. I’m not the mountain. I’m
witnessing it. It’s I don’t see the mountain. I am the mountain. The mountain is actually rising
within my awareness. It’s arising within me, just like the room you’re in right now.
If you just look at it in terms of just your separate body, then clearly your body is in the room. But
if you just let your mind relax into an open awareness, then the room is in your awareness. So
you’re not in the room. The room is in you, and that’s absolute awareness, and that doesn’t just
go for the room. The whole building is within you. The entire universe is arising within you, and
there’s a sense of absolute oneness with all of that.
And so this is sometimes called things like ultimate unity, consciousness, or divine oneness, or
even things like cosmic consciousness sort of thing. So what happens there is all of a sudden
you’re not just standing back in a stance of freedom with a blissful joyous “yah, I’m free of all
that crap.” All of a sudden it’s not a sense of freedom, it’s a sense of radical fullness because
you are literally everything that’s arising and the corresponding emotion or feeling there is not
being free from all of that, it’s loving all of that.
So love becomes the predominant emotion of this ultimate unity consciousness because you’re
literally embracing everything that’s arising and there’s no separate you. You simply are the sum
total of everything that’s arising moment to moment and that carries this overflowing sense of
loving, embracing and again that’s big love. It’s not small love. This is I just don’t love this part
and I hate that part. It’s I love both the small love and I love the small hate. I’m embracing both
of those and that’s one of the hardest things to intellectually understand about these ultimate all-
inclusive states is just how radically all-inclusive they are. Because again that really does mean,
okay, I have to find that part of me that loves terrorist attacks or that loves global warming
because we’re talking about the very glue of existence. These things exist. Of course, they have
a ground of being.
We’re not saying whether they’re good or bad. Adolf Hitler and Mother Teresa, same ground of
being. It’s not, oh, Saint Teresa has a lot more ground and Hitler doesn’t have very much. No,
same ground of being for all of them.
And the glue of that is metaphorically, in a sense, because again, the difficulty of applying
concepts to these all-inclusive realities. But the generalized notion from a whole lot of traditions
is that when that’s what they mean when they say something like “God is love.”
And so that love is something that you’re looking at from an interior perspective. But it’s the
subjective glue that actually holds the whole universe together and so when you feel that you
feel this extraordinarily deep connection with everything that’s arising and nothing is alien to you
and also again because it’s all-embracing there’s nothing outside of you that can crash into you
and hurt you so there’s no other therefore no fear and there’s also nothing that you could just
obsessively want and desire because that’s already arising inside of you inside of your
awareness. And so these two really primary feelings of freedom and the bliss or ec
stasy or joy that that generates and then fullness and the love and embrace and warm hugging
that comes out of that and they’re both very important you don’t have really just one or the other.
You can track your spiritual growth not just by checking and seeing how well are you doing with
witnessing and then how well are you doing with non-dual oneness awareness but how are you
doing with joy and how are you doing with love because these represent both the freedom and
the fullness that you’re getting from the overall ground. So that’s what’s great about it and love
really does put a smile on everything and now we’re open to more and more and more and more
as Trey and I continue to grow.
Thank you for this brilliant explanation. You know, I have to tell you, there were times in my life
when I started to experience this for the first time and that was, I mean, I really thought at this
time, okay, this is it, you know, that’s the end.
And then, of course, I lost it and this was horrible. That was quite deep, deep suffering and I
didn’t understand what was happening. So this was a moment when I found your books and
found an explanation of what was happening with me, also with my spiritual master, you know,
whom I had put on a throne, you know, and with your view of the shadow, you know, and this
was really the first time in my life that I felt concepts can be really healing.
You know, they are not just concepts. They are psychoactive right? Yeah, absolutely. So
speaking about this love, which is everywhere and it’s including everywhere. So let’s talk about
a very special guy in this time.
Mr. Trump. Ah. So, um, you know, we talk about the we have spoken about the development
stages and I guess one of the arrogance of the psycho-spiritual scenes was to think it will go
now further and further and further. Can you give a comment on what’s happening right now in
the US and in the world?
Yeah, part of… Well, I guess I would preface it with a little bit of historical background. Which is
this whole notion that human beings aren’t just put here with a fixed nature and they just sort of
live out their life with that fixed nature, you know, doing better or worse with it. But not really
developing and not really evolving in an evolutionary sense. And so as we look at how history
unfolded for human beings we can certainly actually see various large epochs where just in very
general terms,
broader and more inclusive evolutionary stages continued to unfold. And we mentioned Gebser
before. It’s sort of an archaic to a magic to a mythic to a rational to a pluralistic integral, which is
sort of right where we are now on the edge of what Graves called a monumental leap to second
tier, where we actually have an integrated stance, which has never happened before really
anywhere.
And we’ll come back to that, of course. But this whole notion of a gradient goes all the way back
to what’s somewhat misappropriately called the Great Chain of Being. And the Great Chain of
Being is mislabeled because the dimensions in the Great Chain weren’t really just rigid levels
stacked on top of each other.
They transcended and included. So to give the Christian version of the Great Chain, it went from
matter to body. The difference between matter and body was matter’s dead, body’s living. So
matter to body, to mind, to soul, to spirit.
And the whole notion there was that in order for something to appear in this manifest universe,
that it was created, it was an outflow of this ultimate ground. And this ground had been doing
this over and over and over, you know, a gazillion times.
But it would start out as itself and then throw itself outward. So it would, to use the Christian
terms, you find essentially similar types of terms in, well we talked about the five states, for
example.
You find, sort of throughout the world’s great mystical traditions, you find some version of a
Great Chain. Actually, author Lovejoy, in his book called “The Great Chain of Being,”
demonstrated that as a concept, the Great Chain was the single most widely adopted worldview
in all of human history, literally.
I mean, you find it even right up to the German idealists, for example. They’re essentially
tracking these dimensions as they unfold and evolve, unfold. So, you have this notion of spirit
throwing itself outward.
So, it throws itself outward to a lesser form called soul, and that keeps going to a lesser form
called mind, and that’s an even lesser form called body, and then that finally crashes out at just
the dead, insentient, lowest, densest thing you can have, and sort of as far as things could go,
they had to stop somewhere at the bottom.
That was the bottom, and so then the Big Bang blew into existence. And at the Big Bang, there
was just the lowest level, there was just matter. There were no living bodies, there were no
symbolic minds, there were no self-illumined souls, just matter, and it started to unfold from
quarks to atoms to molecules, and that was just all matter.
And then at some point, a number of very large molecules came together in a stunning leap and
created a living cell. So now bodies are introduced. So then bodies, we undergo body
development. Individual cells came together into multicellular organisms.
Those organisms became more and more complex, differentiated, integrated. And it appears
each of these became a little bit more conscious. And then at some point, with mammals and
into primates and then into humans, some sort of mental capacities started to emerge.
And so we actually got the introduction of mind in the evolutionary stream. And so we’ve gone
from matter to body to mind, sort of the way the Great Chain had it. And then we’re right now on
the verge of more collective movements into what was called soul.
And in the Eastern traditions, that’s the subtle dimension. And so we’re right on the verge there,
on the way back to realization of spirit. And any person at any time can undertake practices to
help them fully realize spirit right now.
But as this collective return, that seems to be happening. So all of the Great Nest theorists,
because again, this wasn’t really rigid. It wasn’t like rungs in a ladder. It was like unfolding
spheres.
So I call it the Great Nest. It’s a much more accurate view of it. And this whole, the movement
outward and downward, the spirit throws itself out, was called involution. But Plotinus called it E-
flux.
And then once that happened, and you have the big bang, matter blows into existence, then the
return, evolution, can occur. And Plotinus called that re-flux, and it was often just called
evolution.
So you have involution, evolution. Every great nest theorist described a great nest process.
Even Hegel gave his version, Schelling gave his version. And then after that, evolution could
start occurring.
So Schelling’s version was, spirit goes out of itself all the way down to create subconscious
nature. And then that evolution starts, nature evolves back to a self-conscious mind, and then
mind and nature return and are united in spirit.
But this was just the whole general process, and then what happens after that occurs, it all
dissolves, starts all over again, and it’s done this billions and billions and billions of times. So, all
of that, of course, is metaphysical.
But what Lovejoy demonstrated was that the Great Chain of Being, not only was the most
common, not the only one, but it was the majority of smart individuals at any time tended to
subscribe to some version of a greatness view of reality.
And that view remained, all the way from the Pre-Socratics and early Greece, all the way up to
and including the Western Enlightenment. The primary concept in the Western Enlightenment,
according to Charles Taylor, was what the French philosopher called the “System de la Nature,”
in other words, the great universal interlocking system of nature.
It wasn’t atomistic and all that, it was a great systems theory view of nature. But they
approached it by measurement, and measurement is much easier to do on exterior objective
things than it is on interior.
So almost accidentally, all of reality got reduced to the lower right quadrant. It was what John
Locke called the Great Interlocking Order. So it was viewed as this big, interacting system where
everything was interwoven with everything else, except these were all material exteriors.
So there were no interiors, and that was really a problem. And that was sometimes called the
crime of the Enlightenment, was the reduction of everything to that lower right quadrant. So that
goes forward a couple of hundred years.
And some individuals kept trying to study interior dimensions. And those, of course, were
extremely important because in integral theory, of course, we have the so-called four quadrants.
And those are just major dimensions that you need to include if you want any sort of a
comprehensive point of view.
So we say quadrants, levels, lines, states, types.
