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Ken Wilber – Folge 39 Part 5
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Are you hoping to discuss one more big subject? Sure. Yeah. I mean, in all the centuries, the
spiritual traditions and the religions had a very important role. Now, for some centuries, we have
a kind of break with this, you know, and the old churches are dying. You have written a very
small book.
I’m still working through it, but I’m very, very happy about this. I would like to discuss with you
the future of religion. So in Germany, you know, right now, and generally in Europe, I would say
the churches are really dying.
Yeah. Well, and in a certain sense, rightly so, the way they’re done. I mean, in the Middle Ages,
something like 90, 95% of the population was with the church, agreed with the church, was a
member of the church.
In Northern Europe today, it’s 11%. I mean, that’s about as big a drop as you can imagine. And
yet, if you look at, okay, well, what’s somebody being asked to believe in a standard,
conventional, major religious orientation?
And unfortunately, if you look at the stages of growing up in spiritual intelligence, and, of course,
we have empirical data on this. We have work like James Fowler, who took thousands of lives of
religious believers and did standard research, testing on them, and he discovered that there
were around six major stages of development in a person’s spiritual development, which is how
a person just thought of spirituality,
even if they are like an atheist and they have all these reasons for not believing, that’s their
spiritual intelligence operating at an orange level. So spiritual intelligence is just the way both
Paul Tillich and James Fowler describe spirituality in that broad sense as ultimate concern.
So it’s just whatever you’re ultimately concerned about is your spiritual intelligence. And that’s a
multiple intelligence that occurs in that overall growing up developmental sequence of human
beings.
It may be a prism a dozen other multiple intelligences. Cognitive intelligence, emotional
intelligence, moral intelligence, aesthetic intelligence, spiritual intelligence. And spiritual
intelligence is different from waking up.
Waking up is a direct immediate first-person experience. Spiritual intelligence, when you’re at a
stage of spiritual intelligence, like any other stage of growing up, you have no idea you’re at that
stage, you can’t introspect and see it.
If you’re following magic or mythic or rational or pluralistic, you’re interpreting your world that
way, just like a set of grammar, but you have no idea that that’s happening. Unlike waking up
state experiences, if you have an experience of being one with the universe and love and bliss,
you know it.
You’re aware of it. There’s not a problem. So waking up states are all conscious and clear and
understood, but growing up structures are all like grammar. You can’t introspect and see what
they are.
But if you look at Fowler’s stages of spiritual growth and development, they go through
essentially the same kinds of stages that we were using in Gebser’s terms for. They’re sort of an
archaic stage, then the kind of magic stage, then a mythic, Fowler actually called mythic-literal
stage.
So that is something that, for example, if the Bible says Moses parted the Red Sea, then the
mythic-literal stage believes that fully. It’s like absolutely 100% true. And then it moves on up to
more rational stages of spiritual intelligence and there you just think about ultimate concern but
you try to reason about it.
You might even use science. You could be an atheist. You could be an agnostic or you could be
some sort of believer. All of those are orange manifestations of spiritual intelligence at that
stage. And then you have pluralistic spiritual intelligence and then integral which tends to
integrate them all.
The problem is that most dogmatic, Western spiritual beliefs in today’s world are still at the
magic, literal level. So, you find a handful of really sophisticated, very smart Christian
theologians who are giving very profound symbolic interpretations to all of this, coming up with,
well, what being on the cross really meant was Christ was dying to his ego, and then when he
resurrected his awakening to his true self and,
you know, all that kind of stuff, it’s not what fundamentalists believe. They believe he died on the
cross meant he died on the cross, he physically died, and then he resurrected meant, no, his
physical body resurrected and he went to heaven.
Educated people, intelligent educated people, the more educated they are, the less believable
they find mythic-literal religions, and it makes perfect sense. Those are the types of beliefs that a
five to seven-year-old has.
So Santa Claus is real, and the Tooth Fairy is real, and they go to Sunday school, and
Jehovah’s real, and that’s fine. That’s not something that a 35-year-old person should be
believing, and so that’s part of the problem.
So we find, as long as religion is presented that way, and just comes from these earlier, lower
levels of growing up, then the more people continue to grow, the less believable they find those
lower levels, because it’s just…
They’ve grown way beyond that, and so my whole point about a Religion of Tomorrow is that
there really are a lot of other things that if you take absolutely everything worldwide and
throughout all of history that called itself spiritual and you put all of that on the table, then you’ll
find a lot of things going on, many of which are extremely important but never got that much
attention, but it clearly points to something very, very important.
And one of those is not just this spiritual intelligence in growing up, although that’s important. It’s
important because you can take your spiritual intelligence and move it up. You can start thinking
rationally about spirit. You can start thinking pluralistically about spirit.
You can start thinking integrally about spirit. You don’t have to think just in terms of magic and
mythic terms. And so that’s one thing that many religions don’t realize. Is that there is that
developmental sequence and they can move to higher and higher stages that also fit with
science from that stage and from an education at that stage and can be worked into a person, a
very intelligent educated person’s overall worldview.
And something like that will have to happen for any religion of tomorrow that’s gonna actually
continue to exist and not just go extinct like the present religions are on their way. Yeah, they’re
11% now, they’ll be at 5% tomorrow and then nothing.
Then there’s another thing that goes back quite far and that it does have to do with those states
of consciousness that you can directly realize and the whole program called waking up or
enlightenment or awakening.
And this is a type of realization that we do find worldwide in virtually every culture going back
thousands of years. William James wrote a classic textbook on it called The Varieties of
Religious Experience.
And what we notice about that kind of spirituality is that’s not just a mythic belief or I believe in
like the Apostles‘ Creed or the Nicene Creed. It’s I believe in the one and only Son of God who
is dead and resurrected three days later.
Now lives on the right hand of God, and that’s just all mythic stories. The other type of
spirituality, which was always much less common and was often referred to as esoteric or even
hidden, as opposed to the exoteric myths and stories and all of that.
And these were the things that really were the paths of liberation. They were ways of waking up,
and they weren’t ways to just adopt belief systems. They were actual practices. They were
psychotechnologies of consciousness transformation.
You’re supposed to actually transform your consciousness into this deeper, more awakened
form, and there are practices you can do to help with that. And they were all referred to with
words like awakening or waking up because in comparison to these profound, direct, immediate
experiences, not just stories and myths and all that, but your own personal, first-person, direct
experiences,
the reality disclosed with that, and realized with that, seems so much more real than typical
ordinary life. That typical life is literally just called a dream. That’s just a dream world. And when
you have these experiences, it really feels like you’re waking up, even just going, whoa, and we
all know what normally it feels like.
You know, you have a dream at night and it can even be a nightmare. So if I can wake up in the
morning and you go, wow, probably that’s not real. Well, guess what? That can happen with the
waking state too.
You can wake up to that. So that’s an important part of a spiritual dimension. And unfortunately,
it’s one that gets almost no attention nowadays. Christianity started off in a riot of mystical
experiences and they’re always having like the first Pentecost meeting, there’s always doves
descending or halos of flame and light or Jesus Christ himself comes up out of the Jordan River
and has his own transformative awakening and realize what he really is.
The whole New Testament, its primary topic of concern was something they called
metamorphosis, transformation, awakening. And you would find a teacher in the first century of
Christianity. You would look for a teacher that was called Sanctus which meant sanctified, which
meant awakened.
They had Christ consciousness in them. So St. Paul describes that as, let this consciousness be
in you, which is in Christ Jesus, that we all may be one. That’s a very good description of
ultimate unity, consciousness, and that’s what you had to do to be a Christian at that time.
As it went on and the church became more powerful by around the third century, common era.
And since nobody comes to salvation except by way of Mother Church, this whole mystical stuff,
they weren’t fond of that because mystical experiences had a nasty habit of going straight from
God to you, bypassing the church.
I already say it’s the reason oil companies don’t like solar energy. Because it goes straight from
the sun to you, and they can’t get a hold of it, you know, sell it. So
that became the predominant way.
At that time, if you wanted to become a Christian, you woke up one morning and said, oh, I want
to be a Christian. Previously, you’d have to spend a year or two finding a teacher who was
awakened, then practice a year or two until you got Christ consciousness yourself, and then you
could say you were a Christian.
Now, when it’s all switched over into just this mythic belief, you wake up in the morning, you
want to be a Christian. All you have to do is go out, find a bishop, tell him you want to be a
Christian.
He says, okay, read this, I believe in God’s Son, whose Son was dead and buried three days
resurrected. And then, okay, sign on the bottom line, you sign it, that’s it, you’re a Christian. It’s a
joke.
You don’t have anything else. And he says, pow. So there went the waking up component of
Christianity right off the deep end. And a few, of course, small branches of Christianity kept up
contemplative traditions.
So you would find things like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa and the Victorian Mystics and
Meister Eckhart and stuff like that. But certainly, particularly with the Protestant Reformation and
then into, like in America, what we call Sunday school, which is where all the kids go and say, all
that is, is a list of myths that you’re supposed to believe.
And again, when you’re three or four or five, that’s fine, because all these myths are, they’re like
superheroes. They’re like Superman or Batman. They’re people that can do all these
superhuman things.
Christ can walk on water and turn water into wine and heal the sick and raise the dead and all.
It’s all magic and so and it’s all wonderful. And then as reason and rationality starts to emerge
during the teenage years, then there’s the crisis of faith.
And that’s what humanity on the whole went through with the rise of the Western Enlightenment.
Because all of a sudden, the mythic realities were confronted with rational science and they just
didn’t work.
And so we went through the whole so-called God is dead. And that was a profoundly wrenching
change for human beings. Because previously, all the way back to our beginning, I mean, there
were no atheist tribes.
There were no agnostic tribes. Everybody believed in nature, spirits, or river spirit, or great spirit,
or something. But there was no tribe that was a secular, humanist, atheist tribe. So that whole
huge first part of Western history, God was everywhere.
And then we went through a whole period where God was nowhere. And now what’s happening
with some of these higher stages of development, those are becoming increasingly trans-
rational and trans-personal and spiritual.
So God is coming back. And there’s going to be another wrenching change. It’s sort of God is
everywhere. God is nowhere. Oops! God is everywhere again. But the gods are really different.
One really is trans-rational.
One really is pre-rational. And that’s going to cause some difficulties as the people believe in
trans-personal, trans-rational, non-mythic, non-anthropomorphic spirit. It’s going to be looking at
the people at amber, mythic, literal.
And when they say God, somebody from third tier is saying God, that’s not what I mean by God.
I disagree with that entirely. As a matter of fact, you’re at the opposite end of the spectrum from
where I am.
But so forth that religion of the future. If there is to be one, if it’s going to go forward, it cannot go
forward. And I don’t believe it will. I believe it will continue dying in terms of if all it’s presenting is
a dogmatic, mythic, literal stage of development.
Intelligent people don’t believe that. It just doesn’t make sense and that’s dropping. Two things
have to happen at a minimum. One is we have to help people see that there are higher stages
of spiritual experience that you don’t just have to go magic to mythic and stop.
There’s a rational spiritual intelligence. There’s a pluralistic spiritual intelligence. There’s an
integral spiritual intelligence. And these are all ways that you can use all sorts of other
disciplines.
You can use what you’ve learned in science. You can use what you’ve learned in philosophy.
You can use what you’ve learned in psychology. But you have your own overall worldview that
gives you life meaning.
And that is taking into account your ultimate concern. What do you think is the most important
and the most important and the most important thing you can do? And that’s what spiritual
intelligence helps you figure out.
And we all have one of those intelligences. They’re one of our multiple intelligences. So the first
thing a religion of tomorrow would do is it would say yes we have spiritual intelligence but it
doesn’t just stop at magic and myth.
It keeps going to these higher stages. So and here’s what religion looks like at each of these.
Actually one of my ideas is in any future religion would actually have like a grade school. We
recognize 12 levels of development and you see it differently.
Well religion is the same thing. Here’s your first grade view, here’s your second grade view,
here’s your third grade. Right now it stops at fourth grade. It just stops. But no, no, there’s fifth,
sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth.
So we have to get that up and running and you could be an atheist again. That’s not the point.
The point is that you’re considering what’s ultimately real for you. What’s your ultimate concern?
That’s spiritual intelligence.
But then there’s also spiritual experience, direct immediate spiritual experience. Usually for that
you have to undertake some sort of voluntary practices. You have to meditate, you have to do
Zen, you have to do Christian mystical practices.
Whatever it is, it’s not something that’s generally given to you. We have these states of
consciousness. So even like dreaming and deep dreamless sleep and then Turia and Turiyatita,
meditative traditions have been created that lets consciousness go through all of those.
So you start with your consciousness stuck in the physical material realm. But as you continue,
just practicing awareness, which means you’re going nette, nette, not this, not that, just practice
pure witnessing, pure witnessing, or just pure mindfulness, not any objects of mindfulness, just
pure awareness, pure awareness, then as that happens, at some point, that awareness will
continue into sleep,
and you’ll start lucid dreaming, because you’ve got this thread of consciousness, it’s not just
passing out when you get out of the waking state and into the dream and deep sleep. If you
keep meditating, and generally it takes about 20 years, but we’re finding ways to accelerate this,
but you also start to move your consciousness into deep, dreamless sleep, into formless, pure
awareness, without any objects arising at all.
And so people like Ramana Maharshi used to say, if it is not present in deep, dreamless sleep, it
is not real. And that’s shocking, because it means that all of this is gone in deep dreamless
sleep. But what isn’t gone?
Your own pure awareness. That’s that ever-present ultimate ground. That’s still there, because
that’s ever-present with everything. And so then in Turia, you have an actual waking up to that
pure consciousness, and then in Turiyatita, that pure consciousness reaches out and embraces
absolutely everything that’s arising in a pure, in a pure oneness.
So you have to practice those a little bit. But the people that do them, it’s pretty much
unanimous. It’s like, I’ve seen polls on it, it’s like 99.93% of people that really have profound
satoris will say, oh, no, this is the most real thing I’ve ever experienced.
Everything else pales in comparison. And so we call that waking up, and we call the other
growing up. And both of those would be our, first of all, they’re both absolutely missing from
most religion today.
And particularly the religions that have crashed, they have almost none of them. And so I have
no problem understanding why nobody wants to belong to something like that. It’s
embarrassing, frankly. But if you’re learning how to interpret it, and you’re continuing to grow,
and many of your multiple intelligences, and you’re moving from amber conformance into
orange achievement, and then into pluralistic multiculturalism,
and then into integral ways to pull all of those together, and you’re doing that. And then you’re
also practicing ways to get states of consciousness that are just deeper and deeper and more
luminous and more radiant until you sort of are at the states of embracing everything that’s
arising and carry a sense of being this reality that’s always been there. That would be something
that,
whether you called it religion or a spiritual system or just fun with your life, it would be something
which has been much more attractive and entertaining for individuals. And it’s just sort of my
whole thesis is that if religion is going to go forward into tomorrow, it’s got to include these other
aspects of spirituality that have been categorically ignored because those are where the real
juice is. That’s where the real stuff is. And the stuff we’re happening to get labeled religion right
now,
again, that was fine for 2,000 years ago. It’s a stage a 10-year-old could emerge in a five, six,
seven-year-old today. And otherwise, that’s it, yeah. So that’s what part of a religion of tomorrow
is about. And because there’s so much evidence for these other factors, I mean, the evidence
for waking up stages and experiences, there’s evidence even like Steve and James Fowler for
higher stages of spiritual intelligence in growing up. So we have an enormous amount of
evidence for these things.
What we actually call scientific evidence doesn’t happen to have to be taken on faith. It doesn’t
have to just be a belief that you’re told to adopt, and then when you die, you get to go live in this
mythic heaven where everybody else, or
everybody who hasn’t sinned, is up there. In other words, you’re up there with every boring
person who ever lived.
All the fun people are down in hell having a good time. I mean, it’s just who wants it. But, you
know, let’s imagine a very ethic scientist would come to you and say, you know what, I’m a very
smart guy. Why should I need spiritual intelligence? I’m just concentrating on cognitive
intelligence. Well, I would simply say, if you actually describe to me your life right now, describe
whatever’s meaningful in it, describe what you think is important, what you think is a real
concern for you.
Why do you get out of bed? What are you doing? What vision do you have for your life? Half of
what you tell me, you’ll be using spiritual intelligence. You’re already doing it. So, I mean, I can’t
talk you into it.
You’re doing it. It’s already obvious. So there’s no non-spiritual being, right? No, that’s the whole
point. You don’t have to do that at all. Like I said, you can be a pure atheist, but the only reason
that you’re using spiritual intelligence when you do that is you get to be an atheist by considering
ultimate realities, ultimate concerns.
You’re thinking about those, and that’s the only intelligence that you actually think about some
sort of ultimate reality. When you’re using aesthetic intelligence, you’re just looking at, you know,
the beauty of something present.
If you’re looking at moral intelligence, you’re considering, okay, I should do this in this
circumstance. I should try to help with this injustice, I should, et cetera. But with spiritual
intelligence, you’re saying, okay, wait, what is the most important of the most important of the
most important things for me?
What’s the ultimate concern for me? What do I think is really, really, really real? And if I think
about it and say, I don’t think there’s spirit, but I don’t think there’s… fine, that’s your spiritual
intelligence, and you reach the rational conclusion that there is no spirit, that’s fine.
That’s an orange-level use of spiritual intelligence. So we spoke about the possibility that
everybody can support the development in the whole world, in developing an integral
consciousness.
So you have developed a training, it’s called superhuman. So how can this help somebody to
develop more consciousness? Right, there are several courses and web courses that people
can take. One of the ones that has been pretty popular as an introductory course is indeed
called superhuman operating system.
And the people that created this with me really wanted to reach a fairly conventional audience.
And so they hyped it a little bit like superhuman operating system. But it does go through some
of the basic elements of this overall integral meta-theory, this integral meta-map.
And it walks people through it and it does a good job. I thought it would do good, but I was
frankly surprised at how well it did. It really got out to a very large number of people. We got
outrageously positive feedback and reviews. It seems to really, really help people get an integral
sense of their own life, their own reality, and ways that they can start applying that in their life to
really help it move forward in more satisfying and more meaningful ways. And so I was delighted
to work with them on that, and it’s done really, really quite well. And then we’ll be following that
up with another course as well. But that’s, if people are interested in that, you can go to one
word,
fivementalmodels.com, so fivementalmodels.com, and people can see about the course, and if
they want to sign up, they can certainly sign up for that. If they just want to check out some
information and see dialogues and discussions on integral theory, I would recommend
integrallife.com.
If you put all the links under this podcast, I think it’s the best way to bring it to the people, and I
really can recommend it because, you know, I have to say, before I really started to understand
your work, I thought this is just a mental concept, you know, and it has to come from my heart
and so on and so on, but I really can say it has really a psychoactive power inside, you know.
It’s not only activating the mind, it’s really activating the whole system, you know. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I really do hope that comes through. I know that there does tend to be a fairly, well, in
introductory versions, I think the model is fairly simple and fairly straightforward, especially
considering how much information is actually integrating or taking into account. And then, of
course, you can get more and more detailed and deeper and deeper into it and stuff like that,
but when I was writing it, I always really did want a strong heart connection with it. I really
wanted to convey, in some cases, almost poetic statements of it. And it was interesting, and I
don’t mean to blow my own horn here, but just as a descriptive statement of the three, sort of,
I’ve had dozens of absolutely extraordinary spiritual teachers.
But the three that I consider my most rooted teachers, all three of them told me that I had, that
there was a special thing about me. And not one of them said my brain. All three of them said
my heart.
And I always thought that was great, because that’s sort of what I wanted to feel like. So I often
say, yes, Esther, yes, Esther. So it does tend to get a bit heavy, because you do have to get into
some details.
But there’s a lot of heart behind it, and particularly if you start applying it, you find it actually
gives you a way to reach out to literally everybody. You find a reason that everybody’s right, and
you make room for everybody, and that’s as loving and as heart-opening as you can get.
What’s really touching me is to see more and more how many people you have influenced with
your work. How many people have based their work, their understanding of their work on your
landscapes. My question is how we can support you from Germany.
What’s a really good support for you? Well, I appreciate that very much. Again, the primary item,
I think, for humans right now is to just increasingly just think integrally. And the more we just
keep thinking integrally, the more we find that we start to behave differently.
We behave integrally. And the more we start to behave integrally, the more we actually start
changing the world. And so just the simple fact of whether it’s picking up one of my books, or
whether it’s taking what you understand about it, and giving a course, or maybe it’s starting a
local discussion group.
Whatever profession you’re in, if you’re from being a doctor to a lawyer, to whatever profession
you’re in, waitress to a gardener. If you’ve been thinking integrally, then you’re going to start to
see ways in your profession that you can make a little bit more integral.
And if you just start doing that a little bit, and when people ask, what are you doing? Give them
a very simple explanation. Don’t give them the whole. One of the things that happens is people
get very excited about this because it’s just, you know, so I think they knew it, but they just never
seen it written down.
And so when they read this, they go, I knew that, I knew that, I knew that, you know, okay, he
wrote it down, but I knew that. And so when I get on to it, then one of the things to do is like their
friends start to get really spooked.
Because every time they see this person coming, they’ve got about 10 Wilbur books, you know,
running at them. Like, you guys have to read all of these and their friends just run. So be careful
about that.
But just small little steps forward as you increase your understanding and then carry it into
behavior, these small things really add up. We’re of course going to, at some point in this year or
two, we’re going to reboot Integral Institute.
We started it almost a little over 15 years ago. And then for a particular point, I simply set it aside
and just sort of put it in hibernation. But now we’re getting to the point where a lot of people are
starting to apply this in a lot of areas.
So we’re seeing, well, like Architectural Digest did an entire year’s worth of articles with one
article each month. So 12 large articles in this overall presentation. They called the presentation
the big rethink.
And it was a complete reinterpretation of all of architecture, all of it, materials and gradients, its
history, et cetera, an interpretation of that using an overall integral viewpoint. And so it’s those
kinds of things happening.
We’re seeing integral medicine groups start up, integral education groups start up. And in the
first 10 years after the book, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, we sort of gave a large boost to this. We
had a lot of theoretical conferences and people, you know, engaging the theory, arguing, adding,
et cetera.
At the end of that 10-year period, the basic theory was still the basic theory. It was still there.
And so a lot of people said, okay, that’s enough. I’m just using the theory. So they went out and
they did architecture and they did medicine and they did art and they did psychotherapy and
they did education and so on.
And in each of those cases, if you were doing like integral medicine, there wasn’t as much need
for you to keep up with what they were doing in integral art or integral history or even integral
education.
And so all of these groups tended to just kind of start moving apart. And on the one hand, that’s
fine because it’s just part of this integral framework moving out into the real world. But at least
for a while, it became clear that we’d also like to give all of them an umbrella where they can at
least check in and see what others
are doing.
And so that’s what we’re going to reboot Integral Institute as and we have, at the last count,
there are over 60 human disciplines that had been completely reinterpreted using an integral
framework. And so we want and all of them are out there doing stuff but they’re not staying in
touch with each other. So we want to do that. And the other thing is we do want to have an
international branch on the site so that every international group or organization will have a
place on the site as well. There are integral institutes in at least a dozen countries and almost all
of them are doing really, really interesting stuff. Germany, of course, has a terrific community as
well as just a lot of organizations using these things in their own way. But we just somehow want
to kind of make a place where people can come and just see what else is going on. So we’re
getting ready to hear that. But otherwise, whatever anybody can do to just forward their own
understanding and then take that into their own behavior wherever they are, that works great.
Are you working right now on a book?
Yeah. Part of the strangeness of recent years is I always thought that the stream of new ideas
would just kind of go like that as I got older. And that at some point when I was, you know, 70,
80, something like that, that those would just kind of, you know, naturally just sort of subside.
And I always said, then all I was going to do is write novels and bad poetry, because I wouldn’t
have to, you know, have footnotes and references and all that kind of stuff. But for some reason,
over the past several years, it’s actually gone like that.
And I went from doing about a book a year to doing about two books a year to doing about three
books a year, which is where I am now. And I’m just overwhelmed with writing this stuff. And I’m
continuing to do it because it still seems to be good stuff.
It’s not just creaky old, you know, falling apart stuff. I mean, it’s really good stuff. So yeah, I’ve
got several books, three, four, maybe five that are almost 80 or 90% done. That’s another
problem. I never have several books going at once.
I’d always just write a book and finish it and write a book and finish it, write a book and finish it.
And now I’ve got them just spreading out everywhere and I’m actually having an organizational
problem and how to fit them in some sort of priority and get them done. I’m always kind of
jumping around going back and forth. But yeah, working on several. I’m very happy to hear this.
Ken, I would like to close our talk with two or three personal questions.
Because we started very personal. So if you would have a wish free, what would you like to still
see accomplished in your life? There’s, I reached a point where I felt that if I died, the remaining
work would be enough to help carry this thing forward. Obviously, and the whole point of course,
I once had a science teacher that said a good theory is one that lasts long enough to get you to
a better theory and my hope about my version of integral theory is that it would be good enough
to last long enough to get us to a better version and I’m my own worst critic. I mean, I keep
watching stuff. I have like just sort of five of just the most fundamental factors in integral theory,
which we call quadrants,
levels, lines, states, and types and I’m always on the lookout for new stuff. If I find it, I’ll add it but
I did reach right after sex, ecology, spirituality, I’d really introduce quadrants along with levels,
lines, states, that if I died after that, that would be good enough to get us to a better one
because it really did seem to be fairly complete and so far I haven’t found anything that’s more
complete, but I keep adding areas and covering areas, and of course evolution itself is still
bringing new stuff, and we have no idea how that will fit with our present orientation. So we’re
going to have artificial intelligence and virtual reality and genetic modifications.
People might live to be hundreds of years old. So, all these things are up in the air. Right now,
my only sense is that I can just keep carrying it forward to flesh out this version, include any new
stuff, and that as more and more people themselves start to move into integral stages of
development, then this kind of work is going to be more attractive to those people.
They’re going to be the kind of people that look at it and say, God, that’s, I get it. That’s what I
want. And so I’m just happy with that part, that this is one fairly decent version that’s gotten out
to a relatively large number of people to have an impact, more than I really thought it would.
And I’ve been very, very happy with that, very gratified with that. And I love to see the places it’s
showing up and how it’s helping, and all that’s wonderful. So I still feel that I could die, get run
over by a bus now, and it would be relatively okay.
But apparently I still have a lot more fiddling to do, so I’m more than happy to do that. Good.
Ken, if you would have to concentrate the essence of your life in one sentence, like a credo, you
know, what’s a credo?
He rode the edge of evolution in the best possible way he could. And Ken, if you would have the
possibility to rent for, let us say, one month all posters in the whole world, all walls. And you
could print it with one sentence or one question.
What would that be? Among all what? All walls on all big buildings in the world. Oh, one single
sentence. Yes. Or a question. Find the place where everybody is right. That’s cool. Ken, so this
last question is very personal.
First, I have to send you very, very warm greetings from my wife. So she and we both want to
ask you how we can support you from here, from outside. And I really mean not only you, but
you personally.
Well, first, I want to thank you. I want to thank you for that. And as specific items come up that
you might be able to directly help me with, I will, I will not forget that the offer has been made
and might very well get in touch with you and let you know.
And that’s a very, very kind thing to say. I appreciate it. Thank you very much, Ken. I’m totally
thankful for this talk. And I very selfishly hope it will not be the last one. My pleasure.
That was a chapter from the podcast „Seen: The Rebellion of the Spirit“ by Ferdinand. I would
be very happy if you could subscribe to my podcast and if I had the opportunity to make a small,
good difference in your life.
