Thus, simply learning systems theory, or the new physics, or learning about Gaia, or thinking holistically, will not necessarily do anything to transform your interior consciousness, because none of those address the interior stages of growth and development. Open any book on systems theory, the new paradigm, the new physics, and so on, and you will learn about how all things are part of a great interconnected Web of Life, and that by accepting this belief, the world can be healed. But rarely will you find a discussion of the many interior stages of the growth of consciousness that alone can lead to an actual embrace of global consciousness. You will find little on preconventional, conventional, postconventional, and post-postconventional stages; nothing on what an enormous amount of research has taught us on the growth of consciousness from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric (or more specifically, the nine or so fulcrums of self unfolding); no hints about how these interior transformations occur, and what you can do to foster them in your own case—thus truly contributing to a worldcentric, global, spiritual consciousness in yourself and others. All you find is: modern science and matriarchal religions all agree that we are parts of the great Web of Life.

The ecological crisis—or Gaia’s main problem—is not pollution, toxic dumping, ozone depletion, or any such. Gaia’s main problem is that not enough human beings have developed to the postconventional, worldcentric, global levels of consciousness, wherein they will automatically be moved to care for the global commons. And human beings develop to those postconventional levels, not by learning systems theories, but by going through at least a half-dozen major interior transformations, ranging from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, at which point, and not before, they can awaken to a deep and authentic concern for Gaia. The primary cure for the ecological crisis is not learning that Gaia is a Web of Life, however true that may be, but learning ways to foster these many arduous waves of interior growth, none of which are addressed by most of the new-paradigm approaches.

In short, systems theory and the Web-of-Life theories do not generally transform consciousness because, hobbled with their subtle reductionism, they do not adequately address the interior stages of consciousness development—where the real growth occurs. They might be a fine place for one to start on the spiritual path—they are helpful in suggesting a more unified life—but they themselves do not appear to be an effective path to that life. They do not offer, in short, any sort of sustained interior practice that can actualize the higher and more global stages of consciousness. And, sadly, in claiming to offer a completely “holistic” view of the world, they often prevent or discourage people from taking up a genuine path of interior growth and development, and thus they hamper the evolution of just that global consciousness that they otherwise so nobly espouse.

If your idea of spirituality is feeling good, then childhood might be Eden;1 but if your idea also involves doing good, by taking the role of others, and projecting your consciousness through multiple perspectives and pluralistic outlooks so as to include compassion, caring, and altruism, then childhood is a realm of diminished expectations, no matter how wonderfully fluid and flowing its egocentrism.

We can say, then, that infants and children at the very least seem to have access to some types of spiritual experiences (as peak experiences), even though these are interpreted through frontal structures that are preconventional and egocentric (and not, as it were, very spiritual themselves). But in possibly being in touch with the deeper psychic (or soul) realm, infancy and childhood might evidence a connection with one type of spiritual dimension, even though, once again, it is of necessity interpreted and expressed through preconventional and egocentric channels, and thus is not spiritual in any pure sense.

IT NOW SEEMS APPARENT that there are at least four major inadequacies to the Great Chain as it was traditionally conceived, and in order to bring it into the modern and postmodern world—and develop a truly integral approach—these shortcomings need to be carefully addressed.1

The first, as we saw, is that the four quadrants were very seldom differentiated on an adequate scale. Thus, the great traditions rarely understood that states of consciousness (UL) have correlates in the organic brain (UR), a fact that has revolutionized our understanding of psychopharmacology, psychiatry, and consciousness studies. Likewise, the traditions evidenced little understanding that individual awareness (UL) is profoundly molded by both its background cultural worldviews (LL) and the modes of techno-economic production (LR) in which it finds itself. This left the Great Chain open to devastating critiques from the Enlightenment, from modern cognitive science, from neuropsychiatry, and from postmodern cultural and historical studies, among others, all of which demonstrated that consciousness is not merely a disembodied, transcendental noumenon, but is deeply embedded in contexts of objective facts, cultural backgrounds, and social structures. The Great Chain theorists had no believable response to these charges (precisely because they were deficient in these areas).

As we saw, each of the vertical levels of the Great Chain needs to be differentiated into at least four horizontal dimensions (intentional, behavioral, cultural, social). The Great Nest desperately needs to be modernized and postmodernized: it needs to recognize the importance of cultural background, relativistic surface structures and contexts, correlations with modern scientific discoveries, sensitivity to minorities that the mythic-agrarian structure often marginalized, the importance of pluralistic voices, and so on. Only as body, mind, soul, and spirit are differentiated into the Big Three can these objections be handled.

The second inadequacy is that the level of mind itself needs to be subdivided in the light of its early development. Here the contributions of Western psychology are decisive. To put it in a nutshell, the mind itself has at least four major stages of growth: magic (2–5 years), mythic (6–11 years), rational (11 onward), and integral-aperspectival or vision-logic (adulthood, if then). Precisely because the infantile and childish origins of the preformal levels of magic and mythic were not clearly understood, the traditions often confused them with the postformal states of psychic and subtle, and this pre/post fallacy haunts most of the perennial philosophy, injecting it not only with truly enlightened wisdom, but substantial stretches of superstition.

The third inadequacy: Because the traditional Great Chain theorists had a poor understanding of the early, infantile, prerational stages of human development, they likewise failed to grasp the types of psychopathologies that often stem from complications at these early stages. In particular, psychosis, borderline, and neurotic diseases often stem from problems at the early fulcrums of self-development, and can best be approached with an understanding of their developmental dimensions. Meditation—which is a way to carry development forward into the transpersonal—will not, as a rule, cure these prepersonal lesions (as hosts of American practitioners found out the hard way).

Meditation—which is a way to carry development forward into the transpersonal—will not, as a rule, cure these prepersonal lesions (as hosts of American practitioners found out the hard way).

The fourth inadequacy in the traditional Great Chain is its lack of understanding of evolution, an understanding that is also a rather exclusive contribution of the modern West. This is easily remedied, because, as many theorists have pointed out, if you tilt the Great Chain on its side and let it unfold in time—instead of being statically given all at once, as traditionally thought—you have the outlines of evolution itself. Plotinus temporalized = evolution.

In other words, evolution to date—starting with the Big Bang—has unfolded approximately three-fifths of the Great Chain—matter, sensation, perception, impulse, image, symbol, concept, rule, and formal, in essentially the order suggested by the Great Nest. All that is required is to see that the Great Chain does not exist fully given and statically unchanging, but rather evolves or develops over great periods of time. And the fact is, despite the bluff of Western biologists, nobody really understands how higher stages emerge in evolution—unless we assume it is via Eros, or Spirit-in-action.

In my definitions, “social” refers to the Lower-Right quadrant (the interobjective dimension, including forms of the techno-economic base, social systems, institutions, and physical structures), and “cultural” refers to the Lower-Left quadrant (the intersubjective dimension, including collective worldviews, ethics, values, and meaning). The preponderance of evidence clearly suggests that evolution occurs in both of these quadrants, as it certainly does in the others. But this needs to be qualified in several respects.

For example, to say that a given society is at a magical level of development does not mean that everybody in that society is at that level. It only means that the average level of consciousness is generally magical, and that, more specifically, the defining laws, principles of cultural organization, and mores of everyday reality stem predominantly from the magical worldview. But any number of people can be above or below that average in their own case.

Evolution in the cultural domain is a sensitive topic, with potential for abuse when not handled with care. Still, the evidence for it continues to mount, and numerous theorists have embraced it in qualified forms. (As we saw in chapter 4, for several decades the green meme successfully fought any evolutionary thinking in academia, understandably concerned over its potential for abuse. But post-green developments have managed to combine green sensitivity to multiple perspectives with second-tier constructions.)

the entire topic [of sociocultural evolution] itself remains deeply problematic to many theorists—especially to liberals (who suspect it of marginalizing tendencies), traditionalists (who do not understand why so much of religion was left behind by modern “evolution”), and Romantics (who often believe in devolution). Since evolution is one of the crucial ingredients—some would say the crucial ingredient—of the modern scientific worldview, and if we truly wish an integral embrace of premodern, modern, and postmodern, then we need a way to put the theory of evolution in a context that both honors its truths and curtails its abuses.

In recent times, cultural evolution has been championed, in various ways, by Gerald Heard, Michael Murphy, W. G. Runciman, Sisirkumar Ghose, Alastair Taylor, Jean Houston, Duane Elgin, Jay Earley, Daniel Dennett, Jürgen Habermas, Robert Bellah, Ervin Laszlo, Kishore Gandhi, and Jean Gebser, to name a few.10

Fortunately, several theorists, who are equally familiar with the higher levels of consciousness, have used their expertise to trace consciousness evolution on the whole. Of these, particular mention might be made of the work of Jean Houston (especially Life-Force, a superb book based in part on the important work of Gerald Heard; see chart 9a), Duane Elgin (whose Awakening Earth is a masterful overview of consciousness evolution; see chart 9b), and Allan Combs (the only reason I have not listed Combs on the chart is that his wonderful book The Radiance of Being is a summary and overview of Gebser/Aurobindo/ Wilber, with many original insights, but without a radically new series of proposed stages, although he does offer his own model).12

During the past several decades, it has been common for liberal scholars to assume that any sort of evolutionary theory of necessity marginalizes various peoples, and thus prevents their gaining the natural freedom that is every being’s birthright. It has increasingly become obvious, however, that freedom is perhaps best defined as the freedom to have access to every level in the extraordinary spectrum of consciousness. The only way those levels become available is through growth and development and unfolding, and thus those liberal scholars who have shunned evolution have shunned an access to freedom for all of those whom they wished to protect. (See Afro-Caribbean specialist Maureen Silos’s brilliant exposure of the standard liberal stance as being, in fact, highly reactionary, and evolutionary thinking as being the truly liberal stance, “The Politics of Consciousness,” in J. Crittenden, Kindred Visions.)

The crucial issue is this: In order for cultural evolution and morphogenesis to be embraced as an explanatory principle in human history, it faces exactly the profound objections that have led traditionalists, Romantics, and liberal social theorists to reject it. In other words, if evolution is operating in the human domain, how can we account for Auschwitz? And how dare we make judgments about some cultural productions being more evolved than others? How dare we make such value rankings? What kind of arrogance is that?

The traditionalists and today’s perennial philosophers, for example, cannot believe in cultural evolution because of such modern horrors as Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Chernobyl. How can we say evolution is at work in humans when it produces such monsters? Better to deny evolution altogether than to get caught up in having to explain those obscenities.

The Romantic critics of evolution, on the other hand, are responding to what seems to be a universal human sympathy for a time prior to today’s turmoils. Primal men and women, on the whole, did not suffer the disasters of modernity—no industrial pollution, little slavery, few property disputes, and so on. By any scale of quality, haven’t we in fact gone downhill? Isn’t it time to get back to nature, back to the noble savage, and thus find a truer self, a fairer community, a richer life?

The liberal social theorists likewise have every reason to recoil in horror from the notion of cultural evolution. Its unbelievably crude forms, such as Social Darwinism, are not just lacking in compassion; much more sinister, this type of crass “evolutionism,” pressed into the hands of moral tyrants, would produce exactly the type of ruinous and barbaric notions of the superman, the master race, the coming human demigods, who would chillingly goose-step their way into history, who would in fact inscribe their beliefs on the tortured flesh of millions, would press their ideology into the gas chambers and let it all be settled there. Liberal social theorists, reacting to such horrors, naturally tend to look upon any sort of “social hierarchy” as a prelude to Auschwitz.

Obviously, if consciousness evolution is to be used as any sort of explanatory principle, it faces several stern difficulties. What is therefore required is a set of tenets that can explain both advance and regression, good news and bad news, the ups and downs of an evolutionary thrust that is nonetheless as active in humans as it is in the rest of the Kosmos. Otherwise, we face the extremely bizarre situation of driving a virulent wedge right through the middle of the Kosmos: everything nonhuman operates by evolution; everything human does not.

What are the principles that can rehabilitate cultural evolution in a sophisticated form, and thus reunite humanity with the rest of the Kosmos, and yet also account for the ups and downs of consciousness unfolding? Here are some of the central explanatory principles that I believe we need:

Further, by making that distinction (average and advanced), we can immediately see that, whereas some past epochs might look “very spiritual,” their most common or average mode (such as magic or mythic) was actually preformal, not postformal. Only the fairly rare shaman, saint, or sage actually evolved into higher levels of psychic, subtle, or causal adaptation; and therefore the profoundly spiritual stages (psychic, subtle, causal)—as a common, average mode of consciousness—exist, if at all, in our collective future, not our past. Of course, any individual during any period—past, present, or future—can develop into the higher realms under his or her own power. But whole epochs of postformal spirituality, as a common attainment, were almost certainly never present at any point in past history. Scholars who mistake magic and mythic for authentic spirituality, and who therefore look at the past and think all forms of spirituality are behind us, are, I believe, in for a pleasant surprise. The most advanced figures of the past were plumbing the depths of the transpersonal levels, and those lie in our collective future, not our collective past.

In the extraordinary archeology of Spirit, those spiritual pioneers were ahead of their time, and they are still ahead of ours. They are thus voices, not of our past, but of our future; they point to emergents, not exhumations; they urge us forward, not backward. As the growing tip of humanity, they forged a future telos through which the trunk of humanity is now slowing heading, not as a rigid pregiven, but as a gentle persuasion. They are figures of the deepest layers of our own true Self, layers that whisper to us from the radiant depths of a greater tomorrow.

In attempting to understand postmodernity, let us ask again: what is it about postmodernity that makes it so different from modernity? We will see that there are also many items, but they can all be very generally summarized as an attempt to be inclusive—to avoid “marginalizing” the many voices and viewpoints that a powerful modernity often overlooked; to avoid a “hegemony” of formal rationality that often represses the nonrational and the irrational; to invite all races, all colors, all people, all genders into a rainbow coalition of mutual respect and mutual recognition. This inclusiveness is often simply called “diversity” (or “multiculturalism” or “pluralism”), and it is at the heart of the constructive postmodern agenda, in ways that we will explore throughout this chapter.

Accordingly, in writings such as “An Integral Theory of Consciousness,”16 I have stressed the need for an approach to consciousness that differentiates-and-integrates all four quadrants (or simply the Big Three of I, we, and it; or first-person, second-person, and third-person accounts: the 1-2-3 of consciousness studies).

The materialist reduces the mind to the brain, and since the brain is indeed part of the organism, there is no dualism: the mind/body problem is solved! And that is correct—the brain is part of the organism, part of the physical world, so there is no dualism; nor are there any values, consciousness, depth, or divinity anywhere in the resultant universe. And that reductionism is exactly the “solution” that the physicalist imposes on reality, a solution still rampant in most forms of cognitive science, neuroscience, systems theory, and so on: reduce the Left to the Right and then claim you have solved the problem.

But the reason most people, even most scientists, are uneasy with that “solution”—and the reason the problem remains a problem—is that, even though materialism announces that there is no dualism, most people know otherwise, because they feel the difference between their mind and their body (between their thoughts and their feelings)—they feel it every time they consciously decide to move their arm, they feel it in every exercise of will—and they also feel the difference between their mind and their Body (or between the subject in here and the objective world out there). And the average person is right on both counts. To take them in that order:

There is a distinction between mind (formop) and felt body (vital and sensorimotor), and this can be experienced in the interior or Left-Hand domains. It is not a dualism, but is rather a case of “transcend and include,” and almost every rational adult has a sense of the transcend part, in that the mind can, on a good day, control the body and its desires. All of that is phenomenologically true for the Left-Hand domains. But none of those interior stages of qualitative development (from body to mind to soul to spirit) are captured when “body” means Right-Hand organism and “mind” means Right-Hand brain—all of those qualitative distinctions are completely lost in material monism, which does not solve the problem but obliterates it.

The dualist, on the other hand, acknowledges as real both consciousness and matter, but generally despairs of finding any way to relate them. “Mind” in the general sense of “interiors” and “Body” in the general sense of “exteriors” seem to be separated by an unbridgeable gulf—a dualism between subject and object. And at the level of formal operational thinking (or reason in general), at which this discussion usually takes place, the dualists are right: inside and outside are a very real dualism, and attempts to deny that dualism can almost always be shown to be facile, a semantic sleight-of-hand that verbally claims that subject and object are one, but which still leaves the self looking at the world out there which seems as separate as ever.

This is where the transrational stages of development have so much to offer this discussion. In the disclosure known as satori, for example, it becomes clear that the subject and object are two sides of the same thing, that inside and outside are two aspects of One Taste. How to relate them is not the problem, according to the clear consensus of the many individuals who have tapped into this wave of development. The problem, rather, is that this genuinely nondual solution is not something that can be fully grasped at the rational level. In fact, simply stating, in a rational fashion, that subject and object are nondual leads to all sorts of intractable problems and paradoxes.13 Besides, if this nondualism could be genuinely grasped in rational terms, then the great materialist and dualist philosophers (many of whom are acknowledged geniuses) would have figured this out long ago, and the mind-body problem would not be much of problem.

… the reason that both sides of the argument have generally agreed that the mind-body problem is irresolvable, is not that they aren’t smart enough to figure it out, but that it is only solved in postrational stages of development, stages which are generally suspect, ignored, or actively denied by most rational researchers. But in principle the problem is no different from this: A rationalist will maintain that there is a proof for the Pythagorean Theorem. A person at a prerational stage will not agree with, or even understand, that proof. Nonetheless, the rationalist is justified in making that claim, which is true enough to virtually anybody who develops to the rational level and studies geometry.

Just so with the nondual solution of the mind-body problem. Those who develop to the nondual stages of consciousness unfolding are virtually unanimous: consciousness and matter, interior and exterior, self and world, are of One Taste. Subject and object are both distinct realities and aspects of the same thing: a true unity-in-diversity. But that unity-in-diversity cannot be stated in rational terms in a way that makes sense to anybody who has not also had a transrational experience. Therefore the “proof” for this nondual solution can only be found in the further development of the consciousness of those who seek to know the solution. Although this solution (“you must further develop your own consciousness if you want to know its full dimensions”) is not satisfactory to the rationalist (whether dualist or physicalist), nonetheless it is the only acceptable form of the solution according to a genuinely integral paradigm.14 When we heard Campbell say that a solution to the mind-body problem is “forever beyond our understanding,” we can amend that to: it is not beyond human understanding, it is simply beyond the rational stages of understanding. The solution is postrational, and fully available to all who wish to move in that direction.

Accordingly, in writings such as “An Integral Theory of Consciousness,”16 I have stressed the need for an approach to consciousness that differentiates-and-integrates all four quadrants (or simply the Big Three of I, we, and it; or first-person, second-person, and third-person accounts: the 1-2-3 of consciousness studies).

… the fact is, for the first time in history we are actually at a point where we have enough of the pieces of the puzzle to at least begin such a project

Consider: in the Upper-Left quadrant of subjective consciousness, we have a body of research and evidence that includes the entire perennial philosophy (which offers three thousand years of meticulously gathered data on the interior domains) and a massive amount of modern research from developmental psychology. Much of that evidence is summarized in the charts, which are a startling testimony to the fact that, even if there are a million details yet to be worked out, the broad contours of the spectrum of consciousness have already been significantly outlined. The general similarities in all of those charts are most suggestive, and, from a bird’s-eye view, hint that we are at least in the right ballpark.

The same can be said with a reasonable degree of confidence for the Lower-Left quadrant (of intersubjective worldviews) and the Lower-Right quadrant (of the techno-economic base). A century or so of postmodernism has made the importance of pluralistic cultural worldviews and backgrounds abundantly clear (even rationally oriented theorists such as Habermas have agreed that all propositions are always in part culturally situated);

moreover, scholars are in general agreement that cultural worldviews historically unfolded from archaic to magic to mythic to mental to global (although there is reasonable disagreement as to the respective values of those views)

Likewise, in the Lower-Right quadrant, few scholars contest the evolutionary sequence of the social forces of production: foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial, informational. In both of those quadrants—cultural and social—although again a million details need to be worked out, the general contours are better understood today than at any other time in history.

Work in the Upper-Right quadrant—particularly in brain physiology and cognitive science—is yet in its infancy, and a fully integral view of consciousness will await more primary discoveries in this quadrant (which is one of the reasons I have written less about this quadrant than the others: cognitive science and neuroscience, despite the enthusiastic pronouncements of their proponents—the Churchlands, for example—is a babe in the woods). Still, our knowledge of this quadrant is growing as fast as babies usually do, and at this time we have enough knowledge to at least be able to situate neurophysiology in relation to the other dimensions of being, even as its contours continue to be elucidated.17

The View from Within, edited by Francisco Varela and Jonathan Shear, is a superb example. They defend a view that is predominantly a neurophenomenology, where first-person experience and third-person systems provide reciprocal constraints, often mediated through second-person positions. “It would be futile to stay with first-person descriptions in isolation. We need to harmonize and constrain them by building the appropriate links with third-person studies. (This often implies an intermediate mediation, a second-person position.) The overall results should be to move toward an integrated or global perspective on mind where neither experience [first-person, UL] nor external mechanisms [third-person, UR] have the final word. The global [integral] perspective requires therefore the explicit establishment of mutual constraints, a reciprocal influence and determination.”18 This is consonant with what I mean by saying that all quadrants are mutually determining (and “tetra-interacting”).

Still, one is hard-pressed to find in many of those authors a full appreciation of the stage conceptions of consciousness development, such as the works of Baldwin, Habermas, Loevinger, Graves, Kohlberg, Wade, Cook-Greuter, Beck, Kegan, et al., even though, as we have seen, there is substantial evidence for their validity. It is not enough to simply note that first-person realities reciprocally influence and determine third-person mechanisms, and that both circulate through second-person intermediaries. It is also crucial to understand that first-person consciousness develops, and it does so through a variety of well-researched stages. Moreover, second-person consciousness develops, and this development, too, has been widely researched. Finally, the capacity for third-person consciousness develops (e.g., Piagetian cognition), and this has likewise been exhaustively studied.20 Perhaps because many of the all-quadrant theorists have come from a phenomenological background, which in itself does not easily spot stages, they have tended to overlook the waves of consciousness unfolding in all four quadrants.21 Be that as it may, a truly integral approach, in my opinion, will move from being merely all-quadrant to being all-level, all-quadrant. Or 1-2-3 across all levels.

For an integral psychology, this also means that a person’s deepest drive—the major drive of which all others are derivative—is the drive to actualize the entire Great Nest through the vehicle of one’s own being, so that one becomes, in full realization, a vehicle of Spirit shining radiantly into the world, as the entire world.

This attempt to be inclusive—holistic and embracing in the best sense—was in part a reaction to modernity’s unfortunate slide into flatland, where the dissociation of the Big Three allowed a powerful science to colonize and dominate (and marginalize) all other forms of knowing and being. Postmodernity was a counterattempt to include the Big Three instead of merely differentiate and dissociate them. Thus, where modernity differentiated the Big Three, postmodernity would embrace them—the many I’s and the many We’s and the many Its—thus arriving at a more inclusive, integral, and nonexclusionary stance. And there, in a sentence, is the enduring truth, the integral truth, of the general postmodern movements.

But we will also see that, just as modernity has its downside, so too does postmodernity. The dignity of modernity slid into the disaster of modernity when the differentiation of the Big Three slid into their dissociation. Just so, the bright promise of a constructive postmodernity slid into a nihilistic deconstructive postmodernity when the pluralistic embrace turned into a rancid leveling of all qualitative distinctions. Postmodernity, attempting to escape flatland, often became its most vulgar champion.

In other words, postmodernity, just like modernity, has its good news and its bad news.

Extreme postmodernism thus went from the noble insight that all perspectives need to be given a fair hearing, to the self-contradictory belief that no perspective is better than any other (self-contradictory because their own belief is held to be much better than the alternatives). Thus, under the intense gravity of flatland, integral-aperspectival awareness became simply aperspectival madness—the contradictory belief that no belief is better than any other—a total paralysis of thought, will, and action in the face of a million perspectives all given exactly the same depth, namely, zero.