Ken Wilber: The Search for Integration
Ken Wilber’s work and intellect is difficult to describe. Throughout a long career—and the authoring of 20 books, including A Brief History of Everything, Grace and Grit, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, and The Religion of Tomorrow, Wilber has put together what is essentially a synthesis of every psychological model of development. In fact, he locked himself away for years, writing every model down on pieces of yellow legal paper, and then knit them all together. I’ve written about Wilber’s work at length in my newsletter, which is also called Pulling the Thread—I’ll put links in the show notes—and I talk about his work on this show as well. Most recently, I talked about Ken Wilber with Nicole Churchill in our conversation about Spiral Dynamics. Wilber is a Spiral Dynamics wizard, though he uses it in aggregate with the work of other developmental thinkers, integrating the work of luminaries like Carol Gilligan, Robert Kegan, and others.
In today’s conversation, we talk about Wilber’s brand new book, Finding Radical Wholeness, which explores the five big processes we all undertake in our lives. In today’s conversation, we mostly talked about two: Waking Up and Growing Up, which are often conflated. Wilber makes the case for why they are unrelated processes—and the essential nature of the latter. While Waking Up, or having a Satori experience is wonderful—and something that 60% of people report—we all need to grow up. Wilber and I spend most of today’s conversation talking about our political environment from the standpoint of developmental psychology: Why we’re so fractured, and what it will look like when the Integral Stage becomes the leading edge of culture and we learn how to include and transcend. I think this is fascinating, and reassuring, and excellent context for a moment that feels so out-of-control. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM KEN WILBER:
More books from Ken Wilber
More from Pulling the Thread Podcast:
“The Basics of Spiral Dynamics” with Nicole Churchill
“Our Collective Psychological Development” with John Churchill
More from Pulling the Thread Newsletter:
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: Thank you for your work. I don't know if you know the Enneagram or like the Enneagram, but I'm assuming you must be a five or a six. Like you are the ultimate map maker for all of us. Do you like the Enneagram?
KEN WILBER: Yes, I do.
ELISE: Okay. What number are you? Six or five? Five. Okay. I'm a six who wings five. I don't think I have enough five like you. So anyway, Ken, we could go in a million different directions. But I was hoping today, because of the moment that we find ourselves in, that we could do I've done podcasts on spiral dynamics before, but I was hoping that essentially, we could talk about growing up. And maybe before we talk about growing up, we can talk about waking up as something that lives alongside of growing up, but is not the same thing. Even though so many of us assume that that's the goal. So should we start there? Like the difference between what waking up actually it is and then the importance of the growing up?
KEN: Yeah. What my most recent book is about, it's called Finding Radical Wholeness. And it's about complete wholeness. Because as it turns out, I mean, I used to think that there was only one wholeness, you know, and you were wholly one with it or not. But there are actually at least five different types of wholeness, and we want to include all of them. And I call them waking up, growing up, opening up, going up and cleaning up. And waking up and growing up are the two most important. Waking up, most people at least know it from Eastern traditions that speak of enlightenment or awakening or satori or something like that. And it's a mystical experience of being one with everything. So you're one with every star, every planet, every galaxy in the entire universe. And of course, you're one with everything you're aware of, right now you're one with the room, one with your house, one with your city, one with your town, and so on. And that waking up is said to be by all of the world's mystical traditions, and we find the same type of waking up present in almost all of them, but they maintain that that's an end to all human suffering. The Buddhists call it dukkha, which technically means sour. Life is dukkha, life is sour, life is suffering, life is painful, something like that. And asatori, and enlightenment, and awakening experience, when you find out you're one with everything. then nothing can harm you because there's nothing outside of you that can hurt you. So you feel a great release and a great relaxation and a great unity and a great peace and even a great bliss. The Hindus call it Sat, Chit, Ananda. Sat means being, Chit means consciousness, and Ananda means bliss. So it's one with all being, unified consciousness and a state of bliss. And that sounds very good when you think about it. So that's what waking up is. And when I first learned the difference between waking up and growing up, it was a huge discovery for me. I mean, it just blew me away. Because when I was around 13 or so, I came upon a field called developmental psychology and developmental psychology studies human growth and development. And there are probably a dozen different models of human growth and development because each one of the pioneers of developmental psychology were actually studying a different multiple intelligence and a multiple intelligence is human beings don't just have one intelligence, which is called cognitive intelligence and measured by an IQ test.
They also have upwards of a dozen, multiple intelligences. So we have cognitive intelligence, we have emotional intelligence, we have moral intelligence, we have aesthetic intelligence, the perception of beauty, we have spiritual intelligence, we have spatial intelligence, and so on. And as developmental psychologists traced how these different intelligences grew up, the stages that they each went through in the growing up process, They all came up with around the same six to eight stages of development that a person grows through. So Gene Gebser, who is a real genius in developmental psychology, he came up with around six or seven stages of development. And these are stages that everybody goes through, although not everybody goes through all of them. Different people progressed through more or less of all of the stages, but he named his stages, the archaic stage, the magic stage, the mythic stage, the rational stage, the pluralistic stage, and the integrated or integral stage. And when you're born, you're in the archaic stage, can't speak, it doesn't have language, it doesn't have a mind, it doesn't understand mathematics. When you're one or two months old, you don't have access to any of that stuff. That's the archaic stage. Then as the mind starts to develop, it doesn't clearly at first differentiate itself from the environment. So a child can't easily tell where his body stops and a chair starts. They're felt to be one. And this is not the same as a unity Consciousness experience, that's called a non dual state, whereas this is called an a dual state, without dualism, without differentiation. It just can't tell where the word stops and the thing that the word represents starts.
So the word tree is one with the actual tree. And that's how a first year old tends to see the world. So, that's the magic stage. Voodoo is a good example of a magic stage spirituality. Because in voodoo, if you don't like somebody, you can make a doll that looks like them. And then if you stick a pin in the doll, you'll actually hurt the real person. Because the symbol of the person, the thing that's representing the person isn't differentiated from the person themselves. So if you stab a pin in the doll's face or in the doll's body, it will actually hurt the real person or so it appears to voodoo. So that's a magical stage development. And then around four or five, Human beings lose the capacity for magic. Our mind differentiates from reality and we can tell a difference between the signifier or the word and the signified or the thing being represented by the word. And so voodoo no longer works. But we do create a whole series of spiritual beings a god of the volcano, a god of the stream, a god of the crops, a god of the planets, and so on. And those gods can perform magic, like the whole Bible is a god forming all sorts of miracles and magical beliefs, but they're all mythic. They're all myths. They're not real. They're like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, but that becomes our mythic stage of development. And by the way, almost all of the world's major religions, their outer forms, All came into existence during the mythic stage of humanity's own historical evolution. Human beings themselves went through an archaic stage, then a magic stage, then a mythic stage. Then with the Western Enlightenment, we went through a rational stage. Then with postmodernism, we went through a pluralistic or multicultural stage. And we're right on the edge now of moving into an integral or integrated stage of development. So that's a series called Growing Up. And when I first learned about all of these models of growing up, again, I was around 13. I pretty soon figured out that all of them are going through the same six to eight levels of development. They all had different names, but they were all going through some version of archaic, to magic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral stages of development.
And here I had all 12 different lines or multiple intelligences and all 12 of them were going through all six to eight major levels of development. And that just blew me away. I thought I'd made an enormous discovery when I figured that out. And then I was also around 13 years old, I had my first spontaneous mystical experience. And by the way, approximately 60 percent of Americans report having at least one experience of being one with the entire universe. So 60 percent of Americans have had, one of these major waking up experiences. Well, I was part of that 60 percent when I was around 13 and I had a major waking up experience. And I started studying Zen and all of the world's mystical traditions, but I was especially attracted to Zen because they had a word called Satori, which meant a major, experience of oneness with everything. And that was the main goal of Zen, was to have a satori, have one of these waking up experiences. And then I learned that Zen was pictured in something called the ten Zen oxherding pictures. And these were ten pictures of the 10 major stages that a person goes through on their way towards having a real Satori experience, a real mystical unity experience. And I thought, wow, those 10 stages are so similar to my eight stages or so of growing up. That's amazing. These stages are everywhere. They deal with everything. But the more I studied them, the more I realized that waking up and growing up were very different experiences and very different growing up stages went through each of them.
ELISE: Culturally, I think we conflate them and or assume that to wake up to have one of these Satori experiences is the end all be all of development. And if you can achieve that, then you've reached somehow guru status and should be sort of leading the masses, when, as you say, like, you can have an enlightened Nazi, you can have someone who is at an ethnocentric level, who has reached Satori and is leading from that level of psychological development.
KEN: That's right. And these two should not be confused like that because they're very, very different and they do develop independently of each other. So you can be very high on one and very low in the other and vice versa and in any combination. So when I understood the difference between waking up and growing up, that was another huge understanding for me because unfortunately, the difference between waking up experience and growing up experience is very profound. All waking up experiences, for example, are first person experience, and we have like first person pronouns: I, me; second person pronouns: you, thou; and third person pronouns: he, she, they, them, it, or its. And first person perspective is defined as the perspective of the person who is speaking. So I'm speaking from a first person perspective now, and it means a direct and immediate experience that I'm having, and I'm communicating it to you. And you are second person, which is defined as the person being spoken to. And then third person is the person or thing being spoken about. All growing up stages are the product of scientific investigation of the stages of growing up that people go through. And those are all defined in third person terms because they're the person or thing being spoken about. When we talk about the archaic stage or the magic stage or the mythic stage, if you look within right now, you can't see any of those stages. As a matter of fact, before we had this conversation, you had no idea that you had all these six to eight stages of growing up that you will go through. You didn't know anything about those because you can't see them. They're not first person or even second person phenomena. They're third person, the person or thing being spoken about.
So that's important, because we can't see these stages of growing up by looking within, they weren't discovered until around a hundred years ago by An American genius psychologist named Mark William Baldwin, and he was good friends of William James, and while William James was studying states of consciousness in waking up, William James made a brilliant study of all the world's great mystical traditions, and he found all of them had this extreme unity experience, a first person experience of being one with the entire universe. And he wrote that up in a book called The Variety of Religious Experience, and that's what it was, religious experience, a first person experience. And that's very real and very important. And because it's a first person direct immediate experience, human beings have been aware of these waking up experiences for hundreds of thousands of years. Some of them go back probably 250, 000 years that human beings will have these profound waking up experiences. Growing up again is simply a description of a third person experience. It's the thing or person that you're talking about. When developmental psychologists discovered them as archaic, Magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral, none of them knew that they had these stages. Because they couldn't look within and find them. So these were discovered only about a hundred years ago.
ELISE: yeah.
KEN: Our waking up experiences go back hundreds of thousands of years. So the point about me going on about when they were discovered is the stages of growing up were discovered much too late to be put in any of the world's great religious traditions. So you don't find anything about growing up stages in a single religion the world over, not one of them has a clue about what these growing up stages are. And yet we've got at least a dozen multiple intelligences, all of them go through these six to eight major growing up stages, and nobody has any idea that they're going through...
ELISE: although, you sort of articulate it as a lattice and you talk about within finding radical wholeness, the expulsion in some ways of religion, once we get to rationality, or this idea that these two systems can't coexist. But one of the things that I loved in this particular book is the way that you talk about the interpretation of religious texts at these different stages, because your understanding of Jesus going from sort of this mythic, he walks on water and performs miracles, to he is the only path to salvation, he is my salvation, I am chosen, you are not to this is our universal path to heaven to oh, he is one of many wisdom teachers explaining unity. Or however you would want to explain it, is also something that I think anyone listening can relate to, like as you develop, as you grow up, your understanding of these texts deepens.
KEN: Yes, right. And that is very important because most people, when they hit their teen adolescent years, they probably were brought up on Christianity, but they start to realize that Jesus and all of his miracles and all of that stuff about it were basically mythic stories, was there really one biological God of the entire universe, and this biological God sent the Holy Spirit down to have sex with Mary? And she gets pregnant and gives birth to the one and only biological son of the one and only God. And I mean, imagine, I mean, Mary was, she wasn't stupid. She's a virgin she gets pregnant. And so she has to tell Joseph, her husband, that she's pregnant. So what does she do? She invents this story. She says, yes, I'm pregnant, but don't worry. I didn't have sex with another man. The real father is not from this planet. Right? And Joseph is so dense, he buys it. And, of course, he sells the story to everybody else. And all of a sudden, you're praying to a virgin Mary. And that's clearly a myth. That's about as real as the tooth fairy. Or Santa Claus. It just doesn't hold up.
So the fact that none of the world's religions know the distinction between growing up and waking up is very important, because almost all the world's great religions were born from a person who had a very real waking up experience. And Jesus Christ did have a oneness with God the Father and a oneness with the entire universe. That was real. That was the genuine part of him. And most of the world's great religion started that way with a Goma Buddha or Shankar or Jesus Christ, or a Muhammad or Moses, somebody having oneness with God experience. And that's a very important realization. It's held to be the sum bonum the greatest good that a human being can have as being one with God and one with the entire universe. And that is a very peaceful, very blissful Sat Chit Ananda experience. So, it's important to understand the differences between waking up and growing up. And unfortunately, for Western religions, not only did we first confuse waking up and growing up, and so we made all these miracles and magic, mythic beliefs about Jesus Christ and what he was here for but we progressively forgot the waking up part of Jesus. So most people aren't aware that they can have an enlightenment experience, that they can have an experience that, like St. Paul said, not I, but Christ liveth in me. So that's a Christ consciousness experience, where you experience your own awareness as being one with Jesus Christ. So that's an important realization. But we've forgotten about that mostly. You don't hear about that very often in Christianity anymore, and that's a shame.
ELISE: It gives a lot of depth. One of the reasons that I love the stages, too, is that they exist in each of us. And then they exist within cultures and within countries, right, where the current center of gravity is at a certain stage in us and in community because there is something so relieving, and maybe you would disagree with me on this, but I find great relief in understanding the politics and the culture wars of today through the psychological developmental lens of green, the mean green meme, or regressive green, orange, blue. And what I love to is the way you take all the systems, Carol Gilligan and Robert Kagan and all these people and put them all together. So hopefully we can keep our naming consistent. But I think people will understand the gestures of the stages. But can you talk a bit about this moment when we're trying to maybe give birth to this integral consciousness or move more people up and why it's so dark and so painful?
KEN: Sure. I was talking about stages, the archaic stage, then the movement to the magic stage, then the movement to the mythic stage, and each stage transcends or goes beyond its predecessor, but it also includes it. And we find this true in all forms of evolution. So, for example, when protons, neutrons, and electrons first came together, they were transcended and included in atoms. Every atom actually contains or includes protons, neutrons, and electrons. And that makes a whole atom. And then a whole atom becomes part of a whole molecule. And molecules are made up of actual atoms that are real ingredients in a molecule. So a molecule is including atoms, but it's also transcending them. It's going beyond what a mere atom can do. So a molecule is larger entity. It contains atoms, but it can do things that atoms can't do, including become parts of living cells and the living cell, you find the cell transcends and includes molecules. So you look within the cell, you find an extraordinary amount of cellular machinery that's made of molecules, including like a single cells, flagellum, that includes about 30 to 40 individual separate molecule, but all of them are bound up and included together in a single flagellum or tail that wiggles and drives the cell through water. So that transcend and include goes all the way up through all the different stages of growing up development.
So we got from archaic to magic to mythic, and we saw that mythic includes supernatural beings that have capacity for magic. So that mythic stage transcends and includes the magic stage and then mythic, which gives us all the world's mythology and most of the world's fundamental religious orientations are built in this mythic stage. And then the next stage is out of mythic stage, there arises a rational stage. And the rational stage is capable of mathematics and logic and all sorts of rational what Piaget called formal operational thinking, which is thought operating on thought. Just like concrete operational thinking, the previous stage of cognitive development is thought operating on the world, then when you get bigger and thought transcends thought, thought can be aware of thought, thought can operate on thought, and that gives us logic, mathematics, and so on. And so we're archaic to magic, to mythic, to rational stage of development. And what the rational stage does is presents universal systems of development, like mathematics or the rules of logic. Those are all individual universal systems. They're true universally. So there isn't Protestant chemistry and Buddhist chemistry. There's just chemistry. And it's the same for everybody because it's a universal system. And that's what rationality does.
It builds these universal systems. And then once we have universal systems built, the green stage, the pluralistic stage, goes through all these universal systems and says, wait a minute, there isn't just one form of truth. There's multicultural truths, because various different cultures the world over have different types of truth, and they develop multicultural approaches to various problems. And so we do have a difference between Protestant beliefs and Catholic beliefs and Buddhist beliefs and Hindu beliefs. And we do have individualized approaches to different multicultural truths. And that's what's called pluralism. And that's the Green Meme, the reason we talk about the Mean Green Meme is that once green divides up these universal systems into many different multicultural systems, you have all these multicultural truths, but green isn't powerful enough to hook them all together and to unify them. And that's what the teal and turquoise or second tier or integral stages of development do. So they'll pull it together into a uniform, it's sometimes called paradigmatic forms of thinking and the paradigm is a unification of many small systems into one large paradigm driven wholeness. And that's a very important stage in growing up the development of this unified multicultural systems. And in 1960, We first developed multicultural, pluralistic, also known as postmodern, stages of growing up. And it's called postmodern because the previous stages, the rational stages, were referred to as modernity. They arose in the 16 and 1700s with the Western Enlightenment and the beginning of modern science, modern chemistry, modern physics, modern biology, modern math. All of those arose in the 1600s and 1700s in the Western emergence of rationality. And so that's where we got all of these original scientific systems. And then in the 1960s, the crazy 60s, we had the emergence of the pluralistic, multicultural stage. And that's where we started talking about multicultural truths and Feminism and all sorts of various differing systems of truth.
ELISE: Mm.
KEN: So when we develop to the rational level, that spread until we had around 40 to 50 percent of the population at an actual rational stage of development. And that's a fair amount, that's a pretty good amount of the population to be at a specific single stage of development and then in the 60s, when we developed the multicultural green stage of development, so far around 23 percent of the population Is that a green, multicultural, pluralistic, post modern stage of development? And we know that mostly now through what's called wokeism And wokeism drives many rational and integral people crazy because it's just insane. You're very aware of what woke is like and the silly things that it's saying and so on. But now we're on the verge of moving from green with its sort of 23 to 24 percent of the population into teal, which is the first integral stage, and then from teal into turquoise. Right now, around 5 to 7 percent of the population is at teal. So, that's not a lot, but we seem to find a major turning point when the leading edge becomes 10 percent of the population when it hits 10 percent it tends to spread and in the general sense throughout the population. So even though there are only 10 percent of the population actually at that stage, everybody's heard of the stage. They'll talk about it. They'll generally know what it means. They can't specifically. And perfectly stated, because they're not actually at that stage, only 10 percent of them are, but all of them know what an integral stage is or what it means, and they can at least talk about it in a fairly intelligent way.
ELISE: And aspire to it? Theoretically?
30 percent is still in sort of the mythic, ethnocentric fundamentalist sort of red world?
KEN: That's right.
ELISE: And we're seeing right now just like an explosion of that red, that mythic and green, which is behaving more like red in some ways. And then the rational sort of scratching its head. And but not quite understanding. I mean, and to grow up you have to go like orange needs to move into green to move to turquoise, right? Like you don't skip stages. But can it be fast to grow up a whole culture?
KEN: It can occur fairly quickly. Generally, historically, it's been several thousand years between major stages of development, but Rational itself was only about 300 years before Green developed in the 60s. So that's relatively soon and We've been at Green since the 60s, so that's 60 years and so we could just continue moving fairly quickly,
ELISE: Well, I mean, it seems, it seems essential, but I think it's, what I love about the stages too, is that sort of, as you explain, when we see the, this, the emergence of the enlightenment, rationalism, science math, these universal systems, that's when we see slavery abolished and it's very easy, I think too, one of the things that drives me crazy is. People today, you know, they'll say like, I would never, I can't believe that anyone could possibly be capable. It's like, well, you weren't born in the 1600s, babe. Like, different level of consciousness.
KEN: That's right. Noting that every major religion the world over had slavery. Because they were all coming from this mythic level. And a mythic level in today's child growing up emerges at around age 5 to 6 to 7, and lasts till beginning adolescence, around age 11 or 12, where rationality starts to emerge. And rationality does think in universal language. And therefore it sees that universally, to put somebody in slavery, is universally immoral. And that's why it wasn't until we started to reach the rational level of development in the 1800s, generally from a 100 year period from around 1770 to 1870, we got rid of slavery worldwide. I mean, every religion, St. Paul counsels slaves to quote, obey your master and love Jesus Christ. That's what Christianity had to say to slaves. That's, that's horrible. And you're right. Most people who have long ago developed to the rational stage of development, they did that when they were 11, 12, 13, 14 years old, they cannot conceive of actually having slaves or imposing slavery. That's right. But it was okay in St. Paul.
ELISE: yeah. And I would add that there is still enslavement of people. There's human trafficking all over the place, right?
KEN: right. Because everybody's born at the archaic stage and has to develop through them. And at least 40 to 50 percent of the world's population is stuck at mythic stage or lower. And the mythic stage is fine with slavery. It's got no problem whatsoever with it. And so there's actually more slaves in today's world than there were in the United States. It's that prevalent because everybody starts at square zero and has to work their way up. And the first three stages are totally okay with slavery.
ELISE: Yeah, and when we look at sort of this particular moment in time, and as schools getting out, we're on the other side of these protests, etc, on campuses, but that is a green emergence that is right on time in terms of sort of where we are, and I love hearing you both like embrace the beautiful green values and then also thrash them because I think we all recognize that this is a paradox of like, we love so much about this, and it's essential, and it becomes as In this sort of every story counts. Everyone's equal. Equality is the only important value. However, I will and and inclusion is the most important value and quality. However, I will exclude anyone or anything that does not abide by my idea of inclusivity, right? Like if sort of eats itself and as you said, it can identify it, it can see the problems, it can't solve them. It can't integrate them.
KEN: That's right.
ELISE: Truly.
KEN: And that's what we get on college protests, is a bunch of protesters trying to shut down people that dare to disagree with them. They just don't want anything to do with them. So much for equality.
ELISE: right. Well, I like it when you're sort of like in this anti hierarchical, seeing everything through the lens of oppression, oppressor, victim, that then the minute you say, okay, if we're all equal, so like you and Trump are equal, and then immediately it's like, oh, no, no, no, no, he is like a base person which He's definitely at a red stage, a mythic stage in terms of his own development, but it's interesting that they can't, to your point, transcend and include, or I like how Father Richard Rohr flips your script and says include and transcend. I don't know if you've heard him do that, but so we're at this shock point. Is there a way, as an achiever, I read things about stages and I'm like, well, I obviously want to, like, I want to get good at this, you know, I'm like, I want to work this spiral, Ken, and I want to be integrated. But is there a way to help people who are stuck at Mythic, to help people, how do you move them besides including them, which is truly what I think we're being called to do. Like, we are all. part of this country in America. We are all constituents. How do we speak to each other? How do we represent our various needs, right? Like it can't be one party shoving themselves down the throat of the other party. How do we do that?
KEN: Well, it takes basically a conversation and an ongoing conversation with the person who is stuck at green. And it's talking equity, diversity, inclusivity. Those are the big three of their religious orientation. And just to talk to them about what exactly do you mean by equity. Explain it to me. And they'll sort of talk, well, everybody's equal, and so on and so forth. Right, so why are you not including those people you're protesting to shut down their talk? That's not very equity, is it? And diversity. What do you mean by diversity? And they'll explain it and go, well, if that's what you mean by diversity is including all these diverse components, why are you, again, shutting down? Why are you protesting people that have a diverse way of thinking from you? What are you doing? That doesn't sound like diversity to me, and in terms of inclusivity, you're definitely not including them. So why do you keep talking about equity, diversity, and inclusivity when you're clearly not doing any one of them? Explain that to me. And you just have to sort of have that conversation as best you can as many times as you can until that person will actually start. Once they start to think differently. They'll start to behave differently, and then you've got the battle sort of won.
ELISE: Yeah. No, I think it makes sense because when you can show someone their own thinking I think that they start to catch themselves in that process of, wait, this is actually not what I stand for here. One thing, and I think for anyone who's listening, who really wants to understand this moment Ken wrote a short book, which is rare for him about Truth and Trump. What is it called? Post truth in a Trump world or I can't remember the exact title, but...
KEN: at truth, it's being brought out again as a post truth world.
ELISE: yes, but it's such a good like concise explication of this moment in time in terms of like what happened to truth, which is actually sort of fell apart because of green and our need to pull everything apart and dissect everything. And then the way that Trump very astutely has sort of campaigned as a anti green and then appealed to sort of the rationalists and appealed at the way that he's worked this whole first tier world to sort of expose green. So it's great for that. It's a great book if you want a handle on like, why this has been so effective. I found it very calming.
KEN: Good. It's sort of the only thing that Trump actually has going for him because everybody knows all of his problems and his character, it's a mess, and he does tend to lie fairly often, and everybody's aware of Trump's problems. But why did he become president? Why might he become president again? Because he talks, every word out of his mouth is explicitly anti green, it's anti postmodern, it's anti pluralist. It's a pure, rational form of truth.
ELISE: Yes.
KEN: that is enough to swing him for many people.
ELISE: Yeah. And that was also really helpful in your book because you explain sort of statistically that like, stop talking about Trump voters as unaware or not conscious of what he's doing. Like they recognize that he's crazy. They recognize that he lies. They recognize that he's a narcissist. And yet and yet they feel included, they feel aligned with his version of the world, which is you think we're crazy, but you guys are insane. So, to me, it was like, oh, first, it was a bit of an unlock for me to understand this moment and to feel like, okay, and I'm from Montana, so I'm from a rural conservative state that went for Trump but to also recognize the way in which we've abandoned red, and are not listening to these people, are not understanding What's happening in their lives and that's not okay. We can't just decide that the values of this group are more important than the values of this group. So I thought, Going back to finding radical wholeness that the way that you explained the rational idea of freedom as being diametrically opposed to the green idea of Equality as very helpful. Can you give a little preview?
KEN: Yeah freedom arose with the rational stage of development. And so we had the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and all of those were working with freedom. And freedom was nobody can tell me what to do. This is the way that I decide I should best proceed. And so freedom is a very important value. And then equality tended to arise with green. And what equality said was that basically everybody's equal. And that meant that, well, not only is slavery bad, and any form of oppression, or holding people out, or, like, not letting women have access to the same number of jobs, and stuff like that But it's generally because Green sort of understands that equality doesn't really work. We have equity, which is what they call it. And equity is just an intense form of a certain type of equality. And equity means that everybody should get access to everything and they're completely equal fashion. And those two ended up clashing with each other quite badly because freedom was the idea of equal opportunity for everybody.
So if you're going to run a race, you want to let everybody who's qualified to run the race, run the race. And so You want everybody to be able to start at the same time and you'll line them up and you fire the gun and they all run and then whoever crosses the finish line first gets a gold star and second gets silver and third gets bronze. So everybody freedom is everybody has an equal opportunity to start the race at the same time. But equality means everybody has to finish the race at the same time. And that, of course, it's just insane because first of all, almost nobody's going to cross the finish line at the same time, exactly the same time as anybody else. It occasionally happens, but it's very rare. But as soon as green notices any group or race or sex or gender is finishing consistently ahead of any other, then that lack of equality is held to be due to oppression. And they don't want that, and so they will enforce any rules or laws or arrangements that they can to make sure that everybody finishes the race with an equal outcome, not equal opportunity, equal outcome. And that's the difference between freedom and equality. And needless to say, We want freedom of opportunity, but we just can't have equality of outcome. That just doesn't work...
ELISE: well, you start to impinge on freedom when you are saying, well, it has to be this percentage of people need to be this.
KEN: That's right. And that clearly is not freedom.
ELISE: right.
KEN: If you say, well, 50 percent of doctors have to be female, Then you're going to have to come up with a quota system, and quota systems are notoriously not freedom. Because in a quota system, you're taking somebody of a particular race, color, creed, whatnot, and you're giving them a big boost. And you're holding somebody else back. So that's not freedom.
ELISE: And then, and the same time, like, Green has very deftly and importantly recognized, sure, we can look at our legal code and say that there's no misogyny, there's no racism, but we all recognize that it's the person who is interpreting that law, or acting on that law, who is potentially being misogynistic, or racist, or whatever it may be. So Green recognizes this. Like, no system can manage against personal bias, et cetera And yet it doesn't, again, we get into this, like, it's moving in the right direction, it just doesn't know how to solve that. So what's the integration, what does that look like on the integral level?
KEN: Well, of course, if you ever find inequality, an actual oppression, or a true enslavement, or a true misogyny, you want to stop that, by the way, we have laws against all forms of oppression. There are actually real legal laws against genuine misogyny, against slavery, against any sort of oppression that will get you thrown in jail. So Green sort of forgets that, but Green has done, there's always good and bad with every stage of development, and there are some good things about Green. So when Green actually spots a genuine oppression, or a general, a true slave, situation, then they can indeed help stop that. And they're generally joined by freedom because freedom is against slavery. Freedom is against misogyny. Freedom is against all of those things. So that's good to keep in mind. When green goes too far, and it almost always goes too far, we get real problems. We get real bias, and real prejudice, and real oppression because, well, we recently had a group of Asians sue Harvard University, because Harvard, like virtually every major university, Big name university has a quota system for what race of students they let in, because without that quota system, almost all of the favored race that would get into a university is Asian.
They simply score higher on the SAT score than any other race and they have a better overall grade point average than any other race and so you're going to be letting in an enormous amount of Asians and Harvard got tired of that and started excluding including Asians. And so they would just hold Asians down. And the Asians found out about it and sued Harvard. And by the way, they won. So, even California for a long period stopped having Quotas for races, because they recognized that they were holding down whites and Asians And French and Germans and, I mean, you name it in favor of Blacks and Hispanics and races such as the minority races were being excluded from all California schools, and California, which is a very green state, just said, Okay, we're not going to do that anymore. And they just cut it out. I heard that they were going to bring it back. I don't know what the actual outcome of that was, but for a long time, California recognized that that form of equality wasn't that racist. It was oppressive. It was not equity. It was not diversity, and it was not inclusivity. And so they dropped it. God bless them for doing that, but I'm not sure it's going to hold, so we'll find out.
ELISE: they're really thorny. It's really tricky. And that's the problem, right? Like it's incredibly complex and, and very gated. And it's hard to hold it all together in a system that makes sense, particularly in the present moment when you're in it, you know, like thinking about the developmental psychology immersion, you can't see it when you're in it. And it takes a certain amount of perspective. And I think you mentioned there too, which I think can't be overstated that every stage has its light and its shadow and its beauty, like wonderful parts, and it's really horrible parts and it seems like the emergence of the shadow or sort of overdoing it in a meme is what pops, is the wake up call to sort of like, well, this is broken. So let's like transcend and include. Do you think that that's what happens?
KEN: Well, that ideally is what should happen. What you really need when you're talking about these forms of oppression is you need very honest studies about what is actually going on. For example the argued pay gap between men and women, first of all, there is not a pay gap between men and women. Time magazine, for example, studied the actual pay that men and women In 150 of the largest U. S. cities and they measured what the average typical woman got paid, and the average typical man got paid, and the average woman was paid 108 percent more than the average man. So there, there was a pay gap, all right, but women are getting paid more than men in this country at this time. So you don't need any laws to bring women up. You don't need to pay them more. They're already getting paid more. And knowing that amount of information, is extremely important before you're going to pass laws about this.
ELISE: When I've looked at pay gap information, where there's like a mom tax, where single white women seem to earn or potentially out earn their male compatriots. But then when you get into moms, there's a gap. And then when you get into women of color, there's a gap particularly for black women and Hispanic women. That's not the data of the day? I mean, it obviously depends. A lot of those women are doing care work, which is so horribly underpaid in our culture. Is it split along other factors? Or do you remember?
KEN: There does tend to be a small gap with mothers and that was definitely included in the overall percentage pay rate, so women on average still got paid more than men, but women mothers, there was a slight I think it was two or 3 percent less pay than the average man.
ELISE: Yeah.
KEN: a certain three or four year period. That does occur. The paygate gap with black women, there was a very interesting study where married black women got paid at least as much as the average man. But for some reason, single black women didn't. And they also found that married black couples had something like 27 percent higher income than single white women.
ELISE: Hmm.
KEN: And that just is how it worked out. And so it's not really a race difference that they were tracking. It was white versus black, with black getting paid more than white.
ELISE: Hmm. Interesting.
KEN: That shocked everybody.
ELISE: It was time magazine?
KEN: Yeah, Time Magazine did the basic study.
ELISE: Okay. So are you optimistic? What do you think is gonna happen to us?
KEN: Yeah, I'm strangely optimistic, and I say strangely because I think that statistically, We're still moving kind of slow. And it just in terms of moving from teal to turquoise, there's still teal is 5 to 7 percent of the population, and that's relatively good. And it's part of the reason that I'm sort of an optimist. But turquoise, there's 0. 5 percent of the population at turquoise, which is essentially the highest stage in growing up that developmental psychologists recognize. Come, 10, 20, 30 years, they'll be a stage higher than turquoise. And I, of course, have third tier stages, which just outlines, since evolution keeps going, what will it likely look like? And I came up with four really high stages. And 50 years from now, we'll have people in all five of those higher level stages. When I think mentally of how we're doing, I do see that sort of slowness around turquoise, 'cause 0.5% is not a happy number. But five to 7% I can at least see that going to 10% maybe within 10 to 20 years. And once teal hits 10%, we're going to have a major culture shift towards an integral heel culture, simply because every previous major stage we've gone through, when that major stage hit 10%, we flipped from archaic to magic stages of shamanic religion and tribal warfare and all sorts of magical, magenta type of experiences. And then when we moved to mythic, we had the rise of the world's great mythic religions when it hit 10%. And the same with rationality, when rationality hit 10%, we had the founding of modern physics, modern chemistry, modern astronomy, and so on.
ELISE: What will teal look like? From what I understand, it's sort of a practical. Or maybe pragmatic, like, can sort of hold everything together, understand the value of every meme and try to knit those, those qualities together. Is that what we would look like? Just like a less hand wringing and a more, I don't want to say productive, but like a more organized or cohesive culture that can maybe solve some of these big, huge looming problems.
KEN: Yes. Developmentalists tend to call the four highest stages of cognitive growing up or development. They call rational stage systemic because it makes those systemic, unified disciplines like chemistry or biology, remember we said there wasn't Buddhist chemistry and Protestant chemistry, there is just universal chemistry, and that's called systemic. And then green, which is a multicultural and divides everything up that's called meta systemic, because it looks at systems and thinks of different multicultural approaches to them. And then teal is called paradigmatic. And turquoise is called cross paradigmatic because teal brings together all the metasystemic parts that are fragmented and broken. It brings them together into unified paradigms. And then turquoise takes different paradigms and cross paradigmatic, draws them together into huge multi paradigmatic systems. So, teal is the first real unified system. A paradigm is a unified system. And that's what Teal does, is it takes all of the multicultural, meta systemic fragments and draws them together into single, great unified paradigms or systems of development.
ELISE: Okay, that makes sense. I'm here for it. Here's my final not really a curveball, but kind of a curveball just to go back to waking up and I know that you've written about psychedelics and you've written about sort of shamanism, but i'm assuming that Sort of the psychedelic waking up experience, which for many people is that like first hint at wholeness or seeing something or unity or seeing something that's bigger. I know a lot of people who go to that experience. Meanwhile, it's like, you got to do the growing up work, you can't just bypass and go hang with mother ayahuasca and then come back to this planet. But can it provoke growing up? Can it move people let's say from... or is it sort of always at a mythic? I mean, I guess you're doing it at whatever growth level or growth stage that you're at. But What are your thoughts?
KEN: Yeah, a waking up psychedelic experience per se does not usually affect the stage of growing up that you're at. They really are independent developments. So if you're at mythic and you have a big LSD experience, you'll be mythic when you come out of it. If you're rational, you'll be rational when you come out of it. If you're teal, you'll be teal when you come out of it. And if you're turquoise, you'll be turquoise when you come out of it. There's a gentleman by the name of Stan Groff who has written extensively on psychedelic mystical experiences and the type of worldview that you tend to get and what you come out away from with from psychedelic experiences is a mystical worldview. And you'll just hold that worldview sort of in mind when you think about what reality really is. And of course you can be at a rational stage, or a teal stage, or a turquoise stage, and hold that worldview in mind. Groff started his career as a psychedelic psychotherapist. So he would do LSD psychotherapy on people, for example. And he started his work in Czechoslovakia and Austria, in Europe, in other words. And then Several years later, he came to America and began doing his practice in America. And when he would do that, he would find that people could have different shades of waking up experience and that those would differ and could get enormously huge.
So you could have a unity experience with the entire cosmos, even if you were at just a rational or even mythic stage. And he ended up writing papers that were published often in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, which is a journal devoted to higher mystical stages of development. And we used to kid about it all the time because that same journal would get papers with titles like Wilbur and Jung, the same map of consciousness. And what would happen is when Stan Groff would write the levels of LSD, mystical experience, they generally followed the same Levels of waking up development that I had developed, on gross level, subtle level, causal level, Turiya or the fourth, and Turiyatita or beyond the fourth, the total unity consciousness. And we used to kid about that all the time and I'd keep saying to Sam, stop copying my stages. And he'd say, wait a minute, you're copying mine. I'd be like, no, we're not. But psychedelics do give genuine and fairly authentic Mystical experiences, but those mystical experiences don't end and of themselves generally change your stage of growing up. I mean, there's a very small, very small percentage of people that once they experience, say something like a turquoise, mystical, cross paradigmatic, big experience of unity, that they'll tend to adopt that stage of unity as their own viewpoint. And so their growing up stage will tend to become Turquoise, but that's very rare...
ELISE: if anything, I would imagine psychologically that with some of the trauma work being done, that someone who is like very inhibited by PTSD, who gets Some access or reaccess to themselves or all parts of themselves could start to maybe grow developmentally more rapidly like they might be stuck at a level because of Trauma and that maybe that would be an opportunity to sort of like actually have access to themselves and do more Work, but I don't know. I'm not a psychologist, Ken.
KEN: I think that's right, though. I think what you're saying is more or less correct.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, thank you for your, for all of your work. Thank you for writing Radical Wholeness. I thought it was a great I haven't read everything that you've written but that it was a great synthesizer. I know that's all you do, right? As all of your work in some way transcends and includes all of your previous work. Wouldn't be right if that weren't the case. But I loved the book and thank you for everything.
