The
Spectrum of consciousness: Integral psychology
and the Perennial Philosophy
taken from:
The
Eye of The Spirit
An Integral
Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad
Chapter 1:
(Shambhala
Publications)
By
K.W.
(e-mail)
(source)
Abstract:
This
article describes the so called Human
Consciousness Project , a "master template" of
the various stages, structures, and states of
consciousness reflecting the "Perennial
Philosophy" of mankind consisting of variations
of the world's great wisdom
traditions.
(compare:
"The
game of Order").
To the
possible corruption of this 'holarchy' the
author suggests not getting rid of holarchy per
se, but arresting (and integrating) their
arrogant 'holons' to overcome the historic and
collective derailment in our modern
psychology.
Biological
and medical scientists are now in the midst of
intensive work on the Human Genome Project, the
endeavor to map all of the genes inthe entire
sequence of human DNA. This spectacular project
promises to revolutionize our ideas of human
growth, development, disease, and medical
treatment, and its completion will surely mark
one of the great advances in human
knowledge.
Not
as well known, but arguably more important, is
what might be called the
Human
Consciousness
Project,
the endeavor, now well under way, to map the
entire spectrum of human consciousness
(including, as well, realms of the human
unconscious). This Human Consciousness Project,
involving hundreds of researchers from around
the world, includes a series of
multidisciplinary, multicultural, multimodal
approaches that together promise
an
exhaustive mapping the entire range of
consciousness,
the entire sequence of the "genes" of awareness,
as it were.
These
various attempts are rapidly converging on
a
"master template" of the various stages,
structures, and states of consciousness
available to men and
women. By
comparing and contrasting various multicultural
approaches--from Zen Buddhism to Western
psychoanalysis, from Vedanta Hinduism to
existential phenomenology, from Tundra Shamanism
to altered states--these approaches are rapidly
piecing together a master template--a spectrum
of consciousness--using the various approaches
to fill in any gaps left by the
others.
Although
many of the specifics are still being
intensively researched, the overall evidence for
the existence of this spectrum of consciousness
is already so significant as to put it largely
beyond serious dispute.
Moreover,
in a rather stunning fashion, it has
increasingly become obvious that this overall
spectrum is quite consistent with the essential
core of the world's great wisdom
traditions.
The
"master template" that is emerging from this
modern research is therefore able to honor and
connect with the essence of the world's wisdom
traditions, while simultaneously attempting to
update and modernize their insights where
appropriate. The goal of the integral approach
is thus a judicious blend of ancient wisdom and
modern knowledge.
Let us
start with the
basics,
with those items from the great traditions that
seem to have withstood the test of time with
flying colors, so much so that they are even
making a remarkable comeback in many modern and
scientific disciplines.
And
they all hinge on this extraordinary spectrum of
consciousness.
What is
the world view that, as A.
L.
pointed out, "has been the dominant official
philosophy of the larger part of civilized
humankind through most of its history"? The
world view that "the greater number of the
subtler speculative minds and of the great
religious teachers both East and West have, in
their various fashions, been engaged in"? What
is the world view that led A.
W. to
state flatly that "We are hardly aware of the
extreme peculiarity of our own position, and
find it difficult to realize the plain fact that
there has otherwise been a single philosophical
consensus
of universal extent.
It has been held by men and women who report the
same insights and teach the same essential
doctrine whether living today or six thousand
years ago, whether from New Mexico in the Far
West or from Japan in the Far East."
And
why is it of interest to integral
studies?
Known
as the "perennial
philosophy"--"perennial"
precisely because it shows up across cultures
and across the ages with many similar
features--this world view has, indeed, formed
the core not only of the world's great wisdom
traditions, from Christianity to Buddhism to
Taoism, but also of many of the greatest
philosophers, scientists, and psychologists of
both East and West, North and South. So
overwhelmingly widespread is the perennial
philosophy--the details of which I will explain
in a moment--that it is either the single
greatest intellectual error ever to appear in
humankind's history--an error so colossally
widespread as to literally stagger the mind--or
it is the
single most accurate reflection of reality yet
to appear.
Central
to the perennial philosophy is the notion of
the
Great Chain of
Being. The
idea itself is fairly simple. Reality, according
to the perennial philosophy, is not
one-dimensional; it is not a flatland of uniform
substance stretching monotonously before the
eye. Rather, reality
is composed of several different but continuous
dimensions.
Manifest reality, that is, consists of different
grades
or levels,
reaching from the lowest and most dense and
least conscious to the highest and most subtle
and most conscious. At one end of this continuum
of being or spectrum of consciousness is what we
in the West would call
"matter"
or the insentient and the nonconscious, and at
the other end is "spirit"
or "godhead" or the "superconscious" (which is
also said to be the all-pervading ground of the
entire sequence, as we will see). Arrayed in
between are the other dimensions of being
arranged according to their individual degrees
of reality (P.),
actuality (A.),
inclusiveness (H.),
consciousness (A.),
clarity (L.),
embrace (P.),
or knowingness (G.
D.).
Sometimes
the Great Chain is presented as having just
three
major levels:
matter, mind, and spirit. Other versions give
five
levels:
matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit. Still
others give very exhaustive breakdowns of the
Great Chain; some of the
yogic
systems
give literally dozens
of
discrete yet continuous dimensions. For the time
being, our simple hierarchy of matter to body to
mind to soul to spirit will suffice.
The
central claim of the perennial philosophy is
that men
and women can grow and develop (or evolve) all
the way up the hierarchy to Spirit itself,
therein to realize a "supreme identity" with
Godhead--the
ens perfectissimum toward which all growth and
evolution yearns.
But
before we get to that, the first thing that we
can't help but notice is that the Great Chain is
indeed a "hierarchy"--a
word that has fallen on very hard times.
Originally introduced by the great Christian
mystic
St. D.,
it essentially meant
"governing
one's life by spiritual
principles"
("hiero-" means sacred or holy, and "-arch"
means governance or rule). But it soon became
translated into a political/military power play,
where "governance by spirit" came to mean "ruled
by the Catholic Church"--a spiritual principle
mistranslated
into a
despotism.
But
as used by the perennial philosophy--and indeed,
as used in modern psychology, evolutionary
theory, and systems theory--a hierarchy is
simply
a ranking of orders of events according to their
holistic capacity.
In any developmental sequence, what is whole at
one stage becomes merely a part of a larger
whole at the next stage. A letter is part of a
whole word, which is part of a whole sentence,
which is part of a whole paragraph, and so
on.
A. K.
coined the term "holon" to refer to that which,
being a whole in one context, is a part of a
wider whole in another. With reference to the
phrase "the bark of a dog," for example, the
word "bark" is a whole with reference to its
individual letters, but a part with reference to
the phrase itself. And the whole (or the
context) can determine the meaning and function
of a part--the meaning of "bark" is different in
the phrases "the bark of a dog" and "the bark of
a tree." The whole, in other words, is more than
the sum of its parts, and that whole can
influence and determine, in many cases, the
function of its parts.
Hierarchy,
then, is simply an
order of increasing holons, representing an
increase in wholeness and integrative capacity.
This is why hierarchy is so central to systems
theory, the theory of wholeness or holism
("wholism").
And it is absolutely central to the perennial
philosophy. Each expanding link in the Great
Chain of Being represents an increase in unity
and wider identities, from the isolated identity
of the body through the social and communal
identity of the mind to the supreme identity of
Spirit, an identity with literally all
manifestation. This is why the great hierarchy
of being is often drawn as a series of
concentric circles or spheres or
"nests
within nests."
As we will see, the Great Chain is actually the
Great Nest of Being.
And
finally, hierarchy is asymmetrical (or a
"higher"-archy) because the process does not
occur in the reverse. For example, there are
first letters, then words, then sentences, then
paragraphs, but not vice versa. And that not
vice versa constitutes an unavoidable hierarchy
or ranking or asymmetrical order of increasing
wholeness.
All
developmental and evolutionary sequences that we
are aware of proceed in large measure by
hierarchization, or by orders of increasing
holism--molecules to cells to organs to organ
systems to organisms to societies of organisms,
for example. In cognitive development, we find
awareness expanding from simple images, which
represent only one thing or event, to symbols
and concepts which represent whole groups or
classes of things and events, to rules which
organize and integrate numerous classes and
groups into entire networks. In moral
development (in both male and female), we find a
reasoning that moves from the isolated subject
to a group or tribe of related subjects, to an
entire network of groups beyond any isolated
element. And so on.
These
hierarchical networks necessarily unfold in a
sequential or stage-like fashion, because you
first have to have molecules, then cells, then
organs, then complex organisms--they don't all
burst on the scene simultaneously. In other
words, growth
generally occurs in
stages,
and stages, of course, are ranked in both a
logical and chronological order. The more
holistic patterns appear later in development
because they have to await the emergence of the
parts that they will then integrate or unify,
just as whole sentences emerge only after whole
words.
And
some hierarchies do involve a type of control
network--the lower levels (which means, less
holistic levels) can influence the upper (or
more holistic) levels, through what is known as
upward
causation.
But just as important, the higher levels can
exert a powerful influence or control on the
lower levels--so-called
downward
causation.
For example, when you decide to move your arm,
and you do so, all the atoms and molecules and
cells in your arm move with it--an instance of
downward causation.
In
any developmental or growth sequence, as a more
encompassing stage or holon emerges, it includes
the capacities and patterns and functions of the
previous stage (i.e., of the previous holons),
and then adds its own unique (and more
encompassing) capacities. In that sense, and
that sense only, can the new and more
encompassing holon be said to be "higher" or
"wider." Whatever the important value of the
previous stage, the new stage has all of that
plus something extra (more integrative capacity,
for example), and that "something extra" means
"extra value" relative to the previous (and less
encompassing) stage. This crucial definition of
a "higher stage" was first introduced in the
West by A.
and in the East by S.
and L.-T.;
it has been central to the perennial philosophy
ever since.
Let
me give one example. In cognitive and moral
development, in both the boy and the girl, the
stage of preoperational or preconventional
thought is concerned largely with the
individual's own point of view ("narcissistic").
The next stage, the operational or conventional
stage, still takes account of the individual's
own point of view, but adds the capacity to take
the view of others into account.
Nothing
is lost; something is
added. And
so in this sense it is properly said that this
stage is higher or wider, meaning more valuable
and useful for a wider range of interactions.
Conventional thought is more valuable than
preconventional thought in establishing a
balanced moral response (and postconventional is
even more valuable, and so on). As
H.
first put it, and as developmentalists have
echoed ever since, each stage is adequate and
valuable, but each higher stage is more
adequate, and, in that sense only, more valuable
(which always means, more holistic).
It
is for all these reasons that K.,
after noting that all complex hierarchies are
composed of holons, or increasing orders of
wholeness, pointed out that
the
correct word for "hierarchy" is actually
holarchy.
He is absolutely right, and so from now on I
will refer to hierarchy in general, and the
Great Chain--the Great Nest--in particular, as
holarchy.
So
that is normal or natural holarchy, the
stage-like unfolding of larger networks of
increasing wholeness, with the larger or wider
wholes being able to exert influence over the
lower-order wholes. And as natural, desirable,
and unavoidable as that is, you can already
start to see how holoarchies might turn
pathological. If the higher levels can exert
control over the lower levels, they can also
over-dominate or even repress and alienate the
lower levels. That leads to a whole host of
pathological difficulties, in both the
individual and society at large.
It
is precisely because the world is arranged
holarchically, precisely because it contains
fields within fields within fields, that things
can go so profoundly wrong, that a disruption or
pathology in one field can reverberate
throughout an entire system. And the "cure" for
this pathology, in all cases, is the essentially
the same: rooting out the pathological holons so
the holarchy itself can return to harmony. The
cure does not consist, as the reductionists
maintain, in getting rid of holarchy per se,
since, even if that were possible, it would
simply result in a uniform, one-dimensional
flatland of no value distinctions at all (which
is why those critics who toss out hierarchy in
general immediately replace it with a new scale
of values of their own, i.e., with their own
particular hierarchy).
Rather,
the "cure" of any diseased system consists in
rooting out any holons that have usurped their
position in the overall system by abusing their
power of upward or downward causation. This is
exactly the "cure" we see at work in
psychoanalysis (shadow holons refuse
integration), democratic social revolutions
(monarchical or fascist holons oppress the body
politic), medical science interventions
(cancerous holons invade a benign system),
critical social theory (opaque ideology usurps
open communication), radical feminist critiques
(patriarchal holons dominate the public sphere),
and so on. 2.
As
I said, all
of the world's great wisdom traditions are
basically variations of the perennial
philosophy,
of the Great Holarchy of Being. In his wonderful
book Forgotten Truth, H.
S.
summarizes the world's major religions in one
phrase: "a
hierarchy of being and
knowing."
C.
T. R.
pointed out, in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of
the Warrior, that the essential and background
idea pervading all of the philosophies of the
East, from India to Tibet to China, lying behind
everything from Shintoism to Taoism, is "a
hierarchy of earth, human, heaven," which he
also pointed out is equivalent to "body, mind,
spirit." And C.
noted that the world's great religions, bar
none, "in their different degrees represent a
hierarchy of types or levels of consciousness
extending from animal to deity, and according to
which one and the same individual may function
on different occasions."
Which
brings us to the most
notorious
paradox in the perennial
philosophy.
We have seen that the wisdom traditions
subscribe to the notion that reality manifests
in levels or dimensions, with each higher
dimension being more inclusive and therefore
"closer" to the absolute totality of Godhead or
Spirit. In this sense, Spirit is the summit of
being, the highest rung on the ladder of
evolution. But
it is also true that Spirit is the wood out of
which the entire ladder and all its rungs are
made.
Spirit is the suchness, the isness, the essence
of each and every thing that exists.
The
first aspect, the highest-rung aspect, is the
transcendental nature of Spirit--it far
surpasses any "worldly" or creaturely or finite
things. The entire earth (or even universe)
could be destroyed, and Spirit would remain. The
second aspect, the wood aspect, is the immanent
nature of Spirit--Spirit is equally and totally
present in all manifest things and events, in
nature, in culture, in heaven and on earth, with
no partiality. From this angle, no phenomenon
whatsoever is closer to Spirit than another, for
all are equally "made of" Spirit. Thus, Spirit
is both the highest goal of all development and
evolution, and the ground of the entire
sequence, as present fully at the beginning as
at the end. Spirit is prior to this world, but
not other to this world.
Failure
to take both of those paradoxical aspects of
Spirit into account has historically led to some
very lopsided (and politically dangerous) views
of Spirit. Traditionally, the patriarchal
religions have tended to over-emphasize the
transcendental nature of Spirit, thus condemning
earth, nature, body, and woman to an inferior
status. Prior to that, the matriarchal religions
tended to emphasize the immanent nature of
Spirit alone, and the resultant pantheistic
worldview equated the finite and created Earth
with the infinite and uncreated Spirit. You are
free to identify with a finite and limited
Earth; you are not free to call it the infinite
and unlimited.
Both
matriarchal and patriarchal religions, both of
these lopsided views of Spirit, have had rather
horrible historical consequences, from brutal
and large-scale human sacrifice for the
fertility of the earth Goddess to wholesale war
for God the Father. But in the very midst of
these outward distortions,
the
perennial philosophy (the esoteric or inner core
of the wisdom religions) has always avoided any
of those dualities--Heaven
or Earth, masculine or feminine, infinite or
finite, ascetic or celebratory--and centered
instead on their
union or integration
("nondualism").
And indeed, this union of Heaven and Earth,
masculine and feminine, infinite and finite,
ascending and descending, wisdom and compassion,
was made explicit in the "tantric" teachings of
the various wisdom traditions, from Neoplatonism
in the West to Vajrayana in the East. And it is
this nondual
core of
the wisdom traditions to which the term
"perennial philosophy" most applies.
The
point, then, is that if we are to try to think
of Spirit in mental terms (which necessarily
involves some difficulties), then at least we
should remember this transcendent/immanent
paradox. Paradox is simply the way nonduality
looks to the mental level. Spirit itself is not
paradoxical; strictly speaking, it is not
characterizable at all.
This
applies doubly to hierarchy (holarchy). We have
said that when transcendental Spirit manifests
itself, it does so in stages or levels--the
Great Holarchy of Being. But I'm not saying
Spirit or reality itself is hierarchical.
Absolute
Spirit or reality is not
hierarchical.
It is not qualifiable at all in mental terms
(lower-holon terms)--it is shunyata, or nirguna,
or apophatic--unqualifiable, without a trace of
specific and limiting characteristics at all.
But
it manifests itself in steps, in layers,
dimensions, sheaths, levels, or grades--whatever
term one prefers--and that is
holarchy.
In Vedanta these are the
koshas,
the sheaths or layers covering Brahman; in
Buddhism, these are the eight
vijnanas,
the eight levels of awareness, each of which is
a stepped-down or more restricted version of its
senior dimension; in Kabbalah these are the
sefiroth,
and so on.
The
whole point is that these are levels of the
manifest world, of maya. When maya is not
recognized as the play of the Divine, then it is
nothing but illusion. Hierarchy is illusion.
There are levels of illusion, not levels of
reality. But according to the traditions, it is
exactly (and only) by
understanding the hierarchical nature of samsara
that we can in fact climb out of it,
a ladder
discarded only after having served its
extraordinary purpose.
We
can look now at some of the actual levels or
spheres of the holarchy, of the Great Nest of
Being, as it appears in the three largest wisdom
traditions: Judaeo-Christian-Muslim, Buddhism,
and Hinduism, although any mature tradition will
do.
(Let
me remind you that these are the levels in the
Upper Left quadrant, the levels in the spectrum
of consciousness itself. We will, in the
following chapters, see how this spectrum plays
itself out in the other quadrants as well,
cultural and social and behavioral--from
anthropology to philosophy to art and
literature. But for now we are concentrating on
the spectrum of consciousness as it appears in
the individual human being, the Upper Left
quadrant.)
The
Christian
terms are
the easiest, because most of us are familiar
with them: matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit.
Matter means the physical universe as it appears
in our own physical bodies (e.g., those aspects
of our existence covered by the laws of
physics); and whatever else we might mean by the
word "matter," it means in this case the
dimension with the least amount of consciousness
(some would say no consciousness, and you can
take your pick). Body in this case means the
emotional body, the "animal" body, sex, hunger,
vital life force, and so on (e.g., those aspects
of existence studied by biology). Mind is the
rational, reasoning, linguistic, and imaginative
mind (studied by psychology). Soul is the higher
or subtle mind, the archetypal mind, the
intuitive mind, and the essence or the
indestructibleness of our own being (studied by
theology). And spirit is the transcendental
summit of our being, our Godhead (studied by
contemplative mysticism).
According
to Vedanta
Hinduism,
the individual person is composed of
five
"sheaths" or levels or spheres of being (the
koshas),
often compared to an onion, so that as we peel
away the outer layers we find more and more the
essence. The lowest (or most outer) is called
the annamayakosha, which means "the sheath made
of food." This is the physical sphere. Next is
the pranamayakosha, the sheath made of prana.
"Prana" means vital force, bioenergy, elan
vital, libido, emotional-sexual energy in
general--the sphere of the emotional body (as we
are using the term). Next is the manomayakosha,
the sheath of manas or mind--rational, abstract,
linguistic. Beyond this is the vijnanamayakosha,
the sheath of intuition, the higher mind, the
subtle mind. Finally there is the
anandamayakosha, the sheath made of ananda, or
spiritual and transcendental bliss.
Further--and
this is important--Vedanta groups these five
sheaths into three
major realms: gross, subtle, and
causal.
The gross realm is correlated with the lowest
level in the holarchy, the physical body
(annamayakosha). The subtle realm is correlated
with the three intermediate levels: the
emotional-sexual body (pranamayakosha), the mind
(manomayakosha), and the higher or subtle mind
(vijnanamayakosha). And the causal is correlated
with the highest level, the anandamayakosha, or
archetypal spirit, which is also sometimes said
to be largely unmanifest, or formless. Further,
Vedanta relates these three major realms of
being with the three
major states of consciousness: waking, dreaming,
and deep dreamless
sleep.
Beyond all three of these states is absolute
Spirit, sometimes called turiya, "the fourth,"
because it is beyond (and includes) the three
states of manifestation; it is beyond (and thus
integrates) gross, subtle, and
causal.
So
the Vedanta version of five sheaths is almost
identical to the Judaeo/Christian/Muslim version
of matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit, as long
as we understand "soul" to mean, not just a
higher self or higher identity, but higher or
subtler mind and cognition. And soul also has
the meaning, in all the higher mystical
traditions, of being a "knot" or "contraction"
(what the Hindus and Buddhists call the
ahamkara), which has to be untied and dissolved
before the soul can transcend itself, die to
itself, and thus find a supreme identity with
and as absolute Spirit (as Christ said, "He
cannot be a true disciple who hateth not his own
soul").
So
"soul" is both the highest level of individual
growth we can achieve, and also the final
barrier, the final knot, to complete
enlightenment or supreme identity, simply
because as transcendental witness it stands back
from everything it witnesses. Once we push
through the witness position, then the soul or
witness itself dissolves and there is only the
play of nondual awareness, awareness that does
not look at objects but is completely one with
all objects (Zen says "it is like tasting the
sky"). The gap between subject and object
collapses, the soul is transcended or dissolved,
and pure spiritual or nondual awareness--which
is very simple, very obvious, very
clear--arises. You realize that your intrinsic
being is vast and open, empty and clear, and
everything arising anywhere is arising within
you, as intrinsic spirit,
spontaneously.
The
central psychological model of
Mahayana
Buddhism is the eight
vijnanas,
the eight levels of consciousness. The first
five are the five senses. The next is the
manovijnana, the mind that operates on sensory
experience. Then there is manas, which means
both higher mind and the center of the illusion
of the separate-self. It is the manas that looks
at the alayavijnana (the next higher level, that
of supraindividual consciousness) and mistakes
it for a separate-self or substantial soul, as
we have defined it. And beyond these eight
levels, as both their source and ground, is the
pure alaya or pure empty Spirit.
I
don't mean to minimize some of the very real
differences between these traditions. I'm simply
pointing out that they share certain deep
structure similarities, which testifies
eloquently to the genuinely universal nature of
many of their insights.
And
so we can end on a happy note:
After
being temporarily derailed in the 19th century
by a
variety of materialistic reductionisms (from
scientific materialism to behaviorism to
positivism), the Great Chain of Being, the Great
Holarchy of Being, is making
a
stunning comeback.
That temporary derailment--an attempt to reduce
the holarchy of being to its lowest level,
matter--was particularly galling
in
psychology, which first lost its spirit, then
lost its soul, then lost its mind, and was
reduced to studying only empirical behavior or
bodily drives, a restriction that at any other
time or place would be considered a precise
definition of
insanity.
But
now evolutionary holarchy--the holistic study of
the development and self-organization of fields
within fields within fields--is once again a
dominant theme in many scientific and behavioral
disciplines (as we will see), though it goes by
many names (A.'s
"entelechy," to give only one example, is now
known as "morphogenetic fields" and
"self-organizing systems"). This is not to say
that the modern versions of the Great Holarchy
and its self-organizing principles offer no new
insights, for they do, particularly when it
comes to the actual evolutionary unfolding of
the Great Chain itself. Each glimpse of the
Great Holarchy is adequate; each advancing
glimpse is more adequate. . . .
But the
essentials are unmistakable. L.
v. B.,
the founder of General
System Theory,
summarized it perfectly: "Reality, in the modern
conception, appears as a tremendous
hierarchical
order of organized
entities,
leading, in a superposition of many levels, from
physical and chemical to biological and
sociological systems. Such hierarchical
structure and combination into systems of ever
higher order, is characteristic of reality as a
whole and of fundamental importance especially
in biology, psychology and
sociology."
Thus,
for example, in modern psychology, holarchy is
the dominant structural and process paradigm,
cutting across the actual (and often quite
different) content of the various schools. Every
school of developmental psychology acknowledges
some version of hierarchy, or a series of
discrete (but continuous), irreversible stages
of growth and unfolding. This includes the
Freudians, the Jungians, the Piagetians,
L.
K.,
C.
G.,
and the cognitive behaviorists. M,
representing both humanistic and transpersonal
psychology, put the "hierarchy of needs" at the
center of his system--to mention only a
few.
From
R.
S. and
his "nested hierarchy of morphogenetic fields"
to
S. K. P.'s
"hierarchy of emergent qualities" to
B.
and C.'s
"ecological model of reality" based on
"hierarchical value"; from F.
V.'s
groundbreaking work on autopoietic systems ("it
seems to be a general reflection of the richness
of natural systems to produce a hierarchy of
levels") to the brain research of
R.
S. and Sir J. E. and W.
P. ("a
hierarchy of nonreducible emergents") to the
social critical theory of J.
H. ("a
hierarchy of communicative competence")--the
Great Chain is back.
And
the only reason everybody doesn't realize this
is that it is hiding out under a variety of
different names.
But
no matter; realized or not it is already well
under way. And the truly wonderful thing about
this homecoming is that modern theory can now
reconnect with its rich roots in the perennial
philosophy, reconnect with not
only
P. and A.
and
P. and M. and S. and H. and
T. in
the West, but also with S.
and P. and C. and F. and A. and L.
T. in
the East--all made possible by the fact that
many aspects of the perennial philosophy do
indeed seem to be perennial--or essentially
universal wherever they appear--thus cutting
across times and cultures alike to point to the
heart and soul and spirit of the family of
humankind (indeed, all sentient beings as
such).
There
is, really, only one major thing left to be
done, one fundamental item on the homecoming
agenda. While it is true, as I said, that one of
the unifying paradigms in modern thought, from
physics to biology to psychology to sociology,
is evolutionary holarchy (see, for example,
L.,
J., H., L., D.),
nonetheless most orthodox schools of inquiry
admit the existence only of matter, body, and
mind.2 The higher dimensions of soul and spirit
are not yet accorded quite the same status. We
might say that the modern West has still only
acknowledged three fifths of the Great Holarchy
of Being. The
agenda, very simply, is to reintroduce the other
two fifths (soul and spirit).
Once
we recognize and honor all the levels and
dimensions of the Great Chain, we simultaneously
acknowledge all the corresponding modes of
knowing--not just the eye of flesh, which
discloses the physical and sensory world, or
just the eye of mind, which discloses the
linguistic and symbolic world, but also the eye
of contemplation, which discloses the soul and
spirit. (We will return to this important topic
in chapter 3.)
And
so there is the agenda: Let us take the last
step and reintroduce the eye of contemplation,
which, as a scientific and repeatable
methodology, discloses soul and spirit. And that
integral vision is, I submit, the final
homecoming, the reweaving of our modern soul
with the soul of humanity itself--the true
meaning of multiculturalism--so that, standing
on the shoulders of giants, we transcend but
include, which always means honor, their
ever-recurring presence. Uniting ancient wisdom
with modern knowledge is thus the clarion call
of the integral vision, a beacon in the
postmodern wilderness.
An
acknowledgment of the full spectrum of
consciousness would alter the course of every
one of the modern disciplines it touches--and
that, of course, is an essential aspect of
integral studies.
But
indeed the first and most immediate impact would
be on the field of psychology itself. I have
explored this full-spectrum psychology in a
number of books (including The Spectrum of
Consciousness, No Boundary, The Atman Project,
Transformations of Consciousness, and A Brief
History of Everything).
These
books present a view of human development that
attempts to incorporate the entire spectrum of
consciousness, from instinct to ego to spirit,
from prepersonal to personal to transpersonal,
from subconscious to self-conscious to
superconscious. If nothing animal, human, or
divine is alien to me, then no state of
consciousness can be dismissed from the generous
embrace of a truly integral psychology. In the
Preface to the new edition of The Atman Project,
I try to suggest why such an integral and
inclusive stance is so important.
The
Atman Project was, as far as we can tell, the
first psychology that suggested a way of uniting
East and West, conventional and contemplative,
orthodox and mystical, into a single, coherent,
and plausible framework. In so doing, it
incorporated a good number of approaches, from
F.
to B.,
Gestalt to S.,
P. to Y., K. to
K..
I began
writing The Atman Project in 1976, along with
its sister volume, Up from Eden--one covering
ontogeny, the other phylogeny. In the almost two
decades since writing Atman, I have found its
basic framework to be as sturdy and solid as
ever, and thus I believe that its general
tenets, with a little fine tuning here and
there, will continue to be valid for a long and
fruitful time.
A
few critics complained that I had simply used
various sources in a literary fashion, that my
approach wasn't based on clinical or
experimental evidence. But this is perhaps a bit
disingenuous: the vast majority of theorists
that I relied on were exactly those who had
pioneered direct clinical and experimental
evidence, from J.
P.'s
method clinique to M.
M.r's
exhaustive videotaped observations
to
L. K.'s
and C.
G.'s
groundbreaking moral investigations--not to
mention the vast phenomenological evidence
presented by the contemplative traditions
themselves. The Atman Project was directly based
on the evidence of over sixty researchers from
numerous approaches, and hundreds of others in
an informal way.
(We
will return to, and carefully explore, this
integral psychology in chapters 6, 9, 10, and
11.)
The
Atman Project also ended my flirtation with
Romanticism and its attempt to make regression
into a source of salvation. I had in fact begun
to write both Atman and Eden as a validation of
the Romantic view: men and women start out in an
unconscious union with the Divine--an
unreflexive immersion in a type of Heaven on
Earth, a paradisiacal Eden, both ontogenetically
and phylogenetically; then they break away from
that union, through a process of alienation and
dissociation (the isolated and divisive ego);
then return to the Divine in a conscious and
glorious union.
Human
development thus proceeds, so to speak, from
unconscious Heaven to conscious Hell to
conscious Heaven.
I started writing both books to validate that
Romantic notion.
But
the more I worked on the books, the more it
became obvious that
the Romantic view was hopelessly
muddled.
It combined one or two very important truths
with some outrageous confusions, and the result
was a theoretical nightmare. Untangling this
monstrous mess was a constant preoccupation with
me for several years--almost a decade,
actually--and marked one of the most turbulent
theoretic times of my life. The reason that I
have authored so many essays about
fallacies--such as the pre/trans fallacy and the
single boundary fallacy--is that the Romantics
committed many of them, and I, being a good
Romantic, had committed them royally; and thus
understanding these fallacies from the inside,
up close and very personal, I could write some
very strong criticisms of them. You are never so
vicious toward a theory as toward one that you
yourself recently embraced.
But
the crucial error of the Romantic view is fairly
easy to understand. Take childhood, for example.
The Romantic view, as we said, is that the
infant starts out in state of unconscious
Heaven. That is, because the infant self isn't
yet differentiated from the environment around
it (or from the mother), the infant self is
actually one with the dynamic Ground of
Being--but in an unconscious (or
"un-self-conscious") fashion. Thus, unconscious
Heaven--blissful, wonderful, mystical, the
paradisiacal state out of which it will soon
fall, and to which it will always long to
return.
And
indeed, the Romantic view continues, sometime in
the first few years of life, the self
differentiates from the environment, the union
with the dynamic Ground is lost, subject and
object are separated, and the self moves from
unconscious Heaven into conscious Hell--the
world of egoic alienation, repression, terror,
tragedy.
But,
the happy account continues, the self can make a
type of U-turn in development, sweep back to the
prior infantile union state, re-unite with the
great Ground of Being, only now in a fully
conscious and self-actualized way, and thus find
conscious Heaven.
Hence,
the overall Romantic view: one starts out in
unconscious Heaven, an unconscious union with
the Divine; one then loses this unconscious
union, and thus plunges into conscious Hell; one
can then regain the Divine union, but now in a
higher and conscious fashion.
The
only problem with that view is that the first
step--the
loss of the unconscious union with the
Divine--is an absolute
impossibility.
All things are one with the Divine Ground--it
is, after all, the Ground of all being! To lose
oneness with that Ground is to cease to
exist.
Follow
it closely: there are only two general stances
you can have in relation to the Divine Ground:
since all things are one with Ground, you can
either be aware of that oneness, or you can be
unaware of that oneness. That is, you can be
conscious or unconscious of your union with the
Divine Ground: those are
the
only two choices you
have.
And
since the Romantic view is that you start out,
as an infant, in an unconscious union with
Ground, you cannot then lose that union! You
have already lost consciousness of the union;
you cannot then further lose the union itself or
you would cease to be! So if you are unconscious
of your union, it can't get any worse,
ontologically speaking. That is already the pits
of alienation. You are already living in Hell,
as it were; you are already immersed in samsara,
only you don't realize it--you haven't the
awareness to recognize this burning fact. And so
that is more the actual state of the infantile
self: unconscious Hell.
What
does start to happen, however, is that you begin
to wake up to the alienated world in and around
you. You go from unconscious Hell to conscious
Hell, and being conscious of Hell, of samsara,
of lacerating existence, is what makes growing
up--and being an adult--such a nightmare of
misery and alienation. The infant self is
relatively peaceful, not because it is living in
Heaven, but because it isn't aware enough to
register the flames of Hell all around it. The
infant is most definitely immersed in samsara,
it just doesn't know it, it isn't aware enough
to realize it, and enlightenment is certainly
not a return to this infantile state! Or a
"mature version" of this state! Neither the
infant self nor my dog writhes in guilt and
angst and agony, but enlightenment does not
consist in recapturing dog-consciousness (or a
"mature form" of dog-consciousness!).
As
the infant self grows in awareness and
consciousness, it slowly becomes aware of the
intrinsic pain of existence, the torment
inherent in samsara, the mechanism of madness
coiled inherently in the manifest world: it
begins to suffer. It is introduced to the first
Noble Truth, a jolting initiation into the world
of perception, whose sole mathematics is the
torture-inducing fire of unquenched and
unquenchable desire. This is not a desire-ridden
world that was lacking in the infant's previous
"wonderful" immersion state, but simply a world
that dominated that state unconsciously, a world
which the self now slowly, painfully, tragically
becomes aware of.
And
so, as the self grows in awareness, it moves
from unconscious Hell to conscious Hell, and
there it may spend its entire life, seeking
above all else the numbing consolations that
will blunt its raw and ragged feelings, blur its
etchings of despair. Its life becomes a map of
morphine, and folding itself into the anesthetic
glow of all its compensations, it might even
manage to convince itself, at least for an
endearing blush of rose-tinted time, that the
dualistic world is an altogether pretty
thing.
But
alternatively, the self might continue its
growth and development into the genuinely
spiritual domains: transcending the
separate-self sense, it uncoils in the very
Divine. The union with the Divine--a union or
oneness that had been present but unconscious
since the start--now flares forth in
consciousness in a brilliant burst of
illumination and a shock of the unspeakably
ordinary: it realizes its Supreme Identity with
Spirit itself, announced, perhaps, in nothing
more than the cool breeze of a bright spring
day, this outrageously obvious
affair.
And
thus the
actual course of human ontogeny: from
unconscious Hell to conscious Hell to conscious
Heaven. At
no point does the self lose its union with the
Ground, or it would utterly cease to be! In
other words, the Romantic agenda is right about
the second and third steps (the conscious Hell
and the conscious Heaven), but utterly confused
about the infantile state itself, which is not
unconscious Heaven but unconscious
Hell.
Thus,
the infantile state is not unconscious
transpersonal, it is basically prepersonal. It
is not trans-rational, it is pre-rational. It is
not trans-verbal, it is pre-verbal. It is not
trans-egoic, it is pre-egoic.3 And the course of
human development--and evolution at large--is
from subconscious to self-conscious to
superconscious; from prepersonal to personal to
transpersonal; from under-mental to mental to
over-mental; from pre-temporal to temporal to
trans-temporal, by any other name:
eternal.
The
Romantics had simply confused pre with trans,
and thus elevated the pre states to the glory of
the trans (just as the reductionists would
dismiss the trans states by claiming they were
regression to pre states). These
two
confusions--the elevationist and the
reductionist--are the two main forms of the
pre/trans fallacy,
which was first outlined and identified in the
following pages. And the crucial point was that
development is not regression in service of ego,
but evolution in transcendence of
ego.
And
thus ended my Romantic fascination.
Now,
there is indeed a falling away from Godhead,
from Spirit, from the primordial Ground, and
this is the truth the Romantics are trying to
get at, before they slip into their pre/trans
fallacies. This falling away is called
involution, the movement whereby all things fall
away from a consciousness of their union with
the Divine, and thus imagine themselves to be
separate and isolated monads, alienated and
alienating. And once involution has
occurred--and Spirit becomes unconsciously
involved in the lower and lowest forms of its
own manifestation--then evolution can occur:
Spirit unfolds in a great spectrum of
consciousness, from the Big Bang to matter to
sensation to perception to impulse to image to
symbol to concept to reason to psychic to subtle
to causal occasions, on the way to its own
shocking self-recognition, Spirit's own
self-realization and self-resurrection. And in
each of those stages--from matter to body to
mind to soul to spirit--evolution becomes more
and more conscious, more and more are, more and
more realized, more and more awake--with all the
joys, and all the terrors, inherently involved
in that dialectic of awakening.
At
each stage of this process of Spirit's return to
itself, we--you and I--nonetheless remember,
perhaps vaguely, perhaps intensely, that we were
once consciously one with the very Divine
itself. It is there, this memory trace, in the
back of our awareness, pulling and pushing us to
realize, to awaken, to remember who and what we
always already are.
In
fact, all things, we might surmise, intuit to
one degree or another that their very Ground is
Spirit itself. All things are driven, urged,
pushed and pulled to manifest this realization.
And yet, prior to that divine awakening, all
things seek Spirit in a way that actually
prevents the realization: or else we would be
realized right now!
We seek Spirit in ways that prevent
it.
We
seek for Spirit in the world of time; but Spirit
is timeless, and cannot there be found. We seek
for Spirit in the world of space; but Spirit is
spaceless, and cannot there be found. We seek
for Spirit in this or that object, shiny and
alluring and full of fame or fortune; but Spirit
is not an object, and it cannot be seen or
grasped in the world of commodities and
commotion.
In
other words, we are seeking for Spirit in ways
that prevent its realization, and force us to
settle for substitute gratifications, which
propel us through, and lock us into,
the
wretched world of time and
terror,
space and death, sin and separation, loneliness
and consolation.
And
that is the Atman project.
The
Atman project: the attempt to find Spirit in
ways that prevent it and force substitute
gratifications. And, as you will see in the
following pages, the entire structure of the
manifest universe is driven by the Atman
project, a project that continues until
we--until you and I--awaken to the Spirit whose
substitutes we seek in the world of space and
time and grasping and despair.
The
nightmare of history is the nightmare of the
Atman project, the fruitless search in time for
that which is finally
timeless,
a search that inherently generates terror and
torment, a self ravaged by repression, paralyzed
by guilt, beset with the frost and fever of
wretched alienation--a torture that is only
undone in the radiant Heart when the great
search itself uncoils, when the self-contraction
relaxes its attempt to find God, real or
substitute: the movement in time is undone by
the great Unborn, the great Uncreate, the great
Emptiness in the Heart of the Kosmos
itself.
And
so, as you read this book, try to remember:
remember the great event when you breathed out
and created this entire Kosmos; remember the
great emptying when you threw yourself out as
the entire World, just to see what would happen.
Remember the forms and forces through which you
have traveled thus far: from galaxies to
planets, to verdant plants reaching upward for
the sun, to animals stalking day and night,
restless with their weary search, through primal
men and women, yearning for the light, to the
very person now holding this book: remember who
and what you have been, what you have done, what
you have seen, who you actually are in all those
guises, the masks of the God and the Goddess,
the masks of your own Original Face.
Let
the great search wind down; let the
self-contraction uncoil in the immediateness of
present awareness; let the entire Kosmos rush
into your being, since you are its very Ground;
and then you will remember that the Atman
project never occurred, and you have never
moved, and it is all exactly as it should be,
when the robin sings on a glorious morning, and
rain drops beat on the temple roof.
Copyright
1996, 1997, Shambhala Publications
Postscript
of The Order of Time:
Althought this
article, contrary to the purpose of The Order of
time, presents spirituality as an alienation
from time: 'the timeless spirit and the timeless
soul that must dissolve in the alaya spirit of
emptiness for liberation', still the contents
are valued as they present a structural
time-bound view on the history of the West with
its reductionism as coming to an integrative
grip with the Perennial Philosophy. It is also
important because of its interest in levels of
attainment, which is also in accord with The
Order. Of course holism and selfrealization do
incorporate the dualities of time and matter as
well as the absoluteness of soul and spirit. Of
course the scientific method is also holistic.
(see On the Method by R.D.)
Or as P.
pointed out in the Yoga Sutra's: at last of the
succession of moments one clearly sees the order
(the order of time; the spiritual soul). The
warning to the 'floating, mystic and vague'
timeless spirituality propagated in this article
is not to submit to a (romantic as
K.W.
says himself ) escapist fallacy but to arrive at
the liberated state of service to the cause and
order of a filognosy of oneness in diversity
(specified
dualism).
T.H.E.
Servant