Sense & Soul Ken Wilber The Four Hands of God: Toward a more complete understanding of the elements of spirituality. So far, in our ongoing exploration of an integral approach to spirituality, we have introduced the ideas of perspectives (first-, second-, and third-person perspectives, such as I, you/we, and it ) and levels of development (such as archaic, magic, mythic, mental, integral, and higher). Let us begin to pull these together into something of a coherent statement, so that the contours of the integral approach will start to become clear. Later, we will introduce the remaining elements of the integral approach, including developmental lines, states of consciousness, and types. When we are finished, all five elements perspectives, levels, lines, states, and types will hopefully be integrated into a seamless whole, which gives us a truly integral framework with which to better understand human spirituality and perhaps Spirit itself. But one thing that we have found time and again is that if you leave out any of those elements in your account of spirituality, you end up with a decidedly less-than-integral approach which is to say, a partial, fragmented, broken approach to God. And, generally speaking, a broken God is not high on anybody s gift list. Let us begin by integrating perspectives and levels. How do they fit together? Please see Figure 1. Notice that it is divided into four squares or quadrants. These quadrants are just another name for perspectives. You can see four of these important perspectives listed in their respective quadrants I (the Upper-Left quadrant), we (the Lower-Left quadrant), it (the Upper-Right quadrant) and its (the Lower-Right quadrant). Figure 1. The Four Quadrants
Notice the contents of each of those quadrants. (Don t worry if all of the terms don t make sense; the diagram shows more details than we need, but the essential points should be obvious.) The Upper Right contains things like atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, triune brains, and so on. These are all things that can be seen out there in an objective fashion. Each of them is an it or third-person object. Science specializes in studying these types of objects. The Upper Right is what an organism e.g., your organism looks like from an objective, detached, exterior, scientific approach. But notice that, unlike the Upper Right, the Upper Left cannot be seen out there in a scientific fashion, because the Upper Left contains things like feelings, ideas, wishes, interior states, even things like mathematics and logic, none of which can be seen running around out there in the sensory world, but can only be accessed by looking within by introspection, awareness, contemplation, meditation, phenomenology, and so on. In figure 1, you can see a few representative items that you can be aware of if you introspect your own mind or awareness or experience things like sensations, feelings, images, symbols, concepts, and so on, none of which can be see in the exterior world. So the Upper Right is what your organism looks like from the outside in an objective stance, and the Upper Left is what your organism looks like from the inside, from within, in a subjective or introspective stance. The Upper Right is a third-person it, but the Upper Left is a first-person I hence, the outside and the inside views of your being. (Needless to say, an integral approach maintains that both of these are equally important for an overall picture. More about that later.) So the two upper quadrants represent the inside and outside of an individual. But individuals always exist in collectives. There is no inside without an outside, and no singular without a plural. So the lower two quadrants represent the plural the collectives or communities of individuals. And like individuals, these collectives, or societies, can be looked at from within and from without. The Lower-Right quadrant is a collective looked at from the outside in a scientific, third-person perspective. Systems theory is the classic approach to this quadrant. Systems theory looks at all things as systems of dynamically interwoven its or third-person processes and systems. You can see many of these collective systems listed in the Lower-Right quadrant. Systems theory usually claims that it is covering ALL of reality, but its third-person-systems approach actually does not include or explain interior realities at all. Poetry, beauty, divinity, the sublime, aesthetics, morals all of those get left out of systems theory, because all of those actually exist in the other quadrants and cannot be captured at all by systems theory. But systems theory does cover this one quadrant very well, and thus it can help to give us, not the whole story, but onefourth of the story, so to speak. The fact is, societies, couples, groups, families, nations and all of the plural or collective forms of beings possess not just an outside but an inside. In addition to exterior forms that can be investigated by systems theory, they have interiors that can be investigated by other means. They have shared values, shared feelings, shared identities, shared cultures, shared worldviews all of the items that can be found in the Lower-Left quadrant (or the interior of the collective). Figure 2 is a four-quadrant diagram drawn with an emphasis on some specifically human aspects of the quadrants. Some of these shared values and worldviews are listed in the lower left of Figure 2, such as magic, mythic, rational, postmodern, and integral. Figure 2. Some Examples of the Four Quadrants in Humans
Another way to get a sense of what the quadrants mean is to notice that many great philosophers and sages have specialized in one quadrant. This makes their discoveries very important but also partial. Take a look at Figure 3 and you will recognize many of these pioneers. Figure 3. Some Pioneers in the Various Quadrants
You might have noticed by now that the four quadrants are simply a variation on the three major perspectives of first-person (I), second-person (you/we), and third-person (it/its). And those are variations on the Good (morals, you/we), the True (objective truth, it/its), and the Beautiful (the beauty in the I of the beholder). Further, each quadrant has development that proceeds through levels. I have previously given a summary of the levels of understanding of Spirit, and asked Which Level of God Do You Believe In? That was a good example of levels in one of the quadrants. But the point is that quadrants and levels always go together. A simplified version of this can be seen in Figure 4 (taken from my book A Theory of Everything). This diagram, which we call AQAL ( All quadrants, all levels ) is therefore an easy way to see how quadrants and levels always coexist. And the integral suggestion is that, if you leave out any of them, a broken God awaits you. Figure 4. All Quadrants, All Levels The AQAL approach makes another strong claim, namely, that none of those quadrants can be reduced to the others. Each of them is an irreducible reality in its own right. Each quadrant contains realities that are crucial for a more comprehensive, balanced, and integral approach to reality, to the universe, to God and Goddess and Spirit. The integral approach maintains that if we take all of these important factors into account, then some of the truly difficult and intractable problems of religion and spirituality start to make sense the relation of science and religion, the nature of humanity s relation to Spirit, the developmental levels of understanding God, the role of spirituality in the modern and postmodern world among many others.
Accordingly, we will next begin exploring the many ways that an integral or AQAL framework can shed much-needed light on some of the most difficult problems facing religion in the modern and postmodern world. Because if this approach is generally correct, it offers, for the first time, a way to integrate premodern religion with modern science and postmodern developments, honoring each and every one of them in an integral embrace. As a small preview, how about this: if you look at Figure 2, notice that many of the great spiritual teachers appear in the Upper-Left quadrant but not in the other three quadrants. (Figure 2 mentions Buddha, Plotinus, and Aurobindo, but it could also list Jesus, Lao Tzu, Luria, Eckhart, St. Teresa, etc.) What if that is true, and it is the nature of religion or spirituality to offer us profound insights about that quadrant, but not the others? Would that hurt religion? Or could it possibly help religion by allowing it to specialize in what it does best, while conceding the other quadrants to other disciplines that historically have outshone religion in results? An integral approach that emphasized all quadrants and all levels would be able to integrate science and religion, premodern and modern and postmodern, but without diluting any of them. If that is the case, something rather revolutionary would be looming on the integral horizon. /// Which Level of God Do You Believe In? Your vision of God depends on where you are in your spiritual development. I have said that, "Throughout history, religion has been the single greatest source of human-caused wars, suffering, and misery. In the name of God, more suffering has been inflicted than by any other manmade cause." I was, of course, using the word "religion" in its sociological meaning, as any belief invested with "ultimate concern," in which case not only Islam, Christianity, and Shintoism are religions, but Marxism, Nazism, and Eco-terrorism are all versions of religions or religiously held beliefs. Seen as such, the opening sentence is obviously true. This points up a crucial aspect of an integral approach to spirituality, namely, there are several different meanings of the words "religion" and "spirituality," all of which are important. The whole point about an integral or comprehensive approach is that it must find a way to believably include all of those important meanings in a coherent whole. I have introduced the idea of perspectives, such as first-person, second-person, and third-person perspectives, and pointed out that those perspectives give rise to such items as the Good, the True, and the Beautiful (or art, science, and morals). As we continue to introduce the ingredients of an integral approach to religion and spirituality, those perspectives are an important part, as we will continue to see. Another important ingredient is levels, which in this case means "levels of religious belief, faith, or spirituality." Levels of religion? Levels of spirituality? Levels of belief? Yes, indeed, and this topic, which is highly controversial, nonetheless has perhaps the most explanatory power of all of the ingredients in an integral view. It refers specifically to the fact that human beings undergo psychological development. At each level or stage of development, they will see the world in a different way. Hence, each level of development has, as it were, a different religious belief or worldview. This does not make God or Spirit the result of human development; it does, however, make the ways in which humans conceive of God or Spirit the result of development. And this is where it gets really interesting. Start with levels of psychological development. Scholars in the field of development are agreed that human beings universally undergo various types of development. Language, for example, emerges in a series of stages, a sequence that we might stylistically summarize as letters, then words, then sentences, then paragraphs. There are no known cases of sentences emerging before words, or words emerging before
letters (or phonemes). In fact, it is impossible, since the whole point about sequential stages is that they emerge in an order that incorporates previous stages. Exactly like atoms to molecules to cells to organisms, each true stage in a developmental sequence transcends and includes its predecessors. You cannot skip stages, just like you cannot go from atoms to cells and skip molecules. Nor can you reverse stages (no cells before molecules). Their general features are universal. Although scholars are agreed that human development occurs and that many of its general features are universal such as words before sentences, neural net before brainstem, symbols before concepts, images before rules (there are literally hundreds of these types of uncontested universals, which we called content-free universals ) there is nonetheless a great deal of argument about the exact details. That development occurs is uncontested, but the various models of development are still hotly debated. What is so amazing, however, is that, despite the differences in the models at the level of fine detail, in broad terms they show a remarkable similarity. In fact, in Integral Psychology, I summarized over 100 different psychospiritual models of development, and what is so striking is their general similarity. Thus, when it comes to levels of development which is the aspect of an integral approach that we are introducing now then if we stay with the general outlines and contours of development, we do just fine. But if we leave out developmental levels, we leave out an important and uncontested component of the human psyche, and thus our approach would not, and could not, be integral. What, then, are some of the more important levels of development? Of the 100 models that I mentioned, I will here use one of the most influential, and one that is still quite valid as a simple summary or overview, that of the pioneering genius, Jean Gebser. Gebser found that human beings tend to go through at least five major levels of development, which he called archaic, magic, mythic, mental, and integral. Those words mean pretty much what you think they mean. Let's accept for the moment that, in a very general sense, those stages might be true. If so, then there is an archaic spirituality, a magic spirituality, a mythic spirituality, a mental spirituality, and an integral spirituality (with possibly higher stages still to come). Put bluntly, there is an archaic God, a magic God, a mythic God, a mental God, and an integral God. Which God do you believe in? An archaic God sees divinity in any strong instinctual force. A magic God locates divine power in the human ego and its magical capacity to change the animistic world with rituals and spells. A mythic God is located not on this earth but in a heavenly paradise not of this world, entrance to which is gained by living according to the covenants and rules given by this God to his peoples. A mental God is a rational God, a demythologized Ground of Being that underlies all forms of existence. And an integral God is one that embraces all of the above. Which of those Gods is the most important? According to an integral view, all of them, because each higher stage actually builds upon and includes the lower, so the lower stages are more fundamental and the higher stages are more significant, but leave out any one of them and you re in trouble. You are, that is, less than integral, less than comprehensive, less than inclusive in your understanding of God. So which level of God do you believe in? Whatever it is, the central point is that, if human beings do indeed undergo psychological development, then their understanding of God or Goddess or Spirit will likewise undergo development. Tracing that development while honoring each and every stage as an equally crucial component of that development is an important part of any integral approach to religion and spirituality.
Along with perspectives, levels are therefore an important ingredient in the integral approach. Now we can start putting some of these items together into a bigger picture. /// Why Do Religions Teach Love and Yet Cause So Much War? Transcending the trauma to get to the truth of the world's faiths. Throughout history, religion has been the single greatest source of human-caused wars, suffering, and misery. In the name of God, more suffering has been inflicted than by any other manmade cause. Does that strike you as odd? And if that statement is true, does it not follow that peace on earth, good will toward men demands the death of God? An integral approach to spirituality takes that assertion very seriously. Yet it also accepts the idea that religion in some sense contains deep and abiding truths about reality, possibly about Ultimate Reality itself. It is one of the distinctive aspects of the integral approach that it claims to be able to reconcile those two astonishingly contradictory items. Item #1: Religion causes more human war and misery than any other manmade cause. Item #2: Religion is about Ultimate Reality. The only way to reconcile those two items is to recognize that, at the very least, religion contains two very different aspects. One clearly divides humans; the other might be able to unite them. Peace on earth, good will toward men obviously rests upon differentiating those two aspects and placing each of them in a larger context. Exactly how to do so is one of the goals of the integral approach. But one thing is certain and historically undeniable: if we cannot do so, religion will continue to be the death of humans until humans have the death of God. It is common, of course, to say that all religions or certainly most of them teach some sort of brotherly/sisterly love, that all major religions have some version of the Golden Rule, and that religions therefore have acted to introduce love and compassion into the world. Once again, however, that flies in the face of historical fact: for every year of peace in humankind s history there have been fourteen years of war, 90% of which have been fought either because of, or under the banner of, God by whatever name. (More on this at Ken Wilber Online.) Again, it seems as if there are almost two different kinds of religion, one of which brutally divides, and one of which unites (or can unite). How do we tell them apart, and how might we begin to switch allegiance from the former to the latter? If you believe in God and yet don t have an answer to that question, you are inadvertently contributing to the wars of tomorrow, yes? And it won t quite do to say that the world would be peaceful if everybody accepted my personal savior or my path to Spirit. Surely that is the cause, not the cure, of the problem, yes? I have introduced the idea of an integral approach to spirituality. Most of my writings are self-contained pieces; few of them require any familiarity with earlier or later writing. The integral approach has about a half-dozen major components, however, each of which needs to be understood in order for the approach itself to make sense. Thus, this constitutes a series of installments, each of which builds upon its predecessors.
Does this sound interesting to you? If so, then let s begin. I haven't spelled out, or really indicated what an integral approach to spirituality would include. Many readers naturally assumed that this was simply another version of universalism the belief that there are certain truths contained in all the world s religions. But the integral approach emphatically does not make that suggestion. Other readers maintained that I was offering a version of the perennial philosophy espoused by Aldous Huxley or Huston Smith. Does the integral approach believe that all religions are saying essentially the same thing from a different perspective? No, almost the opposite. Yet the integral approach does claim to be able to unite, in some sense, the world s great spiritual traditions, which is what has caused much of the interest in this approach. If humanity is ever to cease its swarming hostilities and be united in one family, without squashing the significant and important differences among us, then something like an integral approach seems the only way. Until that time, religions will continue to brutally divide humanity, as they have throughout history, and not unite, as they must if they are to be a help, not a hindrance, to tomorrow s existence. So how can we describe the integral approach in simple terms? It s clearly going to be a bit of a new idea, so bear with me. We might start by calling it a content-free cross-culturalism. Gulp. That s simple? Content-free refers to the fact that virtually all previous approaches at unification have attempted to find some sort of unity on the level of actual content (whereas the integral approach does not). For example, most of the world s great religions have some version of the Golden Rule, and most universalists use those types of common elements to find their unity in the world s religions. The integral approach does none of that. Or rather, all such similarities in content are looked upon as quite secondary, even trivial. This is why we call the core of the integral approach content-free. It finds its similarities in certain patterns of content, not in the content itself. Here s a simple example. Notice that all the world s mature languages contain first-, second-, and thirdperson pronouns. First person means the person who is speaking (I, me, we); second person means the person spoken to (you, thou); and third person means the person or thing being spoken about (him, her, it). So if you are talking to me about your new car, you are the first person, I am the second person, and the car is the third person. These pronouns actually represent three perspectives that human beings can take when they talk about the world or attempt to know the world. For example, I have my first-person impressions of my new car ( I like it! ). I can ask you, a second person, what you think about it ( I like it, too! ). You and I are now a we (a first-person plural) and we both agree, the car ( it ) is great! Although there are obviously countless combinations here, it s sometimes useful to summarize these three major perspectives as I/me, you/we, and he/her/it or simply I, we, and it. So what? Well, the fact that every major language contains these three types of pronouns means that we have a set of metauniversals here, or something that we find in all major cultures. Notice that these universals I, we, and it do not themselves have any content. To say that all languages have a first-person pronoun ( I or me ) is not to say anything about that person at all. It is not to say that this person is named Martha, or this person is spiritual, or this person is made of carbon and water molecules, or this person contains Jungian archetypes, or anything like that at all.
It s much, much deeper than that. To say that all human beings recognize a first-, second-, and third-person perspective is to say that those perspectives but not necessarily any of their contents are universally available to all normal humans. It s sort of like saying that all human beings contain two kidneys, two lungs, and one liver. But it says nothing about what you actually do with your kidneys or lungs or liver. In other words, to say that you have a first-person perspective on what you are reading right now you are a firstperson I who is reading this is to say nothing about what you actually think about what you are reading. Maybe you like it, maybe you don t. All I am saying is that you definitely have available to you a first-person perspective, and you know that you do. Now this begins to get interesting, because we have started to find a series of things that are universal, but that themselves have no particular content. They are meta-universals. Or, as we were saying, contentfree cross-cultural patterns. Notice that we never find a perspective running around all by itself, dangling in midair, completely divorced from some sort of content, only that the perspectives themselves are not merely culture-bound or merely relative, appearing in some cultures but not in others. So I am not saying that content-free means culture-free; rather, perspectives such as I, we, and it are wedded to particular cultures but not reducible to them. The fascinating part is that these three perspectives might actually give rise to art, morals, and science. Or the Beautiful, the Good, and the True: the Beauty that is in the eye (or the I ) of the beholder; the Good or moral actions that can exist between you and me as a we ; and the objective Truth about third-person objects (or its ) that you and I might discover: hence, art ( I ), morals ( we ), and science ( it ). The Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Which leads us to a spirituality gone integral, a God found whole in the midst of the fractured postmodern world. /// What's my philosophy? In a word, integral. And what on earth or in heaven do I mean by integral? The dictionary meaning is fairly simple: comprehensive, balanced, inclusive, essential for completeness. Short definition, tall order. What would something like an inclusive or comprehensive spirituality mean? What could it mean? And would it even be remotely possible? Integral, in a sense, would be the ultimate ecumenical movement, if such a thing is even desirable. It would be a spirituality that claimed to leave nothing essential out. It would be a spirituality that in principle could be recognized and even practiced by believers in all the world s religions without abandoning their own essentials. It would be based on what seem to be universal human capacities to interface with the Divine. It would be inclusive and comprehensive, touching on all the bases of this elusive thing called spirituality. It would be. Impossible, is what it would be. But consider where we are in today s modern and postmodern world. We have, for the first time in history, easy access to all of the world s great religions. Examine the many great traditions from Christianity to Buddhism, Islam to Taoism, Paganism to Neoplatonism and you are struck by two items: there are an enormous number of differences between them, and a handful of striking similarities. When you find a few essential items that all, or virtually all, of the world s great religions agree on, you have probably found something incredibly important about the human condition, at least as important as, say, a few things that physicists can manage to agree on (which nowadays, by the way, ain t all that impressive).
What are these spiritual similarities? I ll come back to those shortly, honest. For now, simply notice what it would mean if there were a handful of general items that regularly recur in humanity s attempts to know God (and presumably God s correlative attempts to reach a slumbering humanity, if God indeed exists). These similarities would seem to suggest, among other things, that there are spiritual patterns at work in the universe, at least as far as we can tell, and these spiritual patterns announce themselves with impressive regularity wherever human hearts and minds attempt to attune themselves to the cosmos in all its radiant dimensions. And that would mean, would have to mean, that the standard-issue human being is hardwired for spiritual realities. That is, the human organism itself seems to be hardwired for these deep spiritual patterns, although not necessarily for the specific ways that they show up in a particular religion important as those are. Rather, the human being seems imbued by the realities suggested by these cross-cultural spiritual currents and patterns, with which individual religions and spiritual movements resonate, according to their own capacities and to their own degrees of fidelity. The simple recognition of these deep spiritual patterns would be the glimmering of an integral spirituality. That recognition would also imply that, any practices that would help individual human beings attune themselves to these patterns would increase humanity s understanding of, and attunement with, the spiritual patterns of the universe. This attunement could occur through any of the great religions, but would be tied exclusively to none of them. A person could be attuned to an integral spirituality while still be a practicing Christian, Buddhist, New-Age advocate, or Neopagan. This would be something added to one s religion, not subtracted from it. The only thing it would subtract (and there s no way around this) is the belief that one s own path is the only true path to salvation. If humanity s attunement to the spiritual patterns of the universe are helped by various practices which might include prayer, meditation, yoga, contemplation then modern psychological and psychotherapeutic measures would surely be part of any integral spirituality, since those measures can help increase a person s capacity for various sorts of practice. What do I mean by psychotherapeutic measures? This in itself is a large topic, so let me say, for introductory purposes, they are any measures that might be taken if you have an emotional problem and visit the office of a psychologist, psychotherapist, or psychiatrist all of the measures for treating human psychological issues that have been developed in the last century or so, and that have demonstrated the capacity to help alleviate or remove emotional problems or obstructions. Finally, integral spirituality as the very name integral implies transcends and includes science, it does not exclude, repress, or deny science. To say that the spiritual currents of the cosmos cannot be captured by empirical science is not to say that they deny science, only that they show their face to other methods of seeking knowledge, of which the world has an abundance. Well, then, what are some of these spiritual currents, or some of the similarities that recur in virtually all of the great wisdom traditions? Let me start with a short and simple list. This is not the last word on the topic, but the first word, a simple list of suggestions to get the conversation going. Most of the great wisdom traditions agree that: 1. Spirit, by whatever name, exists. 2. Spirit, although existing out there, is found in here, or revealed within to the open heart and mind. 3. Most of us don t realize this Spirit within, however, because we are living in a world of sin, separation, or duality that is, we are living in a fallen, illusory, or fragmented state.
4. There is a way out of this fallen state (of sin or illusion or disharmony), there is a Path to our liberation. 5. If we follow this Path to its conclusion, the result is a Rebirth or Enlightenment, a direct experience of Spirit within and without, a Supreme Liberation, which 6. marks the end of sin and suffering, and 7. manifests in social action of mercy and compassion on behalf of all sentient beings. Does a list something like that make sense to you? Because if there are these general spiritual patterns in the cosmos, at least wherever human beings appear, then this changes everything. You can be a practicing Christian and still agree with that list; you can be a practicing Neopagan and still agree with that list. We can argue the fine details, but the simple existence of those types of currents profoundly changes the nature of belief itself. If we add to those spiritual currents the other two ingredients that I mentioned authentic spirituality must transcend and include modern science (not deny it), and psychological measures can help accelerate spiritual capacities then we are getting very close to what might in fact be an integral spirituality, a spirituality for the modern and postmodern world that includes the best of the premodern traditions as well. ///