Greg Voisen
Well, welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voisen, the host of Inside Personal Growth. And that young man on the other side of the screen, for all of you who don't know who he is, is Ken Wilber. And Ken has been on inside personal growth several times before, but the last one was all the way back in 2017 for a book called The Religion of Tomorrow. Which I really love that interview, because it is kind of really stirred me up and got me thinking about, where is all this going? Good day to you, Ken, how are you doing?

Ken Wilber
I'm fine. I sort of knocked the teeth out here. In case you notice a funny look to my smile. But other than that, I'm doing fine.

Greg Voisen
Well, you know what? I people hit their shins on bedpost, people knock their teeth out, people fall down, but I didn't even really notice it. So, there you go. Now everybody's gonna look at your mouth and go, right? Kid, well, we're not gonna do that, but I'm gonna let my listeners know a tad about you. Ken is a visionary thinker of an inspired genius. Is the developer of what's called the integral, or the Theory of Everything, embracing the truths of all the world's great traditions. He is the author of over 20 he just told me, it's more than 20 it's 35 books. And we're going to be speaking about his book calling “Finding Radical Wholeness”. A Brief History of everything. Is one of his other books, grace and grit, sex, ecology, spirituality. And they go on and on and on. And we'll put a link to his website, which is Ken wilber.com in 2000 he founded the integral Institute, a think tank for studying issues of science and society with outreach through local and online communities such as integral education network, integral training and integral spiritual center. And in 2007 Ken co founded integral life, a social media hub dedicated to sharing the integral vision with the worldwide community, as well as documenting and catalyzing the progress of the integral movement. His rise, his writings have been translated into over 20 languages, and he lives in Denver, So Ken, that was a brief introduction. I could have gone on a lot longer than that, but why waste time when we can dive right in through the book finding radical wholeness? And so look, you, you've certainly got a huge collection, and Shambhala has published most of your works as you exception for and I go back to the days it sounds true, putting the cassette CDs of your integral theory into my I remember the guy looked like this on the cover. I listened to those so much with the lines and the levels and making sure where I was so finding radical wholeness, she emphasized the importance of discovering genuine wholeness in our lives. Okay, can you start by defining what wholeness means in the context of your work? Because many our listeners are going to well, they're going to say, well, whole is in half,

Ken Wilber
right? Well, wholeness means inclusive or systemic or all inclusive. And the general idea is that, on the one hand, it's a series of practices that you can do to actually bring wholeness into your life. And on another hand, is sort of a philosophical framework that includes literally all philosophies. And it does this by when I discovered this framework, I was in my late teens, and I had already had a spontaneous, what's then called Satori, or an enlightenment or awakening experience.

Greg Voisen
Was that when you were a dishwasher kid? Yeah, I was a 19 year old kid, right?

Ken Wilber
And so when you have an awakening or an enlightenment experience, you're usually identified with this small ego or small self. It sort of exists behind your face and looks at the world out there and. You're identified with that, and you might have self esteem problems, or you might not, but you're essentially a small egoic self. And when you have an awakening experience, you drop that identity with that small self, and you realize you're literally one with everything. You don't look at the mountain. You are the mountain. You don't look the flock of birds flying overhead. You are the flock of birds. You don't stand on the earth. You are the Earth. You're literally one with everything that's arising in your environment. And so if you translate that into conceptual terms, it means that we all have numerous numbers of philosophical perspectives that we take in the world, and there are a dozen or two dozen major schools of philosophy in the west and around the world. And what I wanted to do was find how they all could be true but partial. And so I wanted to find a framework that would hold all of these different philosophical disciplines together. And so we'd have empiricism and hermeneutics and idealism and systems theory and so on. And I came up with, well, the way I got on to it was I started noticing that there was a branch of psychology called developmental psychology, and there were famous people like Lawrence Kohlberg and Robert Keegan and Jane lovenger And Abraham Maslow. And all of them had actual empirical studies of human beings. And they noticed that all human beings, without exception, goes through major stages of development, right? And each of each of those has a different worldview. So we can use gene gestures names for his major stages. They were archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic and systemic or integral or integrate. And we all go through as many of those stages as we can manage to grow through as we continue our growing up. And so some people get to rational stage. Some people will make it to pluralistic and a very few will make it to integral stages of waking up. And as I notice that of the several dozen developmental psychologists, they each were drawing on a different multiple intelligence that they were measuring its growth. So multiple intelligences, most people know we have a cognitive intelligence and we have a moral intelligence, but we also have emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, esthetic or beauty intelligence and so on. And most psychologists think they're somewhere between eight to 12 multiple intelligences that we have. And so what I started doing is on those big yellow pads, legal pads, I would tear one sheet off, and every time I found a developmental sequence, I would write it down on one yellow sheet of paper, and I had over 100 yellow sheets, and I put them all over my floor in my apartment, and the floor was just covered with yellow sheets of paper and apped

Greg Voisen
it that's mapped it out. You know, as you're as you're saying this, I recall many, many years ago. I don't know exactly how old you are now, but I'm 70 as of July 3. You know, I went to this David Hawking's workshops out in the desert. We were literally in Palm Desert or Palm Springs, and his levels of consciousness, right? Because you really in much of your work, speak about, hey, well, if the Dalai Lama is here and the average person's resonating at this, and it was power versus force, right, right? And, and I always appreciated what Hawking's brought out, right, but I appreciated your stuff more because it was more thorough. Okay, it was, it was, it did add more meaning to it in this work that you're now do. Doing you mentioned that wholeness is not something we naturally perceive, and it's true, because not everybody's had that Sumatra kind of experience like you write it at 19, but something we must actively seek, right? Okay, I get that on the other hand, what are some of the common misconceptions people have about wholeness, because I think some of us might be experiencing it, but maybe not to the degree that you experienced it. I know that I've never microdosed drugs to actually get there, although a lot of people would say, hey, well, let's go microdose some drugs, because then we can have this more out of body experience. What are your thoughts on that about how we actively seek having this connection and wholeness,

Ken Wilber
right? Well, it is a common misconception that wholeness is just lying around and we can see it, yeah, I mean, it's just we look out and we see the whole world, and that's a wholeness, and so we're fine, but that's not really true. So you can, for example, I use a typical example, is like a Zen student, say, 1000 years ago, and he's not yet had what Zen calls a Satori or an enlightenment or awakening experience, although that is the entire purpose of Zen. Buddhism is to have a Satori or a type of holiness with everything. But he could be sitting in the woods one day, and he still he thinks that the sun goes around the Earth, and he thinks that the earth is flat. And when he's sitting in the woods, he doesn't he sees all the trees, but he doesn't see the atoms and molecules or the cells in the tree, so he's not really seeing that side of wholeness and but, and if he has a waking up experience and realizes he's one with all the woods and he's one with the sun and he's one with the earth, and that's Fine, but he still and he will feel that actual oneness, and that's what we call a waking up experience. But he won't read. He'll still think that the sun goes around the Earth. He'll still think the earth is flat, and he still won't see the atoms, molecules or cells in the trees that he's one with So right there we can see that there's very important types of wholeness that are just not available to us unless we know specifically where to look.

Greg Voisen
Well, now look you. You have what you call five pathways to wholeness, right? You just talked about waking up. I think many people get a heightened sense of awareness. The question is, is, how deep do they take that? So you say waking up, growing up, opening up, cleaning up, showing up, right? These are these five. So can you explain how these pathways differ, and why each is essentially for achieving, quote, big wholeness, right? Because I would have never thought those were going to be the paths. But right when I, when I read this, it was like, Okay, this makes sense. Yeah,

Ken Wilber
um, well, you mentioned them, waking up, growing up, opening up, cleaning up and showing up. And the reason that they're all important is I mentioned that I was writing down the developmental sequence of these sheets of yellow paper, and I'd have this all these sheets spread all over the floor of my apartment, and each morning, I'd get up and I'd just walk and look at them. And I think now these have got to divide up in some ways. I mean, they're not all clearly dealing with the same thing, because some of the stages were like archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral. But other stages were like foraging to horticultural to agrarian to industrial, the informational. Now those aren't at all the same as archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic, the integral. And so I started trying to figure out how they all sit together. And after several months of just staring at all of them and trying to figure out how they. Would work, how they would sit together? I noticed that at least half of them were dealing with subjective or interior stages of growth and development. So that was things like archaic stage to magic stage to mythic stage to rational stage to pluralistic stage, the integral stage. And those are all worldviews that we formed in our mind as we think about different types of world and when we were evolving as a species, we evolved through those stages. We started from archaic when we were still basically chimpanzees or gorilla like or ape like. And then we went to magic. And magic is like voodoo. If you make a doll that looks like somebody and you want to hurt that person, you just start sticking knives in the doll, and because you're just learning to differentiate inside from outside, we think that this to change the signifier or the word or the doll that represents this thing, that it'll magically actually change the thing itself. So we think if we start stabbing that doll, it's going to actually hurt the real person, magically. And that's what magic is. And a lot of developmental psychologists actually call that stage the magic stage of development. It's very prevalent in two year olds, for example, and they'll think that if they hide under a pillow, and they can't see anybody. Nobody can see them either, because they magically have disappeared. And then when we move up to the mythic stage, which is, for example, the whole Old Testament is a mythic statement, and myths are famous for ancient Greece. We have Apollo, Aphrodite, Zeus Mars and so on. And they all live on Mount Olympus. Well, those are all myths and but the thing is, those supernatural beings, we human beings can no longer produce magic, but these supernatural beings can produce magic. And so in the Old Testament, there's all sorts of supernatural miracles and miraculous events, and all these supernatural beings are engaging in this type of magic. And if we want them to do something for us, then we have to pray to them or commit a sacrifice. And by the way, when we first started doing sacrifices, this is about 50,000 years BCE, it was frequently actual human sacrifice, like everybody's aware of asked sacrifice, where they have these big pyramids, and they'd walk up the pyramids with a sacrificial victim stretching out on a table and cut his heart out, and they'd eat his heart, and then they'd roll him down the stairs, and the townspeople would take his body home and cook it and eat it, and that was all to get stain. Brutal. Yeah,

Greg Voisen
pretty brutal. So, you know, you know, you you use for my listeners, much in the way of vernacular to describe whether it's mythological or it's an allegory or a story told in the Bible or something, because we're all coming from different perspectives. But I think in this finding radical wholeness, you're finding a common ground, and one of the things that you talk about is being spiritual but not religious. So I want to, I want to touch on this. Because the waking up, growing up, opening up, cleaning up and showing up, they all relate here. Because how does this approach of of being spiritual but not religious help individuals connect with wholeness without the constraints of traditional religious beliefs. Now it did use the word beliefs, but you got to realize true Ken, for many people listening, it also could be a big T, a truth, not a belief, right? We know how challenging it is for people to let go of of a truth that they're very, very vigorous about letting the world know that this is my truth. But if they are more re spiritual than religious, they're going to be open to radical. Wholeness, right? Yeah. Okay, yeah. So address that, if you would, because it's really sure

Ken Wilber
the difference between spiritual and religious. I was just sort of introducing those five types of wholeness, the five different aspects of a radical wholeness. And we were talking about waking up as a type of you feel one with everything, one with the universe. And then growing up is we actually grow through different stages of thinking capacity, or cognitive intelligence, and that means we have different world views as we continue to grow up. And as I said, Gene goepzer, who's a developmental genius called these worldviews, the archaic stage, the magic stage, the mythic stage, the rational stage, the pluralistic stage and the integral stage, the archaic stage is when we're just some half a million years ago, where we're just coming out of our gorilla Ness, our chimpanze, and we are just learning to talk and let alone learning to think, and that's the archaic stage. And then we move into the magic stage, which is we start to learn to differentiate ourself from the environment. But because we are not the mind is not fully differentiated from what it thinks about, then it often confuses the word for the thing that the word represents. And so that gives us a magical we think if we change the word, we'll magically change the real thing. And that's the essence of magic. As I say. It's very common in two to three year olds. And then at around age five or six or seven, we move from magic to mythic, and mythic we populate the world with a whole series of supernatural beings, gods, goddesses, nature spirits. And so I mentioned the Greek pantheon of Zeus, Apollo, Mars, Aphrodite Venus and so on. And they all live on Mount Olympus. Well, all of those are myths. Now it's true that when somebody goes through that stage, these supernatural beings are damn important to them, and because they seem very real, and they believe in them with their full force of being, right? And that is the source of almost all of the world's great religious mythologies. And I call them religious mythologies because they are mythologies. Now that's not to say that there isn't a real God or brahman or Tao or godhead, because there is, and that's a direct spiritual experience when I feel one with everything on one with God, one with Jesus Christ, one with Buddha nature. And that's a real spiritual experience. But if I just, if I just think about it in mythic terms, that's a religion.

Greg Voisen
Well, do you can that I, I, I told you at the onset of this that I used to listen to yours cassettes cosmic consciousness. It's now, obviously on Amazon. It would that be a foundation for our listeners? Potentially, I don't I think there were 10 CDs in there, but now you can download the audio from Amazon. Yeah, I would. I would highly recommend, if people want to get into your work, it's a great entry point as well, because it is available. Obviously, nobody has CD players anymore, but so go download the audio files, right? So the point is, is that you know, you one of the central themes in the book is wholeness. And you say it's not tied to any mythic or super unnatural belief. So repeat that it's not tied to any supernatural belief. So how does this perspective kind of align with broader spiritual movements of today? Spiritual movements? I mean, look, right, we've got lots of them out there. People aren't groving. They aren't running to go to sign up and be a Christian or whatever, but they are seeking a way to understand their own spirituality,

Ken Wilber
right, and all of the world's major. Religious movements, there are seven or eight of them are Christianity, Judaism,

Greg Voisen
Jews, Judaism, all of those, yes, Taoism,

Ken Wilber
Buddha, Hinduism, all of them, including Christian mysticism, have a small but core spiritual experience. And so Christian mystics, for example, tend to be called Neoplatonic mystics because they follow a Neoplatonic view. And Plato, of course, invented the view, and according to him, all normal people are sitting in a cave, and the real sun is outside of the cave, but as the sun shines in the cave, it casts shadows of things in the cave against the cave wall, and all Human beings are shackled so that we're facing the cave wall, and so we're just seeing shadows of a real reality. And the real reality is the actual Sun itself that's outside of the cave, shining in sight in the cave and casting in shadows. So all Christian mystics follow that general metaphor, because God is the light outside the cave. And if they escape from the cave and break out, they can actually see the real light. They have a direct experience of a real God, and that is a real sun. It's the real God. It's a real God head and Christian mystics, but Well, St Paul, who a lot of the early Christians were having mystical experiences, especially the 12 disciples, who were in Christ's presence, because this very powerful gurus, or spiritual masters, or teachers generally throw out a lot of this energy of oneness.

Greg Voisen
Well, how would you how would you reference? You know, many of my listeners are going to understand duality, non duality. You're now speaking about the sun coming in through the cave, and the separation between self and this spiritual God or experience, or whatever it might be. And you know, so radical wholeness really is this non duality. Would be true? Yes,

Ken Wilber
um, although we find that non duality itself breaks up into four or five different aspects of it, and as I continue to discuss them, you'll you're your listeners will stand tend to get a sense about what all these five different areas are that together add up to a radical wholeness. And so we talked about waking up, and I'm just introducing growing up. Waking up is just this direct, immediate first person experience. First Person is described as the perspective of the person who's speaking. So that's a pronoun, like I, me, mine. I'm taking a first person perspective now as I'm speaking, second person perspective is the perspective of the person being spoken to. So as you're listening to me, you're a second person, and then the third person is the person or thing being spoken about. So right now, that would be integral theory. That's what we're talking about. And so it's pronouns, like he, she, they, them, it or it's and

Greg Voisen
but that gives us context, yeah, in other words, if, if we're looking at waking up, growing up, opening up, cleaning up, showing up, right? It's kind of contextual in the way in which you're describing it, because we're using the English language, right to frame the framework, because it's the only thing we've got right now, there might be something coming that's different, so, but, but I think that you know, in that previous question about this being spiritual, but not Religious, I think it's a key thing, and the central theme of the wholeness is not pied, as you said, the any mystic or supernatural belief, but really to align with this broader spiritual movements of today. So let me go back to that question. What in your estimation? It is the broader, more spiritual movement of today. If radical wholeness is the pardon me for saying this, listeners, but is the Bible, okay? Then the sense that, hey, if I picked up radical wholeness, I could change my whole perspective about my life in relation to some supernatural being, whatever it might be. Would you say that would be a true statement?

Ken Wilber
Well, basically, when you ask, Where are the spiritual approaches today, as I mentioned, almost all the major religions have two aspects. They're sometimes called an exoteric or an outer approach, and that outer approach is always religion. It's always some form of mythic, literal belief. And developmentalists actually call that mythic stage from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral. They call that mythic stage the mythic literal stage, because the myths are all taken to be real. Zeus is really real, Aphrodite is really real. Is a mythic, literal reality. But it's still just a myth. It's still up there with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and leprechauns and, you know, whatever agreed. But you can find in almost if you find almost any of the world's great religions, Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Christian mysticism, Jewish mysticism, particularly known as Kabbalah or Sufism, Islamic mysticism. You can find that core of any major religion that is mystical. And mystical means a direct, immediate, first person experience of a unity. And so you can some Pentecostal movements put a great deal of stress on being reborn, which is a direct experiential, experience of being one with Christ or one with God. So St Paul said, Let this consciousness be in you, which was in Christ, Jesus, that we all may be one. Now that's a very mystical statement. Let Christ Consciousness replace your self consciousness. So you're one with Christ, and therefore one with everybody, that we all may be one that's a spiritual, mystical experience. It's real, it's direct, and it's obvious. I mean, when you have a first person experience, it's a parent. If you're sitting in the woods meditating and Lois, and you become one with everything, one with all the galaxies and all the stars and the earth and all the planets, and you feel drenched in love and bliss. You know it. It's a direct, immediate, first person experience growing up, which is these different worldviews that we go through, archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic or integral. When you're going through those stages of growing up, you have no idea that you're at a particular stage of development, because a stage of development is more like grammar. It's like a third person explanation of a worldview, or a third person explanation of an IT or is, or a magic or mythic or irrational or pluralistic, or an integral worldview. And so

Greg Voisen
Kieran, why do you believe as a species, as the human species? This is an off the wall question, but I think appropriate, because understanding all of this is we journey through life, whatever it might be, and as we contemplate our finitude, right to make a transition off the fiscal plane into a spiritual experience, whatever we believe might happen to us, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna reincarnate where, whatever that might be, if, if most of reaching and finding radical wholeness is to help us grab on to a concept or idea that will allow us to explain the afterlife, okay? Because I think in the end, all religions have been pretty focused. On. Well, here's what will happen to you in your afterlife, right? Whatever that might be. Now that wasn't one of my preset questions, but it is important, I think, for listeners to say, hey, look, I'm studying all this. I'm becoming quite spiritual. I'm understanding. I think I have a better understanding of what might happen to me. How would you put that in the context, if I pick up finding, I don't know if you have a copy of the book there, finding radical holders, but if I find radical wholeness, is that potentially going to make my transition off this physical plane into a spiritual plane that much easier?

Ken Wilber
Uh, yes, it will. And okay, that's because if you look at the component of radical home, it's called waking up. That's where you ditch your small self, your ego self, and not you, but Christ or Godhead is living in you. And notice the overall number of real godheads, of real sons outside the cave is but one, and that means your deepest self and my deepest self are the same thing, because when you realize your oneness, you're one with everything, and there's only one of that. And what I realize my oneness, I'm also one with insane everything you're one with. So the overall number of true selves, or real selves, or big cells, or big mind, as Suzuki road she called it, is one erring, straining, or the founder of modern quantum mechanics, said, consciousness is a singular, the plural of which is unknown. In other words, the number of consciousnesses is just one. There's not two. Your consciousness is not different from my consciousness. We both plug in to the same oneness, the same radical homes, and that's what we actually are, and that's why we feel one with all sentient beings, one with all living animals, one with all people. And that is a oneness that makes us feel literally at home in the real universe, because we're one with everything that's arising.

Greg Voisen
I, you know, I go back to remembering as you're speaking about bone and the work that he did, you know, and I I really, and I know you've read most of his stuff, it really resonates with me. But now here we are in modern life. All of us call it modern life. Call it what you want. And finding radical all this is presenting a vision that integrates spirituality with this modern life. So as a listener on the other side of the screen right now, it's like, okay, these guys are talking about some very complex concepts for me to understand. But how can the readers apply the principles the two waking up and growing up into a daily routine that will help them make this I'm just going to call it integration transition, yeah,

Ken Wilber
okay. Well, let me give a very simple example that will show you exactly what a non dual oneness is life and and this works for about 50% of the people that I explain it to will get it rather immediately, and about 50% will sort of get it. But it's it was invented by Douglas Harding, who's a member of the London Buddhist society. So he's very interested in enlightenment and awakening and a non dual oneness with everything. And he calls it on having no head. And this is where we either get people at

Greg Voisen
Loon, I hear where you're going,

Ken Wilber
but Douglas Harding says, notice you can see every part of your body. You can see your toes, your feet, your legs, your thighs, your waist, your chest, your arms, your hands, your fingers. But there's one part of your body you cannot see. You cannot see your head. If you look for your head, all you'll see are two little Bobby pink blotches, and that's your nose. But you can't see your head. I can see your head, and you can see my head, but I can't see my head and you can't see your head. There's just you. Behind your face, there's just this blankness and but Douglas Hardy points out, if you actually look at that blankness, what you'll see is everything that you're looking at. So right now, if you look at your computer screen, you'll notice that because you don't have a head, your computer screen is appearing right where you thought your head was, and you are it's on this side of your face, and you're one with your computer screen because you don't have a head and the so the computer screen is sitting right where you thought your head was. And the same is true of what's behind your computer screen. You're looking at the wall, but the wall isn't out there. The wall is sitting right where you thought your head was. And if you look at that tree, that tree isn't out there is sitting right where you thought your head was, and that is this. So

Greg Voisen
that explanation is supposed to allow our listeners to understand that it's really integrated

Ken Wilber
awareness and a non tool awareness is one. Subject and object are one, and they're always one. They're always appearing where you thought your ad was. I

Greg Voisen
understand it, and I hope for our listeners, that your explanation and they can actually go look up at what was the person's name. Again, Douglas

Ken Wilber
Harding and that was hard on having no head, on

Greg Voisen
having no head. So if you need to go out and get that to understand that better. Now look, you talk about integral meta theory, right? And to understand the big wholeness, you use this term. Can you break down this concept for listeners who might be new to your work, which there's probably plenty out there that are new to Ken wilber's work, that are listening to this podcast, sure, if

Ken Wilber
we take those five areas that we're slowly going through, waking up, growing up, opening up, cleaning up and showing up. We've talked about waking up, which is finding that everything is actually sitting where your head was and you're one with all of it. And that's waking up and growing up is going through these various and more inclusive types of world views, so archaic, the magic, the mythic, the rational, the pluralistic, the integral, and each one of those world views is more whole or more inclusive. So by the time you get up to integral you have a very large wholeness, because you have a mind that has a worldview that's including everything. That's why it's called an integral worldview, and then opening up. Remember, we talked about somewhere between eight and 12 multiple intelligences. Well, you can actually, when I first found out about multiple intelligences, for example, I didn't know that we had eight to 12 of them. I just thought, oh yeah, I've got an intelligence. I've got a cognitive thinking, logical intelligence, and that was my idea of my intelligence. But we actually have not just cognitive or thinking intelligence, we have emotional intelligence, we have moral intelligence. We have spiritual intelligence. We have beauty or esthetic intelligence. We have spatial intelligence. And when I was first learning about these, I would take one day of the week, say Monday, and I would pick one intelligence, say esthetic or beauty intelligence, and I would just try to use that intelligence all day to just see, how could I get a feel for it? And when I first tried it, not everything looked very beautiful. But the more I kept using beauty and looking for beauty, the more I would see beauty. And an enormous number of things started to look really beautiful to me as an idea.

Greg Voisen
So how do those intelligence play a role in one's personal growth or spiritual development? You've just talked about these intelligences and and of what was the number you have a spiritual intelligence. You have a helpline intelligence, yeah, or. Intelligence, right, right? So how do they play a role for us who are listening in actually our personal growth and our spiritual development?

Ken Wilber
Well, the point is, each of these multiple intelligences are called lines of development, because there, if you draw a graph and you put the levels of development, archaic magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, integral on going up the scale and drawn out like that, each multiple intelligence is a line that grows through those levels. So we have about eight to 12 lines of development, cognitive, emotional, moral, esthetic, spiritual and so on, and they are each growing through those levels. So in cognitive intelligence, you'll actually have a worldview that goes from archaic when you're six months old to magic when you're two to three years old to mythic when you're five or six years old to rational as you hit adolescence, to pluralistic. As you get older and you continue to grow, you'll go through pluralistic state. And then is as you continue to grow, you'll go through an integral stage. Well, that's where your moral stages also go from archaic to magic to mythic to rational the pluralistic, the integral. And your beauty stages will go through that, and your emotional stages will go through that. And so when you start to find all of your multiple intelligences, and you actually sort of practice using each of them, then they'll start to come together into a wholeness. And that's why that's an aspect, an important aspect, of our radical wholeness. It includes not only our waking up, not only our growing up, but also our opening up, opening up to all of our multiple intelligences. It

Greg Voisen
almost seems like at a vibratory level, we are resonating at different levels at different times in our life on all right scale, right? So if I was to show you even a sound wave from you and I talking right now, you you might see it up, or you would see everything. You know, maybe we reach the highest integral level, or we're at a different level. And I think that emotional intelligence is really an important one. This reason in in our current you know, look, you wrote a book about Trump you, and I did a podcast about it, which is just totally fascinated that we are where we are in this world, and that it had become so fragmented and polarized. But I think finding radical wholeness can actually be a way for us to figure out how to put this together so it isn't confusing. So how can finding this radical illness guide individuals to create, I mean, the Dalai Lama always says the and I have a non profit called compassionate communications. He says, The only thing that's going to solve the world problem is more compassion amongst one another. Now, look, it's pretty simplistic. That's simplistic as it comes but the re the reality is, hey, look, in defined compassion, you have to have forgiveness, you got to be grateful, you got to have a lot of things going on in your life to actually say that I'm compassionate and that it isn't just empathy, it's true compassion, right? So how do we create more unity and connection in the people out here are listening their communities. I know some people took some pretty radical steps. You know, one guy I had on here is like, Okay, I don't believe what these people do that shoot guns out in the fields, but I'm going to go out there and be with all these guys, and I'm going to get a gun, and I'm going to shoot at the target range practice just to see who these people are right, right? And and he found this amazing awakening that they want that different, right? As he spoke with them, and I was like, Wow, that's pretty cool that somebody didn't feel separate. They were willing to take the step into going to a gun range to actually realize who these folks were. Can you speak with us about how we can use this to not be so? Pardon me, fucking polarized.

Ken Wilber
Yeah. Well, what's what you want to do for a big wholeness is take each of its Sections and. Work on it, practice it. So when we look at waking up, then we want to practice having no head, or we want to practice being one with everything we're aware of. And that's an actual practice. You actually have to do it. And you can do it with a simple analogy of having no head, because whenever you remember you have no head, you everything that appears out there will just collapse and be right where you thought your head was. And so you can practice that, and the more you practice that, the more you'll feel a oneness with everything you're aware of because it's sitting right where you thought your hedge was. And the more we practice growing up, we can be like at the rational stage of development, and we want to develop to a higher, pluralistic stage. Well, pluralistic intelligence is simply, well, preface it by saying rational intelligence creates just unified systems. So when you have a rational intelligence, you don't have German chemistry and Buddhist chemistry and Hindu chemistry. There's just chemistry because that it's a rational product, and rationality just speaks out universal systems. Whole universal rational systems. When you get to the pluralistic stage, it looks at all the world's different cultures, and it says, Wait a minute, these different cultures have different types of truth, and which one's right? Well, in a sense, they're all right. I just have to realize they're true, but partial. And so I'll start to take a more multicultural view of the world, and I'll realize that there's all of these multicultural truths, and I have to take all of them into account if I want to have a real view of the whole world. Of course it will be a multicultural view, and so but what multiculturalism can't do is it can't draw all of those views into unified whole that happens at the next stage, the integral stage and integral

Greg Voisen
then when? When do people begin to realize to release their biases at what stage? At what stage would it be that, because a lot of these biases run within people, they don't even realize they're hidden bias? Right At what stage would I have a realization that I'm being biased, and then an opportunity to release or let go of that bias, the engine I'm holding, the integral stage so you actually have to go all the way to the top of these to to remove those biases that we That's

Ken Wilber
right, and that's to get a real homes, and that's why growing up is an important portion of finding a radical homes.

Greg Voisen
So why are people so afraid to release these beliefs, biases, understandings that they carry around to go into what you're explaining seems to too many people are listening, a bit amorphous, right? It's like, oh, wow, I'm gonna be at this integral state, and that's where I'm gonna live. I'm gonna live in an integral state. And it's like, Well, can I really live in that integral state, or am I gonna, like, bounce around in between all these lines and levels to really actually reach that or at least, you know, I heard it said, it was Joel and Michelle Levey, who've been my meditation teachers, for a while, they put a thing out that the Dalai Lama said about mindfulness, but are you really mindful? Or are you really pretending to be mindful of something like that, that he said? And it's like, well, so how do I reach this incorporate this mindful state in daily routine so that I could live at this integral state, so that I really, actually exemplify right Ken. Because I tell people, this is very simple way to do this. If somebody had a video camera of you and why and videoed your whole day and that you played it back at the end of day, would you really like what you saw, right? And if you didn't like it, what would you change? And I think from an awareness standpoint, that creates a heightened awareness for what it is that I need to change to reach the integral state. Would that be a reasonable statement, but in real layman's terms?

Ken Wilber
Yes. Said, no, okay, when you're going through stages of growing up, there's not much choice. When you move from archaic to magic, when you're around two years old, three years old, that's not a choice. You don't come out of the archaic stage and say, Gosh, I gotta get better. I've got to get bigger. I know I'll start thinking, magically, it doesn't work like that. These are actual, determined stages of growing up, and they emerge through a developmental process that's an evolutionary process, and each evolutionary process transcends and includes its predecessor. So as I said, mythic transcends and includes magic. It transcends magic because it goes beyond to a larger mythic sphere, but it also includes magic, because each supernatural being can actually perform magic. And so the same when you move from magic to mythic, from mythic to rational, from rational to pluralistic, and from pluralistic to integral. So you don't you very rarely get to a point where you go, Oh, I'm at this stage, and I don't like it. I want to get bigger. So I'm going to grow to a pluralistic stage. Or if I'm pluralistic, I'm going to grow to an integral stage. That doesn't usually happen as you interact with the world, and you continue to get all this feedback from the world, it'll either fit or it won't fit, and if it doesn't fit, you'll start to feel a little bit of cognitive dissonance, a little bit of uncomfortableness, and not that you'll consciously do this, but you'll sort of want to overcome this tension, that's your feeling, and that will be the push for your evolution, right?

Greg Voisen
So your evolution will occur as a result of it. So you actually have to go through these stages, that's actually ascend that's true this level, and there isn't a choice, is what I heard you said, right? Like, hey, I have to experience that to actually get there, right? You don't get to choose, just, I'm going to go there. But, but when you have that centoria experience you had at 19, doesn't that accelerate the process of actually getting there, because here you are a dishwasher, and all of a sudden, you know, you write your first book, and it's like, oh, well, but that doesn't happen to a lot of people, yeah,

Greg Voisen
hopefully I didn't throw you a zinger.

Ken Wilber
No, no, no. I'm just trying to think the simplest way to explain it, that growth process is a very real evolutionary process, and we see the same process occurring phylogenetically as Human beings arose from apes and into the first magical beings. That when human beings first emerged as human beings, they emerged as magicians because they actually thought that if they changed the word that was signifying a tree, it would actually change the real tree. Or if they had a voodoo doll, they stuck a knife in it, it would actually hurt the person that the Voodoo Doll represents. And so we lived consciously in magic all the time, but magic is clearly not in touch with real reality, and so we would always feel a little bit of blowback from being so magical, and that would create a tension, and that tension would force us to a higher level of evolution, which happened to be mythic, or mythic literal. And so all these gods and goddesses and nature spirits would come into existence. Every stream had a god or goddess. Every mountain had a god or goddess. Every cloud was had a god or goddess, and that's how we saw the world. But clearly there are problems with that, because are there real gods and goddesses in nature like that? Probably not. And we'll give that. We'll give up that notion anyway, when we get the blow back from well, I don't, I can't actually find a god in this mountain, or I can't find a. God is in this tree, so I'm just going to drop that, and we moved from those mythic to a rational stage, and that's why there's since religion comes from a mythic, literal stage of development, when we went to that phylogenetically, starting around 50,000 to 10,000 years BC, we started to develop the exoteric religions all around the world, and all of them have some belief in some sort of supernatural being or beings, some of them are polytheistic, occasionally, some of them became monotheistic. And the monotheistic religions were ones that actually were introducing greater unity into our developmental sequence, and that unity would be increased when we developed to the rational stage. Because the rational stage we find unified universal systems. So there wasn't Protestant chemistry versus Indian chemistry versus Buddhist chemistry. There was just chemistry, and it arose mostly in the modern West with the enlightenment, and we just dropped all of this. Oh, there's chemistry for trees and chemistry for clouds and chemistry for mountains. There's just chemistry, and it's the same, universally. That's a very rational statement. And then we realized that, well, wait a minute, there's more than just one chemistry, because all these different cultures have their own types of multicultural truths, and we have to start incorporating those. And so we would move into this multicultural stage. And then, as we were looking for unity in that, we developed integral stages of development. And that happened phylogenetically. And each time a new stage emerged, it became permanently available to individual humans. And every time a human being is born, they go through the same stages in the same order as we did collectively as a species. So a young child today will go from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral stages of development. So we're not really choosing those. They're sure, yeah, no,

Greg Voisen
i that is the kind of the set stage and the person that did all that work, who is that? Again you mentioned their name on a repeat, it actually that came up with that work that wasn't your work, particularly, was it? No,

Ken Wilber
what I did is I took all the developmental psychologists and put all of their work together on those yellow pads

Greg Voisen
and but the developmental psychologist that actually came up with that order you mentioned earlier in the podcast, and I was trying to remember his name, lovenger. There you go. Levenger, yeah. So I think for my listeners too, they ought to go out and look for her book as well. Because, yeah,

Ken Wilber
but Jane, loving her didn't invent the levels. She didn't discover them. She discovered them as they went through the self sense, or the ego sense. So she wrote a book called The stages of ego development. And so ego development is one multiple intelligence that we have, and therefore it's one of those eight to 12 lines of development that all go through those major levels of development. Now the words that I'm using for those levels, archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic and integral, those were invented by a man named Gene debsu, but every developmental psychologist that studied a multiple line, and Maslow studied the needs line, Kohlberg studied the moral line, Piaget studied the cognitive line, they all found the same levels of development, although they Give them their own names, of course, right, right, right, but they all were going through because all of our multiple lines of development go through these specific levels of development and and so what I did is I was the first one to pull them all together together.

Greg Voisen
And. Okay, yeah, you know, you have worked at such deep, deep levels of trying to help people understand. I think this book, finding radical wholeness, as we mentioned before, coming on the podcast, is a similar work, and it's a work that could help almost anybody enter this space, maybe has not had any exposure to it at all and really understand what we've been talking about for the last hour and five minutes or so. So I want to kind of end this podcast with this. You know, you've got this book that you've created the finding radical wholeness. You we've talked about the stages, right? What do you hope readers are going to take away? And how do you envision the book impacting their spiritual journey? In other words, if they just walk away and they say, Oh, I know the five pass now it's waking up, growing up, opening up, cleaning up, showing up, and I've got that, and that's one way for me to easily understand what Ken is talking about. And here is the getting to this point of integral, right? Would you say that you'd like for them to take that away? But what do you really want them to, like, move away where they can actually start practicing something or diving into that would help them find this wholeness. Sure.

Ken Wilber
Let me explain cleaning up, because it's a very good example of how learning these different five main paths that need to be included in a radical wholeness. It's a very good example of the good stuff that can come from learning each individual stream. So cleaning up. What do we mean by that? Cleaning up his generally ascribe to Sigmund Freud and his inner circle. And Freud was a genius, and because of that, he attracted a whole group of literal geniuses to work with him. And he generally had five of them, and it was called as inner circle. And most people have heard some of these names, Carl, Jung, Otto, rank, Salvador, forensic, and names such as those. And those were the group of people that together came up with the whole understanding of cleaning up. And when Freud was asked, What does this news psychoanalysis of yours do? He famously said, where Id was, their ego shall become. And most people know the terms ID and ego because they got them from Freud. Well, what they don't know, what almost nobody knows, is Freud himself never once used the term ID or ego. He used the German pronouns, the IT and the ah. So he would say the he wouldn't say the ID can cause the ego a lot of trouble. He would actually write that it can cause the I much trouble. And his official translator, James stalking, translated it into Latin, which is it? And he translated i into Latin, which is ego. And he did that because Latin heathelle made Freud sound more scientific. And so he simply changed that in all of Freud's books, except one called the problem of lay analyzes are written with ID, libido and ego. But what Freud actually said when he was asked, What does the psychoanalysis choose do? He said, where it was there, I shall become now that's a very interesting and very accurate statement, because what happens, what Freud discovered, is that people can actually split off aspects of their own mind, judge them negatively, and repress them out of awareness into the unconscious, and when they do that, they almost always refer to what they pushed out of awareness by a third person pronoun like it, right? Let's say the anxiety it overcomes me, or the oppression I can't control it. I. Or my desire to eat, I can't I have no control over it yet, and so on. So what Freud wanted them to do is convert that edit back to part of their eye. And perhaps the best of Freud's followers at doing this was a man named Fritz. Perls and earls, many people have heard of his name because pearls was a superstar at Esalen Institute. And Esalen Institute was founded by Mike Murphy, who wrote litter, yeah, and Mike is very good friend of mine. I just love Mike, but his family left him this gorgeous spot of land in Big Sur California, right on the by the ocean. Now, well, that's excellent Institute. And so pearls would always do workshops there, and he became super famous for doing this. But he would usually at least 100 people would show up for every workshop he did, and he would say, Okay, who wants to work? Come on up front, and he sit them down in a chair, and then in front of them, he put in an empty chair. And then they say, okay, like Gestalt therapy? Almost, yes. And it which fits pearls invented Gestalt therapy, right, right? So, he the person would come up and sit down in the chair, and so pearls would say, Okay, what's your problem? And the person, I say something, well, like I have this anxiety and it's driving me crazy, right? So pearls would say, Okay, I want you to put that anxiety in this empty chair and talk to it as if it were a person, right?

Greg Voisen
And the person were new or move shares. I mean, it also reminds me so much of what you're saying. Is the other days, somebody trying to think of her name was talking about Byron Katie, and Byron's been on the show many times, but you know, if you ask Byron Katie's five questions, it's going to pretty much do almost the same thing, right? I mean, I've gone through Gestalt there, because my listeners know that I got a degree in spiritual psychology. And the reality is, we studied Carl Jung, we started Perlman. Well, all of them, right? All the greats. And I have seen amazing transformation in people's lives by doing Gestalt therapy, just like what you were talking about, you know, put it in the chair, talk to it, understand whether it was my father that I had issues with or my mother. Go in the chair and pretend that, right, that who's in the chair and pearls.

Ken Wilber
Pearls famously said, I can cure any neurosis in 15 minutes. And the joke is even his critics tending who hated him, tended to agree pearls was just a master of neurosis. And so when he's when you put the anxiety in the empty chair. And then he say, Okay, talk to it. So the person would say, Okay, why are you doing this to me? And the person say, Okay, now you sit in the empty chair, and you become the anxiety. And answer, you just ask yourself a question, why are you doing this to me? So answer as the it has the anxiety. So the person would say, well, because you're stupid and you're dumb and you always mess stuff up, and so I just love to sue your ass out. And then you say, Okay, now sit back again and answer as that. And so they go back and forth, and he'd actually get them involved in a conversation? Well, a conversation uses first person as second person, and then what they're talking about third person. Well, the it starts out as a third person. It is a third person pronoun, and so as as the person would play the it and talk to it as their eye. So they're going to say, Well, I'm doing this to you because you're stupid and you're an idiot or so on there. But even everybody in the audience could see in about 10 or 15 minutes that the person's anxiety was dramatically diminishing, and it was diminishing because they were re identifying with that. It identifying it as an eye. And so where it was their eyes shall become, and that was the brilliance of Freud and girls was a genius himself,

Greg Voisen
well, and you've contributed so much to this space that it's it's truly phenomenal the works you've done, 35 books, as you said, look for everybody out there listening. I want you to go get a copy. I don't have a copy yet. I know that Colin or Andrew is going to send me one. But the reality is, is that it's called Finding. Radical wholeness. You can get it now. We'll have a link to it on Amazon. You also can go to Ken wilber.com as well. That's another place where you can learn more about Ken and his works in the integral theory and those kind of things. Ken again, it's been an honor having you back on again to address our listeners and our viewers for both the ones that that participates on YouTube as well, and I think that while we did bounce around a lot, I'm hoping everybody's listened to this podcast really got a flavor and a feel for what finding radical wholeness could do. It is an entry point book. It's an easier book for you to understand. It's a way for you to move to spirituality, potentially, from somebody who's confused by maybe a religious practice. It's an opportunity for you to explore new ways of being whole. Maybe you haven't had that experience of oneness or wholeness yet, but through some of the things you're going to learn, you can get there and again. Ken, thanks for being on. Namaste to you. Appreciate you and your whole staff for setting this up, calling in. Andrea, thanks so much to all of you guys for giving us this opportunity to put you back on inside personal growth.

Ken Wilber
Do you have another 10 minutes? I have another few minutes. But yeah, go, okay, because you asked me, How could somebody use this in daily life, and how's it going to help them find a wholeness. And I said, Let me tell you about cleaning up, because they'll be able to see how, when they start to understand cleaning up, you understand a couple of general things. And again, the way you get to a big radical wholeness is you learn each of the five aspects of that radical wholeness, and then you sort of they'll start to combine when you learn each of them individually and with cleaning up, what the first things you learn is that almost everything in the environment that bothers you is some aspect of yourself that you've sealed off, repressed and projected. And so if you have a boss you think is too over controlling and it just drives you crazy, it's because you yourself have some over controlling tendencies, and you've repressed them and projected them onto your boss. Now he might also be over controlling but now he's got two over controlling drives. He's got his own and he's got all of yours. And so of course, that double whammy is gonna you're gonna hate it, and you're gonna hate your boss. And that's just an example of how everything in your environment that upsets you is a shadow projection. In other words, you take some material, you seal it off his shadow, and you project that shadow onto other people or things or events, and it drives you crazy, because it's it's going to come back at you, because you're at its source,

Greg Voisen
right? So, and people have to awaken to, you know, you talk about opening up, you've got to awaken to really understand that that's what you're doing. So many people are unconscious of that actual act. I mean, you're talking about it. So cleaning up, getting to the stages of cleaning up is like, Hey, I've gone through awareness, I've gone to opening up, I've gone to growing up. I've gone through the stages that you were talking about. So I could really even get to a point of cleaning up. Because the reality is, they're not going to get to cleaning up unless they have those other stages they go through first. So that's right, you know, as you've really articulated it quite well in the book. And again, a pleasure having you on a pleasure to speak with you again and and really get our listeners exposed to this. Go out, get a copy of the book. Explore what's in between the pages. Go to Ken's website. You can look at some of his other books as well. There's many of them. We'll put links to the other podcasts as well on this blog entry. But again, Ken, you, you certainly are somebody that the world needs to listen to more. And hopefully what you take away today is that you're going to go through these stages. Be patient with yourself. Give yourself lots of self love, honor and respect who you are, and also, you know, use some forgiveness in the whole process, forgiveness or what you may have done, forgiveness or what other people did to you, and be conscious of that. Thanks so much, Ken.

Ken Wilber
You bet buddy, thank you.