← Into the Magic Shop
Into the Magic Shop
Exploring Ken Wilber's Integral Theory and Navigating the Depths of Human Consciousness
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- [00:00]
Ken Wilber
Foreign.
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Dr. Jim Doughty
Hello, my name is Dr. Jim Doughty, and I'm the host of the into the Magic Shop podcast, where we explore the mysteries of the brain and the secrets of the heart. Hi. Welcome to the into the Magic Shop podcast. I'm Jim Doty, your host, and my guest today is Ken Wilber, who many of you know as one of the most influential contemporary thinkers of our time in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and spirituality. He is the pioneering mind behind Integral Theory, a comprehensive framework that seeks to unify science, religion, and art into a coherent understanding of the world and our place in it. Whether you're a longtime follower of Wilbur's work or just curious about integral approaches to personal and societal transformation, this podcast invites you to embark on a journey of discovery and integration. I hope you enjoy our conversation today, and thanks for listening. So, Ken Wilber, thank you so much for being my guest today. It's really an honor to be with you and, and to share with so many people about the work that you have done over the many, many years. And I think in many ways, and please correct me, in some ways, the work has been related to understanding not only perhaps the nature of consciousness, but also for us to have, on a level, the ability to understand why we're here and to integrate many of the, I guess, lessons that our evolution has resulted in us understanding and integrate that into our whole person to help us hopefully understand our purpose. But please feel free to correct, modify, or change.
- [02:24]
Ken Wilber
Sure. No, that's essentially correct. What I started doing was looking for all of the approaches to human awareness or consciousness or psychology in its broadest sense. But in order to understand how our consciousness works, we need to understand what we're being conscious of. So that means we need to basically come up with a theory of the universe. What's the universe made of? How does it present itself to us? And I can just say, for example, one of the conclusions I reached was first introduced by Arthur Kessler, and he said that the universe is made of holons. Now, a holon is a whole that's part of a larger whole. And everything in the universe is a whole lot. So electrons are parts of whole atoms, and whole atoms are parts of whole molecules. Whole molecules are parts of whole cells. Whole cells are part of whole plants and animals and the entire tree of life. So once you start thinking about whole lawns, it all makes sense. And you can see that that, in fact, is what the universe is made of. And so I have a whole series of like, 21 rules that hold ons tend to Follow. And that means that when we're aware of something, we're aware of various types of holons. And that's very important. And I then came up with what must be the structure of human consciousness or human awareness to be aware of these wholeons. And that came up with the so called integral meta model, which is a model of the human being that consists of growing up, waking up, opening up, cleaning up and showing up. And each of those are types of processes that result in holes or holons. And so waking up is, for example, an enlightenment experience, a spiritual experience of oneness with everything. And that's a huge hole on, of course, but that's what awaking up is. And that's what, if you practice in Buddhism, for example, you're attempting to achieve a satori, which is a waking up experience. And that's the wholeness that waking up offers. Growing up, on the other hand, is very different. It's all human beings from birth go through a process of growing up. They grow and develop and evolve. And this process of growing up goes through in every human being a series of stages of structure stages. And for example, Gene Gepser named these structure stages, the archaic stage, the magic stage, the mythic stage, the rational stage, the pluralistic stage, and the integral stage. And all of us go through those stages. And you and I are at one of those stages now, preferably an integral stage, but we one of them. And so that's very important. And then cleaning up refers to a process that's generally associated with Sigmund Freud and his inner circle. All of his inner circle, by the way, were bona fide geniuses. Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank. And they came up with the general notion that we can split off or fragment or repress any aspects of our awareness of our mind, of our thoughts, of our emotions. And when we do that, we split them off as shadow elements and those shadow elements get stored in our unconscious. And so Freud was famously asked, what does this new psychoanalysis of yours do? And he replied where it was their ego shall be. Which is a very good summary of psychoanalysis. But what most people don't know is that Freud himself never used the term ID or ego. Those are Latin terms that were added by his translator, James Strachey, because being Latin words, Strachey thought they made Freud sound more scientific. So what Freud actually the words he would use instead of id, he used the German pronoun for third person, which is it, and Latin for it is id. So that's where Stock got the term Id. And for ego, Freud used the German pronoun for the I, and that's what he would call it. So what he said was where it was there I shall become. And that's actually brilliant because what it means is whenever we split something off from our mind, we tend to take it from a first person I. In other words, it's no longer me or mine or I, it becomes a third person it. And we talk about it. We'll say, the anxiety, it overcomes me. The depression, it's stronger than I am. The obsession, I can't do anything about it. So what Freud wanted us to do was find our it's and re identify with them. And one of the quickest ways to do this was discovered by Fritz Perl, and he called it Gestalt therapy, which means wholeness therapy is the way to make the I and the it whole. And what he would do, he was a star at America's famous growth institute called Esalen Institute, founded by Mike Murphy. But pearls would. Hundreds of people would show up every time he gave workshops. And he would ask anybody in the audience who has a problem with their neurosis or their anxiety, their depression to come up if they wanted to work with him. And they would come up and he would put a chair in front of him and they'd sit down in the chair and then he put an empty chair across from them. And he'd say, okay, what's your problem? And the person would say, well, I have this anxiety, it's killing me. He'd say, okay, put the anxiety in the empty chair and talk to it literally, and say, well, what do I say? Well, ask it like, why are you doing this to me? Or why is are you anxiety upsetting me so much? Just talk to it like that. So he'd say, okay, why are you doing this to me? And then proceeds. Okay, now sit in the empty chair and you play the anxiety and answer yourself, why are you doing this? And answer. And so he'd say, okay. He'd sit in the empty chair and he'd answer, well, because you're rotten, you're no good, you're worthless, you're idiot, you're a creep. And he'd say, okay, now sit over there and answer yourself. And he'd have them talk back and forth. And everybody in the audience could see that within about 10 or 15 minutes, the person's anxiety would start to go away because they were identifying with its cause. They were retaking the anxiety it back and making it part of their eye because they were talking as if they were identical with the it. So Pearls famously said, I can cure any neurosis in 15 minutes. And he could. I mean, even his critics who hated him, agreed. He, he was a genius when it came to treating neurosis. And that's all he was doing, was applying Freud's rule where it was there I shall become. And when you take that it back, it is reintegrated with your I with yourself. So it and ego or it and I become one unit again. And that would cure their neurosis. So we call that part of the integral project. In addition to waking up, growing up, we call that cleaning up. And then we have something that we call opening up, which is that human beings don't have just one sort of intelligence, generally called cognitive intelligence. And measured by the all important IQ test, we have upwards of a dozen multiple intelligences. So we have cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence, moral intelligence, bodily intelligence, social intelligence, or interpersonal intelligence, and upwards of about a dozen of those. And when you actually discover that you have these multiple intelligences and you start identifying with them, it's a really eye opening experience. When I first discovered multiple intelligences, what I did was I took all 12 of them, put them on a pad of paper, and then each day of the week I would identify with one multiple intelligence. And I would just spend all day trying to be aware of that intelligence. So the first one I chose was aesthetic intelligence or beauty. And I would just look everywhere in the world for beauty. And at first I didn't see much, but as I kept trying it and trying it, I just started to see beauty everywhere. And it was, I was just astonished. It knocked me away. And then I went to moral intelligence and then emotional intelligence and the spatial intelligence and so on. And we call that opening up because we're opening up to all of our intelligences, which is a very important factor. And then the final one is called showing up. And showing up is most people don't really understand this, although they sort of know it because they learned it in grammar school. But we have several different perspectives that we can look at the world. So we can look at the world through what's called a first person perspective, which is the perspective of the person speaking. So that's me right now, I'm talking with I and me and mine and so on. And that's a first person perspective. And then second person perspective is the perspective of the person being spoken to. So that's a you right now. So I is first person perspective. You thou thine. That's second person and third person is the person or thing being spoken about. And both. And that's like an it or he or she or they or them or it or it's. And each of both the I and the it have singular and a plural form. And that gives us four overall perspectives. And some people call the fourth a fourth person perspective. And that's just the person or thing being spoken about in plural form. So that's if the upper right quadrant and these four perspectives are called the four quadrants. And we actually draw them out as four quadrants, like that four box, like figures on the sheet of paper. And each of them grow or develop or evolve through stages, like the stages that I goes through. And an I plural is a we, which is a name for culture or social hold ons. And then the third person is he, she, it singular, which is the upper right quadrant. And then it plural is its, or he and she plural is they or them and those, that's the lower right quadrant. So we can address all of those quadrants with all of those waking up, growing up, showing up, cleaning up, and opening up. So that's the. That's a quick summary of the overall integral.
- [16:44]
Dr. Jim Doughty
So I always like, and I appreciate those explanations, obviously you're an extraordinarily brilliant individual who has been studying this clearly in depth for many, many years, and it's had an interesting impact on millions of people. But the basis of this, as I understand, and please correct me again, is your interest initially in spiral dynamics that Don Beck and Chris Cohen actually had sort of developed from the work of Graves. Right. And is that how. But before we start that discussion, though, it's always interesting to me how people sort of chose the path in which they began and that essentially dynamics had.
- [17:41]
Ken Wilber
Nothing to do with it. I developed this by. When I was 13, I had a profound spontaneous mystical unity experience.
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Dr. Jim Doughty
Would you call this an epiphany?
- [17:58]
Ken Wilber
Yeah, you can call it epiphany. Zen calls it a satori. Buddhists call it enlightenment or awakening. But it's just like that. You feel like you've just woken up to an entirely new universe. And the strange thing about this universe is you're completely one with it. And so as soon as I discovered the existence of something called satori, which is a Zen enlightenment waking up experience, which I had spontaneously had, I went looking for Zen masters, of course, and I contacted dozens of Zen masters. This was in the 60s. I'm a boomer. I'm a child of the 60s. And in the 60s there was the Psychedelic revolution. And so there was this whole interest in consciousness and consciousness, psychedelic expansion and stuff like that. And Zen really took off in America. And all sorts of Japanese Zen masters were coming over to America. And so I wrote a dozen of them and said, I want to either assign me a koan, I want to be a Zen Kuddich. And I finally got one who actually did and assigned me the koan Mu, which is a famous Zen Cohen. A Zen Cohen, by the way, is a story taken from one of the Zen masters that gives you the punchline that you're supposed to get to have a satori. So a famous. Some famous Zen koans are. What's the sound of one hand clapping? What is it? But there is a simple, straightforward answer to that. And it's just this. You just hold your one hand out and point it at the master and he can tell by your emotions and the way you're moving and if you're smiling or not. And he can see if you actually know what the sound of one hand clapping is, which means you are one with everything. And that's how it presents itself, as a sound of one hand clapping.
- [20:22]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Let me ask you a question, though, because obviously that was the process of.
- [20:27]
Ken Wilber
Explaining to you why spiral dynamics doesn't matter.
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Dr. Jim Doughty
Okay, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
- [20:32]
Ken Wilber
Remember that and I can come back to it. Go ahead.
- [20:36]
Dr. Jim Doughty
No, I was just wondering that obviously this type of an event, and you said you were 13 years old.
- [20:44]
Ken Wilber
Yes.
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Dr. Jim Doughty
So I was just wondering, were you quite precocious from early childhood and this was a manifestation of that? Did you feel that you had been missing something or were searching for something and then this happened? Or had you studied or put yourself in a position to avail yourself, if you will, to this truth or this epiphany?
- [21:09]
Ken Wilber
Well, I had been precocious since I was fairly young. But spontaneous unity consciousness experiences, you don't have to be looking for them. They strike people of all philosophies, of all disciplines. You're just as likely to have a satori, a spontaneous satori experience, if you're Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, atheist, materialist. They just happen for no reason. And they're profoundly life changing. And this was very life changing for me. And I immediately went out and started looking for Zen masters. Because when I sort of looked through the encyclopedia looking for unity experience and so on, I ran across this discipline called Zen Buddhism. And Zen Buddhism was new to me. And I got a series of books written by the zen scholar called D.T. suzuki. And he wrote like a three volume large set of works called Essays in Zen Buddhism. And I got that and read it just immediately. And I kept running into this term satori. What's the satori? And satori is the Japanese Zen name for a unity experience. And I found out that Zen was, was a form of Buddhism. And the whole goal of Buddhism and the whole core of most of the deep forms of religion around the world is to have a unity experience. Even Christianity, the New Testament, talks about metamorphosis all the time. And metamorphosis is a profound, life changing unity experience. So St. Paul says, Let this consciousness be in you, which was in Christ Jesus, that we all may be one. That's a satori, that's a unity experience. And so I started, I noticed that Zen had something called the 10 Zen Ox hurting pictures. And they're just a series of 10 pictures that are just drawings of a cow and a man chasing the cow and then catching the cow and then riding the cow and then disappearing and then coming back and then enters the marketplace with open hands. So what it's really about are the stages that you go through as you search for your own ox brain, your own enlightened mind. And that's what the farmer is chasing while he's chasing this ox. And so Those gave me 10 stages of development. And from there, as I started looking into stage development, I discovered developmental psychology, of which spiral dynamics is one form. But I started out studying, I did study Claire Graves, but I studied Jane Lovinger, Robert Keegan, Lawrence Kohlberg. And each of these were studying the stages of development that one of the multiple intelligences went through. And they all went through the same levels of development. They all went through the equivalent of Gibson's archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral. But they were different lines going through those levels. So cognitive intelligence went through those levels. Moral intelligence went through those levels, aesthetic intelligence went through those levels. But they all went through them at different rates, at different speeds. But as soon as I noticed the seven or eight major stages they all went through, and I noticed that all of them went through those same stages, although they all gave them different names. Because if you're working on cognitive development, you give them names like Piaget did, pre operational thinking, concrete operational thinking, formal operational thinking. And if you were giving them worldview intelligence, then you'd use terms like Gene Gepser did archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, integral. And if you went through emotional development, you give them emotional names and so on. So that I was studying all of those before I even discovered spiral dynamics. But what I was fascinated with was I thought when I found all of these seven, eight or nine major stages that multiple intelligences went through, and I found the stages Zen and all mystical traditions went through, I thought, boy, these stages are everywhere. They absolutely cover everything in the entire world. But actually stages of waking up, like Zen goes through the 10 Zen Ox hurting pictures, for example. And stages of growing up, like archaic magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic and integral, those are dealing with entirely different stages of growth and development. And for one thing, the waking up stages are all first person stages. So if you're sitting in the woods, having meditating, and all of a sudden you have a full blown cosmic consciousness experience, and you're one with everything in the entire universe, in love and bliss, you know it, you're fully aware of it, it's a first person conscious awareness experience, and you're completely aware that you're one with everything. But right now, if you and I try to figure out what stage of growing up are we at? Are we at archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, we can't look within because these are all third person stages and we can't ourselves see these stages when we look within. They're just not available. Unless you study and learn developmental model like archaic magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, or integral, then you can sort of, if you introspect a long time and look at how you think and what you're thinking, you can sort of guesstimate what stage you're at. And so it was after I had written a book called Integral Psychology where I put together all of the stages from developmental models. Models of growing up not waking up or not opening up or not showing up, but models of growing up, which is what all developmental psychologists are studying. And I studied over a hundred developmental models and I took the stage names from all of them and I put them in charts at the back of that book. So there are a hundred charts that have the anywhere from 6 to 7 to 8 to 9 to 10 stages of growth that the developmentalist has discovered each of those lines go through. And that was, it was after I published that book that I, Don Beck, contacted me and said, hey, I've, I've got one of those models. And I said, well, actually I was aware of that because I included your stages in this 100 developmental models that I included. And so he came to visit me several times and we got to be pretty good friends. And I really like the spiral dynamic model. It's not an integral psychology model because it only covers the values, intelligence. And that's it. That's all Claire Graves studied. He called it value systems and he discovered just values. And I like the fact that Don Beck and Chris Cowan had given the stages, the names of the stages as colors because it was just an easy way to remember them. And I liked that. So I eventually ended up adopting a color scheme as well. But I started to use spiral dynamics as a simple introduction to stage development models simply because it was. It was nine stages of development and each stage was given a name according to what the structure of that stage was called. And then each was given a color. And so I would introduce those. And I actually wrote a book where I talked about spiral dynamics and its various stages of development. But.
- [31:34]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Yeah, I think we were talking about, you'd mentioned, obviously your integral theory is much more complex and it sounds as though you took some aspects of spiral dynamics and utilized to help that clarify some of the issues. And maybe on a simplistic level, and I think you alluded to it, is how does the shadow self fit into the integration, if you will, of our wholeness? And I think you used an interesting term. There's a tendency of people to push away the shadow self because. Because they don't want to identify with it. Yet you have to integrate it into yourself and accept it and not resist it. Could you comment on your thoughts on that and how that relates perhaps to this? If you want to call it radical wholeness, sure.
- [32:33]
Ken Wilber
Again, much of this material goes back and finds its origin in the work of Sigmund Freud and his entire inner circle. Each of them, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, came up with their own separate form of psychoanalysis. They all split off from Freud eventually. And Freud had named Carl Jung, actually told him face to face, you are my crown prince and successor. So Jung was really ready to step in. And then they had a conversation one day where Freud looked at Jung and said, promise me when you take over, you won't give up the libido or ID theory. And Jung wrote in his memoirs what Freud didn't realize. And then he said, why? And Freud said, because it'll open us to the black tide of the black mud of occultism. And Jung wrote, what Freud didn't realize is that what he called occultism was everything I was interested in in my life. And after that conversation, they literally never spoke to each other again. Not one word for the rest of their lives. It was over. But they all were still using some of the basic discoveries of Freud. Only Freud, Freud's preeminent shadow. Well, he came, he went through three versions of what human beings, the main instincts are that human beings have. And his second version is his most famous, that was sex and aggression. But the version he ended up with, his third one was eros and Thanatos. Eros means life and thanatos means death. So Freud felt that eros and Thanatos were the two components that we tended to push away from ourselves and make into shadow elements. And that was why, when he was asked, what does this new psychoanalysis of yours do? He said, where it is, there I shall become. Because when we split off either some of arrows, and we can split off arrows, or life force or sex, we also can, obviously we split off death all the time. We're avoiding death, denying death, and so on. And we can split off segments of death impulse or segments of a life impulse. And when we do, we convert them into an it, a third person. So we push them out of our first person self and make them a shadow self. And then we push that shadow into our unconscious. And that is still all of Freud's inner circle agreed with that basic theory that we can split off factions of our own self and force them out of our conscious self and into the unconscious shadow mind. And then they're called shadow elements. So the way we take it back is essentially the way Fritz Perls figured out, which is, and most Gestalt therapists still use this technique. You set a person down in a chair, you put an empty chair in front of them, you ask them, what's your problem? They tell you your problem. You say, put that problem in the empty chair and talk to it. Ask it a question, why are doing this to me? What are you there for? How can I get you back? Or whatever you want? And so they'll go back and forth talking, and when they sit in the empty chair and identify with whatever it is that's bothering them, it could be anxiety, it could be depression, it could be obsession. They'll identify with it and they'll talk as if they're that depression or they're that anxiety or they're that obsession or that. And then they'll go back and identify it with their self and talk as an I, and then ask the it another question, and then they'll identify with the it and answer as that it. So as they keep doing that back and forth and back and forth, usually within 10 or 15 minutes, they'll start to re identify with that split off shadow portion because they're identifying with it when they talk as it when they answer their own questions. And so that's how. That's a premier way that people re identify with their shadow self. They talk as that self. They identify as it. They talk back to themselves using eye whenever they're identified with the anxiety or the depression or the obsession or the compulsion or whatever it is. And as they go back and forth and back and forth, the more they identify with that shadow and talk to it as if it were part of their I, the more they take it back as part of their I. And that is the essential ingredients of both how we split off a shadow self and then how we re identify with that shadow and take it back. So that's a quick summary.
- [38:57]
Dr. Jim Doughty
So let me ask you a question, because it seems as though, of course, and we're talking about developmental theory in some ways, the shadow seems to me oftentimes to be a product of our development. And then actually for many people, results in many of the decisions or relationships that they choose in life. Yet they don't have the insider self awareness of the reality that there's something else guiding them. And then perhaps at one point they'll wake up and say, wow, I realize now that I've married the same woman three times and have now divorced her three times and what is happening to me? But the other side of this I think is interesting because. And it seems as though, and I don't know if this is your experience, every philosopher and every neuroscientist has their own theory of consciousness, which I, to be bluntly honest with you, barely understand any of them. And maybe that's the purpose. You have to be really smart to create one of these. But what is your definition of consciousness? And we've used the term several times, but how do you define it and how do you from that definition then integrate it? And does that actually have any relationship to the shadow self or is that an independent type of baggage that by the nature of our reality exists, but it really has no part of consciousness?
- [40:45]
Ken Wilber
Yeah, consciousness. Is that our capacity for awareness, for direct experience, for experiential sensations, for seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling?
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Dr. Jim Doughty
Yeah.
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Ken Wilber
And it's intimately. The mind or our consciousness is intimately connected with the brain, but they're not the same at all. The brain, you can actually see a person's brain. If you cut open their scalp and look, you can see the brain. It looks like a crumpled grapefruit fruit.
- [41:31]
Dr. Jim Doughty
I have done that many times as a neurosurgeon.
- [41:34]
Ken Wilber
There you go. But you can't see the mind. Or if you See it, it's full of consciousness or experience or awareness. But that doesn't look like a crumple grapefruit at all. And so we have to distinguish between mind and brain is what I'm saying.
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Dr. Jim Doughty
Well, this is the hard problem, right?
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Ken Wilber
Yes, it definitely is the hard problem. And it's the hard problem because it's a version of the mind body problem. And how are they related? Because again, as everybody knows, all proper minds are the ghost in the machine. So the mind is like a ghost. And everybody knows you can't see ghosts walk through walls. They just go through it. And ghosts can't move walls either. And so how can they move a material body? Well, I do it all the time, apparently. But how? That's the mind body problem, and it's called the hard problem, meaning the hardest problem in Western philosophy, because everybody knows that every ghost can walk through a material object. So how does our mind walk through our body and yet still be able to move it? Nobody can figure that out.
- [43:18]
Dr. Jim Doughty
So I thought that's what we were here for.
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Ken Wilber
Yeah, well, I'm going to give you my solution to it. Yes, but the mind itself is something that we see through introspection. So we can be aware of what we're thinking and we can sort of see our thoughts, but we can't be directly aware of our brain. So again, mind and brain, or mind and body are very different. And so how does our mind move our body? And that's the question for it. So in my view, mind and body are intimately interactive and interwoven, and it's such that they're connected in such a way that the body can move in certain ways that are affected by the mind. So the mind can move the brain, and that's just a direct, immediate connection that they each have with each other. And, well, that's. That's just a property that the mind happens to have such that it can interact with the brain, even though it's a material process. And so the brain has all sorts of connections and different systems and different neuronal interactions and different parts, the forebrain, the temporal region, and so on. And each of those can be interacted with by the mind. And so our mind can hear things coming from our temporal region and it can see things coming from our retinal region and, and so on. And that's just a property that the mind has. And in that sense, it's a little bit different from most forms of consciousness or awareness, because most types of awareness, as I say, can walk through walls or can pass through material, but awareness has a capacity to interact with various material aspects of the body.
- [46:37]
Dr. Jim Doughty
So then is the awareness side or that aspect of us, is that an integral part then of consciousness? Or is it a separate part, if you want to call it of wholeness? Or how does that interact? And perhaps just as important is consciousness or maybe even awareness. Is this a critical aspect of the physical body? Or does it in fact exist independent? And if so, does that then relate to this satori experience in the sense of this, you may want to call it even radical oneness, or perhaps wholeness?
- [47:30]
Ken Wilber
Yes, you could. And the point is that the conscious mind is composed of various degrees of holons. And those holons are the parts that directly interact with the material brain and or whatever part of the body it's feeling or touching. I mean, we can feel our legs, move our legs, feel our torso, move our torso, feel our tongue, move our tongue and so on. And those are all being done by mental holons. And as for the shadow self, what happens is that those mental holons can be pushed out of the mind. They can be pushed out of consciousness, they can be pushed out of awareness, and when they do, they become a shadow element. And that shadow element is pushed into the unconscious. And the unconscious is not part of the conscious mind. It is separate, it's split off, it's forced out of the conscious mind and becomes the unconscious, or not awareness mind. And that's the shadow element. And that's what we. That's what psychoanalysis or psychotherapy works with. Almost all forms of psychotherapy agree that when you get a neurosis, when you get some sort of mental illness, the major thing that's happening is you're taking some part of your conscious mental fabric and you're splitting it off, you're pushing it out of awareness into the unconscious. And there that unconscious mental hold on becomes a shadow hold on. And we're not aware of it, but we can bring it back by using Fritz Perl's technique, for example, and we can start to reintegrate with that shadow holon. And in dreams, often the shadow holons will surface. And we don't see them directly, but we see them in symbolic forms. And that becomes the dream content. And every form of psychotherapy has a different way of interpreting these symbols that show up in our dreams, and they always interpret them in a conscious form. So if you have a dream that has a sex organ in it, for example, and it shows up like a telephone pole or whatever, it always shows up as a conscious symbol. So you see a long phallic symbol, and that's conscious. And so you can then interpret that consciousness telephone pole back into a phallus, the phallic symbol, and then that way you're bringing it back into your own conscious awareness, your own conscious mind. And if you keep doing that, then you'll stop pushing it out of awareness and you'll stop projecting it onto other things or other people or other objects.
- [51:40]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Now, obviously, the path that we. Or the path perhaps that we're talking about, you know, for many people, especially those who are at the lower level, if you want to call it Maslow's hierarchy of needs, they're so focused on survival that these types of discussions are not at issue. But if you will, though, for those who have the awareness or the motivation, and I think this is. You were mentioning the 60s, but it seems that now there's a large subset of people who are trying to understand, if you will, the neuroscience or the brain. And some of them are trying to adopt shortcuts. And what are your thoughts about the use of psychedelics? Do you feel that that actually can give you insights to see more clarity? Some of the stages that we've been discussing or the transformative processes, or can they be a hindrance to some people, or is it a combination of both?
- [53:00]
Ken Wilber
Well, it can definitely be both, but they're generally in different categories. One of the things that psychedelics are very good at is inducing mystical, religious, spiritual unity experiences. And the foremost researcher of this is, of course, Stan Groff. I know Stan quite well who. And he has written several books on. Well, I should back up by saying he started out in Czechoslovakia, in Europe, and he started giving his patients lsd. This was when LSD was legal and you could do that. And Grof would just give very large doses of psychedelic LSD to his patients and see what would happen. And the most common thing that would happen in some 70% of them is they would have a massive unity experience. And this included, like, theological students who would come to him and get lsd. And they had. And many of them had never had a mystical experience in their life, even though they were in theology, they were going into the ministry, but they'd take psilocybin or LSD and they'd have these massive unity experiences. And Grof wrote up all of these experiences. Experiences. And he made a list of the levels that people would generally go through in their LSD experiences. And his levels tended to match exactly the levels that I had come up with from studying the world's mystical traditions.
- [55:06]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Wow.
- [55:07]
Ken Wilber
And so we used to always kid each other because every edition of Journal of Transpersonal Psychology somebody would always come out with an article on the unity of Wilbur and Grof's maps. And they would have both pictures of both of our maps going through essentially the same major stages. And so we always would kid each other about that. But they will tend to produce spiritual unity experiences fairly often. And that's kind of what they're known for. But they also, for people that don't have full blown unity experiences, they can give you a fairly direct experience of each of the major stages of growing up that my model outlined and that Grofs outlined because he was taking careful notice of what everybody experienced at every level of the LSD experience. And it would, as I said, match my own spectrum model. And so you can get specific experiences of stages, specific stages of growing up, from almost the lowest to the highest, to unity consciousness. And that's what.
- [56:49]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Now I've been a long time meditator and I have tried some psychedelics and my sense has been that one, your emotional state or emotional stability or has a great deal to do with the experience. Taking psychedelics, yes, but also that with simple meditation you can achieve many of the states or the experiences you would with psychedelics. Which leads me to believe that with training, and I think we see this in a variety of monks, you have immense control over your mind and you can create great self awareness of actually many of the stages that you've described. One of the things that of course interests a lot of people is this concept of near death experience. Do you have any of your own insights into that, how that relates to what we've been talking about?
- [58:05]
Ken Wilber
Yes, near death experiences are also a fairly common set of similar experiences and they do traverse many of the same stages that are available to an average person growing up and going through the various stages of development on their own. They also follow similar stages that LSD people will, and then they have sort of their own sort of idiosyncratic steps as well. One of the most common ones is in a near death experience, you're introduced to a tunnel of light and at the end of the tunnel is a sort of a blazing white light and various relatives or people that you know will show up around that light and you can actually talk with them and say, hi, how you doing? And so on. And that doesn't often happen spontaneously or it doesn't even happen that often with LSD or psilocybin, but it happens quite often. With near death experiences. And again, you can have a near death experience if you're an atheist, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Daoist, a Christian, a Jewish, it doesn't matter. It strikes everybody with equal opportunity.
- [59:59]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Well, I was just going to say though that I think though if you look at it, in most cases, the figure, if you will, that is felt or seen as in front of you, that massive light, if you will, generally relates to your. Your ethnicity, your culture, your religion and what you've grown up with. Which then I guess begs the question is that a cultural embedded then physiologic property that occurs. Whereas if you will, the brain is dying. The reality that the deepest memories that have been embedded are ones of friends and relatives who are close to you, but also the culture or religion in which you've grown up.
- [60:56]
Ken Wilber
My understanding of many near death experiences is that they are not dependent upon culture or religion or race or anything like that. They are radically independent. Although you can have in some cases a culture experience of near death or a racial experience of near death or something like that. I mean, that can happen and when it does happen, it happens much more often than an LSD experience or a spontaneous experience. But many cases they're relatively clean.
- [61:43]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of them just have the white light, but a number of them will see Jesus or some other figure that.
- [61:54]
Ken Wilber
Yeah. Whether they're Christian or not.
- [61:57]
Dr. Jim Doughty
That is true. Sometimes that is true. Let me ask you another question which maybe relates. So, you know, if you examine and you could argue that personal transformation has existed for a very long time and you know, we have the new thought movement and we have people like who is it? Napoleon Hill and others, which I'm not sure if they're self transformation movements or delusions, but you look at the work of somebody like Warner Erhard and I'm sure you're probably familiar with him, where he essentially accomplishes a breakdown of one's identity or perhaps the baggage or the narrative that they've defined or created on an unconscious level, most likely, and then sort of rebuild what are your thoughts of sort of that radical forcing of this reexamination of self. And in some ways this type of examination which I think relates to some of your work, can that be so traumatic that it becomes not helpful or we have to go through these types of experiences if we want to grow.
- [63:36]
Ken Wilber
Are you talking about psychedelic experiences or.
- [63:40]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Near death experiences as an example, Earhart seminar training or even. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Byron Katie, she's not as forceful.
- [63:51]
Ken Wilber
Sure, I know her and Werner Earhart. So, yeah, I'm familiar with their work.
- [63:57]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Yeah, so that was my question. I mean, some of these require a radical and even Tony Robbins sort of a radical reexamination. But are these different ways of getting to the same path? Are these programs that appeal to individuals who might benefit versus another subset of people? Is it just another serving in the cafeteria of evolving?
- [64:33]
Ken Wilber
Yeah, basically all of those possibilities that you mentioned happen in all of them, but they happen to different degrees and often with, again, idiosyncratic aspects added to them. So in terms of Tony Robbins, Byron, Katie and Werner Earhart, they're all in one sense plugging into a very generalized path. And it's the same very generalized path that near death experience goes through and that psychedelic experience goes through. But they're not all same. Essentially the same. There's very real differences in how each of those paths are experienced. Even Byron Katie's work and Tony Robbins work, for example, there can both lead ultimately to certain types of unity experiences. But they're essentially some types of differences in those unity experiences. Like some of them are more tied to the culture or the race or the philosophy of a person, and others seem to be more a clear experience of that path and not so much, although you do find examples, but not that many related to race, culture or philosophy. And I found that true across the whole, well, what Stan Grof calls the spectrum of altered states of consciousness. In other words, there are fair number of broadly similar altered states of consciousness, but many of those differ in at least modest ways from each other. And so although you can have a type of unity experience, one will be just as an experience of pure unity with the entire universe as you are aware of it. And others will be your one with your North Carolina experience, and others will be your one with Scandinavian culture and so on. But there's a real unity recognizable in all of them.
- [67:30]
Dr. Jim Doughty
When you go through, if you want one of these types of experiences where you're completely engaged, you're present, you're focused, would you define that as a flow state?
- [67:46]
Ken Wilber
Well, the names for all of these altered states tend to be confused and mixed up. Flow state is a common term that applies to states of flowing consciousness. Hence the term flow state. And that flow state will often flow into a unity type experience, and that's another type of flow state. And then in other cases, they'll actually sort of split into separate, independent type of flow experiences. So it varies is all I can say, although they all many of them have certain broad similarities in common, and that's why they're all called flow states or altered states or something like that.
- [68:46]
Dr. Jim Doughty
You know, if you look at the history of our species and there seems to be cycles, and as an example, there may be divisiveness which ultimately leads to war. Following the war, there's a coming together where everyone sort of says, kumbaya, we're one. And it seems that in the present world narrative we're in a situation of divisiveness. And do you think it's possible to overcome that? Or do you have any insights that might help our listeners? Or maybe even me have a sense of, it's okay, this is the way it has been and we will survive. Or maybe the reality is you have to simply be present and whether you survive or not is irrelevant. If you look at some of the work of our philosophers and neuroscientists or even really, probably primarily physicists, they will say, there is no life, there's no death. It's a cycle. And you go from one multiverse to another and you're always alive. You never die. Do you have any thoughts on that? Very simple question.
- [70:12]
Ken Wilber
Well, that's basically hooked up with the whole notion of reincarnation. And of course, reincarnation maintains that you just keep going, carrying your previous karma with you. And I've gone back and forth on reincarnation myself several times since I started studying Zen Buddhism and world's religions and mystical traditions and so on. And at first I didn't believe in it because it just sounded like something somebody would make up to feel better.
- [70:56]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Well, that's. You know, it's funny you say that, because that's been my argument, at least for the justification as an example of the caste system. You know, the reason you have a horrible life here is you did something bad and you deserved it. You know, I think from a physics perspective, I've never heard anyone make it analogous to karma, at least as my understanding is because you're not caring. There may be some thing there, but it's not necessarily the baggage of you being a bad person or a good person. But frankly, I have no clue.
- [71:35]
Ken Wilber
Well, yeah, and by reincarnation, I meant it in a very broad sense. Whether we count karma or not, if you reincarnate, your life goes on from one life to the next life to the next life to the next life. And that was very similar to what you were describing when you asked the question that you can go on from one personhood to another. And I used to not believe any version of that. And then the more I studied Zen and the more I looked at sort of stories told by reincarnated people and so on, I, at first, that actually made it harder for me because what I would do is I would read stories of people who claimed they were reincarnated and they were born like 1916, and then they died in 1966 at 60 years old. And then they came back three or four years later and they could describe the town where they were originally born, you know, and all that. And then I thought, well, that sounds impressive, but how long does it take to reincarnate? Because what you're doing is you're reincarnating and then you're hanging around a while and then you're reincarnating again. So how long do those again period take? Because you're supposed to be coming back fairly soon. And that doesn't make any sense to me how you're, you know.
- [73:32]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Right. Well, but I mean, I don't know if you follow the Dalai Lama. I was the chairman of the Dalai Lama for some time, foundation for some time. And he and I have been friends. But, you know, he's 89 years old and he's made statements, well, I may choose to not reincarnate. Which is sort of interesting that you, once you die, you now have a choice. And then, of course, the question comes in, well, sort of the reincarnation and the finding of the next Dalai Lama is relative to the country of Tibetan. It's not New York City. How does all of that sort of fit in here? I still have no clue. And of course, for the next one to be chosen, which is typically associated with senior regents guided by astrological signs and objects that had been owned by His Holiness, and they find, you know, a small village, typically in Tibet, with a three or four or five year old child who they somehow identify and then. And that seems interesting at best, but, you know, if you can sit there and say, well, I'm not sure if I'm going to reincarnate, does that mean you had to reincarnate right when you died and pick that child and then you're developed over three or four years till you communicate, Is that how it works? Like I said, I have no clue. I'm just asking a question.
- [75:12]
Ken Wilber
Yeah. And like I say, that's why, for almost any good reason, I can come up for reincarnation existing, I can come up with at least one reason that it doesn't work. And that's just kind of. It's been that way Sort of forever for me right now, I'm slightly in favor of. Okay, let's say it works well, and.
- [75:41]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Then he said he may not reincarnate, so I guess you have that choice.
- [75:45]
Ken Wilber
Well, I think that's due only very special bodhisattvas like the Dalai Lama, because you don't hear it outside of those circles.
- [76:01]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Right.
- [76:02]
Ken Wilber
And so I just don't think that's part of the things that you can. I wouldn't count on being able to do that if I were you. Well, if reincarnation exists, you're coming back.
- [76:16]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Well, thank you for that insight. I. I plan on being back. Damn it. Well, listen, I really want to thank you for your time. I. I don't think we spent enough time, because I think you and I could probably talk for hours speaking about Finding Radical Wholeness and the integral path to Unity, Growth and Delight, which I certainly would recommend all of our listeners read. But do you have any closing words for us or insights other than our comments on karma?
- [76:52]
Ken Wilber
Well, I mean, in a sense, all I can say is, if you're interested in an integral approach to these topics, then just start reading a few integral books and just. I mean, you have to learn the system in some way in order to be able to actually follow it. And so if that means reading a few of my books, go ahead. I mean, I'm fine with that. And I would recommend Finding Radical Wholeness as the one to begin with. I think that's the best book I've written. It's my most recent book as well. But you can read any of them and definitely start by reading some books and read Gepser or read anybody like that. Even Stan Grof's works will give you a good hint of the spectrum of consciousness.
- [77:56]
Dr. Jim Doughty
You know, I was going to go off into discussing Carlos Castaneda and Krishnamurti, but perhaps we'll have to save that for another conversation.
- [78:09]
Ken Wilber
Sure. What do you want to know about Krishnamurti?
- [78:14]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Well, I guess we're going there. So what are your thoughts? Did you know him or spend time with him? And obviously he was. I'm not sure if the word influenced, because I don't think he ultimately was, but influenced by the founder of theosophy.
- [78:33]
Ken Wilber
What was it Bladvatsky led Debtor and Blavatsky?
- [78:37]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Yes. Yes.
- [78:40]
Ken Wilber
I met him several times. I went through a period where I was an intense student of his. I read literally everything he published, and I knew his work quite well, and so I would go to see him whenever I could and meet with him. And talk and so on. He was a very special person. And I don't know how much he was actually influenced by Ledbetter and Blavatsky. I know the theosophical version. Is it quite a bit, but what are they supposed to say? And. But I found his work to be very lucid and very clear and essentially quite accurate. And I enjoyed his stuff enormously.
- [79:47]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Yeah, I have as well. Do you have any thoughts about Alan Watts?
- [79:54]
Ken Wilber
Oh, yeah. Alan Watts is another person I went through thickly. As a matter of fact, when I was writing my first book, the Spectrum of Consciousness, I read somewhere on how to learn writing that if you want to learn writing, simply take one of your favorite writers and copy out every line that they wrote from COVID to cover and you'll. You'll pick up how they write. And that hit me as a great idea. And I ended up, no shit, copying word for word, every one of Alan Watts books. Oh, my gosh, at least 13 of them. And I mean, from his first book, which he wrote at age 19, called the Spirit of Sin, he ended up writing a book called the Way is In. And I knew his stuff inside out, but I never did get to see him. And that upset me because I really loved the guy. And I did teach myself how to write from copying his books.
- [81:12]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Wow. Well, you know, it's interesting, though, because on some level, of course, he was a troubled soul. Right?
- [81:19]
Ken Wilber
He was. Well, he's an alcoholic.
- [81:21]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Well, yes, as well as other things. But I find it always interesting because you see these people who have this profound awareness and insight yet, and, I don't know, you could call it the shadow self that still lives within them and still controls them. And that's an interesting dichotomy.
- [81:51]
Ken Wilber
Yeah, it is. And that used to always puzzle me about people who, on the one hand, seemed fairly enlightened. That certainly was Alan Watts. And yet they were, for example, alcoholics. In addition to Alan Watts, there was Chokim Trunkba.
- [82:16]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Yeah, of course.
- [82:17]
Ken Wilber
Of course. I knew quite well and studied with. But he was as drunk as a drunkard as you could get.
- [82:24]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Well, and usually sex is integrated into these behaviors, both with Alan and with Chongam Daw.
- [82:32]
Ken Wilber
Free John.
- [82:33]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Yes, yes.
- [82:35]
Ken Wilber
Drank all the time, had sex all the time, and was another perfect example of these dualistic personalities.
- [82:48]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Yeah. So, I mean, maybe for the listeners, they can realize that all of this work, all of this insight, all of this striving to know does not necessarily free you from the reality of our existence, which is often based in suffering.
- [83:12]
Ken Wilber
That's Right. And our own primordial drives and for lack of a better term, instincts. I mean, we all do have problematic drives, and they can be thanatos or, you know, any number of problems. And the fact that we're studying all this stuff doesn't mean we're going to get rid of it all.
- [83:45]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Well, and I think maybe that is what we close on is an acceptance of our imperfection and flaws, which I always like to say that, even in the face of them. And this is this idea of kintsugi, of course, where this golden glue is used to mend our brokenness. But it doesn't hide the fact that we go through these experiences and we do become broken. And we're all frail, fragile human beings who, frankly, I think for most of us are just trying to do the best we can to get some clarity.
- [84:32]
Ken Wilber
Right. And that doesn't stop us from also pointing out that keep working on yourself because you can get somewhat better and somewhat better and somewhat better. I mean, all three of those guys we mentioned got quite a bit better, but they were still had sickness. But they were getting pretty good.
- [85:00]
Dr. Jim Doughty
But they were still getting pretty good before they died.
- [85:04]
Ken Wilber
Right.
- [85:05]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Well, maybe that's the best we can hope for, is that we get pretty good before we die. Well, thank you, Ken. I appreciate your time and it was a pleasure and I hope we have the opportunity to meet in person and also have some further discussions. It's really a joy and a pleasure.
- [85:23]
Ken Wilber
Yes, been a pleasure. Thank you.
- [85:34]
Dr. Jim Doughty
Again. Thank you for being with us today. The into the Magic Shop podcast can be found where you find your most popular podcast, or you can find us@intothemagicshop.com.