Donna Quesada: I just love to talk to you about all of these things which we love to dig into on Awaken, especially that very question…

So, I’m going to ask you again, even though I’ve asked you before, but this is a new day and we are new people. And so I want to ask you once again with a set of fresh new eyes and ears, what does it mean to awaken?

Ken Wilber: There are several ways to explain that, but one uses just the generalizations that human beings have two sorts of consciousness available to them. And the one is just our everyday thinking, rational, logical, mathematical talk and writing. And most novels and books are written from that frame of consciousness. And then there’s another frame of consciousness, which is, it’s fairly hard to describe because the terms that are usually used for religious experience or spiritual experience or unity with the cosmos, most of those terms have been given meanings which don’t apply to this state of consciousness. Like religious state of consciousness more accurately applies to certain stages of development…where stages of growing up, which Jean Gebser called Archaic Stage, Magic Stage, Mythic Stage, Concrete Operational Thinking, Formal Operational Thinking, and Systemic or Integral Thinking.

And religion comes basically from the mythic level. Jesus Christ is a mythic embodiment of a historical teacher that probably did live. But Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite, they’re all tooth fairy. They’re all Santa Claus. And it’s one of the reasons that you want to be very careful if you get into… it’s a truly spiritual engagement that you want to make sure you’re actually experiencing this state of consciousness, which is a spiritual experience. And in that spiritual experience, you transcend that common, everyday, narrow egoic consciousness and you experience a oneness for the entire world, a oneness for the entire universe.

So, you don’t see the sun, you are the sun. You don’t see a flock of birds, you are the flock of birds. You are not walking on the Earth, you are the Earth. You are one with everything that you’re aware of. And to switch from that common, ordinary, everyday muddled awareness, which is likened to sleepwalking or being asleep or being unaware, and to awaken to this spiritual unity… that’s called to wake up.

And many of the religions, world’s religions, refer to it as well. Buddha, for example, called it “enlightenment.” Also “awakening,” because that’s what it feels like. When you switch into this incredibly expansive and unified, holistic awareness, you feel like you’re actually waking up. It feels just like when you get up in the morning and open your eyes and go, “oh, that was a weird dream I was having.” Here’s reality. And that’s what it’s like, though.

DONNA: It’s an experience. It’s not a description of the bird or the Sun or the Moon. It is when we feel we are that.

Ken: Right.

DONNA: Like that that book, I Am That. And it’s beyond the mathematical descriptions that we use for our ordinary day-to-day operations, whether it be having interviews or writing books. We’re talking about an experience and awakening is an experience. Am I understanding correctly?

Ken: Right

DONNA: Now, pivotal though to your book, is that, that’s not enough. The experience itself is not enough. We all, and you and I have that in common… Of course, I cannot compare to your level of development, but I remember I enjoyed learning that about you last time I met you, that we both found our love of Zen, and connected in that place. And I remember when I was deep into those Zen retreats, it was all about satori and I wanted to have that experience. But what I’m learning in your book is that the experience is just not enough. It’s not enough to have an experience. We need to have the growing up experience to go along with it. We have to cultivate what you call the spiritual intelligence. Could you explain more about that?

Ken: Sure. Within these two different sets of operations, or types of intelligence that we have, one of them operates with the manifest relative world of space and time. And these are referred to as multiple intelligences. And most people have heard the term multiple intelligence, even if they don’t know exactly what it means. But what it means is that we don’t just have one set of intelligence, usually called cognitive intelligence and it’s measured by the all important IQ.

That’s one very important type of relative intelligence because whatever we’re thinking has something to do with this relative manifest world of space and time. But in addition to cognitive intelligence, we have a moral intelligence and an emotional intelligence, aesthetic intelligence or the perception of beauty, a spatial intelligence or the intelligence of spatial dimensions. And psychologists are a little bit unsure of how many multiple intelligences we have, but it’s somewhere between eight and 12.

And so, those are all important types of thinking about a particular topic that we do. And that includes one that’s called spiritual intelligence. But this is what spiritual intelligence refers to, it’s the way we think about spirit in terms of its ordinary everyday existence. So again, it starts to take on a very mythic flavor. So spiritual intelligence is a mythic understanding of absolute reality. And as such, it’s only got a relative reality because it is dealing with a mythic literal situation. It’s no more ultimately real than Santa Claus or the tooth fairy or divine nature spirits, god or goddess of the rainfall, crop growing and so on. So that spiritual intelligence, which is thought operating on an absolute reality or what it thinks is an absolute reality and a spiritual experience, which is a direct, immediate experience of that spiritual absolute reality.

And you know it when you experience it. If you’re out meditating and you’re sitting in the woods and all of a sudden you have a full blown spiritual experience and you’re one with everything and you’re bathed in love and bliss, you know it. It’s a first person experience and first person is described as the perspective of the person speaking. So that would be an I, me.

Second person is the perspective of the person being spoken to. So that’s you. And third person is the perspective of the person or thing being spoken about. So that’s a he, she, they, them, it or its, and none of those are direct, immediate experiences. They’re all thought processes where you’re thinking about something, but a spiritual experience is a direct first-person experiential awareness. And that’s very good.

DONNA: Yeah. So what does it look like to have that experience though, without the intelligence, the spiritual intelligence, to go along with it. And I’m remembering a story… perhaps you can tell the story to our viewers about Ram Dass‘ brother… and he’s someone whose work I love as well… who had an experience. And he was an example of someone to whom this happened to, but he didn’t have the intelligence to go with it. He interpreted it through what you call an ecocentric mindset.

Ken: Right. If you look at the stages of growing up, and that means the stages we go through in our average maturation of our relative separate self. So they go from egoic, natural intelligence, to pre-operational intelligence, to concrete operational intelligence, to formal operational intelligence. A concrete operational intelligence, by the way, tends to be mythic, but it is named concrete operational by Piaget because it actually involves thought operating on the world.

So, if I’m seven years old and I want to go ride my bike, first of all, I get my bike out… that’s a concrete operation. Then I get on my bike, that’s another concrete operation, then I push it off, that’s another concrete operation. Then I start pedaling it, that’s another concrete operation. And then I steer it, another concrete operation. And that’s different from the next higher stage, which is called formal operational thinking, which is thought operating on thought.

So that’s not thought operating on the concrete world. That’s thought operating on thought. So, that gives you logic, mathematics, and similar types of thought of fairly advanced thinking capacities. And in the growing up stages, from archaic to magic to mythic to rational, to pluralistic to systemic or integral, our relative self goes through those stages as it grows and develops.

And so, when we get to magic, which happened around 50,000 years ago, we had religions like voodoo. Because what’s happening with magic is the first fairly major, relatively speaking, stage of development after our archaic stage. And our archaic stage is when we share things with the great apes and chimpanzees, and so on. But then we create a first real thought process. And this is with thought thinking about the external world. But the problem with this early magic stage of development is… thought can’t separate the symbol used to represent something from the thing that is actually represented.

So a typical example is the word tree, T-R-E-E, is actually confused with a real tree, and that’s called word magic or magical thinking. And it’s very common among children. The type of religion that developed at that time was for example, voodoo. So what happens in voodoo, if you get mad at somebody and you want to hurt them, you make a doll that looks like them. But since your mind can’t really separate the signifier or the word, the thing that’s representing them, from them, then if you hurt the doll, you’re really hurting them. So after you get the doll made, you get out a knife and you start stabbing the daylights out of the doll, and that way you’re killing the real person, or so you imagine. That’s magical thinking. You’re magically killing, but you’re not really having any effect.

DONNA: Like superstitions. It’s on that level.

Ken: Exactly. And then the mythic stage, which starts to emerge about age four or five. We, in a sense, get rid of magic because we humans can no longer perform magic because we’re starting to learn to differentiate our mind from the things that are representative. And so, we can’t make a voodoo doll because they don’t believe it represents the real thing. Because our mind is starting to differentiate voodoo signifier doll from real human, real person, real thing. But we still have some degree of magic available because we create a whole heavenly realm of gods and goddesses and divine spirits. And they can perform magic, especially they can perform magic on our behalf if we know how to approach them with appropriate prayer or reverence or worship and so on.

So, it was common to also use animal sacrifice. And originally when the mythic stage first started developing, which was around 10,000 BC, many cultures had human sacrifices. And we would kill and offer some form of life to our chosen God and in return that God will, for example, make our crops grow or make us rich or get us a new car or whatever it is that we want.

DONNA: So you’re saying that this magical way of thinking dominated religions?

Ken: That’s right. And most of the world’s great religions come from the mythic level, archaic, magic mythic. And for many, the developmental level then was called the mythic level, the mythic literal level, because that’s what it does. It mistakes myths.

DONNA: It confuses myth for reality…

Ken: Yeah. God’s, goddesses, Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite, etcetera. For realities, it really thinks those are real entities and those entities each can perform magic. And if we approach them with appropriate sacrifices or prayer or gratitude, then they will perform magic on our behalf. We simply specify what it is we want. I want the crops to grow, or I want to get the new car, or I want to get the girl, I want to get the guy. Whatever it is you want. And if your sacrifice is significant enough, and real significance means it’s a human sacrifice.

And by the way, a lot of cultures are known for their human sacrifice. Aztecs, Mayans, certain Chinese cults, certain mid-eastern cults are very well known. I mean, the Aztec, for example, would build pyramids and then take the sacrificial animal, the human being, up to the top of the pyramid, and then the priest would stab his heart and cut it out while it’s still beating and offer it to the Sun god. And then they would throw the body down the steps of the pyramid and all the town would scoop it up and take it home and eat it. So, it’s not a terribly advanced form of religion.

But when you do get that mythic, literal level of development, of course you’ll actually do it yourself at the magic stage because humans can perform magic at that stage. But when we lose that capacity, we transfer it to these mythic gods and goddesses, and they are literally real. So there’s a mythic literal reality, and they all live on Mount Olympus or some place… some equally mythic place like that. And that mythic level or that mythic literal level is like, just read the Bible and you’ll find nothing but miracles and magic and superstitious stuff occurring on every page. It is just impossible to ignore.

DONNA: Just to connect the dots, Ken… So, that example with Ram Dass‘ brother and with so many, throughout history… people having an experience and thinking that they’re God is just the result of being stuck at that level… that stage of development?

Ken: That’s right. When you’re at the archaic, or even beginning magic level, first of all, we all can intuit that we have this alternative reality or this alternative type of consciousness or this unity awareness. And when you’re at a very low level of development, a level that we call egocentric, because when you’re egocentric, your mind can’t yet take the perspective of another.

So, it confuses its perspective with the one and only perspective that’s available. And so, if you’re at that egocentric stage of development, and egocentric just means you think that your ego and only your ego is a real reality and you still have this intuition of this all powerful, all knowing, all oneness reality, then you’re going to think that you and only you are one with that ultimate reality.

DONNA: And that you’ve been chosen… you’re the special one.

Ken: Right. And the reason I wrote that story about Ram Dass and his brother was his brother was technically what’s known as a paranoid schizophrenic. Which means you have problems stemming from the very earliest stages of growth where your mind cannot differentiate itself from the world around it. And you think that yourself is the only real self there is.

And so, when you intuit this Jesus Christ-like figure, you think that you and you alone are Jesus Christ. Or you might think you’re Napoleon or some other big fish like that, but you will think that you and you alone are Jesus Christ. And Ram Dass tells a story when he went to visit his brother, who was institutionalized because he was a paranoid schizophrenic, and he thought that he was Jesus Christ. He and he alone were Jesus Christ. And Ram Dass went to meet him and said, “You could tell immediately that he had had an extraordinary awakening experience.” Because he just glowed and his face was radiant and all of that.

But Ram Dass said, “I know exactly what you mean. I’ve had that experience too.” And his brother was smiling at him and goes, “No, I’m the only one that has this experience. I am Jesus Christ. You’re not.” And Ram Dass was just flabbergasted by this because he actually found somebody that had this type of waking up experience, but he didn’t know that it could occur in the body of somebody with a very low level of ego development that was just ego-centric. And you’ll go from ego-centric into sociocentric and from sociocentric into world-centric.

And each of those movements will expand the perspectives that you can take. Sociocentric means you can take a second person perspective, and I can understand what you’re saying and I can see your point of view, and I recognize it’s different from my point of view. And then worldcentric is… I can understand all people have their own viewpoints as well, and they see things differently than I do, and so on. Coming back to the original point on spiritual intelligence and spiritual experience… spiritual intelligence goes through those names, stages of growth that cognition itself goes through. So it goes from archaic to magic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral.

This is the second interview with Ken wilber.

Continued in Pt 2  …

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