Ken Wilber: Spiralling Upwards through a Technicolor Cosmos
Ken Wilber, a pivotal yet controversial figure in the integral movement, attempts to synthesize over 100 psychological models into a grand hierarchy of consciousness. While his framework categorizes development through color-coded stages like orange and green, critics argue it relies on decorative scholarship and lacks empirical rigor. The discussion highlights Wilber's contentious political assessments of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, his speculative claims regarding AI transcendence, and his dismissal of dissenters as lower-tier thinkers. Ultimately, this analysis portrays Wilber as a secular guru whose complex cosmology appeals to those seeking meta-science, despite significant factual inaccuracies and a lack of tangible real-world contributions compared to established disciplines. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello and welcome back to Dakota in the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about and what a great mind we have today.
I'm Matt Brown, the psychologist with me is Chris Cavanagh, the anthropologist.
He is, gee, he's the beige to my turquoise, I would say.
I think I'm much more an indigo as it happens.
But, you know, I'll also have my own little comparison, which is I am the toxicity to your Snorlax.
You know, in the last supplementary material, we asked people to identify Pokemon type.
And you were clearly identified as a Snorlax.
And I'm a toxicity.
And is the Snorlax the most evolved, the most integrated?
Some would say.
Some would say he's kind of worked out.
He's mostly sleeping and lying around and eating things.
So yeah.
Yep, that sounds like the life.
I like that.
Yep.
That's what we should all aspire to.
I'm getting there.
I'm getting there.
Well, you know, the reference to colors, Matt, people might have picked up there.
And that's right.
We're really one of the, you know, leading guru figures.
People have requested him for quite a while.
He's a well-known figure.
Not really super popular at the minute.
His heyday has passed, but an influence on many people that we've covered, especially sense makers.
They're very fond of him.
Ken Wilbur.
Ken Wilbur.
Yeah.
Ken Wilbur.
Yeah, you're right.
He's not, you know, he's not in the discourse.
He's no Jordan Peterson, although his light has faded somewhat recently too.
But in the sense that he's not in the discourse, but I think theoretically, you know, of incredible importance to the Dakota and the Gurus mandate, Chris.
So I think it's good we cover him.
Yeah.
And I actually have a little testimony to him here from somebody, Mark Manson, who himself is a self-help offer, right?
He wrote the subtle art of not giving a fuck.
Everything is fucked.
So on, right?
A successful self-help offer.
And he wrote a blog on his website called The Rise and Fall of Ken Wilbur.
And it's like a personal reflection on the influence that Ken Wilbur has had on him.
And it features this little paragraph that I thought I would read out.
Although flawed, Wilbur's integral perspective continues to be an inspiration in my life.
I do believe he will be written about decades or centuries from now and will be seen as one of the most brilliant minds of our generation.
But as with most brilliant thinkers, his influence and ideas will be carried on by others in ways which he did not anticipate or intend.
Wilbur's story is a cautionary tale.
His intellectual understanding was immense, as much as I've ever come across in a single person.
He also tapped into some of the farthest reaches of consciousness, spiritual or not, that humans have self-reported.
I do believe that.
But ultimately, he was done in by his pride, his need for control, and well, ironically, his ego.
The point is, if Wilbur can succumb to it, any of us can.
No one is immune.
No matter how brilliant and how enlightened we are, we are all animals.
Life lessons for us all there, Matt.
Well, he sounds like a veritable titan, though, like all of us, he's just a man.
You have to remember that.
He was flawed.
He was flawed.
And I think he's referring to actually some of Ken Wilbur's responses to people who criticized his theories.
They were sometimes perhaps not the most integrated, maybe a little bit thin-skinned.
Yeah.
Yeah, he does talk about some of the various controversies.
The integral movement began to sputter.
Rabbi Mark Gaffney, a spiritual leader with whom Wilbur aligned himself and even co-sponsored seminars, was later indicted in Israel for child molestation.
Despite this, Wilbur and his movement refused to distance themselves or repudiate him.
In fact, the whole Integral scene doubled down, claiming that its critics were first-tier thinkers and were coming up with lies in order to attack a greater, higher level of consciousness that it didn't understand.
So there you go, Matt, the old first tier thinkers, you know, bad faith critics, if you will, coming up with lies about child molestation to tear people down.
It's funny, it's always the same playbook, you know, Russell Brand, sexual assault, all these claims about people engaging in like fraudulent or multi-level marketing or finance scams or whatever.
They're always just trying to tear down these great thinkers and great men.
So there's also, by the way, I find this quite funny that this little blog is talking about, you know, the person really got into Ken Wilbur, read all his books, thought this was incredible.
You know, he lists out six of the most important insights that came from reading them.
And then he attended a seminar and he mentions at the weekend seminar, I couldn't shake the feeling that we were participating in Finley Veiled Self-Indulgence and Little More.
He goes on to say, no, no, that wasn't, you know, it was actually, it was a branding problem.
It was, it wasn't that.
But I just like that for a moment, you know, a ray of awareness shot through and like, are we all listening to a narcissist chat shit?
Is that what we're all doing here?
And he's like, no, no, can't be that.
That's right.
I've already spent so much time reading all of these books and going to these courses.
There must be something to it.
Yeah.
So I think this is an important thing to remember, just to set the stage a little bit.
Who is Ken Wilbur?
What is his body of work?
And I guess it's at both a very broad integration of basically every, all humans thought about consciousness and awareness and development and transcendence.
And at the same time, there's a community that has sprung up around the author, Ken Wilbur, which is, you know, a commercial ecosystem of sorts.
There's certificates and retreats and, you know, all kinds of programs and stuff integrated into it.
And yeah, we'll talk about the like attraction, I suppose, of that kind of stuff later on.
Yeah, and he's been around a long time.
Like he started off with the spectrum of consciousness in 1977.
And, you know, he's published a whole bunch of books, including the brief history of everything, 1996.
But his publishing has actually slowed down as he's gotten older.
But he's been around for decades.
And as a result of that, many of the people that we've covered, you know, I mentioned the sense makers.
David Fuller was a big fan of Ken Wilbur.
And actually, I think most of them, Jimmy Wheel, Jordan Hall, and so on, would be familiar with Ken Wilbur's output and system.
And I think his role now is often that he's regarded, like that blog post said, that he had important insights and his framework is useful, but there are limitations.
That's the way that he exists in, you know, most new age or third way thinking domains that interact with him.
Like an important thinker, but some issues.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think, you know, this kind of stuff appeals to, you know, the people who are, I guess, intellectually ambitious, who like those sense makers think that mainstream disciplines are too narrow and siloed.
The Hierarchical Stage Problem00:03:41
And it's also connected to the experiential stuff, you know, psychedelic drugs, spiritual, meditative practices, stuff that doesn't fit with this reductive materialist worldview.
And also orthodox religions are similarly constrained by whatever, all kinds of particular assumptions and restrictions.
So the sense makery appeal is that what if we took all of this, the best parts of all of the scientific world, the best parts of the spiritual and psychedelic world, and all of the religions, and we put it all together to open our minds to a bigger, more abstract understanding of the world.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And there's a, as with many of these kind of approaches, there is a hierarchical stage.
Of course, it's not presented as hierarchical.
It's a spiral.
It's not so much a pyramid, it's a trapezoid.
But we're going to get into it because it comes up in it.
But just to mention, because it is helpful to orientate yourself, that Ken Wilbur has given these colors to distinctive stages.
And this is things like BH is the stage just concerned with survival, basic survival instincts, early humans associated with.
Purple is tribal magic stage.
Red, power, egocentric.
Orange, modern, rational.
Green, postmodern, pluralistic.
There's all these stages.
And then he's added in four additional colors recently that go beyond the integral ones.
This is after turquoise or after teal.
Well, no, no, there's turquoise after teal.
Turquoise is still pretty good, right?
That's super integral.
That's holistic, communal, seeing the world as alive and evolving.
And then we have these third, these, these extra tiers.
Indigo, violet, ultraviolet, and clear light.
That's the four additional.
So these ones, if you're on those, you are, I mean, that's pretty good, right?
That's there's not just those tiers.
There's also four quadrants.
There's a bunch of different perspectives in consciousness.
Like it's kind of like all these systems really love making complicated lists and diagrams and systems of classification.
You know, they're in Scientology.
They're basically in most cult systems that they have these quite highly developed schematics.
Yes.
I describe them as Baroque.
These schematics.
Yeah.
And most alternative therapy frameworks are similarly rich and complex, like a tapestry.
So, you know, again, you can see the appeal of just of the mere complexity and evocativeness of the framework.
Some might say that that complexity hides a superficial and shallow nature.
You're getting ahead of yourself, Chris.
You're putting the carpool for us.
Why don't we turn to the material at hand and tell us about that?
So I tried to find something that was relatively recent, just to get the most up-to-date version of the approach, right?
And I found this video that was on a small YouTube channel, just 14,000 subscribers by someone called Suma Godra.
Unconvincing Wig and Hair Tics00:02:57
And she is interviewing Ken.
And I'm going to play a clip and you'll see the dynamics.
But this is very much the disciple interviewing the master.
And the title of it was Ken Wilbur on Future of Consciousness, AI, Trump's Election, a Deep Dive into Spiral Dynamics.
And now, if you can't see the video, I just want to give a kind of trigger warning.
If you're watching the video, you will see a elderly man, clearly elderly man, because Ken Wilbur is now, she's 77.
Okay.
So he's, you know, an elderly man in a very unconvincing wig.
He's got like a long, ill-fitting wig that is like, I can't even describe the color.
How would you describe that, Matt?
What is that style?
I don't know.
It's indescribable.
I think I'm the best delivered at that.
He's also wearing a pair of like orange tinted glasses, which are striking.
So he definitely has a look of like an English 1970s media personality that is now in advanced years, but is still dressing.
Yeah.
And he didn't used to look like that.
I mean, his signature look was a kind of bald, quite muscular, serious looking guy with glasses, like a fink kind of Western Zen monk, you know, with quite a penetrating gaze.
That was his previous look.
He's now kind of elderly andy warhole with colorful wigs.
And he has discussed why.
And to be fair to him, his argument for why was not actually that terrible, why he's wearing these unconvincing wigs.
What was it?
Well, he basically just said, you know, he shaved his head his whole life and he got older and then was like, what would it be like to have hair?
But, you know, it's annoying to grow hair and probably, I mean, he didn't mention it, but I suspect at 77, you're not going to be growing, you know, luscious logs.
So his friend was like, why don't you once hair does deteriorate in its luster and quality?
Trust me, Chris.
Don't ask me how that is.
So he got a, he just bought wigs and was like, he wants to wear a wig tie.
I respect that.
That's right.
We're not into looks shaming on this show.
Be fabulous in your 70s.
That would be my.
It is a disconcerting look, though.
It's disconcerting.
It's disconcerting, but I respect the effort.
And there's one other havoc he has that I have to mention, Matt, because again, it's just something that I don't experience much, which is he seems to, in more recent videos, have developed like a tick of licking his hands and then putting it in his hair or touching his face, like just licking the tips of his fingers.
Nervous Idol Interview Beginnings00:02:46
And it's, it's kind of hard to ignore.
So I, you know, whatever, who knows why, but I'm just saying that occurs with fair frequency in this material.
It's an interesting point.
And yeah, look, nervous ticks that can happen to the best of us.
Okay, well, let's get into the material.
So the first clip, this is the person introducing Ken, and it will give you a little insight into how the interview is going to unfold.
Hi, everyone.
Welcome back.
Today I'm extremely honored to introduce this special guest, Ken Wilbur, widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of our time, known as the father of integral theory.
Ken has developed a groundbreaking framework that synthesizes insights from science, philosophy, psychology, spirituality, and more.
His work has profoundly shaped how we understand human development, consciousness, and the complexities of modern life.
Ken, I've been waiting for this interview for such a long time.
I'm deeply honored to have you on my channel.
Thank you so much for.
Thank you.
I'm delighted to be here.
I know so many people who have on whom whose spiritual journey you have been a big influence, including mine.
So, this interview means a lot to me because even to get to this point where to be able to have a one-on-one conversation, I feel like it's such a journey.
Yes.
So, you can hear the interviewer is very excited and probably more than a little nervous.
A big fan of Ken Wilbert, no doubt about it.
And it's quite endearing, actually, I think.
Yes, I had the same reaction.
Like, you know, I don't have the same appreciation of Ken Wilbur, but I can understand somebody who's getting the opportunity to interview their idol and they're, you know, just like a little bit stumbling over their words and very excited and all that kind of thing.
So, yes, human sympathy for the nervous nature of the questions.
But fortunately for her, and I've actually never seen this in the wave forms when we've looked at content, you know, because in the software we use, you can see who's talking.
It kind of color codes it.
And Ken Wilbur, at various points in this, is talking almost uninterrupted for like 10 to 15 minutes at various stretches.
So she is really only there to prompt and then let him go.
So it's not like back and forth, really.
Low Tier Computer Screen Focus00:10:14
No, no, no.
Yes.
So where does it begin?
Okay.
Well, the first question is about waking up, Matt, and what that means.
I would love to first begin with how, what are the hallmarks or milestones do you think are in a person's waking up journey and how you experience them in your own like waking up journey?
Well, for waking up, it's first of all, a capacity to enter a meditative state.
Now, a meditative state means simply being aware of everything that's arising, all your thoughts, all your feelings, all your perceptions, and you don't judge them.
So you don't have a negative feeling about them.
You don't condemn them.
You don't think bad things about them.
Nor do you like them.
You're not attracted to them.
You're not attached.
You're just witnessing.
And as the witness, you are actually what Vedanta would say, one with your higher self.
Human beings, the mystical traditions maintain, have two separate selves.
They have the small, egoic, relative self, and then we have the real, true, big self.
And the whole point about attaching, finding your big self is it's one with everything, including God.
If you want to think about ultimate reality as a God, your true self is one with God.
The Hindus call it Brahman Atman.
Your Atman, your separate self, is one with Brahman or the ultimate reality.
So That's a pretty good first step to finding that you're one with everything.
So, in many respects, relatively conventional meditative self-help stuff there.
However, you do notice a couple of little features already.
Firstly, of course, the assumption based into the question is that Ken Wilber himself is incredibly advanced up this hierarchy of human awareness.
Worth noting.
And in fact, you'd have to be, wouldn't you, in order to be able to develop a framework like this?
And yeah, we'll get into the way in which it might flatter the participants as well.
The other thing you heard there, too, is that he's not a fan of that egocentric kind of thinking, but also the relativistic thinking.
And I think these are a couple of references to the red stage, which is the egocentric power domination-oriented, and the green one, which is a post-modern, sorry, post-modernist, you guys get dinged as well.
But, you know, that relativistic egalitarian, you know, the stage that doesn't like hierarchies and levels being anti-hierarchy and stuff.
That's a stage.
Yeah, that's that is that is a stage.
So, yeah, I agree.
There are notes there that are going to come up more.
But the general thing that the outlines, as you say, is fairly generic spirituality.
You have a egoic self and a more transcendental, bigger self that you can become more aware of.
Ken Wilber has some issues about how that's for him, but generally, the process of waking up is about that, right?
Yeah.
Escaping this prison of relativity and subjectivity and all of these turbulent desires.
Yes.
So more details, Matt.
Yes.
Self-realization.
Like some see this as either you wake up or you don't.
And once you wake up, that is it.
Like there's nothing more than that.
Right.
Try to pursue more.
That is more like concepts of the mind.
So what are your thoughts on that?
Do you see self-realization as just the beginning?
Well, it can have degrees of depth.
And the important thing is to realize your absolute oneness with everything that you're aware of right now.
So you don't see the mountains.
You are the mountains.
You don't see the clouds.
You are the clouds.
You don't feel the earth.
You are the earth.
You don't see this computer screen.
You are one with this computer screen.
And of course, it's all resting right where you thought your head was.
But the point is, that is a real self-realization because when you realize that unity consciousness, that is your highest self, Brahman.
And Brahman is, of course, one with Godhead, one with Tao, one with Christ consciousness, however you want to think of that.
And that is a self-realization because your small self is letting go of an identity with the ego and is realizing its true self.
So it has a self-realization.
And that's a realization with this absolute oneness with everything.
And you are literally one with everything.
And if you realize that ultimate oneness, that is the highest realization that you can have.
So you're not going to have some higher realization.
All you can have is a deepening understanding of that oneness.
So there you go.
You know, again, I would say this is a fairly straightforward and typical account of self-awareness.
You know, he actually references, I didn't take clips from it, but the concept of not having a head, Douglas Harding.
This is a book from the 60s, which was kind of a Western Zen book, right?
And Sam Harris also likes it, the notion that you can see all parts of your body, but you can't see your head.
And actually, inside your head, you are perceiving all of these things.
The world is being constructed, right?
So you don't actually have a head.
Wait, but you can feel your head.
I'm feeling my head right now.
Isn't feeling, isn't touch of sense, Chris?
Well, yeah.
Also, I mean, you can actually just video and see your own head.
I'm looking at my head at this computer screen at the moment.
I know you're on the self-view.
A mirror head.
It's blowing my mind.
These are the kind of like low-tier thinking, though, Matt, that, you know, I love that.
I'm a low-tier guy.
I'm a very low-tier guy.
But, you know, it seems challenging, though, to sort of just be one with everything, like the computer screen and the Godhead at the same time.
That's, I could imagine it would take a lot of work.
It's not a lot of work.
No.
Actually, what you discover if you do it properly is that there's no work at all because it's the actual state of things.
So you're just recognizing the true nature of existence.
And once you do, there's no effort in it.
So you don't need meditation cushions or anything anymore, Matt, because you see, you know, it's like the matrix.
You see through the, you know, the false image and you see things as they really are.
And, you know, there, they're talking about how like all of these insights about the non-dual nature of being are the same, right?
They've got different labels and different traditions, but whether it's Christ or the Tao or Godhead, they're all talking about the same fundamental process of recognizing this universal truth.
So there's a little bit of comparative religion coming in there as well.
We'll see more of that.
But yeah.
Yeah.
I think the other interesting thing is just from a psychosocial point of view, how this enterprise of going up to tears and developing this higher sense of awareness is presented as basically the best thing you could possibly be doing.
You know, you could be spending your time trying to make money, be a big deal in the corporate world.
You could be like you and me grinding away in academia trying to get some sort of accomplishment there.
Or you could be sculpting your body or, you know, being beautiful.
You know, there's all kinds of ways that people could be living their life and doing things that they might think is worthwhile.
But actually, it's doing this, working through this framework, working through this enterprise of ascending the levels and developing this understanding is actually the best thing that anyone could possibly do.
It's the best work.
It's the true work.
Yes.
You could live your life asleep the whole time and never come into contact with this, but it would be a wasted life.
And, you know, in most systems, you'll just be remanifested in a lower realm as a result of failing to do the self-work.
But you made a rookie mistake there, Matt.
You took the notion that there are actual stages and a hierarchy to those stages.
Let's just address that because the interviewer will highlight that that's a mistake in interpretation.
I had some questions about spiral dynamics.
I wanted to get into the stages of that.
Before I ask those questions, one thing I've noticed in Advaita world is that when we talk about things like in stages, in spiral dynamics, there's a tendency to misinterpret as hierarchy and creating more like mental concepts.
Like their criticism is that when we talk about things in stages, we are feeding more concepts to the mind.
So, how do you explain some people who may have those criticisms?
God, that was such a difficult question to get out.
You note there, Matt, by the way, just that thing that people do where when they want to say something, they say some people have raised these questions.
Upper Quadrant Percentage Claims00:14:50
Not me.
I don't have it.
It's just, you know, it's a normal thing to do when you want to present criticism.
But yeah.
Okay.
So you're like one of those people, Matt, she's criticizing.
You're like the aromatic people that say, aren't you?
I'm going to blame Ken Wilber.
He's got to stop talking about these things as levels and tiers.
But I know it's, I know from my reading, I know that technically these are not phases you pass through, but rather you could be at different levels of development on each of them.
Some are definitely at a higher, more transcendent level than others, right?
Turquoise is absolutely better than beige, but technically a person could be basically like 2% along turquoise, I think, and like 80% along with beige, you know?
Very right.
Very right.
Actually, there's a clip I have, which is from later and which shows this being applied.
I should say that when developmentalists attempt to deduce what stage a person is at, they usually give it in percentages.
So like when I first reached integral stage, probably a developmentalist would say, well, about 20% of you was integral, and the rest hadn't reached integral yet.
So you still had a fair amount of pluralistic and a lot of rationality and maybe some mythic.
So, and they give each of those stages a percentage.
So maybe I was 10% mythic and 15% or 20% rational and 30% green or postmodern.
And so Kamala Harris was a, what we call fractured green.
She was generally at the green stage, which meant 30 or 40% of her was green.
But she fell trap to a lot of the problems with green.
And one of the main problems with green is it looks at all of the universal rational systems that orange rationality created.
By the way, Matt, he's going to go on, as we'll see later.
He puts Donald Trump in the rational stage.
Orange, like he's primarily in like the rational, the one that gives you science and all that kind of thing.
And I'm like, okay, I think that might.
But you heard both things.
You heard, you know, analysis of the percentages, but you also heard Kamala Harris's mostly green, right?
Mostly postmodern.
She's in the green stage, but that's only like 30 to 40 percent green.
And like the rest of her would be distributed amongst the other colors, both higher.
Yeah, but not feel or indigo.
Like she was, she's nowhere near integral.
Like we gotta, we gotta be clear there.
But yeah, so that speaks to what you're saying about like, I mean, it is very clearly a tiered system with like a judgment.
It's very clear.
Green is not as good as turquoise.
And that's one of the funny things about the system.
It is self-sealing and it incorporates in it a refutation of the various criticisms that have been made.
So you can criticize it on rational empirical grounds, a thing that you and I would be want to do.
But you can certainly also criticize it on postmodern sort of egalitarian type grounds.
And it has been done.
This is what I've discovered, Chris, which is that, you know, basically this tiered system, it obviously puts less developed cultures, less developed societies, so to speak, primitive ones at a base tier.
And then, you know, you'll see that the technological Western ones, whatever, are comfortably many tiers above them, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And of course, Wilbur's particular state, he's mentioned there again, how he's he got into turquoise quite some time ago.
I'd say he's mostly turquoise at this point, let's be honest.
So, so, so, what his system does, it kind of kind of pathologizes the point of view of the people that might criticize it.
So, she's basically built like a postmodern critique of his work into his own map and demoted them, basically.
Oh, yeah, yeah, he does have that.
And I also think that we've heard this kind of response previously whenever you had the Ayurvedic system described by Dr. K, right?
Where he very clearly was applying a tripartite classification system saying vatas are like this and so on.
But then, also, when pushed, he would say, Well, everybody is a little bit of each and it's percentages, right?
So, you at once get the benefit of having this clear system structure and a relatively simple classification system.
But then you can deny that it's that simple as it appears, right?
It's actually more complex exactly.
And in fact, Wilbur's framework is much more complicated and advanced.
So, it integrates a lot of things and they all get pre-refuted.
So, Wilbur would say, Yeah, it's okay, you know, to do like a feminist way of looking at things or post-colonial studies or something, but actually it's not as good as what he's doing.
It's okay, you know, there's a place for empirical, scientific, reductionist type work, sure, but it's it's down here at this level of understanding.
Um, so yeah, it's a it's kind of a strength of adopting this approach.
I also will mention, I have a clip that comes towards the end of this conversation, so we're going to get back to them talking about the stages.
But there is a point where he mentions later, even though they've talked about all these different stages and all different things, that they haven't actually got into some of the more complicated things that can be added, and that's called cross-paradigmatic, and that's a fairly sophisticated structure of consciousness.
Um, so you can think of integral theory, it covers a lot of areas, um, and claims to cover major disciplines from physics to chemistry to philosophy to religion and so on.
Um, and that's a cross-paradigmatic attempt to show how all of those disciplines fit together.
Um, and we do that using what's called quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types.
And we've talked about levels, lines, and states.
Um, and we've also talked about quadrants, although I didn't label them.
Quadrants are first, second, third, and fourth person perspectives.
And they're um, go when I first drew the quadrants, I simply drew across like that and then listed first, second, third, and fourth person.
And it turns out to be the inside and the outside of the individual and the collective or the individual and the group.
So anyway, that's a sort of a brief discussion about what the third tier is like.
And the reason you can't find anything on it is there is nothing written on it except what I've written.
This is connected to the post-turquoise stages.
But I just find it interesting that he's like, you know, I also have Liebel Trans quadrants, right?
And I also have these other ways.
So it's just like saying we could make it even more complicated.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, I think the thing to be aware of is that these are all like the quadrants is another framework in his big framework, right?
So it's a separate thing.
So apparently his system is called Aqual.
Aqual.
I think that was an older, I think, spiral dynamics.
As it developed since then.
Well, it's in written class.
In a way, the quadrants, even if it's superseded, the quadrants is a cue in that.
Yes.
Maybe it's superseded, but all quadrants, all levels, all lines, states, all types.
But yeah, so that's yet another framework.
And he goes on at other times about the importance of pronouns, essentially.
So you've got the I, which is you.
Yes.
Yeah.
And then, you know, your subjective experience.
Then you've got the it, which is in the upper right quadrant, which is your body and your behavior in objective terms.
And then you've got the we, the collective.
Bottom left.
Yep, collective shared culture.
And then you've got the lower right, which is the it's, which is the actual like physical stuff out there, social systems, institutions, economies, all that stuff.
So so that quadrant thing basically encompasses the entire inner and outer worlds, both individually and collectively.
I wonder where, you know, Godhead, where that fits in there.
Or maybe that's like a different.
I think that's taken care of by a different, but I think you have to return back to the, what we're just talking about, those stages of development and the states of consciousness and also, we haven't talked about it, but also multiple intelligences.
That's more.
Yeah, those have people get the let's return to the stages that aren't really stages.
You can tell the difference when you're using a first person or second person or third person pronoun.
So those are fairly real events.
But what you can't see is no matter how much you look within, unless you actually study something like developmental psychology and learn the stages as they unfold and then learn to apply them to yourself, whoever you might be on that stage conception.
You can do that.
But that's not an obvious thing.
And for that reason, when we talk about waking up, which is an enlightenment or awakening or a self-realization experience, that's a first person experience.
You have that.
If you're one, if you're sitting in the forest and all of a sudden you become one with everything and love and bliss, you know it.
It's a first person conscious experience and you directly are aware of it.
It fills your awareness and you know you're experiencing this oneness.
But if you look at the stages of what we call growing up, which is different from waking up, waking up is a first person, direct, immediate experience.
But growing up consists of third person stages of development.
I remember now there's this distinction he has between waking up, which is the, you know, the kind of enlightenment or self-actualization thing, and growing up is a separate thing, which is more focused on the stages of development.
Exactly, exactly.
And in his little example there, he's illustrating how, you know, if you're having this transcendental experience by yourself in a forest, he's explaining, he's locating that within his multi-dimensional framework.
On one hand, it's upper left, it's in the upper left quadrant because you're having an inner subjective experience, right?
You're communing with nature.
Yeah, you have to grade me on how well I'm doing here.
At the same time, it's also a state of consciousness, right?
And he's really big on the distinction between, you know, these different states of consciousness, which, you know, just like any state comes and goes versus a persistent kind of stage, right?
Which is, you know, where you've developed to at this point.
So you might have, for instance, an amazing transcendental experience in a forest.
It's happening on the subjected level.
So you're in the upper left-hand quadrant.
It could be like a really groovy experience, the big deal.
But because you're at a lower level, like, you know, down there, maybe in the purple magic level, right?
You might sort of just basically understand that experience purely in magical, animistic types of terms.
See that?
See how subtle?
I mean, it's weird.
This is really antico.
Well, let's hear a bit more about the stages.
So they're like Gene Goetzer named his stages archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral.
And spiral dynamics has variation on those same stages, as do all developmental psychologists.
That's the interesting thing about developmental psychology, is they all agree on the general nature of these stages as they unfold.
So you, but you can't see those stages by themselves.
I mean, it just wouldn't dawn on you to say, oh, yes, I'm aware of that I have a first person stage and I'm aware of that second person stage and I see that third person stage.
That's not what it's like.
They're all third person.
They're all objects or things that exist in you, but you're not really that aware of them.
Anything struck you as tendentious in that, Chris?
Any claim that he made there?
Well, the claim that all the developmental psychology models and things that he are referencing are outlining the same stages.
I don't believe that's true.
You might find some parallels in various developmental psychology frameworks, but Freudian developmental stages are different from Kohlbergian stages are different from Piaget or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a, you know, developmental psychology is a whole field and, you know, various people have proposed stages of development.
Faster Than Freudian Stages00:07:57
And, you know, there's some truth to a lot of them, but they don't even agree with each other very much.
And certainly not, certainly not the Freudians.
Don't even talk about the Freudians, Chris.
Don't put ideas into people's heads.
Yeah, well, he also mentioned that, you know, the archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral were names from another system that he integrated, right?
Like in spiral dynamics.
But I think there's a key maneuver here that you see across a lot of this sort of integrative stuff.
And I think it applies equally to his attempt there to say that his framework is a synthesis and a combination that all the developmental psychologists would agree with.
It's the same as saying that all of the religions of the world are basically the same.
I mean, don't get ahead of us.
I mean, my point is, well, first, it's just not true.
But I think the maneuver can kind of work because if you pick and choose and you work at this high enough level of abstraction, then you can kind of like the Borg pretend at least to have ingested all of these different theories and subsume them all with your overriding framework.
But it's kind of a trick of abstraction.
As long as you're vague and abstract enough, then it can kind of seem plausible, but it's simply not true.
Yeah, he's basically saying, you know, he's consulted all these incredible diversity and deep literatures and come up with the UR framework, the grammar of all these different systems.
And, you know, you can believe that.
We'll see whether that's true or not.
But that's the clium anyway.
So let's hear about more.
And so even all of the earliest native tribes had some sort of spiritual experience.
And they would, maybe it was being one with the earth or one with the manifest universe, but they had that conception.
And they were at least going back that we know of 50,000 years.
So that's a very real realm.
But growing up, these stages that we go through, archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral, those weren't discovered until around 100 years ago.
Because no matter how much we looked within, we couldn't see them.
We didn't even know we were going through all those stages.
I remember when I first learned about what I call growing up or these developmental stages, I was just floored.
I couldn't believe that I had gone through an archaic stage, a magic stage, a mythic stage, a rational stage, a pluralistic stage, and I was running into integral stages.
I was just astounded by that.
Also, there, Matt, again, you know, you had this distinction between the waking up stage, right, which is something that is ancient and even exists in like Hunter-Gallery societies 50,000 years ago to a certain extent.
And then the what is called growing up stages, which is a system that's only at most 100 years old.
Right.
Yeah.
And again with the stages, Chris, I can't leave this one alone, sorry.
But, you know, he's claiming there that, you know, us Westerners just kind of figured this out about a hundred years ago, realizing this truth of the stages in his framework.
And it's just, again, it's, it's just so, it's so much bullshit because yes, it's true.
You know, Western psychology is a relatively young discipline.
So you can take from 100 years ago or whatever.
But the various theories that apply to human development in the lifespan, right?
Going from an infant to an adult, are about completely different things.
They're not even consistent with each other, let alone his theory.
So Piaget was looking at logical and mathematical development and abstraction like that.
Kohlberg was looking at moral reasoning.
Eric Erickson was doing like psychosocial type development.
You know, Maslow's hierarchy, for instance, that's a little bit similar to Ken Wilbur in the sense that it's mainly based on vibes.
But the point is, is that, you know, it's really an absurd claim to say that they're all different investigations into the one thing, which is his thing.
It's totally true.
Yeah, well, actually, just a side point to mention, Matt, you noted that he kind of mentions that, you know, things were progressing and then there's been like a sudden speeding up in the past hundred years and like in some respects associated with modern societies, right?
You know, after industrialization and stuff like this.
But he does talk about that.
So listen to this.
And then from 1800s to 1960 is only around three or 400 years.
So you can see they're getting shorter.
And we expect that to continue.
So evolution is really very much like a spiral that gets faster and faster and faster as you get closer to the center.
And what is the center?
Well, the center might be a point where everybody has a self-realization, or at least the whole culture is aware of self-realization and teaches it in its educational system and so on.
But we'll find out whatever it is.
But those are that's the history of growing up.
And it's very different from waking up, which had been around at least since the beginning of the magic era.
So at least 50,000 years ago.
And it probably had precursors going back several hundred thousand years.
But they are not the same at all.
So I will also mention, Matt, that, you know, we have some archaeological evidence and paleological evidence around hunter galleries and, you know, what they were doing 50,000 years ago.
But we don't know almost anything about their actual beliefs.
And, you know, obviously, because they weren't, you were just doing cave paintings or, you know, Chris, they had a sense of oneness with the manifest reality.
That's what they had.
Yeah, but I did like that things are spiraling faster.
So that's his explanation why he's focusing, you know, on the contemporary period.
It looks like he's interested in things in his lifetime, but that's because the spiral is, you know, speeding up.
Except, you know, not that contemporary too, because in addition to the fact that his alignment of all of this sort of current psychological stuff to his thing only works at this level of abstraction at which words kind of lose all meaning.
Not only the fact that actually the source material that he's integrating actually explicitly disagree.
But as well as that, like he's referring to a particular point in time, you know, like 1990s and stuff like that, where, you know, we had, as you know, the replication crisis and all of these things, like the field has moved on and people out in the public and in other disciplines seem to kind of treat Sigmund Freud a bit like Karl Marx, just kind of this like eternal thinker who dropped all these truth bombs on us, which persists forever.
But actually, the field is an empirical one.
James Baldwin vs William James00:02:06
And most of these classic theories that he's picked and choose from have been substantially revised in light of the often weak evidence that supported the original propositions.
You could say they've been integrated, Matt.
But yeah, well, you pointed out him harkening back to very big figures in the field.
And he does go farther back.
It really impressed me.
And I started studying all the developmental models there are.
And I actually wrote a book called Integral Psychology, where I listed the various stages of development.
And I had over 100 different models of developmental psychology, 100 that had investigated those stages.
Because once we found out about them, and we found out about them, because a genius psychologist named James Mark Baldwin around 1900 discovered that all of our mental contents actually go and grow through stages.
We call them the stages of growing up because of that.
And James Mark Baldwin, by the way, was a good friend of William James.
And William James, of course, is considered America's greatest psychologist.
And if he was, James Mark Baldwin was the second greatest psychologist.
And they were friends.
And what's interesting is that while James Mark Baldwin was studying what we call the structures of consciousness that go through stages, William James was studying states of consciousness.
Yeah, it's like to listen to a magpie.
He's going around finding the shiny little things in the history of the academic tradition.
Yeah, it does remind me of Jordan Peterson, you know, when he's talking, like they always did this thing where they're like, and this person knew that guy and was like friends with him.
And he talked about states and I'm talking about states too.
Western Buddhism Intelligence Lines00:13:31
So there you go.
Yeah.
And do you remember we covered the philosopher who talked to Sam Harris and then kind of went on an entire world tour of the guy of everybody in his intellectual mind palace.
And yeah, I just, I do think there's an issue that, you know, people like to say, well, I knew this guy and I know some facts about him and he connects to this guy.
And I mean, there's much more of this, but we've described it as decorative scholarship.
I think that's what it is.
But also, Matt, we've made a note of the kind of appeal of complexity, right?
Pseudo-complexity, you might describe it, or like intentional complexity, where the system has all these different things.
You know, he mentioned he's synthesizing 100 systems into a single system.
But the single system, it's pretty complex.
We've covered some of the complexities, but listen to this.
And so if you learn, let's say, Gebser's archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral, and its characteristics, then you can look within and find which of those you seem to resonate with the best.
So you can find your stage of growing up if you study the situation and you learn what the various stages are.
And again, you can use almost any model.
It doesn't matter because they all generally agree on the basic stages of awareness.
But those are important differences.
And when I first started studying this and creating an integral model, which is an integration or synthesis of all the various paths to wholeness, and I discovered five main paths to wholeness.
So he's got to outline the five main paths to wholeness, which are not the stages or not the quadrants, right?
So there's there's always a like listicle, you know, that can be broken down, the four steps to thinking or whatever the case might be.
Yeah, yeah, like it is a, it is a rich tapestry.
And you can, you can see the appeal.
And of course, the appeal there too is that you can ascend to the best possible version of a human being simply by studying this stuff, right?
Like that's how you ascend, right?
So by definition, he himself, and he said so explicitly, is right up there at the tippy top of the most, one of the most advanced human beings that have existed.
But also the audience, right?
The audience has generally bought into this stuff.
They are studying it.
They're going to seminars and sessions and working on themselves.
They themselves, the better they understand his very complicated frameworks, the system, the more of a real perfected human being they become.
And unfortunate that it works like that.
Yeah, it is.
And he goes on to talk about intelligence.
And it might be interesting to learn there's multiple types of intelligence.
Of course there are.
Well, we have not just one intelligence called cognitive intelligence, which most people are aware of.
It's what you're thinking right now.
That's your cognitive intelligence.
But we also have an emotional intelligence, an aesthetic intelligence or perception of beauty, a spiritual intelligence, a spatial intelligence, a verbal intelligence, a mathematical intelligence.
And all of those are what they call lines of development.
But all those lines of development go through the same basic levels of development.
So you can pick any, and all the various psychological developmental models generally focus on a particular line of development.
So Piaget studied cognitive development, Cohberg studied moral development, Lovinger studied self-development, Maslow studied motivational development.
But they all came up at very similar stages of development.
So that was a big study.
That was a big realization for me.
And also another realization connected with that understanding was I had myself a sort of spontaneous awakening experience when I was around 13 or 14.
And because of that, I started studying the world's religions.
And in particular, for some reason, began with Zen Buddhism.
And the author who wrote extensively about Zen Buddhism is called D.K. Suzuki.
Now, I know you're going to love talking about Suzuki.
Western Buddhism.
I mean, I know you're just raring to get your teeth into that, Chris.
But before you do, just let me weege a little bit more about how psychology is being treated here.
Before you do, let me just point out he did highlight that those guys were interested in different lines of development, you know, echoing you.
He noted the moral development with Kohlberg and the others.
So yeah, what have you got to say for yourself?
Well, I would invite the listener to notice what he's doing with all of this name dropping.
You might say prestige borrowing by adjacency.
Like all of these names, all of these August figures, most of it is obsolete, discredited.
But you know, putting that aside, the latest one, of course, is the multiple intelligences.
And of course, he's going to love that because he likes his lists.
You can't just have one kind of intelligence.
That's very boring.
And, you know, this is something that most people in the public generally like as well.
I mean, because it's a very attractive thought, right?
Oh, you know, you've got your normal academic type intelligence, but then you've got emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence and spatial intelligence.
Yes, kinesthetic intelligence.
You know, the list grows.
The problem is it's all bullshit.
And even Gardner himself has pretty much recognized that.
Yeah, the empirical basis for those multiple intelligences theories is incredibly thin.
Naima, I'll be the voice of the listener here.
Wait a second, Professor Brian.
Are you claiming that like the only type of intelligence is book learning and shape rotating or working out complex mathematics?
Are you saying people can't excel and be geniuses at some manual skill or sport or art?
What are you trying to say, Professor Brian?
Right.
I mean, it's hard to explain this without getting into a whole thing about it, right?
But intelligence itself is psychometrically a tricky thing and a definitional thing.
It's got its own issues, but it's different from just saying people have a skill or a proficiency or a talent in a particular area.
If you change the definition to describe it as that, then sure, there's a multiplicity of everything.
It's a fractal.
We're all incredibly unique snowflakes in our particular spectrum of abilities.
But if you're talking about the actual academic study of intelligence, yes, there are a couple of domains which show some, I guess, statistical structure, like verbal intelligence versus the shape rotators and the, you know, the analytic type.
Word cells.
Yeah, word cells versus shape rotators, what you referenced there.
There's a little bit of that.
But basically, those theories of multiple intelligences, including Howard Gardner that he references there, it was a nice idea, but it hasn't really been borne out.
So it just follows the pattern of what he does, which is he's picking and choosing on cool sounding stuff from the field of psychology over the last hundred years or so without really any concern or interest in the empirical support for them.
Yes.
And regarding Western Buddhism and Zen.
I will just mention, Matt, that, you know, first of all, he talked about having a spontaneous awakening in his late teens, right?
A bit later than Jordan Hall in the context of his home.
But that is a common thing, right?
That the gurus have these moments of individual, you know, lightning bolt moments, even though they're learning from the world traditions and whatever.
So he had his personal revelation in his early teens.
And then he mentions, you know, for some reason, I got into Zen Buddhism.
I think that reason is because it was very popular amongst counterculture people in the 60s and 70s, right?
And as he mentions, DT Suzuki, a very famous proponent of Western Buddhism, actually quite a strong Japanese nationalist in Japanese and a sectarian for a particular school of Zen Buddhism.
Even I have, I read, I read at least one, maybe two books by Suzuki when I was an undergraduate student.
Do you think that's no, I don't, I don't, because the thing is that it's not surprising at all, right?
And Suzuki was one of the most successful advocates of Zen Buddhism, right?
But it's just that here it's presented as, you know, happenstance or whatever, but like, no, this is exactly what you'd expect someone in the 60s and 70s to orientate towards.
And he ended up like shaving his head, you know, a signature look, which he said he did because, you know, we saw Zen monks shave their head.
And then later, you know, like find the reason that, you know, monks in general do this.
But I think that's just indicative.
And the other point that I make is that Western Buddhism tends to have this narrative that the people have cut through the cultural accretions of the Eastern Buddhist traditions and found the original core, which they are now practicing.
And that is very much what he is claiming about all systems.
So he kind of now puts Buddhism as just one particular flavor that he has absorbed.
But the notion is very similar to, you know, the Western Buddhist approach.
Or Buddhist modernism, if you like.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is a soapbox you'll never get tired of standing on.
And I stand for it, Chris.
But he is like the book, isn't he?
He's absorbing the distinctiveness into his collective.
It doesn't matter who you are, he'll absorb you.
I know that's the way it goes.
Well, so, Matt, would it surprise you to know that there are 10 major stages in the Zen system and that this was appealing?
Only 10?
It depends which version you go, but listen to this.
And I was really struck by the fact that they had 10 major stages of development towards this full enlightenment or full awakening.
And it was fascinating to me because by this time I had sort of completed my first round exploration of developmental psychological models.
And all Western developmental psychologists, for some reason, ignored waking up and they just focused on growing up.
So they focused on the archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic integral stages of structures of consciousness, and they ignored the states of consciousness, waking, dreaming, deep sleep, turya, and turyatita.
And so when I started studying Zen, and as soon as I read my first book on Zen called Essays in Zen Buddhism, I was bound and determined to find a Zen master.
Of course, you were.
You know, there were 10 stages.
Yes.
Actually, you know, Chris, I'm going to mention this now because I'm probably going to forget, but it just occurred to me that Ken Wilbur is like someone who's pathologically high on the personality trait, openness to experience.
Yeah, it's like it's often kind of a good trait, you know, being interested in wild and exciting, diverse new ideas.
But, you know, he's got it to the point where he's seeing meaningful connections between completely unrelated things and it starts generating these grand unified theories of everything.
Yeah.
Like you can see the excitement that he has in finding these connections and trolling through all of this obscure stuff and pulling it all together into a grand synthesis.
But it doesn't have any discipline or any rigor.
I mean, it's not obscure, I would point out as well.
You know, these are mainstream traditions in a lot of cases.
But the other thing is that a lot of it is, you know, you say openness to experience, Matt, but I would also say it has this aspect to it where it's openness to outside information as long as it is reflected in his intuitions and experiences, right?
Hypothesizing Mystic Experiences00:15:31
Like he is interacting with all this literature, but he's basically viewing it as endorsing what he already had discovered or believed from his other things.
Everything is kind of reinterpreted through his lens as adding more support for it.
So it's like interacting with other traditions, but mostly just to say oh, this also provides support for what I uh, you know, already thought, already have developed.
Yeah that's, that's right.
So it's not actually it's not a true engagement with the other stuff.
I mean, this is the way in which these kinds of cosmologies that they construct you can find heaps of examples of them in alternative therapies or in people that are really into Ufos right they, they build up this incredible baroque edifice of, you know, unsubstantiated stuff and you can tell yeah, cosmology, so.
So they, and you can tell that it is incredibly satisfying and enjoyable for them.
They find it rich and and invigorating.
But um, it's true what you said, which is that all the raw material gets filtered and combined and slotted into the existing cosmology.
So, you know, I think in that sense there is a connection between these cosmological theories for whatever phrase and conspiracy theories right, because they, they have the same structure, like a huge amount of diverse interests and all kinds of disparate things being brought into it.
They, they love going away and doing the deep research and learning about things, but it's all ultimately getting slotted into their existing preconceived structure.
Yeah, and you know, if you think that Matt and I are layering our own interpretation of that, just listen to Kim Wilber explain that exact thing.
There were probably two dozen in America at the time.
I began looking for them, but I finally found one and he was a highly respected Zen master and I started studying with him.
Um, and I was fascinated to find that Zen had these 10 stages of development towards enlightenment.
Because I had worked out these eight to nine to ten stages of growing up by studying a hundred different models of it and seeing all and, and the models themselves vary from like five stages to 12 stages and I sort of deduce that there were roughly eight or nine, maybe ten, stages of growing up development.
And then I saw Zen had these 10 stages towards enlightenment and I immediately thought they were referring to the same thing and I thought wow, these guys have the same stages.
That I discovered.
I'm gonna go down in history, i'm brilliant.
Oh, this is wild.
Um, and so I started studying all the mystical traditions.
Well and, by the way, he he doesn't actually end up finishing, because I think the version of the story that he wants to get to there is, but that was a false realization because actually there was more.
But he gets sidetracked and like he doesn't get to that point which you probably anticipate is coming more, but that was, you know, like a false gold, right?
Yeah, I think still, though, he's seeing not only that these hundred psychological developmental theories that he's surveyed are all pointing to the one earth theory that he's developed, but also that he's seeing deep synchronicity with these Eastern traditions.
Yeah, and well, actually, he does kind of get to this point.
So I'll take you on the journey.
So, of course, you have the comparative religion part where all the religious traditions are essentially the same.
And it turns out that all the mystical traditions, although they were very different from their core religion, like a Christian mystic doesn't believe very much of the Christian fundamentalist message, but they all believe that, well, as St. Paul put it, let this consciousness be in you, which was in Christ Jesus, that we all may be one.
And that was a fairly good explanation of oneness, unity, consciousness.
And I found that all the mystics worldwide agreed that the whole goal of life is to have this awakening experience, is to have this Satori, this Kensho.
And so I was amazed to discover that.
And then I discovered that all of the world's mystic traditions tended to agree with those same basic stages of enlightenment.
And those were stages that really were going through the basic states of consciousness.
Because when you sit and meditate and have an immediate experience, you know it.
It's a direct first person experience.
And so you're tracking that.
And so you're studying your state of consciousness.
And that's why they came up with about 10 stages to enlightenment.
And I was thrilled with that because it seemed to match my nine or 10 stages of growing up.
So I figured out I found this universal stage sequence.
There's quite a lot of repetition, by the way.
Yeah.
If you haven't noticed.
Yeah, he's hammering that point.
He's an older man.
Yeah, that's right.
I've got to give my break for that.
But I think there's something there, though, isn't there, Chris?
Because for me, the takeaway is that if you operate at a high enough level of abstraction, and the sense makers are practitioners par excellence at this, then you can see all kinds of legitimate similarities between, say, I don't know, a monk in medieval Europe who's experiencing the agony and the ecstasy and praying and going to out-of-body experiences and Zen Buddhism and the rest.
Like if you move up the levels of abstraction, then you can connect everything together.
Well, also, it is the case that like, you know, mystics and various religious traditions, one, often do tend to be some of the more tolerant strands within those religions, right?
And secondly, that there is various ways that you can highlight overlaps in the experiences they're talking about.
Now, in my case, Matt, I might say that's because we're all humans dealing with the same cognitive architecture at the end of the day.
So if you engage in introspective practices, you know, there are going to be inevitably certain experiences which are consistent.
The way that modernist Buddhists or Western Buddhists take it and other people interested in mystical traditions is often to say that speaks to, you know, a fundamental reality that is shared.
Like all religions are grasping the elephant from a different part.
But it can also simply be there's only so many ways to skin a goose.
No, I hear what you're saying.
Yeah, we're all fundamentally human beings.
And there's only so many different permutations you can make of some basic, not only biological, but I guess existential kind of facts of being alive, right?
Right.
You know, as we experienced when we looked at the Kurtz-Cassak book, essentially we are a long tube with sense organs surrounding it.
So that's so poetic, Chris.
It's a real mystery why your perspective on the world isn't as popular as Ken Wilfers.
You're basically just a long tube.
Yes, there's only so much you can do.
And people call you a reductionist, for sure.
Yeah, well, so, okay, but we've heard how things are similar, and it's very, you know, comparative religion stuff.
He's not the only one with this approach to things.
But that's not where he stopped, Matt.
Unlike these other people, he noticed something else.
But the more I studied it, the more I realized they really were quite different.
I mean, even if you just look at the names of them, waking up, or waking, dreaming, deep sleep, Turia, and Turiya Titida don't even sound like archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral.
They don't even sound like they're dealing with the same thing.
And they're not.
The states are dealing with these first-person, immediate experiential realities that we have, which include an experience of enlightenment or awakening or opening up.
But the growing up stages just take you through a series of different worldviews or different ways you're going to interpret your experience.
Yeah, so this is a theme he returns to a fair bit, which is the big distinction between states of experience and stages or persistent traits, I suppose, is another way to put it.
And, you know, like that's not, that's not wrong, right?
On the face of it, like standard psychology would agree with this, right?
You can have state-based psychological properties or more persistent ones, which you might call them a trait.
And of course, people develop over the lifespan in many different ways.
Yeah.
And the development of society and culture is at different stages, you know, so you can also talk about stages there, right?
Yeah.
But I guess the point is that his framework has enough degrees of freedom in it.
It has like, you know, it has the different quadrants.
It's got the stages.
It's got the states.
It's got the multiple intelligences.
It's probably got other diagrammatic kind of structures in there as well.
And it's flexible enough to basically incorporate anything into it and into itself.
Yeah.
And, you know, remember, Matt, that all of this is in the frame of it, sounds like you're outlining a progressive hierarchy of things.
And he was like, no, no, you know, not at all.
But it does feel like it's a spiral.
Yeah.
So just to have Ken Wilber describe that, you know, we've heard this in other words, but here it is again.
We can study them and then figure out what stage we're at and so on.
But they really are quite different in terms of our capacity to be aware of them.
And that's why we discovered waking up at least 100,000 years ago.
And we didn't discover growing up until 100 years ago.
And that was a big deal.
And so for me to understand the difference between those two was a very important part of my own growth and creation of an integral framework.
Integral framework has taken all of that stuff that we've been talking about.
But let's not get bogged down, Matt, you know, trying to work out the hierarchy.
As Ken says, that's not really what it's about, right?
It's about integrating the knowledge.
And the interviewer does have a more advanced question.
Among all the stages that you discussed, some of those, the four stages, I couldn't find a lot of information and I couldn't find the difference nuances of each of those stages.
For example, indigo, violet, ultraviolet.
and clear light, these four stages.
There's not much information about them.
Can you share nuances of each of those stages?
These are the stages that come after the integrated, or these are the integral stages, I think.
They were added later, these four.
Yeah, and they are stages.
They are tiers.
The ones at the top, so reductive.
And, you know, and it has that feature, which just made me think it's quite similar to Scientology in that respect, which is that the higher up you go in these things, in Turia and Turia-Tita and so on,
up from the orange and the infrared up to supermind, the states get more and more abstract, more and more untethered from even the most tenuous connections with any kind of psychological research and goes into a kind of spiritual terminology where you're talking about phrases like what is it, like a seamless composition of the internal and the external, a non-dual awareness where the witness and the witness collapse into the one presence.
You know, you're talking about language like that to describe these kinds of stages.
Yes, that's that's right.
And, you know, you sound disparaging there, Matt, but that's obviously just because you're not properly.
I'm just excited.
I'm just enthusiastic about the topic, Chris.
Okay, well, you know, as we know, Matt, if you advance hypotheses, it's fine to say anything because that's just hypothesizing.
So Ken is doing that here.
Yeah.
We're not very close to those stages.
And so I'm sort of hypothesizing what they'll look like based on what all the previous stages have in common.
So we find that each stage transcends the previous stage.
In other words, it goes beyond it.
So mythic went beyond magic, magic went beyond archaic, but they include it.
They actually embrace it.
And that transcend and include is a rule of evolution wherever we find it.
So just in the natural world, atoms are transcended by molecules because molecules do more than atoms.
They're have more capacities and they're larger and so on, but they include atoms.
So molecules transcend and include atoms.
And then molecules are transcended and included in living cells.
So every living cell includes molecules, but also transcends them.
They can reproduce, for example, and they're living and so on.
And multicellular animals transcend but include single cells, obviously.
It continues, but I can imagine.
Yeah.
Ecosystems.
Yeah, now, what a perfect example of pseudo-profound bullshit, Chris.
Would you not agree?
I mean, you know, making that incredibly loose analogy between those different levels of the physical world to his different stages in his theory.
Yeah.
And one thing that I think is worth noting here is like, so here he said, you know, he's hypothesizing about those stages, which suggests that we haven't reached it.
But you have to remember the stages are not individual development.
They are the stages of society, right?
So society is not yet at these stages, but that doesn't mean Ken Wilbur is not getting the highest stages.
So just in case you thought he was saying, like, I don't really know, you know, what goes on at the higher stages.
Waking Up Versus Growing Up00:02:43
That's mistaking the waking up and the growing up or very right.
Well, my understanding, Chris, correct me if I'm wrong, is that these stages apply to both people, individuals, and sort of cultural societal evolution as well.
Yeah, but I think that's the waking up and growing up distinction.
Like waking up is personal-based developmental thing, and the growing up is, you know, the stages of society.
But you're right, it overlaps and it will depend on the circumstance and so on.
But that's that's why he's saying he doesn't know.
And, you know, the spiral is speeding up.
So we're going to probably get into these stages soon enough.
Just imagine when we all progress to that level, it would be a society made of nothing but Ken Wilbur's and sense makers.
What a world that would be.
Yeah.
And you know, the other thing you pointed it out, Matt, but we've seen this with Jordan Peterson, Jordan Hall, all of them.
They really do not mind belaboring metaphors for an extremely indulgent amount of time, right?
You could give a single point about that or say it in like one sentence.
But why say it in one sentence when you can spend seven minutes saying, and inside cells, there are atoms, and inside atoms, there are quarks.
You know, like it's, they go on and on, and don't mind.
They like Jordan Peterson is the same, they don't seem to have any concern with just like really strongly belaboring a very basic point.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a functional reason for that, which is that the main rhetorical force for the ideas that they're spinning come from their metaphors and analogies, right?
So, so, so, the more, the more you get people thinking about the analogy, and everyone's in your agreeing, yes, molecules are comprised of atoms, Chris.
They are, yeah, and just the human cell is comprised of molecules when you think about it.
So, you know, the metaphor makes perfect, you know, it's perfectly coherent.
And so, that serves as the rhetorical strength of the point that they're looking to make.
But there is a fundamental mistake there, which is that a good and evocative metaphor is not evidence.
No, no, that's the constant mistake that the gurus make, or not mistake, you might describe it as tactic.
But yeah, so the other thing that is, I think, an interesting tactic is that Ken Wilbur is often very clear about, you know, we've heard some uncertainties about the numbers of stages, but he also is fairly clear.
Stage Beyond Population Teal00:14:48
It's nine or ten.
And there is like a precision to the things that he talks about.
There's four types of perspective and there's three ways of knowing and so on.
And in terms of the amount of people that have entered stages, which speaks to your point, Matt, it's not just the society.
There is some specificity about that too.
And the reason we need to include them is virtually no developmental model anywhere in the world includes any of those stages.
The 100 models that I studied only include up to what I call the turquoise or the fully integral stage.
But the percent of the population that reaches that stage is 0.5%.
That's almost, that's one person out of 200.
That's not exactly overflowing.
So the next stages of which a very minuscule number of people are at the stage right beyond the integral stage.
And you listed the four as I've sort of described them.
And the first stage, I've hypothesized that one of the things that happens as we continue to grow to these higher stages is that we become aware of states of consciousness.
And so we tend to include those states.
And so we include the gross or physical waking state at the first stage beyond turquoise.
And I call that the paramine.
And it's para because para means beside, and the paramind is beside the rational mind.
And so it's a more inclusive identity.
And it tends to be identified with all of Gaia, for example, the whole earth.
So that's a form, a beginning form of cosmic consciousness.
But I believe it starts at this beginning, third tier.
That kind of highlights what you talked about.
Here it is individuals, right, and their level of progress.
Yes.
Before it was, you know, the society.
But I think this is where you start to get some overlap with those cultish dynamics, right?
Because just like any good cult, like Scientology, you have a mission.
Part of the mission is your personal enlightenment and purity and going clear.
And part of it is elevating all of humankind to eventually come up to that tier.
But at this point in time, Chris, just like with any good cult, it's the select few.
There's one in 200 people are operating even in the turquoise levels, right?
Like that's that's mid-tier, right?
That's mid at best, right?
But you know, where you might be able to get to is gesturing beyond.
We do know that Ken Wilbur is most definitely operating fully at that tier.
And I think part of the appeal of these systems, including Scientology, is that graduated access to the higher knowledge.
Like Scientology is more harmful and more horrible in so many ways.
But in terms of that structural similarity, they've got a lot in common.
Scientology keeps their secrets sort of secret.
You've got to pay all this money to get another special course to get ascend to the higher levels.
I think Wilbur's is a bit less toxic and a bit less concrete.
It's more abstract and therefore less obviously wrong.
But it still has that kind of cosmic spiritual thing whereby studying and reflecting and meditating and going through all the process and really embracing the framework fully, you will gradually go clear and join that select group.
Yeah, and it's positioning, like you've talked about, the integral perspective is the next tier up.
Like the other religious systems and stuff, they have value.
They can take you up the stages.
But they are concerned with what 99.5% of people stay at because what he's talking about is a level of advancement, which is really only for the super select, right?
Who are able to transcend all the way up.
And then there's levels beyond that.
And of course, the religions haven't focused on that because less than one in 200 people will ever even touch that stage.
So if you're listening to this and you're interested in those stages, that implies that you are a very special person who is, you know, like if you aren't there yet, you're on the road to getting there.
And in that sense, too, like Scientology, there is the preemption of criticism because any alternative point of view that does not actually embrace it is actually slotted in at one of these more primitive, less developed ways of looking at the world.
And Scientology famously has the concept of like oppressive, is it oppressive?
Is that the right word?
Suppressive.
Suppressive personalities and so on.
So in Wilbur's cosmology, your objection reflects your developmental level.
And that's where you and I are sitting very clearly.
We're dead.
We're orange.
I think we're orange.
Orange.
We're orange, which is not even a good colour.
That's not a good color.
No.
And, you know, so that was stage one past whatever color turquoise or the mind boggles really when you start thinking about the the next ones.
Oh, yeah.
So here you go.
And you mentioned, Matt, you know, abstract spirituality.
Well, I mean, sort of.
And then the next stage includes the dream state, which is also called the subtle state.
And the subtle state is the home of subtle energies like kundalini.
A lot of people have heard of kundalini energy.
This is energy that goes up the spine, out to the crown of the head, and becomes one with the entire universe.
Well, that can occur at the second stage beyond the turquoise.
Of the four stages you mentioned, I call all of those third tier.
And the integral stages are second tier.
And the first eight or so stages leading up to second tier are all called first tier.
So first tier is archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and pluralistic.
And they all have one thing in common, which is they think that their truth is the only truth in existence.
There we go, Matt.
That's clearly, we're first tier.
I mean, usually when you say first tier thinkers, it's kind of like a compliment.
But in this system, first tier is really you haven't even started beginning spinning multiple paradigms, right?
Actually, it does remind me very much of Jordan Paul.
That's what you don't commit to just one paradigm like we do.
We're in the orange paradigm of scientific rationalism.
That's a mistake.
You've got to be spinning all the paradigms at once, embracing them all.
And that's the thing.
All of those other tiers, they subsume, right?
They subsume all the previous.
They already understand all the science and stuff.
They've mastered that and they're beyond that.
So that's right.
They don't criticize them because they don't know anything about the higher tiers.
They don't even see the code anymore.
It's just like, you know, woman in a red dress, that kind of thing.
It's metrics, man.
That's it.
Well, now, some more details, Mike, because, you know, this is sounding a little poetic, a little bit, you know, abstract, but let's get down to the actual numbers.
I want to know more about, you know, specifics and statistics.
And don't worry, Ken has it covered.
But what integral stages do, they're called paradigmatic and cross-paradigmatic stages.
And the first stage we refer to is teal.
And it is, it looks at all of the systematic, fragmented pieces that the earlier stages have created,
and it finds ways to tie them all together into unified wholes, which is why it's called a paradigmatic stage, because a paradigm is a unified whole theory that takes care of an entire range of subjects.
And so it's called the paradigm.
And science, according to Thomas Kuhn, proceeds by major discoveries of new paradigms.
So as science busts into teal, it starts creating paradigms.
And paradigms are broad, unified structures of consciousness that unify many separate fragments into a unified whole.
And the percent of the population at teal or that first paradigmatic stage is about seven to nine percent of the population is at teal.
And that's very important.
And then turquoise, of which there's only 0.5%, is called cross-paradigmatic, because what turquoise does is even more integrative than teal.
It takes all of the paradigms that teal has discovered and brings them together into unified wholes.
Wow.
And there's more stages.
But 10% of the population is at teal.
What was the one in 200 then?
What's the 0.5% of the population?
Yeah.
Sorry.
Sorry.
You're right.
It is.
Yeah.
10% of the population is at teal.
And then turquoise is the one that 0.5%.
Ah, ah, I see.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Now, from a little bit of looking around, I read that a lot of this is cribbed from an Indian yogi, Sri Aurobindo.
Aurobindo.
Yeah.
But I don't think we can get into it.
But basically, yeah, some of it, the paramind and the meta-mind, I think the first two of these.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I recognize those things.
Yes.
He's cribbing from a bunch of spiritual sources.
And it's worth noting that these were addedly it, but these didn't exist in the original framework, but implicitly they were there.
But I'm just impressed that 10% are at, what is it, teal or turquoise, whatever color they're at.
Yeah, I mean, we're doing all right as a human race.
We're doing okay.
And we added in paradigmatic and cross-paradigmatic and non-paradigmatic.
So there's another free classification for different ways of thinking.
You can never be enough.
But again, I refer to my comparison to like pathological levels of openness to experience, because this is like crack to a certain kind of person.
Like it's just endlessly fascinating.
There's more terms, there's more categories, there's more subtle distinctions.
And it reminds me of the sense makers and Jordan Peterson, that fascination with making those definitional distinctions between subtle graduations of categories.
I mean, none of it's actually based on anything apart from what's popping into their head at that very moment.
But, you know, you can tell when you're listening to Jordan Peterson or Pajot or any of the sense makers, just how much they enjoy this activity.
So yeah, I'm seeing a lot of shades of it here, too.
Yes.
And would you like to hear more about the final two stages?
Of course I do, Chris.
Of course, that's why I'm here.
That's why you, I don't know if you're ready for it.
The final two stages.
Let's see what they're about.
So integral theory is an example of a cross-paradigmatic turquoise theory.
That is, well, the third of the four third-tier stages is where the causal or deep dreamless state tends to enter.
And that's just the pure witness, pure awareness.
And without any qualifications or any abstract descriptions applying to it.
So it's a pure emptiness type of awareness.
And that tends to unite with that third state or stage structure of awareness in the third tier.
And then the fourth, the clear light, is Turiya Tita, which is just the pure non-dual unity of the witness with everything that's witnessed.
The reason that no other developmental model in the world includes any of those stages, the highest any of them go to is the turquoise stage.
The reason none of them go any higher is there's only 0.5% of the population at turquoise.
We got that chance.
Yeah, we established that.
Now, Chris, I have to tell you something.
From looking at the text of an interview on a website called Integral Life, an interview with Ken Wilber.
There were some QAs.
And one of the questions Wilbur was asked by students was to please describe how he uses these four stages in this third tier in his day-to-day life.
Okay, great.
So his personal day-to-day experience of being a supermind, an overmind, or something like that.
Traditional Buddhist Scope Complexity00:06:33
What does he do?
Well, I mean, I stopped reading then, but I, because for me, the important point was that, in case there's any doubt, he's operating at this level.
This level is virtually.
He's up there, man.
He's there.
And that is the assumption of his students.
So, just to be clear.
Just to be clear.
I mean, he doesn't speak like he's operating on that level.
It just sounds like it's a very cognitively demanding task to remember which tier that that is.
I mean, I have subsidy for him there because there's a lot of tears.
And I think if I was 80-something or 70-something, I'd have trouble keeping everything straight myself.
Yeah.
And like, you know, he says, nobody's ever documented these tiers or whatever.
But like what he's talking about, like non-dualistic awareness and all that, these stages exist in like traditional Buddhist systems and stuff as well.
You know, Taoist systems, all sorts of systems have stages which sound remarkably similar to what he's describing that nobody has ever detailed before.
Right.
So yeah, it's not really like a creative enterprise where he's summoning up all of this out of nothing.
He's picking and choosing from a wide, wide variety of traditional metaphysical lines of thought.
Yeah.
And, you know, we already heard about what happens when you add quadrants.
That's where this came about, right?
It's.
It's about understanding all the previous systems of philosophy and psychology and religion.
And and the interviewer does ask matt about how the stages interact, how blue interacts with turquoise, how turquoise interacts with orange, how you know how there's a lot of that's a lot of interactions.
That's yeah, there's huge scope for complexity there.
And here's his answer right well, the higher you go, remember each stage transcends but includes its predecessor, and as we become self-conscious or able to reflect on our separate selves, which happens at rationality, then we start to sort of self-consciously include our including act.
We tend to become aware of it.
So rationality, for example, comes up with things like philosophy and modern sciences and so on.
But certain types of philosophy attempt to integrate all schools of philosophy because they can do that, and even more so pluralistic and especially integral stages.
So integral is teal and turquoise, and they will reach down and embrace pluralism and rationality and mythic to some extent, and magic to a little bit.
Um, so that's what we see as we get higher and higher stages.
Is that embracing tendency?
Um, and so whenever I first hit the integral stages of development um, I started pulling together all the various schools of philosophy and psychology and sociology and religion, and that was what I was trying.
I was explicitly trying to tie them all together.
That's what I wanted to do, and so that was a conscious aim of mine.
Um, and looking back on it, if I really was pushing in the integral stages, that's exactly what you would expect somebody at an integral stage would start doing is trying to integrate everything.
Um, and that's certainly what I was trying to do.
There's a beautiful logic to this, isn't there?
Like okay, so the higher you go up the stages, not not only do they subsume and encompass all the previous stages, but but you start getting up to the integral stages and the kind of thing that a person who has achieved that level of awareness, of consciousness or whatever, is to develop exactly the theory that Ken Wilbur created.
That's the sign of being integrated.
I know, you know the.
The funny thing though, Matt is like you know, it's like the sift in Star Wars.
This system has the seeds of its own destruction within it, because by teaching people this right that like to get Higher, you take the system that took you there and then you transcend it.
This is what will lead to the integral community eventually believing that they transcend, you know, integral is useful, but it's actually just a perspective on the way.
And I think that's what we kind of encountered with various sense makers where they say, Oh, Ken Wilbur, you know, I got some value from his system, and I think you know, there's a lot there.
Yeah, but it's a bug, which is how they've basically leveraged leapfrogs from that lily pad up to a more inclusive or more all-embracing and more subtle kind of thing.
Yeah, no, and that does ring true because a lot of the people that seem to like Ken Wilbur's stuff have in fact moved on to their own bespoke cosmology.
Yeah, and you know, it reminds me, Matt, that every time we've interacted with people that are sense making inclined, there is the impression that they kind of pity you for feeling to appreciate, you know, the you're stuck in tier one thinking, right?
You think scientific evidence and all that is what really matters, and you think aggregors can be reduced down to do they exist or not, which is a very tier one way you look at the world.
So, it's yeah, it's just funny that you know, like you said, the logic is built into it.
Where if you disagree or don't find it profound, well, of course, you would because you're not high enough, yeah.
I know, and and you know, so you know, they've studied this a lot, and again, the parallel with conspiracy theories is strong because conspiracy theories famously have the refutation of criticism baked into them.
Narcissistic Postmodernism Trump Divide00:09:05
Any evidence that that comes along against the theory or people that are criticizing their theory are lumped in as part of the conspiracy.
So, it is a feature of you know, I guess, pathological belief systems.
Yes, now, Matt, we've been up in the clouds here for a long time going through the stages and the beyond the traditional stages.
But as you mentioned, you know, applying this to actual concrete reality, like analyzing the world around us.
What would that look like?
And if we have to apply this model to the current times, like for example, the recent um election results, how the reaction has been polarizing.
Um, there has been like striking divide between left and right.
If you have to look at in trying to interpret this from this different levels, tiers of thinking, first level, second level, and third level of tier of thinking, how would each tier look at what happened with the election results and potentially the divide, a societal divide that's how that could happen?
Okay, again, the question a little bit struggling to emerge there, but um, we've got the question, and we we did hear, you know, I played a clip before where you know Kamala Harris was a fractured green, 10% Mippic 50, 20% rational.
So, you've you've heard that analysis, right?
But it continues to Trump and Kamala and comparing them.
So, let's hear that.
And that tended to be Kamala Harris's problem.
She had a great deal of difficulty giving unified answers to her questions.
And a lot of people just interpreted that as she can't answer questions at all.
But what she couldn't do is she couldn't pull together all of the differentiations that she saw in her mind's eye.
And that meant that she would just sort of stumble or bumble or say sort of word.
They called it word salad a lot.
And that's what she did.
Now, Trump was very orange, a very orange, rational guy.
But he still had a lot of mythic and even magic in him.
And particularly magic and mythic are marked by stages that are also called narcissistic.
And that's the person gives a very high self-esteem and they have a great wonder at being themselves.
They're amazing.
And Trump just, I mean, I once sat down and tried to write down how many narcissistic statements he said in a typical 20-minute speech.
And I got to 30 of them, and he wasn't even halfway through his speech.
And every other sentence was, well, I'm associated with this guy, and this guy is the greatest in the world.
And I'm pretty great to recognize this guy, of course.
And he just, it was one narcissistic statement after another, after another.
I was really kind of shocked at how many of his statements were narcissistic.
Important insights there, Moira.
Important insights.
Yes, yes.
Trump is a narcissistic person.
Well, we're in hard agreement on that one.
I don't like being placed in the same color category as Donald Trump.
I think he's wrong there about him being a rational scientific thinker.
Yeah.
I mean, it's quite funny that he put Trump in the orange category, right?
Like it's just, you know, but also, like, to the extent that there is, you know, as is often the case, the banal thing, Trump is narcissistic, that I mean, is Ken Wilbur, everybody already knows that.
It's very obvious, right?
And to the extent that he's saying something unique, it's that Trump is rational and scientific, but he is magic and mythic as well, right?
Like, and no, he's not a rational scientific type person.
And actually, he elaborates on what he means here.
So, oh, and in his model, Kamala Harris is postmodern.
By the way, she's green.
That's right.
He's not a fan of green either.
He's not a fan.
We'll hear his opinion on postmodern.
It's fairly predictable.
But yeah, so listen to this.
And so he's very businesslike, and that's what Trump is.
And somebody like Trump has no trouble sort of in the debate prouncing somebody like Kamala because Kamala's having a hard time pulling her own ideas together.
And so when she's attacked from the outside, she really doesn't respond very well.
She'll say, oh, I love you, or something like that.
But that doesn't count when you're having an actual rational argument.
So that's the basic battle that we had was orange versus green, rational versus pluralistic postmodern.
And Trump is not only not postmodern, he attacks postmodernism because postmodernism also goes under the name wokeism.
So we have all this woke philosophy and it's pure pluralistic nonsense, most of it.
So it's always contradicting itself.
It'll say there is no such thing as objective truth.
And what they really mean is it's objectively true that there is no objective truth.
And they just contradict themselves like that all the time.
And that's a real problem.
And that's why postmodernism as a philosophy is sort of falling apart.
It made some important introductions about there are multiple interpretations of the world and so on.
But it couldn't tie them together.
It couldn't explain how they're unified so that they can be part of a single collective thought.
Some fantastic analysis there, both psychological and cultural through the lens as well.
This is the power of integral theory.
Kamala Harris, her problem in the debate, she just kept saying, I love you.
I love you.
That's what happened.
That's what definitely happened.
Defeated by rational Trump.
He was just pure business.
He's pure business all the time.
He doesn't meander around points or contradict himself.
No, like he knew always what he was saying.
Just pure rational thinking.
That's what I think of when I think of Trump.
And postmodernism, Matt, I mean, you know, you and I are not huge fans of that general approach to philosophizing.
Yeah, at least in its popular culture, many of them.
In its popular version.
Yes.
But like his point there, there's an inherent contradiction, Matt, by them saying there is no objective truth.
They're actually making it.
Yeah, it's incredibly, it's obviously an incredibly facile critique.
Well, that's why it fell apart.
That contradiction.
Yeah, they just didn't realize where they were in the levels.
And there was just a stage towards a higher synthesis.
That's where they wanted.
Like you say, Matt, it's just, it's so superficial and shallow and silly.
And like, you know, if you want to point out that Kamala Harris took contradictory positions or wasn't very good at spelling or something to distinguish herself from Biden or whatever, you don't need to make reference to green and orange.
You don't need colors to make these criticisms.
Trump is not an opponent of postmodernism.
He is a postmodern conservative in many ways.
He's an opponent of arts and humanities, like academic type stuff, but he has no problem invoking, you know, post-truth politics and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, he's the archetypal implementer of flooding the zone with bullshit where words have no meaning and there is a disconnect from reality.
He's a perfect.
So anyway, just stupid analysis.
Let's leave it at that.
Well, yeah.
So they do talk about what a good leader would be like.
You know, they don't really like, I mean, it's quite clear, I think, they likes Donald Trump more than he likes Kamala Harris from the way that he describes it.
But him and the interviewer do talk about, you know, how you can apply integral approaches as a world leader.
And it sounds like this.
AI Algorithm Development Bones00:15:28
So it seems like maybe to make valuable use of some of those ideas in green, one may have to get into yellow to be able to actually apply them in a more practical manner.
Who can apply them?
I meant yellow or in your model, it would be teal.
The teal stage is what spiral dynamics call yellow.
Yeah, like, for example, in the green stage, there's a lot of confusion about how to integrate these ideas.
There are like theoretically, it sounds good, but there's no practical application.
Whereas maybe advancing into teal stage, moving up to teal stage, you may see leaders at that stage to be able to then be able to apply some of these ideas in a practical way.
Right.
And that's green moving to where?
Teal.
Teal.
Yes, that's exactly right.
And that's what Teal is designed to do is it looks at all of the multiple universe, multicultural ideas that Green has come up with.
It synthesizes them.
Yes, we got it.
Yep, we get it.
We get it.
It feels like we've, are we approaching saturation, as the cool televised researchers like to say?
Have we plumbed all of the nooks and crevices of oh, yeah.
Yeah, well, I mean, I could go on, Matt.
I could go on.
There's a very specific question, which is, you know, what about mainstream media as the source of truth that we can't trust anymore?
So this is the usual, you know, heterodox thing.
Now that the institutions afield, what can we turn to?
And another thing that came up during this recent event was the nature of like mainstream media as source of truth.
Like some see mainstream media as source of truth, whereas there are some who see it as manipulative or deeply biased.
I would love to understand with each tier, how does the role of mainstream media as well as the nature of truth changes in each of these tier?
But Ken Wilber answers it by just explaining the stages again.
Yeah, and talks about how teal unifies paradigms and doesn't mention anything.
And then the interviewer responds saying, thank you for sharing that.
And I'm like, that's not fair.
So that doesn't come.
And that's what happens when you get from pluralistic to teal.
Teal takes all of the separate fragments and pulls them together into unified paradigms or unified wholes.
And a paradigm includes an enormous number of the previously fragmented truths.
And then turquoise, which is cross-paradigmatic, takes all of the previous paradigms and ties all of them together into a very encompassing truth.
So you can see how truth sort of gets more and more encompassing and more inclusive the higher the stage you go.
Thank you for sharing that.
There is one last section and we'll finish with this, which is in your bollywick, I'm afraid.
AI.
Ken Wilbur.
Here we go.
Hold on to the seats, everybody.
Yeah.
So a hot topic of the moment, AI.
What does Ken have to say?
So here's the question.
Another aspect I wanted to add to understanding what's going on currently in our society is how does AI factor into some of these models of thinking?
Does it would it accelerate our growth even more?
Do you see that happening because of AI?
So let's first of all just hear Ken's initial response.
Like, what does he think about that?
That's a straightforward question.
How does AI play into the, let's see what Ken says.
Yes.
I'm, by the way, four of the largest AI, three or four of the largest AI companies in America have contacted me to include an integral approach to what they're doing.
So I'm working with several AI companies in order to bring an integral viewpoint to bear on AI.
And AI is also pursuing a sort of its own type of integral approach in that each algorithm in an AI system takes, includes other algorithms.
And so they're transcending and including as they go along.
And that's what the really great AI programmers do is they take an algorithm and they include in that algorithm yet other algorithms.
So they're transcending and including as well.
And I'm particularly impressed by one of the companies I'm working with, because what they want to do is have each stage of development that's built by their AI system.
They want to have it transcend and include its predecessor.
So there's the first step, Matt.
This is the first step.
So what do you think?
I mean, there's quite a lot of insights there.
It's amazing stuff.
I think that's the most cogent explanation of AI that I've heard to date.
Can you believe three of the four AI companies are working with CAN?
Well, of course they are.
That makes perfect sense.
That's right.
I mean, you're going to need an integral, an integral perspective if you're going to build an AI.
This is obvious.
Imagine an AI just operating down there at Orange.
Yeah.
And the best AI programmers out there.
They're not just built with algorithms.
They're putting algorithms inside other algorithms.
And that's integral theory.
Anytime you put anything inside something else, Chris, that's integral theory.
That's integral.
Yeah, that's really incredible so far.
So there we go.
Just, you know, unlike Eric, the phone is ringing for CAN.
And this is important.
And there's one company, it doesn't mention which one, but you know, it's more integral than the other ones.
But that's not all that.
AI, it can even perhaps go further than that.
They seem to be doing a pretty good job with it.
So I'm excited.
If we ever got an AI system that actually used the integral approach, it would, of course, be an enormous boon for the integral theory.
Right now, we have sort of every major university in the country has one or two professors that know about integral.
And usually one of them will actually teach a class on integral.
But it's not an everyday understanding.
It would become an everyday understanding if AI included it.
And every time you bought a program that had an AI chat room or AI, whatever, you'd be learning an integral approach.
So that would be very cool.
And AI in itself could have its own stages of development.
AI could have its own stages of development, but they would stay within the guidelines that were put in their algorithm.
So they could create, I mean, supposedly the same algorithm that told it to transcend and include could include several different ways to transcend and include.
And they wouldn't know which one to choose.
So you could get the same stages occurring up to a point.
Then this algorithm starts, finds it has four different directions it could go.
Oh my God, you know, you thought you were at the cutting edge of AI understanding.
Yeah.
Had your musket been blown?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It is amazing to think about.
And I didn't even know that they were teaching integral theory at all.
The major.
Well, you must have one or two integral professors in your we must.
They're just keeping quiet.
Like they're not.
Well, they're not teaching whole courses.
They're just teaching classes like, you know, integral.
One or two in most departments, right?
We'll know about integral theory.
Well, I could be one of them because I know integral theory now.
So I'm representing.
But I'm not a bit confused because he's talking about, you know, the possibility of the integrate integral theory into the AI.
But didn't he say they're all currently doing that and interested in it?
Isn't that revolution already happening?
I think so, but you know, fully, fully actualized.
Like a TLAI.
Yeah, a TLAI.
Just wrap your head around that.
That would be amazing.
I think we're poor old Ken Wilbert.
Nobody should be asking a 70-something year-old about what they think about AI.
Unless, you know, there are well-versed 70-year-olds.
Like, I feel there are 70-year-olds that their head around Desmond.
That's true.
That's true.
But can you imagine someone like Ken Wilbur?
Or who is the other guru we covered who was talking about AI as well at the end of two of those in parallel?
Yeah, Teal Swan.
Teal, great name.
Great name.
Oh, yes.
Yeah, she had big ideas about AI too.
And yeah, pretty much on the same level with Ken Wilbur's.
Yeah, I think she might have been a little bit more reasonable.
But I mean, in her version, AI is a alien, Chris.
It was more reasonable.
Don't do Ken Wilbur dirty like that.
Come on.
I mean, they're both pretty bad.
The last clip, Ma, it reaches for the stars, just like T Swan.
So what you heard, you might regard it as somewhat speculative with a lack of grinding in understanding what AI is.
But what about this, Ma?
And again, that's just stupid.
I mean, we have these stages and they're given.
They're what we are.
It's like studying an embryo and not realizing that it's going to have 208 bones.
It is.
Well, some people say men have 208 bones and women have 207 bones.
And Christians say that's right, because Eve was created with the rib of Adam.
So Adam has to have one less bone.
I doubt that's the explanation.
But you get the point.
It would be like somebody ignoring the fact that we're going to have 207 or 208 bones and we're going to have one heart and one two kidneys and one stomach and so on.
I mean, these are given structures of a human being and they're there and we can't avoid them.
And the same is true of the stages of development, at least as they've extended beyond where the average person is now.
And that includes at least the pluralistic stage, the teal stage, and the turquoise stage.
Those are real structures.
They exist in the blueprints of being a human being.
And so if you build a human being, you're building these future stages into them, just as they're going to be born at an archaic stage.
And all of them are going to evolve into a magic stage.
And all of those are going to evolve into a mythic stage.
And there's just no exceptions that we're aware of to any of those types of structures.
Well, there you go.
Integral theory is as much a part of our nature as the number of bones in our body.
It's just a brute fact of existence.
So Laura, he gets a number wrong.
And that thing about, you know, women and men having a different number of bone, not true.
Not true.
He said, you know, some people say it, but no, yes, but it's not true, Ken.
It's 206 bones.
We all have.
Yeah, he's not safe from the fact-checking.
I didn't know how many bones are in the human body.
There you go.
206, not 207 or 208.
Fine.
But this was in relation to a question about the future of humanity.
And whether we're going to merge with AI or Transcender or AI.
But the answer is, you know, humans are humans.
The universe operates by the integral stages.
You can never prevent that from happening.
Right.
Like, that's where.
All you can do is increase your awareness of who you truly are.
Who we truly are.
There you go.
Well, that's a good note to end on.
I'm glad he didn't try to speculate about the merging of the human and AI intelligence because that could have gone sideways.
I'd like where he left it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what's just one more little thing there, Mr. Brown, before you go, Professor Bright?
Just one more little clip I've got for you.
I'd like to see what you think about this.
Just my wife was asking me, you know.
Oh, you're columboing me, huh?
Okay.
That's right.
That's right.
I do have a final clip, and it is relevant to you, Matt.
And I think this might change your whole opinion on what you've heard.
You don't seem like you've been completely on board with spiral dynamics, but perhaps this will.
So the point is, how does a mind interact with a body or specifically a brain?
And integral theory handles that in a very simplified fashion, following a lot of the so-called panpsychists.
And I don't like that term, but a panpsychus represents about half of modern Western philosophers, like Alfred North Whitehead.
And what a panpsychist believes is pan means everywhere and psyche means mind.
And so they think that mind is everywhere in the universe.
Some sort of consciousness or awareness is all present.
I don't like the term because psyche seems to be a bit too complex an idea for an atom to have a psyche.
Secular Interior Exterior Met Tradition00:14:40
An atom can have sort of what Whitehead call prehension, which is a very rudimentary sense of touching and awareness.
And I agree with that.
So I maintain that even an atom, that's why they maintain, has a bit of prehension.
And then it has an exterior, and that's its interior.
And its exterior is some form of mass and energy.
And both the interior and the exterior evolve.
So as interior prehension becomes more evolved and to evolve, remember, is to transcend and include.
So it's becoming larger, more inclusive, more embracing.
And so our awareness goes from just very simplistic sensations and rudimentary awarenesses and feelings.
Okay.
Okay.
All right.
So I mean, if I'd let him go on there, he would have told you about, you know, the sense organs and what kind of things might you can sense with the sense organs.
So yeah, better to stop there.
But you got the thing.
He's a panpsychist like you, but he doesn't, you know, a special kind.
But yeah.
Yeah, and I didn't get the way in which integral theory handles panpsychism so elegantly or simplistically in his words.
And I don't think also that 50% of philosophers are basically panpsychists.
I don't think that's true.
Do you think atoms are apprehending or prehending?
You know, they've got touch and yeah, yeah, they can bounce off other atoms with the strong force or the weak force.
So yeah.
You know, every clip that I hear of this, it keeps making me think of, you know, when they start talking about embracing and integrating and spinning and turning, it reminds me of that like Simpson's clip where Kodos was giving a speech, right?
And was saying, tonight I say we must move forward, not backward, upward, not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards.
Yes, it's very much along those lines, isn't it?
He's using a lot of words to, you know, to do something.
It wasn't clear to me what he was trying to put together there.
But, you know, you heard again the name dropping, of course.
So I don't know whether or not Alfred Lord Whitehead was a panpsychist.
Probably, I'm sure he's correct there.
But, you know, he sprinkles those references to august personages liberally throughout everything.
And, you know, I think that gives what he's saying a sense of gravitas that is perhaps unearned.
Maybe so.
Maybe so.
Well, I promised you, Matt, that was the last.
And that is the last.
So what do you have for big thoughts on Kim O'Burden?
Let me ask you this, Matt.
Is he a secular guru?
As we have to find it, is Ken Wilbur a secular guru?
Yes, he is.
He is.
He's definitively one.
He fits squarely, squarely within our definition.
He's an exemplar of the form.
Yes.
And actually, the interesting thing is people might get a little bit caught up because, well, but hold on.
He's talking about spirituality and religion.
And, you know, I'm sure he's in the aggregors and various other things as well.
Yes, yes.
But his understanding of it is that is all incomplete forms of knowledge that he has transcended and combined into a meta science, right?
So, yeah.
And very importantly, it's not just spirituality and religious traditions that he has incorporated into his thing.
It is all of science and all of philosophy and everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And actually also with religion, although there is, you know, mention of magic and these kind of, you know, supernatural powers or whatever, that is regarded as not as refined as the comparative religious approach, which, you know, the mystic introspective insights from the different religious traditions.
So it is the more intellectualized versions that are of interest.
But I do think that for me, one telling point of this, Matt, is the last couple of clips we heard there were, you know, the rhetoric is grand and soaring and complex and the system is very baroque.
And then when you actually apply it to things like AI and politics, it reveals just how shallow and superficial it all is and how little insight it offers.
Especially, yes.
Yes.
Like when he applies it to atoms just there, for instance, you know, and connecting it to panpsychism, it was hard to follow what he was trying to say, but it was pretty clear it was a very shallow type of application.
So yeah, I think you're completely right there.
I mean, that's the thing with these Baroque self-sealing cosmologies, which is they seem so fascinating and so rich.
And they're certainly rich in kind of generating more internal details, building castles in the sky, as we like to say, but incredibly poor at actually being useful at doing something in the real world.
They give that feeling of truthiness, of course.
You know, the people who are right into it would definitely argue that they feel as though they are getting all kinds of insights and making all kinds of intellectual and spiritual progress.
But I think you and I would argue that that's a mirage.
We are the meta thinkers.
We're beyond.
We've transcended the integral and spiral dynamic framework and we are operating in a what's beyond pure white.
Have we transcended the light to the darkness or are we back in the darkness?
I know what's beyond pure clear could be could be darkness, could be black.
But he's an interesting character.
Like I think the personality and yeah, the personality or cognitive style of both the gurus in this field and the people that are really attracted to this kind of thing is interesting to me because, you know, he's obviously like in a sense, by his own lights, he's a curious person, right?
He's he's interested in a whole wide range of things.
You know, I'm sure he's read widely and he's, you know, pondered and speculated on connections between everything.
So he's not, he's not a fool, right?
But he clearly has been huffing his own farts for decades.
And this is this is where he wishes.
Yeah.
And, you know, actually, Matt, as you mentioned, like there, there is a genuine, limited engagement with non-Western spiritual traditions and different systems of philosophy and that kind of thing.
And actually, one of the interviews that I looked at in preparation for this was the Theosophical Society, right?
Yeah, we're interviewing him.
And that is squarely where I would put this.
You know, like, I know that we make the secular distinction, right?
But the Theosophists in a similar sort of way, even though they had interest in the magical side of things, they were also about, you know, systemizing and categorizing and so on.
So he has a very friendly conversation with the modern day theosophists.
And yeah, he is in a lot of ways a modernized version of theosophy.
Yeah, in a way, he's part of a tradition, isn't he?
Like the alchemists had similar cosmologies, but with a lot more, I guess, justification, really, right?
Pre-proper chemical theory.
They were doing the best they could.
And they actually did do some useful empirical work that led to proper chemistry.
But there's also been a tradition even in sort of Victorian era, and I guess the Theosophists are an example of this, where, you know, there was a great deal of interest in science and, you know, Darwinian theories and all kinds of stuff.
But then there was also an interest in like the occult and the various religious things.
And sort of there were a certain kind of person who was looking to bring it all together.
And yeah, and I think he's sort of part of that tradition.
And I can see why Ken Wilbur, if people came across his books when they were teenagers and it introduced them to this wide array of literature and a very complex system that is saying, you know, everybody has a part of the puzzle, but they are not putting it all together.
And it's explicitly endorsing, you know, science and rationalism as an important framework, but just not the only framework.
So I can see how that would appeal and why he is such a significant figure in the backgrounds of a lot of people that we've covered, especially the sense makers, because you mentioned Matt, that the thing, the last kind of clip, understanding this point is a little difficult.
But I think, as with the sense makers, his point revolves around how you define a specific word, right?
He takes psyche to refer to a specific kind.
Of thought and he wants to argue that, like his word, prehension or apprehension or whatever he said, is a better thing for the kind of mental activity that an atom is capable of.
But like that's only a distinction that is meaningful to Ken Wilbur and other sense makers, because they're still all agreeing that atoms are, you know, conscious units and stuff.
So like the debate is around which label should we use for that and you know what's the exact property.
But they, they share that like they think it's very important to this, determine which word to use and how many layers or levels of each word there are, and so on.
Yeah, yeah it's, it's hard to categorize this stuff.
Um, then I include sense making and cosmologies like Ken Welbur's in that stuff.
But it is kind of like a like folk philosophy maybe, you know yeah, and folk science yeah, folk science just sort of, you know, in a recreational, you know unserious kind of way, touring around and pulling all the things together and build, and you know, I I see the fun in that and it's like for for genuine philosophers or scientists or, you know, investigators or researchers of any kind.
That is part of the enjoyment of the job, but it's usually followed by a lot of other less fun critique and rigor and you know empirical testing and counter examples and a whole bunch of mechanisms that are there that enforces some kind of restraint on just unbridled theory building and I I feel like the recreational version is just, is just like the fun bit,
without any of the you know less pleasant work.
And I think like i'm not going to reprise all the comments we made throughout this, but I will reprise just one of them Chris, because it does stick in my throat, which is the way in which it is is designed.
Like the actual theory, the actual framework is one that puts itself at the tippy top of the apex of the thing.
Like it's, it's like a self-justifying theory um, and that is um, something that makes it special.
It's obviously kind of annoying and and we saw this with when talking to sense makers and stuff too they kind of have a slightly condescending.
I mean, we would probably be accused of being condescending too, but to me they come across as a bit condescending because they go, oh yes, you know, look at you you you materialist, scientific reductionist I, you know you're, you're sitting down here and aren't, you know, working at this, at this higher level, which is, I guess, Guess a convenient point of view,
but I'm going to return to my rejoinder that I've made before, which is like, just point to me to some real verifiable things that your amazing alternative epistemology has produced, because I may be a representative of this closed-minded reductionist kind of framework, but I could point to a bunch of things from cosmology, you know, like real cosmology,
like astronomy or understanding evolution or all of the amazing technological advances.
I could point to a bunch of real things.
And I think if you ask someone who was into integral theory to point to the concrete contributions and things that it's produced, I think they would all be like self-referential contributions, you know, ways in which they subjectively feel that they are now a more attuned and enlightened person than they were before encountering this theory.
But really, to my mind, it's a theory that actually is one that kind of narcissistically caters to your own specialness.
That, you know, like that's, that's the main draw card.
Yeah, well, actually, I did come across before, Matt, you know, there's a semi-controversial evolutionary theorist.
Do you know David Sloan Wilson?
Yes, I do.
Yes, he's he often courts controversy because of his attempt to rescue group selection, right?
But a lot of it comes down to definitions as it happens.
And he actually met Ken Wilbur at some event that he attended to and was saying that he was one of the most insightful thinkers on evolution that he'd ever met.
And I thought, actually, that makes sense.
Like you are a big idea evolutionary guy who thinks the standard model is like kind of missing these important parts.
So he didn't seem to pick up on the pseudo-scientific aspects of Kim Wilbur, just like he found, you know, the whole system he had is very fascinating and this kind of thing.
So it can appeal to people who, you know, are actual academics and doing research as well.
So I think it just depends.
Master Paradigm Patreon Stream God00:08:03
What kind of academic are you?
That's the question.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think if you have a tendency to wander up into higher levels of abstraction, then it can seem quite appealing, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, there's Ken Wilbur.
He's been decoded now, Matt.
All that remains is to put him into the grammar, which we'll do at a later date.
We'd like to let these things percolate, if you will.
But we do need to give just a little nod, just a little hot tip to our very fine patreons.
Would you take issue with that, Matt?
Would you refuse them a few kind words from us?
God forbid.
God forbid.
No, I stand for it, Chris.
I fully stand for it.
Well, can I also mention, Matt, that, you know, we have what we have on the Patreon, you know, I feel like people understand what is on a Patreon.
There's bonus material, there's the supplementary material episodes, you know, the full version, grammater episode, so on.
But we also have a fairly lively discussion community there.
We have, you know, the chat function on Patreon where people talk about, you know, clips and stuff that they've seen related to gurus and so on.
But also, people are sharing pictures of their food in Matt's fruity corner, exercise videos in the monastery of God's effort.
That is content you cannot get anywhere else on the internet.
No, you can't get that anywhere else.
You cannot get this kind of thing.
And Patreon's fairly lackluster functionality actually works well.
It's like going back in time to the old days where, you know, it's not all discords and weird things.
So, you know, I'm just saying, if you are interested in that kind of thing, if you like the podcast, there are people discussing episodes and arguing about horseshoe theory mainly on the Patreon chat.
So that's our, I don't think we've ever mentioned that there is like a chat thing that people use, but it is there.
Yeah, it's quite active.
And it's a good, it's a good little community.
They're pretty normal people.
They're not terminally online.
Mostly normal.
They're less terminally online than you and me.
So that's.
Most of them.
Yes, that's right.
But if you want to join them, you can be like these people, Matt, on the Patreon.
I'm going to give a shout out to a bunch of revolutionary geniuses first.
Okay.
And these include Prefrontal, Klepto Manta, Casey Hartnett, Peter Jensen, Nick Schmidt, Boltzmann One, David Seifgate, Paul Reyns, Raz Dylan, Eric Weinmeister, Jeremy, Lee Goldman, Simon Lewis, No Flux Given, Rocky R., Pat, Radandeep Singh, TLS, Lewis Khan, Miatrik Santa,
or Matrix Santa, Andrea, Zuxestra, Pete Stanton, Andrew Hurry, Jan Maris, Sonegal, Olson, and Ryan Weeks and ValueSoup.
Those are our revolutionary geniuses.
Wonderful this week.
Thank you.
Thank you all.
I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess.
And it could easily be wrong, but it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
I love, I'll never get tired of the 30 or 40 different paradigms.
That's a man that has read Ken Wilbur, that's for sure.
And gone beyond it.
That's right.
That's right.
Well, now I'm at the Galaxy Breen Gurus, rarer to spot, you know, in general.
They're like Bigfoot, right?
You see one and it's just darting behind a bush, looking atiamed.
But they are the people that can join the live monthly stream.
What do you call that?
The live stream that we do, the Q ⁇ A type, the Hangout thing.
And they include Tokness Bibi, Bracky Dayon, David Tinhamar, Dude Na, Lien Barlow, Madeline Reed, Big Beef Compass, Cindy S., Curtis Freeman, John Michael Turner, and Lorenzo Servetchi.
Okay.
Excellent.
Thank you.
Good bunch of guys and gals there.
Great bunch of people.
Hello there, you awakening wonders.
You may not be aware that your entire reality is being manipulated.
Become part of our community of free speakers.
We are still allowed to say stuff like this.
Science is failing.
It's failing right in front of our eyes and no one's doing anything about it.
I'm a shell for no one.
More than that, I just simply refuse to be caught in any one single echo chamber.
In the end, like many of us must, I walk alone.
Yeah.
Sabine Hossenfelder.
You know, she posted another one of those tweets about how science is failing.
And this one was sort of framed a little bit more conservatively.
She's saying, well, even if science isn't failing, the fact that so many people think that should give you good cause for concern, a deep reflection of public life.
Yeah.
I mean, it's almost as if there's high-profile YouTubers who are constantly saying it's really like that.
You know, I wonder where people got that idea from.
But yeah, well, there they are, Matt.
And, you know, the funny thing is that while Jordan Hall in the previous clip warned us about collapsing things down to a master paradigm, he has, of course, subsequently become a Christian.
And now he probably would collapse things down to a master paradigm.
He became a Christian too, did he?
I missed that one.
Yeah, he had a Christian thing.
But I don't know if it's stuck.
You know, you never know how long these things will last.
But last I heard, he was talking about his conversion to Christianity.
So God bless them all, Matt.
I was doing that long before they had any notion about that.
So I've been to Mass more times than they can count.
So hot right now.
So hot right now.
It's interesting because the gurus really bucked the trend.
Like, you know, Christianity in English-speaking countries is on the decline, even in the most Christian of all nations, the United States.
Yeah.
But the gurus, as is their wont, going in another direction.
Well, actually, yeah.
And in general, this is a good reminder that the discourse does not reflect the representative reality in the actual country, right?
Like, so there's all these articles about the resurgence of religiosity.
You know, the free press and Fox News or Quillette will be talking about, you know, so many people are becoming religious and whatnot, but like the actual population trends continue to follow the broad secularization way of it.
And that's even with the case, man.
Catholic School Roots Religiosity Peace00:02:41
I know all the arguments about alternative forms of religiosity and spiritual, but not religious, but the metrics, they don't lie.
So, yeah.
Yeah, yep, yep.
Anyway, you probably won't be seeing a religious turn on this podcast.
I don't know.
I'd be surprised.
Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe Chris will rediscover his Catholic roots, figure out that the incense and all of the, I don't know, what else to Catholic?
Yeah, you've got a lot of familiarity with church.
I can tell.
The incense and the, was there a pope in your church?
What did you guys do?
What do you guys do?
Peace be with you, Matt.
Peace be with you.
That's what I want to say to you.
What would you say if I say peace be with you?
What do you think the appropriate response is?
Thank you.
No.
No, I know.
No, I know the answer to that one.
Yeah.
And also with you.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's right.
Okay.
Not that much of a heaven.
I'm still connected to my roots.
That's like my Irish roots.
They're deep.
The Catholic roots and the Irish roots are deep and strong.
And, you know, I won't look like an atheist living here in Australia, but deep down.
I did have an academic visit who was telling me that, you know, he went to a Catholic church, but he wasn't raised Catholic.
And he didn't know what the thing is when they give you the Eucharist and they say, body of Christ.
And he didn't say anything.
They stopped and were like, they were like, you have to say the thing.
And he was like, what?
And then they were like, why do you not know the apparently it caused, you know, breaking the script.
And then he was like, I thought it would be a man.
Like, it's usually a man, but I didn't know.
And I was like, yeah, you should just always go over a man.
Like, it's going to go down fine.
I have this vague memory as a child, Chris.
Like, I have to ask my mom about this because she's visiting at the moment.
But I remember being taken.
I think she was trying to get me into a Catholic school.
I think she wanted me to go to a Catholic school.
Well, the best people have went to them, so that makes sense.
Yeah.
And but there were these rules around, you know.
And I remember having to put on a nice shirt and stuff and then go and I remember talking to basically some sort of priest person who was basically sniffing us out to check out whether we were inquisition.
And I think we failed that test, Chris.
I think if I were to give you this piece of wafer, what would you say?
If I held this up in front of you, what would you say?
Corpus Colosum McGilchrist Hemispheres00:01:52
Thank you.
And then she ended up enrolling me in a, what are they called? Church of England type rip-off school.
Oh, they didn't give a shit about anything.
Can you pay the money?
You know, really want to be a little bit more excited about it.
Smart Church of England, Matt.
Church of England.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sounds like them.
Well, with that heretical discussion, I think we'll bring this podcast to a close, Matt.
We'll end it here.
We'll leave it.
We'll leave it.
Okay.
Just leave it, Matt.
Let's just stop.
We'll just stop now.
But no, I've got to say one more thing, which is I enjoyed this.
I enjoyed this.
I enjoyed Kevin Wilbur's cosmology and I want to do more bespoke cosmologies, Chris.
I don't know how it can happen, but just make it happen for me.
Well, I'm thinking about Ian McGilchrist for the next person, the two hemisphere guys.
Does that count?
Yeah, I mean, what's the deal with the two hemispheres?
Well, you'll find out you'll find out a lot of things from the two hemispheres.
You're the neuroscience guy, Matt, not me.
So you should know already.
Do you know what the thing is called that connects the two hemispheres?
The information superhighway?
No.
What's it called?
I do know it.
I've heard it before, but I can't remember the name.
What's it called?
The colestrum?
Corpus Colstrom.
The Corpus Colosum.
Corpus Colosum.
All right.
The Corpus Colosseum.
Now we've established who knows what and who's the expert of which.
Now we can draw a close.
Okay.
We look forward to your fact checks on Ian McGilchrist next time.