To Transcend and Include (Ken Wilber)
Listen now (77 mins) | “All growing up stages are the product of scientific investigation of the stages of growing up that people go through. And those are all defined in third person terms..."
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Ken Wilber’s work and intellect is difficult to describe. Throughout a long career—and the authoring of 20 books, including A Brief History of Everything, Grace and Grit, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, and The Religion of Tomorrow, Wilber has put together what is essentially a synthesis of every psychological model of development. In fact, he locked himself away for years, writing every model down on pieces of yellow legal paper, and then knit them all together. I’ve written about Wilber’s work at length in my newsletter, which is also called Pulling the Thread—I’ll put links in the show notes—and I talk about his work on this show as well. Most recently, I talked about Ken Wilber with Nicole Churchill in our conversation about Spiral Dynamics. Wilber is a Spiral Dynamics wizard, though he uses it in aggregate with the work of other developmental thinkers, integrating the work of luminaries like Carol Gilligan, Robert Kegan, and others.
In today’s conversation, we talk about Wilber’s brand new book, Finding Radical Wholeness, which explores the five big processes we all undertake in our lives. In today’s conversation, we mostly talked about two: Waking Up and Growing Up, which are often conflated. Wilber makes the case for why they are unrelated processes—and the essential nature of the latter. While Waking Up, or having a Satori experience is wonderful—and something that 60% of people report—we all need to grow up. Wilber and I spend most of today’s conversation talking about our political environment from the standpoint of developmental psychology: Why we’re so fractured, and what it will look like when the Integral Stage becomes the leading edge of culture and we learn how to include and transcend. I think this is fascinating, and reassuring, and excellent context for a moment that feels so out-of-control.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Ken Wilber Episode
MORE FROM KEN WILBER:
More books from Ken Wilber
More from Pulling the Thread Podcast:
“The Basics of Spiral Dynamics” with Nicole Churchill
“Our Collective Psychological Development” with John Churchill
Ken using the term "wokism" is disappointing. As well as his cliched take on it.
I'm loving the spiral dynamics convos - thank you for leading/sharing. I had some questions that I kept wanting you to ask Wilbur that I wondered if you've contemplated because I know you're far better read on spiral dynamics than me:
I find his critique of "wokeism" pretty close-minded to be honest, so maybe that is clouding my judgment, but when he uses Harvard as his example of green gone wrong, he says they're wrong because they aren't getting the so-called highest qualified students. But it seems to me that they're valuing diversity as a value on its own, and so that metric becomes more important than standardized test scores for example. How can Wilbur dictate what metric is "best?" Maybe I'm stuck in my post-rational green worldview, but it seems to me that the next stages beyond green should include the post-modern idea of many things being true at the same time, while transcending the idea that all of the things should have equal footing. In Wilbur's discussion about diversity, he seemed to think he was the authority and/or there is an obvious on what metric should be the highest or "rightest." This seems to fly in the face of how he so helpful discusses how there are different types of intelligence beyond the cognitive.
On the wokeism stuff, I find myself irritated in both the Wilbur conversation and the intro conversation on the podcast because white people have appropriated this word from Black culture that had quite a different original meaning for and among Black communities, and us white people have turned it around to use in an umbrella way that just feels like more colonizing. Maybe it's dumb and pointless to be frustrated about that, but I think words matter and we should be careful to critique the actual problem instead of repeating soundbytes from MAGA-style politicians with agendas. For example, I think you and Wilbur made some great points about the college protests this spring, but I wish we would do a better job of articulating what it is that is the problem instead of lumping it under some stolen word that has lost all meaning outside of signaling which side of the culture wars you fall on.
Thanks again for hosting such engaging conversations!