Quest Magazine

Printed in the   Fall 2025  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, "Inner Guru, Outer Guru, Secret Guru"   Quest 113:4, pg 10-14

By Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama 

This interview appeared in the first issue of The Quest, autumn 1988. It was held at the close of annual teachings and initiations in Bodhgaya, India, the place most sacred to Buddhists. It is selected from a book, The Bodhgaya Interviews, edited by Jose Ignacio Cabezón.

His Holiness: At the outset, I would like to express my greetings. I am not staying many days in Bodhgaya, so I have been very busy. At the same time there are many people this year, aren’t there? There is a much bigger gathering this year than last year.

Now the teachings are finished and everyone is departing. Except for our memory, soon there will be nothing left of our days in Bodhgaya. This is the way of human life—time passes. As a Buddhist, one must think not only in terms of this lifetime, but in terms of trillions and trillions of years. To think in this way is also a form of practice. I think this is very important.

At the beginning, we must certainly learn from a teacher or from books. Then it is necessary to apply what we have learned to the new experiences and events we encounter in our daily lives. Now, in the present case, if we consider our departure from Bodhgaya, some people may feel sad. To dwell on this and to think, “Now we are leaving and we shall not see each other any longer” is not a very useful thing to do.

If, however, we contemplate the deeper significance, the implicit lesson in impermanence and change, and the nature of human life, then the experience of departing can be a useful one. It becomes meaningful. Physically we may be departing, but mentally, our memory and certain things we may have experienced in Bodhgaya—these will remain in our minds. The physical part cannot remain with you always. It will remain for a while and then depart. So, you see, all external material things, no matter how important or how beautiful, will eventually depart. But certain things which are related mainly to consciousness, to the inner experience, these, generally speaking, remain always with you.

Question: Your Holiness, how can we separate the essence of Buddhism from Tibetan cultural adaptations?

His Holiness: I think the basic teachings such as the Four Noble Truths and the Two Truths (conventional and ultimate) are the very foundation of Buddhism. These are teachings that are to be found in Indian Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism, Chinese, Thai, Burmese, and also in Tibetan Buddhism. They all have teachings such as the Four Noble Truths—these are basic to all forms of Buddhism. Now the Tantras are not practiced in common. They are practiced only in Tibet, in Japan, and perhaps in Korea. But we can nonetheless consider the Tantric teachings as authentic Buddhism, as the true teachings.

When we perform certain kinds of prayers and rituals in Tibetan Buddhism, in certain minor aspects, there may be Tibetan adaptations. These parts, then, can be dispensed with in the transmission of Buddhism to other cultures. For example, when we perform certain pujas (offering rituals), we use certain musical instruments. We use, for example, the conch shell: this is something we took from India. (In Tibet, there were no conches. But other instruments were common in Tibet.) When you Westerners perform these pujas, these rituals, it is not necessary for you to use these same instruments, you can use your own.

This is just one example of aspects that are local adaptations. In another place with a different culture and different people these things may not be relevant, they may not actually be useful, and that part should change. In the West, for example, there exists the tradition of using song; some Christians, for example, use song as a means of conveying and appreciating spiritual meaning. This is fine: it is useful.

Question: In the teachings there are many things mentioned that are contradicted by Western science. For example, it is claimed that the moon is 100 miles above the earth, etc. Many of our teachers hold these views to be literally true and Westem science to be wrong. Would Your Holiness comment on how we should view these teachings of the Buddha, and on how we should regard our teachers who hold to them literally?

His Holiness: This is a complicated matter. But I believe, and I have expressed this on several occasions, that basically a Buddhist attitude on any subject must be one that accords with the facts. If, upon investigation, you find that there is reason and proof for a point, then you should accept it. That is not to say that there are certain points that are beyond the human powers of deductive reasoning—that is a different matter. But things such as the size or position of the moon and stars, etc., are things that the human mind can come to know. On these matters it is important to accept the facts, the real situation, whatever that may be.

When we investigate certain measurements and descriptions as they exist in our own texts, we find that they do not correspond to reality. In such a case we must accept the reality, and not the literal scriptural explanation. This should be the basic attitude.

If something is contradictory to reasoning, or if it is found to be false after investigation, then that point cannot be accepted. That is the rule, that is the general attitude. For example, if something is directly experienced by the senses, then there is no question, no doubt, that we should accept it.

In the scriptures there are many different cosmological theories expounded. We do believe that there are many billions and billions of worlds, in the same way that Western science accepts there are limitless numbers of galaxies. This is something that is mentioned very clearly in scripture, though the size and shape may not be the same. They may be different.

For example, Mount Meru is mentioned in the scriptures. It is claimed to be the center of the earth. But if it is there, by following the description in scripture of its location, it must be found. At least we must get some indication that it is there, but there is none. So we must take a different interpretation from the literal one.

If there are teachers who still hold to the literal meaning, then that is their own business. There is no need to argue with them. You can see things according to your own interpretation, and they can see things as they see fit.

In any case, these are basically minor matters, aren’t they? The foundation of the teachings: the Four Noble Truths, what they have to say about the nature of life, about the nature of suffering, about the nature of mind—these are basic teachings, these are what is most important, what is relevant to our lives. Whether the world is square or round does not matter as long as it remains a peaceful and good place.

Question: Can Your Holiness comment on the power of a holy place such as Bodhgaya? What makes virtuous activities performed here more powerful and worthy of more merit?

His Holiness: The fact that many holy beings, spiritually advanced practitioners, stay and practice in a certain place makes the atmosphere or environment of that place change. The place gets some imprint from the person.

Then when another person who does not have much experience or spiritual development comes and remains in that place and practices, he/she can obtain certain special kinds of experience, though of course the right type of motivation and certain karmic forces must also be present in the person as contributing factors for such an experience to come about.

According to the Tantric teachings, at important places there are nonhuman beings, like dakinis, who have bodies that are much more subtle than those of humans. When great spiritual practitioners stay in a certain place and perform meditation and rituals there, then that place becomes familiar to beings like dakas and dakinis, so that they may inhabit the place and travel around it. As indications of this, sometimes one may notice an unusual noise or smell that seems to have no particular reason for existing. These are indications that some higher beings, different beings who have more experience, are inhabiting or traveling through that place. This could also act as a factor influencing whether or not a place is considered special.

In addition, in regard to Bodhgaya, we know that the Buddha himself must have chosen this place for a particular reason—this we believe. Due to the power of his prayer, later, when his followers actually come to this place, they may feel something—hence the power of the Buddha’s prayer could also be a factor.

Perhaps we must take human psychological factors into account as well. For example, Mahayana Buddhists feel strongly toward Sakyamuni Buddha, toward Nagarjuna, etc. In my own case, I have a strong feeling towards the Buddha, towards Nagarjuna, Arya Asanga, to all of these great beings. So when you stay at the place where these people were born and remained, then you feel something. If you use this feeling in the right way, that is fine, there is nothing wrong with it.

Question: Could Your Holiness say something about growing open to one’s own inner guru and also something about the absolute guru?

His Holiness: In general, there is said to be an inner guru, an outer guru, and a secret guru. This is explained in different scriptures, and there are some slight differences in the way these concepts are interpreted or explained in Nyingma, Kargyu, Sakya, and Gelug (the four main orders of Tibetan Buddhism). Likewise, there are differences in the way the different sects explain the four types of mandalas. Outer, inner, secret, and the mandala of reality (de kho na nyid).

The internal or inner guru is the innermost subtle consciousness of the guru. Now that innermost subtle consciousness which your guru has is exactly similar to the innermost subtle consciousness you yourself have. What then is the difference between the two? The guru, who is in effect using this subtle consciousness in his practice, is actually experiencing it with awareness, so that the consciousness becomes a form of wisdom.

When we faint or when we are dying, we too experience that subtle consciousness. And although that consciousness is there, although it is present, we are not aware or conscious of it. We do not realize that it is present. So the real guru, the inner guru, is this consciousness that exists within ourselves. It is also the inner protector, the real ultimate refuge. It is the experience of that state that is the real teacher, that is the real protector, that is the real Dharma. Thus there is this inner guru.

Now, you see, the manifestation of that consciousness in the form of a human body we call the external guru.

As for the secret guru, it is the special method or way that brings us to an awareness of that consciousness. This includes breathing meditations, the generation of bliss, and of the inner heat. These we may call the secret guru because it is through these techniques that we come to realize the inner guru. Sometimes this subtle consciousness is called “inner guru,” sometimes it is called the “ultimate guru.” In any case the two terms are synonymous.

According to the sutras, according to the Madhyamika school, “the absolute” refers to sunyata, to emptiness. In the Mahanuttaniyoga Tantras, however, the word “absolute” has two meanings. It can refer either to sunyata itself or to this special type of subtle consciousness (not to the ordinary, vulgar levels of mind, however). For the most part, when these scriptures refer to “the ultimate,” they are referring to the consciousness aspect, but not to ordinary consciousness, to a consciousness we call rigpa, the ultimate, innermost subtle consciousness. Even when the five senses are not active, the subtle consciousness is still there, though it is overpowered by the senses.

You see, all the senses are individual types of consciousness. The eye consciousness has color, shape, and so forth as its object: the ear consciousness perceives sounds, etc. Even though they are all different, having different objects, nonetheless, they are all of the same nature, of the nature of knowing. They may come to know through different means, but they are still of the nature of knowing. This common aspect they have in common we call shes pa, knowing. Now the rigpa, which we can call “awareness,” this innermost subtle consciousness, is also of the nature of “knowing.” It too is a “knower,” just as the eye consciousness is a “knower.” So both the coarser sense consciousnesses and the more subtle rigpa are of the nature of knowing. They are both “knowers.” The coarser types of consciousness come to know something because of the subtle consciousness. The basic nature of knowing thus comes from, or is due to, the existence of the subtle consciousness. Even during moments when the sense organs are very active, if we rely on the instructions of a proper, experienced teacher, we can separate the two experiences: the path of the coarser consciousnesses from the path of the subtle consciousness.

These points, however, are difficult. First of all, the matter being discussed is difficult; add to that the fact that the Dalai Lama’s English is poor, and it makes for an altogether awkward situation. You see, it is actually quite shameful. For quite a few years now I have had to speak with my own English, but it never comes out properly. In fact, sometimes, instead of getting better, it actually declines!

Question: Your Holiness, in what way does an individual consciousness exist? What part of that consciousness is still present after death? And is there a total dissolution of that consciousness when one reaches Buddhahood?

His Holiness: Consciousness will always be present, though a particular consciousness may cease. For example, the particular tactile consciousness that is present within this human body will cease when the body comes to an end. Likewise, consciousnesses that are influenced by ignorance, by anger, or by attachment—these too will cease. Furthermore, all of the coarser levels of consciousness will cease. But the basic, ultimate, innermost subtle consciousness will always remain. It had no beginning, and it will have no end. That consciousness will remain. When we reach Buddhahood, that consciousness becomes enlightened all­knowing. Still, the consciousness will remain an individual thing. For example, the Buddha Sakyamuni’s consciousness and the Buddha Kasyapa’s consciousness are distinct individual things. This individuality of consciousness is not lost upon the attainment of Buddhahood. Still, all of the minds of all Buddhas have the same qualities—in this sense they are similar. They have the same qualities while still preserving their individuality. 

Question: What does Your Holiness think of unilateral nuclear disarmament?

His Holiness: Now, you see, world peace through mental peace is an absolute. It is the ultimate goal. But as for the method, there are many factors that must be taken into consideration. Under a particular set of circumstances, a certain approach may be useful while under other circumstances, another method may be more useful. This is a very complicated issue which compels us to study the situation at a particular point of time. We must take into account the other side’s motivation, etc., so it is a very complex matter.

But we must always keep in mind that all of us want happiness. War, on the other hand, only brings suffering—that is very clear. Even if we are victorious, that victory means sacrificing many people. It means their suffering. Therefore, the important thing is peace. But how do we achieve peace? Is it done through hatred, through extreme competition, through anger? It is obvious that through these means it is impossible to achieve any form of lasting world peace. Hence the only alternative is to achieve world peace through mental peace, through peace of mind. World peace is achieved based only on a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, on the basis of compassion. The clear, genuine realization of the oneness of all mankind is something important. It is something we definitely need. Wherever I go, I always express these views.

Question: Western monks and nuns sometimes find it difficult wearing robes in the West. We are often stared at and looked upon as being strange. Does your Holiness recommend wearing robes in non-Buddhist countries?

His Holiness: This we must judge according to particular cases and circumstances. If you can remain in robes without disturbing others, then of course it is better to wear robes. In some particular cases, however, this may be difficult.

Basically, as practitioners, we must remain in society. We must be good members of the society in which we live. So if society has a negative attitude towards you, this may be good neither for yourself nor for society. This is the basic position. Now if for this reason, one decides not to wear robes, if it is not suitable, better not to do so under those circumstances. This is all right. If the circumstances should change, then change. Gradually the society itself may change its attitudes. The West is a society in which Buddhism has never flourished, and this is changing. I think that, compared to thirty years ago, today when monks travel on an international air carrier, they are recognized as monks. So, you see, time goes on, and gradually things will change. The important thing is not what we wear but our behavior in our everyday lives.

Thank you very much. Today there is not much time, but I am happy to have shared these few moments with you. All of us have come from different parts of the world and we may even have different faiths, but we all have the same human mind. Isn’t that so? When it comes down to the level of basic human qualities we are the same, there are no differences. On a superficial level, however, there are many, many differences. So what we need to do is go to a deeper level. There we find that we are all human brothers and sisters. No barriers exist for us. Everyone wants happiness and does not want suffering, and everyone has the right to achieve permanent happiness. So we must share each other’s suffering and help each other. If we cannot help others, at least we must not harm them. That is the main principle. Whether we believe in the next life or not does not matter. Whether we believe in God or not doesn’t matter. But one thing that does matter very much is that we live peacefully, calmly, with a real sense of brotherhood and sisterhood. This is the way to achieve true world peace, or if not world peace, then at least a peaceful community. That is important, very useful, and very helpful. Thank you very much.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama is recognized as the fourteenth incarnation in the line of Dalai Lamas, and is the head of the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India. He is known the world over as a great spiritual teacher and tireless worker for peace.

Dalai Lama, excerpts from Answers: Discussions with Western Buddhists, edited by José Ignacio Cabezón. Copyright © 2001 by José Ignacio Cabezón. Reprinted by arrangement with The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Shambhala Publications Inc., Boulder, Colorado, www.shambhala.com.

Printed in the  Winter 2026  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard   "The Spectrum of Consciousness: An Interview with Ken Wilber"   Quest 114:1, pg 12-18

By Richard Smoley

Ken Wilber is one of the most dynamic and respected thinkers of recent generations. His numerous books include The Spectrum of Consciousness; Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution; The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development; Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution; and, most recently, Finding Radical Wholeness: The Integral Path to Unity, Growth, and Delight.

            One of the central themes of Wilber’s works is the evolution of consciousness from the most basic atomic particles all the way up to the human level and beyond. Influenced by figures such as the Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser, he relates the various stages of human history to different levels of development in human consciousness. Wilber also makes use of the Spiral Dynamics system developed by psychologist Clare Graves (see diagram), with his own modifications.

            In this interview, conducted by Zoom in June 2025, Wilber discusses these ideas and their relation to the present day.

Richard Smoley: I’’ll start with one concept that seems to be central to your philosophy, which is the evolution of consciousness. The idea is not only that consciousness has evolved from, say, the days of the paramecium, but it has also evolved in historical times over recent centuries. Could you talk about your views on that point?

Wilber: Sure. There’s a fairly widespread school of philosophy in the West called panpsychism, and panpsychism maintains that what we call the psyche, or the mind, is pan-, or present everywhere. That means that atoms have a bit of mental capacity. Molecules have a bit of mental capacity. Single-celled organisms have a mental capacity. Multicellular organisms have a mental capacity, and all the way up the tree of life from fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals, to humans, which have the highest reach of mental capacity.

Let me say something about what I mean by mental capacity, because I don’t like the term panpsychism. The reason is that psyche is too complex a term for the type of mind that a proton or a neutron or an atom has. I much prefer Alfred North Whitehead’s term: prehension, because prehension just means touching or feeling, and that touching is the type of mentality that an atom has: an atom touches other atoms, and those atoms together make up molecules, and molecules touch other molecules.

When a bunch of molecules come together, they form single-celled organisms, and those single-celled organisms touch other single-celled organisms to form multicellular organisms, and those go all the way up the tree of life, from fish to amphibians, to reptiles, to mammals, to humans.

Their mentality also goes through a variety of stages of development; this was discovered by America’s second greatest psychologist, James Mark Baldwin (America’s greatest psychologist, is, of course, William James). He wrote a book called Thoughts and Things. Baldwin invented developmental psychology, which is the study of the stages of mental growth (or of prehensive growth) that humans went through. He took the fairly common Western philosophical tradition, focusing on so-called goodness, truth, and beauty, and found that each of them went through a series of stages of unfolding or development. He named those stages things like prelogical, logical, translogical, and integral.

The good, the true, and the beautiful. The good involved the stages of moral development: how we treat each other with goodness and care and concern and morality. He took truth to mean scientific, objective truth. And then the beautiful, which was beauty in the eye of the beholder, or of the pronoun I.

To these three he added religion, because he noticed that religious belief also went through the same stages of development. So that gave us four different lines of development. Baldwin actually discovered around seven or eight total levels of development.

That was the beginning of developmental psychology. By the 1950s these stages of development had become fairly well known among the psychological community, and there was an outburst of many different models. Psychologists came to realize that there are around a dozen or so different types of intelligence: cognitive intelligence; moral intelligence; ego development, or ego intelligence; spatial; mathematical; musical; and so on.

Each psychologist, unknowingly, singled out a particular multiple intelligence and studied the growth of that intelligence. Abraham Maslow chose a needs hierarchy of development. Jean Piaget chose a cognitive line of development. Lawrence Kohlberg chose a moral line of development. Jane Loevinger studied ego development. Each major researcher selected a particular type of intelligence, studied the stages of growth that it went through, and found that everybody went through these stages. If they continued to grow and develop, they went through all eight or so major levels.

These psychologists were all describing the same basic levels. But because each of them was dealing with a different line of development, each gave these levels different names. Piaget gave cognitive names to his stages: sensory-motor intelligence; preoperational intelligence; concrete operational intelligence; formal operational intelligence; and systemic or integral intelligence. Kohlberg named them according to the stages of moral development: preconventional, conventional, postconventional, and systemic.

Eventually they realized all of them were dealing with the same basic levels, even though they each gave them different names. That became the first full-fledged developmental model of consciousness.

Jean Gebser argued that each of these levels unfolded at a different time in human history. He gave names to these stages: archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral.

The earliest, which he called the archaic stage, was our basic transition from the great apes into Homo sapiens, which started around 400,000 years ago. That went to the so-called preoperational stage. This was a kind of magic belief, because the mind had not yet fully differentiated from that which it was aware of. As it started to invent symbols and words and an alphabet, it wrote, say, the word tree. That was called the signifier. The signified is what came to your mind when you read the signifier. Whenever you word the word tree, you form an image of a real tree in your mind. The actual referent of the signifier tree is the real tree. But because the mind had not yet fully differentiated the symbol tree from the real referent, or the real tree, it couldn’t distinguish between operating on the signifier and operating on the real tree. So if it changed the signifier, or the word tree, they felt that it magically changed the real tree. That was just one of the very earliest predifferentiated stages of development. It was called magic: if you change the signifier, you magically changed the referent, because they weren’t clearly differentiated.

Then, in the mythic stage, human beings learned to differentiate the signifier from the referent. This began to happen around 50,000 years ago. But they didn’t get rid of magic. They just themselves could no longer perform magic, because they had fully differentiated the signifier from the referent. Instead, they transferred the capacity for magic to a whole host of heavenly gods, goddesses, divine nature, spirits, and so on. If we prayed to those heavenly beings with a great deal of sincerity and belief, we could ask them to perform magic on our behalf. We would often pray for them to make crops grow. In today’s world, we’d pray to them to get a new car, or a girlfriend or boyfriend. If we prayed with a great deal of sincerity, they would magically get us the car, the new house, or the pay raise, or whatever we wanted.

Then, as we moved into the Common Era, around the time of Christ, we moved into concrete operational thinking, which Piaget defined as thought operating on the real world. An example of concrete operational thinking would be: I go in the garage, I get my bike, I pull it down from the wall, I get on it, I put my feet on the pedals, and I start pedaling. All of these are concrete operational behaviors because they’re me concretely operating on the world. My thought is operating on concrete items.

By the time we reached the Western Renaissance and Enlightenment, formal operational cognition started to emerge: we started using things like logic or mathematics, which is thought operating on thought, not just on the concrete world. Thought operating on thought gave us rationality, logic, and mathematics.

The next stage is one that I call green. Here it is noticed that rationality forms single, universal, holistic systems. There isn’t Protestant chemistry versus Hindu chemistry versus Buddhist chemistry: there’s just chemistry. It’s a single, unified science, and it applies to everywhere on the planet and to every human being on the planet. So it forms single, unified systems of thinking.

That’s what rationality does, and that’s what science does. So we have multiple sciences: chemistry, biology, physics, psychology, sociology. Each of those are separate individual items. But they apply to the single universal system. There’s only one basic chemistry, only one basic biology, only one basic psychology, and so on.

Then the next stage starts to notice: “Wait a minute. There are all sorts of different cultures around the world. There’s French culture, German culture, Chinese culture, American culture, and so on. And each of those have separate but important truths.” We call that multiculturalism. That was discovered roughly in the 1950s and ’60s.

We call that multiculturalism or pluralism, or more commonly postmodernism, because it came after modernism, which was formed by rationality and which recognized just a single universal system for each individual science. Multiculturalism recognized a multiplicity of separate truths, each referring to a different multicultural system.

But those green systems could not unify all those multicultural systems. So we just had a plethora of multicultural truths and no way to bring them together. Then came what Clare Graves called “the monumental leap to second tier.” That was when we began to create paradigms out of integrated systems of thinking, which would usually unite two or three separate, individual sciences into a single unit, for example uniting biology and chemistry into biochemistry.

This was often called crossparadigmatic: when they brought together these separate individual multicultural truths. That’s why Claire Grace referred to this stage as a “monumental leap,” because none of the previous stages could unite various paradigms into crossparadigmatic unities. That’s what the integral stages did. So we divide those into teal and turquoise stages, or paradigmatic and crossparadigmatic.

About 5‒7 percent of the population reach the teal or paradigmatic stages, which isn’t very much. But the percentage that reached turquoise—the cross-paradigmatic stage—was significantly less: 0.5 percent. So a very small percent of the population reached turquoise levels. But it was a real stage of development. It was available to everybody who kept growing up to the cross-paradigmatic stage.

That gives us a full history of prehension, which started from the lowest—quarks, protons, neutrons—and continued into atoms and molecules, into single-celled organisms into multicellular organisms, into fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and human beings. Human beings in turn developed through the archaic to magic to the mythic to the rational to pluralistic to integral stages of development. That gave us our entire spectrum of consciousness, of the stages of development that our consciousness went through. That’s the story of our historical unfolding of consciousness.

Smoley: Thank you. That’s very comprehensive. You would seem to be saying that these stages represent a cumulative growth.

Wilber: Right.

Smoley: The contrasting perspective, which is represented by a fair number of thinkers, including Gurdjieff and René Guénon, point to the fact that we may have lost as much as we have gained cognitively. For example, Bushmen could perceive things that Laurens van der Post couldn’t, as he writes in his books. Max Weber spoke of “the disenchantment of the world.” There’s a sense of loss, which may be a cognitive loss as well as an emotional loss. How would you respond to a claim like that?

Wilber: That is a fundamental confusion that all retro-romantic thinkers make. The confusion is very easy to understand, because in the first year or so of life, the brain-mind has not yet differentiated itself from the referent. So it comes up with all sorts of symbols, all sorts of words, but those words are not yet differentiated from the thing they represent. The word tree is not differentiated from a real tree, so it appears that there’s a unity in consciousness—and there is. But it’s a prerational unity. It’s not a fully developed mystical unity. If we use the Christian version of the great chain of being, it goes from matter to body—body meaning real, living organisms—to mind, to soul, to spirit.

When you reach the spirit stage and have a unity experience, it’s a unity with all five of those levels: matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit. But that’s not the type of unity that a newborn has. A newborn is one with the material environment, from which it has not yet differentiated itself. That’s not a very high type of unity: it’s not a unity with matter and body and mind and soul and spirit. But if you have a Zen Buddhist satori, a mystical experience from the highest level, it is a unity with all five of those stages of development. If you include models that give eight or even ten stages of development, it’s a unity with all of those stages.

When developmentalists were studying that first, earliest, or archaic stage, they naturally found that the infant could not differentiate itself from the material environment. Being sort of materialistic at heart, the developmentalists looked at that as an absolute unity with the entire universe. But it wasn’t. It was only one with the lowest level of the entire universe, which is a terrifyingly narrow and small type of unity: it’s not a full, complete unity. But the retro-romantics all confuse this ultimate unity with the infantile unity. I myself did this at the very first stage of my own understanding: I felt a unity with the entire world.

But as we grew up and developed into body, mind, soul, and spirit, we’re cutting off our unity with the entire universe. We arren’t: we’re actually growing from the matter to the body stage, and from the body to the mind stage.

At the mental stage the ego starts to emerge, and we get a separation of ego from body and matter. As soon as retro-romantics see the emergence of the ego, they say, “That’s a loss of our profound unity.” They all make that confusion, and that’s why I call it retro-romantic, because it’s a retrogression. It’s not a high level of unity: it doesn’t even get to soul or spirit.

We call them retro-romantics because they have a romantic vision that sees the earlier stage of unity with the material world as a unity with the entire universe. It’s nothing like that at all. It’s a unity with the lowest level of the entire universe.

If you just become one with the material level, you’ve clearly gone backwards from matter, body, mind, soul, or spirit, and you’re just identifying with material level. That’s obviously a regression. You’ve gone back down to the lowest level of the entire universe, which is simple matter. You’re not even at the level of body or mind or soul or spirit.

The people that make the kind of statements that you just summarized are all retro-romantic thinkers, because they all make that same mistake: they think, “I’m going to go back to the unity I had when I was an infant.” No, you’re not. That would be horrifying. If you actually regress back to the material level, you wouldn’t be one with body, mind, soul, or spirit. What kind of unity is that? That’s just a unity with the very lowest level of the material universe, which is nothing to be proud of.

Smoley: Thank you. That’s very enlightening. The model you just presented is one of increased unification and integration of consciousness. How do you relate this to the reality of the present-day world, where there’s an enormous sense of increasing fragmentation and isolation?

Wilber: As you move up this great chain of being, as you go from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, (or to use Jean Gebser’s six stages, archaic to magic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral), something can go wrong at each of those stages.

You can move from matter to body. When the body level starts to emerge and we begin to identify with our feelings, emotions, and separate ego, that is what Gebser called “magic.” Again, because we haven’t yet fully differentiated the mind from what it’s thinking about, we think that to change the word, or the signifier, is to change the actual referent, or what the word represents. That’s just not true. It happens in a magical cognition, a magical imagination, but that’s magic that’s not real.

Then we move from magic to the mental and develop a fully mental, rational stage of development. Something can go wrong at that stage. When that happens, we don’t transcend and include the previous stage, which is healthy development: all healthy development transcends and includes the previous stage. You can overdevelop mind, or you can repress the previous stages of development. You don’t integrate them: you don’t transcend and include them; you transcend and repress them.

When you do that, you split off the mind from the body and from its material elements, and when you split off the mind from body and matter, you are creating repression. You’re repressing the lower levels. You’re not integrating them. Because of that, almost everybody develops some form of body-mind dissociation. That’s where you split the mind off from the body and its material components. That’s not good. When that happens, we generally form various types of depression because we’re not in touch with our body and matter, or we form some type of split or dissociation. We don’t differentiate and integrate: we differentiate and repress. That repression is an uncomfortable feeling or dissociation: almost everybody has some degree of repression or dissociation or splitting. That’s why the mind-body problem is called the most difficult problem in Western philosophy: what is the relation of this mind and body, especially if I’m split off into just my mind, and I’m repressing my body?

Smoley: In your discussion you’ve alluded more than once to Clare Graves’s Spiral Dynamics, which posits these levels of consciousness in terms of colors. If I remember correctly, beige is the lowest. Red is the next. Up and up and up, and turquoise, as you point out, is at the top as the most integral kind of consciousness.

One thing that intrigued me about in Spiral Dynamics is the speculation of a level beyond turquoise, which they call coral.

I’m curious to think what you associate with this level of coral—where you think it will go beyond turquoise.

Wilber: We’ve already talked about a higher stage containing a bigger perspective. For me, the turquoise is the eighth major stage of development, and the ninth major stage of development is the psychic stage. It’s added a greater perspective. And that means you have a larger identity, because as development goes through these eight major stages, each stage adds a larger self identity.

You start out identified just with the material aspects of your being. Within the first year or so you add a second stage or a second-person perspective; when you do that, you identify with all of your emotions and your feelings, and so on. In the third stage, you add a third-person perspective. You expand from identifying with your self and your feelings and emotions to identifying with the mind. Matter, body, mind, expand to the full ego self. So you’ve gotten bigger again.

Then, as you move beyond the ego, you start to move to the trans-ego stages, including the green, or multicultural, integral stage, and then from there you move to the interval stages: the paradigmatic and the cross-paradigmatic. Each of those involves getting a bigger self, a self that’s more inclusive, that can identify with larger perspectives. And each stage does just that.

What goes beyond the eighth stage, or the turquoise stage, is the first trans-integral stage. This is the stage that Beck and Cowan call coral (although they’re not very clear about what coral is).

For me, the next biggest self you can have once you’re identified with the full range of mental capacities is when you go beyond your identity with the self to an identity with the earth, which is what I mean by the word psychic. That actually includes a oneness with the lower levels of the entire universe.

Mystical experiences, for example, begin by identifying with all of the universe. And if they get bigger, they go into the stage that’s beyond the turquoise: identification with universal consciousness. This is a very real mystical experience. It’s often called cosmic consciousness, because it’s an identification with the entire cosmos

That’s what I believe is the next stage beyond turquoise. And remember, only 0.5 percent of the population reach turquoise. A tenth of the percentage of people that identify with the previous stage identify with the next stage. So the percent that reaches beyond turquoise is even less than 0.5 percent. One tenth of 0.5 percent is not very much, so there aren’t a lot of people having that type of cosmic consciousness experience, but the ones that do are all identified as mystics, and they tend to think of themselves in mystical terms.

Smoley: I’d like to ask you about psychology. A lot of what you say has been connected with a movement called transpersonal psychology, and you know many if not all of the leading figures in that movement. There was a time when when this movement seemed to be burgeoning, say with the emergence of Maslow’s humanistic psychology in the sixties, into the nineties, when psychiatrists started listening to Prozac and stopped listening to anything else.

Wilber: Right.

Smoley: Where would you say the state of transpersonal psychology is now? Where do its insight stand in regard to mainstream psychology? Because they would seem a lot more on the fringe now than they may have done fifty years ago.

Wilber: It’s often referred to as fourth force: the first force being psychoanalysis, the second force being behaviorism, the third force being humanistic, existential psychology, and the fourth force being transpersonal. You can notice that each one of those is going higher on the scale of consciousness. By the time we get to the fourth force, or the transpersonal, the name gives it away. It’s whatever stage is beyond the personal stages. In other words, what they’re really talking about when they talk about transpersonal psychology is states of consciousness that include cosmic consciousness and higher.

That’s what transpersonal means: beyond the personal stages of development comes this transpersonal, or cosmic consciousness, stage. It’s now become fairly well recognized, although it’s still the smallest of the four forces. But it’s real. It is dealing with the smallest percentage of the population, the percentage that has reached cosmic consciousness. And remember, that’s a tenth of 0.5 percent. That’s not a tremendous number.

CAPTION, ALTITUDES OF DEVELOPMENT:

This diagram relates the levels of Spiral Dynamics, as discussed in Don Edward Beck and Christopher C. Cowan’s book Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Leadership, Dynamics, and Change, to Ken Wilber’s level of development. In this interview, Wilber uses his own color terms for the different levels.

VOLUME 113, NUMBER 4
CONTENTS

Inner Guru, Outer Guru, Secret Guru
Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

The Chakras and the Human Energy Fields
Shafica Karagulla and Dora van Gelder Kunz

The Mill and the Millpond: A Twenty-Year Conversation with J. Krishnamurti
Ravi Ravindra

Who Are the Masters? An Interview with Joy Mills
Richard Smoley

The Cant about "Masters": Koot Hoomi's Last Letter to Annie Besant

The Rainbow Body: How the Western Chakra System Came to Be
Kurt Leland 

H.P.Blavatsky: The Sphinx of the Nineteeth Century
Franz Hartmann

From the Editor's Desk

Viewpoint; A Nineteenth-Century State of Mind
Douglas Keene

VOLUME 114, NUMBER 1
CONTENTS

The Spectrum of Consciousness: An Interview with Ken Wilber
Richard Smoley

Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Aquarius
Ray Grasse

A Friend of the Mirror: AI as Guide and Mirror of the Self
Dominic Bucci

AI on Study, Meditation, and Service
Andrew Barker

Threads of Unity: Theosophy and the Science of Strings
Yajnavalka Banerjee

Geoffrey Hodson: Reminiscences
Nathaniel Altman

From the Editor's Desk

Members' Forum: Kurukshetra Now:
The Bhgavad Gita and the Battlte for the Human Spirit
Peggy Heubel

Viewpoint: Searching for Intelligent Life
Douglas Keene