Philosopher Ken Wilber's Keynote Address at the Integral European Conference (IEC) 2018
(The Original Title of
Wilber’s Lecture)
Is Religion Evolution’s
Ally or Enemy?
LINK (in the public domain): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z9vyJDME7w&t=2118s
Published: Oct 1, 2018 / Accessed: 2021-05-11
(The numbers in-between parentheses are timestamps. Parts in blue are my own [jkk] annotations to Wilber’s talk. When parts are italicized within Wilber’s talk, those are my own emphases. Special thanks to my research assistant Christine Atchison for help with the transcription of Wilber's talk.)
[jkk
annotation] Have you ever wondered why religion can produce both the
best things and the worst things in the world? I think the best way to answer
that is by explaining religion through what is called “the Integral Theory.” I’ve
found that this talk of philosopher Ken Wilber, the major proponent and exponent
of the Integral Theory, is one of the best and most succinct-yet-complete
presentations that could help us gain a good “big picture” of religion – its
lights and shadows, its tremendous potential as well as its darkest
dysfunctionalities. This talk of Wilber titled “Is Religion Evolution’s Ally or
Enemy,” gives us an excellent overview of an understanding of religion and
spirituality that could help humanity advance through the proper developmental
stages and grow into a more mature and more holistic state as individuals and
as groups, and also experience the highest states of bliss that religious
traditions envision.
Introductory Remarks on Religion
in the West
Hello everybody, my talk is titled
‘Religion: Evolution’s Ally or Enemy?’. So let me start by asking ‘what are we
going to do with this thing called Religion?’ Around two or three hundred years
ago the percentage of people in, for example, [Northern] Europe who considered
themselves ‘churched’, that is, serious and regular followers of a traditional
church (in this case the Catholic Church) was well over 90 %. Today the
percentage of people in Northern Europe who consider themselves ‘churched’ is
less than 11%. The number of people who are followers of any sort of
traditional religion has dropped dramatically—especially in the modern,
developed countries. In the pre-modern or developing countries the numbers of
religious believers are much higher and, as we’ll see, there’s a reason for
that. But, in general—and this is the central point—the more evolved a country
is, the less religious it is. And this is true for individuals as well; the
more evolved a person is, the less religious they’re likely to be. Why is that?
Are religion and evolution the opposite of each other so that the more you have
of one, the less you have of the other? Is religion an ally of evolution or its
enemy?
Defining Terms: Spiritual Intelligence and Spiritual Experience
First of all, we need to understand what we mean by the word religion. There are at least two very different meanings of that word. One meaning is called religious intelligence or spiritual intelligence. It’s how we think about spirit, how we think about what we believe is an ultimate reality or ultimate concern. It’s how we interpret or conceptualize or think about ultimate reality. The other meaning is not spiritual intelligence but direct spiritual experience or immediate religious experience. Human beings have both capacities—spiritual intelligence and spiritual experience.
[jkk annotation] I would avoid using the word “religion” altogether because it has negative connotations nowadays in many circles. We can use terms with a more positive resonance for people today, such as the Japanese word ikigai (生き甲斐) or “spirituality”. “Human beings are spiritual beings” might be a foundational principle. Why? Because a person is usually animated and motivated to engage with life by interior and exterior factors that are “greater than (but also inclusive of) the physical.” That is just another way to say “spiritual.” Hence, the spiritual dimension plays a foundational and crucial role in humans.
In certain instances, like listening to beautiful music, walking in nature, making love, having a peak experience or an altered state of consciousness, humans can have a direct spiritual experience. William James explored these direct spiritual experiences in his classic book The Varieties of Religious Experience. But even if we have a direct spiritual experience, we almost always start interpreting it, conceptualizing it, giving it some sort of meaning or using some sort of conceptual framework—however simple—to make sense of it. So, as soon as we have any direct or religious or spiritual experience, we use our spiritual intelligence to interpret it, conceptualize it, frame it. We have spiritual experience and we have spiritual intelligence. (4:15)
Sometimes people have not had any direct spiritual experience, but they have lots of ideas and thoughts about what spirit is or what they think spirit is like. Most people have some sort of idea of what an ultimate reality is like, or at least what the most important reality or ultimate concern is for themselves. In other words, they have some form of spiritual intelligence, however vague or crude, but they have no direct spiritual experience. Some of these people even have very advanced spiritual intelligence. They’ve read texts from all the world’s great religions; they know all sorts of theological theories and ideas. They’ve thought a great deal about spirit and ultimate realities They might even have tried to weave together all of the latest leading-edge versions of modern science into a ‘new paradigm’ and then claim that this new paradigm represents a mystical, interwoven unity of all reality—just like Zen, or Daoism, or Vedanta. And yet, even though they believe this theory they themselves have never actually had a genuine spiritual experience in their life. So when it comes to spiritual reality they have lots of knowledge by description (or spiritual intelligence), but no direct knowledge by acquaintance (or direct spiritual experience, or satori, or enlightenment).
On the other hand, others have had a great deal of spiritual experience or several of them, but they can’t articulate it well or show how it relates to all the other areas of life. They have much spiritual experience but not much spiritual intelligence. These two forms of religious engagement—spiritual intelligence and spiritual experience—are very different in their fundamental nature and recognizing that difference is truly important, as we’ll see. These two forms cannot be completely separated from each other but they are different in several important ways and it’s crucial to recognize that difference. Spiritual experience, in its highest form, is claimed by its adherents to be a direct and immediate experience of pure one-ness with an ultimate reality.
This experience itself has been known in almost every major culture throughout history and around the world and given names such as enlightenment, awakening, metamorphosis, Satori, Moksha, Fanaa—the great liberation. And this is said to result in states described as ultimate unity consciousness, divine oneness, pure unity, infinite wholeness, or the supreme identity. Supreme because it is said to be one with spirit and thus one with the entire universe. And this oneness is said to constitute a person’s real self or true self. For the moment, simply assuming that something like this ultimate, religious, experience exists, I refer to this overall process in any of its forms as ‘waking up’. ‘Waking up’ is the ultimate form of spiritual experience. (8:22).
Spiritual intelligence, on the other hand, is one of up to a dozen multiple intelligences that all human beings possess. That is, in addition to cognitive intelligence we have emotional intelligence, moral intelligence, aesthetic intelligence, linguistic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence and, yes, spiritual intelligence. These are not so much experiences as they are intelligences. That is, mental operations that address fundamental questions faced by humans. Emotional intelligence, for example, addresses the issue of ‘what are you (or I) feeling?’. Moral intelligence addresses the question ‘what is the right thing to do?’. And spiritual intelligence is the thinking process that humans engage whenever they think about some sort of ultimate reality or ultimate concern. A person might use their spiritual intelligence and decide that there really isn’t any spirit or ultimate reality—they’re atheistic. Or they might conclude that they just can’t decide that issue—they’re agnostic. Or, as I said, they might look at today’s leading-edge sciences and come up with a new paradigm about a fully interwoven and unified nature. In any of those cases, they’re using their spiritual intelligence because they’re thinking about ultimate realities.
Note Well: Spiritual Intelligence, according to Wilber, is one of several multiple intelligences that human beings possess.
Now, like all multiple intelligences, spiritual intelligence grows and develops through a well-known sequence of developmental stages. People aren’t born with any of their multiple intelligences operating at their highest and most mature levels. Like all things in nature, any multiple intelligence has to grow and develop through a series of stages. Each stage being more functional, more complex, and more mature. The same is definitely true of spiritual intelligence. So, what stages does spiritual intelligence grow through? What stages are there? (11:05).
[jkk annotation] To summarize：Religion―Spirituality consists of two main factors：(1) Spiritual Experience and (2) Spiritual Intelligence. Traditional religions know #1 well; they unfortunately are largely unaware of #2 and hence they cannot “get” why religion has become irrelevant to many people in the West today.
On Stages of Spiritual Intelligence – “Growing Up”
What stages do all people develop through their spiritual intelligence, even if they end up deciding they’re an atheist. Well, these stages in the various multiple intelligences have been given a huge number of different names by the different researchers who first studied them. Some names are more cognitive, like (Jean) Piaget; some are more moral, like (Lawrence) Colberg; some are more motivational, like (Abraham) Maslow. James Fowler gave perhaps the most specific and appropriate names to the stages that spiritual intelligence itself goes through since he was the first researcher to fully discover and describe around six major stages involved in spiritual intelligence. And I use his terms for technical presentations, but here I’m going to use a variation on the names of worldview development first given by Jean Gebser simply because they’re simpler.
[jkk annotation] Putting the spotlight on “spiritual intelligence” … Humans have the innate trait of searching for and constructing meaning. Sometimes it takes the form of systematizing reality BEYOND what we can perceive with our natural senses (beyond what conventional science can prove). That’s why it’s called SPIRITUAL intelligence. We project our hopes onto and imagine a reality that is “metaphysical” in the sense of “beyond physical.”
So, one version of the major stages that spiritual intelligence grows and develops through are: [1] the archaic stage to the [2] magic stage to the [3] mythic stage, the [4] rational stage, the [5] pluralistic or relativistic stage and the [6] integral stages. With higher stages coming in the future. Any specific religious system anywhere will be primarily at one of those major stages of spiritual intelligence. This overall sequence of development I call (not waking up but) growing up and every multiple intelligence goes through a similar set of stages or levels in its own development or its own growing up.
But the very stages of growing up are quite difficult to spot and in fact they weren’t really discovered until only around 100 years ago. This was much too recent to be included in any of the world’s great religions since almost all of those are over 1000 years old. So many of the world’s religions have, or at least had at some point, a direct access to waking up. Usually, the founders of the religion had a profound waking up and they often based their religion on that waking up experience. However, although all of them were also at a specific stage of growing up in their own spiritual intelligence not one of them knew about the stages of growing up or knew what stage they themselves were at. These stages had not been discovered yet and were literally unknown around the world just as how to build a Jeep or perform a kidney transplant were totally unknown. So, the great religions around the world usually had waking up but not one of them was aware of growing up—and this was a disaster as we’ll see. (14:49).
The Problem of Religion in the
West: No ‘Waking Up’ - Very Limited ‘Growing Up’
So, having laid out these basics we can now
state the two major problems with Western religion in today’s world. 1)
Christianity started with a great deal of emphasis on waking up. When Saint
Paul said ‘let this consciousness be in you, which was in Jesus Christ, that we
all may be one’ …
This is a combination of Phil. 2:5 and
John 17:21
the
early Christians usually had that direct spiritual experience of oneness. They
called this waking up experience metamorphosis or profound
transformation
The better term is “metanoia” which is
also in the gospels.
and that profound spiritual experience is what defined most of early Christianity.
But by the third and fourth centuries they had abandoned most forms of waking up and actually started considering waking up itself to be fairly dangerous and certainly not recommended. And this was largely because these mystical experiences of unity could not be controlled by the church and thus they were increasingly rejected. So that’s the first problem with today’s Western religion—it mostly lacks any real waking up.
The second problem is that, although Christianity itself was mostly at the mythic stage of its own development when it began to become popular (that is, it was at the mythic stage of the overall sequence from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral), but it had no understanding of these growing up stages and thus it could not see that its own stage—the mythic stage—was a relatively low stage or low level of growing up and that there were actually higher developmental stages of its own religion that were possible—that is higher stages of its own spiritual intelligence.
Fowler actually called this mythic stages the “mythic-literal stage” because the myths—and the entire Bible itself—were taken to be absolutely and literally true. Moses really did part the Red Sea, Lot’s wife really was turned into a pillar of salt, Jesus really was born of a biological virgin, Noah really did put two of all animals into an arc and so on. The Church, for the most part, became fixated to this mythic literal stage of spiritual intelligence development. It made myths dogmatic and demanded that people believe them literally if they wanted any salvation at all. This would have been okay if, when the higher stages of modern rationality and then post-modern pluralism and then systemic integralism emerged, the church also allowed its spiritual intelligence to evolve to those higher stages as well. But for the most part it did not. It had made the mythic level dogmatic: if you didn’t believe the myths literally you’d burn in hell forever.
[jkk annotation] A note on the so-called “ethnocentric-mythic-literal” stage. Religious people whose faith is fundamentally located in the ethnocentric-mythic-literal stage imagine that there were special persons, events, or time periods in the world’s history when fantastical, mythic elements (like the miracles you found recounted for example in the Bible) were “more frequent” (if we may put it that way). In short, they believe that there were certain special eras (technically, “dispensations”) in history when God, as it were, was more willing to suspend the laws of nature in order to intervene more directly in this world through miraculous deeds for the purpose of proving by miracles the truth about a special person (for example, that Jesus was really divine) or a special thing (for example, to prove that God was really behind the sacred story of Israel in Old Testament times). Well, the more mature and way to deal with this is to insist that the world and its reality that we confront and experience now is roughly the world and reality that people in any historical period confronted and experienced. There are no “special dispensations.” Mythical stories that emphasize fantastical and miraculous events were “constructed” after historical events in order to give them a “special status” in a certain community.
Thus, when rational science emerged at the next major stage with the Western Enlightenment, the Church didn’t also adopt a rational, spiritual intelligence. It dug its heels in at the mythic stage and so an idiotic battle of religion versus science sprang into existence and this battle has remained a huge problem ever since. Instead of seeing that there are religious and scientific approaches at every level of development—religion isn’t inherently stuck at mythic and science at rational—there is magic science and religion, mythic science and religion, rational science and religion, pluralistic science and religion, and integral science and religion and so on. (19:45).
(I
think this following paragraph is crucially important, hence, it’s written in
red)
So, here’s the point. As cultural evolution continued from mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to beginning integral, religion in the West—instead of following that evolving trend, as did all the other human disciplines and multiple intelligences—instead, dug its dogmatic heels into the mythic stage and stayed stuck at that level. Thus, the more that people themselves continued to evolve upwards in culture (into rational and pluralistic and integral) the more and more that people increasingly saw typical religion as childish and completely unbelievable, which in this case it definitely was. And thus, starting at this point, the more evolved a person was the less religious they were. And religion was no longer an ally of evolution; it became an enemy of evolution.
And thus, the two major problems with today’s religion in the West is that it has virtually no waking up in spiritual experience and it only has very low levels of growing up in spiritual intelligence. In short; no waking up, very low growing up. And that is exactly why less than 11% of Northern Europeans want anything to do with that belief system. Who can blame them? And this is precisely why, in Western societies, the more evolved a person is the less religious they tend to be.
Religion is not an ally of evolution—it is a preventer of evolution. Something is obviously very, very wrong with this arrangement. But a religion with no waking up and very low growing up silently crept into Western culture at large and these massive deficits have directly contributed to and helped to drive the widespread culture wars that today are indeed threatening the existence of Europe and Western Culture in general. (22:30).
[jkk annotation] The fundamental problem of institutionalized Christianity, the West’s historically dominant religion, is that it became too confident in itself (the faults of pride and hubris) as being the embodied presence of the Divinity itself on earth. It did (and still does) this by maintaining ideas such as papal infallibility, biblical inerrancy, and similar notions that purport to “guarantee” the institution’s supremacy in matters of faith and morals over other groups. This attitude—I am strongly convinced—is tantamount to idolatry – It pretends to know the very mind of God and that is simply an impossible thing because God, if there be such a being, is, in the final analysis, a great unfathomable MYSTERY.
The Impact of the Western
Enlightenment on Modern Western Conceptions of Religion
With the Western Enlightenment, and the emergence of the rational level of growing up on a fairly widespread scale, the death of God was loudly announced—which actually meant that there had occurred the death of the mythic God (the God, or the spiritual intelligence of the mythic level). Spiritual intelligence itself, or the possibilities of spiritual intelligence, like all the other multiple intelligences actually continued to evolve. But [conventional Western] religion ([jkk] in effect, this means the different Christian churches in the West), by remaining fixated at the mythic stage, was left behind as cultural evolution continued its inexorable unfolding.
The leading edge of culture had evolved from mythic-traditional to modern-rational and it then unfolded from modern-rational to post-modern-pluralistic relativism starting in the 1960s and it now stands on the brink of a major revolution from post-modern-pluralistic relativism to a genuine integral age, but we’ll come back to that later.
This new post-modern era was strongly announced by the student riots in Paris, May 1968 and the leading edge of Western culture remained faithful to the attitude of these post-modern student rioters. It became a common, cultural belief in today’s post-modern era that Western culture is a disaster for the entire world. That Western culture is the source of all oppression, all victimization, all marginalization, all racism and all sexism. All of the world’s serious problems will be solved when Western culture is finally destroyed. And what is required instead—this stage announced—is a multiculturalism that values equally each and every culture in the world—which is a belief that oddly overlooks the fact that the belief in multiculturalism itself is found only in Western culture. No other culture anywhere in the world believes in multiculturalism except post-modern Western Culture.
But this multicultural belief is now taught
at virtually every major Western university in existence. One slight exception
is that Eastern European cultures—Poland and Hungary, for instance—still tend
to almost fully embrace the depth and value of Western Culture. Whereas,
Western Europe—from Germany, to France, to Sweden, to Britain—largely embrace
the post-modern deconstruction of the West. And they are therefore thoroughly
drenched in a massive guilt shared with elites in America, and this is a guilt
driven exactly by this belief that Western culture is the source of all
oppression in the world (26:15).
On Oppression and the West
Of course, what actually introduced almost all oppression—wherever it appears anywhere in the world—is the mythic, ethnocentric, absolutistic stage of human development (or, the amber stage of cultural growing up). Wherever that stage emerged anywhere in the world—in China, in the Islamic empire of the Middle Ages, in various African tribes—it was marked by a violent conquest and oppression of any other culture than its own. The Muslim slave trade was enormous, dwarfing that of the European, and it was only where the world-centric rational stage emerged from the ethnocentric mythic stage that oppression itself was actually opposed, and usually overcome in most forms. Thus, it was only the modern, rational, Western culture, that finally put an end to slavery.
[jkk annotation] The paragraph above is really worth noting well. It is wrong to unilaterally condemn religion as promoting ignorance and continuing oppression (as Marx seemed to imply). It is a particular stage/phase of religion—the mythic-ethnocentric stage that is absolutized as the truth and condemns all other positions as false and wrong—THAT kind of religion is the source of oppression. But we know that religiosity can develop to higher, more mature levels and, when it does, it can be the source of true human flourishing.
In a one-hundred-year period from around 1770—1870 slavery was outlawed in every modern, rational, industrial, Western nation on the planet. The first time anything like that appeared anywhere in history. Even the original indigenous tribes had slavery. The American Indians took their slaves with them on the trail of tears. And liberational movements like feminism arose only in modern, Western, culture. Again, Western culture was the only major source of these movements like abolition and feminism anywhere on the planet. We in the West would do well to remember this while we go about tearing down our culture faster than you can say deconstruction.
It was the West, which first evolved to the pluralistic, relativism of the post-modern, green stage of growing up, that actually introduced all of the values of multiculturalism—which include inclusivity, diversity, and non-marginalization. These are deeply Western products appearing nowhere else on the planet—all of which the post-modernists completely overlooked as they continue to trash all things Western. Of course, we can and should be critical of today’s culture but only from the next higher stage of cultural evolution itself—that is the integral or systemic, holistic stage—and not by celebrating an extremist form of the post-modern relativistic stage that’s caught in self-contradiction everywhere it turns.
As we just saw, the post-modern, pluralistic values of inclusivity and diversity and multiculturalism only emerged at the pluralistic stage of development. A person has to have developed from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic before they will even find these post-modern values attractive at all. And yet the post-modernists completely attack and deny any form of hierarchy. They attack not only dominator hierarchies, which are indeed evil, but they also attack their growth hierarchies (or evolutionary hierarchies) that involve the very process of growing up that produces the post-modern values in the first place. But all of that is deconstruction and this leaves it followers—that is it leaves today’s Western culture—completely stuck without any authentic value system at all (31:04).
The Perils of Post-Modernism: Nihilism
and Narcissism
By default, nihilism and narcissism, that postmodern tag team from hell, step into the void and then all we have left is The Strange Death of Europe—as Douglas Murray’s book title puts it. The Strange Death of Europe. Just how serious the situation is becomes obvious when you realize that. Precisely when the cultural leading edge of postmodernism has totally failed to provide any real meaning or significance or unity or solidarity for the people of Europe and the West in general, as citizens anxiously look around for something to fill that meaning void, they can no longer count on traditional religion to help them out. Postmodernism destroys meaning and religion can no longer replace it. Virtually all of the evolved people in the West have already abandoned traditional religion anyway, as we’ve seen.
They abandon traditional, mythic, literal religion and embrace postmodernism multiculturalism only to realize that the extreme emphasis on multiculturalism ends up doing nothing but pushing people to regress to massive tribalism, to a jagged identity politics. With identity politics you are only allowed to identify, not with anything you have in common with somebody else, but only with your own isolated tribe. You’re allowed to identify with this race, or that race; this sex or that sex; this skin colour or that skin colour; this ethnic group or that ethnic group—but never what you all share or have in common. Thus, postmodern multiculturalism as an actual, social, organizing principal simply does not work.
[jkk annotation] I have some reservations with what Wilber says in the paragraph above. I think he just wasn’t able to elaborate his points completely. “Identity politics” (especially the kind practiced by heretofore oppressed and marginalized groups) is not necessarily negative. I think it is actually necessary in order to strategically protest against the dominance of certain groups in society. When white people say, “we’re all equal”, that is actually not true here in the West because if you’re white, you’ll always have a racial advantage in this society than other people who are non-whites. Hence, it is important to emphasize identity politics on the part of non-dominant groups as a strategy to bring their oppression to the awareness of more people and, thus, build a more just and fair society.
Multiculturalism is, in essence, a very good thing and we want to embrace it. But for it to actually work, it must rest on a deeper, underlying principle that actually unites the many different tribes and effectively holds them together. The whole point of an organizing principle is that everybody it organizes has to find value in it. And yet, multiculturalism—as defined by postmodern identity politics—is nothing but a multi-tribal celebration. It values only how each tribe differs from the others, not what they all share. Thus, especially with the migration crisis in Europe, multiculturalism collapsed with the rest of post-modernism into a massive nihilism and narcissism resulting in nothing but a major, cultural fragmentation that is accelerating right now as we speak. Western culture today is increasingly headed towards this widespread fragmentation driven by the lack of any universally believable values and instead drowning in post-modern relativism with its nihilism and narcissism. And the Strange Death of Europe is indeed upon us. (35:28).
What Can be Done?
So what exactly are we to do? At least two things need to be addressed and they relate directly to the two major deficits in our religious systems. Religion or spirituality at any level of development is what creates meaning or significance for the person.
[jkk annotation] To make it clearer, I would rephrase that to: <religion or spirituality at any level of development is the MAIN FACTOR that is responsible for creating meaning or significance for a particular human person or a particular human group>. In short, we can rename religion-spirituality to: “the human quest for meaning” How is this quest conducted? One, by going deeper into our inner selves to discover one’s authentic and deepest nature. And, two, also by pursuing something bigger than oneself, something that transcends oneself. This quest for meaning often takes the form of a metanarrative with a central element that is imagined to be the ground and source of everything. In the West, this central element has been frequently named as “God.”
When Star Trek fans say logic is Spock’s religion that’s what they mean—that logic is what gives Spock’s life meaning. Likewise, using the term in this way, we would say that secular humanism became the religion of many people during The Enlightenment. In other words, using religion in this sense, religion is the fundamental meaning aspect of existence that is created by the spiritual intelligence found at each stage of growing up. There is magic religion (like Voodoo and Santiari), there is mythic religion (like Christian or Islamic fundamentalism), there is rational religion (like scientific materialism, which is believed in like a religion, or the new paradigm, which is based on scientific materialism), there is pluralistic religion (for example, a zealous belief in multiculturalism or things like social or green Buddhism), and there is integral religion—which is aware of each of those levels of religion and integrates all of them in the bigger picture, which also includes science.
[ESPECIALLY
IMPORTANT!]
So, what we have
overall is that today’s West is in a huge culture war between the values of the
old religion—coming from the amber, mythic level—versus reductionistic,
scientific materialism—coming from orange, rational, modern level—versus a
rampant relativism—coming from the green, pluralistic, post-modern level. These
are the contours of today’s Western culture. We have a mythic religion, or a
scientific materialism, or a post-modern relativism. These are all the average
citizen has for creating any sort of meaning or significance in their lives and
it is precisely because not one of those value systems is believable anymore
that we have the strange death of Europe at our doorstep. (38:20).
It’s Time to Move into the
Integral Stage
Literally, the only way out of this mess is through our continuing evolution from the relativistic stage to the integral stage of growing up. Right now, about 25% of Western culture is at the pluralistic, relativistic stage. But, that is the highest stage of most educated individuals and thus most of sophisticated culture in today’s West comes from this stage of pluralistic relativism with its rampant nihilism and narcism. Only around 5% of the population is at any of the integral stages of development. But there is some good news in all of this. History suggests that when around 10% of the population reaches the leading edge of evolution then there’s a type of tipping point and the values of the leading edge tend to permeate or seethe to the culture at large. So, we can expect to see a major and profound cultural revolution when just 10% of the population reaches the first integral stage, which we call teal (colour-coding). One of the major things that an integral stage of growing up is capable of doing is integrating all of the previous stages, which is why many developmentalists call this stage integrated or holistic or systemic or integral and so on. The more that integral values begin to permeate the culture, the less attraction there will be for mythic religion, scientific materialism, or post-modern relativism. This means that Western culture will have an actual centre of self-organization that pulls society together once again and helps integrate it instead of pulling it apart in aggressive culture wars and rampant tribalism and fragmenting identity politics.
Because culture is upstream from politics, to continue these culture wars will be to continue numerous political wars. And, in many cases around the world, this will mean actual, physical wars as well—particularly among those cultures that are just coming up and passing through the tribal, magic stages of development as well as those cultures in their mythic, ethnocentric stages of development, where they almost always have some form of mythic, literal fundamentalist religion. But once the world reaches the 10% tipping point at an integral stage of growing up then the first stage of an authentic, global civilization will start to emerge—which will include a relatively effective world federation of one sort or another.
And the second, major step will be taken when over 25% of the population reaches an integral stage. This will be a large enough group of people to start to have a world-wide effect similar to what the post-modern stage now has in the world at large. At this point, there will be virtually no aspect of human existence that does not have some sort of integral version available and this will change history in a way more profound than anything we have yet seen anywhere in the world. And one thing that will change fundamentally is that the core of spirituality will be realized to be not simply a mental or intellectual belief system, whether offered by mythic dogma or offered by some sort of new paradigm based on materialistic science, but rather consists of practices that help people to genuinely wake up . . . to awaken to their own timeless and eternal, spaceless and infinite, ground of being. (42:57).
The Importance of Providing Possibilities to
“Wake Up”
The great traditions have always distinguished from what they call relative truth and ultimate truth. Relative truth is truths offered by, for example, the natural sciences—physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and so on. Any truth that relates to the manifest, finite universe, was considered a relative truth. These types of truths always need to be included in any comprehensive approach to reality. But then there’s also ultimate truth; and this refers not to any relative thing or event or systems, or groups of those relative things, but to the timeless and eternal ground of all of them. Only through effective spiritual practices of waking up can ultimate truth be realized. And this is crucial aspect of spirituality that the West so desperately needs. How could a culture exist that had access only to relative truth and no access to ultimate truth? How could its members find any sort of ultimate meaning or significance in their lives? And the answer is, it couldn’t and they can’t. This lack of access to ultimate truth is perhaps the greatest cultural deficit that the West faces.
The introduction of effective means of
waking up is the one item that will make religion or spirituality attractive to
educated and evolved people, but only if this waking up is
experienced and interpreted from an integral level of growing up. And
if this is introduced, we can expect to see the percentage of the population
that’s drawn to such an integral spirituality start to increase from its
present 11% to 20%, or 30%, or higher. What’s even more significant is that the
influence that this integrally-awakened population will start to have on the
culture at large will be staggering. Most significantly, religion would return
to being the very leading edge of evolution itself and evolution’s greatest
ally. The leading edge of culture would be the brightest light from both waking
up and growing up as well including both showing up and cleaning up—an idea for
another time. But the point here is that with truly integral spirituality,
evolution would have found the greatest ally its ever seen. This would be a
real heaven on earth and replace the hell on earth that too many humans are
enduring now. (46:15).
The Promise and Benefits of the Integral Theory
Integral meta-theory addresses all of these issues, including ways to both increase spiritual intelligence to ever higher levels of growing up and ways to ground all of it in genuine realization of waking up. It does many other things as well, of course, but it definitely addresses this dual deficit of Western religion that has damned our culture for ages. As we move into the coming future, there will be major and profound transformations in many areas—technological, economic, educational, cultural. Integral versions of each of those will be a mark of the future.
But these two major changes in both growing
up and waking up will especially define the religion of tomorrow. And, if not,
then religion as a distinct area of human activity will simply cease to exist
and humankind on the whole will lose all access to ultimate truth—which would
be a disaster of infinite proportions. Integral meta-theory is now addressing
each of these major areas along with many, many other items so I’d like to
welcome all of you to this year’s Integral European Conference. And if you take
one point away from this talk, please take this point: If we don’t actually end
up seeing “the strange death of Europe,” it will be because of the work that
all of you here are doing. So, I’d like to thank each and every one of you and
wish you all the very, very best. Thank you, this is Ken.
***
[jkk annotation]
My dominant
thoughts as I reflect on Wilber’s points in this talk:
·
[Integral Theory and
How It Can Show Religion’s Promise] | Wilber outlines a theory
of religion-spirituality based on the Integral Theory (IT). After years of studying the IT, I’m convinced
that it has the potential to show how religion is something that is helpful for
human beings today to find greater wholeness and to attain the genuine bliss (the
different waking up experiences) that religious traditions at their finest have
provided to humans throughout history.
·
[The Unenlightened
State of Most Religious Institutions] | However, conventional
religion in the West (by that I mean: the mainline religious institutions) are
in a serious crisis. They have been, by and large, dismissed by people as
irrelevant because the centre of gravity of many religious institutions remains
at a lower stage of spiritual intelligence/development, namely, the mythic-ethnocentric-literal
stage that is absolutized within these institutions as “the absolute TRUTH” and
presented as such to their (poor!) members. But the central claims and priorities
of religious institutions are no longer considered important by many in our
societies because they do not provide the sustenance that people in higher
stages of spiritual intelligence need, nor do they provide ways and
techniques to experience a genuine “Waking Up.” Therefore, although the religions
continue to insist that they and they alone have the absolute TRUTH and they,
and they alone can provide genuine SALVATION, when seen from the Integral
Theory, they are just unfortunately stuck in a lower level of spiritual
intelligence (I repeat: the ethnocentric-literal-mythical level). That developmental
level might have answered most people’s needs in the West during the Middle
Ages (and still continue to answer people’s needs today where that particular developmental
level dominates in the given society) but NOT SO here in the West where the
centre of gravity of most people is found already in a higher stage.
·
[Why People Don’t Go
to Church Anymore] | This is why most conventional religions (in
effect, most Christian churches in the West) today seem to be outdated,
backward, reactionary, too conservative, too narrow-minded to many (maybe most)
people in the West. This is why people don’t go to church anymore. Thus, I have
to conclude that many religious institutions just "don’t get it." Because of
this, they are not helpful anymore for integral human flourishing. As long as the
centre of gravity of a religious institution remains at a lower ‘ethnocentric-mythic-literal’
stage, the kind of religion that they will teach functions more as an IMPEDIMENT to integral human flourishing because, in
effect, they impede growth to higher, more mature stages.
· [My Burning Questions - How to Move Religious Believers to Higher Stages?] | If many (most?) religious institutions or churches do not know how to help their adherents move to higher stages of spiritual intelligence, is it even worth staying in them? How does one enable religious believers to move to a higher stage of spiritual intelligence? Many churches will consider 'moving to a higher stage of spiritual intelligence' a betrayal of the religious tradition itself. In fact, it is merely moving on from a lower stage of spiritual intelligence in which the church is stuck. In effect, moving to a higher stage will usually mean leaving the religious institution which is stuck in a lower stage and can no longer provide true spiritual support. It is like well-intentioned parents who do not want their children to ever leave home and become more mature as self-supporting adults. But the question remains: How does one concretely enable religious believers to move to higher stages of spiritual intelligence? In different places, Wilber and his collaborators say that engaging in spiritual practices will surely enable people to advance to higher stages of spiritual growth. One good summary of such practices has been done by Roger Walsh. See this LINK. I will reflect more on this question in another essay.
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