Integral Theory, Awakening, and Society || Ken Wilber

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widely translated academic writers in America. In age seventy four, he is still very much active as a philosopher, author and teacher, with all of his major publications still in print. In this episode, I talked to Ken Wilbur about his integral theory. Instead of trying to tackle it all in its complexity, Ken hones in on the application of his theory to intelligence, consciousness, and transcendence. He believes that development in these areas follows a predictable path, such as in

the case of enlightenment. Borrowing from Zen Buddhism, Ken talks about what it's like to awaken to the truth of reality. We also touch on the topics of psychological research, diversity, artificial intelligence, social media, and of course we talked about Abraham Maslow. So, without further ado, I bring you Ken Wilbur. Hey, Ken Wilbur. It is such an honor to chat with you today. It's been a long time coming.

multiple intelligences, some none are, but they're all important. I mean, we have not only a cognitive intelligence, we have an emotional intelligence, a moral intelligence, an esthetic intelligence, an interpersonal intelligence, a spiritual intelligence, and so on. And for each of those intelligences, we're going through a given number of around

eight or so stages of development. And that's a very important piece of information because not only can you identify different multiple intelligences that you have, you can recognize that each of them will be coming from essentially the same level of development, although they go through it at different

speeds and at different times and so on. But that's an piece of information to know and understand, and it's one of the favorite aspects that I have for integral theory, so I appreciate that there also we have different states of consciousness. Commonly they're waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and then one called turia, which is a transcendental self awareness. It's

your awareness of your inpendent individual self right now. There's a huge witness this witnessing yourself, and so when you look with them and see yourself, you're in touch with a witness experience. And that witness is actually your true self or or your real self or your big self, and that witness is also one with everything you're witnessing right now, which is called the state of turial tita,

which basically means beyond turia or beyond identifying. With this witness, you can notice that everything that you're aware of right now is actually existing, coming from a state that Douglas Harding called our handless condition. And what headless means is if you look, you can see every part of your body except your head, and you can't see your head. You're headless. What you see when you look out of your two eyes is you can see two sort of

fleshy blobs on each side of your awareness. But then there's a whole world of objects. This seems to be arising out there, but they're not really arising out there. They're arising right one with your own awareness, So they're shitting right where you thought your had was. Is an objective world arising out there, but it's not arising out there. It's a rising right here, right where I thought my

head used to be. So I really am headless except one with everything that's arising in my headless space.

intelligence or even esthetic intelligence. Although there are specific disciplines for each of those, and of course, if we sign up to one of those classes, will get a fair amount of attention paid to that intelligence. It might be our moral intelligence, or our esthetic intelligence, or even our emotional intelligence. And what was your second question. I didn't understand it when you first said it.

order than others. And I heard in one of your talks you said that unfortunately, the more lower order ones are the most prevalent ones, and the more higher ones or the least prevalent. Let's even go zoom and further on spiritual intelligence for a second. Tell me some of the ones you think are some higher than others.

of growing up or development in general. So it'll go from archaic stage to pre operational stage, concrete, operational, the formal, operational, to integral stages of development, and each of those, of course have a different worldview, a different view of the world, and when it comes to the line of spiritual intelligence as it goes through those stages, they're often referred to in teen geptsu's terms as archaic stage, magic stage, mythic stage,

rational stage, and an integral stage, and those are each very real components. There's a spiritual worldview from each one of those levels, and it does include an understanding of the innerwoven nature of all reality and the oneness of all reality, and you can directly experience that oneness in a state of consciousness, not just a structure stage of consciousness.

So US structure stages use something like pha's cognitive stage, and so they are pre operational, concrete, operational, formal, operational, and the states of spiritual awareness. At the magic stage, you're simply if you have a spiritual experience of magical then you become one with the magical world. What you tend to believe is that this oneness with everything that you're aware of is indeed has a magical quality to it.

You feel that you're one with something that's arising, because your subject of awareness is one with the mental world you that's arising, and so to change objective component of the worldview is actually change your subjective awareness of it

as well. And that's what magic means basically. So if I change my worldview of an object and it goes from magical oneness to a mythic oneness, in the world that's arising does appear to be mythic in nature, and so that might be an actual mythic story or fairy tale or some Greek mythology or something along those lines. And then we have a rational stage of development, and that's a third person awareness. Magic is always first or

second person, and mythic is usually second person. And then as we move into formal operational we move into mathematical capacities and a definite third person awareness. So a ham or her or day or them or it or it's and that's becomes a very real reality. And if we change our third person representation, then will change the way we relate to those third person objects, to he or

him or they or them. Even if I refer to you as he or him or part of us or a part of them relationship, then that is different than if I talk to you by using your first person name or if I refer to you as a second person. So I'll say, oh, that squad cast is being done by him, and not use your name or not refer to you.

fairly good system if you look at integral psychology. I include charts in the back of that book that refer to over a hundred developmental psychologists, and I have charts of all of the stages of development they've given, and almost all of the structures, the actual ones that have stages that are real structures that can usually be stated as a first person or a second person or a

third person structure that they're referring to. Almost all of those go through the same basic levels of development, and that inclate its Maslows. So you go from physiological to safety, two mythic realities, and then self actualization and ultimately a

self transcendence and then an ultimate unifying stage. And I think those are all fairly real stages, and they do correspond to these major stages that all one hundred of these developmental models accurately reflect, but from a different perspective and a different person perspective of development and so on. But those are all very real and very important aspects of our own being. And I've really appreciated that part of the integral framework, the developmental component, and I've gotten

a lot of those. I've gotten almost all of those structure stages from various modern day developmental psychologists, and that includes a Manslow. So here's an important and because his model is so well known, he was a fairly important influence on me.

argue that we target multiple needs simultaneously. That it's not Life's not like a video game where you have to reach a certain level before you're allowed to get unlock the next level. I wanted to have a discussion with you about if you see any limitations to stage theories of development, because I've been a little critical of stage theories. I have like the sailboat model, where I like to think about it as an integrated harmony of pieces as

opposed to stages. I actually think that a integrated sailboat model is more in wine with integral theory than stage theories. So I'm actually surprised that you embrace stage theories. I'd love to hear some of your thoughts.

So I actually just wondering if you see some limitations to stage theories, because I've been a little bit critical that that's the way, that's how we should think about self actualization as stages.

having a second person and a first person. And so that doesn't mean that all the developmental sequences have to go through those stages, but to the extent that they do, to the extent that you actually spot a third person stage of mathematical development, there has to be a second person that's part of that third person, And of course there has to be a first person that's aware of the second person and the third person, and those are They of course can occur simultaneously, but we have to

have a first person before we have a second person, and we have to have a second person before we have the third person.

important aspect as well. That doesn't mean that we have to completely do all of one stage of mathematics before we can be aware of another stage, And once they're sort of all flowing, you can be aware of all of them simultaneous if you want to be. So that's a major issue. But the ways that like, you're not going to be aware of what a third person consciousness is, what it feels like if you don't have a first

person and you generally need a second person. That's an understanding that there is not only an I, there's a you, there's a val yeah, and then not only that, but we can have a hymn or her or they or them, and so those are fairly important and particularly I mean that's the way grammar is outlined, and the different forms of I, thou and him her are unfolded and outlined,

and they're fairly significant. So that's just part of an overall integral approach is when can include all of those first, second, and third persons stages of development in every multiple intelligence that we have. And that's usually it comes as a bit of a surprise to most people to learn that

they do have available general stages of development. And they started out as a first person kid, just aware of their own awareness, and then they became aware of their mother, their father, siblings, or some second person that they were directly talking to, and a stream of exchange where they would take the other person's perspective and then they would go back to their own perspective and so on, and then they would understand that there's a third person perspective

that I don't have to be talking to you in order for you to exist, because you can just be that person over there, that third person him or her,

it or they or them. But when people realize that they have first person like Maswa's stages of development is one example, or Jane Levenger's or Robert Keith, they're often surprised to find that those stages have been named and that they can recognize them if they look within generally speaking, so that becomes very interesting as a novel experience for most people if they read ge Levenger's Stages of Ego Development, for example, and they'll see it going from very interior, infantile,

just first person stages of development to a full U development to they or them development. They're interested to find that they have those stages in themselves that are arising. And I think it's a very interesting component of integral overall. And so I spend a fair amount of time when I talk about the magic stage, or the mythic stage, or the rational stage, the formal operational stage, or the integrative stage of development. Yeah, and a lot of people are very interested in finding that out.

different forms of transcendence. There's vertical and horizontal forms. I've been trying to emphasize in my own research horizontal like what Masow called synergy, which is a concept he took from you know, the anthropologist I believe Ruth benedict the idea of synergy that what's automatically good for me is

good for me is automatically good for the world. So there's like it's a huge integration between self and world as opposed to a vertical form of transcendence where you can fall prey to I think spiritual narcissism and this what's psychologists called the I'm enlightened and you're not effect you know, where you take some sort of meditation retreat and you think that you're more enlightened than everyone else

and you're better than everyone else, you know. So I just want to get your thoughts on vertical verse horizontal transcendence.

of a particular stage. Like Levinger called her highest stage the integral or integrated stage of development, and this came right after an autonomous stage, which came after a formal, operational or authentic stage, and that came after a conformist stage. But when you're at a conformist stage, you don't know you're at a conformist stage. So you're not going to feel that much greater when you go post conventional. So you have to have some sense that you're moving through

these stages, and then you don't generally feel superior. That's not the nature of the experience that most people have at different stages of development. It's not, oh, two thirds of the way up, I'm better than two thirds of those people out there are. That just doesn't cross your mind. It doesn't come up as an experiential reality that, oh,

now I'm at a higher stage than somebody else. Is It's that you can think that you're at a higher stage, but you won't necessarily, at the same time think higher than that person or higher than those people who aren't at this high stage. That just doesn't come with your awareness. Okay, wait a minute, Now I'm on mass Low's self transcendent stage or I'm on his self authentic stage. It just doesn't come in that type of experience. Yeah.

stage models agree with that empirical finding. Now, it is possible that when that, you go through different lines of development at different types, at different stages, so somebody can have it's at least theoretically possible that they could have a spiritual intelligence experience and tag it to their own narcissism, right, I mean, that's completely possible, but it doesn't occur as

a typical condition. So when you have, like if you're practicing Zen Buddhism and you have your first satory, you feel fantastic, you feel one everything, and it's a great, great feeling and all. But you won't tend to think, oh, I've had a satori and nobody else here has or all those people over there haven't had the satory. It's just not part of the satori experience. That's not how and why and what you experience when you experience a satti.

It's discovering your own true in nature, your own true so and that feels fantastic obviously, but you don't therefore tend to look down on people who haven't had satories. I mean, you can, there's nothing preventing you, but it's not described as a typical experience of a satory. That's not how satori is defined or described.

mathematical development, for example. But again it's not my understanding nor my experience of people that do reach great heights of mathematical understanding that they're always thinking, Wow, I've got this great mathematical brain and most nobody else can match it. It just doesn't that's more likely to occur in the

earlier stages of development, the developments developmental. That's actually called narcissistic stage or an ego power stage, and people there often think that they're better than a lot of other people because that's the nature of that stage. It thinks only that its own ideas are true and important, and

that's because they really can't take another person's perspective. So you can have like a six year old who thinks that they're the world's greatest, and they're particularly at the stage of development that Levinger narcissist stick or egoic power, and that's exactly what they're experiencing. Their own ego has an enormous amount of power and that way, and so they will sometimes make that comparison when I have more power than you do.

that is that? Right?

lower stage to a higher stage. And if the higher stage does include as an actual component of its own self being that actually includes a previous stage, then that previous stage has to be there in some sense for the higher stage to include it. Yeah, and so that are we comment just like we have to have a first person awareness and first person words, I need mine before we can be aware of another person? Are you a thou? And so on? I like that.

or right, And that's not a good sign. No, it's actually a sign that you're at one of the earliest stages of narcissistic development.

Zen teacher and so on. And as I started to and I knew that Zen had a sort of developmental perspective, and what was called the ten ox Herding Pictures, which showed ten broad the overall developmental stages of Zen awareness. And so it goes through these different pictorial representations called the ox Hurting pictures. For the ox means are large, our big mind, our true mind, and how we first are not aware of it at all, so it just

looks like an ordinary world out there. And then we start to become aware of higher states or stages, even to the point that we get to the eighth stage, which just shows an empty circle. And when you sit in meditation and you meditate, that's what comes up absolutely nothing. There's a vast formless emptiness to awareness, and that's your eighth then ox Hurting picture, because it really is does

feel like a vast formless emptiness and nothing arising. And then you get to the tenths and hurting picture, and it's essentially the same as the first ox hurting picture,

except you've gone through all of these previous stages. And so I always at those stages of development in mind, and when I started actually studying developmental psychology, I naturally would sort of compare their stages that they presented, and all of them presented six seven, eight, nine or so stages of development, and none of them lined up directly with the can box hurting pictures. There was some sort of different something going on, and I couldn't figure it out.

And what I was looking at, of course, was Zen was talking about stages in the waking up process, a process of enlightenment, which is where you come to realize that your real self is not this little self that you think exists behind in between your eyes in your head looking out at the world and is separate from everything it sees and is above all of it. It doesn't talk about those the stages that that awareness goes through. It talks about going from that awareness to a vast

emptiness to an ultimate unity or oneness with everything. And that's a waking up experience. And as you experience some of those, it's like six, fifth, six seventh, eighth, ninth stages of the xenoxerning pictures. You'll often feel like you're actually waking up, and that feels just like you've been asleep. And then when you first open your eyes and the world comes in, that's a waking up. And that's what

a zen satory feels like. It feels like, Wow, I've been a sleep in this waking world for a long period of time, and now I'm actually aware of reality and I happen to be one with that reality.

scores who do not have unitive consciousness. So I'd love for you to talk to me about this.

go off the scale in your IQ. You don't have to be at one hundred and forty or one hundred and sixty to have a satory. You do have to be at least have some degree of adult growing.

you can are open to a type of satory. And the satory, of course, can itself be fairly small, or maybe you experience go from first person the tens and titious to the third person when you have your first satory, but that can still feel like a genuine awakening that you're seeing stuff that you've never seen before, and that includes some degree of your headless condition of realizing, oh, I don't have a head, and my head is one with everything that's looking at.

you have too much. But there is there is a certain point where it's good to have schizotiple like traits. Have you heard the phrase schizo tippy skizo tippy like schizotiple It's like it's like the personality dimension of schizophrenia, so all of us. Yeah, yeah, so being uh, you know, having being prone to magical thinking, being prone to unusual ways of thinking of at sometimes it can cause an

affect difference. You know, these are these are not things that we would want to psychopathologize, right, These aren't things we want to stick a DSM on. We just say people differ in these traits naturally occurring in the general population. What do you make about these findings that those who score higher on these questionnaires, these schizo typal questionnaires, do tend to score higher in in openness to experience and soft drinks and experiences and maybe even experiences of enlightenment.

than the previous stage or stages of development. And so I think that's very interesting, and they generally all tend to occur when that particular developmental model is tracing stages that are about two thirds of the weights as high as they can go. And that just seems to be just a generalized characteristic that you'll notice in a lot

of the developmental models. And that's always been a very interesting experience to me, because very few models that I'm aware of, Maslow tracted actually track the experience of satire. They don't say, oh, let's look for what stage people start to have satori, But that's what you do tend to see in some vague, undefined way. So that's always been interesting to me. And about two thirds of the way through their stages that they present.

and scientifically testing for the stage of development. And so since I'm simply referring to the sub total of all of those stage models, the particular stage is not going to be generally disproven. But how those models actually fit together that's something that is open to discussion and dispute. So my claim that I give one hundred stage models and that they're all going through the same similar levels

of development, that could certainly be discussed and dismissed. It would be a little bit hard because I include so many different models. But when at the beginning, when I'm putting together three or four or five, each way that I would put them together could be disputed and checked, and it might be that they're just appear to be going through similar stages of development, but they're actually not when you look at the real evidence at each stage.

But I think because I have my sell such a high respect for the scientific method and scientific models of reality, I don't want to present some idea that doesn't have a lot of evidence supporting it. And so that's why if you want to go through my claims and integral psychology, you're going to have to look at one hundred developmental models. Yeah, and take evidence from me to that. Oh, but that's

the whole point. A model got to be included in that one hundred models because it's supported the general idea that I was presenting.

of stages. But he had demonstrated so much important to the general ideas that he presented that he did have a profound impact on psychology. I mean, he founded two of the four forces. He founded humanistic psychology, and he went on to help discover trans personal psychology, and those were pretty major.

with you, I'm with you. Can we talk about the societal level for a second and some of your thoughts about this, because in some of the work I've read. You seem to suggest that we are progressing to higher levels of society, but I can say that doesn't appear to be the case. It seems like society right now is the opposite of the especially American society. Everything is so polarized on every issue. Isn't that the exact opposite of the spirit of integral theory?

spiritual experience. So there were things like Caroac and dharma bums and zeno and satory experiences, and in large measure that was probably because of the psychedelic influx that began in the fifties and throughout the sixties, and people would have psychedelic unity experiences, yes, and that's what Caroac was writing about. That's what a lot of human potential organizations

were talking about. And they weren't necessarily recommending psychedelics, but they were talking about the psychedelic sort of unity experience, and that was that sort of had an impact on our society at large. And so we sort of went through us in period in our social awareness and those seemed to die down along with the psychedelic experience, and we seemed to lease interest in both of those at about the same time. And I'm not sure why, except

it could be a causal. It could be the psychedelics induce satory like experiences, and as long as psychedelics are sort of a crass hit in our culture, then a psychedelic type satory experience is going to be fairly common and talked about and referred to. But as we just sort of got over psychedelics, we also got over the zen satori.

of huh. I may disagree with you, but maybe there's some truth to what you're saying that I can incorporate into my truth. But you know, no one thinks like that these days.

some reader questions from Twitter? Twitter questions? What are the ways in which you think research psychology could improve and is off track? We talked a little bit about that earlier. I don't know if you've anything further same of it the way modern day research psychology could improve and is off track?

But I haven't seen a series of specific testing and a large degree of the type of psychedelic experiences or alternate experiential awareness is able to be generated from different types of drugs.

She came up with written tests sometimes just to fill in my mother is still in the blank or I am still in the blank, but she would get responses that clearly fell into about eight or nine different classes, and those classes tended to come one after the other in the stage like fashion. But her developmental model and its test is now the most I don't used psychological tests worldwide, So that's great. But that was she developed that some piece.

to experience or go through. Well, I don't know that that's true in my theoretical model, and I would expect that if we went on in some way, we would be in effect growing upon what had come before. Makes a certain amount of sense. And then apparently when we're reborn, we ditch all of that and go back to stage one.

But some place in our awareness is an understanding of what we have to do to get to stage two and stage three and stage four, because there's no doubt that human beings grow and develop, and we can spot certain broad stages to that growth and development, so it

appears to be very real. And then when developmentalollegists started in the forties and fifties actually measuring this amount of growth and development and they would notice these seemingly stage like aspects to it, then we got all these models of development, and there were, as I say today, there are like one hundred different developmental models in existence, and there are at least some fifteen to twenty that are

fairly well known. And if you take a class in developmental psychology, you'll get exposed about a dozen different developmental maps of awareness, and they're presented with a great deal of authority, like these are really real and really exists. And here's the experimental data that measured each stage of development, real experiential evidence or scientific data on this stuff. So

that's all fine. And how that so the fact that that likely if consciousness goes on in any degree in an after life, I have no doubt that development will continue, right, because that's what consciousness does. It We learn from our

mistake and from our successes. A lot of what we do now is based on what we did yesterday, right, And so that can I mean, if there is an after life, I'm sure it'll be a developmental concern and we can spot growing up in our degrees of Christ's consciousness or whatever the hell we're actually introduced to.

help at all just talking about it? But I'm sure that would be an area that we would look into because it would be a bunch of people, a bunch of second person use brought together into a large third person social environment, and they would naturally be talking about all these things, and so it would be very curious to see what developmental capacities emerge from that.

And I'm not sure why degree or level of our conscious discussion isn't higher than it appears to be because it doesn't appear to be that high. And I don't know what your experience of social media.

that really entertainment. You know, there's a lot of entertainment value.

It is so inadequate. I mean, some of the calculations have been done showing that the overall number of mutations that would be required in order to produce not only just a living being, but a horse or a deer or a human being would take like it's somewhere over three volumes of five hundred pages interesting in a set of Encyclopedia Britannica, so three sets of ency to even get close to the amount, I mean, it's something like one to the ten forty zeros. It's some aaggering amount

like that. And so they're clearly and most evolutionary biologists now seem to acknowledge this. You'll see a lot of YouTube presentations on why evolution is occurring, what is forcing that dramatic increase in the diversity of option, And I happen to agree with that, and so you're sometimes that I'm tagged with creation science or something along that line, and all that it's doing is pointing out that there has to be some sort of drive or force or

desire or some thing that's driving this. Why of evolution goes to go from a simple bacteria to a deer. It just takes an enormous amount of mutations. And the natural selection, which is supposed to be the selective force, but that's just natural selection, is just talking about whether an organism manages to pass on its DNA. And the claim is that well, the stronger, the fitter, the better of all, the more likely that it will carry on, but that doesn't say much. That's not telling us very much.

you to be quite open minded, modest. I think there might be some misconceptions about you because someone else to ask this, they said, some people have said you have an inability to deal with criticism. What do you think of that criticism? They can try to catch you to catch twenty two there.

But I I get that criticism as well. Oh he's hypersensusive, and he's because he's got You're not.

What do you think about objective truth?

including simple bacteria. I think they come with an individual subjective awareness, and they're aware of an actual objective something or other, and they come together and form collectives in the lower quadrants, and those collectives have an interior consciousness and an exterior awareness. So there is subject and object and intersubjective and interobjective all the way up and all the way down. And I believe that, and so I don't have any trouble when there are, of course, various

forces operating in all of them. So I don't have any trouble when I watch all these evolutionary programs on YouTube and they're talking about the extraordinary mutational rate and natural selection of these hundreds of thousands of mutation selective processes, and they are all describing something that happens in an objective world. And I believe that objective world is real.

I don't believe it's just apart from subjective reality. As I said, subjective realities go all the way down, and that's true in the creation of the universe and the creation of life in that universe. So I don't have any trouble watching those kind of YouTube presentations. It makes sense to me. So there's a real objective world. But then how each subjective creature interprets that world varies. Yeah, and that's true for human beings. The way you and

I are interpreting this conversation has significant, important differences. Yeah, And the incredible thing about human perspectives is we can talk about those differences in the way we see thing. So we have a perception of our perceptual differences and that's great. But all of those are available to us in this in these quadrants that are subjective and objective and inter subjective and inter objective, and all of those realities are very real.

of people that are doing that. So we're getting vaccines or different sorts of diseases, and we're getting binding moving towards cures for cancer, and all of those are because we're dealing with some of these very real realities, and we can test our approaches to them, and we can create things that will alter any of those quadrants, any of those forms of awareness. Those are all real issues.

of that, they're altering their present. And that's a sense of growth. That's a type of growth. And depending on whether we're going to start tracking the degree of complexity that each computer brings to the present situation, and we see those complexities grow and we follow the ways that they grow and find that there are certain similarities in them, then that would start to indicate a certain type of

stage like development of the very complex computer awareness. And that wouldn't surprise me if something like that started to happen. I don't know, I mean, other than the fact that we do have computers that, in the sense grow and develop their own programming and create those kinds of stages, if you will, that's already been demonstrated. I mean, these computers do create their own programming and go through it,

and they more complex and go through that. Nobody's gotten onto a stage conception of what these computers are knowing why In large measure, that's because psychology itself continues to sort of ignore the issue. And we've told talked about why this is, and the answer is, I don't know. I'm very disappointed in it and very happy to see when somebody like Keegan or Lovinger comes out with another model of what's going on. I'm not sure that's just

as we talked about. Maybe psychedelics are everywhere you look, but stages of psychedelic growth and development are not everywhere. So that still tends to be not totally ignored, but it's not a great rush of research and awareness on that type of reality.

And you have a movie, you know, about the loss of your wife, and it was like, if you don't if someone doesn't cry in that movie, why watching that movie? They're not human in in my view. So, you've had such a remarkable life so far, I mean not over yet, You've had a remarkable life so far. Where do you this is my question? Where do you see your consciousness as it is right now? How would you classify it right now? And then is there any room for growth anymore?

This is my final question for you. Is there anywhere for your conscious Can you still do better.

the top of the heat. Wow. It's just that doesn't seem to be that feeling and awaking up like when you first wake up, you're aware, oh I've gone from being asleep that I'm really waking now, and you can be oh, you're aware of that transition, but you don't walk around for days afterwards thinking, wow, I'm at the top of this pile of levels of development. I'm right up and it feels good. It just doesn't. It doesn't

appear to you that way. You can't really feel stages of growth undevelopment, although you can sort of feel your expansion when you move to a higher state, but it never you never get to a point where you say I'm there, oh right. I don't even know any awakened Zen masters they feel that. And I've talked to several of them, and I know several of them are personal friends, and I just I've never gotten that since. And when I've talked with them about it, they've all denied that

anything like that goes on. And I think that's true. So all I can say is I'm quite advanced in waking up certain experiential aspects of that. And I don't mind saying that it doesn't feel non humble or something. I know, but I'm not claiming that I'm totally enlightened or anything like that. And again, I don't know anybody who does. But and on the growing upscale, I'm somewhere

in third tier. And I mean I had gone through Lovenger's first tier and second tier of development by the time I was a teenager, And so that's just based on tests that I have taken. Yeah, And so are there any stages higher in Lovenger scale? Definitely? I mean I think that's also something that almost anybody that you talk to who seems fairly developed, if you ask them, do you feel yourself are as far up as you

can go up? And I don't know very many people that have that experience, even if they are really highly developed I just don't hear many of them saying, oh, yeah, I'm at the top of the scale, you can't get me higher and where I'm at because they first know it's not true. They know if they look within that

they can still go higher. So I think that outside of the handful of models that have actual tests for their stages of growing up, and there are at least a dozen very good tests for the PHE's test, the Lovinger's test, the Keegan and you can measure where you are in that growing up scale and to the scent that they have the highest scale, like Levinger has a turquoise second tier fully integrated stage of development. You can

measure that. But notice that the percentage of the people in the population that are at Jane Levenger's highest stage is zero point five percent. That's not a lot of people, you know, it's not Stay.

So that does a lot to show us why post modern multicultural, pluralistic, relativistic approaches are so common, but truly integrated approaches are not very Zero point five percent is not a lot of the population.