The Middle Way

(excerpt from Integral Psychology, by Ken Wilber)

Whether, in the end, you believe in spiritual practice involves stages or not, authentic spirituality does involve practice. This is not to deny that for many people beliefs are important, faith is important, religious mythology is important. It is simply to add that, as the testimony of the world’s great yogis, saints, and sages had made quite clear, authentic spirituality can also involve direct experience of a living Reality, disclosed immediately and intimately in the heart of consciousness of individuals, and fostered by diligent, sincere, prolonged spiritual practice. Even if you can relate spirituality as a peak experience, those peak experiences can often be specifically induced, or at least invited, by various forms of spiritual practice, such as active ritual, contemplative prayer, shamanic voyage, intensive meditation, and so forth. All of those open one to a direct experience of Spirit, and not merely beliefs or ideas about Spirit.

Therefore, don’t just think differently, practice diligently…A qualified teacher, with whom you feel comfortable, is a must. One might start by consulting the works of Father Thomas Keating, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the Dalai Lama, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Bawa Myhaiyadeen, or any of the many widely acknowledged teachers in any of the great lineages.

At the same time, be wary of those spiritual paths that involve simply changing your beliefs or ideas. Authentic spirituality is not about translating the world differently, but about transforming your consciousness. Yet many of the ‘new paradigm’ approaches to spirituality would simply have you change the way you think about the world: you are supposed to believe, not in the Newtonian-Cartesian billiard-ball world, but in the world of systems theory and the great “web of life”; you are supposed to think in terms, not of patriarchal divisiveness, but of the holistic Goddess and Gaia.

All of those are important ideas, but they are merely ways to think about the Right-Hand world, not ways to transform the Left-Hand world. Most of these new-paradigm approaches recommend that we use vision-logic (or holistic thinking) in order to overcome our fragmented world. But, as we have repeatedly seen, cognitive development (such as vision-logic or network-thinking) is necessary, but not sufficient, for moral development, self-development, spiritual development, and so on. You can have full access to vision-logic and still be at moral stage one, with safety needs, egocentric drives and narcissistic inclinations. You can totally master systems theory and completely learn the new physics, and still be very poorly developed in emotional, moral, and spiritual streams.

Thus, simply learning systems theory, or the new physics, or learning about Gaia, or thinking holistically, will not necessarily do anything to transform your interior consciousness, because none of those address the interior stages of growth and development. Open any book on systems theory, the new paradigm, the new physics, and so on, and you will learn about how all things are part of the great interconnected Web of Life, and that by accepting this belief, the world can be healed. But rarely will you find a discussion on the many interior stages of the growth of consciousness that alone can lead to an actual embrace of global consciousness. You will find little on preconventional, conventional, post-conventional, and post-postconventional stages; nothing on what an enormous amount of research has taught us on the growth of consciousness from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric (or more specifically, the nine or so fulcrums of the self unfolding); no hints about how these interior transformations occur, and what you can do to foster them in your own case- thus truly contributing to a worldcentric, global, spiritual consciousness in yourself and others. All you find is: modern science and matriarchal religions all agree that we are parts of the great Web of Life.

The ecological crisis- or Gaig’s main problem- is not pollution, toxic dumping, ozone depletion, or any such. Gaia’s main problem is that not enough human beings have developed to the postconentional, worldcentric, global levels of consciousness, wherein they will automatically be moved to care for the global commons. And human beings develop to those postconventional levels, not by learning systems theories, but by going through at least a half-dozen major interior transformations, ranging from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, at which point, and not before, they can awaken to a deep and authentic concern for Gaia. The primary cure for the ecological crisis is not learning that Gaia is a Web of Life, however true that may be, but learning ways to which foster these many arduous waves of interior growth, none of which are addressed by most of the new-paradigm approaches.

In short, systems theory and the Web-of-Life theories do not generally transform consciousness because, hobbled with their subtle reductionism, they do not adequately address the interior stages of consciousness development- where the real growth occurs. They might be a fine place for one to start on the spiritual path- they are helpful in suggesting a more unified life- but they themselves do not appear to be an effective path to that life. They do not offer, in short, any sort of sustained interior practice that can actualize the higher and more global stages of consciousness. And, sadly, in claiming to offer a completely “holistic” view of the world, they often prevent or discourage people from taking up a genuine path of interior growth and development, and thus they hamper the evolution of just that global consciousness that they otherwise so nobly espouse.

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