A Brief History of Everything

A Brief History of Everything

by Ken Wilber

Preface

What Wilber recognizes is that a given truth-claim may be valid without being complete, true but only so far as it goes, and this must be seen as part of other and equally important truths. Perhaps the most important new tool he brings to bear in A Brief History is his notion that there are four “quadrants” of development. 

Exterior forms of development are those that can be measured objectively and empirically. 

Interior dimension—one that is subjective and interpretive, and depends on consciousness and introspection…both interior and exterior development take place not just individually, but in a social or cultural context. Once the four quadrants. None of these forms of truth can be reduced to another. The truth will indeed set you feee, but only if you recognize that there are many kinds of truth.

Introduction:

…testosterone basically has two, and only two, major drives: fuck it or kill it.

Oxytocin keeps her right in there, focused on the relationship, and very, very attached. The emotions are not fuck it or kill it, but continuously relate to it, carefully, diffusively, concernfully, tactilely. 

The great call of feminism, that women begin to define themselves in terms of their own autonomy and their own intrinsic worth, and not merely in terms of relationship to an Other.

So for both men and women, it’s transcend and include, transcend and include. And we are at a point in evolution where the primary see roles—hyperautonomy for men and hyperrelationship for women—are both being transcended to some degree, with men learning to embrace relational being and women learning to embrace autonomy

This is not the undoing of a brutal state of affairs that could easily have been otherwise; it is rather the outgrowing of a state of affairs no longer necessary.

The real problem with the “imposition theory”—men oppressed women from day one—is that it paints a horrifying dismal picture of women. You simply cannot be as strong and as intelligent and oppressed. This picture necessarily paints women basically as sheep, as weaker and/or stupider than men. Instead of seeing that, at every stage of human evolution, men and women co-created the social forms of their interactions…

When the sexes are polarized or rigidly separated, then both sexes suffer horribly. The evidence suggests, in fact, that the patriarchal societies were much harder on the average male than on the average female…

…more “equalitarian” societies—that is, societies that gave roughly equal status to the male and female value sphere. They never equated male and female; they balanced them.

…two very different types of spirituality, which I call Ascending and Descending. 

The Ascending path is purely transcendental and otherworldly. It is usually puritanical, ascetic, yogic, and tends to devalue or even deny the body, the senses, sexuality, the Earth, the flesh. It seeks its salvation in a kingdom not of this world; it sees manifestation or samsara as evil or illusory; it seeks to get off the wheel entirely. And, in fact, for the Ascenders, any sort of Descent tends to be viewed as illusory or even evil. The Ascending path glorifies the One, not the Many; Emptiness, not Form; Heaven not Earth.

The Descending path…It is this-world to the core, and it glorifies the Many, not the One. It celebrates the Earth, and the body, and the senses, and often sexuality. It even identifies Spirit with the sensory world, with Gaia, with manifestation, and sees in every sunrise, every moonrise, all the Spirit a person could ever want It is purely immanent and is often suspicious of anything transcendental. In fact, for the Descenders, any form of Ascent is usually viewed as evil. 

In the West, from the time roughly of Augustine to Copernicus, we have a purely Ascending ideal…Final salvation and liberation could not be found in this body, on this Earth, in this lifetime.

But then, with the rise of modernity and postmodernity, we see a complete and profound reversal—the Ascenders were out, the Descenders were in.

…the great Nondual traditions, East and West, attempt instead to integrate both the Ascending and the Descending paths…to balance both transcendence and immanence, the One and the Many, Emptiness and Form, nirvana and samsara, Heaven and Earth. 

It seems that only when Ascending and Descending are united can both be saved.

Part One:

1 The Pattern That Connects

The Kosmos contains the cosmos (or the physioshere), the bios (or biosphere), psyche or nous (the noosphere), and theos (the theosphere or divine domain). 

autopoiesis (or self-replication) occurs only in living systems. It is found nowhere the cosmos, but only in living systems. It is found nowhere in the cosmos, but only in the bios. It’s a major and profound emergent—something astonishingly novel—and I trace several of these types of profound transformations or emergents in the course of evolution in the Kosmos.

What we want to do is Kosmology, not cosmology.

…reality is composed of whole/parts, or “holons.”

“holon”…an entity that is itself a whole and simultaneously a part of some other whole. 

For instance, a whole atom is part of a whole molecule, and the whole molecule is part of a whole cell, and the whole cell is part of a whole organism, and so on. Each of these entities is neither a whole nor a part, but a whole/part, a holon.

No matter how far down we go, we find holons resting on holes resting on holons. Even subatomic particles disappear into a virtual cloud of bubbles within bubbles, holons within holons, in an infinity   of probability waves. Holons all the the way down.

We never come to an ultimate Whole. There is no whole that isn’t also simultaneously a part of some other whole, indefinitely, unendingly.

Even the “Whole” of the Kosmos is simply a part of the next moment’s whole, indefinitely. At no point do we have the whole, because there is no whole, there are one whole/parts forever. 

Tenet 1 is that the Kosmos is composed of holons. Tenet 2 is that all holdings share certain characteristics. Every holon is a whole/part, it has two “tendencies” to two “drives,” we might say—it has to maintain both its wholeness and its partness.

One the one hand, it has to maintain its own wholeness, its own identity, its own autonomy, or its own agency. If it fails to maintain and preserve its own agency, or its own identity, then it simply ceases to exist. So one of the characteristics of a holon, in any domain, is its agency, its capacity to maintain its own wholeness in the face of environmental pressures which would otherwise obliterate it. This is true for atoms, cells, organisms, ideas.

But a holon is not a whole that has to preserve its agency, it is also a part of some other system, some other wholeness. And so, in addition to having to maintain its own autonomy as a whole, it simultaneously has to fit in as a part of something else. Its own existence depends upon its capacity to fit into its environment, and this is true from atoms to molecules to animals to humans.

So every holon has not only its own agency as a whole, it also has to fit with it communions as part of other wholes. If it fails at either—if it fails at agency or communion—it is simply erased. It ceases to be.

Each holon possesses both agency and communion. You call these the “horizontal” capacities of holons…the “vertical” capacities of holons, which you call “self-transcendence” and “self-dissolution”…

When it does break down, it decomposes into its subholons: cells decompose into molecules, which break down into atoms, which can be “smashed” infinitely under intense pressure.

How did inert molecules comes together to form living cells in the first place? The standard new-Darwinian explanation of chance mutation and natural selection—very few theorists believe this anymore. Evolution clearly operates in part by Darwinian natural selection, but this process simply selects those transformations that have already occurred by mechanisms that absolutely nobody understands.

Everybody simply agreed to call this “quantum evolution” or”punctuated evolution” or “emergent evolution”—radically novel emergent and incredibly complex holons some into existence in a huge leap, in a quantum-like fashion—with no evidence whatsoever of intermediate forms.

…refer to evolution as “self-realization through self-transcendence.” Evolution is a wildly self-transcending process: it has utterly amazing capacity to go beyond what went before. So evolution is a process of transcendence. The drive to self-transcendence thus appears to be built into the very fabric of the Kosmos itself.

And that is the fourth “drive” of all holons. So we have agency and communion, operating “horizontally” on any level, and then “vertically” we have the move to a higher level altogether, which is self-transcendence, and the move to a lower level, which is self-dissolution.

The pull to be a whole, the pull to be a part, the pull up, the pull down: agency, communion, transcendence, dissolution.

The self-transcending drive produces life out of matter, and mind out of life. 

…common patterns found in the evolution of holons wherever they appear—matter to life to mind, to maybe even higher stages. Maybe even spiritual stages, yes?

The continuous process of self-transcendence produces discontinuities, leaps, creative jumps. So there are both discontinuities in evolution—mind cannot be reduced to life, and life cannot be reduced to matter; and there are continuities—the common patterns that evolution takes in all these domains. And in that sense, yes, the Kosmos hangs together, unified by a single process. It is a uni-verse, one song.

As “ultimate categeories”—which means concepts that we need in order to think anything else at all—Whitehead listed only three: creativity, one, many. (Since every holon is actually a one/many, those categories really come down to: creativity, holons)…As Whitehead put it, “The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.” New holdings creatively emerge. 

That’s tenet 3: holons emerge. And each holon has these four capacities—agency, communion, self-dissolution, self-transcendence—and so off we go, creating a Kosmos.

What is an “ultimate metaphysical ground” if not Spirit? For Spirit, I also use the Buddhist term “Emptiness,”…Spirit or Emptiness gives rise to form. New forms emerge, new holons emerge and it’s not out of thin air.

Self transcendence is built into the universe.

“Emptiness” as a term for Spirit, because it means unbounded or unqualified.

Spirit or Emptiness is unqualifiable, but it is not inert and unyielding, for it gives rise to manifestation itself: new forms emerge, and that creativity is ultimate. Emptiness, creativity, holons.

Tenet number 4 is: Holons emerge holarchically.

A natural hierarchy is simply an order of increasing wholeness…The whole of one level becomes a part of the whole of the next…natural hierarchies are composed of holons. And thus…”hierarchy” should really be called “holarchy.”

When any holon in a natural holarchy usurps its position and attempts to dominate the whole, then you get pathological or dominator hierarchy—a cancerous cell dominates the body, or a fascist dictator dominates the social system, or a repressive ego dominates the organism, and so on.

The critics of hierarchy…claim in getting rid of hierarchies they are being holistic, because everything is treated equally and thus joined together. It appears to be just the opposite. The only way you get holism is via a holarchy.

Tenet 5: Each emergent holon transcends but includes its predecessor(s). …holons are whole/parts, the wholeness transcends but the parts are included.

2 The Secret Impulse

Now if, in a type of thought experiment, you “destroy” any particular type of holon, then all of the higher holons will also be destroyed, but none of the lower holons will be destroyed. And this simple thought experiment can help you spot what is higher, and what is lower, in any sequence.

It works by virtue of the simple ways that wholes depend upon parts, but not vice versa.

The number of levels in any holarchy is referred to as its depth, and the number of holons on any given level is referred to as its span.

Evolution produces greater depth, less span. There are fewer organisms than cells; there are fewer cells than molecules; there are fewer molecules than atoms; there are fewer atoms than quarks. Each has a greater depth, but less span.

…because the higher transcends and includes the lower, there will always be less of the higher and more of the lower, and there are no expectations.

The individual holon has more and more depth, but the collective gets smaller and smaller.

Where matter is favorable, life emerges; where life is favorable, mind emerges…where mind is favorable, Spirit emerges.

Each dimension transcends and includes its junior dimension in a nested holarchy…Each level includes its predecessor and then adds its own emergent qualities, qualities that are not found in the previous dimension. Each succeeding dimension is “bigger” in the sense of greater embrace, greater depth…an individual holon’s identity actually expands to include more and more of the Kosmos…the number of holons that actually realize the deeper dimensions becomes smaller and smaller.

Each level transcends and includes its predecessor. Spirit transcends all, so it includes all. It is utterly beyond this world, but utterly embraces every single holon in this world. It permeates all of manifestation but is not merely manifestation. It is ever-present at every level or dimension, but is not merely a particular level or dimension. Transcends all, includes all, as the groundless Ground or Emptiness of all manifestation. 

So Spirit is both the highest “level” in the holarchy, but it’s also the paper on which the entire holarchy is written. It’s the highest run in the ladder, but it’s also the wood out of which the entire ladder is made. It is both the Goal and the Ground of the entire sequence. 

Kosmic consciousness…Individual identity expands to Spirit and thus embraces the Kosmos—transcends all, includes all.

The ultimate depth is an ultimate oneness with the All, with the Kosmos. But his realization is not given equally to all beings, even though all beings are equally manifestations of Spirit. This realization is the result of a development and evolutionary process of growth and transcendence. 

Evolution has a broad and general tendency to move in the direction of: increasing complexity, increasing differentiation/integration, increasing organization/structuration, increasing relative autonomy, increasing telos. 

Evolution meanders more than it progresses. But over the long haul, evolution has a broad telos. This is the self-transcending drive of the Kosmos—to go beyond what went before, and yet include what went before, and thus increase its own depth.

Since depth is everywhere, consciousness is everywhere. Consciousness is simply what depth looks like from the inside, from within. And as depth increases, consciousness increasingly awakens, Spirit increasingly unfolds. 

Spirit is unfolding itself in each new transcendence, which it also enfolds into its own being at the new stage. Transcends and includes, brings forth and embraces, creates and loves, Eros and Agape, unfolds and enfolds—different ways of saying the same thing.

As Emerson put it, we lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which by any other name is Spirit. There is a theme inscribed on the original face of the Kosmos. There is a pattern written on the wall of Nothingness. There is a meaning in its every gesture, a grace in its every glance.

…ultimate significance…We don’t have to think of God as some mythic figure outside of the display, running the show. Nor must we picture it as some merely immanent Goddess, lost in the forms of her own production. Evolution is God and Goddess, transcendence and immanence.

Depth increases from subconscious to self-conscious to superconscious, on the way to its own shocking recognition, utterly one with the radiant All, and we awaken as that oneness.

I’ll tell you what I think. I think the sages are the growing tip of the secret impulse of evolution. I think they are the leading edge of the self-transcending drive that always goes beyond what went before. I think they embody the very drive of the Kosmos toward greater depth and expanding consciousness. I think they are riding the edge of a light beam racing tower a rendezvous with God.

Because you transcend all, you embrace all. There is no final Whole here, only an endless process, and you are the opening or the clearing or the pure Emptiness in which the entire process unfolds—ceaselessly, miraculously, everlastingly, lightly.

3 All Too Human 

Outline the predominant “worldviews” of the various epochs of human development…these worldviews, may be summarized as archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and existential.

Which correlate with the major stages of technological/economic development.

Which are: foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial, and informational.

The ecomasculinists vociferously condemn farming of any sort as the first rape of nature, because you are no longer just gathering what nature offers; you are planting, you are artificially interfering with nature, you are digging into nature and scarring her face with farming technology, you are starting to rape the land. The heaven of the ecofeminist is the beginning of hell according to the ecomasculinists.

“the dialectic of process.”…the idea is that every stage of evolution eventually runs into its own inherent limitations, and these may act as triggers for the self-transcending drive.

When the sexes are heavily polarized—that is, when their value spheres are sharply divided and compartmentalized—then both sexes suffer horribly. The polarization of the sexes happened with the patriarchy. Agrarian societies have the most highly sexually polarized structure of any known societal type (along with herding). This was not a male plot, nor a female plot for that matter, but was simply the best that these societies could do under the technological form of their organization at that time. Thus, when men began to be virtually the sole producers of food stuffs, then—no surprise—the deity figures in these cultures switched from female-oriented to almost exclusively male-oriented.

Where females work the field with a hoe, God is a Woman; where males work the field with a plow, God is a Man.

4 The Great Postmodern Revolution 

Kant’s “Copernican revolution”: the mind forms the world more than the world forms the mind. Not in all ways, but in many important ways. And Hegel then added the crucial point, the point that, in one way or another, defines all postmodern theories: the mind, the subject, can “only be conceived as the one that has developed.”

This extreme constructivism is really just a postmodern form of nihilism: there is no truth in the Kosmos, only those notions that men force on others. This nihilism looks into the face of the Kosmos and sees an unending hall of mirrors, which finally show it nothing but its own ego nastiness, reflected to infinity. This is a major movement in American universities. 

Thought is a performance of that which it seeks to know, and not a simple mirror of something unrelated to itself. The mapmakers, the self, the thinking and knowing subject, is actually a product and a performance of that which it seeks to know and represent.

In Zen there is a saying, “That which one can deviate from is not the true Tao.”

Wherever there is the possibility of transcendence, there is, by the very same token, the possibility of repression. The higher might not just transcend and include, it might transcend and repress, exclude, alienate, dissociate.

…the animal that can transcend can also repress…

5 The Four Corners of the Kosmos

we have to (1) be open to modes of consciousness that move beyond mere rationality, and (2) embed them in modes of techno-economic structures that move beyond industrialization. In other words, a change of consciousness embedded in a change of institutions. [Bitcoin embeds modes of techno-economic structures for the societies of the future]

…trans-rational and trans-industrial.

Part of the coming transformation will involve both a change in consciousness and a change in institutions.

The fours quadrants are the interior and exterior of the individual and the collective…

the upper half of the diagram, the individual…the lower half, the collective…

…”cultural” refers to the shared collective worldview and “social” refers to the material base of that worldview.

…if holons share outsides, they share insides. Their “culture,” as it were…

So my supposedly “individual thought” actually has at least these four faces, these four aspects—intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social. And around the circle we go: the social system will have a strong influence on the cultural worldview, which will set limits to the individual thoughts that I can have, which will exist in the brain physiology. And you can go around that circle in any direction you want. The quadrants are all interwoven.

6 The Two Hands of God

Left-Hand Paths: Interpretive, Hermeneutic, Consciousness

Right-Hand Paths: Monological, Empirical, Positivistic, Form

Every holon on the Right Hand can be empirically seen, one way or another. They all have simple location, because these are the physical-material correlates of all holons.

Nothing on the Left Hand can be seen in that simple fashion, because none of the Left-Hand aspects have simple location…an interior dimension doesn’t have simple location.

All Right-Hand paths involve perception, but all Left-Hand paths involve interpretation.

Simple distinction between the Right and the Left: surfaces can be seen, but depth must be interpreted.

The Right-Hand paths are always asking, “What does it do?” whereas the Left-Hand paths are always asking, “What does it mean?”

We are dealing with the Right and Left Hands of God, of how Spirit actually manifests in the world.

The Upper-Right quadrant approaches, such as behaviorism or biological psychiatry—at their extreme, they want absolutely nothing to do with interpretation and depth and interiors and intentions. They couldn’t care less about what’s going on “inside,” in the “black box.” Many of them don’t even think it exists. They are interested solely in observable, empirical, exterior behavior.

So with behaviorism, you simply find the observable response you want to increase or decrease, and you selectively reinforce or extinguish it. Your interiors are of no consequence; your consciousness is not required. With behaviorism, the therapist will engineer operant conditionings that will reinforce the desired response and extinguish the undesirable ones. 

Similarly, with purely biological psychiatry, the therapist will administer a drug—Prozac, Xanax, Elavil—that will bring about a stabilization of behavioral patterns. Many psychiatrists will administer the drug within the first consultation, and then just periodically check with you, say once a month, to make sure it’s having the desire effect. Of course, some medical psychiatrists will engage in a bit of the talking cure, but many don’t, and we are giving “pure examples” of the Upper Right.

And with this pure biological psychiatry, as with pure behaviorism, your presence is not required. That is, there is no attempt to get at the meaning of the symptoms. There is no extensive interpretation of your predicament. There is no attempt to increase your own self-understanding. There is no attempt to explore your interior depths and come to a clearer understanding of your own being.

Hermeneutics is the art and science of interpretation.

Interpretation is always context-bound…all meaning is context-bound…the context helps determine which interpretation is correct. And that context itself exists in yet further contexts, and so off we go in the “hermeneutic cycle.” The reason, of course, is that there are only holons, and holons are contexted indefinitely: holons within holons, contexts within contexts endlessly. So all meaning is context dependent, and contexts are boundless.

How you interpret this experience will govern the ways you can even speak about it to others and think about it yourself.

We want to make sure that we have checked our interpretation against all four quadrants. We want an “all-quadrants” view, an interpretation from the context of the Kosmos in all its dimensions.

Many people interpret these spiritual experiences basically in terms of only the Upper-Left quadrant—they see the experience in terms of the higher Self, or higher consciousness, or archetypal forms, or enneagram patterns, or care of the soul, or the inner voice, or transcendental awareness, and so forth. They tend to ignore the cultural and social and behavioral components. So their insights are limited in terms of how to relate this higher Self to the other quadrants, which are then often interpreted rather narcissistically as mere extensions of their Self. The new age movement is replete with the type of Self-only interpretation. 

Others see the experiences as basically a product of brain states—the Upper Right. They attempt to interpret these experiences as coming solely or predominantly from theta brain wave states, or massive endorphin release, or hemispheric synchronization, and so on. This also devastates the cultural and social components, not to mention the interior states of consciousness itself. It is hyper objective and merely technological. 

Others—especially the “new paradigm” ecological theorists—attempt to interpret these experiences mostly in terms of the Lower-Right quadrants. The “ultimate reality” for them is the empirical web of life, or Gaia, or the biosphere, or the social system, and all holons are reduced to being merely a strand in gate great web. These approaches poorly understand the interior stages of consciousness development, and reduce all Left-Hand component to Right-Hand strands in the empirically web. This mistakes great depth and therefore collapses vertical depth to horizontal expansion. This results invidious forms of what many critics have called ecofascism. 

Others attempt to interpret these experience merely in terms of collective cultural consciousness and a coming worldview transformation—the Lower-Left quadrant. This overlooks what individual consciousness can do at any given point, and denies the importance of social structures and institutions in helping to support and embed these experiences. And so on. 

From attunement to atonement to at-onement: we find ourselves in the overpowering embrace of a Kosmic symphony on the very verge of Kosmic consciousness itself…if we listen very carefully.

7 Attuned to the Kosmos

Interior Left-Hand Paths

Subjective/Individual (I) truthfulness sincerity integrity trustworthiness 

Collective/Intersubjective (we) justness cultural fit mutual understanding rightness

Exterior Right Hand Paths

Individual/Objective (it) truth correspondence representation propositional

Collective/Interobjective (its) functional fit systems theory web structural-functionalism social system mesh

The essential point is that the way to depth is blocked by deceit, blocked by deception. And the moment you acknowledge interiors, you must confront the primary roadblock to accessing those interiors: you must confront deception and deceit. Which is precisely why we navigate in this domain by truthfulness.

The amazing fact is that truth alone will not set you free. Truthfulness will set you free.

The subjective world is situated in an intersubjective space, a cultural space, and it is this intersubjective space that allows the subjective space to arise in the first place.

The subjective space is inseparable from the intersubjective space.

You and I can inhabit each other’s interior to some degree. You and I can share our depth. When we point to truth, and we are situated in truthfulness, we can reach mutual understanding. This is a miracle. If Spirit exists, you can begin to look for it here. 

So there is intersubjectivity woven into the very fabric of the Kosmos at all levels. This is not just Spirit in “me,” not just the Spirit in “it,” not just the Spirit in “them,”—but the Spirit in “us,” in all of us.

The Upper Right is exteriors of individuals, the Lower Right is exteriors of systems. So the Upper Right is propositional truth in the very strictest sense: a proposition refers to a single fact. But in the Lower Right, the proposition refers to the social system, whose main validity claim is functional fit—how various holons fit tougher in the overall objective system.

Gross reductionism we all know about: everything is reduced to atoms in the Upper Right.

The truth of the Lower Right is found in how the individual holons functionally fit into the holistic system, how each is a strand in the interrelated web, which is the primary reality.

The systems theorists admirably fight gross reductionism, but they are totally caught in the monological madness of subtle reductionism, which is the real root of the Enlightenment nightmare, as recent scholarship has made more than clear.

The validity criteria in the Lower Left is mutual understanding.

We have four different quadrants, each with a different type of truth, a different voice. And each has a different test for its truth—a different validity claim. All of these are valid forms of knowledge, because they are grounded in the realities of the four facts of every holon. They each have a different validity claim which carefully guides us, through checks and balances, on our knowledge quest. They are falsifiable in their own domains, which means false claims can be dislodged by further evidence from that domain. 

The validity claims are the ways that we connect to Spirit itself, ways that we attune ourselves to the Kosmos.

From auttunement to atonement to at-onement: until, with a sudden and jolting shock, we recognize our own Original Face, the Face that was smiling at us in each and every truth claim, the Face that all along was whispering ever so gently but always so insistently: please remember the true, and please remember the good, and please remember the beautiful.

8 The Good, the True, and the Beautiful

This I-component cannot be described in it-language. That would reduce the subject to a mere object. Subjects are understood, objects are manipulated. 

Every holon does indeed have an objective or Right-Hand aspect! Every component on the Left Hand has its empirical and objective Right-Hand correlates….And since empirical and monological studies are infinitely easier than that messy interpretation and intersubjective hermeneutics and empathetic mutual understanding, it initially made all the sense in the world to restrict knowledge to the empirical domain, to the Right-Hand dimensions. 

The mapping paradigm, the representation paradigm…which just happened to leave out the mapmaker and the interiors altogether. Interpretation is not required; the world is simply obvious and “pre given.” And you simply map this pre given world, the world of simply location. You map the Right-Hand world.

This Enlightenment web-of-life conception was indeed holistic and interwoven, but it acknowledged only holarchies in the Right-Hand dimensions. It did not acknowledge the holarchies in the Left Hand on their own terms. It collapsed the Big Three into the Big One—collapsed the interwoven I and we and it…into a a flatland system of just interwoven its.

And so, of the Big Three of consciousness, culture, and nature, only sensory nature now was real, and all real knowledge must therefore be a mere reflection of that only reality. The reflection paradigm. The mirror of nature. The collapse of the Kosmos. 

The disqualified universe. It-language…essentially value-free, neutral. It has quantity, but no quality. So if you describe everything in terms of quantities and objective exteriors and network processes and systems variables, then you get no qualitative distinctions whatsoever—you get the disqualified universe. 

Everything on the Right Hand has simple location, which can be bigger or smaller but not better or worse.

Consciousness is intrinsic to the Kosmos.

The ultimate I, the ultimate We, and the ultimate It—Buddha, Sangha, Dharma.

The Buddhists would say that the individual “I” discovers its prior nature as Emptiness, so that the isolated and alienated “I” relaxes into the radically open and empty and transparent ground of all manifestation.

We can describe Spirit subjectively as one’s own Buddha-mind—the “I” of Spirit, the Beauty. We can describe Spirit objectively as Dharma—the “it” of Spirit, the ultimate Truth. We can describe Spirit culturally as Sangha—the “We” of Spirit, the ultimate Good.

PART TWO The Further Reaches of Spirit-In-Action

9 The Evolution or Consciousness

Spirit is both the highest level—“causal”—and the Ground of all levels—“nondual.”

The specific characteristics of the self, in Transformations of Consciousness I list these as identification, organization, will or attention, defense, metabolism, navigation. 

“Navigation” involves the four drive that all holons, including the self-holon, possess—namely, agency and communion, self-transcendence and self-dissolution (regression). At each rung in the self’s growth and development, it has these four basic choices about which way to go in its development. Too much or too little of any of these four drives, and the self gets into pathological trouble, and the types of pathology depend upon which of the nine basic rungs the trouble occurs at.

The self has to actually negotiate them, has to actually climb the development rungs of expanding awareness, and the self can take a bad step at any rung—and get very badly hurt.

There are nine corresponding fulcrums or steps for the self to negotiate.

You can remember a fulcrum because all of them have this same 1-2-3 structure: identify, dis-identify, integrate; or fusion, differentiation, integration; or embed, transcend, include.

And if anything goes wrong with this 1-2-3 process, at any rung, then you get a broken leg or whatnot. And the scar tissue of that disaster will depend on what the world looked like when you broke your leg. And generally, the lower the run, the more severe the pathology. 

Ladder: Basic rung of awareness — Once they emerge, they remain in existence as basic building blocks or holdings of consciousness

Climber: Climber of the basic rungs — Each step in the climb is a fulcrum, a 1-2-3 process of: (1) fusion/identification (2) differentiation/transcendence (3) integration/inclusion

View: Changing view of self and other at each state — including a different: self-identity, self-need, moral sense

Individuals can have a spiritual experience—a peak experience or an altered state of consciousness—at almost any stage of their growth. The basic levels, from the lowest to the highest, are potentials in every person’s being. So you can tap into the higher dimensions under various conditions—moments of elation, of sexual passion, of stress, of dream-like reverie, of drug-induced states, and even during psychotic breaks.

So people can have spiritual experiences and peak experiences and all sorts of altered states, but they still have to carry those experiences in their own structure. They still have to grow and develop to the point that they can actually accommodate the depth offered by the peak experiences. “States” still must be converted to “traits.” You still have to go from acorn to oak if you are going to become one with the forest. So while “states” are important, “stages” are even more important. 

Cognitive development is necessary but not sufficient for moral development.

And the same thing can happen with spiritual experiences. People can temporarily access some very high rungs in the ladder or circle of awareness, but they refuse to actually live from those levels—they won’t actually climb up there. Their center of gravity remains quite low, even debased. [Our society has a low center of gravity, a debased society with debased money]

So you can have a very powerful peak experience or satori. Bu then days, weeks, months later—where do you carry it? What happens to this experience? Where does it reside? Your actual self, your center of gravity, can only accommodate this experience according to its own structure, its own capacity, its own stage of growth. Spiritual experiences do not allow you to simply bypass the growth and development upon which enduring spiritual realization itself depends. Evolution can be accelerated, as Aurobindo said, but not fundamentally skipped over.

If the self represses or dissociates aspects of itself, it will have less potential left for further evolution and development.

We want to integrate Freud and Buddha, we want to integrate lower “depth psychology” with “height psychology.”

As a general rule. If you don’t befriend Freud, it will be harder to get to Buddha.

We recontact these lower holdings and expose them to consciousness, so that they can be released from their fixation and dissociation and rejoin the ongoing flow of consciousness evolution. 

When you step off the ladder altogether, you are in free fall in Emptiness. Inside and outside, subject and object, lose all ultimate meaning. You are no longer “in here” looking at the world “out there.” You are no looking at the Kosmos, you are the Kosmos. The universe of One Taste announces itself, bright and obvious, radiant and clear, with nothing outside, nothing inside, an unending gesture or great perfection, spontaneously accomplished. The very Divine sparkles in every sight and sound, and you are simply that. The sun shines not on you but within you, and galaxies are born and die, all within your heart. Time and space dance as shimmering images on the face of radiant Emptiness, and the entire universe loses its weight. You can swallow the Milky Way in a single gulp, and put Gaia in the palm of your hand and bless it, and it is all the most ordinary thing in the world, and so you think nothing of it.

10 On the Way to Global: Part 1

A global perspective is a rare, elite, extraordinary perspective of great depth, and there are relatively few individuals who actually make it to that depth (greater depth, less span).

Spirit begins to recognize its own global dimension.

When you have only sensations and impulses, what does the Kosmos look like to you? We call that archaic. When you add images and symbols, what does the Kosmos look like then? Magic. When you add rules and roles, what does the Kosmos sees? A mythic world. When formal operational emerges, what do you see? A rational world. 

11 On the Way to Global: Part 2

The telos of human development—is toward less and less egocentric states.

The arch battle in the universe is always “evolution versus egocentrism.” The evolutionary drive to produce greater depth is synonymous with the drive to overcome egocentrism, to find wider and deeper wholes, to unfold greater and greater unions. 

But the typical multiculturalist cannot allow this judgement, because they confusedly deny distinctions between moral stances altogether—all stances are equal, no judgments allowed! (this is the typical “anti-hierarchy” stance of the extreme postmodernists.) And so what happens, or course, is that they simply tend to become completely intolerant of those who disagree with them. They know that they have a noble stance, which in party they certainly do, but because they don’t understand how they got there, they simply try to force their view down everybody’s throat. Everybody is equal! No moral stance is better than another! No hierarchies here! And so off we go with vicious intolerance in the name of tolerance, with censorship in the name of compassion, with we-know-best thought police and mindless political correctness—with a bunch of elitists trying to outlaw everybody else’s elitisms. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so fundamentally wretched.

So is this related to the pathology of this stage?

This stage and the next, yes. Once you start to go world centric, once you begin scrutinizing your culture, and perhaps distancing yourself from its sociocentric or ethnocentric prejudice, and you strike out on your own—once you do that, then who, exactly, are you? Without all the old and comfortable roles, who are you? How can you fashion your own identity? What do you want from life? What do you want to be? Who are you, anyway? Erikson called this an “identity crisis,” and it is perhaps the central “un-ease” or “dis-ease” of this fulcrum.

And the multicasts are in a massive identity crisis. Since their official stance is that elitism of any sort is bad, but since their actual self is in fact an elite self, then they must lie about their actual self—they must conceal, distort, deceive.

So they go from saying everybody should be judged fairly, in a non ethnocentric way, to saying that everybody should not be judged at all, that all moral stances are equivalent. Except their stance, of course, which is superior in a world where nothing is supposed to be superior at all (oops). So they have an elite stance that denies its own elitism—they are lying about their actual identity. They have a false self system. And that is an identity crisis. [This is exactly what is occurring in today’s society]

It’s very spooky. It’s Orwell’s newspeak and thought police. But it seems to be fairly pervasive. The universities have all but been hijacked by it.

Yes, American universities today seem to specialize in it. All this is actually doing is contributing to the retribalization of America, by encouraging every egocentric and ethnocentric fragmentation and grievance politics, the politics of narcissism. All stance are equal means every preconventional and ethnocentric shallowness is given encouragement. The country is facing its own identity crisis, we might say, but I suppose that’s another discussion.

The centaur, representing an integration of the mind and the body, the noosphere and the biosphere, in a relatively autonomous self—which doesn’t mean isolated self or atomistic self or egocentric self, but rather a self integrated in its network of responsibility and service.

One of the characteristics of the actual self of this stage (the centaur) is precisely that it no longer buys all the conventional and numbing consolations—as Kierkegaard put it, the self can no longer tranquilize itself with the trivial.

12 Realms of the Superconscious: Part 1

The observing self becoming aware of both mind and body, and thus beginning to transcend them.

What is this observing self? How deep, or how high, does it actually go? The answer given by the world’s great mystics and sages is that this observing self goes straight to God, straight to Spirit, straight to the very Divine. In the ultimate depths of your own awareness, you intersect infinity. 

….starting to dis-identify with the mind itself…The mind is no longer merely a subject; it is starting to become an object. An object of…the observing Self, the Witness. And so the mystical, contemplative, and yogic traditions pick up where the mind leaves off. They pick up with the observing Self as if it begins to transcend the mind, as it begins to go transmittal or supramental or overmental. Or transnational, transegoic, transpersonal.

What if you push beyond or behind the mind, into a depth of consciousness that is not confined to the ego or the individual self?

This observing Self eventually discloses its own source, which is Spirit itself, Emptiness itself.

four major stages of transpersonal development or evolution…the psychic, the subtle, the causal, and the nondual…These are basic levels or spheres of consciousness, and so of course each of them has a different worldview, which I call, respectively, nature mysticism, deity mysticism, formless mysticism, and nondual mysticism.

As the personality begins to grow and develop, during the first three fulcrums, it tends to settle into one of these nine Enneagram types, depending largely on the self’s major defense mechanism as well as its major innate strength. These types persist and dominate consciousness until roughly fulcrum-7, or the beginning of the transpersonal domain, where they begin to transform into their collective wisdom or essence.

The idea is based on the central tantric notion, found from Sufism to Buddhism, that if you enter a lower state or even a defiled state with clear awareness, then that state will transform into its corresponding wisdom. So if you enter passion with awareness, you will find compassion. If you enter anger with awareness, you will find clarity. And so on. The traditions give various accounts of these transformations, but you can see the general point, which I think is quite valid. And with higher development, the Enneagram types likewise begin to unfold their corresponding essence or wisdom. 

From the Neoplatonic traditions in the West, to the Vedanta and Mahayana and Trikaya traditions in the East, the real archetypes are subtle seed-forms upon which all of manifestation depends. In deep states of contemplative awareness, one begins to understand that the entire Kosmos emerges straight out of Emptiness, out of primordial Purity, out of nirvana Brahman, out of the Dharmakaya, out of unqualifiable Godhead, radiant Ein Sof, and the first Forms that emerge out of this Emptiness are the basic Forms upon which all lesser forms depend on their being.

These Forms are the actual archetypes, a term which means “original pattern” or “primary mold.” There is a Light of which all lesser lights are pale shadows, there is a Bliss of which all lesser joys are anemic copies, there is a Consciousness of which all lesser cognitions are mere reflections, there is a primordial Sound of which all lesser sounds are thin echoes. Those are the real archtypes.

13 Realms of the Superconscious: Part 2

…bondage…”the identification of the Seer with the instruments of seeing”…

Things arise in awareness, they stay a bit and depart, they come and they go. They arise in space, they move in time. But the pure Witness does not come and go. It does not arise in space, it does not move in time. It is as it is; it is ever-present and unvarying…The Witness is aware of space, aware of time—and is therefore itself free of space, free of time. It is timeless and spaceless—the purest Emptiness through which time and space parade. 

Whitehead: “the ultimate metaphysical principle is the creative advance into novelty.”

Nirmanakaya—gross or nature mysticism…Sambhogakaya—subtle or deity mysticism…Dharmakaya—causal or formless mysticism…Svabhavikakaya—the integration of all three of them.

Zen Master: “When I heard the sound of the bell ringing, there was no I, and no bell, just the ringing.”

William James: “Experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity.” …duplicity  has the meaning of both “twoness” and “lying.” The twoness of experience is the fundamental lie, the primordial untruthfulness, the beginning of ignorance and deception, the beginning of the battered self, the beginning of samsara, the beginning of the lie lodged in the heart of infinity. Each and every experience, just as it is, arrives as One Taste—it does not arrive fractured and split into a subject and an object. That split, that duplicity, is a lie, the fundamental lie, the original untruthfulness—and the beginning of the “small self,” the battered self, the self that hides its Original Face in the forms of its own suffering.

Spirit—the pure immediate Suchness of reality

Generally, as in the Theravadin Buddhist and the Samkhya yogic schools, whenever you enter this state of unmanifest absorption, it burns away certain lingering afflictions and sources of ignorance. Each time you fully enter this state, more of these afflictions are burned away. And after a certain number and type of these entrances—often four—you have burned away everything there is to burn, and so you can enter this state at will, and remain there permanently. You can enter nirvana permanently, and samsara ceases to arise in your case. The entire world of Form ceases to arise.

But the nondual traditions do not have that as their goal. They will often use that state, and often master it. But more important, these schools—such as Vedanta Hinduism and Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism—are more interested in pointing out the Nondual state of Suchness, which is not a discrete state of awareness but the ground or empty condition of all states. So they are not so much interested in finding an Emptiness divorced from the world of Form (or samsara), but rather an Emptiness that embraces all Form even as Form continues to arise. For them, nirvana and samsara, Emptiness and Form, are not-two.

Not a single experience is closer to or further from One Taste. You cannot engineer a way to get closer to God, for there is only God—the radical secret of the Nondual schools. 

So the call of the Nondual traditions is: Abide in Emptiness, embrace all Form. The liberation is in the Emptiness, never in the Form, but the Emptiness embraces all forms as a mirror all its objects. So the Forms continue to arise, and, as the sound of one hand clapping, you are all those Forms. You are the display. You and the universe are One Taste. Your Original Face is the purest Emptiness, and therefore every time you look in the mirror, you see only the entire Kosmos.

PART THREE Beyond Flatland

14 Ascending and Descending

Since each of these four quadrants deals with a different aspect of holdings, each of them has a different type of truth, a different validity claim. And humanity, through long and painful experimentation, slowly learned these validity tests—ways to ground knowledge in the realities of each quadrant. We saw these as truths, truthfulness, justness, and functional fit. 

Since the two objective and exterior dimensions—the Right-Hand quadrants—can both be described in objective it-language, we simplified the four quadrants to the Big Three: I, we, and it. Studied, for example, in self, morals, science. Or art (self and self-expression), ethics, and objectivity. The Beautiful, the Good, and the True. In the spiritual domains: Buddha, Sangha, Dharma—the ultimate I, ultimate We, and ultimate It.

We could simplify the Big Three even further. The Left-Hand dimensions (the I and the we) can only be accessed by introspection and interpretation, whereas the Right-Hand delivers itself up to perception and empiricism—and those are the Left- and Right-Hand paths. That is, the Right-Hand aspects are the exteriors of holons, and so they can be seen empirically. But the intentional and cultural—the Left-Hand quadrants—involve interior depth that can only be accessed by interpretation. Interpretation means, in the broadest sense, empathic resonance from within, as opposed to objective staring from without. Surfaces can be seen, depth must be interpreted. And those are the Right- and Left-Hand paths.

The four transpersonal stages: the psychic, the subtle, the causal, and the nondual…each of these has its own worldview and therefore  its own type of mysticism, namely, nature mysticism, deity mysticism, formless mysticism, and nondual mysticism.

The Ascending and Descending currents were united in Plato.

Most of the Gnostics were mere Ascenders. Any form of Descent was, in fact, equated with evil. So the entire manifest world—this world—was thought to be illusory, shadowy, corrupted, sinful. Only by ascending to the One and shunning the Many could salvation be found.

Plotinus: How can this world be separated from the spiritual world? Those who despise what is so nearly akin to the spiritual world, prove that they know nothing of the spiritual world, except in name…

In the East: Prajna, or wisdom, sees that Form is Emptiness. In the East: Karuna, or compassion, sees that Emptiness is Form. Wisdom and Compassion—this is also Eros and Agape. Ascending Eros and descending Agape, transcendence and immanence, the love that reached up and the love that reaches down…

This is also God and the Goddess—as Eros and Agape, Wisdom and Compassion, Ascent and Descent…

If we ignore for the moment the more provincial and stage-specific notions of the horticultural Great Mother as a farming protectress, and the agrarian images of God the Father as a Big Daddy in the Sky—these mythic images are not very useful for an overall picture—and if we look instead to the broad understanding of God and Goddess, then the balanced picture that emerges is something like this: If we wish to think in such terms, then the Masculine Face of Spirit—or God—is preeminently Eros, the Ascending and transcendental current of the Kosmos, ever-striving to find greater wholeness and wider union, to break the limits and reach for the sky, to rise to unending revelations of a greater Good and Glory, always rejecting the shallower in search of the deeper, rejecting the lower in search of the higher. And the Feminine Face of Spirit—the Goddess—is preeminently Agape, or Compassion, the Descending and immanent and manifesting current of the Kosmos, the principle of embodiment, and bodily incarnation, and relationship, and relational and manifest embrace, touching each and every being with perfect and equal grace, rejecting nothing, embracing all. Where Eros strikes for the Good of the One in transcendental wisdom, Agape embraces the Many with Goodness and immanent care.

15 The Collapse of the Kosmos

Where the modern and postmodern world still rests: a fragmented lifeworld with self and culture and science at each other’s throat, each struggling, not for integration, but domination, each trying to heal the fragmentation by denying reality to the other quadrants.

Equal rights can never be achieved in the biosphere, where big fish eat little fish; but they can be achieved—or certainly aimed for—in the noosphere.

The Age of Reason was therefore the Age of Revolution as well, revolution against mythic dominator hierarchies. This was a revolution not just in theory but in practice, in politics.

The indictment handed down by the city of Athens began “Socrates is guilty of refusing to recognize the gods of the State.” It ended with, “The penalty demanded is death.”

Within the techno-economic base, a culture unfolds its possibilities. And within the industrial base, an altogether product and technical and instrumental mentality unfolded, a mentality that, almost of necessity, put a premium on the it-domain.

The irony, of course, is that the universe you can put your finger on is the meanings universe. So although consciousness and value and meaning are intrinsic to the depth of the Kosmos, they cannot be found in the cosmos. 

Holarchies of quality…holarchies of quantity. To reduce the Left to the Right is to reduce all quality to quantity, and thus, land directly in the disqualified universe, also known as flatland.

Nature was either predifferentiated and egocentric, as in magic; or nature was devalued in favor of a mythic other world, as in mythology. Or, in the case of a Plotinus or a Padmasambhava, nature is an expression of Spirit, an embodiment of Spirit—Spirit transcends and includes nature. But never in history had a differentiated nature simply been equated with the ultimate reality! Never had translogical Spirit and dialogical mind been so rudely reduced to monological nature. But with the modern industrial ontology, nature is the ultimate reality, nature alone is real. 

16 The Ego and the Eco

We are in search of a more integral vision, an “all-level, all-quadrant” vision. This would unite the best of ancient wisdom (all-level) with the best of modernity (all-quadrant). One of the primary roadblocks to this integral vision is the embrace of the purely Descended world, the world of flatland. 

In the battle between the rational Enlightnment—which you simply refer to as “the Ego camps”—and nature Romanticism—which you call the “Eco camps”—for all their differences, you maintain that both of them were thoroughly caught in the modern Descended grid.

…transcendence can simply go too far and become repression.

Most of the Romantic criticisms could be summarized as an extreme uneasiness with the Ego’s repressive tendencies. The rational Ego—that great autonomous master of the universe—had in fact simply sealed out and ignored its prepersonal roots as well as its transpersonal illuminations. It had cut off, or pretended to cut off, its subconscious juices as well as its superconscious inspirations. 

17 The Dominance of the Descenders

What Darwin and Wallace contributed to this already-accepted notion was the theory, not of evolution, but of evolution by natural selection—which, it turns out, can’t explain macroevolution at all! Which is why Wallace always maintained that natural selection itself was not the cause but the result of “Spirit’s manner and mode of creation,” and even Darwin was most reluctant to remove Spirit from the nature of evolution.

Spirit is present at each and every stage of the evolutionary process, as the very process itself. 

Schelling’s point is that nature is not the only reality, and mind is not the only reality. Spirit is the only reality.

Spirit must go out of itself, empty itself, into manifestation. Spirit first goes out of itself to produce nature, which is simply objective Spirit. At this point in evolution Spirit is still un-self-conscious. Thus the whole of nature Schelling refers to as slumbering Spirit. Nature is not a mere inert and instrumental backdrop for mind, as the Ego camps maintained. Rather, nature is a “self-organizing dynamic system” that is “the objective manifestation of Spirit”—precisely Plato’s “visible, sensible God,” but now set developmentally afloat.

Where nature is objective Spirit, mind is subjective Spirit.

Spirit knows itself objectively as nature; knows itself subjectively as mind; and knows itself absolutely as Spirit—the Source, the Summit, and the Eros of the entire sequence.

…sub-conscious, self-conscious, and superconscious. Or prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal; or precautional, rational, and transnational; or biosphere, noosphere, and theosphere…

When you realize your supreme identity as Spirit, then you are autonomous in the fullest sense—because nothing is outside you—and therefore you are also whole or unified in the fullest sense…

Findlay: “Finite existence in the here and now, with every limitation, is Hegel teaches, when rightly regarded and accepted, identical with the infinite existence which is everywhere and always. To live on Main Street is, if one lives in the right spirit, to inhabit the Holy City.”

In 1796, Hegel wrote a poem for Holderlin, which says in part: “For thought cannot grasp the should which forgetting itself plunges out of space and time into a presentiment of infinity, and no re-awakens. Whoever wanted to speak of this to others, though he spoke with the tongues of angels, would feel the poverty of words.”

Would that Hegel had remained in poverty. But Hegel decided that Reason could and should develop the tongues of angels. This would have been fine, if Hegel also had more dependable practices for developmental unfolding of the higher and transpersonal stages. Zen masters talk about Emptiness all the time! But they have a practice and a methodology—zazen, or meditation—which allows them to ground their intuitions in experiential, public, reproducible, fallibilist criteria. Zen is not metaphysics! It is not mere mapping.

The Idealist had none of this. Their insights, not easily reproducible, and thus not fallibilistic, were therefore dismissed as “mere metaphysics,” and gone was a priceless opportunity that the West, no doubt, will have to attempt yet again if it is ever to be hospitable to the future descent of the World Soul.

The collapse of Idealism left the Descenders virtually unchallenged as the holders and molders of modernity. 

A horizontally extended Net is not the same as a vertically developed consciousness. Merely pushing the horizontal extension is flatland at its worst and most Descended and possibly most destructive.

And we reach that worldcentric moral perspective through a difficult and laborious process of interior growth and transcendence. In short, global problems demand global consciousness, and global consciousness is the product of five or six major interior stages of development. Simply possessing a global map won’t do it. A systems map will not do it. An ecological map will not do it. Interior growth and transcendence, on the other hand, will do it. [Bitcoin will do]

The hatred of transcendence is the way that the flatland grid reproduces itself in the consciousness of those it is destroying.

18 An Integral Vision

A new center of gravity is slowly emerging—the vision-logic information society, with an existential or perspectival worldview (Lower Left), set in a techno-economic base of digital information transfer (Lower Right), and a centric self (Upper Left) that must integrate its matter and body and mind—integrate the physiosphere and biosphere and noosphere—if its behavior (Upper Right) is to functionally fit in the new worldspace.

Every new emergent and transformative development brings a new demand and a new responsibility: the higher must be integrated with the lower. Transcend and include. And the greater the degree of development, the greater the burden of inclusion.

Even with a new and higher worldview available, every human being still has to start its own development at square 1. Everybody, without exception starts at fulcrum-1, and has to grow and evolve through all the lower stages in order to reach the new and higher stage made available.

And the more vertical levels of growth there are in a culture, the more things there are that can go horribly wrong. As I was saying, the greater the depth of a society, the greater the burden placed on the education and transformation of its citizens. The greater the depth, the more things that go massively, wretchedly, horribly wrong. The more levels, the more chances for lying (pathology) Our society can be sick in ways that the early foragers literally could not even imagine. 

Societies with greater depth face increasingly greater problems. In all four quadrants! So where many people talk of the coming transformation and get all ecstatic and giddy at the thought, I tend to see another chance for a huge nightmare coming right at us.

It is sometimes said that one of the major problems in Western society is the gap between the rich and the poor. This is true. But that is a flatland way to look at it—merely quantified as a money gap. And as alarming as that exterior gap between individuals is, there is a more worrisome gap—an interior gap, a culture gap, a gap in consciousness, a gap in depth.

The “economic gap” between rich and poor is bad enough, but much more crucial—and much more hidden—is the culture gap, the “values gap,” the “depth gap,” which is the gap between the depth offered as a potential by the culture, and those who can actually unfold that depth in their own case.

The potential for this culture gap of consciousness becomes greater with every new cultural transformation. 

Environmental ethics usually center on what is known as axiology, the theory of values…four broad schools of environmental axiology.

The first is bioequality—all living holons have equal value.

The second approach involves variations on animal rights—wherever there is any sort of rudimentary feelings in animals, we should extend certain basic rights to those animals.

The third school is hierarchical or holarchical…This approach sees evolution as a holarchical unfolding, with each more complex entity possessing more rights. Human beings are the most advanced and thus possess the most rights.

The fourth school involves the various stewardship approaches, where humans alone have rights, but those rights include the care and stewardship of the earth and its living inhabitants. Many conventional religious theorists take this approach as a way to anchor environmental care in a moral imperative.

Ground value, intrinsic values, and extrinsic value.

All holons have equal Ground value. That is, all holons, from atoms to apes, are perfect manifestations of Emptiness or Spirit, with no higher or lower, better or worse. Every holon, just as it is, is a perfect expression of Emptiness, a radiant gesture of the Divine. As a manifestation of the Absolute, all holons have equal Ground value. All Forms are equally Emptiness. And that’s Ground value.

But every holon, besides being an expression of the absolute, is also a relative whole/part. It has its own relative wholeness, and its own relative partness.

As a whole, every holon has intrinsic value, or the value of its own particular wholeness, its own particular depth. And therefore the greater the wholeness—or the greater the depth—then the greater the intrinsic value. Intrinsic value means it has value in itself. Its very depth is valuable, because that depth enfolds aspects of the Kosmos into it’s own being. The more of the Kosmos that is enfolded into its own being—that is, the greater its depth—then the greater its intrinsic value. An ape contains cells and molecules and atoms, embraces them all in its own internal makeup—greater depth, greater wholeness, greater intrinsic value. 

So even though an ape and an atom are both perfect expressions of Spirit (they both have equal Ground value), the ape has more depth, more wholeness, and therefore more intrinsic value. The atom also has intrinsic value, but relatively less. (Less value does not mean no value!) We also saw that the greater the depth of a holon, the greater its degree of consciousness, so it comes to much the same thing to say that the ape is more intrinsically valuable than the atom because it is more conscious. 

But every holon is not only a whole, it is also a part. And as a part, it has value for others—it is part of a whole upon which other holons depend for their existence. So as a part, each oolong has extrinsic value, instrumental value, value for other holons. The more it is a part, the more extrinsic value it has. An atom has more extrinsic value than an ape—destroy all apes, and not too much of the universe is affected; destroy all atoms, and everything but subatomic particles is destroyed—the atom has enormous extrinsic value, instrumental value, for other holons, because it is an instrumental part of so may other wholes.

Rights express the conditions for the intrinsic value of a holon to exist, the conditions necessary to sustain its wholeness, sustain its agency, sustain its depth.

Responsibilities are simply a description of the contents that any holon must meet in order to be a part of the whole.

Responsibilities express the conditions for the extrinsic value of a holon to exist, the conditions necessary to sustain its partners, sustain its communion, sustain its span.

Agency and communions, intrinsic value and extrinsic value, rights and responsibilities, are twin aspects of every holon, because every holon is a whole/part.

In a nested holarchy of expanding complexity and depth. Because human beings have relatively more depth than, say, an amoeba, we have more rights—there are more conditions necessary to sustain the wholeness of a human—but we also have many more responsibilities, not only to our own human societies of which we are parts, but to all of the communities of which our own subholons are parts. We exist in networks of relationships with holons in the physiosphere and the biosphere and the noosphere, and our relatively greater rights absolutely demand relatively greater responsibilities in all of these dimensions. Failure to meet these responsibilities means a failure to meet the conditions under which our holons and subholons can exist in communion—which means our own self-destruction.

A truly “holonic ecology” would honor all three types of value for each and every holon—Ground value, intrinsic value, and extrinsic value.

The higher a sentient being is on the holarchy, the less right you have to sacrifice it for your needs.

The Basic Moral Intuition is “protect and promote the greatest depth for the greatest span.” I believe that is the actual form of spiritual intuition, the actual structure of spiritual intuition. 

When I am intuiting Spirit clearly, I intuit its preciousness not only in myself, but in all other beings as well, for they share Spirit with me (as their own depth).

Only by rejecting flatland can the Good and the True and the Beautiful be integrated. Only by rejecting flatland can we attune ourselves with Spirit’s radiant expression in all its verdant domains. Only by rejecting flatland can we arrive at an authentic environmental ethics and a council of all beings, each gladly bowing to the perfected grace in all. Only by rejecting flatland can we come to terms with the devastating culture gap, and thus set individuals free to unfold their own deepest possibilities in a culture of encouragement. Only by rejecting flatland can the grip of monoculture be broken, so that nature can actually be integrated and thus genuinely honored, instead of made into a false god that ironically contributes to its own destruction. Only by rejecting flatland can we set the global commons free in communicative exchange that is decentered from egocentric and ethnocentric and nationalistic imperialism, racked with wars of race and blood and bounty. Only by rejecting flatland can we engage the real potentials of vision-logic, which aims precisely at integrating physiosphere and biosphere and noosphere in a radical display of its own intrinsic joy. Only by rejecting flatland can the techno base of the Infobahn be made servant to communion rather than master of digital anarchy, and in this way the Net might actually announce the dawn of global convergence, not global fragmentation. Only by rejecting flatland can a World Federation or Family of Nations emerge in a holarchical convergence around the World Soul itself, committed to the vigorous protection of that world centric space, the very form of Spirit’s modern voice, glorious in its compassionate embrace. 

And thus—to return to specifically spiritual and transpersonal themes—only by rejecting flatland can those who are interpreting spirituality begin to integrate the Ascending and Descending currents. In flatland you can only be an Ascender or a Descender. You either deny any existence to flatland altogether (the Ascenders), or you try to make it into God (the Descenders).

In medicine, you can see that any effective care would have to take into account, not just the objective medicine or physical treatment that you give the person (UR), but also the person’s subjective beliefs and expectations (UL), the cultural attitudes, hopes, and fears about sickness (LL), and the social institutions, economic factors, and access to health care (LR), all of which have a causal effect on the course of a person’s illness (because all four quadrants cause, and are caused by, the others). You can do the same analysis with law, education, business, politics, environmental ethics, schools of feminism, prison reform, philosophical systems, and so on. 

If the fours quadrants are real, then any health care system that includes all of them will be more effective (and therefore more cost efficient). Any business that takes them into account will be more efficient and thus more profitable. Any educational system will be more effective; politics will be more responsive; spirituality will be more transformative. 

What would a full-spectrum medicine look like? Likewise, what would a full-spectrum education look like? Full-spectrum economy? Full-spectrum politics? Business? Marriage? Cinema? Art?

Appendix The Twelve Tenets

1. Reality as a whole is not composed of things or processes, but of holons (wholes that are parts of other wholes; e.g., whole atoms are parts of whole molecules, which are parts of whole cells, which are parts of whole organisms, and so on).

2. Holons display four fundamental capacities: (a) self-preservation (agency), (b) self-adaptation (communions), (c) self-transcendence (eros), and (d) self-dissolution (thanatos).

3. Holons emerge.

4. Holons emerge holarchically.

5. Each emergent holon transcends but includes its predecessor(s). 

6. The lower set the possibilities of the higher; the higher sets the probabilities of the lower.

7. The number of levels that a holarchy comprises determines whether it is “shallow” or “deep”; and the number of holons on any given level we shall call its “span.”

8. Each successive level of evolution produces greater depth and less span.

1. Addition 1: The greater the depth of a holon, the greater its degree of consciousness.

9. Destroy any holon, and you will destroy all of the holons above it and none of the holons below it.

10. Holarchies co-evolve.

11. The micro is in relational exchange with the macro at all levels of its depth.

12. Evolution has directionality. A) increasing complexity B) increasing differentiation/integration C) increasing organization/structuration D) increasing relative autonomy E) increasing telos

1. Addition 2: Every holon issues and IOU to the Kosmos

2. Addition 3: All IOUs are redeemed in Emptiness