Enlightenment 2.0 as the convergence of the Western and Eastern Enlightenment Traditions

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I’d love to hear you unpack this a bit, so we can see what kinds of meat we might want to pack onto them bones!

The one piece we might want to be careful about, though, is that “waking up” is technically not a “line” that moves through different altitudes, but rather a sequence of states that can be accessed from any altitude. Adding to the complexity, we can also talk about a “spiritual line” that does move through these vertical altitudes (e.g. James Fowler’s Stages of Faith), but this does not necessarily predict what sorts of horizontal states one might experience from each of those stages.

So, in short:

1. Growing up: general growth of the self-system through vertical structure-stages of unfolding

2. Waking up: training states of consciousness through horizontal state-stages of awakening, producing experiences which are then interpreted according to our current position in the growing up/opening up process.

3. Opening up: similar to growing up, but assessing and working with each individual line of development (interpersonal, aesthetic, emotional, etc.)

4. Cleaning up: Reintegrating dissociated pieces of ourselves, which can occur either in the growing up or waking up process.

5. Showing up: Taking all of this predominantly upper-left quadrant work, and allowing it to flood into the other quadrants of our being (e.g. our behaviors, our relationships, our career, etc.)

In terms of both “peacemaking” and “sensemaking”, I can see how all five of these would directly apply. For example, “peace” (which I am enacting here as “harmony or integration of self and other”) can be defined differently from ego-centric, ethnocentric, and worldcentric stages, which determines our overall circle of care. Meanwhile, our capacity for inner peace and equanimity is often associated with increasing familiarity of gross, subtle, causal, witnessing, and nondual states. And cleaning up clearly has an important role here, as we learn to reintegrate the various inner conflicts and hostilities that we may be projecting onto others, which may be making genuine “peace” that much more difficult to achieve. Cleaning up is something like peacemaking with our own self-system.

Similarly, “sensemaking” is going to depend not only on our cognitive capacities (we can only make sense of the phenomena we are actually capable of perceiving/cognizing, which means a 2p perspective can never make adequate sense of systems that can only be cognized at 4p, which is a huge issue underlying our culture wars), but also any number of other “opening up” lines of intelligence — our moral intelligence, our aesthetic intelligence, our spiritual intelligence, etc. And of course “cleaning up” also becomes critical in our sensemaking, or else we risk following our own confirmation biases further down the rabbit hole, resulting in broken sense-making and world-modeling.

Sorta related to this, I’ve been working for the last couple weeks on a new approach that tries to use polarity work to scaffold growing up, cleaning up, and showing up processes. What I’m doing is creating a “giga-glossary” of critical polarities in each quadrant, at every stage of development. So here are three critical polarities in the UL of the red stage, three critical polarities in the LL of the red stage, etc. The idea being, each of these polarities comes to the forefront at particular stages, and once they do, they remain in the self-system. And if any of these polarities remain unintegrated for us, chances are it is producing some sort of shadow material, which can hopefully be re-integrated simply by contemplating and reintegrating the core polarity itself. Still a work in progress, but I’ve compiled over 120 polarities so far, and happy to talk more about it if anyone is interested!

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Serious point about that …

With the volume of factual, empirical information about world history growing exponentially, along with the exponential growth of every other discipline, the idea of forcing all undergraduates to take something like the 400 credits of history required to learn it all in detail is a non-starter. So we need … integral meta-models for purposes of cognitive organization.

Apart from meta-theory, art in general is also a great information delivery mechanism. So bully Clavell! There are always geeks like me lurking to fact-check the art if the artist takes too many liberties …

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Hi @corey-devos. Good game you have going on there … can I play to?

Here is a body of essays I hacked a couple months ago. In this post, I’ll just give a bullet point synopsis of what these essays may do for (or to) integral meta-theory.

https://openwa.pressbooks.pub/worldciv/

  • shores up the “altitudes” model with good old fashioned cultural materialism, systems theory, history of civilizations, and all LL, UR, and LR factors in general.

  • allows spiritual freedom and creative genius in the UL, coupling that with the larger model through the systems theory concept of “agency”.

  • adapts R. Kegan primary to claim that the “leading edge of culture” is far from a gimme. As a teacher, I well know you have to bust your butt to get students all the way to Kegan’s level 4 consciousness, not to mention level 5 or anything resembling second tier.

  • I make a tentative gesture towards integrating “waking up” and “growing up” by claiming that to transcend postmodern (Kegan level 5) you need a new “witnessing consciousness”. The “witness” is the new subject, and the old post-modern self is the new object, under the Kegan system of growth in which previous subjects become objects when new subjects emerge.

  • not in my essays - but I just figured this out while typing - ancient sages have been going straight to a witnessing subject without all the Western-centric altitudes (at least not the usual content used to illustrate those altitudes.) So no, you need not read Derrida or become a SJW to practice meditation. But if you do read Derrida and become a SJW, I strongly advise that you begin a serious spiritual practice stat. Otherwise you will likely manifest symptoms of “mean greeness”, or, among our elderly, the often-fatal condition of Boomeritis.

So, that’s a start. All that was written before I studied Gebser or Vervaeke at all. Stay tuned …

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Actually above I defined “peace” in much broader terms to include inner and outer, singular and collective. So working toward peace within one’s social relationships, one’s community, and the wider social context in which one has some sort of awareness is essential for achieving the highest level of enlightenment that is available to them. Of course inner peace is essential as well. Cleaning Up is essential for that and also the “existential depth” inner developmental dimension that Hanzi Freinacht described in The Listening Society.

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Then Militarist “Enlightenment” doesn’t seem to fit into “peace” in this model in the wider social contexts, unless we seriously consider NRA Jesus “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition”. Or speaking of Jesus, there is also that Krishna was a fierce warrior, but is worshipped through religions of nonviolence today. Though some say he did not engage in direct combat, paintings do depict him fighting enemies.

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Very cool! I’ll take a more thorough look when I have more time.

I think Ken would likely agree with this, maybe with a couple little wrinkles:

  • You are totally right on in your intuition that the “subject becoming object” is the core mechanism here, not only in terms of “growing up” but also “waking up” and “cleaning up” as well.

  • Technically, the new subject would be a “Teal subject”, which is now looking at “Green” as an object. That is, the subject of the prior stage is now being observed as an object by the subject of the present stage.

  • However, as we enter into Teal and Turquoise structure-stages, the state-stages are becoming more integrated into the structures themselves. By the time we make it to Indigo, for example (I am using “we” very loosely here LMAO) Witness consciousness becomes more of a permanent trait than a temporary state. This is apparently confirmed by Terri O’Fallon’s work (check out her recent talks with Keith Martin Smith, if you haven’t already).

  • And of course, it can be a bit tricky to talk about that “witnessing consciousness”, because as you mention, it is available at every step of the way. It is the empty container within which “subject becomes object” is taking place. But of course, what that consciousness is capable of witnessing depends on the complexity of the consciousness itself. A three year old can theoretically be plugged into the Witnessing state, but that doesn’t mean she will suddenly be effortlessly aware of calculus.

Fun discussion guys!

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Yeah, I just got done with a long walk in the park, which is about as “spiritual” as my practices get. But during the walk, I pondered deeply how to be cautious and measured in approaching the “spiritual”. A few ideas –

  • the origin of “spirit” as a symbol is complete freedom. From the Hebrew ruach, by way of the Greek pneuma, through the Latin spiritus. Vervaeke and Gebser have quite a bit to say about this, as do any number of Biblical scholars.

  • the spiritual thus enjoys complete freedom vis-a-vis the altitudes.

  • if the spiritual is “horizontal” to the altitudes, I consider it “horizontal” in the sense of coming straight off the page or the computer screen and piercing the heart of the reader.

  • my geographically-oriented theories will now adopt the terminology of a “lateral” or “geo-spatial” dimension for the altitudes to allow for cross-civilizational comparison of altitude content. (What Freinacht means by “cultural code”).

  • Corey, I like what you say about the witnessing self becoming more stable at higher altitudes. That tracks.

  • so here is the nub (remember @EnlightenedWorldview started this thread way back when!). Do you need to grow spiritually to obtain second tier cognitive complexity?

  • Case 1: search the history of math and science. You will find many cognitively complex geniuses who were not distinguished by spiritual or other forms of development.

  • Cast 2: most people. I will assert from a standpoint of praxis, that without spiritual practice leading to something like the witness, most people will hit the wall cognitively somewhere around the level of multiculturalism. Teal, second tier, integral - not happening. Why? I view the “spiritual”, among other things, as a matter of energetics. Without the breath of the spirit in their sails, most people do not have enough oxygen to scale to the highest levels of cognitive complexity. It was easy for Emerson to dismiss “foolish consistency” and embrace paradox, because Emerson absolutely manifested the witness. For anyone not there yet, paradox will be a massive energetic burden and too much weight to carry. So yeah … you can hit the books to climb the MHC scale without any self-awareness at all. But the right practice will get you there far more reliably. See John Vervaeke on detailed theories on how this works.

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I’m just kind of riffing on your words right now, let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d like me to respond to.

This is actually a wonderful metaphor. When talking about how to locate witness consciousness in the integral model, Ken often says it’s “the paper the quadrants are written upon”. And of course, the stages/altitudes themselves exist within the four quadrants, so the analogy tracks :slight_smile:

So maybe we could say the gross state is represented by the physical ink (or the liquid crystals in your LCD screen), the subtle state is represented by the signifiers on the screen (and the ideas that they correspond to), and the causal state is the underlying unseen organizing principles and creative patterns that give rise to those signifiers.

my geographically-oriented theories will now adopt the terminology of a “lateral” or “geo-spatial” dimension for the altitudes to allow for cross-civilizational comparison of altitude content. (What Freinacht means by “cultural code”).

Yes! I often wonder if this sort of spatial reasoning is inherent to vision logic thinking (“spatial reasoning” already sounds like a euphemism for “vision logic”) or if it’s just one particular mode of vision logic thinking. Either way, it seems like prepositions become as important to integral thinking as pronouns are to postmodern thinking :wink:

Which is also interesting, because it shows how our cognitive intelligence is always influenced by various other intelligences, such as our aesthetic and kinesthetic intelligence, both of which will influence how we visualize these sorts of things in our own mind.

  • the origin of “spirit” as a symbol is complete freedom. From the Hebrew ruach, by way of the Greek pneuma, through the Latin spiritus. Vervaeke and Gebser have quite a bit to say about this, as do any number of Biblical scholars.

Ken often suggests multiple definitions of the word “spiritual”. I am still only barely familiar with Vervaeke’s work, but I wonder which of these he would resonate the most with:

  • A spiritual state or peak experience (e.g., nature mysticism).
  • The highest levels in any developmental line (e.g., transrational cognition, transpersonal self-identity, etc.).
  • A separate developmental line itself (e.g., Fowler’s stages of faith).
  • A particular attitude or orientation, like openness, wisdom, or compassion, which can be present at virtually any state or stage.
  • The always-already, ever-present condition of this and every moment
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My own sense, is this is because the lower-right quadrant “life conditions” that require teal solutions have only recently emerged.

In other words, before the 20th century, people would have hit the wall cognitively somewhere around the level of rationalism. Some individuals would push into postmodern thinking, but for the most part, they would be few and far between, which would prevent postmodern ideas from gaining traction and exerting serious influence. And then the media age of the 20th century suddenly made all of these different “truths” and “narratives” available to us, which began to confront us with our unexamined assumptions of orange universals, and gave us an entirely new set of life conditions that only postmodern thinking could make sense of.

I think something similar is happening now — not just with our really big and global hyper-problems like climate change and sustainability, but also with the acceleration of things like Artificial Intelligence, which is causing more people in the mainstream to ask the sorts of “luxury” questions that integral folks have been asking for years — the nature of consciousness and its relationship to complexity, evolutionary emergence, cross-paradigmatic thinking, big picture views of reality, etc.

As usual, I think our surrounding Lower-Right environment is the primary driver of our collective evolution. And once the conditions of that environment changes, it forces new adaptations in all other quadrants — new ways of thinking in the UL, new kinds of behavior in the UR, and new ways of relating in the LL. Which then creates new changes in the LR, and back around the bases we go :slight_smile:

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Feels like a jam band taking shape … and I’m here for it! Freestylin’ is the way to play!

Vervaeke’s 4Ps, 3Rs model hinges mainly (my view) on the first P - participatory knowledge, which anchors the 3Rs of recursive relevance realization. When Vervaeke talks about reverse engineering enlightenment, he is focused on the anti-BS program of not fooling yourself with faulty perceptual filters. Those filters are adaptive, up to a point, but then they become limiting, distorting, and BS-inducing. Participatory is a very immersive, practice-oriented knowledge, allied to shamanism or very experiential types of spiritual practice.

So it seems to me that Vervaeke is working tightly and deliberately at the second-tier jumping off point. But everything about perspectival filters (BS and non-BS) has a lot of applications to AI theory also, so it’s very in the moment.

As far as spatial metaphors are concerned … I may be having a Gebserian aperspectival breakout with time presentiation and systatic visualization. Or maybe I’m just into network theory and data visualization, so mesh networks of high complexity and dimensionality are just the ocean I swim in. Or maybe it’s both, because as you say, thanks to AI and so forth, teal-level complexity will just be the normal adult package going forward.

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I’m definitely interested in discussing this with you Corey. I imagine you could do some sort of presentation on this and a few attendees could ask questions. Or if you just want a smaller group or a one-on-one with someone to bounce ideas back and forth, send me a message. I’m pretty sure you have my email but PM through this site works as well.

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One of my favorites. I like it to contrast it with “The Sun Also Rises”. Which of the two I prefer depends on if I am more in a wintry central European mood of Kundera’s youth or a sunny Spanish Spring mood. They both address the banality of different lifestyles, but with slightly different flavors.