PNTV: The Essential Ken Wilber by Ken Wilber (#36)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do a great author, Ken Wilber. We have Ken Wilber. This is actually the Essential Ken Wilber, one of the many books that I used to draw from for this note. So we've got Ken Wilber six page PDF with, I don't know, half dozen, eight of my favorite big ideas from Ken's thinking. So really quickly, first of all, to get capture Ken's energy and integral philosophy in 10 minutes is essentially impossible. But here's the big picture. So Ken Wilber, one of the leading philosophers alive today, he is an integral philosopher. And the idea is that if you look at the eras that we've moved through, from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution to what is it, the Information Age to today, they would suggest his institute, the Integral Institute, would suggest we're entering the Integral Era. It's an era where we're integrating all these amazing ideas, we're integrating cultures. It's just an extraordinary time. When we look forward 250 years at today, it's very likely that today in this era will be called the Integral Era. So. So he's synthesizing all these ideas from these great teachers and creating models that we can use to apply his Integral philosophy. That's a really quick nutshell of what Integral Philosophy is all about. I'm not going to go into details right now on some of his models, but I do want to share some of my favorite big ideas that I've picked up at their seminars and events and stuff like that that I think are most directly applicable to our lives right now. So the first big idea that I'm going to talk about right now is this idea of spiral dynamics, which is only a facet of the Integral Philosophy, but one that I found really, really helpful for me. And it's based on the work of Don Beck and Chris Cowan, who adapted the work of Claire Graves, who I believe was associated with Abraham Maslow. But this idea is that different cultures and individuals go through stages of development, right? And they give colors to the memes. That's what they call the stages of development. And you start out at one meme, red meme, right. Actually, you don't start out there. You got memes before that. But for our intents purposes, let's just say red is the first one. Red is kind of like terrible twos in an individual or it's a culture before there were any laws. Right. Kind of barbarians and just warring tribes and stuff like that. That's kind of a red meme. Then you move up from there and you have blue. Blue is captured by the idea of Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. You have laws, right? In our adolescence, we're conforming to society. We're doing what needs to be done in modern culture. It's fundamentalism, it's fundamentalist Christians, it's fundamentalist Judaism. Its fundamental is Buddhism and anyone. Veganism. I used to say I was vegan Jellico, when I was vegan, you know, I was just. It was all about, this is the only way you can do it. That's kind of the blue meme. Then we move beyond that into the orange meme, which is more rational and scientific and academic, right? So with the orange meme, you say, I'm not so sure that Moses part of the Red Sea, or if it's important for me to believe that, I can see it as a metaphor rather than the absolute truth that the blue meme sees it from. Now, orange meme is more Wall street and academia, science, capitalism, stuff like that. You move beyond that into the green meme. Green is more pluralism. It's environmentalism, it's all these things kind of seeing unity among everyone, the oneness, all that good stuff. So these are some of the memes that we go through. Now what the theorists say is that these are first tier levels of development. And everyone at the first tier, whatever meme you're in, you hate everyone else. You're 100% right and they're 100% wrong. So green meme people look at orange meme people, corporations, for example, and they say, you're destroying the planet. Corporations are inherently evil. And the orange meme says to green, well, you know, cut your hair, get a job, you hippie. We need business in order to function. You guys are just idiots. And then blue meme looks at everybody and says, you're all going to hell because you don't believe in my chosen savior, whether it's Allah or Jesus or Buddha or whoever, right? And then red meme looks at everybody and says, f you, I'm going to blow you up. Kind of a suicide bomber approach. Now, first tier, everyone disagrees with everyone else. Everyone thinks they're 100% right, and the other people are 100% wrong. And the idea of part of integral philosophy is to move beyond that into a second tier level of consciousness. The spiral guys call it yellow, I believe the Ken and their group call it teal. But you move into the second tier where you can say, yes, and it's no longer either or. You can say, well, of course we want to take care of the environment and have a business that's based on love and compassion. And we want to have a good business. Free markets are incredible. What they do to create wealth and to create prosperity in the world is incredible. How do we merge it with green and consciousness raising stuff? Right. We of course we want rules of the blue meme. And of course at times we need to respond with aggression to certain situations. Longer conversation there. But this is the idea to say yes. And that's the biggest thing I've gotten from Ken Wilber and his work is to say yes. And in my life, Ken says no one is smart enough to be 100% wrong. Isn't that amazing? No one's smart enough to be 100% right, of course. And no one's smart enough to be 100% wrong. There's always a partial truth. And as we elevate our consciousness, we want to see the partial truth and realize that we don't own the whole truth. It's a really big idea. We're going to talk about a lot going forward, but that's spiral dynamics. I have a lot of fun with that. It's just again, a facet of integral theory. But I think the yes and we get from that holding both is a really big idea. So look into your life and see if you're either or about things and how can you become more. Yes and about it. Big idea. Let's see, what else do we want to talk about? States and stages. This is huge. Again, I have Ken to thank for this. Here's the idea. Let's say you watch the Secret or. Or you go to an inspiring weekend workshop or a yoga retreat and you just feel plugged in or Burning man or you have some drug experience. You have a state experience of being on fire. You see things clearly. The world is just. Everything has come together like that you tasted whatever it was that you feel really connected to. Right? That's a state experience. Now that's great that you had a state experience that was different than your normal level of being and you saw what was possible. But what Ken and other great teachers say is that's nice, but you've got to translate that state experience into traits. You've got to make that state experience a stage of your development. Right? So when we have a spiritual epiphany or an awakening of any kind, that's really cool. But too often a week later we've fizzled and we've Gone back to where we were. We've gone back to our stage of development. So it's very important that we diligently, patiently, persistently and playfully develop habits that allow us to move our stage of development slowly but surely up. So that those great states of experience that we've all had become who we are, becomes a trait. It becomes a stage of our development. And you can only do that through diligent practice. So think about how you orient yourself to life. Are you going after the state experiences, even people? I meditate daily. I don't know. I'm like 550 days into it now. Haven't missed a day of an hour in the morning. Now I'm doing 15 minutes at night. But I don't do my meditation for the state experience I might have in the meditation. I do it because I'm becoming a more grounded, spacious human being. And I know that over time, my stage of development is going to go up. And we're talking months and years and decades, not seconds or minutes of some state experience. So translating the beauty of the state into a trait and stage is huge. As you can tell, I get excited about this. I can go off forever. We will do a lot more on this. So the final big idea here that I want to talk about is the idea of the integral sage. So we're not going to have time here. But one of the big things that I want to talk more about is this idea of transcending our ego but including it. Too many teachers, in my opinion, want to transcend and exclude it. And Ken talks about this beautifully. This passage that I have here in the note is one of the most underlined asterisks sections I've had in any book. And he captures beautifully the idea that we don't want to transcend and exclude our ego. First of all, that's impossible. And secondly, it just doesn't make any sense. And it's not an effective way to live. We want to transcend our ego. So we're not just our ego, but we want to keep our ego in place and plug it into something bigger than ourselves. Plug it into source. Really big idea. We're running out of time here. So check out the note. Check out Ken's stuff for more and look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have fun. See you.