Life/Work - Issue 39

For nearly a decade, I have believed that when it comes to the subject of human development, my friend and mentor Ken Wilber is the most comprehensive thinker alive. Happily, the word finally seems to be getting around. Wilber now has devoted fans ranging from Al Gore to Michael Crichton, Daniel Yankelovich to Deepak Chopra, Huston Smith to Warren Bennis.

In a confusing and complex era, when nothing seems connected to anything else, Wilber, 51, has managed to pull together under one capacious umbrella a vast amount of data from ordinarily warring worldviews, contradictory developmental theories, and disparate academic disciplines. Not content to synthesize the work of leading thinkers from more than a dozen fields, Wilber has laid out a genuinely new school of thought, creating an original formulation out of ideas that had long seemed irreconcilable. His goal has been to create an "integral" vision, which he describes as "finding a more comprehensive view . . . that makes legitimate room for art, morals, science, and religion, and doesn't merely attempt to reduce them all to one's favorite slice of the cosmic pie."

After more than 25 years of writing a stream of books for a passionate but narrow audience, while living reclusively in Boulder, Colorado, Wilber is now beginning to raise his public profile. His newest book, audaciously titled A Theory of Everything (Shambhala Publications, 2000) will be released this fall. In the past two years, he has published four other books, each one advancing some aspect of the "integral" vision that he is creating. During the past year, Shambhala Publications has published an eight-volume set of Wilber's collected works, with more volumes on the way.

Wilber also recently launched the Integral Institute, which aims to bring together broad thinkers from a wide range of fields. So far, there are nine branches: art, business, ecology, education, law, medicine, politics, psychology, and religion. Most of them have a minimum of 40 members so far.

Wilber has spent many of the past 28 years trying to create new maps of human development, not by privileging or dismissing a particular school of thinking, but by connecting them all to a bigger and more inclusive vision. His early work, for example, sought to find common ground between developmental psychology and the meditative/contemplative traditions. Wilber wrote his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, when he was 23 years old and had just dropped out of graduate school, where he had been studying biochemistry. The book made the case that our growth and development unfolds in stages that have the potential to extend beyond those that are ordinarily recognized by Western psychology.

Expanding on maps drawn by such psychologists as Erik Erikson and Jane Loevinger, Wilber argued that it was possible not just to reach a healthy state of individuality but ultimately to develop a broader spiritual identity that includes -- and transcends -- the personal self. Echoing psychologist Howard Gardner's view that "the whole course of human development can be viewed as a continuing decline in egocentrism," Wilber extended his own map to the highest levels of spiritual development. In those domains, he argued, egocentricity finally dissolves. The experience of the self as the center of the universe gives way to a palpable sense of oneness.

Although Wilber got almost no mainstream recognition for his early work, he continued to apply his approach to fields ranging from physics to biology, anthropology to sociology, art to aesthetics. Over time, he began to wonder how the apparently contradictory "truths" in each of those fields fit together. "At one point," Wilber writes in A Theory of Everything, "I had over 200 hierarchies written out on legal pads lying all over the floor, trying to figure out how to fit them together." Ultimately, it dawned on him that the various developmental hierarchies fell into four categories, or "quadrants."

Any comprehensive approach to development, Wilber posits, recognizes an interior dimension that is subjective and dependent on introspection. It also recognizes an exterior dimension, which can be quantified objectively and measured empirically. At the same time, development takes place not just at an individual level but also within a social or cultural context. Thus, Wilber's four quadrants are composed of "individual interior" (upper left); "individual exterior" (upper right); "collective interior" (lower left); and "collective exterior" (lower right). For simplicity's sake, Wilber often condenses the four quadrants into what he calls "the big three": "I" (upper left), "We" (lower left), and "It" (right).

Even as theory, this is exhilarating stuff, simply because it organizes and explains so much. Over the years, I have found myself returning to Wilber and his work whenever I feel confused about how contradictory ideas or systems relate to one another.