Ken Wilber has written a great new book where he goes into Finding Radical Wholeness.
Waking Up, Growing Up, Cleaning Up, Showing Up and Opening Up
Waking up explores what we truly are in essence. This Waking Up is similar to what has been known throughout our history as awakening, enlightenment, cessation, and many other names.
Wilber speaks about 4 additional fields that help us find wholeness.
These are Growing Up; going through the naturally occurring psychological development stages, Cleaning Up; doing inner child and shadow work, Showing Up; understand that reality can be seen from four different quadrants and Opening Up; there are multiple lines of intelligence we can open up to and develop.
In this interview with Buddha at The Gas Pump, Ken Wilber gives an insight in his way of thinking and exploring consciousness.
Waking Up
His Waking Up model has 5 stages and is based upon the progressive stages found in most religions. His model follows mostly Vedic and Buddhist traditions. He distinguishes the gross body which relates to everyday awake consciousness, the subtle body which relates to the dream state consciousness, the causal body which relates to the deep sleep state of consciousness, Turiya which relates to the True Self/The Witness state of consciousness and Turiyatita which relates to an ultimate Non-dual/One Taste state of consciousness.
Growing Up
In his Growing Up model Wilber goes into how individuals and groups go through psychological developmental stages and one stage needs to be fully integrated before one can grow into the next stage.
In a very simple model this growing up of an individual goes from egocentric/self/me to ethnocentric/tribal/us, to world-centric/all of humanity/all of us to kosmo-centric/ultimate Unity Awareness.
In a more extended version more stages of psychological development can be discerned. People start at the lowest level and once they have fully lived through that stage they can grow to the next stage and start integrating that, etc.
If you want to learn more about the Growing Up stages of Psychological Development have a look at Spiral Dynamics from Clare W. Graves.
Cleaning Up
When it comes to Cleaning Up, this refers to dealing with the shadow and doing inner child work. Unfortunately organizations of all kind, including religious ones of which we expect most, can have problems with sexual misconduct, financial exploitation, guru’s that turn into raging egomaniacs etc. Cleaning Up is here to make sure those problems are minimized. And that our Waking Up and Growing Up happens in a balanced way.
In this video Ken Wilber talks about Waking Up, Growing Up and Cleaning Up and how they work together.
Showing Up
In Showing Up, Ken Wilber points out that reality arises through 4 different quadrants at the same time. It is important to acknowledge all of these quadrants since ignoring one or more of these can give very lopsided results and can be damaging on both an individual and a societal level.
On the left side there is the inside perspective from the individual (Upper Left) and from the group (Lower Left) so how an individual or a group of people experiences their world. This is also called the Subjective side.
On the the right side there is the external viewpoint that can be measured in the outside world. And here things can be looked at from an individual (Upper Right) and a group (Lower Right level).
The model can be a bit complicated to understand in the beginning but these illustrations might give some insight. Also this video gives some extra insight.
Opening Up
In Opening Up, Ken Wilber shows that there are multiple fields of intelligence that we can develop. He pairs each with a question to open up to that field of intelligence.
Radical Wholeness
When people focus on all these different fields we can truly evolve our consciousness to greater levels both on an individual and on collective levels. And the more free and wise people become the more inner peace we will know within our individual and collective lives.
Related articles:
-) The Human Experience – Beingness is Worthiness
-) From (mistaken) Mind Identification to Open Hearted Awareness
-) A Scientific Cross-cultural and Cross-religious Approach to Fundamental Wellbeing
-) Awakening & Liberation