text/TheKenShow-1601.txt

Ken, how are you, man?  Well, Ken, my friend, good to see you.  Yeah, good to see you. First episode of the new year, the new decade.  Yep.  And this is going to be a fun one.  So, you know, in previous episodes, Ken, we have, we've basically done sort of this extended guided tour through all the various elements of your integral model.  So, you know, a few months ago, we did a really, really fun trip through the stages of development using film clips to sort of demonstrate, you know, the main values and leadership styles associated with each stage.  We did another episode shortly thereafter called The Many Ways We Grow, where we looked at multiple experiences.  And then we talked about states of consciousness in an episode called The Varieties of Integral Spiritual Experience.  Right.  So all of this, basically, I thought today would be a really good opportunity for us to talk about another really, really critical element of integral, which is the four quadrants.  Yeah.  And this is going to be, you know, I've sort of had quadrants on the brain lately, Ken.  You know, I've been doing this.  This is the part where I kind of shamelessly plug, but I've been doing a lot of...  Woodworking in the last, really, last year, I've been getting, you know, really, really into it.  Right.  And I just started creating, I'll actually show, these four quadrant portraits that I've been carving.  So this one is made out of maple with bronze paint on there.  And it's been so much fun making these.  And I just want everyone who's watching to know these are available.  If you want to buy one, you can do that.  I am doing these for commission.  So if you want a custom piece, just...  Send me an email.  Corey at IntegralLife.com.  C-O-R-E-Y at IntegralLife.com.  And I'll be happy to work with you.  And you can have your own special four quadrant plaque to put on your wall.  So we can end the shameless plugging.  But, yeah, so the four quadrants, Ken, this is huge.  And, you know, this is obviously a topic we could spend the next 12 hours unpacking because there's just so much to talk about.  And, of course, you know, the four quadrants.  When it comes to your work, this is one of your most well-known contributions.  Yeah.  It was huge when you first rolled out the four quadrants several decades ago.  Represented the fourth major stage, I believe, of your work.  So I think we're going to have a lot of fun today kind of talking about this and unpacking this.  You know, you've said before in the past that the universe is not fundamentally made of things like atoms or molecules.  Holes or parts or anything like that.  It's fundamentally made of perspectives.  So today we're going to talk about some of those perspectives, particularly the perspectives that give rise to the four quadrants of the cosmos.  Well, actually, that's going to be one of the questions.  Do the perspectives give rise to the quadrants?  Do the quadrants give rise to the perspectives?  That's going to be, I think, something fun for us to explore together.  Right.  So, Ken, I was thinking to begin, maybe you could give us sort of a brief introduction of the four quadrants.  The major quadrants.  The major polarities that they represent.  And I was actually hoping you might be able to kind of start from the beginning in terms of your own personal story.  You know, really beginning with the day you discovered the four quadrants.  The day sort of the whole universe came together and surrounded by legal pads.  It's a cool story.  I was hoping you could share that with us.  Yeah.  Well, I had started out with this sort of basic.  Integral orientation, trying to figure out how different systems fit together and particularly how different systems, different disciplines, different fields that had to do with our own personal growth and development, but also just in general across the board.  And so my first book, for example, Spectrum of Consciousness.  I had.  I had become in late adolescence.  I'd become really interested in the various forms of growth that there were out there.  And that included therapeutic growth and included meditative systems, Zen, psychoanalysis, all of that, because they all claim to somehow help make human beings better.  But they clearly seem to disagree.  They clearly seem to disagree.  They clearly seem to disagree with each other.  So a very simplistic example is for psychoanalysis, you have people that are unhappy, neurotic, suffering, and so on.  And in order for them to get better, they have to create a whole and healthy ego.  They have to create ego strength.  And when they do that, then their neurosis will tend to die down.  For something like Zen Buddhism, the idea is you have to get rid of your ego.  So those.  Those don't seem to fit together very well.  So I was, I began looking at pretty much all the various systems of growth, therapy, enlightenment, awakening around the world and started sort of just notice certain family resemblances and how those would kind of fit together.  And one of the really important sort of breakthrough.  their insights for me at that time,  was that consciousness wasn't just this thing.  You know, we have consciousness, we don't, but that it really was much more like a rainbow,  that there was a whole spectrum of different colors, different bands, different waves of consciousness.  And there were, in terms of the overall kind of families of improvement,  consciousness improvement, growth, development.  They turned out to be around six or seven major different schools  that you could sort of group these different things together,  the psychoanalytic, the humanistic, transpersonal,  liberation, Zen, Vedanta, that kind of thing.  And it dawned on me that there were also around  six or seven major levels of consciousness,  six or seven major bands in the spectrum of consciousness.  And each of these major different types of growth  or therapy or realization was really applying  to one of the different levels of consciousness.  And so there was a sense in which all of them  had important things to tell us,  but they were just dealing with different bands  in the spectrum of consciousness.  And so I was 23.  At that time, I wrote that up as my first book  called The Spectrum of Consciousness.  And then I started to look at just development  and generalize, curious how these actually developed.  And originally, I took what was a very, very common assumption  at the time, which was a bit of a romantic view,  which is that when we talk about enlightenment  as sort of being, realizing there's a ground of all being  and therefore, you know, you're not going to be able to do that.  You're not going to be able to do that.  You're not going to be able to do that.  You're not going to be able to do that.  You're not going to be able to do that.  Realizing that you yourself are one with everything.  And then we look at the development of human individuals.  We find in the first several months of life,  the infant feels that it's one with its environment.  It really can't differentiate,  can't tell where its body stops and the chair starts.  So there's this kind of indissociation.  And it was very easy to see that  as like an early,  immature version of unity, consciousness.  And then we broke away from that and formed this separate,  rational ego.  And that was suffering and neurosis and all that kind of horrible  misery for human beings.  But then if we kept growing,  we could regain that original unity state only now in a conscious fashion.  And that was enlightenment or realization or so on.  And so I actually started,  writing up some people that started a journal based on my work,  the journal is called Revision Journal.  And I had become involved in that.  And so I was writing up a book on just this whole developmental scheme.  And it was called the Atman Project.  But the more I sort of thought about those early,  apparently unity stages and then the ultimate enlightened  divine unity,  ultimate unity consciousness,  something just didn't quite,  something was wrong about that.  It wasn't totally clear to me.  So I decided I would go back and just look at history on the whole,  because you find in a whole lot of cultures,  the idea of these myths of an Eden,  that human beings are once sort of whole and unified.  And then there was a fall from Eden into our separate,  isolated,  fragmented,  partial suffering state.  But then we could regain that paradise with enlightenment,  realization,  metamorphosis,  satori and so on.  And so I started,  I started doing that.  And the long and short of that one was it became really  clear that these early stages of unity,  um,  and I'll go,  I'll go back to the infant today's infant as an example,  if we use just as an example,  and I'm not a total fan of the Christian version,  but everybody tends to know this one.  So the major sort of stages of development are matter to body,  to mind,  to soul,  to spirit.  And that's generally referred to as a great chain of being.  It's more like a great nest of being,  because these,  you know,  these are not just rigid rungs that envelope each other.  They're not just rigid rungs in a ladder.  But what became really,  really clear about this early infantile state of unity is that what the infant  was one with,  it wasn't one with matter and body and mind and soul and spirit.  Those,  it wasn't one with all of those.  It literally was one essentially with just the material environment.  Um,  so it could indeed,  um,  have this sense of oneness with this immediate material environment,  but it didn't have mental concepts emerged.  It didn't have a luminosity of soul.  It didn't have a radical infinite embrace of spirit.  And if you look at Piaget,  for example,  when he was studying this early stage and he noted that the infant's awareness  was just really,  really tracking nothing but material things,  it wasn't even tracking bodily emotional impulses and stuff like that.  And so Piaget said quote,  the self is here material,  so to speak.  And so that's easy to confuse with an ultimate unity of the entire one with  the entire great chain.  But it's actually just a unity with the lowest level and a great chain.  So it's a unity,  but it's the smallest possible unity you can ever have.  And so that's not something that you want to recapture  when you've developed your body and your mind  and you're moving into soul and you're trying to realize spirit.  You're not trying to get back down.  It's just an unconscious, unreflexive, nonverbal, pre-personal, material self.  That's not what you want.  And so that's the way I then saw,  I could see that in the whole unfolding of the human race at large.  And so I wrote a book intentionally called Up From Eden,  that being the point.  Now, what was happening,  I went on to just sort of continue to expand these kinds of things.  My training itself was in what we would end up calling the upper right quadrant,  atoms, molecules, cells.  It's organisms.  My graduate degrees were in biochemistry.  And from college, I had a dual bachelor's,  one in biology, one in chemistry.  So that was my training.  But here I was looking at interiors and individuals  and then at interiors and collectives or cultures and humanity on the whole.  And I always had an enormous sympathy with systems theory.  And what I didn't realize at any of those times  was that those are actually what we call the four quadrants.  So about a dozen books later,  and one of the easily most significant events in my life  was meeting Treya, marrying her,  10 days.  10 days.  10 days.  And after we were married, we discovered she had cancer.  And we spent the next five years fighting cancer.  I did write that up in a book called Grace and Grid,  which is now a major motion picture.  Coming up this year.  In a few months.  So we'll keep people posted.  They can go see that.  And so then when I sat down and had kind of recovered from her death  and started talking,  I started to write.  I hadn't written anything for really about eight or nine years  because I was just constantly taking care of Treya.  So I sat down to write this book.  And it was clearly,  I just had an enormous number of things in mind.  And I sat down, I wrote the first paragraph.  And by the time I got to the end of that paragraph,  I knew something was just really wrong.  And what had happened is that,  during that almost decade period,  which is the late 80s and into early 90s,  postmodernism had continued to infiltrate academia.  And on the one hand, postmodernism was a positive development.  It was called postmodern because it came after the previous modern stage of development.  And the modern stage,  which we call orange,  was generally marked by rational cognition.  And it had moved from the previous stage,  our amber mythic membership stage,  which was ethnocentric,  it had moved up to world centric.  And this was only starting in around 16, 1700.  And world centric was a profoundly,  totally different type of moral perspective,  among other things for human beings and different type of identity.  In ethnocentric stages,  we were always identified with a particular group or groups.  So we were Christians.  And if you were Christian in the middle ages,  then you had rights.  And when you die,  you're going to go to heaven and live on the right hand of God forever.  But there are no Hindus.  And heaven,  there are no Buddhists in heaven.  They don't count.  The enlightenment philosophers looked at that and they said,  wait, that's not right.  Every single person worldwide has equal rights by the simple virtue of being born a human.  And so at that point,  instead of just your special group getting rights,  with,  with the world centric stages of modernity,  we attempt to treat all people fairly regardless of race,  color,  sex,  gender,  ethnicity,  or creed.  And that was radically new.  And so it was,  it was,  that was one of the reasons that even though all the previous cultures essentially had slaves,  um,  including even the cultures that are,  that introduced the great paths of enlightenment awaking and waking up as Thomas Sowell's history of slavery put it,  quote,  Buddhist monasteries had slaves,  Christian monasteries had slaves,  pretty much every culture did.  And then in,  I've mentioned this before,  but then in about a 100 year period from 1770 to 1870,  slavery was outlawed in every single rational industrial country in the world.  First time anything like that had happened.  The modern sciences were all invented during that period because the major form of cognition is switched from mythic to rational.  Um,  and so this,  this was,  um,  so a profound change.  Rational,  orange,  modern rational tended to believe in universal truths.  So there wasn't Hindu chemistry and Jewish chemistry,  there was just chemistry.  And these universal truths were indeed what drove the study of and creation of a lot of modern sciences.  Those two major stages,  the ethnocentric special rights,  um,  mythic membership stage,  which marked off,  for example,  all the way through the middle ages and then the modern,  uh,  rational universal world centric stage.  These were as political orientations,  the people supporting the existing ethnocentric state of affairs,  they felt those needed to be conserved.  And so they were conservatives,  but then there was this newfangled group of people that at that time they were so new,  they didn't even have a political name or political philosophy.  So they had to come up with a name.  For their political philosophy.  And they call themselves liberal and liberal came from Liberty.  And that's what the liberal was off.  It was offering was freedom for everybody,  a universal freedom,  hence freeing the slaves,  those two political parties.  Um,  and as I,  I,  I,  I've also mentioned,  um,  in the French assembly of the time,  the old,  the old conservatives sat on the right hand of the king and these newfangled liberals sat on the left hand of the king and those terms stuck left and right left progressive liberal right conservative ethnocentric.  Those two are sort of at each other's throats managed to live together pretty much until the sixties when a yet new significant stage emerge,  which was the green postmodern pluralistic,  Graves called it relativistic stage and there they weren't so much interested in universal values because all values to become relativistic and and because they were all relativistic,  you really couldn't say just one of them is true and another is false.  So you have this notion of egalitarianism.  All values are equally important and you can't just choose one.  And because of that,  it's not just that one culture had has it right.  All cultures have to be included and given equal significance.  So we have multiculturalism,  these ideas.  Again,  there are some truths to them.  They were true,  but partial.  And part of the problems is that this radical egalitarianism,  they started to,  uh,  look at all hierarchies as being demonic,  as being the source of oppression,  evil suffering,  and there are no good hierarchies.  They're all bad.  You have to flatten hierarchies everywhere.  Now,  the problem with that is that they confuse two very,  very different types of hierarchies.  There are dominator hierarchies and they're all the bad things the postmodernists said about them.  And then the dominator,  hierarchy,  the higher up you go,  the more people you can oppress,  the more people you can hurt.  So if you have somebody like Stalin at the top of the dominator hierarchy,  then he can murder around 60 million people in a Gulag archipelago.  Adolf Hitler,  top of his dominator hierarchy murders 13 million people around 7 million intellectuals,  gypsies,  gays,  et cetera.  And about 6 million,  Jews.  These are horrible things.  But then there are growth hierarchies and growth hierarchies are exactly the opposite of dominator hierarchies.  The higher you go in the growth hierarchy,  the more inclusive you are.  So there's an overwhelming amount of evidence,  for example,  that individuals as they're born and then grow and develop their identities continue to grow and expand.  So they start out identified with just themselves,  and then grow and expand.  And they can't even take the role of other.  They can't realize that people have perspectives different from theirs.  But then if they keep growing,  they'll expand their identity to entire groups and they identify with those entire groups.  And so that's called ethnocentric.  And if a person stays stuck at ethnocentric,  identify with just their own group,  then it can become ethnocentric in a negative,  unethical way.  You can become racist or sexist or homophobic or xenophobic and so on.  But if you keep growing,  then you grow into world centric.  And that's where you want,  you try attempt to treat all people fairly,  regardless of race,  color,  sex or creed.  And then you can even go into like Cosmo centric and integral stages of development.  So part of the problem,  and this is,  please,  that was all a preface up to how I hit upon the quadrants.  One of the words that I had used in the first paragraph that was very clearly problematic is that in that roughly 10 year period that I hadn't been writing,  I'd done about a dozen books up to that time.  And they were all looking at developmental,  by the way,  the,  um,  Arthur Kessler's term for growth hierarchies is what he called whole archies because they increase wholeness.  And what happens in any growth whole archie is that the whole of one stage becomes part of the whole of the next stage.  And then the whole of that stage becomes part of an even bigger whole of the next stage and so on.  So that's why they get more and more and more expansive.  So I had been writing books about growth,  whole archies in a lot of these different areas.  So at one project in the interior of an individual up for me on a culture and,  and so on.  But as I,  as I was writing about hierarchy in the first paragraph,  it dawned on me that that would get a really bad reception in today's academic world.  And that there was something not right about that.  And so I looked at all of the growth whole archies that I had studied and there were well over a hundred of them.  Um,  I mean,  just even in developmental psychology in a book called integral psychology,  I look at over a hundred models of developmental psychology and do a meta analysis on them to determine what the most common,  uh,  factors are in their stages of growth and development.  But I had all sorts of other whole archies.  I had linguistic development,  stellar development,  biological development,  um,  just the broad evolutionary sequence itself from quarks to atoms to molecules to cells to organisms.  That's a growth whole archie.  So I took those yellow,  legal pads,  which everybody knows.  Um,  and I would just write one growth whole archie on each sheet of paper,  tear the sheet of paper off,  write another one on the next,  tear it off.  So I had well over a hundred pages and I had them all over the floor and the house and it covered just about the entire floor of my house.  And all I would do is,  you know,  there's somehow they,  they seem to be all essentially in some broad sense similar,  but there were some really strong differences.  So,  I mean,  even something like atoms,  molecules,  cells,  organisms,  and up the biological tree of increasing complexity and so on.  And then there were stages like Gene Gebser's worldviews,  archaic,  the magic,  the mythic,  the mental,  the integral.  And it's like,  well,  how did,  how do those fit together?  There were Lenski's stages of techno economic development,  uh,  foraging,  horticultural,  agrarian,  industrial,  informational.  But how,  how are these things actually going to fit together?  So I,  every morning I would get up and literally I would just spend the day walking through the house,  looking at all of these whole archies.  And the next day I'd get up and do the same thing.  And I would do that for weeks.  And the first sort of breakthrough came because up that point I'd studied,  um,  a huge number of the world's more sophisticated metaphysical systems.  And one of the common themes that showed up in a lot of them,  um,  was the notion that a universe comes into being when subject and object are differentiated.  So that had always made a certain kind of sense to me.  Um,  and so I went through and looked at these 100 plus,  uh,  whole archies and it became very clear that about half of them were dealing with subject and object.  Growth and development and about half of them are dealing with what was clearly objective growth and development.  And so that seemed to work enormously.  And that sort of gave me one distinction between these,  these various whole archies.  But then it was the second one that was a bit harder,  um,  and took me a bit longer.  So day in,  day out,  walking through looking in them,  walking through,  looking,  looking at them.  And then finally it dawned on me if you are looking at something like,  let's say Maslow's needs whole archie,  that's clearly defining needs in an individual.  Now,  of course other individuals can have that and it can be shared and all that.  But the,  the needs whole archie itself is just looking at your individual growth needs as you grow and develop.  So that was an interior,  that was a subjective that was on the subjective pile and in Gebser's worldviews,  those are also subjective.  They were interior consciousness,  awareness views.  Um,  but they were collective.  They weren't looking just individual.  They were looking at what whole cultures had in common.  And of course individuals could sort of be higher or lower,  but the overall,  the overall cultures themselves tended to have the standard organizing principles.  If it was magic that tended to be magic cultures.  If it was mythic,  tended to be mythic.  If it was mental rational,  tended to be the rational enlightenment type cultures and so on.  And so what we have here was two fundamental distinctions.  Well,  I looked through all of the others and they also divided fairly,  equally into individual whole archies and collective or singular and plural.  So if we put this all together,  then we had,  um,  facing this,  uh,  we had the left hand quadrants,  which were subjective or interior and in the right hand were objective or exterior.  And then the upper were individual and the lower were collective.  So we had the inside and the outside of an individual and a group.  And the more I looked at those,  the more it really became clear that these were extremely fundamental distinctions needed to get a universe up and running.  And so maybe in a bit we can talk about whether I see these as,  um,  in evolutionary givens, or something that just showed up very, very quickly at the beginning  of evolution. They were clearly fundamental. And I believe essentially they go all the way up,  all the way down. So what we have is, and these names come just from the way I happened to write  the quadrants down the first time. So on the left hand, I did indeed have the interiors.  So there's the interior of the individual, subjective domain, and then there's the interior  of the collective, an intersubjective domain, and then there is the, well, interiors on the way  you're looking at on this side, and then exteriors over here, and  There were the individual exteriors, atoms, molecules, cell, organism, that kind of thing.  And then there were the collective inter-objective.  These are objects.  These are inter-objective systems.  So these turned out to be absolutely central.  And they tended to show up all over the place.  Although nobody had ever seen sort of this underlying structure that was giving rise to all these things.  And I'll talk about a few of them in just a minute.  But they're bloody everywhere.