Ken Wilber and Definitions of “Spiritual”: Or, How I Made Sense of a Recent Spiritual Experience
Ken Wilber’s Four Definitions of “Spiritual” or “Spirituality”
I wanted to write a post tonight to talk about something that is often avoided, denied, overlooked, repressed, or (worst of all, and probably most endemic) misinterpreted: that is, what we might call religious or spiritual experiences. More specifically, I wanted to write about my own recent spiritual experience, and try to come to terms with its meaning. For my part, I prefer the term “spiritual experiences,” because I tend to think religion, or at least normative religion, can be very conventional and even somehow actively opposed, consciously or unconsciously, to experiences of the spiritual variety. But before I go more into the “experience” side of spiritual experiences, it’s important that we first try to define the “spiritual” side. For that, we can turn to the work and thought of Ken Wilber, a transpersonal psychologist, who will figure heavily and importantly in this piece.
Wilber observes in his 2006 Integral Spirituality, and perhaps elsewhere in his body of work as well, that there are really four definitions of “spiritual” or “spirituality,” and that conversations that don’t off-the-bat make known which definition they are using usually go off the rails quite quickly. With that in mind, let’s talk about these four definitions, and then make explicit what definition we are using when we go more into the personal side of this piece. Here are Wilber’s four definitions, with some context for background:
- Wilber is a “transpersonal psychologist.” I used that phrase in the first paragraph of this piece, and perhaps when you read it, your eyes glassed over and you just read on. Or, conversely, you knew what the term means, or you even looked it up. Whatever the case, transpersonal psychology is a school of psychology that attempts to incorporate or include religious or spiritual experiences into the field of psychology. “Trans” is a Latin word that means basically “beyond” — so “trans-personal” means going beyond the personal. If that sounds hopelessly out there, give me a second. Because Wilber, of course, is not only interested in the transpersonal, but also in the other side of the term, i.e. psychology; he writes quite extensively about developmental psychology (the study of how human beings change over time), for starters, with some fascinating detours as well into rather shockingly incisive (for me at least) critiques and interpretations of more famous and ubiquitous psychologists like Freud and Jung. Because Wilber is interested in developmental psychology, as well as understanding and critiquing earlier psychologists like Freud and Jung, he is in many ways first and foremost interested in marshalling forth a map of the mind, or of consciousness. Freud has his id and all that; Jung had his introversion, extraversion; Wilber’s model or map is called AQAL (which stands for All-Quadrant, All-Level), which we will hopefully get into during a different post. The most important thing to know, at this point, is that Wilber is interested in human development, and that he wants to offer us as comprehensive a map as he can of human development. One way he has depicted visually how he conceives of human development is the “Integral Psychograph,” which sounds kind of like a corny invention (“Here is my Integral Psychograph!” “Neat-o!”), but is in fact very useful. Here’s one below; give it a look and then we will talk about it.
As you can see, there are six vertical lines of various lengths rising up from the x-axis, and their height corresponds to various numbers on the y-axis. Each line is given a name or title: kinesthetic, cognitive, moral, emotional, spiritual, aesthetic. What does this mean? Here is one way to think about it: we are all gifted at some things, and not as good as we want to be at other things. Development is messy and uneven — that’s why a person can be at a high level (the y-axis; we will discuss what “high level” means a bit later) cognitively, while still being an emotional wreck; there are people who might be advanced aesthetically (with a strong sense of the beautiful), but who cannot talk to others (interpersonal). This could continue ad nauseum. The main thing is that each developmental line is significant and cannot be reduced to another line. There are psychologists in the past, for example, like the Swiss developmentalist Jean Piaget, who seemed to think that the cognitive line was the only line. Wilber disagrees with this (he calls it — he likes coming up with terms — “line absolutism”); and his visualization, the Integral Psychograph, is a way to think about human development more robustly and with greater granularity. Okay (letting out breath)! What does this have to do with a definition of spirituality? Here it is: our first definition of spirituality is that it is the highest level of any of the developmental lines. According to this definition, spirituality refers to the higher levels of cognition, or the higher levels of interpersonal relating, or the higher levels of appreciating the beauty in the world (aesthetics), and so on. That’s our first definition. (If you are wondering what on earth “higher levels” could possible mean, we talk about this a little further on.)
2. Our second definition of “spiritual” or “spirituality” can be seen on the Integral Psychograph as well. On the fifth vertical line from the left, we see a developmental line called “spiritual.” This means that “spiritual” can be defined as its own developmental line, as opposed to being the higher levels of any of the developmental lines. Spirituality would then be its own intelligence, different from aesthetic or musical or kinesthetic (insert whatever developmental line you want here) intelligence. And in our second definition of “spirituality,” this specific developmental line, called “spiritual,” would be what we were talking about. (I realize this definition becks some unpacking. What in God’s name is the spiritual line of development? Is this a part of me, of you, of us? I’m going to save this question for (hopefully) a later post, but for starters, one way to learn about it is through the educational theorist Howard Gardner’s “existential intelligence.” Google it.)
3. A third way of defining “spiritual” or “spirituality,” according to Wilber, is as a religious or spiritual experience. Therefore, in this third definition, spirituality would be understood as a state of consciousness, what is sometimes called in other contexts a peak experience. In this definition, we are not talking about the higher levels of any one developmental line, nor are we talking about one specific developmental line. Instead, we are talking about a state of consciousness. What does a state of consciousness mean? Wilber differentiates between states of consciousness and structures of consciousness. This is not splitting hairs. If we had to put it simply, states of consciousness are temporary; structures of consciousness are more enduring and permanent. A child from the age of 2–7, according to Piaget and many developmentalists after him, is at the “pre-operational” stage of consciousness. A child at this level, among other things, does not understand concrete logic, and has trouble seeing things from different perspectives. So his or her structure of consciousness is “pre-operational.” It lasts a while; it is not here for an hour, and then gone an hour later. Now take an adult at what Piaget called “formal operational.” This adult can, among other things, think abstractly and use metacognition to foster self-reflection. The child, at preoperational, and the adult, at formal operational, see and experience the world in quite different ways — they are functioning from different structures of consciousness. Now, what happens if the adult takes a walk in the woods one day, and experiences a profound sense/feeling/intuition that he or she is one with nature? And what if, after this experience, the adult finds himself or herself leaving the park and returning after a little bit to an earlier sense of himself or herself, and wondering to himself or herself, What was that, and how do I interpret it? (Wilber is fantastic when it comes to discussing interpretations of spiritual or religious experiences; I really suggest getting a hold of a copy of Integral Spirituality for a deeper discussion about this.) Well, this interesting, perhaps even vitally important and nurturing, experience would be an example of a state of consciousness — it was temporary, it has not turned into anything more enduring, i.e. a structure. So, for our third definition, “spirituality” or “spiritual” refers to a state of consciousness. (The y-axis in the psychograph refers to structures of consciousness.)
4. For our fourth definition, “spiritual” or “spirituality” could refer to a a special kind of attitude. Not a developmental line, not the highest level of a developmental line, and not a state of consciousness, but rather a kind of attitude at any of the structures of consciousness. This attitude could be involved with love, or compassion, or wisdom, as Wilber points out in his definition — but it can be found at any of the structures of consciousness. That’s our fourth definition of “spiritual” or “spirituality” — a special attidue.
Wow, we’ve covered a lot of material. Let’s summarize:
“Spiritual” or “spirituality” can refer to 1. the highest level of any developmental line; 2. one particular developmental line; 3. a state of consciousness; and 4. a special attitude.
My Experience this past February
Okay, we covered the more theoretical stuff. Now a bit about me. I am 38 years old, work as an adult services librarian in the great city of Cleveland, OH, where I also live with my family. I practice a form of meditation called “Heartfulness” (I’m happy to discuss it, if you have any questions), and also do daily meditations in the workbook of A Course in Miracles (Google it if interested; this book has really changed my life for the better, although when I practiced it at earlier points of my life, I was not ready for it, and it probably caused more havoc than healing then). “Heartfulness” used to be called “Sahaj Marg,” (I know, probably not the greatest thing to call a meditation practice for us Westerners), which I practiced in the early 2000s, then took a long break. I took a long break because, at that time in my life, I was not ready for practicing meditation or having spiritual experiences. I was struggling with mental health issues like anxiety and depression, and even some psychosis and mania, and wasn’t really ready for a spiritual practice. The main thing for me back then — what was really needed, more than spirituality, more than meditation — was character-building, growing into a “healthy ego,” being in therapy, working through my various neuroses/pathologies, etc. During the very long time that I was for the most part not meditating or doing anything remotely spiritual (with a few exceptions), I earned two master’s degrees (in English and Library Science), met my wife, married, met a therapist weekly for long periods of time, found a steady job as an adult services librarian, took a bunch of medication, bought a house, and started raising our two sons.
So I was working, raising my family, not doing anything spiritual…and then one day I found I was thinking about reincarnation a lot. I’d think about it when I drove to work (I have a fairly long drive), or I’d wonder about it at various moments. What I thought about was, how do we explain things like child prodigies? Can we really resort to brain chemistry to explain a child prodigy at the piano? Have you ever seen a child prodigy at the piano? Does this really do justice to, is this really a robust explanation to account for, the rather mind-blowing reality that a child prodigy of the piano embodies? I felt like reincarnation had some explanatory power in this regard, and that perhaps this child had lived an earlier life where he or she had also really practiced at the piano (“you reap what you sow”). There was that. I was also reading quite a bit about Judaism (I am and was raised Jewish, and went to a Jewish day school from kindergarten to eighth grade, though at this point am probably more culturally than religiously Jewish), and thinking a lot about the meaning of God. Finally, around this time, I planned a meditation program at my library with a Heartfulness trainer, although at that time I did not know that Heartfulness was the same thing as Sahaj Marg, which I had practiced for some years in the early 2000s.
All of this coalesced one night when I realized with a start at work that Heartfulness was just an updated version of Sahaj Marg. I was floored. And I couldn’t shake the feeling, although I tried mightily, that there was a reason why I had been thinking so much about reincarnation and Judaism and God, why I had been put in touch with a Heartfulness trainer, why I had planned that program, why I had spent so much time in my twenties meditating, etc. The most prevalent philosophy in academia (and maybe in the media?) is what we might call postmodern cultural relativism, and the members of this elite group would probably laugh at me thinking there was a reason why all of these things had happened. Their chant is something like “change, not progress,” and they seem rather afraid (Wilber is great on this) of either reverting to an earlier mythic or ethnocentric state of consciousness (understandable), or moving into something that transcends and includes rationality or formal operational (close-minded). They also have a tendency to confuse the pre-personal and the transpersonal (what Wilber calls the “pre/trans fallacy,” which he discusses at great lengths in his magnum opus, Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality — the confusion of the pre and trans is Wilber’s main critique of Jung, and lots of other approaches, too), all of which is to say that thinking the Kosmos or God or Spirit was guiding me towards meditation and spirituality again would be something these particular human beings would most likely consider literally insane.
Whatever they might think, or what I thought, I decided there was something important about my gut-feeling of feeling floored and guided. So, over time, I got in touch with a Heartfulness trainer, and started meditating again. I ordered an e-book of A Course in Miracles and started doing the practices daily, in the morning and evening, even though earlier in my life the book had not been right for me, and had cause havoc. And then, one night, while I was reading a book called The American Religion by Harold Bloom, my perennial favorite literary critic, who has also been something of an aesthetic and spiritual guide for me, I had what I guess we could call a spiritual experience.
Spiritual Experience
Have you ever read the spiritual teacher and writer Eckhart Tolle, who describes his own religious or spiritual experience in The Power of Now? I really enjoyed that book many years ago, and his narrative about his own experience really stuck with me. Although I don’t have the book with me, what I remember is that, after a rather excruciating emotional episode, during which he seriously considered suicide, Tolle suddently felt himself falling back into a kind of black vortex. Something happened. When he woke up, he felt different, transformed somehow, and very, very peaceful. For a long time he just kind of walked around, sat on park benches, and felt utterly at peace.
What happened to Tolle? Do you remember all that theoretical talk above about “structures of consciousness”? Tolle experienced a transformation in consciousness; he moved beyond one structure and into a different structure. Did this happen to me in February?
This is what I experienced: I felt like I was being lifted up, and at the same time like I was falling backwards. At some point, I felt something that I’ll call the breath of divinity sort of step inside me. I felt a Presence that seemed to me to be what the energy of the sacred feels like or is, and I was utterly possessed by it. Every sound I heard sounded holy and illuminated. It was very intense, very powerful, very good-feeling, very beautiful-feeling, very true-feeling. It was a spiritual experience of Presence. Was it a state or a structure?
After this happened, for the next few weeks, I felt like I literally saw the world differently. I could actually see the world, and it was big, and vivid, and beautiful. Clouds in the sky were shocking. The sky itself was shocking. Birds were utterly breathtaking in their movements. Usually we are so lost in our thoughts that we don’t actually see anything whatsoever. But all of this thinking for me had come to a pause or rest, and my mind felt free to witness the world without judging it, conceptualizing it, analyzing, or coming to any hasty conclusions about it. I wrote an entire poetry manuscript over the course of a few weeks, although I did not feel even slightly manic, (I experienced mania in my twenties and early thirties, and this did not feel remotely the same). This sense of presence, and of seeing the world with more clarity and force, has lasted to now. I have felt such a greater degree of freedom these past few months. I appreciate music more, I feel more love for people more, I cry more when I hear about injustice, I care more about others, I am moved by literally anything that’s not too monstrously sentimental; but with these sensitivity I also feel stronger, more centered, more sure about myself, more confident, while also feeling levels of humility and gratitude that I’d never experienced in this lifetime before.
Was there some preparation for any of this? I don’t know. When I was in middle school, a rabbi and teacher taught us a meditation on the Hebrew letter “aleph,” and I remember sitting at the edge of my bed at night and really doing this meditation in an intense way. Something had really spoken to me, reached me, then about meditation. Why did it speak to me so much when I was in fifth grade? Then, when I started practicing Sahaj Marg in my twenties with such intensity, why did this happen? Why was I so obsessed with what enlightenment meant, or felt like, or looked like? I have one memory of meditating in my bedroom at my old parents’ house, when I was in my early twenties, and telling or promising myself that night that I would meditate “until I experienced enlightenment,” like how Buddha meditated under the bodhi tree until he experienced awakening. I meditated for a long time, but nothing happened. But…why was I driven to do that in the first place? Some people like cars. Some people like sports, or poetry (I do, too), or fashion, or bugs, or shopping, or music (ditto), or building things. Why had meditation been this thing for me since a long way back?
I really don’t know. Maybe former lives makes some sense here? At any rate, I don’t want to end this very long piece on that question. Instead, I want to contextualize my spiritual experience within Wilber’s four definitions, and therefore come to some understanding about it, no matter how tentative or preliminary. So: did this experience involve 1. the higher levels of one developmental line; 2. the specific developmental line called “spiritual”; 3. a state of consciousness; or 4. a special attitude?
Well, we can rule out #1, as this wasn’t the higher levels of morals, or aesthetics, or values, or needs. What about #2? Yes, maybe that makes some sense. I can’t comment now on just what level exactly this happened on, in the unfolding spiritual line of development (check out Wilber’s Integral Psychology for a good breakdown of the structures of consciousness, which he also calls levels or waves), but it would make sense that this particular developmental line was involved, and that if we are to call the experience “spiritual,” we are referring to this particular line of development. The other two definitions? Was it a state of consciousness? Without a doubt, yes. While I still had a wonderful, abiding sense of Presence long after the experience, the experience itself was temporary — I did not feel that lifting, falling feeling afterwards, nor do I afterwards feel as intensely that sense of the sacred possessing me. So definition #3 works as well. Lastly, was it an attitude? This one is tricky, because I think having an open attitude over the previous months helped the experience to happen. But was the actually experience an attitude? No, we’ve got to say — it was not.
So: to summarize this very long Medium post, my spiritual experience involved a state of consciousness and the spiritual developmental line. I’m sure there’s much more to say about this (I haven’t even finished Integral Spirituality!), but let’s leave it here for the night. Maybe I’ll write more about this on another day.
