The 4 Quadrants by Ken Wilber
I / We / It / Its
Everything Falls Apart
In 2002, as a graduation gift, my old friend Joel Brock gave me Ken Wilber’s “No Boundary,” his second book (after The Spectrum of Consciousness), and my introduction to Ken’s prolific career spanning thirty-some-odd books. I took the book on a road trip from New York to California and back alongside my then-girlfriend and now wife, Elizabeth. We stopped in all the right places, camping out in a tiny two-person tent 30 of the 31 nights we were on the road together. This was our second epic journey together, the first to southern Spain and Morocco, as told in this post detailing my most mind-blowing synchronicity experience that re-wired my mind’s architecture once and for all.
At this point in my life, at 22 years young, I was pretty far off the deep end of existentialism, dwelling in the NOTHING beyond Nothing. However, I was also quite far into studying the Tao, Sufism, Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, the Vedas, and my all-time favorite, Alan Watts. As I dug into No Boundry, I enjoyed it, but it felt like a more clinical, less poetic version of a Watts book. Little did I know at the time, as I would find out later, Wilber used to copy out Alan’s books by hand, page by page, in full, as a means to capture his rhythmic dance of language. I wasn’t enthralled and likely never would have picked up another Wilber book again.
As I read the book, and I think somewhere around Montana, as we camped out by a river and had the worst mosquito attack of my life, something curious happened that would end up changing the course of my life more profoundly than ever. The book, “No Boundary,” slowly but surely… fell out of the binding. The entire text of pages fell out in chunks, leaving it nearly unreadable. Luckily I’d finished it by the time it fell apart.
Leaving no synchronicity behind, I took this boundary-less occurrence to heart and decided to pick up my second Wilber book, his newest at the time, Boomeritis. Reading this yellow pseudo-fictional “Novel That Will Set You Free” really did its job on me. It was my first introduction to the indelible Spiral Dynamics and Wilber’s silly-yet-enlightening and overtly self-deprecating analysis of the “Mean Green” stage typified by the Baby Boomer generation’s appeal to “selfish selflessness.” I will definitely cover both Spiral Dynamics and Boomeritis in future posts, but first need to focus on Wilber’s Four Quadrants, the reason we’re here today.
Wilber’s work, by a longshot, is the most influential I’ve ever read and creeps into just about everything I’ve done since. The fact I’ve made it sixty-five days without mentioning him yet is impressive.
The Four Quadrants
First revealed in his magnum opus Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Wilber’s final model is called AQAL, short for “All Quadrants, Levels, Lines, States, Types, and Perspectives,” and is the basis for his “Theory of Everything” that is likely the most comprehensive meta-theory aiming to categorize and organize all of reality as elegantly as possible. For this post, we’ll only cover the “Q” (no, not that Q…) in the Four Quadrants, likely Wilber’s most significant contribution to what he calls the “neo-perennial philosophy,” a synthesis of mysticism as first noted by Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, with the addition of a more cosmic evolution along the lines of famed Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo.
Be sure to review the above diagram before/during reading this to understand better how it all breaks down. The top half of the quadrants represent the Individual, while the bottom half represents the Collective. The left side is the Subjective, and the right is the Objective. The paper (instead, pixels) that it's printed on is -0-, Source, Origin, Brahman, Nothingness, etc. Ultimately, the unnamable, unspeakable Void within which all Isness unfolds.
Every language system of Earth uses variations of the exact four words: I, We, It, and Its. This universal truth is vital in understanding the quadrants, which transcends all cultures, applicable to anything you filter it through.
The upper-left quadrant (everyone’s favorite!) Individual + Subjective is the “I” of Self and Consciousness. Truthfulness. What it means to be me. I am-ness. My own personal, unique, subjective understanding of reality. Like all quadrants, the I is broken down into Holonic evolutionary stages of inclusivity and holism. With this diagram, you have: Instinctual, Magic, Warrior, Mythic, Achiever, Sensitive, Holistic, and Integral. There are many variations of these titles; I’m using what’s on this particular diagram. I’ll also go way further into these stages in future posts.
In the top-right slot, we see the “It,” Individual + Objective, or what it is to be me. Truth. The empirical, observable, physical, touchable side of the being, or using my system, “self” with a small s. Organic states, the Limbic system, neocortex, nerves, veins, muscles, bones, body, etc. This is the behavior realm, the action-taking-in-the-world on behalf of the subjective I that dwells only in the metaphsyical. Rather than how you “be”, It is how you do.
The bottom left is the “We” quadrant, the Collective + Subjective, or what it means to be us. Justness. The best word for this quadrant is of course, “Culture”. Like the top left, the stages of collective meaning unfold in ever-evolving stages of growth, inclusion, mutual understanding, and representation. The stages defined here are Archaic, Magic, Power Gods, Mythic, Scientific-Rational, Pluralistic, Holistic, and Integral.
Finally, the bottom right is the combination of the Collective + Objective, or what it is to be us. Functional fit. Here was have the objective, behavior “Social” as juxtaposed with its bottom half quadrantal neighbor in the culture. Systems theory, structural functionalism, social systems, and the environment. As per the chart, we have the unfolding evolutionary systems of Survival Clans, Ethnic Tribes, Feudal Empires, Early Nations, Corporate States, Value Communities, Holistic Commons, and Integral Meshworks.
The Integral Approach
As we’ve learned in studying Jean Gebser here and further here, the “Integral” is the most advanced stage of awareness, as seen in the quadrants above. Using this context, Integral means applying all quadrants (and levels, lines, stages, types, and perspectives) to analyze any given phenomena.
Most humans tend to pick one of the four quadrants — or focus only on the Absolute perspective of the paper/pixels from which the quadrants arise — and fight like hell for that quadrant being the One True Opinion. A psych major might dwell myopically in the I quadrant, fighting for subjectivity as the only true filter. A culture warrior may only see the We collective consciousness as True Reality, submitting to the sum of the whole rather than dividing it up into its parts. A reductionist will fight to the death for the upper right It, all the way down to the quarks and strings of the quantum. A social-ist sees only the Collective-Objective, a never end setting of cogs and wheels, with no unique Individuality, Cultural objectives or sense of objective self.
Rather then choose a quadrant and myopically call it True, an Integral analysis takes all four quadrants into account simultaneously, studying each while also addressing their inter-relationship. In this time of great division, our dualistic, us vs them, my quadrant vs your quadrant mentality may be the death of us. The sooner we can find Integral understanding of these complex and rapidly arising issues, we will only drive each other further apart.
The NOW is Time.
Love,
jb
