Robert van Mourik & John Scoble
Wilber (Robert’s notes from Conspire 2017)
“Religion is the only discipline where grown human beings will adopt an infantile, magic or mythic belief and believe it as adults; they don’t keep going forward. The modern [rationality] and post-modern [pluralistic] understanding of spirituality is infinitely more complex and satisfying and at this moment, with other things that we know, it’s a real spirituality. It does something that science can’t do, that medicine can’t do. It is our direct access to ultimate truth. It’s the intelligence that gives you ultimate truth. Is that important or not?“
Introduction
To summarise, we have previously examined Wilber’s model of personal development that can be initially categorised as Waking Up, Cleaning Up, Growing Up and Showing Up.
Waking up refers to a realisation that the way in which we have viewed our world has been an illusion, that reality is something different and we want to understand what that is. Yet it is still only a starting point to a process that requires reflection and personal growth.
Cleaning up is necessary when we realise that our previous unconscious behaviour is not in accord with our new vision for ourselves. The psychologist, Carl Jung, identified this process as addressing our “shadow self”.
Growing up is the process of development of personal maturity as described by a number of different behavioural models.
Showing Up represents the fourth pathway that requires bringing our heart and mind into how we live our lives, to how we address the actual suffering and problems of the world.
Growing Up Models
We remind you that neither John nor I are psychologists, even though we have a reasonable grasp of layman psychology through our work and life experience. There are a large number of behavioural models that have been developed during the 20th and 21st centuries to try to explain human behaviour and human development. These are complex and are the subject of degree level study.
However, Wilber (and others) have summarised these stages into four levels:
Egocentric – at this stage, a person will view all events and interactions from the perspective of the self. They will ask: how does this affect me; what is in it for me? Typically, this covers the early years of life. The perspective is one of self and others – a dualistic construct.
Ethnocentric – as a person matures, they begin to see the world from the perspective of their tribe as defined by them. Examples would be family, school, sporting team, church group. It can extend to gender, sexual orientation, state and country. This stage is still dualistic and always involves an “in group” and one or more “out groups”.
World centric. Further maturity will see a person understand that all persons in the world have equal value, irrespective of race, religion or nationality. The tribe has become everyone living on the planet. However, there is still an in group and an out group. The in group is the human race. The out group are all other sentient beings and the environment, over whom the human race has dominance and can exercise control.
Cosmo centric. At this level of maturity, a person recognises the connectedness between people, animals, plants and the earth. They have developed a unity of consciousness which unites heaven and earth, flesh and spirit and have integrated all the previous levels into a perspective of non-dual consciousness. The encyclical “Laudato Si” by Pope Francis aptly demonstrates a cosmo centric worldview.
According to Wilber, we look at the world from the level we are at. As we develop our view of the world, the manner of our relationships with other people changes. Wilber suggests 60% of the world’s population exists in the first two levels.
Growth in our personal development does not necessarily occur uniformly across these different streams of waking up, cleaning up or growing up; growth across these different streams can be staggered. Our ability to mature also can be constrained by limited development in other areas. Wilber discusses this impact in comparing waking up and growing up in the video below at “Additional Preparation”. He particularly identifies the risks when we place reliance on gurus who are spiritually aware but have not grown up.
It is worth noting that some commentators have attempted to apply these stages of development to organisations. Without going into detail about this, one such commentator suggests that the Catholic Church has not progressed beyond the ethnocentric stage. In the past, the church has openly supported slavery, colonialism and sexism. Even today, church authorities ostracise or discriminate against certain groups such as the LGBT+ community, priests who have resigned their ministry and the divorced or remarried.
The insights we gain must be integrated and consolidated in our new, emerging worldview. As our worldview changes, we undergo a process of continuing integration and transcendence towards new levels of understanding. These new concepts are illustrated in the lyrics of the song One. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odlw8WdsZS8
Some Relevant Quotes
Richard Rohr, “Conspire 2017”: “Just because you overcome the separate self doesn’t mean you haven’t overcome the shadow self. There is a difference between waking up & growing up.”
Later in the Q&A, Rohr quotes Wilber: “Why do some people change and keep growing?” Wilber’s response: “It comes down to their learned capacity to suffer; people who can endure ambiguity, paradox, mystery keep growing.”
Maxime Lagacé: "You can’t be mature if you don’t know yourself. Experiences, failures, and reflection will bring you what you need."
Hermann Hesse, “Gertrude”: "Youth ends when egotism does."
Mark Z. Danielewski: "Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of not knowing.”
Laura Linney: “It is always good to explore the stuff you don’t agree with, to try and understand a different lifestyle or foreign worldview. I like to be challenged in that way and always end up learning something I didn’t know.”
Alex Steffen: “In tough times, some of us see protecting the climate as a luxury, but that’s an outdated 20th century worldview from a time when we thought industrialisation was the end goal, waste was growth, and wealth meant a thick haze.”
Mira Nair: “I am actually a resident of three worlds – of America, of India, and of Africa. I live in Uganda most of the year. It’s extraordinary to have that worldview that is an expansive one rather than just looking at the world from where you sit.”
Diarmuid O’Murchu: “In the Christian context, we frequently hear allusions to a personal relationship with God or with Jesus, with scant attention to the projections being acted out, and the often subtle and subconscious desire to control and manage God in our Lives. Not much room for coming-of-age in this codependent relationship.”
Additional Preparation
We recommend the following for your consideration prior to our meeting:
2. In this video https://batgap.com/ken-wilber/ Wilber discusses the relative impacts that can occur with waking up and growing up at 1 hr 1 minute for 16-17 minutes.
Questions for reflection & discussion:
1. How would you describe your current worldview?
2. Which of the relevant quotes above resonate with you? Has any one quote or idea particularly influenced you to change your worldview?
3. How has growing up influenced your self-identity and how you identify with “God”?
4. Finally, do you see any connection between Wilber’s remarks at Conspire 2017 (at the head of these notes) and the last quote from O’Murchu?
February 2022
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