Ken Wilber on the Psychology of the Future: Quadrants, Levels, and Lines
Consider what happens in the upper-left quadrant when human lifespans stretch toward two centuries. A psychology built for that reality doesn't exist yet, and building it demands genuinely integral thinking. Over in the lower left, the cultural worldviews people share are drifting toward a sense that everything connects: humans to one another, species to species, all of it to the surrounding environment. That outlook used to live almost entirely inside rare mystical and meditative traditions. These days the research at the frontier of science keeps gesturing at the same picture.
Interconnection on that scale carries a political consequence. Some form of world governance starts to look less optional and more inevitable, and the case for it grows harder to dismiss with each passing day as globalization keeps pushing forward. Look at the lower right and you can already see the shape of it: renewable energy sources wired into smart grids, the whole thing folded into an Internet of Things. Medical records, economic activity, psychological data, the sociological texture of ordinary life, all of it stitched into vast networks.
The upper right may unsettle people most. Genomics, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence applied to the human body stand to rewrite what the word human even points to. A discipline capable of meeting that, and psychology is only one such discipline, will have to be integral through and through. That seems to be the first requirement: psychology itself has to grow integral before it can help anyone else face what's coming. Call it the primary demand that a psychology of the future makes on us.
From there it's worth running quickly through levels and lines. These belong to the larger framework of all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types. If quadrants are about showing up, meaning how many perspectives you can genuinely hold (first person, second person, third person, and onward), then levels and lines are about growing up. They track the maturing and developing that most of our capacities go through, from conception to death, and some would extend the arc past death as well.
An earlier diagram touched on developmental levels, using Maslow's hierarchy of needs as the example of growing up. The reason this matters is simple: nearly everything that exists came out of a sweeping evolutionary push, so nearly everything has a developmental history behind it. Our skills, our talents, our aptitudes, the things we're good at: they all start out crude and incomplete, pass through workable intermediate stages, and sometimes arrive at forms that function fully and well.
Two findings stand out here, and they go by two sets of names for the same pair of realities. People call them levels and lines, or they call them waves and streams. Start with lines, short for lines of development. Human growth doesn't run along a single channel or rely on a single kind of intelligence. For a very long time the assumption held that people possessed one basic intelligence, the cognitive kind, pinned down by an IQ score that everyone treated as decisive.
That assumption has given way. We now know humans carry at least a dozen distinct intelligences, separate lines that each develop on their own: cognitive, moral, emotional, interpersonal, musical, mathematical, linguistic, kinesthetic, aesthetic, and spiritual intelligence, with more besides.