Ken Wilber (Interview Archive)
Start with this: someone who never stood out for cognitive intelligence may be quietly brilliant in one or more of the many other intelligences. Plenty of people who struggled with the purely cognitive side got written off as slow, or even dismissed as stupid, when they were in fact aesthetic or kinesthetic geniuses. Working with all of the intelligences, or at least staying aware that they exist, is one of the parts of our integral map. Roughly half of what we mean by growing up involves levels and lines. These multiple intelligences are the lines, the many streams, and they mark out the main areas in which a person can actually develop.
Different professions and disciplines lean on their own particular mix of these intelligences. A high IQ, by itself, is no longer treated as anything close to sufficient. Howard Goldman, who did more than almost anyone to turn emotional intelligence into a familiar phrase, laid out a large body of evidence that emotional intelligence predicts things like business success and strong leadership far better than cognitive intelligence does. In Conscious Capitalism, John Mackey, who founded Whole Foods, and Raj Sisodia argue that beyond cognitive intelligence the effective business leader also needs high emotional intelligence, systems intelligence, and spiritual intelligence. That is an integral approach as far as lines go. The same book, incidentally, holds that principles drawn from all four quadrants matter too. So the first piece of growing up is these multiple lines or streams.
The second piece is where it gets genuinely surprising. These intelligences differ enormously from one another, yet they all climb through the same basic levels of development. Different lines, same levels. Moving through those levels is what growing up actually consists of: travel from thoroughly immature toward fully mature. And here is the good part. The stages of that overall growing up have by now been mapped out in fairly complete detail. We know, for the most part, what the levels of growing up are, in whatever line or stream they happen to show up in.
Dozens of models exist describing how and why human beings develop across all sorts of areas, intelligences, lines, and capacities. The striking thing is how much they converge. Nearly every one of these developmental maps and models lands on the same basic six to eight major stages. In a book I wrote called Integral Psychology, I gathered data covering more than 100 maps and models of growing up drawn from around the world, and what stood out was their broad agreement on those same six to eight major levels. A few of them count slightly fewer stages, a few count slightly more, but the same basic six to eight keep turning up, over and over.