Ken Wilber on the Interior Future of Humanity (Interview Archive)

Almost everyone forecasting the future speaks in what Wilber calls right-hand terms. The conversation fixes on technology and the waves of disruption coming toward us. What gets left out is the interior, the left-hand quadrants, and the deep changes underway in consciousness and culture as the future arrives. At the moment the planet is running a race. On one side, a more harmonious, integral second-tier consciousness is beginning to emerge. On the other, roughly 70 percent of the population sits at amber ethnocentric levels or below.

Call it a horse race, because that is what it is, and the result will decide more than almost anything else whether the world moves toward peace or toward another long run of brutal wars. Technological and economic shifts, for all their weight, barely touch this contest. You can watch Al Qaeda members on the news using smartphones to coordinate with one another. Technology carries worldviews; it rarely manufactures them, even if it moves them around with great force. So the interior is where we have to look if we want to read humanity's direction.

What that means in practice is the slow climb of growing up: from egocentric to ethnocentric to world-centric to integral. Will the bulk of people shift from ethnocentric, war-prone levels toward world-centric, peace-seeking ones? That question, not the singularity or any gadget on the horizon, is the real $64,000 question about where we are headed.

States of consciousness, altered states included, sit at the heart of a separate process. Not showing up, not growing up, but waking up. Think about the great pre-modern civilizations, east and west, north and south. Nearly every one of them recognized two broad kinds of spirituality. The first was the outer or public teaching, built mostly from mythic-literal stories that grew out of the mythic stage of development. Moses genuinely parted the Red Sea. Elijah rose to heaven in his chariot while still alive. Lot was 900 years old. Those narratives were meant to be taken at face value.

The second kind went by names like esoteric, hidden, or advanced, and it worked differently. Rather than a collection of stories, it offered a psycho-technology of consciousness transformation: a set of actual practices. At one end stood the small, finite, skin-encapsulated ego. At the far end was said to be a oneness with the entire ground of all being, what some have called the supreme identity, the union of the individual with his all-pervading infinite ground. That condition has been named many ways over the centuries. Enlightenment, awakening, metamorphosis, moksha, satori, emancipation, salvation, the great liberation.