Ken Wilber on Cleaning Up and the Eight Zones (Interview Archive)
Cleaning up isn't only a matter of repairing what's damaged. Part of the work is strengthening what already runs well in us, the terrain that positive psychology studies, the capacity to flourish rather than merely cope. So the full picture looks like this: showing up across all four quadrants, growing up through every level and every line of development, waking up to the stages of our supreme identity and our unique self, and cleaning up our shadow material while building out our ability to thrive.
Every person carries all of these dimensions. They are present and operating in each of us right now, not as some advanced attainment but as basic equipment. Human 101. The trouble is that almost none of the maps we use account for more than a handful of them, and rarely all. What falls off the map doesn't stop acting on us. Those elements keep rising up, colliding with us, bruising and shaping us, pulling and pushing, wounding and assisting, all while we remain unaware they exist.
Turning to psychology for help doesn't improve matters much. Most of the schools in play today fix their attention on one of these elements, or maybe two. Each of them matters, no question. But to elevate one at the expense of the rest leaves you with a view that is partial and warped, a fragment mistaken for the whole.
A couple of quick examples will round this out. Begin by seeing that each quadrant is really a cluster of perspectives. The Upper Right, say, is a third-person of a third-person of a third-person. The Upper Left is a first-person of a first-person of a first-person. Because perspectives run on almost without limit, each quadrant opens onto still further perspectives of its own.
One way to do this: look at any quadrant either from the inside or from the outside. From within or from without, taking a subjective stance or an objective one. That move hands us not four quadrants but eight, which we call zones. Glancing at figure five (and there's no need to hold any of this in memory, it's a technical aside meant only to land one general point, which I'll state plainly at the close), consider the Upper Left quadrant approached specifically from within, in a subjective stance. What you get is Zone One, a pure interior phenomenology. Pure meditation and contemplation, where inner realities are seen, felt, and prehended on the spot, with hardly any conceptualizing, modeling, or reflecting. Just immediate experiential awareness, right here.
Step back instead from that immediate experience, reflect on it, think it over, adopt a more objective posture toward your own interiors, and you arrive at Zone Two. Here the interiors get conceptualized through various maps and models, running the gamut from psychoanalysis to developmental structuralism.