Wilber traces human development from infancy into adulthood and beyond, into those states described by mystics and spiritual adepts. The spiritual evolution of such extraordinary individuals as the Buddha and Jesus hints at the direction human beings will take in their continuing growth toward transcendence. Everywhere we look in nature, said the philosopher Jan Smuts, we see nothing but wholes.*** And not just simple wholes, but hierarchical ones: each whole is a part of a larger whole which is itself a part of a larger whole. Fields within fields within fields, stretching through the cosmos, interlacing each and every thing with each and every other. Further, said Smuts, the universe is not a thoughtlessly static and inert whole—the cosmos is not lazy, but energetically dynamic and even creative. It tends (we would now say teleonomically, not teleologically) to produce higherand higher-level wholes, evermore inclusive and organized. This overall cosmic process, as it unfolds in time, is nothing other than evolution. And the drive to ever-higher unities, Smuts called halism. If we continued this line of thinking, we might say that because the human mind or psyche is an aspect of the cosmos, we would expect to find, in the psyche itself, the same hierarchical arrangement of wholes within wholes, reaching from the simplest and most rudimentary to the most complex and inclusive. In general, such is exactly the discovery of modern psychology. As Werner put it, “Wherever development occurs it proceeds from a state of relative globality and lack of differentiation to a state of increasing differentiation, articulation, and hierarchical integration." Jakobson speaks of “those stratified phenomena which modern psychology uncovers in the different areas of the realm of the mind,’'!®* where each stratified layer is more integrated and more encompassing than its predecessor. Bateson points out that even learning itself is hierarchical, involving several major levels, each of which is “meta-" to its predecessor.** As a general approximation, then, we may conclude that the psyche—like the cosmos at large—is many-layered (“pluridimensional’), composed of successively higher-order wholes and unities and integrations. The holistic evolution of nature—which produces everywhere higher and higher wholes—shows up in the human psyche as develoment or growth. The same force that produced man from amoebe, produces adults from infants. That is, a person 's growth, from infans to adulthood, is simply a miniature version of cosmic evolution. Qp we might say, psychological growth or development in humans simply a microcosmic reflection of universal growth on the whole, an has the same goal: the unfolding of ever higher-order unities and inte, grations. And this is one of the major reasons that the peyche à indeed, stratified. Very like the geological formation of the eert) psychological development proceeds, stratum by stratum, level b level, stage by stage, with each successive level superimposed upon ib predecessor in such a way that it includes but transcends it (“enve) ops it,” as Werner would say). Now in psychological development, the whole of any level becomen merely a part of the whole of the next level, which in turn becomes 4 part of the next whole, and so on throughout the evolution of con. sciousness. Take, as but one example, the development of language: the child first learns babbling sounds, then wider vowel and consonant sounds, then simple words, then small phrases, then simple sentence, and then extended sentences. At each stage, simple parts (e.g., words) are integrated into higher wholes (e.g., sentences), and, as Jakobson points out, ‘new additions are superimposed on earlier ones and disso. lution begins with the higher strata.''*° Modern developmental psychology has, on the whole, simply devoted itself to the exploration and explanation of the various levels, stages, and strata of the human constitution—mind, personality, psychosexuality, character, consciousness. The cognitive studies of Piaget?®* and Werner,** the works of Loevinger*“* and Arieti’ and Maslow?®* and Jakobson, '®* the moral development studies of Kohl. berg***—all subscribe, in whole or part, to the concept of stratified stages of increasing differentiation, integration, and unity. Having said that much, we are at once entitled to ask, “What, then, is the highest stage of unity to which one may aspire?" Or perhaps we should not phrase the question in such ultimate terms, but simply ask instead, ‘What is the nature of some of the higher and highest stages of development? What forms of unity are disclosed in the most developed souls of the human species?’ We all know what the “lower’’ stages and levels of the psyche are like (IT am speaking in simple, general terms): they are instinctual, impulsive, libidinous, id-ish, animal, ape-like. And we all know what some of the ‘middle’ stages are like: socially adapted, mentally ad: justed, egoically integrated, syntaxically organized, conceptually advanced. But are there no higher stages? Is an “integrated ego’ of “‘autonomous individual’ the highest reach of consciousness in human beings? The individual ego is a marvelously high-order unity, but compared with the Unity of the cosmos at large, it is a pitiful slice of holistic reality. Has nature labored these billions of years just to bring forth this egoic mouse? The problem with that type of question lies in finding examples of truly higher-order personalities and in deciding exactly what const tutes a higher-order personality ín the first place. My own feeling is that as humanity continues its collective evolution, this will become very easy to decide, because more and more ‘‘enlightened’' personalities will show up in data populations, and psychologists will be forced, by their statistical analyses, to include higher-order profiles in their developmental stages. In the meantime, one's idea of ‘“higher-order’’ or “highly developed’ remains rather philosophic. Nonetheless, those few gifted souls who have bothered to look at this problem have suggested that the world's great mystics and sages represent some of the very highest, if not the highest, of all stages of human development. Bergson said exactly that; and so did Toynbee, and Tolstoy and James and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Maslow. The point is that we might have an excellent population of extremely evolved and developed personalities in the form of the world's great mystic-sages (a point which is supported by Maslow's studies). Let us, then, simply assume that the authentic mystic-sage represents the very highest stages of human development—as far beyond normaland-average humanity as humanity itself is beyond apes. This, in effect, would give us a sample which approximates ‘the highest state of consciousness’'—a type of “superconscious state. Furthermore, most of the mystic-sages have left rather detailed records of the stages and steps of their own transformations into the superconscious realms. That is, they tell us not only of the highest level of consciousness and superconsciousness, but also of all the intermediate levels leading up to it. If we take all these higher stages and add them to the lower and middle stages /levels which have been so carefully described and studied by Western psychology, we would then arrive at a fairly wellbalanced and comprehensive model of the spectrum of consciousness. That, exactly, is the nature and aim of this volume. Once we put all the stages and levels of consciousness evolution together, we arrive at something that resembles an overall life cycle. Further, we will find that—if all the higher stages reported by the mystics are real — this life cycle moves from subconsciousness (instinctual, impulsive, id-ish) to self-consciousness (egoic, conceptual, syntaxical) to superconsciousness (transcendent, transpersonal, transtemporal), as shown in Fig. 1. Further, we can divide this cycle, for convenience, into two halves: the Outward Arc, or the movement from subconsciousness to self-consciousness, and the Inward Arc, or movement from self-consciousness to superconsciousness (see Fig. 1). The overall cycle is nicely described by Ananda Coomaraswamy: The life or lives of man may be regarded as constituting a curve—an arc of time-experience subtended by the duration of the individual Will to Life. The outward movement of this curve..….—the Path of Pursuit —the Pravritti Marga—is characterized by self-assertion.
