“Growing Up interprets and explains Waking Up” 🦄

I’ve been reading Ken Wilber’s new book Finding Radical Wholeness, and my biggest inspiration so far is to share this crucial distinction for spirituality: "Growing Up interprets and explains Waking Up". 

The Distinction

Our level of cognitive, emotional and psychological development (Growing Up) shapes how we understand and interpret our spiritual experiences (Waking Up).

This explains why two people can have similar spiritual experiences yet draw vastly different conclusions, and why there's such a broad spectrum of spiritual practices and insights. It underscores the importance of doing spiritual practices geared at “Waking Up” while critically examining the ontological assumptions that go along with these practices—understanding what stage of “Growing Up” they come from. It helps us understand why a teacher can be "woken up" to a deep level of mystical union, yet interpret it through an immature frame. In some cases it helps us understand how a teacher with so much loving-kindness can also be an emotional wreck or sexual abuser.

Here are some Common Mismatches I see: 

1. Green-postmodern interpretations (of genuine Waking Up):

   - Example: Most popular mindfulness teachers like Tara Brach's Radical Acceptance or the general ethos at SAND conferences

   - Potential issues: Stunting growth of those with higher stages of Growing Up but less Waking Up experience, getting caught in culture wars, promoting pre-modern beliefs—reducing access to practices they teach which could be helpful a wider range of stages

2. Orange-rationalist interpretations (of genuine Waking Up):

   - Example: Jed McKenna, Sam Harris' Waking Up (which I loved)

   - Potential issue: Dismissing valuable insights from other stages, and justifying that dismissal through the supposedly unassailable truth of nondual experience.

3. Amber-conventional interpretations, or earlier (of genuine Waking Up):

   - Example: Postmodern seekers following Eastern teachers or Ayahuasca Shamans with traditional worldviews, 

   - Potential issue: Uncritical adoption of pre-modern beliefs (beliefs they would reject coming from a preacher or imam). This can lead to negative effects in their relationships, lives and work because it’s out of sync with the rest of their meaning-structure including the cultures and communities they’re in.

Why does this matter?

Growing Up interprets and explains waking up, yet this is not common knowledge and we’re mostly unable to see the lens we’re interpreting and explaining Waking Up with, so most of us, including our most revered spiritual experiencers and historical texts, are conflating the two.

Higher isn’t always better, but I think alignment usually is. Misalignment between a person’s developmental stage and their chosen spiritual path can cause frustration, endless looping, backsliding, and uneven development which perpetuates suffering. People grounded in a profound awakening experience often believe they have THE TRUTH, mixing the map with the territory.

And sometimes higher is better—it’s perfectly fine for a malnourished tree not to reach its full potential but I also feel disillusionment versus awe at the fully grown masterpiece. Furthermore, some of the world’s current problems are demanding a Teal-integrative and higher interpretive frameworks, with hearts open to these wider Waking Up worlds…

What do I do about this? 

1. Love both Waking Up and Growing Up.
2. Try to stay grounded and humble about Waking Up experiences. There’s infinity here to explore; I wouldn’t be surprised if Growing Up goes on forever too, so my understanding will always be superseded by something more holistic, true, loving.
3. No pedestals or halo effects: Most spiritual teachers will speak out of their lane, sometimes, so I try to stay discerning, aware, and compassionate.
4. Recognize and respect the limits of my own (and humanity’s) understanding, and create cultures that celebrate true uncertainty and honest feedback.
5. Cultivate both spiritual experiences and spiritual intelligence. For Growing Up particularly this means not just learning new facts, or even taking new perspectives, but looking at the how of making sense itself—making it into an object I can see. If I've got principles I'm relying on that are self-chosen, how’d I get those, how often am I examining them critically? How will I know if I'm in one of my own distortions or blindspots, not about inaccurate information, but in the very process of my meaning-construction?
   
6. Be humble, self-compassionate, and perhaps even excited to learn when I inevitably fail in all of the above.
   
   

Conclusion:

Compassion all around here—being a person having an experience at all is a wild, wild ride. Most of this shit makes no sense whatsoever. For example, the flowering plants I passed on my walk today were basically giant penises asking a bee to come fertilize them. Is that weird, or is the human way of doing fertilization weird, or both, or neither, or something else?

As preeminent Integral Scholar Suzanne Cook-Greuter says, "we’re all bozos on the same bus". So I guess let’s be nice, do right by others, and have a damn good time.

With love, Jordan