States vs Stages of Consciousness (Ken Wilber Summary)

This is a summary on states vs stages of consciousness according to Ken Wilber (Integral Theory).

This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction (content has been paraphrased and organized in my own way). Short summaries and quotes aren’t substitutes for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Ken Wilber’s books (Amazon).

I’ve personally read six of Wilber’s books so far, which have been used to synthesize the summary below:

• “Finding Radical Wholeness” (Book Summary)
• “The Integral Vision” (Book Summary)
• “Integral Psychology” (Book Summary)
• “Integral Spirituality” (Book Summary)
• “A Theory of Everything” (Book Summary)
• “A Brief History of Everything” (Book Summary) + 20 Tenets of Integral Theory

States vs Stages of Consciousness (Ken Wilber Summary)

States Overview (Waking Up):

Waking Up is a baseline position for those who want a deep, extensive, and even absolute experience of Wholeness, and it has probably had a more profound impact on human history than any other experience that has ever occurred.

Every human being has available the general spectrum of consciousness—ego to soul to spirit—at least as temporary states, for the simple reason that all humans wake, dream, and sleep. What I experience in an immediate, 1st-person fashion includes (in addition to specific ‘contents’ or ‘immediate experiences’—a feeling, a thought, an impulse, an image, etc) what are often called ‘phenomenal states’.

• The goal: Waking Up systems maintain two things about the ultimate goal of Awakening: (1) everybody fully possesses right now the already Enlightened or fully Awakened Mind (of pure Wholeness), but (2) virtually nobody is aware of it. The average state of consciousness of a typical human being was said to be narrow, limited, fragmented, and marked by inherent suffering, anxiety, and torment—a state that generally was said to involve what is called the ‘separate-self sense,’ ‘self-contraction,’ the ‘illusory self,’ the ‘fallen self,’ the ‘dreaming self,’ or simply the ‘ego’ (none of them complimentary terms). The goal of Waking Up was, through the direct experimental practices of meditation, contemplation, or yoga, to transform consciousness from that limited and contracted state through several much more inclusive, open, and free states, to a genuine Wholeness, a pure Nonduality, an ultimate Unity consciousness or Kosmic consciousness, an absolute Oneness with the entire universe.

• Direct experience: States are directly available to awareness, under various circumstances. Take nothing on belief or as dogma but rather base claims on direct experience and evidence (believe nothing that you haven’t verified for yourself). The claim (metaphorically) is that we are directly realizing a Oneness with ultimate Reality itself—a direct experience of being one with the Divine, one with Spirit, one with our own highest and deepest Ground of Being, one with the Great Perfection. Waking Up directly increases the territory of your self by moving you through various dimensions of increasing wholeness until you reach a radical Oneness with the entire universe.

• The Truth: Waking Up deals not with relative truth but with ultimate Truth. Ultimate Truth does not deal with a particular being or group of beings; it deals with Being itself—the Ground of All Being, spaceless and therefore infinite, timeless and therefore eternal, and a groundless Ground that underlies every relative truth in existence but is not itself a relative truth (and thus is not detectable by ordinary, external science but only by an interior, meditative science).

Stages Overview (Growing Up):

Growing Up does not involve the Real Self or ultimate Truth; it unfolds in the relative world of space and time and growth and development—in other words, it evolves. The relative world is engaged in an ongoing process of Growing Up, a developmental or evolutionary process that continuously creates greater and greater complexity, unity, and consciousness.

The structure-stage of Growing Up that a person is at will tend to determine how they think and feel about everything else. In Growing Up, you are increasing the number of other perspectives with which you can identify.

• Stages are snapshots: Stages (and stage models) are just conceptual snapshots of the great and ever-flowing River of Life. Stages of growth are simply snapshots that we take at particular points in time and from a particular perspective (which itself grows and develops).

• Stages are real: Stages are real in the sense that there is something actually existing that occurs in the real world and that we call development or growth.

• Stages synonyms: Structures (emphasizes that these are enduring holistic patterns of being and consciousness—each is a holon, a whole that is part of other wholes); Levels (emphasizes that these are qualitatively distinct levels of organization, arranged in a nested hierarchy (or holarchy) of increasing holistic embrace (each level transcending but including its predecessors); Waves (emphasizes that these are not rigidly separate and isolated, but, like the colors of a rainbow, infinitely shade and grade into each other).

Growing Up (stages) interprets Waking Up (states):

You can have a profound Waking Up experience (state of consciousness) at virtually any one of the stages of Growing Up (structure of consciousness).

· Waking up states: 1st-person experiences (direct experiences); knowledge by acquaintance (immediate awareness); the experience is timeless and eternal; offers an ultimate Truth (and an infinite Wholeness); tells you virtually nothing about the relative world of Growing Up.

· Growing Up stages: 3rd-person explanations (objective realities); knowledge by description (words & concepts); the explanation exists in the world of time and evolution where it can unfold and develop; offers a relative truth (and a finite Wholeness).

• Stages interpret states: Everybody interprets their experience according to the structure-stage of Growing Up that they are at (according to the entire AQAL matrix operative at that time). All of our experiences—including our spiritual experiences of Waking Up—will be interpreted or explained by the structure-stage of Growing Up that we are at, which profoundly changes our entire view of spirituality itself. Although the major states of gross, subtle, causal, and nondual are available to human beings at virtually any stage of growth, the way in which those states or realms are experienced and interpreted depends to some degree on the stage of development of the person having the peak, religious, spiritual, or meditative experience. The way Waking Up (states) is interpreted grows and changes with Growing Up (stages).

• States into traits: It’s one thing to tap into a higher level; quite another to actually live there! Spiritual experiences do not allow you to simply bypass the growth and development upon which enduring spiritual realization itself depends. All peak experiences, no matter how profound, are merely temporary, passing, transient states. Although a person can have a peak experience of a higher dimension, the person’s self still has to grow and develop and evolve in order to permanently accommodate to those higher or deeper dimensions (in order to turn a temporary state into a permanent trait). In the upper reaches of evolution, the transpersonal potentials that were only available in temporary states of consciousness are increasingly converted into enduring structures of consciousness (states into traits).

• The ideal: Although states of consciousness are important, structures of consciousness give much more detailed information about the actual status of any individual’s growth and development, and thus a full-spectrum approach would want to include both states and structures. Having the highest states of Waking Up interpreted by the highest stages of Growing Up (that is, turiyatita One Taste interpreted by turquoise Integral) is indeed an ideal situation.

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• “Finding Radical Wholeness” (Book Summary)

• “The Integral Vision” (Book Summary)

• “Integral Psychology” (Book Summary)

• “Integral Spirituality” (Book Summary)

• “A Theory of Everything” (Book Summary)

• “A Brief History of Everything” (Book Summary) + 20 Tenets of Integral Theory