Most of the more sophisticated of these cartographies give around six to ten waves of development from birth to what I call the centaur level. But they all tell a generally similar tale of the growth and development of consciousness from-to use Jean Gebser's particular version-archaic to magic to mythic to rational to integral. Of course there are dozens of disagreements and hundreds of conflicting details. The harmony of alignment shown suggests a possible reconciliation of theories." įrom Clare Graves to Abraham Maslow from Deirdre Kramer to Jan Sinnott from Jurgen Habermas to Cheryl Armon from Kurt Fischer to Jenny Wade from Robert Kegan to Susanne Cook-Greuter, there emerges a remarkably consistent story of the evolution of consciousness.
Indeed, in Integral Psychology I assembled the conclusions of over one hundred different researchers, and, as one of them summarized the situation, "The stage sequences can be aligned across a common developmental space. One of the striking things about the present state of developmental studies is how similar, in broad outline, most of its models are. Both of those pressing issues (the integral vision as it relates to the most developed and the least developed populations) are related directly to the contents of this volume of the Collected Works. Moreover, there is the more typical or average mode of consciousness, which is far from integral anything, and is in desperate need of its own tending. But there are several obstacles to that integral embrace, even in the most developed populations. So it is that the leading edge of consciousness evolution stands today on the brink of an integral millennium-or at least the possibility of an integral millennium, where the sum total of extant human knowledge, wisdom, and technology is available to all. From isolated tribes and bands, to small farming villages, to ancient nations, to conquering feudal empires, to international corporate states, to global village: the extraordinary growth toward an integral village that seems humanity's destiny. You were, for example, born a Chinese, raised a Chinese, married a Chinese, and followed a Chinese religion-often living in the same hut for your entire life, on a spot of land that your ancestors settled for centuries. It seems hard to imagine, but for humanity's entire stay on this planet-for some million years up to the present-a person was born into a culture that knew virtually nothing about any other. In the history of the planet earth, this has never happened before. We live in an extraordinary time: all of the world's cultures, past and present, are to some degree available to us, either in historical records or as living entities. The original text and all footnotes can be found HERE. This excerpted version simply excludes a few sections (specifically, those dealing with critical theory, Boomeritis, and Wilber's Quadrants, Levels & Lines) in order to provide a more approachable introduction to Wilber's explanation of Spiral Dynamics, an important aspect of the integral vision of consciousness.
Excerpts from Introduction to Volume Seven of the Collected Works
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