Complex Coherence: MG Interviews Ken Wilber, Part Two

[Continued from Part 1.  I highly recommend that you read these in order, as a great number of confusing terms are explained in annotations throughout the interview.  The audio for Part Two is available below, so you can listen along.]

Complex Coherence:  Michael Garfield Interviews Ken Wilber, Part Two

KW:  The artist of the postmodern era is basically the artist that comes to reduce everything to equal fragments, including itself, in preparation for all of those fragments being integrated.  And that's what art in the coming years can do, is get into art that doesn't solve the temporal problem or the duality problem, but solves the plurality problem, the self-loathing problem, and the lying.  The fundamental lying that is at the heart of art in the postmodern era.

And so, again, that can be felt in the artist.  The artist goes from feeling like a, ringing like a, cracked bell - because everything they criticize, they know at the bottom of their heart the same criticism applies to their own artwork, and if everything else sucks, their own artwork sucks, it's just as well to be deconstructed, and so nothing has any fundamental meaning in postmodernism and all you're supposed to do, all you can do, is put up stuff for ironic exposure and basically deconstruct anything that's out there.  And that's all that postmodern art can do.  It cannot offer a positive vision.  And so we're coming to the end of that era.  And it's a preparatory era, it's sort of John the Baptist, basically.  And that's why, again, it's very exciting to be in art at this time, if you have teal or turquoise consciousness.  I mean, I can sorta go on about that theme and let me just pause about that cuz part of this is that we were going to sorta have a discussion...

[We both laugh.]

MG:  Well this - yeah, thank you.  In this kind of a context, then, when Gebser says that the new music is in a position to abolish previous time forms, he's actually speaking to the music of green deconstructionism.

KW:  Yes, he's speaking of that, and -

MG:  Of this digestive layer.

KW:  Yes.  Yes, he's confusing it with that, and he also, in some of the positive aspects of that, he means a nondual state.  Cuz that does abolish time.

MG:  Yeah.  And then, just kind of moving from that point, at which we're starting to reassemble things and bring a tender appreciation of the partiality of our perspectives -

KW:  Right.

MG:  And, you know, a recognition of deeper universals -

KW:  Right.

MG:  How do you see - and let's stay on this topic for just one more question, because time is so fundamental to musical expression - as you described in your work, each altitude of development is aware of, and expresses artistically, a new mode of temporal experience.  I've been really fascinated by the work of Arvo Pärt recently, and he describes his music as an expression of "the wing-beat of time," which is this tension between the linear time of rational awareness and this timeless space that we seem to start to push into when we recognize that the time that we experience from any perspective is a constructed notion, and we - I'm a little wary to say this, but it's almost like time-as-a-spatial-matrix. 

KW:  Yeah.

MG:  And so, I'm just curious, given that you have spoken with so many integral musicians, and have explored that notion of time as it emerges in this integral vision-logic awareness, how do you see that being experienced and communicated in integral music?

KW:  Well, I certainly agree with the gentlemen you quoted about music certainly can be two-winged, one floating on timelessness and one floating on whatever the constructed nature of time is at any given level.   And I think that is where we actually start to talk about sort of the two different dimensions of what art can do.  And one, again, is structural - its altitude, what actually is the altitude resonating in the signifier of the artwork.  And that means that if you do music, primarily from a red altitude, then in ways we don't full understand,  red signifiers will be transmitted along some sort of conducive medium, and be picked up in another sentient being.  If the other sentient being has the same essential bodily structure as you do, then that sentient being will resonate with the same altitude, it will resonate with red, if it has emerged, in their own case.

So in part, then, there's a vertical judgment about what art is doing.  And that is that it is coming from a particular altitude.  If it's an altitude that's lower than the present center of gravity [the average level of development] of the culture they're in, then it can be because it's trying to remind us of something that we've forgotten, or it can be pre-conventional [too immature to understand rules and laws] adolescence rebelling a conventional world, fight the system, you know, all the sort of...protest music that is actually pre-conventional, and is protesting the imposition of a[n] amber conventional structure on top of their red impulsive desires and intentionalities.  If it's higher than the average center of gravity, then it's the call of the future, it's Art From Tomorrow.  Art on a signifier that the general culture is not yet embodying, and therefore it actually carries content and a transformative pull to these higher structures.

And so as the Renaissance was emerging, you would see visual painting go from grand mythic schemes, with actual men as heroic and as semi-divine, and a sort of very powerful mythic background, to a painting that was reflective and coming from an orange rational, perspectival space.  So all of a sudden you get three-dimensional perspective for the first time.  Which is astonishing, that people actually don't see three dimensions, until they get to orange rational structure.  And it didn't get depicted in art until that time.  And so even standing in visual art with three dimensions was a transformative pull on consciousness.  It's actually art as transformation, as cultural transformation.  And then often what was depicted in those paintings was just an individual person.  Just portraiture.  And because individual egos are the nature of orange society, as opposed to mythic roles and rule-roles in the mythic society.

[Examples:  the good son or daughter, a man of the faith, an honorable husband or wife - these things are not defined by the values of the individual, but how the person's behaviors match an external and supposedly eternal concept of the rules and roles of the world.]

And so just looking at this artwork would have the effect of taking someone at amber and pulling them up, pulling them up to orange.  And the same thing happened as the postmodern revolution hit art, and you had Marcel Duchamp's urinal just put out there and presented as a piece of art.  That artwork is still consistently - I saw another voting where it was voted the most important artwork of the 20th Century.  And it's because of what it did - that is, announce that there's an entirely different form of art.  It's an art that is self-exposing and self-deconstructing of the present society.  And that self-deconstruction became a transformative pull for people at orange to move into green.  And of course, all the problems of green, and all the self-contradictions in it.  Nonetheless, it's a higher altitude.

And so art can perform that transformative function.  But then art can also - and that's sort of a vertical function, if you will.  But art can also perform kind of a, what you can think of as a horizontal function of states, and that's not transformative as much as transmuting.  And that means that no matter what altitude your at, art can evoke these states.  And beyond just sort of subtle emotional states, which good art tends to do in any event, there is what we could call, sort of, spiritual art.  And spiritual art, no matter what its content, pulls people into the causal witnessing contemplative states or into nondual flow states, and that actually moves them from a third person to a second person to a first person.

So art starts out as a third person, as just something that you listen to as an object.  But then if it really has impact on you, people will start to say, "I really hear that music."  Or, "The art is speaking to me."  And that's cuz it's moved into a second-person relationship with that artifact.  And then if that sort of deep connection continues, the person will move into a first-person identification, then a nondual flow state with that artwork.  And so that is a transmuting and a liberating force of art.

So the first one is more of a transformative and a communicating and a working with fullness, and the second one is working with freedom, is actually  helping you in a sense disidentify with any particular manifest thing and simply move into a role of witnessing contemplation.  Or, then, nondual unification.  And so, these two different dimensions that art is working on.  And the second dimension of moving into causal or nondual spaces, that's indeed working with the timeless, that's working with an actual eternity, that's working with an actual abyss, a vast openness or presence or emptiness from which each thing emerges moment to moment.

And ultimately, we are that vast openness that is our own Big Mind.  The witness in each of us right now that's listening to these words and sees an environment around it, is aware of thoughts moving through its mind, is aware of sensations.  The witness of all of those is pure spirit.  And art can evoke that realization as a peak experience.  And at that point, it's a very real emptiness.  It's a pure, absolute, ultimate Spirit.  And art is one of the forms that immediately can tap into that dimension and can find ways to transmit it.  And that is indeed one of the important functions of art. 

So the first is to transmit a certain sort of altitude, a certain space, a certain signified perspective.  But the others actually tap into a spiritual dimension, an absolute dimension, a dimension that's eternal and that's timeless and can influence the art simply by going through the mind of the artist on its way to the artwork.  And the artifact will pick up as much eternity as the artist can get into it.  But being influenced by both of those.  So the artist dipping into their own source of creativity, their own vast, open wellspring of creativity, which is itself pure causal Spirit - and out of that comes creative forms.  And artists are more attuned, generally speaking, to the emergence of these creative forms.  And that's what art is all about, is transmitting those forms that are closest to the timeless, closest to eternity.  And so, sort of go back and forth and back and forth between the world of form, and the formless, the world of form, and the formless as the source of creativity, and then that which is created.  And that gets transmitted depending on the talent of the artist.

MG:  And in this light, where art is - can be - more of a transformative, transmutive technology, the integral artist - the integral painter, or musician, or sculptor, or author - is operating with an immediate awareness of this deeper union beneath the multiplicity.  And so is there even - you know, in attempting to communicate anything about the relative world, anything that's contained within this timelessness - is there such a thing as a coherent spatial or temporal message that comes from an integral art, something that we can recognize as a transformative signifier from that altitude?  Or is it that the integral artist is so fascinated with and attentive to this honoring of this entire continuum that there is no one single perspective that we're going to be able to recognize as emergent at that level?

KW:  Well, I think it's a good question, and I think, though, that there is a signifier - I don't know that I would call it a single signifier, but I would call it maybe a common class of signifiers.  And they're signifiers that basically look, touch, and feel vision logic.  And basically what that means is a systemic, but a genuinely systemic, acceptance of everything that's arising.  And so even though some of the things that are arising can be portrayed in integral art - let's say a red music beat could be included primarily in a piece of turquoise art, let's say - but it's going to be red as it [red] appears in a turquoise space.  It's not going to be red as it appears in a red space.  So red as it appears in a red space is an impulsive set of signifiers that can not take the role of other, that simply is in a narcissistic space, and it is in an egocentric, power-driven space.  And it has no option but to do that, and it can't even take the role of other, it can't even know how you are resonating to this, except as an extension of itself.

And it's entirely - well, it's half different - from how red appears as it's presented in a turquoise piece of art.  Even if it's presented alone in a turquoise piece of art, it's presented without the first-person perspective limitation.  So in other words, it's just pure power, or pure intentionality, held in its own right, now taken over by a first-person perspective.  So it's just sheer power - but power that is actually held in a turquoise space - it's sheer intentionality, but intentionality held in a turquoise space.  So at the very least, that means it's red power looked at in a fifth-person perspective.

[The term "fifth-person" refers to the degree of perspective-taking of which integral consciousness is capable.  Egocentric red can only account for its own perspective, and so only offers a first-person view.  Ethnocentric amber has become aware of the other members of its community and so can guess at what you are feeling and thinking - awake to a second-person view.  Worldcentric orange has recognized the multiplicity of diverse perspectives and how they converge on a single system of reality, enabling it to describe things in objective terms (a third-person view).  Deconstructive postmodern green consciousness takes a fourth-person view when it further objectifies even the third-person view, recognizing that there is a meta-perspective on empirical reality that renders all truth relative.  Reconstructive integral teal and turquoise takes a perspective on the endless contextualization of green's fourth-person revelation and recognizes a deeper level of historical commonalities - not absolute universals, but simple common features of every other perspective.  This is a fifth-person perspective, as Ken means it.  More on this in a moment.]

And even though the essential contours of power might look the same, there's going to be a flavor to it, there's going to be an atmosphere to it, there's going to be some sort of turquoise signifier - and again, I don't think there's a single one, I think there's a whole class of common turqouise signifiers that that red is going to be held in.  And again, nobody knows how that works.  Nobody knows how vibrations of consciousness or how levels of consciousness or how stages of consciousness - nobody knows how consciousness itself gets imprinted in signifiers.  But the integral theory is that not only does consciousness inform material artifacts, but the viewer of those artifacts has the same resonance drawn forth in their own being.  And there might even be subtle energies involved in this, and that's actually a part of how there's a genuine, concrete transmission.  Or it just might be that, you know, birds of a feather flock together.  But whatever it is, a turquoise signifier or a turquoise space is recognizable, in the whole feeling of, uh, complex coherence that it communicates.  And even if it's communicating something narrow, it will be communicating it in a space of complex coherence.  And that will have a feeling to postmodern pluralism as something that is really healing a lot of fractures that postmodernism either induced or exposed.  There will be an actual feeling to second tier, in the same way that there is a distinct feeling to orange:  three perspectives.

And what we're waiting to see is what the actual structure of those signifiers are.  Cuz we can look at them in certain individuals, but turquoise is still being laid down.

[Ken's integral theory is evolutionary, in that it recognizes creation and emergence as ongoing dynamic processes inherent to a self-organizing Kosmos.  New levels of consciousness first appear ill-defined - frothy, inexplicable, and nebulous - because their newness means that they are not as rigidly established as habits of the universe.  For a more scientific treatment of evolutionary cosmology, see the work of Rupert Sheldrake.]

And there's still any number of actual ways that it could be laid down.  But right now the general signifiers are basically complex coherence, and a differentiated and integrated consciousness.  And that gets transferred to the artwork, and is there to be decoded from the artwork.

MG:  Hmmm, yeah.  Something that just off the top of my head - when I saw Tool last April, they're working with such...well, you talk about "the red beat," this driving, primal aggressive energy.  And yet it was clear from my place in the audience that they were holding it with such even-handedness, and they were allowing the audience to move through these spaces and kind of grapple with this material, with the spaciousness that they themselves were holding for the music. 

KW:  Yeah, there you go.

MG:  Yeah, so that seems to be, that's pretty much what we're getting at, right?

KW:  Yeah, exactly.  Yeah, that's a good explanation, that's a good description of it, too. 

MG:  So part of this - you mentioned that part of this is a process of differentiation, part of it's a process of integration -

KW:  Right.

MG:  - and that we don't really understand how we charge a work of art with our intent.  Suffice to say that there does seem to be a certain balance between being able to hold it in a third person place and to take a perspective on it, but also an ability to enter into it and to, as the artist, live as the work, in its construction.  Paul Levy talks a lot about the work being in some sense a projected component of this higher self that's attempting to emerge through you.  So what do you see as being common traits among artists who are talented at specifically and consciously communicating a particular vision or state or mode of consciousness?  You know - even if we don't know the actual mechanism for this process, as engineers of states of consciousness, what do you see people continuing to find to be useful in their art?

KW:  Yeah, and this gets into areas of just how, you know, just where artists themselves come from.  Are they born?  Are they made?  Is it a reincarnation, a rebirth?  It'd help explain why somebody like Mozart hits the ground running.  Cuz it's certainly hard to explain with normal developmental scales, what some of these individuals are doing.  But in terms of just what basically constitutes the artist, there are certainly certain skills in certain of the multiple intelligences.  Because there are different kinds of art, there's no single psychograph of, let's say, a second tier artist.

Except there is a capacity, at least intermittently, for second tier cognition.  Because that is indeed what is going to be the essential stamping signifier:  that fourth or fifth person perspective that gives the feeling, the deep feeling of connectedness and the deep feeling of a complex coherence and the deep feeling of a truly - not the way Gebser meant it - but a truly integral-aperspectival.  A truly integral space bringing together any number of different perspectives and showing a common, central feeling to all of those perspectives, the integral universals.  And not just the monolithic orange formal-operational universals.  And so that cognitive line is going to be the stamp that is certainly one of the foremost things that gets added into the medium and forms, in-forms, the actual structure and the pattern, the flow, the nature of second tier art.  And then there's excellence in, and achievement in other multiple intelligences, depending on the nature of art itself.  So certain kinds of art will have an excellence in kinesthetic intelligence, others will have an excellence in affective intelligence, others will display an excellence in intra-personal intelligence, and you can sort of go through almost any of the multiple intelligences and find some type of art that makes use of them.  And so that kind of gets across the whole point of "What is art?," and "Why do we do art?," and "What's the nature of art itself?"

And to sort of put that aside for a moment to touch on this other question, I'd say that art is the depiction of that which is pleasing.  And attractive or beautiful.  And in a minute we can come back to that, but human beings - that's the inherent nature of human beings, that's one of the dimensions of human beings, one of the quadrants, in a sense, and so all human beings are artists to some degree.  But then some individuals will take that capacity and refine it into really extraordinary pieces of self-expressive and communicative artwork, using almost any number of multiple intelligences.

So one of the things that an integral artist is doing, of course, is firing up second tier cognition.  And that means anything that the artist can do to help take the perspective of others, and take the perspective of the perspective of others.  And take perspectives on perspectives on perspectives.  Cuz even though those sound really kind of abstract and difficult, they're actually straightforward and simple and profound ways that individuals get a view of how other people are viewing what other people are viewing.

But this just comes up, and it's one of the ways that worldviews are integrated.  And that second tier automatically integrates the worldview of red, and the worldview of amber, and the worldview of orange, and the worldview of green.  And just having even a SENSE of that wholeness comes from one of those higher perspectives.  So any sort of practice of perspective-taking, any just putting one's self in the shoes of others, and be able to see not only through one's perspective, but through others, is the fundamental nature of integral cognition.

And then in terms of the states issues, this is where emotional issues of artists get drawn in, because often emotional disorders involve states of consciousness, and many artists taking advantage of that.  And of course, it's the whole notion of "There's a fine line between genius and madness," and that line, in this case, is referring to access to states of consciousness, and the ease with which some artists do it, and there's any number of these states.  But one's capacity to experience states in a wakeful fashion is an extremely important part of inculcating artistic capacity and particularly the transmutation capacity of art.

And that's into subtle dimensions, and into causal dimensions, and into nondual.  And one of the best ways to do that, of course, is meditation.  And contemplation.  And then one can do that, though, with any particular aim in mind.  One doesn't have to do this change of states with a spiritual nature in mind.  Although in a sense, they are spiritual, they don't have, necessarily, content that is religious.

So basically, anything that helps open states of consciousness to artists is something that's really fundamental in terms of their own development, and their own program of excellence, basically.  And I think really great art, what it does, is it reaches an extraordinary balance between a sort of transformative art and transmutation art.  And that's sort of the two wings that  I think terrific art rests on.  And so those are two sort of dimensions that artists want to pay attention to.  And many of them are born doing this, but a lot of that can be trained.

[To be concluded.]