You Have To Be In Love: MG Interviews Ken Wilber, Part Three

[Here are links to Part One & Part Two of this interview, highly recommended if you intend to make sense of the lingo.  And immediately below is the audio for this part of the interview, so you can listen along.]

You Have To Be In Love:  Michael Garfield Interviews Ken Wilber, Part Three

MG:  So, as a musician who wants to communicate a message of love to the world, basically, I have to get two things straight.  Which would be that I have to be a skilled communicator, and I need to develop myself in whatever ways are relevant to the medium in which I'm attempting to express that message.  But the other is that I actually have to be in love.  For it to be a totally authentic message, I actually have to be in a loving state of mind when I'm engaging my work.

And there's something that I've seen so much of, just living up here in Boulder, and there's so much "conscious media" - there's like a node of truly conscious media, and around it there's this vast morass of media that seems to be following the style but not the substance.  Alex Grey really railed on modern advertisement in his book, The Mission of Art, for painting a glowing aura around a hamburger.  And whoring out this spiritual stuff.


KW:  And yes, there's a lot of that in Boulder, around so-called "integral."

MG:  But there's actually a transformative demand, you're saying here, that's being made on the artist their...whatever, you know, the Muse.

KW:  Right.

MG:  There's actually a kind of multivalent practice involved, that is a practice of mind and a practice of body that's involved in being a good artist. 

KW:  Yes, and the key thing to what you're saying is that whatever state of consciousness an artist is in, whether they're conscious of it or not, is going to be whatever informs and impacts the artifact.  And that is what will be, that's what is available, that's the impression that it will have on viewers or readers or listeners of the art.  And that's a really crucial item in integral theory, is that these artifacts of art are being created by sentient beings, and sentient beings impact those artifacts with essentially the nature of consciousness that is doing the creating.  And that that artifact will then evoke a similar state of consciousness in sentient beings viewing or impacting or coming into contact with it.

And so that means that - exactly - you can have artwork about love from someone who is genuinely in love, or is genuinely conveying feelings that they had when they were truly in love - that's still alive for them - that, like it or not, will impact the artifact.  And likewise, there's this sort of adulterous, fake, advertising sort of stuff.  When a false consciousness creates a piece of art, the dimensions of what is communicated in that art will include the false nature, will include the tinniness, will include the inauthenticness [sic] of it.  And a good critic will be able to spot that.  And of course, to be a good critic, you have to be integrally alive to all of these dimensions yourself.  Somebody who is green can not be an informed critic of turquoise art.  All they'll see is how much of those signifiers can get into their altitude.  Which is very limited.

But that's a really important point, is that whatever you wish to convey in art is something you genuinely have to be in a state of, yourself.  Or have immediate access to it, or certainly a good, genuine recollection of it.  And that is what will be conveyed.  And you can't really choose some of these factors.  And that's what's kind of an important point, is that you can't really choose the altitude that you're in.  You can choose to sort of convey the highest that you're possible of, and you can get in the highest states that you're possible of, but that might be for example, um, green.  Or it might be orange.  Or it might be turquoise, but whatever that altitude is, is the altitude that will come across in the artwork.  And that's why we can look at artwork, we can read something - certainly, reading something and you just get the feeling that, "Oh, this person is very, very amber," or "This person is very turquoise, this person is very green."  It comes across as a smell, a touch, a feel.  Its actual signifiers are embedded in that space, in the artifact.

And so leading edge artists, almost usually even unknowingly, but they do find themselves at a leading edge of transformation, and so their signifiers are coming down [from] a level or two above where the cultural center of gravity is, and is speaking to people in a way that is then actually transformative.  And as a secondary issue, it might also - the impact of that transformative art might be doubly increased by having transmutational elements in it as well.  And then it comes across as something that carries an extremely timeless and important message.

And so both of those dimensions are ones, though, that cannot be faked.  Because your consciousness can fake what you're saying - you can put the glow around the hamburger - but what comes across in the artifact doesn't lie.  The artifact tells the truth.  And whatever you actually make is the product of the entire being of the maker.  And if there's something in there that's false, or crooked, or wrong, it will come out.  And we all know artists that have, you know, famously have a particular kind of shadow that just shows up in everything.  And that's just one example, but the artwork doesn't lie.  The artist might lie, but the artwork doesn't lie.

MG:  Hmmm.  Yeah.  So that's an excellent place to jump from that...earlier on, just a few minutes ago, you mentioned why we do art.  Because it's an attempt to express or communicate some something beautiful.  And you know, I make that expression/communication distinction here, because in any case, it's moving into the signifier and back into someone's first person awareness.  And it may be that it's private art, and it may be that you're only making it for yourself, but at the same time, it's still in some sense a communication from your self in one moment to yourself in another moment.

KW:  Right.

MG:  From one perspective to another perspective.

KW:  Right.

MG:  So basically at this point, I would kind of like to - with that anchor - kind of flip this conversation a little bit, because we've spent a lot of time analyzing the nature of artwork, and rather than systematizing it in a scientific survey or exploration, I'd like to ask for you to discuss why we do art, why we do music, how we experience music - this cluster of concepts - from more of a poetic place.  I know that you write extensively in both an analytical voice and also as more of a spiritual poet.  So if we can just step back from integral theory as a heuristic device, and then if I can hear you talk about these things as an artist.  Why do we do artwork?  Why do we make music?

KW:  Right.  The fundamental answer to that is that it's basically an essential need of human beings, and it expresses something that - if we're going to talk specifically about an aesthetic view, then we're talking about that judgment that humans make about what is attractive to them.  About what's beautiful.  And that's essentially something that, I mean, even postmodern art, which certainly sometimes doesn't look beautiful, is nonetheless expressing what postmodernists find attractive.  And it's that feeling of what's attractive, the feeling of what's beautiful, and both the sort of self feeling of that, and the desire to communicate that.

So although all art isn't necessarily this type of communication, most art does have a component that is this, and it's a central part of it.  And it's the communication of that which you feel is really beautiful about life.  And in my own case, what I find really beautiful is both informed by sort of a second and third tier vision logic and vision, and a causal and nondual state.  And both of those point to "what is beautiful" as a vast...wholeness.  A harmony.  A balance.  A universe where, no matter how things appear on the surface, underneath them, they're beautiful.  And everything that's arising is exquisitely beautiful.  Everything that's arising is a[n] ornament of Spirit, is an absolute, positive manifestation of the ultimate Divine.

And whether it shows up in first-persons or second-persons or third-persons, it's showing up as this exquisite, painful beauty.  And that beauty can be expressed at any altitude, and so you can express it in first tier terms, you can express it with second tier terms, you can express it with third tier terms. 

It is, in terms of my own writing, because I have selected to write in certain academic circles, then the form of my writing is often constrained by what's accepted in those circles.  And that's a kind of third-person, analytic, rational, cognitive sort of overview.  So even if I'm writing about things that are transrational, I'm giving a rational summary of them.  But my work never confuses the two.  I, more than anybody, point out that this is just a map; we don't confuse it with the territory.  And all of my books have a call for praxis, or practice.  And even going back to the first books I wrote, like No Boundary, each chapter is a theoretical discussion about a particular level of consciousness, and then at the end of that chapter, each chapter has dozens of practices that you can do to evoke that level.  So it's grounded in a praxis that wants to really evoke, for everybody, this universal beauty.  And this universal radiance.  And this universe of a splendid ornamentation of the one and only Divine.  And that is most immediately expressed in artistic mode, cuz artistic mode is one of the sort of...well, it's just the way I speak, and it's the way that most human beings celebrate something that they find wonderful, and that they want to share with somebody else.  And they want to take that "I" space of beauty and wonderfulness, and make a "We" space out of it.  Expand it to as many people as possible.  And make that communication to as many people as possible.

And so one of the ways that I do it in my own writing is, after I've written, you know, hundreds of pages of technical stuff, then I'll sort of slip into poetic descriptions, and poetic celebrations, and more artistic modes of celebrating this, um, profound Great Perfection.  Entire books have been written by just taking those parts out.  The Simple Feeling of Being, for example, is an entire book of just the poetic statements.  So, definitely, there's a place for that, and it's a primary place, in terms of my own expression of my own understanding.  But, again, it gets curbed when I have to write technical and theoretical, analytical writings.   And so I play by those rules.  But even then, I try to sneak in a little bit of poetry, because that is a more intimately first-person mode of expression, and less a third-person, dry, analytic mode.  And it's certainly not true that I, you know, have some sort of addiction to the cognitive line, or anything like that.  It's just "When in Rome," you know?

MG:  No more than I do.

KW:  Yeah!  [Laughs.]  So those're a few reflections, in terms of what I do as an artist.

MG:  Yeah.  So, then, that's what Ken Wilber does as an artist...  And what I'm picking up from this whole scope is that from a witnessing or a nondual vantage, that because everything is arising as this beautiful and luminous integrated wholeness, that there is, in some sense, a movement or an effluence from Spirit in which the entire work of the universe is a single artistic act. 

KW:  Yeah.

MG:  So if you could just expound a little bit on that, about the motivation of Spirit to create...[let's say,] this conversation as a work of art.

KW:  Right.  And that fundamentally comes out of the superabundance of Spirit itself.  And what it would be able to do as ultimate, absolute Spirit.  And there've been lots of theoretical arguments about this, I mean, going back to Plato and Aristotle.  Aristotle argues that the ultimate One, because it's complete in itself, has nothing to do with Manifestation.  It wouldn't create anything, cuz that would imply a lack.  Plato, on the other hand, says, "Well, wait a minute:  A Spirit that can't create is less full than a Spirit that can."  [We laugh.]  And so, for Plato, there're shadows in the cave, but they're shadows of the Light.  And once you discover the Light, you're supposed to embrace the shadows.    Well, actually, Plato was a - even though he's branded as a dualist - he really ultimately was a nondualist, and saw ascending and descending as one essential process.

But that's certainly my point of view, is that it's a superabundance of Spirit, and a superabundance of I-AM-ness that causes it - and "cause" is not quite the right word - but just is why - also not quite the right word [We laugh.] that it overflows.  Again, cuz there's no causality here, there's not something in time that pushes Spirit to do something over here.  It's a radical timeless superabundance.  Once Manifestation is created, then you can talk about time, and then there's temporal unfolding, but all of these things are modifications of Spirit itself.  And Spirit itself remains...you can describe it poetically as vast, and full, and omnipotent, and infinite, and eternal, and so on, but those are all, um, metaphors.  And the Absolute itself is...the best it can be described is just pure emptiness.  Unqualified - including that.  But, metaphors then help to talk about it, and that's where you talk about the superabundance of the One.  The superabundance just causes an overflowing into the world, and it's a sharing capacity, but it also then creates different viewpoints out of itself.

It's like if you want to play checkers with yourself, as a - kids do this all the time, and they are first learning checkers and they want to play it with themselves, and they play one side, and then they try to play the other side, but then they realize it doesn't work, because they know that the other side's going to do.  And so it sort of dawns on you is that the only way you can have a real game is if you take different perspectives, and forget that you're taking the other perspective.  Or you won't get a real game going.  And so out of this superabundance, in order to get a real game going, Spirit creates all these different perspectives and then forgets Who It Is.

And there is a slow evolving back to a remembering of that - again, sort of metaphorically putting it that way.  But individual perspectives can wake up at any time to their fundamental oneness with this absolute, pure I-AM-ness.    And that is a...well, a union of the human and the Divine, and an intersection of the eternal timeless and the world of time.  All of which, though, is nonetheless a product of the superabundance of this Divine Mystery.

And that's part of what my own writing is tracking, and attempting to give some coherent expression to.  Although, it again remains...you know, they're just inscriptions on the...on the face of, uh...stuff that's gone with the wind...and are good stories for this time, because I think they stick, but they're just stories.  And just ways of tracking what this superabundance is all about.  And I generally write it at a turquoise/indigo level of communication, just cuz that's about the highest you can go at and still have a fair number of people that will understand what you're saying.

MG:  If you've got really good news, you see something really beautiful, you've got nobody to share it with...from a mythological perspective, you can say it's like, "Well, you got nobody to share it with, you gotta make somebody."

KW:  Right.  Basically, that's exactly right.  You know, it's no fun having dinner alone.  You can't really get into things like sharing, and you can't really get into things like love, in terms of loving-of-another, and so for all of these reasons and lots of other sort of metaphoric reasons, it makes it easy to understand why, even if you are perfect, absolute, infinite One, if you wanted to - just to say again - even have a game, or just have something that was going to surprise you, if you wanted to actually have an adventure, then you could dream something.  But in order for that dream to really work, you'd have to forget during the dream that you're the one doing it.  Cuz otherwise, it just doesn't work.  So all of these different ways that Spirit starts the world, the different accounts of them, all have some notion of amnesia.  Or forgetting.  And all have, in terms of the path of realization, some notion of an-amnesis.  Or remembrance.  Or recognition of something that's already true, and not something that has to be created.  And that's why the Supreme Realization itself is just a recognition of ever-present Big Mind.  The recognition of ever-present True Self.  And not something that has to be created or developed.

But in the world itself, that's manifest - that world - in this particular go-round, relates by evolving.  And evolution is the one central notion of the manifest universe.  And so we track Spirit's unfolding in the manifest universe, which is the universe of itself, and we track that through development and evolution.  And that's just sort of one of the stories that sticks best in this particular manifest world.  But you can see how all of these stories about manifestation have to do with forgetting who you are in order to get a good game started.

MG:  You know, every work of art has multiple interpretations, so even here in the mundane, vividly, there's a progress by which this artist is - in attempting to communicate a single message - actually creating this multiplicity of perspectives, constantly.

KW:  Right, yeah.  And the more evolved the artist is, the deeper the implicit number of perspectives it will accept.  And therefore, there's just a depth to the artwork that is noticeable.  There's a presence in the artwork that's noticeable.  And that depth is just almost palpable.  You can just sort of feel it.  And the more developed a person is, the more depth they have.  The more it becomes something that you can actually just feel in their presence.

MG:  All those other interpretations, right on the other side of perception. 

KW:  Uh huh!

MG:  Well, thank you so much, Ken. 

KW:  Well, sure!

MG:  This is a lovely opportunity, and really, I think I speak on behalf of a lot of people - all my friends who helped me formulate some of these questions, and the Zaadz Visionary Music community, the integral community at large - when I say, thank you for your time today.

KW:  Great!  Thank you, Michael.  This was fun.