Vishen: Hi, I’m Vishen Lakhiani, Founder of Mindvalley, the school for human transformation.
You’re listening to the “Mindvalley Podcast,” where we’ll be bringing you the greatest teachers and thought leaders on the planet, to discuss the world’s most powerful ideas in personal growth of the mind, body, spirit, and work.
I’m Vishen Lakhiani, and this is the “Mindvalley Podcast.”
Hi everyone, this is Vishen Lakhiani, and with me, I have the legendary Ken Wilber. Ken, how are you today?
Ken: Hello, my friend. Good to hear your voice, and I’m delighted to be here with all of you.
Vishen: So what we did for all of you listening is, I put up several posts on my Facebook, I got several dozen people to ask their deepest, most interesting questions to Ken on a variety of topics, from the world we live in, and understanding geopolitics and how things are playing out today, to education, to personal growth, and deep questions such as what are stages beyond kosmocentricness, as well as questions on God and religion itself. So it’s been a very interesting conversation. And we’ll be talking about education and the world we live in.
So, we’re gonna start with the first question, and this came from Shalla Anna Lucia. Shalla asks, is it possible to bring about health on this planet if every newborn was given the right upbringing education? Followed by, what would the ideal education model for humanity look like?
So Ken, that’s a big one, I’d love to hear your take on it.
Ken: Yeah, it is a big one and so we need to cover just a few components to make sure we’re touching all the bases. And one of the things we have to remember here is that the human being is a complex combination of various aspects. Different dimensions, different levels of development, different lines of development or multiple intelligences, different states of consciousness, including ones like enlightenment or awakening, different types, and so on.
In integral theory, we summarize all these with a framework. It’s technically called AQAL, A-Q-A-L, which is short for all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types. But those are really just ways to summarize all of these various components of a human being. And if we’re gonna have a truly whole education, we’re gonna have to touch on all of these areas.
So, I mentioned quadrants, and quadrants just means different perspectives, like I, we, it. Those are three very real, very important, but very different domains. They are the basis of things like the good, the true, and the beautiful. The good is the we, or how we treat each other, ethics. The true is the it domain, or objective truth, or facts. The realm of science. And beauty is the I domain, or beauty in the eye of the beholder. Are all the great individual and personal potentials of any human. All three of those domains are important.
But today most education focuses just on the it domain or teaching facts and objective truths. It leaves out or ignores the we domain or interpersonal intelligence and social interaction and ethical values, and it’s very thin on the I domain, personal realities and values and purpose and potentials.
And it turns out that the I domain is actually very important, especially in education. And it consists of things including different lines of development or multiple intelligences. Usually education just focuses on only one or two of our multiple intelligences. But we now know human beings have upwards of a dozen different multiple intelligences, most of which are just thoroughly ignored.
Education mostly focuses on cognitive intelligence or book smarts, but there’s also emotional intelligence, moral intelligence, values intelligence, aesthetic intelligence, spiritual intelligence, among others, and all of those are incredibly important. They’re all very real, they actually exist, they’re not just theoretical, and they’re all almost completely ignored.
What we’ve also learned, which is absolutely fundamental, is that all those lines of development grow and evolve through a series of stages or levels of development. One version of those levels for example goes from magic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral. These others are really important because they’re the basic frameworks or grids or world views through which we see and interpret and experience our world, and any of our multiple intelligences.
That’s for example the post-modern teacher of culture anywhere nowadays is something called the culture wars. And the culture wars are ongoing cultural battles between what are widely recognized as three different world views or value systems. And these are simply the three most common values, or the three most common of these levels that I just mentioned.
In other words, the three combatants in the culture wars are, one, traditional, religious, usually with what’s called the mythic literal world view, then two, modern science with a rational world view, and then three, post-modern multiculturalism, with a pluralistic or relativistic world view.
In short, the culture wars are pre-modern, modern, versus post-modern. Or mythic, rational, versus pluralistic. And what none of the individuals who are involved in these culture wars seem to realize, is that those are three of the major levels of development available to all human beings. But we don’t educate for any of that. Even though it’s the predominant feature in today’s culture, present everywhere and unrelentingly.
What’s more is research shows there are yet higher levels of development or levels of consciousness, which only a very small portion of the population has developed to so far, such as the integral level. And we don’t teach those because we mostly just aren’t aware of them. So, families don’t teach them, education doesn’t teach them, and the culture at large certainly doesn’t teach them.