Let’s talk about the Wilber-Combs lattice and the implications it has for our psychospiritual growth.
Before we get started, it’s worth noting the that Wilber-Combs Lattice comes from Ken Wilber and Allan Combs’ larger discovery of how human growth works and how traditional psychological growth can fit seamlessly with spiritual growth. The Lattice is useful, but only if you understand this larger discovery.
Let’s begin by discussing how Wilber and co came up with the Wilber-Combs Lattice.
The Origins of The Lattice
The origin of the Wilber-Combs Lattice is the discovery that spiritual state development (which we develop through contemplative practices like meditation) exists independently of psychological stages of development.
Wilber and co went through arduous years of research before finally discovering this and creating the Wilber-Combs Lattice. In fact, in Integral Spirituality, Wilber calls this process a “convoluted mess”.
Right from the early days of his work, Wilber knew the stages of development present in Western psychology were crucial for understanding human beings. He often calls these basic levels Archaic, Magic, Mythic, Rational, Postmodern, andIntegral.
These levels appear in many different guises in developmental models, regardless of whether their focus is values, morals, faith, worldview, cognition or any other developmental line.
As an experienced meditator, he also recognised thestages of spiritual growth that dominate in Eastern spiritual traditions, and which Daniel P Brown summarised in his five stages. Wilber calls these Gross, Subtle, Causal, Witness and Non-dual.
The problem is that these maps had never been blended together. Neither included the other in any meaningful or deliberate way. Wilber saw the importance of integrating the two and understanding how these growth processes related to one another. But in attempting to do so, Wilber ran into a slew of problems.
In the beginning, he believed that the upper stages of psychological growth corresponded to the lower stages of spiritual growth.
So Wilber simply took the meditative stages, treated them as advanced developmental stages, and stacked them on top of the traditional Western ones. This lead to his first developmental models, as seen in works like The Spectrum of Consciousness.
Soon he realised that this couldn’t be right. This one-dimensional formulation implies that you have to pass through all the developmental levels to have spiritual experiences, which didn’t seem plausible.
How could that be true when several of the higher Western stages are very recent emergents (to wit, Rational, Postmodern and Integral), while Eastern meditative traditions are thousands of years old? Did accomplished meditators from the past really all grow past the development levels that dominated in their time, often Magic and Mythic?
And how could we define enlightenment such that it made sense across all human history? What even is enlightenment?
To complicate matters further, Wilber observed that some of the Western models also included stages above Integral that seemed to mimic the major Eastern states of consciousness. How does that fit with the confusion above?
This convoluted mess continued for years without solution, until Wilber realised that you had to stop equating the two axes and that both axes must co-exist.
Both the Western structural-developmental models and the Eastern spiritual-meditative models now made sense as part of one model of human growth, as separate yet interdependent dimensions.
Once he realised this, everything made sense. Human history, religion, spirituality, Western psychology and more all now fitted together, and the explanatory model for their interrelation was quite simple.
Corroborating his work, Allan Combs came upon the same idea just a few months later, and the two eventually combined their ideas to create the Wilber-Combs Lattice.
The Wilber-Combs Lattice
Thus, the Wilber-Combs Lattice is a two-dimensional model that shows how Western developmental growth corresponds to Eastern meditative-state growth.
On the horizontal axis, we have the major state-stages of consciousness: Gross, Subtle, Causal, (Witness) and Non-Dual. On the vertical axis, we have the major structure-stages of developmental growth: Archaic, Magic, Mythic, Rational, Postmodern, Integral, which appear in many different developmental lines.
The implications and applications of this model are numerous and profound.
The Implications of the Wilber-Combs Lattice
Remember I said that the Wilber-Combs Lattice is just a map of the fundamental discovery that spiritual states and psychological states are two valid yet separate dimensions of human growth.
For one thing, the Lattice shows us why people experiencing the same state of consciousness can interpret it in many ways. It’s because we all interpret that experience according to our level of developmental growth, our inner “equipment”.
And once you take into account cultural and societal factors (the Lower-left and Lower-right quadrants), you realise that the same state can be interpreted in essentially endless ways. No interpretation is necessarily wrong or implies that we don’t experience the state, but they can certainly be partial and unwholesome.
In The Religion of Tomorrow, Wilber gives the example of various people having a Subtle experience of inner luminosity, all using the framework of Christianity.
In each case, they have the same first-person experience, but their interpretation of it is wildly different, and the experience tends to confirm and reinforce their interpretative framework.
Magic: Jesus Christ is a magician that works wonders on my behalf. Literally, he flies, walks on water and cures the sick with his superhuman abilities.
Mythic: the word of Christ is absolutely true and he is my one true saviour.
Rational: Jesus is fully human, a wise teacher of a practical philosophy for happiness and purpose.
Postmodern: Jesus is a teacher of non-sectarian, non-hierarchical love and togetherness, if imperfect.
Integral: Christ is a placeholder word for a spiritual realisation that is described and taught in a slew of traditions.
The Wilber-Combs lattice legitimises them as different interpretations of the same experience.
The Lattice also tells us what enlightenment is and how it fits with other aspects of human growth. We no longer hold traditional enlightenment to be the only important dimension, yet we also give it prominence alongside the Western paradigm.
In the meditative traditions, one is typically considered to be some degree of enlightened if they have glimpsed the Witness state. In Buddhism, such people are called Stream-Enterers.
For the Western traditions, “enlightenment” is a question of values, morals, worldviews, behaviour, and so forth, and the entry requirements vary by level.
From a broad perspective, we all experience various enlightenments as we traverse these phases, transcending and including each. In a sense, we feel enlightened when we’re centred in each one, because we typically venerate our current stage. This is especially true for 1st-tier stages, the five stages prior to Integral.
To Mythic people, only fellow Mythic people are enlightened. To Rational people, only Rationalists are enlightened. To the Postmodernists, only Postmodern people are enlightened. But to Integralists, we’re all enlightened just by virtue of being human, but are at different levels: “a 9-year-old is not a defective 12-year-old.”
It also explains why many spiritual masters can seem both wonderfully enlightened and yet so deficient in their values, worldviews, desires, behaviour, and so forth. They may have taken up semi-permanent or permanent residency in Witness or Non-dual, while their equipment is fundamentally Mythic or below.
They’re enlightened in the Eastern meditative sense, but remain painfully underdeveloped in the Western sense, stuck in junior levels of viewing, valuing and understanding.
As a meditation teacher, this framework is essential for me. I see myself and my students as traversing the state-stages of meditative growth, while our basic psychological equipment varies considerably. I’m still trying to figure out how to explicitly incorporate the Western stages into our practice.
That said, I see where everybody is at and grant them the right to be there, realising that meditative growth is still possible for them. I also don’t impose my values or beliefs on them because I realise you can’t force people to grow developmentally.
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The post The Wilber-Combs Lattice first appeared on Deep Psychology.
The post The Wilber-Combs Lattice appeared first on Deep Psychology.
