It's just life

So, I believe it's time for me to introduce the concept of consciousness evolution in this blog. It sounds so exotic and esoteric, doesn't it, this very fact that there is an evolution to our consciousness. But it's ever so basic, ever so simple. It works like this - Hitler was mean, Gandhi was less mean. There's a difference in consciousness. However, whoever would suggest that Hitler was stupid is way off. He was a brilliant reformer, a brillian rhetorician, yet he was essentially, if you subscribe to the validity of the term, evil. Gandhi was also a brilliant reformer, a brilliant rhetorician, but he on the other hand was good-hearted.

So, we already see that goodness/badness doesn't necessarily depend on the capacity of a person's intellect. So we have already, using Ken Wilber's AQAL model, touched on two fundamental concepts - levels and lines. Let's look at them more closely:

AQAL: Levels
A level is a concept that refers to the overall development of an individual's consciousness. When a large portion of an individual's psyche is integrated on one particular rung of the consciousness ladder, we say their consciousness is on this level. These levels refer to broad observations of the consciousness of the individual and correspond, depending on what system you use, to a certain type of evolutionary framework. One of these reads as follows (low level consciousness at the top, highlevel at the bottom)

• Archaic
  
• Magical
  
• Egocentric
  
• Mythic/Ethnocentric
  
• Rational/Scientific
  
• Pluralistic/Postmodern
  
• Integral
  
• Transpersonal
  

I will break down the meaning of this in more detail later on, but right now, without having given this much thought and analysis, we could put Hitler stuck between the chairs of egocentric and ethnocentric while putting Gandhi on integral.

AQAL: Lines
Even though it's very easy to generalize, reality isn't as simple as we'd like to think. The idea of lines suggests that we have multiple lines of development that don't necessarily move in tandem. Some of these include:

• cognitive
  
• ethical
  
• aesthetic
  
• psychosexual
  
• spiritual
  
• kinesthetic
  
• affective
  
• musical
  
• spatial
  
• logical-mathematical
  

This part of the AQAL model suggests that you can have a very high development in one line, but a very low level of development in another. Taking the example of Hitler, let me guess my way through the five first items on the list:



Cognitive
Highly developed. He was smart.

Ethical
Almost not developed at all. If you happily send millions away to their certain deaths, you have issues.

Aesthetic
Highly developed. He was an artist and Nazi symbolism was highly aesthetic - one of the best feats of branding in history.

Psychosexual
Hardly developed. I'm guessing here, but this is Freudian territory and there is much to suggest that Hitler had a very complicated relationship with his parents. I don't think he was much of a lover to put it that way.

Spiritual
Moderately developed. It may come as a surprise that I don't say he had no development, but Hitler was in fact, in his own perverted way, a bit of a sparetime mystic. He was interested in Hinduism as showcased by his use of the ancient Hindu symbol the swastika. This symbol can still today be found on the diplomas of Indian universities and Buddha statues - the symbol hasn't been tarnished there in the same way as in Europe. Hitler is also known to have practiced yoga and was 100% vegetarian. These things may seem incredibly strange, but I think his moderate development in the spiritual line together with has lacking development in the ethical line was an extremely explosive combination. Many people in history have used concepts from Eastern spiritual philosophies to cause tremendous damage to the world (e.g. Zen buddhism and kamikaze pilots)

The understanding of the concept of lines sheds light on the abuses seen in the Guru phenomenon. It's possible to be highly evolved spiritually, but hardly developed in psychosexual terms. A dangerous combination to say the least.

Right, that's my first post on the AQAL framework which I will be using on my blog in the future. In the next installment, I will discuss quadrants, states and types to flesh out the model