This article presents a model of the social evolution of consciousness that describes how human consciousness has changed during the span of human history. By "consciousness" I simply refer to the inner life of the individual, including thoughts, attitudes, emotions, motivations, and spiritual experience. This article deals with the social evolution of consciousness only. The biological evolution of consciousness has taken place over millions of years and will not be discussed here. Biologists tell us that in the last 35,000 years, our biological make-up has changed so little as to be irrelevant to the enormous changes we have seen in our consciousness (Glantz and Pearce, 1989), all of which are the result of the evolution of our social arrangements. This model is part of a more extensive model of social evolution developed by the author (Earley 1997) which also includes the evolution of technology and social structure. This model helps to explain both our many scientific, humanitarian and artistic advances as a species and the moral horrors that have occurred during our history.

This model provides a framework for understanding our consciousness today. As we reach the millennium, Western society is in the midst of a planetary crisis, whose most dangerous symptom is that we are undermining our biological support systems at an alarming rate. The model points a way out of this crisis by advocating specific changes in consciousness that can help transform material and social arrangements. This is not because I believe that changes in consciousness by themselves are enough but rather because I have chosen to limit the scope of this article to the realm of consciousness.

Although other scholars have recently developed models of social evolution (e.g., Elgin, 1993; Wilber, 1983, 1995), this model stakes out new ground by highlighting the dialectical nature of social changes and offering a new understanding of the modes of consciousness that need to be integrated in the next stage of evolution.

THE MODEL

The model defines two complementary qualities of consciousness: participatory and reflexive. Participatory consciousness is known as a ground quality because it has been present from the beginnings of human social evolution. In contrast, reflexive consciousness is called an emergent quality because it has gradually emerged over time.

Participatory consciousness is characterized by a sense of belonging to the world. In this mode, people relate to the world primarily through instinct, emotion, the body, and the immediate present. Reality is experienced as animate, organic, and spiritual. Reflexive consciousness, in contrast, gives us the ability to understand ourselves and the world through the mediation of images and ideas. Rather than simply experiencing, we can also reflect on how we experience the world; we can conceptualize and analyze. Reflexive consciousness allows for objective understanding and enhances our ability to take control of our environment and plan for the future.

Reflexive consciousness uses "exclusive" concepts, which specify clear boundaries, such as the dictionary definition of a word. When participatory consciousness uses concepts at all, it tends to use "inclusive" concepts, such as a dream image that can mean many different things.

This distinction between participatory and reflexive consciousness has an analogue in constructivist cognitive psychotherapy theory. Guidano (1991) discusses the interplay between "embedded immediacy" and "abstract distancing" in meaning making. My emphasis on integration of these two modes of consciousness finds confirmation in the work of Greenberg and Pascual-Leone (1994), who "call for a dialectical synthesis between the direct emotional process and the reflective cognitive knowing processes to guide adaptive action"(Fodor, in press).

According to the model, each stage of social evolution is defined by the relationship between participatory and reflexive consciousness (as well as with the relationship between the ground and emergent qualities in the material and social realms in the more inclusive model). Over the course of history, the two complementary qualities have been opposed to each other, and the emergent quality, reflexive consciousness, has been growing while the ground quality, participatory consciousness, has been increasingly suppressed and devalued.

In the final analysis, healthy interpersonal functioning and social organization require integration of these two modes of consciousness. Our ability to reflect on and analyze our experience is the foundation of much that is uniquely human. Our capacity to observe our actions and deduce their consequences has given us conscious choice, and therefore ethics and philosophy. Our ability to objectively comprehend the material world has given us technology and science. On the other hand, without our aliveness and our emotions, without our passion and our spiritual depth, without our sense of belonging to nature and to the human community, there would be little point in living. Life would be sterile and meaningless. However, when participatory and reflexive consciousness are integrated, you can experience vitality and belonging while also being able to reflect on your experience in order to make autonomous choices.

OUR HISTORY

Let’s now look at the relationship between participatory and reflexive consciousness during five stages of social evolution.

Stage 1

From roughly 35000 - 8000 BC, people lived in small bands, gathering food and hunting for subsistence. During this era, participatory consciousness prevailed. People felt a deep sense of belonging—to the tribe and to the natural world. They were fully alive to sensual and spiritual reality in a way that most of us today have lost. The consciousness of tribal peoples may have been so different from ours that it is difficult for us to truly comprehend their experience of the world. They were alive to the subtle nuances of nature, from impending rain to the meaning of the track of a jackal. They experienced themselves as an integral part of the natural world, and in many ways they felt closer to neighboring animals than to tribes that were culturally different.

Their spiritual life was characterized by animism, the impression that everything was alive with spirit—animals, birds, trees, rocks, sacred places, and even their artifacts, such as drums or tools. They felt a kinship with everything, including the animals they killed for food. They had certain totem animals with which they communed for spiritual guidance. Erich Kahler describes totemism:

A personified essence of the species...takes shape as a First Ancestor, who represents both the origin and the substance of the species. [This] need not always be a human being. He may be an animal or a plant, a rock or a star.... Even his descendants may be not merely human beings, but leopards, aras, or crocodiles (Kahler ,1956, p. 42,43).

During stage 1, people believed in magic, and often tried to influence the weather or the hunt through symbolic activities and rituals such as the rain dance. Their primary mode of understanding was vastly different from ours. They didn’t step back and analyze the world to calculate linear cause and effect relationships. Instead, they related to reality in an inclusive and metaphoric way, through story and symbol. They believed that things could affect each other through contagion and similarity (Rozin and Nemeroff, 1990).

Stage 1 people also felt a deep sense of belonging to the band and tribe. They knew where they stood and felt at home in their community. They felt little separation from their tribal culture. They could make their own choices about how to live, but these choices were strongly circumscribed by their traditions. A person wouldn’t even consider living in a way that violated tribal customs or believing anything different from the tribal worldview. However, this description doesn’t even capture their consciousness because they didn’t think in terms of "customs" or "world views." Those are modern ideas. Customs were simply "the way things are done" and their worldview was simply "the way things are."

It seems that there was an immediacy and vitality to their experience of life that we rarely attain—even in glimpses. They were not split as we are between thinking and feeling, observing and experiencing, doing and being. This is because they didn’t engage in nearly as much reflexive thinking or objective observing or long range planning as we do. These early people were open to the beauty of a sunset and the richness of a forest glen. They experienced the vitality of their bodies and enjoyed the closeness of their relationships. Art and religion were not special activities set apart from life. Everything they made had both aesthetic and practical value, and every ritual was simultaneously an artistic performance and a religious ceremony.

Stage 2

In stage 2, from 8000 to 3000 BC, people lived in villages subsisting by horticulture, a primitive form of agriculture. With the advent of horticulture, more reflexive consciousness was required. Food producing activities had to be planned and coordinated on a yearly basis. While hunter-gatherers were able to live hand-to-mouth, horticulturists had to plan ahead. The social complexity of Stage 2 demanded much more in the way of conceptual understanding. People were no longer just people, there were complex kinship relationships and status gradations. Trade and commerce required a more refined ability to calculate the worth of goods and keep account of transactions. Warfare became more frequent and more complex, requiring a greater capacity to train, plan, and outsmart opponents.

Stage 1 people lived in small bands, and their loyalties and beliefs were strongly organized around blood ties—family and extended family. In moving to Stage 2, people emerged from an exclusive family orientation and became members of larger societies which were held together by their mythic beliefs.

In his seminal study of the evolution of consciousness Gebser (1986) identifies the mythical structure of consciousness as the dominant structure during what I call Stages 2 and 3. He defines imagination as the essential subjective medium of this era, whereby he means "making ideational pictures or models of the world" (Feuerstein, 1987, p.77). Imagination gave people the ability to form more detailed models of the world. It also enabled them to form more complex, coherent, and delineated mythologies with which to understand the meaning of the world and their place in it. Stage 1 people had myths, too, but theirs were simpler and more immediately connected to their physical surroundings. In Stage 2 myths became richer as reflexive consciousness began to grow.

By roughly 3000 BC, certain areas of the world, such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Babylon, had moved to a new stage of social evolution, characterized by agriculture, the use of bronze, the first cities, and the first political units that could be called states. With the increase in technological sophistication and social complexity, greater advances in reflexive consciousness were, of course, needed. But the more significant change in stage 3 was an emergence from embeddedness and belonging. While this was still an era of mythology, the type of myth changed. In stage 2 myths, people were embedded within the community and the culture and the Goddess or Great Mother was supreme.

The mythology of stage 3 was very different. Let’s listen to Ken Wilber:

The easiest way to introduce this new myth is by recalling the typical structure of the old Great Mother myths. In those myths...the individual (i.e., the self-structure of that period) involved with Great Mother, usually comes to a tragic end—killed, mutilated, castrated, sacrificed. The Great Mother is always the victor—the self never triumphs over the Great Mother, but is always reduced to one of her mere satellites....But in the new myths, we find an extraordinary occurrence: the individual triumphs over the Great Mother—breaks free from her, transforms her, defeats her, or transcends her. And this is the "Hero Myth," the myth that is this period of history (Wilber, 1983, p.183).

These new myths, of course, correspond to the change in consciousness of the period. As reflexive consciousness increased, people (specifically men) began to experience themselves as actors in the world, who could change things to suit themselves. They could emerge from their embeddedness in nature and community, and take over.

When one can reflect on his experience and his situation, one develops the power to change things. One need not fatalistically accept his position in life and the cosmos. One can build irrigation systems and cities, enjoy art and culture, and create an empire. The male ruling classes, especially the monarchs, did precisely this. Societies were often ruled by Kings, sometimes god-kings, who were frequently also military commanders and/or war heroes. Like the mythic heroes and gods of the time, they took power into their own hands and attempted to subdue the natural world and surrounding peoples. Ordinary people looked up to them and identified with them, participating vicariously in their triumphs and glories.

The transition from Stages 2 to 3 involved replacing a predominantly feminine mode of consciousness with a masculine one. Unfortunately, this transition led to the subjugation of women. Women lost status and power. They no longer had any say in social and political decisions and were subjected to the rule of their fathers or husbands.

In stage 3, reflexive consciousness (in the form of masculine emergence and order) was growing, partly at the expense of participatory consciousness (belonging). However, this stage does not represent the full flowering of reflexive consciousness or the full suppression of participation as the two qualities were fairly evenly matched. However, they were dissociated from each other in that they were split between different groups in the population, with the male ruling class exhibiting the emergent quality and the oppressed classes and women the ground quality.

Stage 4

The next great transition in social evolution happened at about 500 BC, moving into stage 4, which covered both the Ancient and Medieval Eras and lasted until about 1500 AD.

Reflexive consciousness grew to the point where people began to think rationally about the nature of reality and what it meant to be human. Especially in Greek philosophy, they developed their own ideas about life, presented them publicly, and debated them. This was an immense step forward from simply accepting the traditional or tribal views of reality which were developed unconsciously over long periods of time. There was a growth in the complexity of concepts, the first use of rational analysis to understand the world, and an appreciation of the individual mind. Stage 4 also witnessed the rudimentary beginnings of science and historiography.

The social changes of stage 3—war, trade, and travel—eventually produced a considerable mixing of peoples and traditions, leading to an emergence from embeddedness in the mythic traditions and the adoption of a more cosmopolitan attitude of tolerance toward other cultures and religions. The mythic consciousness of stages 2 and 3 was replaced by world religions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Taoism. These religions posited a single supreme God or universal essence which represented the ideal of moral possibility—all-encompassing love and wisdom.. The old mythic religions were each tied to a specific people, a certain tribe or tradition. The Gods of the new world religions were universal and recognized the value of all human beings; the religions were open to anyone who believed in them.

Religions were dualistic, especially in the west, in the sense that they clearly separated heaven and earth, the spiritual and the secular. Stage 1 consciousness made little separation of this sort—everything was both material and spiritual simultaneously. Stages 2 and 3 brought in some separation, as special times and places were set aside for the spiritual, and gods and goddesses were conceptualized as somewhat separate from the human and natural realms. In Stage 4, this process culminated in a fully separate and more abstract spiritual realm and a much more secular human world.

The cult and worship of a tribal source of life [Stages 2 & 3] was the first form of detaching and distinguishing a non-self from a self...At this stage, the non-self, the divine source of life, was still in partial physical connection with the self, although cult and worship were already initiating a spiritual connection between man and god. The development [from Stage 3 to 4] meant a gradual preponderance of this spiritual connection, a progressive spiritualization of a more universal god, and the increasing worldliness and individualization of man (Kahler 1956, p. 111).

In Stage 4, for the first time, people begin to observe and reflect on themselves and the consequences of their actions. Both religion and philosophy, which were not nearly so separate as they are today, examined ethics. As L. L. Whyte (1948) maintains, Stage 4 emerged as a reaction to the excesses of stage 3 when the ruling classes had taken advantage of their position and engaged in destructive and self-indulgent behavior. In reaction, Stage 4 saw the growth of a rigid sense of right and wrong .

The large empires, which cut people loose from their native communities and traditions, established new mediated social structures such as guilds and legal codes. This transition toward more abstract social bonds eventually had the effect of promoting the growth of individuality. While the mythic religions of stages 2 and 3 had been group-oriented, in stage 4 the individual was now responsible for having faith in God and acting like a good Christian (Buddhist, etc.). As John Perry (1987) argues, the democratization of consciousness during Stage 4 led many citizens—not just kings—to experience themselves as individuals with a sense of personal pride and autonomy.

The central underlying change in Stage 4 was the emergence of consciousness out of the instinctual and traditional and into the realm of conscious choice. L. L. Whyte, in his superb analysis of the transition to Stage 4, describes this process of advancing reflexive consciousness:

The circumstances of human life demanded that individual choice, based on personal consideration of the problems of behavior, should to an increasing degree dominate behavior. The attention of the individual was drawn more and more to his own thought...and he became aware of himself as a thinking and feeling person with the faculty of choice. (Whyte 1948, p. 87-88).

During the period from the 1500’s to the 1700’s, humanity went through a complex transition from the Medieval to the Modern Era, leading us to the world of today.

Reflexive consciousness came to dominate participatory consciousness in the Modern Era. Although participatory consciousness continued to be a widespread way of living, it was no longer respected, even by many of the people who lived by it. Intuition, emotion, and spirituality began to be denigrated or discounted. They were considered part of the inferior realm of women or the marginal realm of artists and clergy. Whereas in Stages 2 and 3 the primary vehicle for consciousness was myth and in Stage 4 it was organized religion, in Stage 5 it was science, the "religion" of the Modern Era.

Stage 5 consciousness developed to its fullest the rationality that the Greeks had initiated. Rationality gives a person the ability to step back from experience and consider what would happen in the future under different circumstances. Through imagination and logical operations on these possibilities, one can get a clearer understanding of reality. In individual cognitive development, this ability corresponds to Piaget’s formal operations stage (1977).

In the Modern Era, everything was questioned, examined, and explored logically. Abandoning a blind faith in authority, humanity used the scientific method to achieve a wealth of new knowledge about the physical world, ushering in the industrial revolution. However, since it was recognized that participation could lead to bias and distort one's ability to know the truth, science attempted to wipe out all traces of participation in its methodology. This led eventually to a different kind of distortion.

The dualism that began in Stage 4 was taken to its extreme, with the philosophy of a separate body and mind, and separate material and spiritual worlds. As Stage 5 progressed, since the mind and spirit couldn't be known scientifically and couldn't be studied without some participation, they began to be ignored. Eventually the spiritual realm was held to be non-existent, and the mind was declared to be simply an epiphenomenon of the brain. Having reduced reality to the material world, Modern consciousness regarded it as a machine. Even human bodies and minds were conceptualized as machines, leading to advances in medicine and psychology (as well as considerable dehumanization).

As the influence of religion faded, much of human activity became purely practical and goal-oriented. As the subjective side of life was relegated to second place, emotional, spiritual, and artistic pursuits, which tend to give life meaning, were devalued.

Stage 5 also witnessed an emergence from dependence on traditional authorities such as the Church and classical authors. Realizing that the story told by their religion and culture was not the only possible way to understand the world, people sought autonomy through creating their own lifestyles and worldviews. The Renaissance had ushered in the philosophy of humanism, in which for the first time people placed their faith in human beings rather than in religion or the supernatural. People began to trust in humanity’s power to solve its problems. The growth in reflexive consciousness was associated with a new ability to control nature and our social environment. Progress also became a hallmark of the consciousness of the era, leading to the 20th century belief in the technological wonder world of the future.

In the Modern Era, the principled morality of Stage 4 grew stronger and more autonomous. People emerged from embeddedness in moral traditions and began to examine their moral grounding and formulate their own beliefs using reflexive consciousness. It became important to understand the actual principles rather than simply following specific religious or secular laws. Modern ethics, through its support for the intrinsic worth of each person, has led to some important advances such as the demise of slavery as an institution, an interest in human rights, and the legitimization of democracy.

However, relational morality, associated with participatory consciousness, has diminished in the Modern Era. Whereas the hunter-gatherers of Stage 1 had acted on the basis of empathy, relationship, community and tradition, our new reflexive, personally chosen morality is dissociated from relational ethics. Our moral principles are so removed from our participation in life that they don’t provide much guidance for everyday interactions. Instead, selfishness and competitiveness are lauded and we treat most people as objects to be manipulated or used. Only with close friends and family do we relate from a sense of caring.

Surprising as it may seem, life in Medieval times was lived entirely publicly and in groups, with little privacy for individual reflection or intimacy. In the Modern Era, people created space and time for privacy and solitude, leading to the growth of individuality. People began to define themselves primarily in terms of their personal qualities and achievements and only secondarily in terms of belonging to a community or to an ethnic or religious group. The resulting emphasis on individuality has had its pluses and minuses. On the positive side, it has democratized both power and people’s sense of value, and has fostered personal development through educational, creative, and spiritual endeavors. On the negative side, the Modern suppression of participatory consciousness has led to a distorted version of individuality, called individualism, in which each person struggles for personal gain and power.

THE CURRENT CRISIS

The Modern Era has run its course and is coming to an end. Its innovations are now outmoded and threatening to destroy our society. Consequently, as we make the transition to Stage 6, we face a planetary crisis. The current crisis results from the increasing domination of emergent qualities and suppression of ground qualities in conjunction with a dissociation between these qualities. Reflexive consciousness dominates and suppresses participatory consciousness. This imbalance between ground and emergent qualities also applies to our social arrangements. Our economic system now emphasizes material growth (emergent) at all costs, trampling over community and self-reliance (ground). Technological advance (emergent) and population growth are threatening our ecological well-being (ground) and perhaps our very survival.

As the Modern Era ends, the dissociation between the ground and emergent qualities is extreme, and the ground qualities are suppressed to the point where their loss is causing serious problems for society, for individuals, and for the world. By devaluing participation and privileging understanding based on empirical data and logic, reflexive consciousness has become detached. By losing the sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves, our lives are bereft of meaning. We feel separate from nature, isolated from community, out of touch with the emotional and creative, and disconnected from the artistic and spiritual. We dedicate our lives to money, security, power, and appearances. In our detachment we are forced to rely on that which can be objectively counted, and our lives have become barren and sterile.

The impact of this detachment goes beyond the individual level. Modern societies has also lost a sense of meaning. We blindly chase economic growth and technological innovation. We apply quick fixes and band aids to the great problems of our time such as drug abuse and homelessness. We have no larger vision of where we are going.

Along with the loss of meaning, detached consciousness brings about an impairment of empathy. We tend to see everything in objective and machine-like terms. We treat other people, other nations, and the natural world as objects to be controlled and used. We allow wholesale destruction of species and habitats because we have lost empathy with the natural world. Lacking a sense of compassion, we permit widespread oppression and exploitation. We have even lost empathy for ourselves. We treat our own bodies and psyches as objects to be manipulated. Dismissing the importance of our inner lives, we rely on "magic bullets" and behavioral quick fixes to solve our psychological problems. We ignore ecological threats to our health and well-being.

Ground qualities embody a vitality that we Moderns need. In the current crisis, these vital qualities of life have been suppressed, and we unconsciously attempt to substitute for the vitality we have lost through a process I call vitality compensation. Human beings naturally get a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from our connection with nature. When we are deprived of this natural vitality, we often seek substitutes. In the West, our homes are filled with stereos, TVs, and VCRs to compensate for the natural sights and sounds we have lost. We buy expensive, flashy clothes, throw lavish parties, take drugs, and covet sports cars.

People need the closeness and security that comes from true community, loving families and close friends. We also need to be in tune with our creative and artistic nature. When we are cut of from our real human needs, our craving for vitality doesn't vanish, it becomes dissociated. We seek vitality wherever we can, even in substitutes that don’t fully satisfy, such as power, wealth, addictions and manufactured excitement. Much of our interest in vitality compensation is encouraged by the market economy, through advertising. And these compensations support the suppression of the ground qualities in the social and material realms as well as in consciousness. Emptiness on the personal level has produced a vicious cycle. The more we seek artificial pleasures as individuals, the more we create an alienating society based exclusively on technological progress. The world-wide environmental crisis and the loss of community, in turn, push us to rely even more on vitality compensation.

OTHER VIEWS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION

Duane Elgin (1993) has developed a model that deals specifically with the social evolution of consciousness. According to Elgin, each stage of social evolution is characterized by a move to a higher dimension of "sacred geometry," where the extra dimension is not a literal dimension of space, but rather one of consciousness that allows for a larger perspective. This is similar to my concept of reflexive consciousness. His understanding of the next stage of consciousness, the witness self, where we are able to step back and view ourselves dispassionately, corresponds in my model to a further development of reflexive consciousness. However, Elgin’s model doesn’t account for the dialectical nature of our evolution nor does it contain any theoretical constructs, such as my ground and emergent qualities, which explain this dialectic.

Ken Wilber, one of the premier theorists in transpersonal psychology, has mapped out the spectrum model of consciousness (1977). Based on the "Great Chain of Being," his model views reality as a spectrum of levels starting with the material world at the bottom, and progressing up through the body, emotions, intellect, and then various degrees of spiritual reality. Each higher level includes the levels below it, until one reaches the ultimate level, which is a form of pure spirit or consciousness that is the origin of all of reality. He uses this model to explain both the social evolution of consciousness and the development of consciousness during an individual’s life.

Wilber (1983) sees consciousness as evolving up this hierarchy historically, with hunter-gatherers functioning primarily at the body level, agriculturists at the emotional/imaginal level, and medieval and modern people at the mental or ego level, about halfway up—corresponding to my Stage 5 reflexive consciousness. Recently, Wilber (1995) has connected his model to general and evolutionary systems theory in creative new ways, and relates it to the planetary crisis, especially gender and ecological issues.

One limitation of Wilber’s model is that his view of ultimate reality seems to be completely derived from Stage 4 consciousness. He assumes that the great spiritual figures of the Ancient and Medieval Eras were able to understand the ultimate nature of spiritual reality. I believe that humanity’s future development is only emerging as we evolve, and that there is much we don’t yet understand.

Wilber’s model is dialectical, but in a different sense than mine. He assumes that the evolution of consciousness moves in a straight line up the ladder and only allows for a dialectical process within each stage of evolution. He doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that there might be a cumulative dissociation involving many stages of evolution, which is what I believe has actually happened. At each of his stages there is a possibility of a healthy transcendence or an unhealthy dissociation. While this is true, it seems to me that it is possible to move on to higher levels without resolving the dissociations of lower ones. Wilber’s model recognizes the need for integration today; in fact, he calls the next level of social evolution the "centaur" stage, which involves integrating the body and the consciousness of the pre-Modern stages. He understands that the Modern Era has now "clearly moved into the beginning stages of dissociation" and that integration is needed. However, as far as I can tell from his model, this integration only happens as part of the development of each new stage and does not include a larger dialectical movement involving many stages as mine does.

SOLUTIONS TO THE CRISIS

Changes in consciousness affect our social structures and our technology through the way people think and feel about themselves and the world. Therefore they affect not only our inner worlds but also our social arrangements. Though these influences are indirect, they are no less important or influential than changes in social structures or technology.

The consciousness realm is crucial to the process of social change because it is the realm in which it is easiest to promote change incrementally on a one-to-one basis. In other realms, entrenched structures resist change unless a great number of people with significant social power are involved. In the consciousness realm, it is possible for individual people to change their consciousness in healthy directions, and therefore consciousness movements can build gradually.

Integrative Solutions

Solutions to the planetary crisis in the consciousness realm involve integrating participatory and reflexive consciousness. This can take a variety of forms as discussed below.

Recent research suggests that human beings have at least seven different kinds of intelligences (Gardner 1983). Modern society places such an emphasis on reflexive consciousness that our school systems value only verbal and logical intelligence. The other five—musical, visual, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and kinesthetic—which reflect participatory consciousness, have largely been ignored. We need to develop an integral consciousness that includes all forms of intelligence.

We can look at participatory and reflexive consciousness in terms of activity. In participatory consciousness, activity tends to be spontaneous and flowing, stemming from instinct, feeling, and impulse. In reflexive consciousness, activity tends to be deliberate, planned, and structured. Neither of these is good or bad in itself. Ideally, you should be able to act and express yourself spontaneously while also being consciously in charge of your actions.

Integrating participatory consciousness can address the loss of meaning, empathy, and vitality in today’s world. Some people are already revitalizing themselves through psychotherapy, self-help groups, holistic health, spiritual disciplines, and other approaches. As part of this consciousness movement, people are also coming alive through conscious community, reconnecting with nature, and engagement in artistic and creative endeavors. They are developing their empathy and compassion, their experience of belonging, and their deeper sense of purpose. Psychotherapy has evolved from an arcane procedure for the "mentally ill" to a common way of bettering one’s life. Whereas the more intellectual approaches, such as psychoanalysis and cognitive-behavior therapy, may perpetuate the suppression of participatory consciousness, humanistic psychology has been in the forefront of integrative approaches that include participation in the form of emotional expression, inner experience, the body, and spirituality.

In the Ancient and Medieval Eras, the dominant world view saw the consciousness realm as the underlying reality and the material world as derived from it. As a result, the most advanced spiritual seekers were often monks and nuns who gave up sexuality, family life, and sometimes even personal autonomy on their path to spiritual realization. The Modern Era reversed this world view, believing that the Material Realm is the only thing that is real, and consciousness is just an epiphenomenon. In today’s transition, we are seeing an integration where the more advanced spiritual approaches include those aspects of material life that were relinquished in Stage 4, such as having a career, social action, and a full life in society.

These efforts at integration on a personal level can help realign the value system of our societies. Then public policy can be guided by compassion for the suffering of others, by a sense of interconnection with the human race and all of life, and by deeper purpose and meaning. When people are able to satisfy their real needs for intimacy, creativity, and spiritual connection, then they won’t need to pursue substitutes such as power, money, and status. This shift in values will provide the personal and psychological support for social efforts to build a healthier economy, government, and business world.

Advancing Reflexive Consciousness

Remember that reflexive consciousness means emerging from embeddedness in a way of being that you were not able to see because you were too close to it. Throughout social evolution, humanity has gone through a series of emergences from being embedded in various ways of thinking and being. In each case, we advanced by becoming more aware of an aspect of our experience that wasn’t seen before, and therefore moving away from an exclusive or unexamined reliance on this way of being and embracing a larger and more inclusive one.

As reflexive consciousness is integrated with participatory consciousness, it is safe for reflexive to advance even further without unhealthy distortions. For example, modern science in its more extreme dissociated form tends to be atomistic and reductionistic. It assumes that the way to understand reality is by analyzing it into parts and reducing it to the lowest level of these parts. However, since this is not an accurate view of reality, a more advanced kind of reflexive consciousness will recognize the intrinsically relational, interconnected, participatory nature of things (Capra, 1982). Some of the newest and most exciting developments in this direction are ecology, general system theory, chaos theory, and complexity, all of which view reality as an interconnected whole, where the relationships between the parts of a system are even more important than the nature of the parts (von Bertalanffy, 1968; Gleick, 1987; Lewin, 1992; Waldrop, 1992).

In the early phases of humanity’s attempt to understand the world rationally and experimentally, we used static models. As reflexive consciousness has advanced, we moved to developmental and now dialectical models, which recognize that seeming opposites can be reconciled by moving to a greater level of understanding that includes both sides of the conflict. Wilber (1995) makes an analogy to Piaget's stages of cognitive development in children and sees dialectical thinking as a critical development for Stage 6:

Numerous psychologists...have pointed out that there is much evidence for a stage beyond Piaget's formal operational. It has been called "dialectical," "integrative," "creative synthetic," "integral-aperspectival," and so forth (Wilber, 1995, p. 258).

Our Modern destructive use of technology has been sanctioned by our view of nature as simply a machine whose parts are static and separate from each other. In this perception, domination of the natural world makes some sense. The new view of reality, which emerges through systemic and dialectical thinking, is encouraging us to align ourselves with nature rather than exploiting it, and helping us understand how to begin repairing the damage we have done.

Identity

I will now further explore solutions to the planetary crisis by dividing consciousness in three areas —identity, morality, and epistemology. These solutions all involve integrating the respective ground and emergent qualities.

First, let’s look at identity, where I see the ground quality as belonging, which means the experience of being part of something larger than oneself. The emergent quality is individuality, which means that people derive a sense of well-being and identity through their personal qualities and accomplishments. Individuality is an aspect of reflexive consciousness because the concept of the "self" is the prime mediator between the person and his experience and because conscious choice is so crucial to individuality.

Individuality without belonging, and especially without community, results in social isolation. Belonging without individuality results in engulfment in a group and a loss of uniqueness. The healthy goal is an integration of individuality and belonging, which I will call conscious belonging.

One aspect of this is conscious community, where individuality and intimacy go hand in hand, where closeness in a group is not dependent on suppression of differences. In conscious community, differences are expressed directly and then worked through or used constructively. Each person’s unique individuality and autonomy is respected. This is the explicit goal in psychotherapy groups, and should also be the goal for couples, families, work groups, and all small and large group situations. The integration of community and individuality is a central task for Stage 6. The term conscious community can also refer to a community that is chosen by its members. In the past, people didn’t choose to be in a community, they were born into it. Today, people are beginning to create their own communities, this time by voluntary association rather than by the accident of birth.

A more advanced integration of belonging and individuality is global identification, where you identify with the human race as a whole and link your welfare with that of all humanity. This involves a wider circle of belonging formed by an advancing individuality.

In today’s world, many of us remain isolated from a sense of belonging to nature and from a larger spiritual connection. Stage 6 integration promotes an experience of spiritual oneness without compromising our individuality. Spiritual growth can actually be seen as a further advancement of reflexive consciousness because it entails looking more deeply at our inner experience. As Ken Wilber notes:

The more one can go within, or the more one can introspect and reflect on one's self, then the more detached from that self one can become, the more one can rise above that self's limited perspective, and so the less egocentric one becomes...and the more one can thus embrace a deeper identity with a wider perspective (Wilber 1995, pp. 256-7).

Through this exploration of our inner experience, we emerge from embeddedness in a fixed identity with our body and local self, and move into larger, more flexible and fluid identities.

In the area of morality, the ground quality is relational morals, where morality is governed by empathy for those close to you whom you care about. The emergent quality is principled morals, which flow from universal principles.

If you have relational morals without larger principles, then your morality usually applies only to your own people in a parochial way. If your morals are handed down by a tradition rather than chosen through an reflexive process, they can easily become dogmatic. In Stage 6, we face the task of redeveloping the ground quality of empathy and integrating it with principled morality in order to empathize with people around the world who aren’t necessarily similar to us, producing an integrating structure which I will call global empathy.

Furthermore, principled morals need to advance beyond principles that protect the rights of the individual to systemic principles. We must be able to perceive the world as a many-leveled system, with individuals and families embedded in communities, and these contained in bioregions, ethnic groups, nations, humanity-as-a-whole, and the earth, where each level of the system has its own moral right to wholeness and well-being.

Global empathy and systemic morality will help us to have compassion for the suffering that is happening in the world today, not just that which is happening around us, but the destruction of animals, forests and ecosystems, the poverty and oppression of billions, the great waste of human potential.

As we develop spiritually, not only our morality but our sense of identity can expand to include the human race and the natural world. From this place, people naturally act in ways that are moral, not because of principles, but because they are simply acting to take care of their larger "self" (Macy, 1990). This morality, which is based on advances in reflexive consciousness, is one of the main teachings of the deep ecology movement (Naess, 1989).

Epistemology

In Stage 6, we must also integrate reflexive and participatory consciousness in our epistemology, our mode of understanding reality. The Stage 5 method for understanding reality has been science, which is based on reflexive consciousness and involves rational understanding of empirical data. It has been purged of participation so completely that its ability to study many aspects of reality is limited.

This chart summarizes participatory and reflexive modes of knowing:

For an integrating structure, we need to redefine the scientist as a participant-observer. In order to study psychological, spiritual, and cultural reality, we must develop a participatory science, which includes methods that can be applied to problems that are inherently meaningful, interconnected, and multi-leveled. The Institute of Noetic Sciences has been on the frontier of the development of such an approach (1993).

Looking back on the process of social evolution, it seems that there may have been a necessary logic to the whole dialectic, including our current crisis. Despite the horrors and our current predicament, our evolution has produced a high level of reflexive consciousness, enabling us to understand ourselves and what drives us, to understand social evolution. We have developed a capacity for technology and social structure that, if used properly, can allow us to take decisive action. We now need to bring back the ground qualities that have been suppressed and integrate them with the emergent qualities, so that both can develop further. We need to integrate our vitality with our understanding, our community with social structure, our technology with natural process. For the first time in our history, we have the chance to take charge of our evolution, to guide it consciously for personal and societal well-being. This is our great task at this time in history, to take this next step in the on-going story of evolution.