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Stairways to Heaven: Honoring Dr. James Fowler
Evolutionary Spirituality
Contributors: 
This is the third installation of an extraordinary hour-and-forty-five minute presentation on Dr. James Fowler's work, in which Rollie and Ken discuss some of the critical contributions this sort of evolutionary approach to spirituality and religion has to offer the world.
Dr. James W. Fowler III is Professor of Theology and Human Development at Emory University, and was director of both the Center for Research on Faith and Moral Development and the Center for Ethics until he retired in 2005. He is a minister in the United Methodist Church, and is best known for his book Stages of Faith, published in 1981, in which he sought to develop the idea of a developmental process in faith.
During the 2007 Integral Spiritual Center conference, Integral Institute paid a formal tribute to Dr. Fowler's extraordinary body of work, presenting him with a very special lifetime achievement award—the first Integral Spirituality Award ever presented. It was an incredibly moving occasion for everyone involved, and remains one of the most poignant memories in Integral Spiritual Center's already abundant legacy.
Roland Stanich
Rollie has played a vital part in the emerging Integral movement as the Chief Facillitator of Integral Spiritual Center, as a former managing editor of Integral Naked from 2004-2005, and as an ongoing contributor to Integral Life. Rollie's spiritual path is that of contemplative Christianity—he is a practitioner of Centering Prayer and a longtime student of Fr. Thomas Keating; he co-wrote and co-produced the 2008 Integral Life DVD The Future of Christianity; and he is currently writing a book about Integral Christianity entitled Who Do You Say That I Am? Rollie is an extraordinary friend, teacher, and role model; an exemplar of clarity, compassion, and grace; and is dearly beloved by all who have been fortunate enough to feel the tender warmth of his heart.
Ken Wilber
Ken Wilber is the most widely translated academic writer in America, with 25 books translated into some 30 foreign languages, and is the first philosopher-psychologist to have his Collected Works published while still alive. Wilber is an internationally acknowledged leader and the preeminent scholar of the Integral stage of human development, which continues to gather momentum around the world. His many books, all of which are still in print, can be found at Amazon.com. Some of his more popular books include Integral Spirituality; No Boundary; Grace and Grit; Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; and the "everything" books: A Brief History of Everything (one of his largest selling books) and A Theory of Everything (probably the shortest introduction to his work). Ken Wilber is the founder of Integral Institute, Inc., the co-founder of Integral Life, Inc., and the Senior Fellow of Integral Life Spiritual Center.
Written by Corey W. deVos
Evolutionary Enlightenment: Fully Human, Fully Divine (12:08)
While states of spiritual experience have been explored for tens of thousands of years in all the world's religious traditions, stages of spiritual experience are a relatively new discovery. These structures of consciousness remain forever hidden from introspection, and can only be uncovered through sophisticated psychological methodologies. Before we knew about these structures of consciousness, it appeared that there were only four distinct types of mystical experience: gross, subtle, causal, and nondual. But if we account for just four major states of "horizontal" development, and seven major stages of "vertical" development, we begin to see that there are not just four types of spiritual experience, but twenty-eight!
Enlightenment, often thought of as a single unchanging realization, turns out to be anything but. Enlightenment is slippery—the Buddha's enlightenment is not our enlightenment; Christ's atonement is not our atonement. If we were to dare to define enlightenment—knowing that all such descriptions are hollow and frail in the face of the Mystery—we might get away with saying that it represents the union of the relative world and the absolute; an intimate and infinite release from the illusion of separation; a radical apprehension of the inherent "not-two-ness" of the entire universe. But in the midst of this nondual embrace of form and emptiness, it is clear that half of this equation—the world of form—is constantly changing, a never-ending carnival of shape, colors, and sound, a perpetual thud of erotic emergence that forms the heartbeat of our living Kosmos.
Enlightenment, in other words, is evolving.
It is not enough to have direct and immediate experiences of spiritual realities, powerful and life-changing as they are, as these experiences must then be properly interpreted and internalized before it can be communicated to the rest of the world. After all, what would Moses’ fabled encounter with the burning bush have amounted to much if he had not returned from the mountaintop with the Ten Commandments, carving the Divine Will into stone, sculpting the interpretive foundation upon which thousands of years of Western history are built? What good would St. Teresa of Avila’s experiences of the “Interior Castle” have done for the world if she hadn’t translated her transcendent visions into the viscera of language, unveiling the blueprints to the Heavenly Kingdom for all to see? Would we even be having this discussion if Christ had left his revelations in the desert, lost forever to the scorched sands, without ever coming back to the world to become one of history’s greatest exemplars of divine Love? Our interior states need to be interpreted and communicated to the rest of the world, burning in our hearts and haunting our dreams until we somehow find a way to express them—and this process of expression and communication is almost entirely determined by one's vertical stage of consciousness.
Even those who have realized permanent or semi-permanent nondual awareness—the integrative dissolution of self and other, form and emptiness, the temporal and the eternal—even these people need to continue exercising their vertical growth. To be fully enlightened in today’s world is to be both fully human and fully divine, which means developing vertically through all the developmental stages currently available to us as well as mastering the many horizontal states, or else we a substantial part of a world remains forever "over our heads," limiting the amount of reality we can "become one with". In this sense, "full" enlightenment can never be attained, in much the same way that we could never say that we are "fully educated"—but we come ever nearer, inching closer and closer to the unreachable horizon of human development. While states of consciousness teach us why we should love, stages of consciousness determine who, what, where, when, and how we love, increasing the heart's capacity for love with every step.
States and stages of consciousness—by understanding and embodying these two directions of human growth and spiritual revelation, our mortal and immortal hearts are able to truly become one. Following the path Christ laid down for us two thousand years ago, we slowly begin to fulfill our evolutionary heritage, billions of years in the making—fully human, fully divine, feeling the blissful union of two hearts beating as one.
Subject Becomes Object (8:13)
Vertical development and horizontal development—one measuring our humanity, the other measuring our divinity, both guiding us "up and in" through layer upon layer of identification. But what, if anything, do these two axes of development have in common? Is there a shared dynamic between the two that can help us make sense of the brutality of human growth and development?
Here Ken refers to the work of Harvard researcher Robert Kegan, who is known for his seminal book The Evolving Self. Like Dr. Fowler, Kegan presented his own model of vertical development, presenting a system of six "orders of consciousness" that are extremely compatible with Fowler's own Stages of Faith. In his work, Kegan identifies the actual mechanics of transformation, a process of identification and disidentification that he describes as "the subject of one stage becomes the object of the following stage."
While this phrase was originally intended to describe the process of vertical psychological development, it perfectly applies our progress through the various states of consciousness as well. Using introspection to continuously dislodge our exclusive identification with this phenomenon or that, we slide through layer upon layer of increasingly subtle moments, shedding our attachment to our senses, feelings, emotions, thoughts, and visions. Slowly recognizing our own embedment within the carnival of creation, dislodging our identities from the cycle of pain and pleasure, we strip away false self after false self until no subjective stone is left unturned, and all that is left is our own ubiquitous radiance—radically free, radically present, and radically NOW.
Gratitude: Toward a Universal Catechism (8:38)
The significance of Dr. Fowler's Stages of Faith cannot be emphasized enough. Not only has he done the hard empirical work to support his model of spiritual development, but he has gone the extra step of creating resources specifically for ministers engaged in diverse congregations—explaining how people at different stages of their journey will interpret the gospel, what parts they will resonate with, what parts they will have trouble with, how to best meet people exactly where they are with open hands and an open heart, and how to adapt the lineage according to the stage-specific needs of a "flock of many colors," rather than providing a single stream of one-size-fits-some interpretation.
It takes this sort of comprehensive approach to appreciate the role religion has played as history’s greatest source of suffering and liberation alike, and to help us to update our spiritual traditions so that they can offer a path beyond religious fundamentalism and ideological zealotry—creating a genuine "universal catechism" with the hope of carrying people vertically through magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral stages of consciousness, as well as horizontally through gross, subtle, causal, and nondual states, and onward into the limitless heart of human potential.
We all stand upon the shoulders of giants, and Dr. Fowler's work has propped us up even higher, helping to push our heads above the clouds of confusion—opening our minds to new ideas and new possibilities, and our hearts to more warmth, tenderness, and love.
We are deeply indebted to Dr. Fowler's remarkable contributions, and it was a very real blessing to be able to honor his life's work in this way.
Other Pieces in This Series:
In the first installation of this presentation, Rollie offers a simple overview of Dr. Fowler's work, demonstrates how it fits into the rest of the Integral model, and clarifies what exactly we mean by words like "faith" and "spirituality."
In the second installation of this presentation, Rollie offers an in-depth walkthrough of Fowler's Stages of Faith, complete with first-hand accounts, third-person descriptions, and concise summaries of the main breakdown points associated with each stage.
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