Becoming your true self might sound like a paradox, but it is the greatest achievement we can aspire to. Despite our potential, most of us never fully experience the true possibilities of human life.
There’s much confusion around what it means to become or discover your true self. Different traditions, thinkers, and schools of thought give different answers. All seem right, in a way, but all seem to be missing something vital too.
And look at the world today. For all our knowledge, we are drowning in injustice, suffering, and ignorance. Our whole species is in need of realizing its potential. And soon.
(You can watch the video version of this essay on YouTube.)
Ken Wilber’s Integral Map
In this essay, you’ll discover a map for self-actualization that can guide both your personal journey and our collective evolution. This map is the result of decades of interdisciplinary research by Ken Wilber and his colleagues. It combines the key insights of ancient wisdom traditions with the cutting-edge findings of modern psychology.
The map traces 3 major paths of becoming your true self: Waking Up, Growing Up, and Cleaning Up. These aren’t paths you choose between; they must work together if you’re to unfold your nature in the deepest, most comprehensive way possible.
Waking Up means exploring the states of consciousness accessible to your mind. This path leads to direct experience of your ultimate nature. It leads to enlightenment.
Growing Up means evolving your sense of identity. This path widens your perspective on your place in society and the world. It leads to maturity.
Cleaning Up means setting free all you’ve repressed within yourself. This path leads to true understanding for yourself and for others. It leads to authenticity.
After we explore these paths, I’ll briefly mention Jung’s insights into individuation. This will round off our discussion with some much-needed context.
Waking Up
Let’s begin with the oldest path of becoming your true self. The core of every spiritual tradition in the world: Waking Up.
In everyday speech, ‘waking up’ means leaving the dream state and returning to waking consciousness. The path of Waking Up builds upon this principle. The idea is that if we can move between waking and dreaming – there might be other states of consciousness out there too.
As it turns out, there are a number of increasingly open states of consciousness available to our mind. As you progress through these states, your sense of being a separate self becomes ever more fluid, until it finally dissolves. Waking Up culminates with the direct recognition of your identity with the entire universe.
This may sound like esoteric mumbo-jumbo, and sometimes it is. But the states we are about to cover have been reported worldwide by various traditions. What’s more, each and every one of them is open to you, should you undertake consistent practice under an experienced teacher.
Practicing Waking Up
Consciousness can spontaneously enter altered states. Near-death experiences, extreme exertion, and extreme emotion are some cases where this may happen. Wilber writes around 60 % of people have had a major altered-state experience in their lives. But generally, Waking Up requires consistent effort on the part of the individual.
It requires some sort of practice.
Various traditions have developed such practices ranging from meditation and breathing techniques to ecstatic dancing and plant medicine. Each of these has its particular strengths and limitations, but that’s a topic for another time.
The 5 Major States Of Consciousness
Here, we’ll map the various states your mind can experience. Integral Theory’s cross-cultural analysis has concluded there are 5 of them. Each of these states reveals a new dimension of your self and unlocks new ways of experiencing reality. The states are:
- Gross (or Waking)
- Subtle (or Dreaming)
- Causal (or Archetypal)
- Turiya (or Witnessing)
- Turiyatita (or Non-Dual)
The first three of these are relative states, while the last two are ultimate states. We’ll return to this distinction in a bit.
Waking Up: Gross State
The gross (or waking) state is the one we’re in most of the time. Here, consciousness is securely anchored to the ego. Our sense of separate self is more or less fixed and we experience the world as made of separate objects, people, and events. Consciousness experiences incessant mental chatter and bouts of craving, aversion, and ignorance. Most importantly, this state is suffused with discomfort, dissatisfaction, and suffering. What the Buddha calls dukkha.
An important note here: language is adapted to this gross state. The further we get from this state, the less adequate words become as means of communication. Literal language gives way to metaphor and metaphor gives way to silence. There are states of consciousness from which people return without any words to describe their experiences. In such cases, silence says more than words ever could.
In any case, the suffering inherent in the gross state has driven people’s search for alternatives. And the first state they explored is the one we experience every night.
Waking Up: Subtle State
In the subtle (or dream) state, the ego liquifies. We still possess a subtle personality, but one that is fluid and porous. Our sense of self can easily morph and embody different aspects of its nature. This same fluidity imbues also the things, entities, and events we experience. The physical realm is replaced by metaphysical images, symbols, and forms. The shamanic practice of ‘soul flight’ and lucid dreaming work in this state.
Jung, that great modern shaman, has explored the subtle state further than most. It is here that he says our personal psyche can receive teaching from the collective psyche of our species, of all of life in fact. This is what makes dream journaling and analysis such a powerful practice.
Seemingly meaningless dreams often contain lessons in symbolic form. Jung points out dreams are not obscure on purpose; in fact, they communicate as clearly as the subtle state allows. This is not theory or conjecture. The messages within dreams are an observable fact, should we afford the humility to listen.
(You can read our essay on Jung’s Self and the Buddha’s Non-Self for more on this.)
Waking Up: Causal State
Once we move beyond the dream state, we enter the causal (or archetypal) state. This state actually has two levels, a formal and a formless one. Now, my description of these states may sound esoteric at points. Not many people have experienced these states throughout history and so appropriate words have not been invented. Hence, we have to use ordinary words in non-ordinary ways.
Formal Causal
The formal causal state contains what Plato calls forms, what Jung calls archetypes, and what Indian philosophy calls vasanas. These are all names for the universal patterns of existence. You can think of these patterns as the fundamental motifs or the primary colours of reality.
At every moment, Spirit generates universal forms, the first forms. Forms such as Love and Hatred, Life and Death, Light and Darkness, etc. Spirit then filters down through these forms and shapes into the manifest world we experience. This is not something you must take on faith, and please ignore it if it makes no sense. Just know this is what Integral Theory calls the formal causal state. Here you experience the forms that cause the world. It is a real state and there are a number of practices that can take you there.
Formless Causal
The formless causal state takes us one step beyond these universal forms where they are still undifferentiated. Here one only experiences pure consciousness without content, apparently. I cannot speak from experience. The wisdom traditions claim we enter this state every night during deep dreamless sleep. The Buddhist tradition in particular discusses it at length.
This exhausts the relative states of consciousness we know of. There are two more states, however, which Wilber calls ultimate. Whichever relative state you are in, the two ultimate states are already present. There’s nothing you must do to enter these last two states, as you are already in them. The catch is, it may take you a lifetime to recognize this.
As the Sufi wrote:
The thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it.
Bayazid Bastami
Waking Up: Turiya
The first ultimate state is called ‘turiya’. You don’t have to remember the word, don’t worry. Integral Theory borrows the term from Hindu philosophy to denote a state free from all identification with experience. This state is also often called the Witness.
In turiya, you experience yourself as the boundless, empty, aware space in which all of experience is occurring. And yet this description is misleading. ‘Being a boundless, empty, aware space’, is yet another experience within turiya. Turiya cannot be adequately described with words and you can never understand it until you experience yourself as it. Wilber writes:
The Witness is not anything that can be observed or seen; it’s the pure Seer…
As you go in search of this True Self… you won’t find it by seeing something—if you see anything, that’s just more objects, more content, more stuff…Rather, you will start to sense a vast Freedom from all of this, a vast Openness and Spaciousness, not as an object but as an atmosphere.
Ken Wilber, Finding Radical Wholeness
Turiya is one good candidate for what the Buddha describes by the term nirvana. Recognizing this unconditioned state and staying with the recognition means full liberation from suffering. Buddhist self-immolation is a tragic but powerful display of this. One watches in horror and wonder as the monk burns to the bones without so much as a flinch.
Waking Up: Turiyatita
The final and highest state of consciousness is turiyatita. This means simply ‘beyond turiya’. This state is also called non-dual as it is the recognition of the total identity of consciousness and its contents. Here is how Wilber describes it:
Your sense of being a separate-self simply disappears. Your ego no longer has an experience—your ego becomes every experience it has.
That is, your sense of self expands to enfold every single experience that it is having—it reaches out and embraces the entire world, and you are all of that.
Ken Wilber, Finding Radical Wholeness
Turiyatita is well-documented in nondual traditions. Here, as the Heart Sutra says:
Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness.
The Heart Sutra
Waking Up To Our True Self (Reprise)
I hope this summary of the 5 states open to consciousness gives you a good map for your own journey. For most people, the ordinary, waking state constitutes ‘real reality’. Waking Up shows us quite the opposite is true. The gross state is the most constricted and stressful mode of being. What’s more, it gives you the most partial understanding of your true nature.
Waking Up opens up new dimensions of experiencing ‘ourselves’ and ‘the world’, leading to the total identity of the two. What was first an ego, discovers it is, in fact, all of existence. Talk about becoming your true self!
But as revolutionary as this is, it is only one part of the journey.
Most enlightened teachers in history have supported slavery, sexism, racism, and war. Many have been painfully superstitious. To experience yourself as the universe tells you nothing about universal human rights, or ecology, or the scientific method. Altered states of consciousness eclipse the ego for a while, but sooner or later, you’re back to the small-minded, anxiety-ridden, neurotic ego, wondering where all the enlightenment went.
And the answer is, it is not enlightenment’s job to make you a mature and authentic individual. Nor is it enlightenment’s job to stop war, violence, and crime.
For this, there are other journeys we must undertake. Other paths of becoming our true self.
Growing Up
While our species has pursued Waking Up for ages, we have discovered Growing Up in only about the last century. Growing Up has always been happening, of course, but collectively, we have only just noticed it.
Remember, Waking Up traces the states through which we experience ourselves and the world. So, states of experience.
Well, Growing Up traces the stages of how we interpret ourselves and the world. So, stages of interpretation.
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this. Reality is not just an objective ‘thing’ we are perceiving. The very act of perception is a form of interpretation.
Perception = Interpretation
When I say ‘Копривщица’ most people hear gibberish. Bulgarians hear the name of a beautiful town in the western part of the country. The objective sound I am uttering is the same, ‘Копривщица’, but it makes different people perceive entirely different things. That’s because perception is interpretation.
Any major shift in your interpretation causes your whole reality to change. When you hear people say a person, a book, or an experience changed their lives, what changed was their interpretation of their lives. They’ve gained a new perspective on the world and now they simply can’t go on living the way they used to. They’ve grown up.
Stages of Interpretation
Psychologists have found people’s interpretation of experience evolves through distinct stages. These stages always go in the same order and each new stage transcends and includes the previous ones.
Integral Theory has concluded there are between 6 and 8 key stages of Growing Up. We don’t need to study all of these in detail here. I’ll only go through 3 major periods of Growing Up, which will give you a good idea of the whole process. Chronologically, these periods are:
- Egocentric,
- Ethnocentric
- Worldcentric
Wilber also adds a fourth, extremely advanced period of development called Integral, but we don’t need to go there for now.
The stages of Growing Up describe both the development of humanity throughout history and the development of each person throughout their life. It turns out each of us repeats in small scale the collective journey of our species. Understanding this process then gives us both personal and societal insights. It explains the reasons behind most man-made suffering and also holds promise for ending this suffering in the future.
So, let’s look at the stages.
Growing Up: Egocentric Stages
When we are born, we all begin at square one, the adual stage. At this beginning of human life, there is no experience of separation between world and self. Biting down on a blanket and biting down on our finger feels only vaguely different. Here the new-born identifies unconsciously with the material world. This should not be mistaken with consciously identifying with experience, which is non-duality.
The adual stage evolves into the narcissistic stage, where the young child develops personal preferences and intentions. The young ego here recognizes only its own reality. Others are real only in so far as they can serve our purposes. We are narcissists in the most unconscious, innocent sense of the word. It just never occurs to us someone else can be as real as we are.
A powerful Waking Up experience at an egocentric stage will be filtered through the pigeonhole of the ego. You will become convinced you are the one and only messenger or incarnation of God. Jung calls this ‘inflation’: the ego grows up to the size of the God-image. Many cults have formed around such enlightened narcissists.
Growing Up: Ethnocentric Stages
Our next major period of development comes when we see we are not the only real person around. Here come the ethnocentric stages where our sense of self centres around our group. Here we resonate with statements such as: ‘I am a Hindu’ or ‘I am an American’, or ‘I am a Socialist’. Of course, we belong to such groups all the time, but at ethnocentric stages, our group identity is our self-identity.
Here we develop for the first time the capacity for care and understanding towards others. Acts of compassion begin from this period onward, though here they are unconscious and exclusive. Wilber remarks:
Nazis truly loved their families and their country.
Ken Wilber, Finding Radical Wholeness
The ethnocentric stages of development are, in fact, the greatest source of human violence and cruelty. Here acts of aggression can feel not only justified, but honourable. If my people serve the one and only true God or ideology, it is my moral responsibility to convert your people. If conversion is not an option, well, all the worse for you lot.
The danger of ethnocentric stages is that they make it feel very right to do things that are very wrong. Here the world is strictly divided between us and them. All fundamentalist, extremist, racist, sexist, xenophobic sentiments are born here. Unfortunately, humanity has been at ethnocentric stages throughout most our history.
Growing Up Interprets Waking Up
And here you see the true importance of Growing Up.
Our species has had access to the highest states of Waking Up for millennia. And yet, the practice of slavery officially ended only about two hundred years ago with the Enlightenment. Discrimination against women is still the norm in much of the world. No amount of Waking Up will fix this.
A powerful Waking Up experience at an ethnocentric stage will only strengthen the conviction your tradition is the one and only true path. Should you hear infidels describing similar experiences, you will be certain what they experience is a corrupted, perhaps even demonic perversion of the true thing.
Wilber writes 70% of people today are stuck in ethnocentric stages or even lower. Hence, all the humanitarian disasters and war crimes we are witnessing. Thankfully, there are a number of more mature stages of development. The fact we know of these stages today makes us all the more responsible for cultivating them in our communities.
Growing Up: Worldcentric Stages
The worldcentric stages begin with the understanding that ‘us and them’ is a broken way of seeing what is really only ‘us’. Here our sense of identity transcends our family, society, culture, and religion. Ideas like universal human rights, indiscriminate compassion, being a global citizen – all these are born here. Even our species is no longer a limit on our compassion. The wellbeing of animals, plants, and the whole ecological system becomes a priority here.
Wilber often uses the term ‘rational’ here, since at worldcentric, humanity becomes receptive of universal laws. He writes:
[Here we] find the first emergence of the modern, rational, universal sciences—modern physics, modern chemistry, modern astronomy, modern biology, and so on—not Hindu chemistry versus Protestant chemistry, just chemistry, universal in its reach.
Ken Wilber, Finding Radical Wholeness
Here we also find the post-modern stage. At post-modern, one becomes aware of the relativity of systems of thought, belief, and morality. One begins to see the underlying structures of power that create and shape the way people live and think. Nietzsche is a prime example of this stage.
The post-modern stage can make us critical of tradition to the point of recklessness. This is its danger. It does, however, further open us to universal care and understanding. This is its promise.
Worldcentric Spirituality
It is at worldcentric stages that Waking Up becomes truly effective. Our relative self is finally ready to embody the experience of our ultimate self. Wilber believes the world’s greatest teachers, such as the Buddha and Christ, were worldcentric individuals:
[Christ] was indeed awakened to his Oneness with Spirit. Importantly, he interpreted his realization from [a] worldcentric stage not [an] ethnocentric stage, which is why Jesus the Christ clearly wanted his realization to be given to all the gentiles as well as the Jews…
He himself insisted that he was most fundamentally “the son of Man,” which meant the “son of all humans,” not just the son of one people.
Ken Wilber, Finding Radical Wholeness
Growing Up Into Our True Self (Reprise)
These then are the 3 major periods through which our interpretation of ourselves and the world evolves: egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric. If each of us is an opening through which the universe knows itself, then by Growing Up that opening widens.
And yet, at every stage of Growing Up, we are exposed to danger. With every step, our relative self can be crippled due to the inability to face certain aspects of itself.
For example, as my ego forms when I am a child, I may repress all feelings of anger. This can happen if my father is responding to my tantrums with punishment. Or, when entering the worldcentric stage, I may repress my spiritual interests. This may be because my peers mock religious people for being superstitious.
These feelings and ideas we repress don’t just vanish. They cluster in the basement of the psyche, the unconscious. And the more parts of ourselves we push down there, the more fragmented we become, the more scattered our energy, the more difficult Growing Up.
Worst of all, our inner conflict comes out as aggression towards others.
To fully Wake Up and Grow Up, we must enter the basement of our psyche and reclaim what is truly ours. We must walk the path of Cleaning Up.
Cleaning Up
Consciousness is a tiny stream in the otherwise vast ocean of psychic life.
As we navigate our days, countless thoughts, feelings, memories, and fantasies present themselves. The task of consciousness is to discriminate between these and pursue only what best serves our purposes.
Think of how many thoughts and feelings you’ve had while just watching this video. How many of them did you have to look away from to stay focused on what I’m saying? Chances are, most.
This automatic process leaves most psychic content by the wayside, directing our attention to only what’s important. But sometimes we push away thoughts and feelings not because they are not important. Sometimes, we push them away because they are too important in a way we don’t like. We repress what otherwise demands our full attention because we are afraid of the consequences it may have on our lives.
We pretend it’s not there.
This repressed content goes into the basement and becomes what psychologists call the ‘shadow’.
The Shadow
Repressed shadow elements usually make a number of attempts to draw our attention. And every time we deny them, their attempts become more disruptive. They begin showing up in dreams, in slips of the tongue, in intrusive thoughts, emotional outbursts, depression, anxiety… They may even cause physical illness, as Gabor Mate has shown.
For example, the son of a homophobic father would rather live with depression than recognize any gay tendencies in his own psyche, should such arise. What would happen if it turns out he is gay? The boy would become everything that’s wrong with the world – or so has his father convinced him. So he pushes his authentic feelings down and feels depressed.
But that’s not all.
The more we repress, the more pressure builds up within us, pressure which disrupts our normal functioning. The psyche has evolved a mechanism for releasing this pressure and restoring psychic balance. A mechanism both efficient and dysfunctional: projection.
Projection
Let’s continue our example with the boy. Every time someone brings up gay people, he lashes out with a hateful homophobic rant. And he isn’t faking it. He is genuinely hateful of homosexuals and feels they are everything that’s wrong with the world. Why? Because they represent what he least wants to recognize in himself. He has projected his own shadow onto them and this releases the pressure he feels.
After his rant, the boy feels renewed, finally free from inner conflict. For a time, that is.
Wilber uses a similar example. He quotes a study which found homophobic men experience greater arousal when seeing homoerotic images as compared to non-homophobic straight men. And this is exactly how shadow projection works.
The things I want to destroy within myself, but can’t, I try to destroy in others.
Remember, projection is not a mind-game we consciously play. If it was, only the most sophisticated of people would do it. In fact, it is the most psychologically immature among us that project the most. Projection is an automatic response of the psyche, entirely unconscious.
We don’t think ‘Let’s project some repressed feelings onto these people’. We simply think ‘I hate these people’.
Are You Projecting?
One becomes uneasy the first time he hears of this: ‘What if it turns out I am projecting?’
Well, yes you are. We all are. It’s safe to assume every overwhelmingly negative or positive reaction is a projection of repressed material.
You hate a certain politician with a passion? Most likely he has qualities you hate to admit you have.
You’re in love with the wisest, kindest person in the world? Most likely you underappreciate the wisdom and kindness within you.
Discovering your projections is no cause for concern. In fact, it’s progress. It is a form of consciousness expansion that neither Waking Up nor Growing Up provide. Remember, the discoveries of depth psychology are little over a century old. That’s why ancient traditions offer little insight into the unconscious. And the guidance they do offer is wrapped in ambiguous language, since their understanding was an intuition at best.
Shadow Work
Becoming whole by integrating our shadow is one of the key tasks of self-actualization. Cleaning Up is more urgent in some periods of our lives, but really, it is the work of a lifetime. Theoretically, you can do this work on your own. In practice, you go much farther, much quicker, and much safer by working with an expert. Therapy, journaling, plant medicine, and confession are all ways of Cleaning Up. And you don’t have to limit yourself to just one.
In an exclusive video for Patrons & Members I discuss a shadow work technique Ken Wilber recommends. Join the community and check it out if interested.
Cleaning Up Our True Self (Reprise)
As long as the shadow remains unseen, we have only a partial and false understanding of ourselves. We are rigid, at war with our own nature and looking to take this out on others. Sincere compassion for others and for ourselves becomes a rare thing.
We live a life we think we ‘should’ live, and not the life we yearn for. We are neurotic, inauthentic, unfulfilled, and victim to compulsions. Altered states of consciousness dissociate us from our issues for a time, but this only postpones the work. Sooner or later, we return to our conventional self and find it in need of healing.
This then concludes the triad of self-actualization I wanted to present to you: Waking Up, Growing Up, and Cleaning Up.
Before you go though, there’s one more perspective I want to bring up. This, I hope, will dispel some misunderstandings that may arise from what we’ve covered.
Jungian Individuation
For Jung, individuation is the most important task of human life. It is to find your life’s true meaning; to become who you truly are.
Jung points out our actions, thoughts, and beliefs mostly conform to unconscious collective values. Convention and tradition are like ocean currents that carry generations of people along well-trodden paths. And thank God for that! These unconscious currents keep us safe within tried and tested patterns of life. Finish school, finish college, get a job, find a partner, start a family, etc.
Any well-adjusted member of society must learn to recognize these patterns and align with them. This keeps you safe within the herd, it protects you from the pitfalls of disgrace, isolation, and insanity. Unfortunately, it also keeps you from finding out who you really are.
A Life Well-Lived?
Now, a well-adjusted life is an achievement we shouldn’t disparage. For many disadvantaged people it requires inhuman effort. Still for others it remains only a dream.
But those who earn their place in society, it is they who find how empty this leaves them. The well-adjusted life, as good as it can get, will always be a form of servitude to the herd. No matter how successful we may appear from the outside, we remain an amalgam of what family, friends, and society expect.
To become yourself, to find out what you truly feel, think, and believe, requires one of the most dangerous acts for a human being. It requires that you leave the herd and expose yourself to the very dangers convention and tradition protect us from.
The Road Less Taken
Clearly this is the road least taken. And no sane person would walk it if they were not forced by necessity.
Individuation usually begins when a dramatic experience shakes us awake from unconscious life in the herd. Suddenly, we find ourselves facing a challenge others know nothing about. Our close ones may offer understanding, support, or even (most annoyingly) advice. But ultimately, we are on our own. We find ourselves exiled from the currents carrying so blissfully those around us.
And yet this is not enough for individuation. Here we can, through great repression, force ourselves back to sleep. And just like that, the opportunity of a lifetime is lost.
To individuate, we must answer our unique challenge with a unique response. A moral choice. This choice usually flies in the face of what others consider right and proper. But through the choice sounds the voice of our true self.
This voice, we find, comes through us but not from us. Though it is an inner voice, it feels like a call from outside, a command from an intelligence beyond our ego. To others, we appear fiercely independent, while in fact, we are only answering a call. A call coming from unconscious depths and leading us to our life’s purpose.
I’ll stop here.
Context
Individuation deserves its own proper video, something I plan for the future. I am introducing it here, however, to address 2 misconceptions that might arise from what we’ve covered.
First, Cleaning Up is only one aspect of working with our unconscious. The unconscious is not just the trash bin of consciousness. It does not contain only repressed personal contents. Jung discovered a collective dimension of the unconscious which contains timeless wisdom. The unconscious can be a teacher, should we know how to approach it, and it can point us to our true self, should we know how to listen.
Second, Growing Up widens our self-identity to the point where we feel one with all of life. This must be balanced with Jung’s insights into individuation. Your mind and body are not there simply to be transcended and left behind. They are unique expressions of the ultimate.
The spirit of life works through the individual no less than through the collective. Being one with everyone must not come at the cost of abandoning the person you are. If total oneness was the goal of existence, we would all be one by now.
The person you are, with all your flaws and idiosyncrasies, embodies a unique piece of the universe. By discovering and embracing who you are, you uncover insights the entire species may need. Jung reminds us humanity’s greatest achievements have always come from individuals. Dissolving into the collective will deprive both you and everyone else of the treasures only your destiny holds.
Conclusion
This completes the map I hand to you with this video. Waking Up, Growing Up, and Cleaning Up, all balanced with individuation. While no map will capture the full richness of the journey, this one offers a profound guide for a lifetime of self-discovery.
Ignorance of what we’ve discussed here has engulfed our planet in conflict, suffering, and confusion. I urge you not only to absorb this knowledge but to embody it. Spread it through your actions, your words, and the way you live your life. This is how we heal, one step at a time.
Remember, we are all desperately in need of what you, and only you can bring forth from within. Our maps of reality have blank spaces waiting for you to fill them.
So, get on with it.
