As we close out the year, I continue writing about mystical capacities by addressing what I believe is one of the most important: qaway, which is mystical vision. A qawaq is a visionary or seer: a person with exceptional clarity who can “see” the metaphysical and physical worlds simultaneously. Deep down the two worlds are One; yet qaway allows us to maintain a metaphysical stance even as we “see” our human world just as it is—in all its darkness and light. Qaway helps us understand not only what is happening on the surface, but energies that play into root causes way down in the netherworld of cause and effect.

Although statistics show that across the globe humans live in better conditions than ever before in history—better health, less poverty and hunger, higher rates of education, greater wealth—the predominate perception seems to be that we are living in particularly troubled times. Authoritarianism is on the rise, a climate crisis looms, AI threatens to reduce employment at record levels, the cost of living is rising, and people appear to be less tolerant and more tribal. Can there possibly be a single, core explanation for the heavy state of so much of humanity? If so, what could it be?

The answer is yes, and the core explanation probably is not what you think. The root cause of most of our problems, if not all of them, is not politics, power structures, prejudices, oppressive social or economic systems, and the like. It is a person’s stage of consciousness, and by extension the predominant collective stage of human consciousness.

As I lead you into a brief discussion about human consciousness, I must state the obvious as caveats. Consciousness is an immensely complex and intricately nuanced subject. We will be venturing into only one aspect of it: the evolutionary nature of the development of human consciousness. There are, of course, innumerable reasons for the problems in the world; but the hub of the wheel, so to speak, is consciousness and where we are individually and collectively along the spectrum of consciousness development.

It also is useful to know the core terms of consciousness: state, stage, and structure. Roughly speaking, a state of consciousness is a person’s shifting, transitory phenomenological experience: happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, curiosity, envy, boredom, etc. The stages of consciousness are the progressive shifts in the quality of how consciousness functions and thus in how we understand and experience the world differently as we develop. The various theories of consciousness development do not agree on the number of stages, although most identify between four and seven. An example of progressive stages might be pre-rational/instinctual, rational/egoic, relational/social, mythic/spiritual, transcendental/non-dualistic, cosmic/integral/Oneness. A structure of consciousness is the way our consciousness is ordered, and so how we experience our own beingness. In the Andes, we would use the word mast’ay, which means reordered or reorganized. At each stage of development, our consciousness is restructured in such a way that we expand our conception of being.

A sampling of some of the most well-known of these (mystical) models include Sri Aurobindo and his Integral Yoga philosophy; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s four-stage evolutionary consciousness, Jean Gebser’s Integral Theory, Ken Wilber’s Integral Metatheory that builds on Gebser’s and others’ models, Meister Eckhart’s stages of union, Theravada Buddhism’s stages of awakening, and Huston Smith’s four progressive spiritual personality types.

Many theories I have read about agree that collectively humanity is in a middle stage: usually at stage three of a seven-stage spectrum. This is not a highly developed stage, and the condition of the world reflects this. As mystic theologian Willigis Jäger writes in his 1989 book Search for the Meaning of Life: Essays and Reflections on the Mystical Experience: “We seem to find ourselves . . . in the middle of our journey toward full and complete humanness—and it is precisely at this point that we face special danger. No longer animals, we have nevertheless yet to reach full maturity, namely that mystical dimension of consciousness in which the future of humanity evidently lies. Til we get there, we are in a rather tragic stage, as the situation of today’s world shows.” (p 30)

The Andean mystical tradition can be added to the list of theories. In fact, the entire foundation of the tradition rests upon the qanchispatañan, a seven-stage model of the dynamical unfolding of consciousness. As with other models, at each of the earlier stages of the qanchispatañan we can express the characteristics of that structure of consciousness in both heavy (hucha-generating) and light (sami-generating) ways. We can be happy at any stage, but as we move up the spectrum of increasing consciousness, we produce less and less hucha. We broaden our abilities to harmoniously engage the world and our fellow human beings, especially those radically different from us.

Because of space constraints, I am providing only the briefest overview of the zero through second stages of the qanchispatañan, and concentrating on the third and fourth, as these are the stages that most of us have achieved. There are no human beings we know of who currently are developed to the higher stages (five through seven). Although some people display flashes of these stages, no one is fully developed to and consistently at stage five and higher.  

In this model, we all start at the zero stage, that of the purun runa: our raw, natural, undeveloped self. As we age and engage in life, we step up through the first, second, and third stages. Using psychology as a guide, we might think of the first stage as an almost totally egoic stage. Because our priorities are survival needs first and personal status second, a core personality characteristic is victim mentality. We take little responsibility for ourselves and our self-created hucha, believing the world and others are the cause of our problems. At the second stage, we increase our self-awareness and thus begin to own and deal with our shadow (unconscious) needs, drives, and desires. We increasingly take responsibility for ourselves and may even begin a sustained program of self-improvement. Most human beings (and organizations, nations, and other social and human power structures) are at the third stage. Here we engage the world in much healthier ways, although this stage also has a host of pitfalls. The most divisive are duality thinking, tribalism such that others are either with us or against us, heavy judgments on those different from us, and the belief that we have the truth and others (whom we see as our opposition) do not.  We also display our heaviness as either-or thinking, a win-lose mentality, and a drive toward competition rather than cooperation. Our focus tends to be on differences rather than similarities, and so we are more exclusionary than inclusive.

Because the third-level worldview is so dualistic, the most difficult leap to make is from the third to the fourth stage. It is an expansion of consciousness that has dramatic effects on the way we think of ourselves, others, and the world in general. We usually do not advance to the fourth stage unless we have done our shadow work and made significant progress toward self-actualization. The fourth stage is that of the chakaruna: we are bridge builders. Our frame of reference and our daily practice is that of taqe, joining. We respect all traditions, because we see the core, underlying truths and values that they share. So, we move from focusing on what separates us to the commonalities among us. We seek win-win strategies, encourage cooperation rather than competition, and, among many other capacities, strive to see every individual as worthy of respect and compassion. We marvel at the diversity of human expression, while knowing in the physical realm we are all part of one human family and in the spiritual realm we are each an expression of the All That Is.

To understand many of the problems we face in human relations and, thus, in the state of the world, we must acknowledge three fundamental “truths” about any evolutionary model of human conscious development. First, we as individuals, and thus collectively as a species, cannot skip a stage of development. There is no leap-frogging from the second to the fourth stage, or the third to the sixth stage. There is only a steady progression stage by stage.

Second, ontologically (meaning what is means to “be”), we can only understand what it means to be human from the view of the stage we are at. Others might tell us what it is like at a more advanced stage, but we are essentially clueless about what it means to “be” (as in our quality of self, our human beingness) at that stage of development until we have reached it ourselves. As an analogy, there is no butterfly without there having first been a caterpillar. A caterpillar cannot know what it is like to be a butterfly. If it were capable of imagining, mystically a caterpillar might know it contains within itself a butterfly nature, but as a caterpillar it can only be what it is.

Third, although language is linear, we must rise above that restriction, because one stage of human consciousness is not “higher” than another in a purely hierarchical sense. Consciousness is evolutionary in nature, so we could say that all stages exist simultaneously in potential, but display in reality more or less sequentially. We take everything we have developed in previous stages with us as we progress to the next stage. Going back to the caterpillar and butterfly analogy: That butterfly, at some energetic and perhaps physical stage, retains aspects of its former caterpillarness. It is what it is, but also what it was. Thus, a later stage of development is not “better than” a previous one; it is simply “more of” what is possible within the realm of the unfolding of beingness. The new enfolds the old, the current enfolds the former. Consciousness is a process of emergence, an increasing expansion of awareness toward our “God” nature.

Now that we have the necessary context, we can more easily understand that many of our problems arise because of our ignorance, misunderstandings, or outright refusal to live by these “truths.” We end up projecting the values of our own stage of consciousness onto those who have not yet reached our stage. Every stage has heavy and light aspects to it, and we tend to valorize the light aspects of our own stage of development and focus on the heavy aspects of people at stages below us. Thus, instead of understanding that everyone can only “be” the capacities inherent at their stage of consciousness, we see people as willfully and intentionally being ___________ [insert whatever epithets of abuse you want: ignorant, selfish, immoral, hateful, racist, oppressive, misogynist, xenophobic . . .].

They are the problem, we say. But that is not true in the qawaq sense. When we have developed our mystical vision, we “see” that each of us is right where we are. We cannot be anywhere else. While we want to work to increase the good in the world, it is a waste of our energy to shame, insult, demonize, or try to legislate “morality” into people who are expressing the heavier aspects of an earlier stage of development. We cannot speed up evolution. Doing so, as Ken Wilbur wrote in The Post-truth World: Politics, Polarization, and a Vision for Transcending the Chaos, is like “calling age 5 a disease and outlawing it.” (p 69) A five-year-old cannot do anything else but think, behave, and understand as a five-year-old. To expect anything more of that child is to be impatient or unfair at best and delusional at worst.

What is “wrong” in the world is not “out there,” but “in here.” We think things like (and act from these thoughts and beliefs), “Everyone knows right from wrong, right?” “Everyone knows that [X] hurts us, while [Y] helps us, right?” Even if we temper those feelings, we are prone to thinking along the lines of: “At the very least they should know, right? In this day and age, there simply is no excuse for anyone to lie and cheat, to dox and cancel, to support or enable any kind of oppression, to think misogyny or xenophobia is tolerable, to desecrate the Earth and our resources, right?”

Wrong.

Andean paqos and a variety of consciousness theorists remind of us of the obvious: We all start out as purun runa—at the zero stage, which is that of the natural but undeveloped human being. Although some of our development is fueled simply because we grow up and live in the world at a particular time and in a particular culture, much of personal development is a mix of circumstance and choice. As Ken Wilber says: No matter how fast the world is developing socially, culturally, materially, and technologically, “. . . everybody today is still born at square one and must begin their growth and development from there—and they can stop when they reach any [stage]. And thus even worldcentric [i.e., fourth stage] cultures everywhere continue to possess individuals at, for example, deeply ethnocentric [second and third] stages of development—and those individuals possess powerfully oppressive, coercive, and domineering impulses.” He adds, “Human beings are not born at a worldcentric stage of morality, values, or drives—they are not born democratically enthused. They develop to those stages after [passing through several other] major stages of development, and by no means does everybody make it.” (Post-Truth World, p 73)

However, even those at the fourth and higher stages of development face challenges, not the least of which is that they forget that everyone does not see the world as they do. Others at earlier stages may not share their ethical and moral values. Consequently, fueled by remnants of their former third-stage selves, they can be impatient with those they perceive as blocking progress or perpetuating injustices. They then tend to become contemptuous toward people they consider “less developed” than themselves. Because those at the earlier stages cannot know what consciousness at a more developed stage is like, they are clueless as to why they are being blamed and shamed for being who they are and holding the worldview that they do. They then tend to react by demonizing those at the later stages, who they come to see as elites, dominators, privileged, prejudiced, [insert your own abusive epithet]. If those at the higher levels do not right themselves, a viciously divisive cycle ensues.

While light-bearers, change-makers, activists, advocates, and educators at every stage are doing good works and striving to solve problems for the good of all, their efforts often fall short or boomerang in unexpected and unfortunate ways in part because they forget they are not talking to their peers. To be successful in their advocacy, they need to reach out to people at earlier stages of development who appear ready to be guided to the next stage of development. And they need to communicate with them in the “language” of that earlier stage. All of us must meet people where they are, not where we wish they were.

There is a danger of thinking that such a strategy is manipulative or patronizing, but it is not. (Well, it can be depending on the interior stage of development of the communicator.) Remember, when we develop our qaway ability, we “see” reality as it really is. And if we agree with the main premises of many of these evolutionary models of human consciousness development, then acknowledging that people are at different levels, and meeting them where they are and in a way they can understand, is not only realistic, but necessary. Theories of consciousness are stunning in their complexity. They easily can be misunderstood when they are only partially presented, as I have done here. So, I leave you with the advice Ken Wilber provides in A Post-Truth World: “What so desperately needs to be understood, from a developmental and evolutionary perspective, is that each major stage of development becomes a possible station in life for those who stop there, and there is nothing that can be done about that—except to make sure that all means of further development are made as widely available as possible (a core task of the leading-edge), and—just as importantly—make room in society for individuals who are at each station of life . . ., and douse the whole affair with outrageous amounts of loving kindness—and do this by example. (p 11, italics in original)