In his foreword to the recently released second edition
of The Radiance of Being by Allan Combs, Ken Wilber
points out that “for the first time in human history we of
today have access to virtually all of the world's accumulated
information about human consciousness and its potential . . .
and it signals the possibility of being able to
formulate—also for the first time in history—truly
comprehensive or all-inclusive or 'integral' maps and models of
human consciousness and its unfolding.” What makes Combs's
achievement so remarkable is that in little over three hundred
pages he manages to synthesize, and make accessible to the
uninitiated reader, the essence of so much of this accumulated
information.
Combs tells us that his intent in The Radiance of
Being is “to serve as part guide and part fellow
traveler on a quest into the labyrinthine realms of science and
traditional wisdom in search of the roots of
consciousness.” It is precisely this quality of open-ended
curiosity that enables him to impart the considerable fruits of
his erudition and research with such dexterity and ease. Indeed,
if you are compelled, as I was, by the prospect of
“understanding the grand integral vision” and have
not yet found the time, as I hadn't, to digest the collected
works of Hegel, Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, and Ken
Wilber, let alone the perennial wisdom of the great religious
traditions and the latest neurological research into brain
dynamics, then following Combs's thread through The Radiance
of Being will no doubt prove to be a captivating and
educational journey.
A psychologist with a background in chaos theory and
the newly emerging sciences of complexity, Combs begins
by
bringing his knowledge and insight to bear on the mystery of who
we are, with a fascinating investigation into the biological and
neurological foundations of mind and consciousness. His
description of the interwoven systems that have evolved over
millennia to form the human brain, combined with his intriguing
exploration of the dynamics and patterns that undergird the
entire panorama of conscious experience, left me marveling at
the complexity, fluidity, and impersonality of what goes on
inside our heads. While it is one thing for the Buddha and other
great teachers and wisdom traditions to tell us that all our
experience is impermanent—that there is no enduring,
static entity that can be held onto as
“self”—it is quite another to begin to
understand empirically how insubstantial are the states
of consciousness and patterns of activity that appear to form
the “solid ground” of who we think are.
What was even more awe-inspiring, though, was
learning what this emerging understanding reveals about both our
evolutionary potential and the “grand integral
vision” of life as a whole. As Combs says, “We will
begin to see ourselves, not as static organisms, but as living
processes evolving into the future in a continuous dynamic event
of self-creation.” Indeed, the most compelling aspect of
the first section of The Radiance of Being is the way
in which Combs illuminates how it is the intentionality
inherent in consciousness itself that “like a polarizing
magnetic field that draws iron filings into formations of
multiple ellipses . . . aligns the processes of the mind into
patterns with direction and purpose.” He conveys how the
domains of science and spirit are converging to release the
concept of “evolution” from the hold of the outdated
Darwinian model of adaptation in the physical universe. In the
context of the deepening integral understanding that he
presents, evolution reveals itself to be the movement of the
self-organizing and self-creating intelligence inherent in all
that is alive.
Having established an overarching context of
ever-evolving complexity and creativity as the raison
d'être of consciousness itself, Combs explores its
unfolding through the minds of some of the leading pathfinders
throughout history. Skillfully distilling the essence
of Hegel,
Teilhard de Chardin, Jean Gebser, and Sri Aurobindo, among
others, he highlights the pivotal insights that shaped their
endeavors to map the mystery of consciousness.
Particularly enlightening is the way in which Combs
charts the development of an evolutionary spirituality in the
West stretching from Plotinus to the present. We learn, for
example, that late-nineteenth-century French philosopher Henri
Bergson was the first to elevate evolutionary thinking to the
status of a major philosophy that included both the outer
dimension of biology and the inner dimension of consciousness.
Bergson posited that evolution operates as a pressure that is
constantly forcing its way toward higher levels of expression
and demonstrates itself through an organism's power of
choice.
In one of the most educational chapters, Combs
introduces us to the still largely unknown Polish cultural
philosopher, Jean Gebser. Gebser's great contribution to the
“grand integral vision” was his attempt to
conceptualize the dominant patterns of experience that have
emerged during human history in his model of five major
structures of consciousness—archaic, magic, mythic,
mental, and integral. By elucidating how each of these
structures is based on a specific perception of time and space,
Combs imparts a fascinating experiential snapshot of the
evolution of consciousness as we see through the eyes of each
worldview.
Combs brings his synthesis of the “grand
integral vision” right up to the present with a masterful
appraisal of the prodigious, and still-unabated, contribution of
contemporary integral philosopher Ken Wilber. In a chapter
featuring an amusingly titled section, “The Whole Shebang;
states, levels, stages, structures, waves, lines, streams and
realms,” Combs gives us Wilber 101, in which he delineates
how Wilber has managed to incorporate virtually all major
research findings on human development into his multifaceted
integral model, the Four Quadrants. The cutting edge of
contemporary integral inquiry is further augmented by the
inclusion of the author's own recent collaboration with Wilber,
entitled the “Wilber-Combs Matrix.” Described by
Combs as a “periodic table of consciousness,” it
melds the sheaths of traditional Vedanta (physical, pranic,
mental, subtle, causal) together with Gebser's five
structures of consciousness and the “value memes” of
Don Beck's Spiral Dynamics, to represent how different
“states” of consciousness are experienced and
interpreted according to the developmental structure or
“stage” through which they are perceived. And if
that makes your head spin, then rest assured, Combs makes it all
surprisingly accessible!
It was only toward the end of the book, as the focus
shifted to the subject of the second subtitle, “living the
integral life,” that I felt Combs's narrative began to
lose its fresh and adventurous character. I admired his critique
of the popular psychological notion of an unconscious mind,
“we shortchange ourselves when we appeal to explanations
that lie hidden beyond the creative dynamics of our being”
and his description of how integral consciousness emerges
through an embrace of complexity resulting in an
“enlargement of objectivity.” But Combs's tentative
forays into how we might actually begin to harness, and become
expressions of, the “grand integral vision”
ultimately amount to little more than a summary of various
established paths and modes of practice.
Combs finishes his book by sharing his conviction
that “each of us must find our own unique integral path.
This must be a path that reflects our own needs and aspirations,
which will change throughout our lives as our circumstances,
opportunities, growth and aspirations also change.” While
what he suggests here appears reasonable enough, it does not
seem to embolden us to inquire deeply into the implications of
what he has so generously presented to us in the preceding
chapters. As Combs's thread wove the thrilling multi-dimensional
tapestry of the “grand integral vision,” I found
myself pulled into a natural contemplation. What might this
universal trajectory of evolving consciousness want of myself
and all of us at such a critical juncture in our collective
journey of Becoming? What would it mean, for example, to
seriously consider the implications of the “quantum
leap” envisioned by Teilhard de Chardin, which, as Combs
tells us, “has its own emergent properties that go far
beyond the individual minds”? If we are to sincerely
grapple with the implications of “living the integral
life,” then surely it means daring to open ourselves up to
a potential “radiance of being” that is so
positive, all-encompassing, and infused with purpose that it may
propel us far beyond the relativistic field of our personal
“needs and aspirations.” Indeed, if integral
consciousness is to be truly integral, which implies
whole, all-encompassing, and unified, then its genuine emergence
would have to transcend the status quo of a postmodern culture
that only seeks to foster the primacy of the individual's subjective experience.
However, despite this weakness in the overall coherence of The Radiance of Being, Combs's essential offering to us all shines through. What we might otherwise have to spend years gradually assimilating and distilling on our own from a pile of weighty books (in more than one sense of the word!), Combs makes available to us in a medium-sized paperback. So buy it, and as Ken Wilber says in his introduction, take
“an exhilarating tour through the grand possibilities of our own being and our own becoming.”
–Pete Bampton