Ken Wilber's Integral Theory is a "theory of everything" that aims to integrate all human knowledge and experience, encompassing various philosophical, scientific, and spiritual traditions, using a four-quadrant model (individual interior, individual exterior, collective interior, collective exterior) and a developmental framework. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

All Quadrants All Levels (AQAL, pronounced "ah-qwul") is the basic framework of integral theory. It models human knowledge and experience with a four-quadrant grid, along the axes of "interior-exterior" and "individual-collective". According to Wilber, it is a comprehensive approach to reality, a metatheory that attempts to explain how academic disciplines and every form of knowledge and experience fit together coherently.[2]

AQAL is based on four fundamental concepts and a rest-category: four quadrants, several levels and lines of development, several states of consciousness, and "types", topics which do not fit into these four concepts.[15] "Levels" are the stages of development, from pre-personal through personal to transpersonal. "Lines" of development are various domains which may progress unevenly through different stages. "States" are states of consciousness; according to Wilber persons may have a temporal experience of a higher developmental stage. "Types" is a rest-category, for phenomena which do not fit in the other four concepts.[16] In order for an account of the Kosmos to be complete, Wilber believes that it must include each of these five categories. For Wilber, only such an account can be accurately called "integral". In the essay, "Excerpt C: The Ways We Are in This Together", Wilber describes AQAL as "one suggested architecture of the Kosmos".[17]

The model's apex is formless awareness, "the simple feeling of being", which is equated with a range of "ultimates" from a variety of eastern traditions. This formless awareness transcends the phenomenal world, which is ultimately only an appearance of some transcendental reality. According to Wilber, the AQAL categories — quadrants, lines, levels, states, and types – describe the relative truth of the two truths doctrine of Buddhism. According to Wilber, none of them are true in an absolute sense. Only formless awareness, "the simple feeling of being", exists absolutely.[18]

Mysticism and the great chain of being

One of Wilber's main interests is in mapping what he calls the "neo-perennial philosophy", an integration of some of the views of mysticism typified by Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy with an account of cosmic evolution akin to that of the Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo. He rejects most of the tenets of Perennialism and the associated anti-evolutionary view of history as a regression from past ages or yugas.[quote 1] Instead, he embraces a more traditionally Western notion of the great chain of being. As in the work of Jean Gebser, this great chain (or "nest") is ever-present while relatively unfolding throughout this material manifestation, although to Wilber "... the 'Great Nest' is actually just a vast morphogenetic field of potentials ..." In agreement with Mahayana Buddhism, and Advaita Vedanta, he believes that reality is ultimately a nondual union of emptiness and form, with form being innately subject to development over time.

Theory of truth

Wilber believes that the mystical traditions of the world provide access to, and knowledge of, a transcendental reality which is perennial, consistent throughout all times and cultures. This proposition underlies the whole of his conceptual edifice, and is an unquestioned assumption. According to David L. McMahan, the perennial position is "largely dismissed by scholars", but "has lost none of its popularity".[20] Mainstream academia favor a constructivist approach, which is rejected by Wilber as a dangerous relativism. Wilber juxtaposes this generalization to plain materialism, presented as the main paradigm of regular science.[21][quote 2]

In his later works, Wilber argues that manifest reality is composed of four domains, and that each domain, or "quadrant", has its own truth-standard, or test for validity:[22]

• "Interior individual/1st person": the subjective world, the individual subjective sphere;

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• "Interior collective/2nd person": the intersubjective space, the cultural background;

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• "Exterior individual/3rd person": the objective state of affairs;

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• "Exterior collective/3rd person": the functional fit, "how entities fit together in a system".

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Criticism

Wilber describes the state of the "hard" sciences as limited to "narrow science", which only allows evidence from the lowest realm of consciousness, the sensorimotor (the five senses and their extensions). Wilber sees science in the broad sense as characterized by involving three steps:[27]

• specifying an experiment,
• performing the experiment and observing the results, and
• checking the results with others who have competently performed the same experiment.

He has presented these as "three strands of valid knowledge" in Part III of his book The Marriage of Sense and Soul.[28]

What Wilber calls "broad science" would include evidence from logic, mathematics, and from the symbolic, hermeneutical, and other realms of consciousness. Ultimately and ideally, broad science would include the testimony of meditators and spiritual practitioners. Wilber's own conception of science includes both narrow science and broad science, e.g., using electroencephalogram machines and other technologies to test the experiences of meditators and other spiritual practitioners, creating what Wilber calls "integral science".[citation needed]