Holarchical Development: Discovering and Applying Missing Drives from Ken Wilber’s Twenty Tenets

Holonic Development A Brief Overview of the AQAL Model The AQAL model, developed by contemporary philosopher and integral theorist Ken Wilber, offers a framework within which to synthesize what Wilber sees as the partial truths of many disparate fields of study. The goal of his approach is to bring together the insights of science and mysticism as elements of a larger, integral understanding of what Wilber has called the Kosmos (Wilber, 2000c, p. xii). The term Kosmos refers to a universe that contains not only the objects of the exterior world, the cosmos of science, but also the contents and events of the inner world of experience, including those aspects of reality pointed to by spiritual and mystical experience. Wilber sees science and spirituality not as competing paradigms, but as partial and complementary aspects of this more inclusive, integral perspective on reality (Wilber, 2000c, p. 273). One of Wilber’s earlier contributions was a model of human development that moved from pre-personal levels to personal levels, much as standard developmental psychology proposes, but then has the potential to continue beyond conventional ego maturity to transpersonal levels. Wilber saw conventional development as only part of a larger evolutionary journey through a spectrum of stages of consciousness, one that can ultimately carry the individual on to higher levels of spiritual awareness. According to Wilber (1999a), this marked the second phase of his work with the 1980 book The Atman Project. By comparison, Wilber’s 2006 book Integral Spirituality has more recently unveiled aspects of his fifth phase of work (which includes integral methodological pluralism). Holarchical Development: Discovering and Applying Missing Drives from Ken Wilber’s Twenty Tenets