From Map to Practice: A Question from Our Community
The five dimensions outlined in the article “An Introduction to Integral Human Development” (Growing Up, Cleaning Up, Opening Up, Waking Up, and Showing Up) provide a valuable framework for personal growth. While they appear neatly organized on paper, the reality of integrating these aspects into our lives can be more complex and rewarding.
These dimensions naturally interconnect, evolve at different paces, and occasionally catch us by surprise. We may find ourselves thriving in one area, progressing in another, and discovering new insights in yet another. Embracing this journey can lead to a richer and more balanced life experience, in my opinion and experience.
This strikes Wilber himself:
…it’s also astonishing that none of them includes the others.
(Wilber, 2024, Introduction).
A deep spiritual realization does not automatically bring psychological maturity.
Careful shadow work does not by itself open the contemplative or spiritual dimension.
And none of them, on its own, guarantees that we will bring what we have found into the world we share with others.
This is why the framework is less a ladder than a way of seeing or comprehending. Wilber’s own warning applies here, I think: “You have to know where to look for Wholeness” (Wilber, 2024, Introduction). Each dimension reveals a different kind of wholeness, and each one stays hidden until someone points it out.
In our ATCT community, we exchange ideas collaboratively. Students actively engage with the framework, not just passively receiving it. Many of them (not all, of course), through their own efforts, test its applicability to their experiences. They return to the lectures with insightful questions that enhance our collective understanding, including my own.
One such question arrived recently, after a student listened again to my lecture on Integral Development and Showing Up:
If I understand correctly, it basically means that when awareness deepens (higher subtle and beyond as per Wilber map), you return back to the personal, and act on the personal level with the new awareness?Or does it mean you find ways to express the new depth/breadth?This is probably individual?
It is a beautiful and precise question. It names a movement many practitioners know from their own lives: a deepening, a spiritual experience, and then the question of what to do with it. It also touches a point the framework itself has to clarify.
Is Showing Up the final step after awakening, or something wider and more immediate?
My first answer to her stayed mostly with the inner, personal side of the question. But the question deserves a fuller reply, one that takes in all four dimensions of Showing Up as Wilber describes them in his latest book.
What follows is that reply, shared here with gratitude to the student who asked it.
Dear student
Your question resonates deeply, as it reflects a common experience many share after moments of profound insight. After encountering a broader or more serene awareness, we often ponder our next steps. We may wonder whether to return to daily life with a refreshed perspective or seek avenues to share our discoveries.
In my previous response, I primarily focused on the inner journey. However, I’d like to expand on this idea, drawing on Wilber’s latest book, which presents “Showing Up” as an opportunity to embrace a greater meaning beyond personal growth.
Not a return, but an inhabiting
In Finding Radical Wholeness, Wilber defines Showing Up simply: it means
to fully show up for all the basic dimensions and perspectives to which human beings have genuine access.(Wilber, 2024, Ch. 10).
A little later, he makes it concrete. Showing Up means
to fully acknowledge, and totally inhabit, all 4 quadrants of existence—to not try to deny, ignore, or reduce any of them to the others.(Wilber, 2024, Ch. 11).
One detail changes the shape of your question, in my opinion: Showing Up doesn’t wait for awakening, meaning the act of Showing Up does not wait for enlightenment or transpersonal insights; instead, it takes initiative and embraces the moment as it is:
“You don’t need a major Waking Up in order to begin Showing Up,” Wilber writes. “In order to Show Up, it is only necessary to realize that, at whatever level of Growing Up you are at, you have all 4 of these major dimensions available” (Ch. 11).
So Showing Up isn’t the last step after the Subtle, the Causal, or the Nondual experiences. It’s a way of being present that is open to us at every point along the path, and it matures as we do.
Image Copyright by ITP
The four rooms of one house
Wilber’s four quadrants are the inside and the outside of the individual and of the collective. Your new depth can show up in each.
The “I” (inner, individual)
This is where your question began, and it is a true place to begin: awareness, intention, the felt sense of a wider presence. Two cautions keep this room honest.
First, whatever we experience in depth is interpreted by the stage we are at; Wilber insists that Growing Up interprets Waking Up (Ch. 3).
Second, shadow does not dissolve with depth: Wilber notes that most states of Waking Up can produce their own shadow material, and that meditation “will not necessarily clear up shadow elements” (Ch. 10).
What he calls “the incredibly hard lesson of shadow research” is that:
the things that we most despise in the world are exactly the things that we possess and most despise in ourselves.(Wilber, 2024, Ch. 10).
Showing Up in this room means turning toward all of our own experience, shadow included, rather than only the luminous parts. Following this line of thought, we might even avoid the trap most people fall into: spiritual bypassing and/or spiritual materialism.
The “It” (outer, individual): body
Depth isn’t only an inner event. Wilber notes that “even Upper Left spiritual states (such as a Zen satori) have correlative Upper Right material brain states” (Ch. 11), and that matter is “the exterior dimension of all levels of existence” (ibid.). So depth actually has a body. Showing Up here asks plain questions:
How do I sleep, eat, move, and speak?
Does my behavior match what I say I have realized?
This is where depth becomes something others can actually see in how we live.
The “We” (inner, collective): relationships, culture, shared meaning
Wilber reminds us that “there is not a single thought in the mind that is not deeply interwoven with, and made possible by, a culture of other minds,” and that “any real ‘you’ is always a ‘you/we’” (Ch. 11).
Our awakening is never purely private. It lives in the language we share, in how we listen, in the atmosphere we bring into a room. Here, expressing new depth may mean something very simple: more patience in a conversation, more room for someone who sees the world differently, a gentler tone in our communities.
The “Its” (outer, collective): systems, institutions, ecology, technology
Wilber is sobering here. He warns that “Right-hand material realities, artifacts, and technologies often run far ahead of the Left-hand morals and wisdom needed to use them appropriately and responsibly—which is compounded by the fact that we aren’t even tracking the Left-hand realities” (Ch. 13).
He also observes that you can outlaw exterior behavior, “but you cannot make thinking in racist terms an illegal act,” because “erasing racism from the Right-hand legal system does nothing to change a person’s Left-hand, interior value structure” (ibid.). Hence his conclusion that “we need to consciously track interior or Left-hand development in each culture” (ibid.).
Showing Up here means letting depth reach the structures we take part in: our workplace, our institutions, our relationship to the Earth.
In the language of the Tantra chapter in the book, it means being willing to:
“get off your mat and help the planet and those people around you who are in such suffering”
(Ch. 18).
Acting for the benefit of others
This reminds me of a story from our Secret Mantra (Tantra) lineage, the Lineage of Mahasiddha Tilopa (Tilopa, Naropa, Marpa, Jetsun Milarepa, and those who followed). Since you are a student in this Lineage, if I remember correctly, the following might contribute.
Tilopa’s student Naropa possessed superior capacities, so the Master was quite direct with him (to say the least). After twelve great acts of self-denial and the profound transformations they brought, Naropa attained the highest realization, Mahamudra, and simply went away to unknown countries (Guenther, 1963/1974, p. 96).
Some time later, two of Naropa’s brothers in the Dharma, Riripa and Kasoripa, came to the monastery of gTsug-gi nor-bu, where Tilopa was, and asked where Naropa had gone. Tilopa had no news of him. The two felt that someone of Naropa’s stature should be urged to act for the benefit of beings (Guenther, 1963/1974, p. 96). When Tilopa suggested they call him, they asked what to do if he would not come. Tilopa replied: “Tell him my message to come” (Guenther, 1963/1974, p. 97).
They searched all regions without success. Only after praying in their discouragement did they find him, sitting in a valley. Paying their respects, they told him that it was wrong for someone like him to remain in a sphere beyond thought instead of acting for the benefit of sentient beings: “Tilopa said that you should start acting” (Guenther, 1963/1974, p. 97). Naropa answered that if his teacher said so, he must go.
Back with Tilopa, Naropa was told to act for the benefit of sentient beings, and Riripa added a prayer: “Reject the attitude of the Sravakas and Pratyekabuddhas / Concerned only with their own peace and happiness” (Guenther, 1963/1974, p. 97). Naropa accepted the charge (Guenther, 1963/1974, p. 98).
In Riripa’s words, the pratyekabuddha, named together with the śrāvaka, stands for a realization that remains concerned only with its own peace, freedom, and salvation, not with that of others (the path of Theravada Buddhism, not Mahayana/Tantra).
We all know how that turned out. Mahasiddha Naropa is one of the great ones in the Buddhist Tantric tradition. Had he stayed in that valley, I don’t think it would be so.
Showing Up at its best, I think.
On expressing the new depth
Your second question, about finding ways to express the depth, has a lovely answer in what Wilber calls the “1-2-3 of Spirit.” Jesus, he observes, “spoke about God (3rd person), he spoke to or with God (2nd person), and he spoke as God (1st person)” (Ch. 11).
A full spiritual life includes all three: thinking about Spirit, relating to Spirit, and resting as Spirit. Expression isn’t only doing something with our realization. It is letting all three voices speak. See?
Here I’ll add my own reading, which goes beyond Wilber’s wording. He writes that ultimate Spirit “is not found in any quadrant … but rather is loosely represented by the paper on which the diagram of the quadrant is placed” (Ch. 11, n. 3), and that “nondual Spirit manifests the entire relative world, and when it does, it does so as all 4 quadrants simultaneously” (Ch. 11).
Well, if that is so, then the four quadrants are simply the shape the Nondual takes when it appears as a world.
Showing Up would then be less a return from depth to the ordinary than the recognition that depth was always already appearing as the ordinary. This fits what Wilber describes as the great shift of the nondual traditions: “from finding a Heaven not of this Earth to finding a Heaven on Earth,” guided by the tantric rule “Bring everything onto the path” (Ch. 18).
Is it individual?
That’s a great question! An honest answer, one that acknowledges the complexity of the situation and its dialectics, is both a yes and a no.
We all share a common framework, often called the “map,” that represents our existence in four distinct quadrants. Each of us navigates these quadrants simultaneously, yet our experiences within them are profoundly personal and evolve as we progress through life. Wilber says the worldcentric, orange stage “meant a new and higher way to Show Up” (Ch. 14).
I read this as true of every stage we grow into: each brings its own way of Showing Up.
So your way of Showing Up will be yours. Your stage, your gifts, your shadow, and your particular corner of the world will shape it. See?
Showing Up as integrity
It’s worth noticing that Wilber speaks of Showing Up in moral terms, not only in theoretical ones. He calls our collective neglect of the inner dimensions “a colossal failure to Show Up, a deep lack of authenticity” (Ch. 13).
He spells out what that new and higher way to Show Up meant:
to fully and authentically inhabit all 4 quadrants, with trust, sincerity, and integrity.(Wilber, 2024, Ch. 14).
Showing Up, then, is a form of integrity: being whole in the old sense of the word. And it does not come ready-made. Wilber notes that Kegan and Laskow Lahey know from experience that it “takes some effort and practice” (Ch. 13), and he quotes them with evident sympathy: “We are works in progress” (Kegan & Laskow Lahey, 2016, as cited in Wilber, 2024).
Image Copyright by Shambhala Publications.
A short practice
The book we focus on here gives no formal exercise for Showing Up, so here is a simple one of my own.
At the end of a day, or after a meaningful experience, ask four questions:
- What did I notice in myself? (I)
- How did it show in my body and my actions? (It)
- How did it touch my relationships and the shared spaces I’m part of? (We)
- Did it reach, even slightly, the systems and structures I choose to take part in? (Its)
Whichever question feels thinnest is probably where the next step lies.
Let me close with the line from this chapter that moves me most:
No matter how alone you might feel, at every moment of your life, you are truly and actually at home in the universe.(Wilber, 2024, Ch. 11)
Showing Up, in the end, may simply be the art of living as if that were true, because it is.
What do you think?
Edmond Cigale, PhD
References
Guenther, H. V. (1974). The life and teaching of Naropa: Translated from the original Tibetan with a philosophical commentary based on the oral transmission. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1963)
You can buy the book here on Amazon (Kindle edition) >>
You can buy the book here on Amazon (Kindle edition) >>
Wilber, K. (2024). Finding radical wholeness: The integral path to unity, growth, and delight. Shambhala Publications.
You can buy the book here on Amazon (Kindle edition) >>
You can buy the book here on Amazon (Kindle edition) >>
To translate the content on this page (or any other page on the ATCT® Blog and website) into your native language, click or tap on the dropdown menu located at the top right corner.