Waves and Streams

Wilber's View

Before presenting Piaget's stages of cognitive development, Wilber lays down the vocabulary that keeps his whole developmental picture from collapsing into a single ladder: waves, streams, states, and self. Waves are the basic levels of consciousness — roughly a dozen major levels running from subconscious to self-conscious to superconscious — which he deliberately calls "waves" rather than "rungs" to stress that they're fluid and overlapping, like colors bleeding into each other in a rainbow, not rigid steps. Streams are the developmental lines (cognitive, moral, psychosexual, affective, interpersonal, spiritual, and so on) that move through those waves relatively independently of one another — so a person can be advanced cognitively, middling emotionally, and undeveloped morally, all at once. States are temporary altered states of consciousness (peak experiences), which only become permanent developmental gains once converted into stable traits. And the self is the navigating agent that has to make its way through all of this at once — not a passenger riding a single elevator, but something threading multiple rivers simultaneously.

The importance of this move is mostly critical: it's Wilber's answer to the standard objection that stage theories (Piaget's especially) are rigid, linear, and one-dimensional. His claim is that within any one stream a sequence of waves can still be genuinely invariant and hierarchical — he's not abandoning stages — but because there are two dozen or so relatively independent streams running through those waves, overall human development looks far messier and more idiosyncratic than any single-line model would predict. This is a genuinely useful distinction and does real work defusing the "hierarchy = rigid ranking of whole people" objection. What's less examined here is exactly how independent the streams really are from each other, and how the four-quadrant machinery (each quadrant getting its own streams) is meant to interact with this waves/streams frame — that gets built out gradually across the rest of the chapter rather than settled at the point this vocabulary is introduced.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

This model consists essentially of waves, streams, states, and self. Waves are the basic levels of consciousness (about a dozen major levels that range from subconscious to self-conscious to superconscious). I call them "waves" to indicate the fluid nature of these levels of consciousness, the fact that they interpenetrate and overlap (like colors in a rainbow) and are not rigid rungs in a ladder.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6, "Magic, Myth, and Beyond"

Streams are the various developmental lines (such as cognitive, moral, psychosexual, affective, interpersonal, spiritual, and so on) that develop relatively independently through the basic levels or waves (so that a person can, for example, be at a fairly high level of development cognitively, a medium level emotionally, and a low level morally; development, in other words, is anything but a linear, step-by-step affair).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6, "Magic, Myth, and Beyond"

States refers to altered states of consciousness (such as peak experiences), which are brief, temporary, but often powerful experiences, especially of the transpersonal realms (however, if development into the transpersonal is to become permanent and not merely passing, these states must be converted to traits: altered states must become permanent structures or levels of consciousness). And the self refers to the self-system that navigates the waves, streams, and states as it makes its way through the great River of Life.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6, "Magic, Myth, and Beyond"

Waves and streams—or levels and lines—are operative in all four quadrants. They are simply the grades and clades of evolution—the levels of holons and the lines of holons… In each of the quadrants, the various lines can unfold in a relatively independent fashion, but the point is that any holon in any line has correlates at the same level in all the other quadrants ("same-level relationship").

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6, "Magic, Myth, and Beyond"

The major inadequacy of Piaget's system, most scholars now agree, is that Piaget suggested that cognitive development (conceived as logico-mathematical competence) is the major axis of development, and that all other domains are subservient to the cognitive… In my model, for example, the cognitive line is merely one of some two-dozen developmental lines, none of which, as lines, can claim preeminence.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6, "Magic, Myth, and Beyond"

See Also

• four-quadrants — waves and streams run through all four quadrants, each with its own characteristic lines
• great-chain-of-being — the waves, in their broadest form, are the levels of the Great Chain
• repression — a pathology of the self-system failing to differentiate and integrate a given wave
• transpersonal-domains / [[psychic-subtle-causal-nondual|The Psychic, Subtle, Causal, and Nondual]] — the highest waves this vocabulary makes room for
• Jean Piaget — the cognitive stream Wilber uses as his worked example
• Jane Loevinger / Lawrence Kohlberg — researchers of other developmental streams (ego development, moral development) Wilber draws on