Chris Grosso’s Everything Mind is a raw, real, authentic look at what is traditionally known as Enlightenment or Awakening or the Great Liberation—the discovery that we have an identity not just with a small, separate, finite self or mind (what Alan Watts called “the skin-encapsulated ego”), but also with a radically whole, infinite, all-embracing, and all-encompassing self or mind known as Buddha Mind, Christ Consciousness, Purusha, or Big Mind. Chris very appropriately calls this Everything Mind. “Everything” because, unlike the small mind or self, which identifies basically with just the “skin-encapsulated ego,” Big Mind or Everything Mind identifies with everything—the entire manifest and unmanifest universe, the Ground of all Being, Godhead, the Kosmos, Buddha-nature, Brahman. Call it what you will, it is what there is and all there is. As the Upanishads famously put it, tat tvam asi: You Are That.
This might sound far-out and woo-woo, except that thousands and thousands of people over at least two millennia have had this direct and immediate experience of Enlightenment or Awakening, and their collective testimony is consistent, compelling, and altogether believable. What’s more, you can directly and immediately have this experience for yourself and find out whether you believe it is true or not. Most people—educated or uneducated, rich or poor, brilliant or average—who have had a strong Enlightenment experience claim that, as one recently told me, “It was the most real reality I have ever known.” The world’s Great Religions were founded by men and women who originally had one of these Awakening experiences, realized that it had put them in touch with a Divine or Ultimate Reality, and set out to share that realization with others. There are traditions and practices and exercises that still exist today that can put you directly in touch with this all-pervading, all-embracing Everything Mind—and Chris’s book is loaded with examples drawn from those that he has tried himself and found to be most valuable. He sets these forth in a clear, straightforward, no-nonsense fashion, which he elucidates with his trademark raw, authentic, and brutal honesty. This is indeed a no-bullshit spirituality, from one who has gone from gutter to glory, from ravaging drug addiction to the process of Awakening, from a living hell to a radiant heaven here and now. One thing is sure: as you read Chris’s words, you can believe him. There are no lies in his narrative lines. He’s seen where lies lead; he’s been there, done that, and is now done with that, leaving only raw truth bleeding from a vulnerable, open heart.
If you look around the world of self-improvement or self-transformation, you notice that there are three main paths offered by various schools around the world. There is the path of Waking Up offered by the schools of the Great Liberation and aiming for Enlightenment or Awakening. There is the path of Cleaning Up, which aims to re-own and re-integrate previously repressed and dissociated shadow material, helping ameliorate any neuroses. And there is the path of Growing Up, the major stages of growth and development that all our multiple intelligences go through as they move from their earliest, immature, and undifferentiated forms to their highest, most mature, most differentiated and integrated forms (in other words, what happens as we actually “grow up” in any of our capacities). Chris stresses the first two—Waking Up to Everything Mind and Cleaning Up our shadow elements. He doesn’t directly address Growing Up, but it is implicit in virtually all his recommendations, so let me say a few words about this so you can better understand where Chris is coming from, and because it is important that all three paths be engaged simultaneously, otherwise the result will turn out to be partial, fragmented, broken, tormented.
The path of Waking Up is a series of direct and immediate experiences that you are fully aware of as they happen. If you feel, for example, a loving oneness with the entire universe, you will know it—believe me. The stages in the path of Growing Up are not like that. You can’t see them by introspecting. They are more like the rules of grammar. Everyone who grows up in a particular culture ends up speaking that language more or less correctly—they follow the rules of grammar. Yet, if you ask any of them to actually write down the rules they are following, very few can do so. In other words, they are following a large set of explicit rules but have no idea how they are doing it, let alone what those rules actually are. They can’t see these rules by introspecting.
The stages in the path of Growing Up are like those rules of grammar. They are hidden values, meanings, needs, motivations, understandings, ethics and morals, worldviews—and they govern how we see and interpret our universe. They are not discovered by looking within, but by observing and interacting with many people over time. (In fact, they are so difficult to spot that, unlike the direct experiences of Waking Up—which go back at least fifty thousand years to the earliest shamans—the rules of the stages of Growing Up were only discovered about one hundred years ago.)
The way you do this is similar to the way American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg explicated some of the major stages of our moral development (our moral Growing Up). You start by asking a series of questions—one of Kohlberg’s most famous was, “A man is married to a woman who is dying of a particular illness. The local drugstore has a drug that will cure her, but he is very poor and cannot afford it. Does he have the right to steal it?” Kohlberg received three basic answers to this question: “Yes,” “No,” and “Yes.”
When he asked the reason for the first “Yes” answer (why the husband had the right to steal the medicine), the person would answer with something like, “Well, what’s right is whatever I say is right, whatever I want, and if I want to steal it, I’ll steal it.” This stage is variously called egocentric, narcissistic, preconventional, and selfish. It looks after itself, and only itself; it cares for itself, and only for itself. It is where all humans begin their growth and development to higher, wider, deeper stages of identity and capacity as they follow the path of Growing Up.
The “No” reason was, “What society says is true and its laws cannot be broken at all, so nobody has the right to steal this.” This stage—which is more complex and more developed than the previous egocentric “Yes” stage—is known as: ethnocentric (extending identity from the individual self to a particular—“ethnic”—group or groups of people—a clan, tribe, race, sex, nation, religion, and so on; care (extending care from oneself to caring for an entire group—but just that one group, seeing everybody else as an outsider or other who doesn’t deserve care); or conventional or conformist. The thought process at this stage is mythic and fundamentalist, with a strong “law and order” tendency and beliefs like “My country, right or wrong,” or “My religion, right or wrong.” In terms of spirituality, somebody at this growth stage will believe, for example, that all the myths in the Bible are literally true, that Moses really did part the Red Sea, God really did rain locusts down on the Egyptians, Christ really was born from a biological virgin, and so on.
The final “Yes” reason was, “He has the right to steal it because life is a universal value and worth more than the forty dollars that the medicine costs.” This highest stage, based on universal principles that are true for all humans regardless of race, color, sex, or creed, is known as worldcentric, rational, post-conventional, global, planetary. It seeks fair treatment not just for individuals or their chosen group, but for all human beings. Odd as it sounds, this stance only showed up on the human scene around four hundred years ago. Before that, every known societal type had ethnocentric elements—slavery is a good example—and never questioned morality, as it was assumed to be the state of nature. In a hundred-year period, roughly from 1770 to 1870, slavery was outlawed from every rational-industrial society on our planet, the first time in our million-year history that anything like that had ever occurred.
If we look at ethicist and psychologist Carol Gilligan’s stages of moral development in women, we find what she calls selfish (egocentric), care (ethnocentric), universal care (worldcentric), and finally integrated (an integral and wholistic inclusiveness). These stages are just a shortened version of the major stages that virtually all developmental researchers have found humans go through in their process of Growing Up in any of their intelligences or capacities.
The reason this is particularly important is that recent research has demonstrated that we can be at virtually any of those stages of Growing Up and have a major experience of Waking Up. However, when we do so, we interpret our Waking Up or Enlightenment experience according to our stage of Growing Up. If we are at a mythic ethnocentric stage, we will interpret our unity consciousness or Everything Mind according to the fundamentalist beliefs of that stage. If I am Christian at an ethnocentric stage of Growing Up and have an experience of unity consciousness or Waking Up, I will indeed feel a profound unity with the entire world of Form—with Everything—but that is Form only as far as it is understood within that ethnocentric level. The higher levels of worldcentric and integral will be, as developmental psychologist Robert Kegan puts it, “over my head.” Those higher levels haven’t emerged in my case, and I obviously cannot be one with, or in unity with, something that doesn’t even exist for me. Therefore, I will interpret my unity experience in ways that are deeply ethnocentric—such as sexist, racist, homophobic, highly authoritarian, or rigidly hierarchical, and always deeply fundamentalist. I will interpret those ethnocentric qualities as being part of ultimate reality, so of course I’ll view slavery as okay, and of course homophobia as a correct stance, and of course sexism as part of Divinity—as almost every Great Religion espoused in its early, mythic, ethnocentric stages.
This ethnocentric Enlightenment is still common and widespread. For example, in Zen at War, Brian Daizen Victoria chronicles deeply and shockingly ethnocentric statements and actions by some of the most respected Zen masters in history. These types of ethnocentric statements occur in almost every spiritual tradition, simply because the stages of Growing Up, as I have pointed out, cannot be seen by introspecting, so they can’t be reached by meditation or contemplation. Waking Up, yes; Growing Up, no. That’s why not a single meditative or contemplative religion has anything resembling the major stages of Growing Up; and thus, while their exercises and practices do wonders for helping us Wake Up, they do nothing for helping us Grow Up. This must be addressed on its own, so that when we can have an experience of unity consciousness, or Everything Mind, we don’t only Wake Up and Clean Up, we also have to Grow Up to our highest levels. This will lead to a genuine integration with all humans, indeed all reality, and not just with our “chosen people.”
As you will find in Everything Mind, Chris has a deeply worldcentric and integral orientation, and so he bends over backward to assure people that what is true for them is what is important; that all people be treated fairly and equally, regardless of race, color, sex, or creed (or appearance or clothing or language or practices). The sole thing he is consistently judgmental about—and entirely appropriately—is the fundamentalist stance, the belief that “I have the one and only true way,” that “I have the only real approach to true God.” What he’s criticizing, of course, is this ethnocentricity, precisely because it represents a case of arrested development. He’s acknowledging the higher stages of Growing Up that extend one’s identity from just a particular group or single religion to a solidarity and care for all humans, for all sentient beings, and not just one particular “true” way.
Two thousand years ago, to include all perspectives was not a legitimate criticism or a basic concern. Rather, if you were Muslim, you defended Islam to the death (literally); if you were Christian, you defended Christianity to the death (literally); if you were Hindu, you defended Hinduism to the death (literally). It’s only in the last four hundred years or so that this new level of moral Growing Up—that of global worldcentricity—has emerged, and thus a real concern for the importance and rights of the individual (and the universal rights of humans) has come to the fore. This is etched in Chris’s own approach, which he calls indie spirituality, or spirituality focused on what the individual feels to be the most appropriate path, not what some tradition or dogma or outside authority claims is best. (Of course, we can take that too far. There are universal truths—including the very demand for universal tolerance and fairness—that are worldcentric, not just ethnocentric. I might believe fervently, in my heart of hearts, that 2 + 2 = 5, but that doesn’t make it right; it is still a wrong belief, and it’s wrong for everybody. The spiritual path of Waking Up is full of these kinds of universals, and we’re not supposed to make them up ourselves, but see which ones resonate most, and then creatively build on those. But we do have to be careful here, especially with “following our own bliss”—because if that bliss is of the 2 + 2 = 5 variety, it’s still wrong, no matter how deeply we feel it—and it will never lead to our true Awakening. This is especially a concern given the widespread legacy of the “me” generation. [If you’d like more information on the path of Growing Up, you might start with any book by Robert Kegan; in relation to spirituality, any book by James Fowler; or almost any of my books.])
Waking Up, Cleaning Up, Growing Up. Each of these is relatively independent. We can be highly advanced in one and poorly advanced in the others. A truly integral approach emphasizes and utilizes all three. Chris’s whole approach is anchored in the higher reaches of Growing Up (worldcentric and integral), and from there, he gives a marvelous guide to the fundamentals of Waking Up, while also pointing out the crucial importance of Cleaning Up. He’s a solid guide to our own growth and development along all three of these paths.
So, sit back and get ready for some raw, real, genuine, tried-and-true practices and explanations centering on our own deepest condition and reality, our universal, our Everything Mind. It’s a trip—one you won’t regret.
KEN WILBER