When I first started studying Wholeness, I thought there was just one kind of Wholeness. I’ve since learned that there are many different types, all of them important. Let me outline 5 different types for you—Waking Up, Growing Up, Opening Up, Cleaning Up, and Showing Up. You’ll see how different they are, and also how important each of them is.

Waking Up refers to a wholeness or oneness with the entire universe—sometimes called “cosmic consciousness,” “unity consciousness,” or “oneness consciousness.” You go from thinking that you are this small, skin-bound ego self to finding that you are one with the entire Ground of Being, one with the whole universe or cosmos, one with absolutely everything in existence. It’s an extraordinary feeling of total connection and fullness of Being. This oneness with absolute Reality or Godhead is the major aim of the world’s great mystical spiritual traditions—such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Christian mysticism, Taoism, Kabalah, Sufism, Zen, and so on. It’s also known variously as Enlightenment, Awakening, satori, Waking Up, kensho, and so on, mostly because it feels like you are waking up from a long sleep full of dreams and illusions, and are discovering a fully awakened awareness in a world that is actually one with an ultimate Reality. This is a highly sought aim of mystical religions, and well worth the effort.

Then we have Growing Up. Most people are completely unaware of the fact that as they grow and mature, they actually go through around 8 to 10 major stages of development—given names such as the archaic stage, the magic stage, the power stage, the mythic stage, the rational, the pluralistic, the paradigmatic, and the cross-paradigmatic or integral stage. Each of these stages transcends and includes the previous stage—much as in the evolutionary sequence from atoms to molecules to single-celled organisms to multicellular organisms and up the entire Tree of Life. Molecules actually transcend but include or embrace atoms, and single-celled organisms transcend and include molecules, and multicellular organisms transcend and include single cells, and so on up the entire Tree of Life. This produces an entire sequence of ever-more holistic unities.

Within this Growing Up sequence, we human beings don’t just grow in our capacity to think—so-called cognitive intelligence—we also grow and develop through upwards of a dozen multiple intelligences—not just cognitive intelligence, but also emotional intelligence, moral intelligence, verbal intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, social intelligence, and so on. Although not all people have developed all of their multiple intelligences, they can definitely do so, which greatly increases their mental wholeness and unified personal capacity. This is the type of wholeness called “Opening Up,” because we open up to our numerous multiple intelligences.

Then we have what I call “Cleaning Up,” which is generally associated with the name of Sigmund Freud and his inner circle, all of whom were bonafide geniuses—Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Salvadore Ferenczi. Their discovery was that human beings can deny and repress elements (thoughts, feelings, emotions) out of their conscious minds into a shadow-world of unconscious and repressed contents. What psychoanalysis was designed to do, as Freud put it when asked this question, was “Where id was, there ego shall be.” In other words, where the unconscious material was, there would instead be a conscious self. Most people know the words “id” and “ego” from Freud. But what most people do not know is that Freud himself never once used either of those terms (ego or id). Freud actually used the real terms the “I” and the “it.” So what Freud really said was “Where it was, there I shall become.”

What this actually means can best be seen using the technique of another of Freud’s followers, Fritz Perls. Perls was a superstar at America’s first growth center, named Esalen Institute by its founder, Mike Murphy. This was a place where many teachers of almost any sort of growth therapy were invited to teach. So Perls would start his sessions by asking who wanted to come up and work. Many people would raise their hands, and Perls would select one of them to work with. When the person came up, Perls would seat them in a chair, and place an empty chair in front of them. Then he would ask, “Okay, what’s your problem?” The person might reply, “It’s this anxiety, it’s killing me.” So Perls would then say, “Okay, put your anxiety into that empty chair and talk to it.” “What do you mean?” came a common response. “Well, ask this anxiety why it’s doing this to you,” Perls would respond. So the person would ask why his or her anxiety was doing this to them, and the anxiety might respond something like, “Because you’re an idiot, you’re so stupid, you can’t do anything right.” “Okay,” Perls might answer, “so go ahead and respond to that.” And so back and forth they would go, the person asking the anxiety questions, and the anxiety responding.

Of course, what was actually happening was that the person was responding with a 1^st-person “I-voice,” identifying with the anxiety—as an “I”—and responding. (1^st-person is the perspective of the person speaking—I, me, mine; 2^nd-person is the perspective of the person being spoken to—you, yours, thy, thine; and the 3^rd-person is the person or thing being spoken about—he, she, they, them, it, its.) When the person responds as the anxiety using a 1^st-person I-voice, they are in effect identifying with the anxiety (it’s an “I”), and thus they are re-identifying with it, they are taking it back from being a repressed, split-off aspect of their selves and making it a part of their conscious self (it has become a part of their “I”-self). And within 10 minutes or so, everybody in the audience could see the person’s anxiety begin to visibly diminish. (Perls had already claimed that he could “cure any neurosis in 15 minutes”—and even his harshest critiques agreed.) The person had created the anxiety in the first place by repressing and splitting-off some aspect of their own self (so it was no longer felt to be part of their own 1st-person “I”-self but a repressed and fragmented 2^nd– or 3^rd-person element in their awareness, which is why they often spoke of this split-off part as an “it”—”The anxiety, it’s killing me”; “the obsession, I can’t control it”; “the depression, it’s awful.” By taking the role of the symptom and talking as if it were an “I,” the person was -re-identifying with it, re-owning it, and taking it back as a genuine part of themselves, thus curing the repressive split and healing the neurosis. This was the essence of Freud’s great discovery, and this was why Perls could cure any neurosis “in 15 minutes.”

So there are four major types of wholeness—Waking Up to a oneness or wholeness with the entire universe, Growing Up to a fully unified and mature wholeness in the self system, Opening Up to a wholeness in intelligence by identifying with the unity and wholeness of all of our multiple intelligences, and Cleaning Up by re-identifying with all of our fragmented, split-off, and repressed shadow elements. The fifth and last major form of wholeness is called “Showing Up,” and it refers to a realizing and utilizing all of our major perspectives for seeing all of our present reality. The pronouns that we use to do this are called 1^st-person, 2nd-person, 3^rd-person (and higher, going up to 7^th– or 8^th-person person perspectives, depending on how many different perspectives are included). “1^st-person” refers to the perspective of the person speaking (I, me, mine), 2^nd-person to that of the person being spoken to (you, thy, thine), 3^rd-person to the person or thing being spoken about (he, she, they, them, it, its), and so forth (if you are thinking about all 3 of those perspectives at once, you are using a 4^th-person perspective, and so on). Jane Loevinger defines each of her 8 or 9 levels of Growing-Up development by the number of perspectives that stage can take, so her highest level of growth can take an 8^th-person perspective. This is quite a high degree or level of wholeness, obviously.

So there we have our 5 major levels of wholeness available to pretty much everybody (Waking Up, Growing Up, Opening Up, Cleaning Up, Showing Up). You can see how each of them brings a significantly greater sense of wholeness, yet how different each of them actually is. I’m not saying these are the only levels of wholeness available to humans, but they are a good place to start in any discussion of human wholeness. And when we recognize and include all 5 of them, then we have genuinely found a truly Radical Wholeness.