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Interviewer: Well, you know, you've talked a lot about the value of meditation. In fact, you said that meditation can possibly push you two levels in your stages of development. So first of all, I'm curious: Why two levels, and why not three levels? How long does it take to be able to progress these two levels? And this is a pretty huge promise to lay out there.

KW: Yeah, it's actually fascinating, and there's a fair amount of research on it, and I mention Skip Alexander who was a real genius and a real pioneer in this, and I still recommend looking into his work.

We're still nonetheless at a kind of early stage of mapping this. And what we're trying to map out is in what I would call the Upper Left and the Upper Right Quadrant, meaning the Upper Left is the interior of the individual—my interior mental states and consciousness states, and how they correlate with exterior brain physical sensorimotor material aspects. So mental states and brain states are correlated—they can't be reduced to each other and they're not lock-stepped causing each other, but they're correlated—they influence each other. So as we continue to sophisticate our mapping of mental states with brain states, I think the amount of information is going to be really extraordinary.

Now, we've also done research with stage conceptions, and this is where it sort of talks about the two levels, but again, it's all pioneering, and it's all early. But what happens is, you take any number of valid measurements of growth and development, what we are calling developmental lines, whether Jane Loevinger, or Clare Graves, or Kohlberg and so on, and you take a group of people meditating, and you give them these measurements before, during and after, and you see if there is any actual vertical growth on the scale.

You have to preface that by saying that in the average adult human being, roughly ages 25 to 55, there's just no growth at all. It's just very hard. There are exceptions, but for the average person, there's just not much vertical growth going on. And you can put people through psychotherapy and role-playing—almost any number of things have been tried—and no real vertical growth has occurred.

Interviewer: I have just a quick question about that. Do you think that it's because people are either raising kids, or trying to make money, and that both of those things are so time-consuming that you can't really do anything except make peace with where you're at?

KW: All of that. All of the above. But if you take people who are doing what you just said, and they meditate about a hour a day, then about four years later, they're two stages higher on any scale we give them. Meditation is the only thing that's been empirically demonstrated to vertically move people to that degree.

Now again, that's a very generalized statement, not everybody does that, different meditations do different things, you get different results if you use different measurement scales. But a lot of things have been measured, for all the things that we were saying—psychotherapy to role-playing to various types of educational experiences, to journaling, dialoguing, all this kind of stuff—it's usually the most you get on any statistical analysis is a movement of maybe .5 stages. In other words, it's not huge. Doesn't mean good stuff isn't happening; very, very positive things can happen it terms of what we were calling horizontal health. You can be integrating what you've got, which is extremely important. But you're not going up—there's no vertical growth or development occurring. It's very, very rare. The only empirically demonstrated thing to do that is meditation, and it's not to say that other things can't do it, but they haven't been demonstrated to do so.

Another way to measure it is to take the number of people that are at a particular stage of development in a particular development line like Jane Loevinger, and in her case, what she would call our level six, our integral level on our seven-level generic scale, she finds about 2% of the population reaches that stage. And after four years of meditation, 38% of people doing it reach that stage. That's another way of measuring what meditation can do.

So it's very, very powerful in terms of moving people vertically in terms of growth and development and evolution. It doesn't mean everything else is going to be made well or happy or whole, but it does mean that it can have that effect. It doesn't skip stages either, but it seems to accelerate your growth through these stages, and that's very important. Whatever else it does, there's a lot of evidence that it's doing that. And that's a very significant fact, particularly given what we were talking about earlier, where sort of the ultimate goal is to help people move from egocentric and ethnocentric into worldcentric stages of awareness. Then meditation has to be counted as one of the most moral imperatives for human beings to do. It's the only thing that's been demonstrated to move them into higher moral stages. Not as a belief, but as an actual concrete realization. So that's very important as well.

Later on this track (beginning at 5:30), KW says:

This is the really kind of preliminary look at the research on it. The research is solid and it's been repeated.