No Boundary: Who Am I?

Ken Wilber. No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth. Shambhala, 1979

So when you say "my self," you draw a boundary line between what is you and what is not you. When you answer the question, "Who are you?," you simply describe what's on the inside of that line. The so-called identity crisis occurs when you can't decide how or where to draw the line. In short, "Who are you?" means "Where do you draw the boundary?"

Figure 1. The Spectrum of Consciousness

The fact that different levels of the spectrum possess different characteristics, symptoms, and potentials, brings us to one of the most interesting points of this view. There is today an incredibly vast and growing interest in all sorts of schools and techniques dealing with various aspects of consciousness. People are flocking to psychotherapy, Jungian analysis, mysticism, Psychosynthesis, Zen, Transactional Analysis, Rolfing, Hinduism, Bioenergetics, psychoanalysis, yoga, and Gestalt. [...] So many different and conflicting schools, all aimed at understanding the very same person. Or are they?
That is, are they all aimed at the same level if a person's consciousness? Or is it rather that these different approaches are actually approaches to different levels of a person's self? [...] And could it be that these different approaches are all more or less correct when working with their own major level?

Figure 2. Therapies and Levels of the Spectrum