Experience Is Not Enough: Allan Combs and the Developmental Conditions of Integration

Authors

Maria Giovanna Vianello, CIISFollow

Abstract

Allan Leslie Combs occupies a distinctive position in consciousness studies through his sustained attention to the relationship between experience, interpretation, and development. This article examines Combs’s enduring contribution by focusing on his insistence that extraordinary or altered states of consciousness are neither self-interpreting nor inherently developmental. Drawing primarily on Consciousness Explained Better and related works, the paper argues that Combs’s central insight lies in viewing interpretation as a function of one’s developmental stage rather than treating it as a reflective process applied after experience. This perspective is articulated most explicitly through the Wilber–Combs lattice, which correlates states of consciousness with developmental stages without collapsing one into the other. By framing developmental stage as an interpretive lens, Combs offers a way to take phenomenologically powerful experiences seriously without falling into spiritual inflation, developmental elitism, or reductionist dismissal. The article situates this contribution within Combs’s broader body of work and argues that his emphasis on integration, stabilization, and epistemic restraint remains especially relevant in contemporary discussions of transformation. Combs’s legacy, it concludes, is not a closed model of consciousness but an open framework that anchors how claims about transformation are interpreted, integrated, and sustained over time.

Keywords: Allan Combs, consciousness studies, developmental structure, interpretation, integration, Wilber–Combs lattice

Recommended Citation

Vianello, M. (2025). Experience Is Not Enough: Allan Combs and the Developmental Conditions of Integration. Journal of Conscious Evolution, 22(2). https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/cejournal/vol22/iss2/14