Ken Wilber on Science & Integral Spirituality (long Book Summary & brief Winn critique)

INTEGRAL SPIRITUALITY:
A STARTLING NEW ROLE FOR RELIGION IN THE MODERN AND POSTMODERN WORLD
By Ken Wilber
Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Shambhala (October 3, 2006)
Average Customer Review: Four out of five stars based on 13 reviews.
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,649 in Books

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Note from Winn: Below is a long summary by Joseph Dillard of a difficult book by Ken Wilbur that summarizes his already complex ideas. If you are not already familiar with Wilbur’s ideas, this can be a bit much to absorb.
I plan to write more for this audience in the future, but for the moment have excerpted a few comments of Dillard below (quotation marks indicate Wilbur speaking). So you only have to read a few pages – with my comments on Wilbur – to decide if you want to wade through the intellectually more meaty stuff below.

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From Dilliard:

Wilber defines enlightenment, in light of evolution: “Enlightenment is the
realization of oneness with all states and all structures that are in
existence at any given time.”

“…the same structure that 6000 years ago
could be said to be fully Enlightened, is no longer so today. Somebody at
mythic-membership today is no longer one with the Totality of all Form…”

Winn: Totally agree with Wilbur’s embrace in this time zone of all post-natal and pre-natal realms as holding the collective truth. The ancient sages could only experience the truth of their time/space, whichi is always evolving. What is missing for me in Wilbur is the recognition that the PROCESS of moving between structures and states itself is an expression of the core underlying reality – the Life Force itself. The experience of the Life Force is tangible, and thus unlike faith-based religions in God.

Wilbur concludes by stating that levels of reality do not pre-exist but are
created by the evolution of consciousness. This means that enlightenment,
while always equally free and empty, becomes more “full” as habits of
consciousness create higher stages. Wilber believes his answer satisfies the
criticisms of modernity and post-modernity without postulating a
metaphysical foundation for spirituality.

Winn: this essentially supports my position in debates on this forum that “immortality” must be achieved/evolved, vs. the position that it pre-exists and must just be noticed. Wilbur however doesn’t define what the medium of consciousness is that is evolving – and this where the Taoists shine with their detailed mapping of the Life Force’s movement through time/space.

“Nobody ever has any truth, just various degrees of falsehood.”

– “Things” do not exist objectively in a pregiven world. “All real things
are first and foremost perspectives.” You locate something in the universe
by determining the level on which it exists and by determining the quadrant
in which it exists. You also must take into account the level and
perspective of the perceiver!

– He sums the last point up in a succinct and revolutionary way: “Any
language other than injunctive is metaphysics.” Wow! This is the most
important part of the book, and it’s in the second appendix!!! “No
injunction, no meaning, no reality. Just metaphysical gibberish in an age
that is no longer capable of being impressed by such.”

winn: Wilbur uses four quadrants and eight vectors, a structure that Wilbur seems to be unaware has been well-mapped out for thousands of years by the Chinese with the I Ching and its precursors, the Turtle and River charts (hetu and luo shu). This structure already been used by the Chinese to integrate the interior and exterior realms that Wilbur complains have been torn apart in modern times. So Wilbur is really re-inventing the wheel, perhaps necessarily so to encompass modern modes of intellectual anc scientific accomplishment. But I think he hasn’t gone far enough into the 8 vector model to understand the 9th integrating force is also functional (in Taoist lingo, the Original Jing-Chi-Shen). Wilbur talks about the non-dual as a category, but seems to have little clue as to how it can have substance. I isuspect he treats the non-dual as a kind of Given, but may not have read enough of him to know if he is making this mistake. Original Spirit-Breath-Essence is necessary evolving along with its collective aspects as the Ten Thousand Things.

– Wilber thinks that contemporary writers on spirituality like Capra and
Chopra have done little to rehabilitate spirituality for intellectuals. They
write for a popular audience that has not come to grips with the serious
questions, much less the disheartening answers, that modernism and
post-modernity pose for spirituality. Their mistake is that they have
attempted to demonstrate that mysticism has modern scientific support in an
attempt to give it the credibility necessary to have it be accepted by the
humanities. “This was EXACTLY THE WRONG MOVE in every way. The enemy was
never science, which won’t listen anyway. The enemy was the
intersubjectivists. And by showing, or trying to show, that spirituality
could be grounded in quantum physics, or dynamical systems theory, or chaos
theory, or autopoiesis, they played right into the hands of the
intersubjectivists.”

Winn: I agree 100% with Wilbur here – its why, unlike new agers, I don’t rely on science to verify the truth of old-age Tao spiritual science, although I think its useful to point out the parallels in their discoveries so that people can integrate the two. Ultimately you must truth your own experience and integration of all levels and vectors of reality. That is cultivating your True Earth. Your Gold is your evolved perspective that has integrated the individual and collective perspectives.

– Wilber’s point is that the post-modernists reject all forms of reality
that do not take into account the relativism created by the consideration of
unavoidable contexts created by language and interpretation. Science is as
guilty of this as the humanities in their critique, which Wilber accepts.

Winn: Wilbur is absolutely right, in that both Science (Relativism in search of Absolute Truth) and Big Religion
(Absolute in search of Relative Truth) are shooting past each other and thus cannot dialog. This is where using Taoist Process-as-the-Absoute-Principle is able to embrace both realms as a single continuum. This process-centered approach using the Life Force as the multii-dimensional medium of the process works well because it has both vertical (jing-chi-shen-wu) and horizontal (yin-yang and five phase cycles) processes that move through seven stages (One Cloud’s Seven Alchemical Formulas for Attaining Immortality).
Wilbur has adopted the seven stage approach of Spiral Dynamics (which pretends to be emperically scientifically based but I find is not). The Wilbur seven stage approach I believe is simply an archetypal structure also found in seven chakras, and can be identified in Taoist ancient number diagram readings as associated post natally with the West, the Gold/Metal element, which is the aspect of humanity that is ultimately in charge of transformational process.

Wilbur: “Meditation is
still hobbled by the myth of the given (that everything pre-exists) because it is still monological; it
still assumes that what I see in meditation or contemplative prayer is
actually real, instead of partially constructed via cultural backgrounds
(syntactic and semantic).” “Meditation is the extension of the myth of the
given into higher realities, thus ensuring that you never escape its deep
illusions, even in Enlightenment.” “Again, meditation is not wrong but
partial, and unless its partialness is addressed, it simply houses these
implicit lies, assuring that liberation is never really full, and even
satori conceals and perpetuates the myth of the given .”

Winn: One of Wilbur’s greatest strengths is his ablity to unveil the illusions of meditator’s subjective experiences as claims to absolute Enlightenment. It is why I prefer the Taoist models of meditation to the Chan Buddhist, the Tao model is more dynamic and evolutionary and thus less likely to fall into the “myth of the given”.
This gets into (in Taoist terminology) giving equal emphasis to both one’s post-natal (worldly) destiny as well as one’s spiritual destiny (achieved through marriage of pre-natla and post-natal). Elsewhere, Wilbur uses Emptiness as the core of his model that gives Free Will the space to express itself in new ways, which I agree with. He uses Emptiness in the Taoist (and Tibetan Buddhist) sense of being at the center of manifestation/fullness, not as an absolute state/space with inherency.

END OF WINN INTRODUCTION & COMMENTARY.

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POSTING by New Heaven New Earth Editor David Sunfellow:

Pop quiz: you are walking along, trying to better understand the nature of
human existence and you run into the following words and phrases: Integral
Methodological Pluralism, phenomenology, structuralism, hermeneutics,
ethnomethodology, autopoiesis, social autopoiesis, Integral Mathematics of
Primordial Perspectives, integral psychograph…

What planet are you on?

If you guessed Ken Wilber’s planet, you are right.

Next question, multiple choice: Joseph Dillard has put together a summary of
Ken Wilber’s new book, “Integral Spirituality”. As you read it, you begin to
feel: A. Dense; B. Sleepy; C. Stupid; D. like you are a Neanderthal (a
member of an intellectually challenged species that is about to become
extinct) or E. electrified because you realize someone is finally on the
verge of creating a comprehensive system of thought that explains the vast
dimensions of human experience?

If you answered A., B., C., or D., you’re not alone, because those are the
choices that most accurately reflect how I feel when I read (and try to
understand) Wilber. If you answered E., then congratulations: your brain has
apparently been wired with enough neurons to understand a system of thought
that sounds like extraterrestrial chit chat to 95 percent of the human
beings that currently live on planet Earth. You should make a beeline for
NHNE’s “All Things Integral” Forum <http://tinyurl.com/gvf9e> and join
forces with Joseph and other NHNE readers who speak this new, highly-evolved
language.

And with that as an introduction, what follows is Joseph’s brave attempt to
condense and translate Wilber’s new book into something mere mortals can
understand…

— David Sunfellow

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INTEGRAL SPIRITUALITY
Summary by Joseph Dillard

http://tinyurl.com/gvf9e

This is another important book by Ken Wilber, but one that many people will
put down somewhere in the first chapter, if they make it through the
introduction. That’s because the first chapter is probably the most
conceptually challenging work he’s written to date. If they give up,
however, they will be missing out on a terrific education by one of the
greatest minds of our age, as Wilber grapples with what to do with
fundamentalist elements, such as those in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam
that are creating great destruction in the world today.

First, an overview. What exactly is Wilber attempting to accomplish with
this book? Integral Spirituality attempts to answer the question, “[H]ow
can we validate the existence of spiritual realities, specifically, the
higher levels of mystical experience claimed by the world’s wisdom
traditions, in the face of modern and postmodern attacks that deny those
realities as unscientific or reduce them to social constructions?” Wilber is
attempting to reconstruct the great truths of the wisdom traditions of the
world’s religions but without their metaphysics. These “metaphysics” are
assumptions about the nature of reality that have been thoroughly
discredited by modernity (Kant) and post-modernity’s insight of the
inherently contextual nature of all truth, which makes it relative.

Wilber views spirituality as a necessary engine for human evolution, along
with the arts, sciences, and ethics. But unlike arts, science, and ethics,
spirituality was discredited by the Western Enlightenment in the 1600’s and
1700’s when it was confused with religion, one manifestation of
spirituality. Wilber has written this book to rehabilitate spirituality in
the eyes of Western intellectuals and everyday people around the world who
have lost faith in traditional religion but don’t know where to turn. It is
true that most everyday people will not read this book, but the
intellectuals who are at the top of their pyramids of influence will read
it, and they will translate its concepts into forms that everyday people
will grasp. So Wilber is writing for the opinion setters of the day, those
who are influential, and those whose ideas are respected by broad numbers.
His audience is, as always, those who are well read and broadly educated.

Wilber’s introduction is a succinct, compact overview of his AQAL (all
quadrant, all levels, lines, states, and types) model. For those who have
been following Wilber’s writing for years, this introduction is an excellent
and lucid summary of his model, which is the broadest, most powerful
explanatory model of everything that exists in the world today. Anyone not
familiar with Wilber’s model should read this chapter over until they “get
it” or they will get lost in the rest of the text. While it serves as an
introduction, it is also truly the first chapter of the book. Don’t skip
over it! Toward the end of the chapter Wilber discusses implications of the
integral model for medicine, business, ecology, and other fields, which are
enormous. Discussions about the relationships among fields of knowledge or
discussions about the basic questions driving particular fields of knowledge
will flounder on their own inherent contradictions unless they take place in
the context of Wilber’s integral model. It’s that important to the further
evolution of mankind. This is because the context in which we approach our
lives creates the perspectives, worldviews, and assumptions that both allow
us to see connections among disparate facts and people or blind us to those
transformative relationships.

…………

Wilber’s Chapter One, Integral Methodological Pluralism, starts with a
daunting name and gets more intimidating from there. Wilber is always
revising and expanding his model. To that end, he has deeply considered the
implications of the four basic perspectives that are inherent in every holon
and determined that each includes two perspectives, doubling the number of
fundamental perspectives to be taken into account to eight. Wilber makes a
very good case for both the existence and usefulness of these eight, because
he points to well-respected fields of knowledge that are representatives of
each. But let’s back up and take a look at the four quadrants, which contain
eight fundamental perspectives. What does that mean? Wilber contends that
everything has an interior and an exterior aspect as well as an individual
and a collective aspect. This is simple, obvious, and brilliant. Can you
think of ANYTHING that doesn’t have those four aspects?

Each of these four perspectives can be experienced from the inside or
investigated from the outside. You might think of your subjective experience
of yourself, in which you are identified with who you are, on the one hand,
and your ability to stand back from yourself and watch this or that aspect
of your life go by, such as your feelings or your relationships, on the
other. Here is a summary of the eight perspectives, which Wilber believes
have always existed but have only recently been differentiated or
objectified. Wilber believes that all of these are forms of empiricism, in
that they are ways of knowing that can be subjected to appropriate truth
tests and verified.

#1: When we think, feel, sleep, dream, or meditate, we are having personal
interior experiences of the upper left quadrant. When you study your own
experience by say, observing your thoughts in meditation, you are practicing
phenomenology. This is what mystics do and what you experience when and if
you are enlightened. Without this perspective you wouldn’t think, feel,
dream, or be able to have mystical experiences at all. In perspective #1 you
are subjectively identified with your experience, whatever it is. It defines
who you experience yourself to be.

#2: When you study what is going on in yourself or others while thinking,
feeling, sleeping, dreaming, or meditating, you are attempting to evaluate
personal interior experience, not directly experience it yourself. When you
do such evaluations you are practicing something called structuralism. What
you come up with are developmental models that depict the evolution of
consciousness and your own personal development. Structuralism creates a
road map to guide your own growth. Without it you are more likely to
misunderstand your experience and waste a lot of time in confusion. Clearly
we need both phenomenalistic and structuralist perspectives to grow and
experience our lives more fully.

#3: We communicate our interpretations. Your interpretations of your
experience are both unavoidable and mostly unconscious. You can make
unconscious interpretations conscious and you and change them, but you can’t
stop interpreting and still communicate. When we state an opinion, such as,
“Wilber is pedantic and egotistical and his system is grandiose,” we share a
common or collective experience (a series of English words) that is interior
for each of us. I have my meaning and you have yours, but out of that a
sense of shared meaning arises. You are interpreting what I am saying and I
am thinking about how you are hearing me and what interpretations are being
made by you. Interpretations are unavoidable. When scientists communicate
their experimental findings they are sharing their interpretations, which is
not merely a subjective affair, but because it is a form of communication it
is called intersubjective. The study of how reality is shaped by our
interpretations is an unavoidable and important part of life that has been
given the unsufferable name of hermeneutics. Just think of it as the
meanings we make out of people, words, and things. These shared meanings are
called culture. Without meanings, life is meaningless.

#4: Ethnomethodologists are people who study the way people make sense of
their social worlds. They consider the cultural and linguistic contexts in
which all experience is embedded. You use it when you try to understand how
other people arrived at how they look at things. When you attempt to
understand how Wilber arrived at his conclusions in Integral Spirituality,
you are practicing ethnomethodology. When peer groups assess truth claims of
scientists or gurus they are doing the same. Consensus guidelines for truth
cannot exist without this perspective.

#5: While the experience of consciousness is phenomenology and the study of
consciousness is structuralism, the study of the mechanisms of perception
that allow frogs and humans to make sense of the world is cognitive science
or “autopoiesis” (self-creation). Cognitive science is the perspective taken
by the interior of the behavior of organisms. It is not the study of
thoughts and feelings, which would be structuralism. Without it, it would
be impossible for you to learn how and why you think the way you do or how
you create the interior neurological realities that in turn create your
perception.

#6: When individual behavior is explored from the outside we are doing
traditional science. We make hypotheses in our minds and then test them out
in the real world. For example, I could hypothesize that most people who
read these words are sitting down. To test it I would either have to ask you
or I would have to have you on camera or in some way observe you, say by
sending my astral double over as a scientific voyeur. Also, if you hook me
up to an EEG while I am meditating, you are doing traditional science.
However, you are not measuring my state of consciousness but only its
neurological correlates in the form of patterns of electrical neuronal
discharges in my brain.

We can now see that part of what Wilber is doing is breaking science’s
stranglehold on knowledge by making a strong case for seven other forms of
empiricism. Here are the remaining two:

#7: All groups devise rules that govern communication. When you look at
social groups from the inside, you are looking at the way their members
communicate with each other. These patterns of group communication are how
groups create themselves, in a process called “social autopoiesis.” Those of
us who form an ad hoc group of those interested in discussing Wilber’s ideas
and their applications are also practicing a type of empiricism that is
internal to our social group. We develop our own shared criteria for
determining what the rules for that communication are to be. Without it you
will have no way of knowing how to communicate within any and all groups —
your family, your network of friends, your place of work.

#8: When you look at social groups from the outside you are doing systems
theory, chaos theory, and social psychology. This is how you understand your
relationships with others and your relationship to the world.

Those are the eight perspectives that Wilber says are all basic,
unavoidable, necessary, and equally important to human experience and, in
fact, to understanding all holons. They all make sense to me and do seem to
be irreplaceable. What do YOU think? If you had to ditch one, which would
you get rid of? Now, imagine your life without it!

Wilber has fun in this chapter intimidating us with his “Integral
Mathematics of Primordial Perspectives.” This is the most mind-bending part
of the text, along with further work on the coding of AQAL in the
appendices. These shorthand codings are meant to quickly identify the
“Kosmic Address” of any truth claim that can be made. Think of them as more
specific extensions of the color coding of levels of consciousness, in that
they tie any statement to a particular quadrant, perspective, and level of
consciousness. This is very important, because we often assume that a
statement is say, transpersonal, when it is actually prepersonal or
personal.

Wilber says that the recent realization that all these perspectives exist
has created massive problems for traditional religions and for the
credibility of people who have claimed to be enlightened in the past. Modern
and postmodern thinkers have been asking, “Because neither religions nor
enlightened sages took into account most of these perspectives, just how
spiritual, just how developed, just how enlightened could they really be?”
This is the main reason why religion and spirituality have both lost
credibility in the modern world and among intellectuals, according to
Wilber. Because religion and spirituality do not take most of these
perspectives into account they choose to remain both naive and ignorant. The
truth claims of the masters are undermined. So, what is to be done about
it?

Wilber believes that only spirituality that can heal the discounting of
interior experience that is found in science and that only spirituality can
overcome the yawning gap between rational scientists and egalitarian
liberals, on the one hand, and religious true believers on the other. So
most of the book is about laying out a description of that spirituality.

………….

In Chapter Two, Stages of Consciousness, Wilber makes the following points:

– When we reduce transpersonal experience (like a near-death experience) to
prepersonal experience (psychotic hallucinations), as science does, we are
guilty of the reductionistic version of the pre-trans fallacy. Most
scientists, from Freud to Skinner to Watson and Crick commit this fallacy.”

– When we elevate prepersonal experience (like voodoo trance) to
transpersonal experience (thinking it is a mystical experience), as Carl
Jung and New Age thought tend to do, we are guilty of the elevationistic
version of the pre-trans fallacy.”

– The developmental progression disclosed by structuralism gives you ways of
interpreting your experience that you just don’t get when you are
subjectively immersed in it, as you do when you are say, meditating.”

Wilber uses the concept of an “integral psychograph” to talk about different
developmental lines, such as cognitive, kinesthetic, emotional, moral,
aesthetic, and spiritual. The idea is that we need balance in development,
which means that we need to pay attention to important core lines that we
are behind in.

Wilber explains the interaction between stages of development that occur on
every line, and the different developmental lines themselves. On pictures
after page 68 and also on pp. 248-9 he summarizes the stages as viewed from
different structural models.

Wilber has moved partially away from the use of colors derived from Spiral
Dynamics to reference stages and has returned to a modified version of the
electromagnetic spectrum. This is a good thing, because the SD colors were
arbitrarily chosen to reflect a higher personal pluralistic and egalitarian
perspective which is to favor only one of some ten possible stage
perspectives. I say Wilber settled on a “modified,” version of the
electromagnetic spectrum because in my opinion, he had such an investment in
using Spiral Dynamics colors to talk about certain levels (in particular
pluralistic and egalitarian “green,”) that he has tinkered with the entire
spectrum to make it fit his bias. So while I am still not happy with his
version of the spectrum, at least it acknowledges that there is a genuine,
“real” vibratory hierarchy that is far from arbitrary. That’s the main
point.

………….

In Chapter 3, States of Consciousness, Wilber discusses natural and trained
states of consciousness.

– Think of these states as dealing with four different types of mystical
oneness: nature, deity, formless, and non-dual. They represent a horizontal
opening on any developmental level.

– These natural states (waking, sleeping, dreaming) do not show development.
This means they can be experienced in their fullness by infants.

– Trained (i.e., through meditation) states (nature, deity, formless, and
non-dual) do show development.

– Both the literature and scientific evidence demonstrate that meditation
reveals very sophisticated stages of trained states of progressive
enlightenment.

………….

Chapter 4, States and Stages, differentiates stages of consciousness from
states of consciousness. This is very important and a major contribution to
man’s understanding of spirituality. Most writing about spirituality is
dreadfully confused because it does not understand the distinctions made in
this chapter. Here they are, in a nutshell:

– States are impermanent while stages are permanent. This means that having
an experience of oneness with God when you are experiencing life from say,
the rational level, is a) not going to last because it’s a state, or b) will
not transcend and include higher stage experiences of oneness with God. It
won’t, because you haven’t yet reached those higher stages yet; you’re still
at rational.

– All states are available at every level. That means you can be at a
prepersonal stage of development and have an experience of non-dual
enlightenment. But you will interpret it from a prepersonal worldview!!!

– Wilber gives a lot of examples of awakenings at different levels of
development.

– He believes that to make sense, “enlightenment” must take into account 1)
whether the experience is passing (a “state”) or permanent (a “stage”), 2)
the type of experience of oneness (“Is it nature, deity, formless, or
non-dual?”), and 3) the average over-all stage of development of the
individual. (This is an average of their major developmental lines.)

– Wilber also differentiates among four different ways of using the word
“spirituality:” 1) the highest level of any developmental line, 2) a
specific developmental line, 3) a spiritual or religious experience, and 4)
a specific attitude.

…………

In Chapter 5, Boomeritis Buddhism, Wilber discusses what can go wrong with
development in general and with spiritual development in particular. He uses
the example of Western Buddhist meditators who have an individualistic,
egalitarian, pluralistic (higher personal) perspective which they bring to
their practice of meditation.

– Boomeritis is an example of the pre-post fallacy in that preconventional
narcissism is mistaken for transpersonal world-centric awareness: “The
harder you could feel your ego, emote your ego, and express your ego with
real immediate feelings, the more spiritual you were thought to be.”

– High transpersonal experiences and meditation instructions were
misinterpreted by people at high personal from a pluralistic, egalitarian
perspective. Wilber thinks of this as being like a virus in a system,
causing teachers of meditation to communicate these misperceptions to their
students.

– People can’t spot this virus from within their own meditative practice.
Understanding and using all eight perspectives will create objectivity that
reduces the likelihood that one will fall prey to the virus. When they do,
they will have more tools for figuring out how to get unstuck. So having
“correct views” by being able to use all of these perspectives as needed is
very important to correctly interpret spiritual experience.

– To this end, Wilber recommends that meditators supplement their
phenomenological (individual interior) perspective with structuralist
developmental models, many of which he discusses in the text. He recommends
taking up an integral life practice, which he discusses toward the end of
the text. Finally, he recommends orienting personal spiritual practice in an
integral or AQAL framework. This is because you can’t see what your
worldview won’t allow and you will distort what your unconscious worldview
distorts.

…………

In Chapter 6, The Shadow and the Disowned Self, Wilber discusses how
meditative traditions have traditionally ignored and repressed thoughts and
feelings and what a major contribution the West has made in its
understanding of the necessity of acknowledging both before transcending
them. He goes on to outline an easy method of doing just that.

– He defines the “Shadow” as “dynamically dissociated 1st person impulses.”
(“1st person is the person speaking, 2nd person is the person being spoken
to; and 3rd person is the person or thing being spoken about.”) Wilber’s
point is that unrecognized impulses get projected onto the external world.
We see others doing to us what we are actually doing to ourselves. “I see my
neighbor as a control freak when I am actually the control freak, but don’t
recognize it.”

– Meditation lacks the objectivity to recognize or respond therapeutically
to these disowned impulses. As a result, they simply get carried forward so
that a person becomes enlightened, in that they are stabilized at a high
state and perhaps at a high stage, yet unaware of their own shadow.

– Instead of letting go of everything, Wilber makes a case for first owning
and accepting impulses fully and then letting them go.

– Ken next talks about vertical enlightenment (transcending and including up
through the developmental stages) and horizontal enlightenment (becoming one
with all states — gross, subtle, causal, nondual). Later in the chapter he
talks about how he believes proper meditation can allow one to jump two
vertical stages in as little as four years. Nothing else can do that!
(“Proper Meditation” for Wilber can be presumed to be those practices
endorsed in the Integral Life Discipline in the final Chapter, Spirit: Big
Mind Meditation, Compassionate Exchange, Integral Inquiry, the 1-2-3 of God.
For more information on these, check out the Integral Institute website
<http://www.integralinstitute.org/>.)

– Wilber then talks about the damage that repressed, unaddressed shadow does
in meditators.

– Wilber describes the 3-2-1 process of reowning the self before
transcending it.

…………

In Chapter 7, A Miracle Called “We,” Wilber makes a major contribution to
systems theory by demonstrating how many theorists, from Capra to Chopra,
mistakenly define groups as living organisms that include individuals.
Wilber points out that groups lack what Whitehead called a “dominant monad.”
Essentially, that means that individual group members don’t have to do what
the group as a whole wants and that therefore individuals are not interior
to groups.

– Instead of individuals being interior to groups, groups are the collective
aspect of individuals. What is interior to groups is their communication.
Systems theorists (mostly perspective #8) have missed these basic and
critical distinctions.

– Wilber emphasizes the consciousness of “we” as a particularly effective
doorway to spiritual development.

– Individual holons go through mandatory stages of development. Social
holons don’t. The cycles of development social holons go through, such as
societies, businesses, and civilizations are horizontal, in that any group
at any level or stage can go through them. They are usually mistakenly
described as vertical stages in most texts on the evolution of cultures,
societies, and systems.

– Social holons change their stage of development as their membership
varies. They can move forward or backward, while individual holons only move
forward, at least in some lines, such as ethical.

– Social holons do not have four quadrants. They lack the internal
individual “dominant monad.”

– Spirit in 2nd person is experienced as a devotional relationship based on
love that deepens into compassion. Wilber emphasizes its importance.

– Wilber believes that most writers on spirituality have not grasped the
“we” dimension of spirit. Partially this is because they have been trying to
escape a suffocating personal depiction of God from their youth but mostly
it’s because the exteriors of “we” are very difficult to see.

…………

In Chapter 8, The World of the Terribly Obvious, Wilber discusses scientific
empiricism (perspective #6) and autopoiesis (perspective #5). He discusses
scientific reductionism and its attempts to reduce God to brain states.

– Higher order transpersonal experiences cannot be experienced or be said to
exist for those who are not at those levels. Therefore they will be
misperceived if seen at all by those observing them from personal levels of
development, as scientists do.

– The basic problem of this perspective is that it does not grasp the
relative nature of all individual experience, which is the basic insight of
postmodernism, which gives priority to the intersubjective matrix of
interpretations and cultural meanings in which all individual experiences
are embedded.

…………

Chapter 9, The Conveyor Belt, is the heart of the book. Everything to this
point has been laying a complex, sophisticated theoretical foundation for
this chapter.

– Because everyone must navigate every stage of development in turn from
birth, the average stage of people alive on the planet today is high
prepersonal egocentric-mythic to low personal ethnocentric. 70% of the
people on the planet are controlled by the world’s great religions. That’s
less than at any time before in the world’s history, but it’s still huge.

– There is a “vertical component crash” between individuals and cultures
stuck at ethnocentric and below and the 30% that have evolved into rational
and worldcentric perspectives.

– Terrorists are stuck at mythic and ethnocentric perspectives with a
prepersonal narcissistic self-image, the kind you normally find in four year
olds.

– The problem is that those stuck at these pre-rational belief systems
cannot grow because the rational world view dismisses them as irrational and
foolish. So they cannot grow without abandoning their prepersonal belief
systems, which they will not and cannot do, because they are the belief
systems of their entire culture.

– With the Enlightenment, Western intellectuals actively repressed any
higher levels of their own spiritual intelligence. Reason was the answer.
“Death of God” meant “Death of the Mythic God,” which is the one 70% of the
world believes in today. Because religion and spirituality were equated,
throwing out religion meant throwing out spirituality.

– Wilber describes this problem as a new type of fallacy, a “Level-line
fallacy.”

– In disowning the Mythic stage of development rational intellectuals also
disowned the entire spiritual line of development. They mistook mythic
spirituality for ALL spirituality. This insight of Wilber’s is brilliant and
right on. You are left wondering why no one has spotted it before. (Wilber
says they missed it because spirituality didn’t exist as a distinct,
separate expression from religion when the cognitive, aesthetic, and moral
lines were differentiated at the onset of the Enlightenment. It had already
been dismissed and dropped by serious thinkers.)

– Wilber says there are four different multiple intelligences: cognitive,
aesthetic, spiritual, and moral. All were differentiated and advanced with
the Enlightenment, except the spiritual intelligence/line/judgment, which
was brutally repressed.

– With the repression of that line, there was no way for prepersonal mythic
spirituality to evolve. Any movement beyond the rational was discredited as
well, leaving everyone who made it to rational got stuck there in their
development. “Modern liberal intellectuals no longer had religion, they only
had art and morals.”

– The “grand displacement” occurred: “Because the line of ultimate concern
(spirituality) was repressed at amber (mythic), and because this is
nevertheless a multiple intelligence still active, that inner judgment of
ultimate concern was displaced from religion to science. In the modern
world, it was now science that was implicitly felt to give answers to
ultimate questions, and science to which ultimate faith and a pledge of
allegiance should occur.”

– Absolute science is scientism, which collapses the four quadrants into the
upper right. The spiritual line of development gets repressed along with the
mythic stage of development.

– There are two parts to the problem: 1) repression of spirituality by
rational intellectual culture and 2) fixation at the mythic stage for those
who don’t have a way to express their spirituality in higher developmental
stages. That means almost everybody living in religion-dominated cultures.

– Rational intellectual culture needs to stop hating mythic religion and
start appreciating spirituality as it naturally expresses itself at the
rational stage, including agnosticism, skepticism, and atheism. It also
needs to understand that spirituality acts as a developmental conveyor belt
for everyone, because everyone must move through the lower stages, and only
the spiritual line provides fundamental meaning to life through addressing
issues of ultimate concern. People need “real” myths at certain stages of
development, and only the spiritual line provides it.

– Wilber is calling for the de-repression of the developmental line of
spiritual intelligence.

– He also calls for religions to make training in meditative states part of
the core of their message and training in stage appropriate ways to meditate
made available at every stage of development. Such training will speed
evolution through the stages.

…………

In Chapter 10, Integral Life Practice, Wilber addresses what he thinks state
training should look like as part of an over all plan for life integration
and development.

– Wilber’s model is very sophisticated, including at least six or seven
practice choices in each of the following areas: the core of body, mind,
spirit, and shadow, and the auxiliary areas of ethics, sex, work, emotions,
and relationships.

– Each of these areas has one or more “gold star” or “highly recommended”
practice:

Body: F.I.T., ILP Diet, 3-body workout;

Mind: Integral (AQAL) Framework;

Spirit: Big Mind Meditation, Compassionate Exchange, Integral Inquiry, the
1-2-3 of God; Shadow: 3-2-1 Process;

Ethics: Integral Ethics;

Sex: Integral Sexual Yoga;

Work: Work as a Mode of ILP;

Emotions: Transmuting Emotions;

Relationships: Integral Relationships, Integral Parenting.

– Wilber repeatedly points the reader to resources at the Integral Institute
<http://isc.integralinstitute.org/public/static/Default.aspx>.

…………

Wilber includes several appendices that are actually part of the text and
need to be read. They amount to fully a quarter of the text, not counting
the extensive footnotes that take up almost all of some pages of the text.

Appendix I, From the Great Chain of Being to Postmodernism in 3 Easy Steps,
deals with the rehabilitation of mysticism by making it compatible with
modernity and postmodernism.

– The first problem is that the Great Chain of Being views spirit as above
and beyond mind and matter. The solution is to view spirit as interior to
matter, as the two left quadrants of the human holon. This addresses a basic
criticism of modernity.

– The second problem is that the Great Chain of Being views spirituality as
basically an individual and interior expansion. The solution is to view
spiritual development as also collective and thereby including the bottom
two quadrants of the human holon. This addresses a basic criticism of
post-modernism.

– The third problem is what to do with the subtle levels of energy talked
about in all the mystical and esoteric traditions: etheric, astral, psychic,
causal. Wilber’s solution is to associate increasing complexity of form (in
the upper right quadrant) with increasingly subtle levels of energy.

………….

As if he hasn’t covered enough, in Appendix II, Integral Post-Metaphysics,
Wilber tackles the issue of what a healthy spirituality looks like once it
sheds the assumptions that cause it to be discounted and deemed irrelevant
by modernity and post-modernity. Both religion and spirituality have been
discounted since Kant showed that all of our concepts, including “God” and
“spirit” are conditioned by natural cognitive structures. What we think is
real and existing “out there” is only perceived and understood in terms of
the way our minds organize the experience. Metaphysics doesn’t grasp this.

– Wilber launches into an extensive discussion of what it means to be
enlightened in previous historical epochs and what enlightenment now would
consist of. Very interesting reading, starting at the bottom of p. 237 and
going all the way through p. 248. Here’s the summary:

The great spiritual traditions believed that the Great Chain, with all its
levels, was given all at once and exists in its entirety right now, even if
parts of it aren’t realized or awakened to. But when you acknowledge
evolution, you are saying that the lower 4 or 5 levels of the Great Chain —
matter, sensation, perception, impulse, emotion, symbols, concepts —
evolved over 14 billion years! What this means is that the upper part of any
“Great Chain” has not yet unfolded, has not yet evolved! This would mean
that the only way to get Enlightened would be to wait until all of time has
unfolded! Wilber’s answer is to say you can realize Emptiness and attain
absolute Freedom on any level, by mastering the gross, subtle, causal, and
non-dual states, but the fullness of that Enlightenment increases over time
as consciousness evolves. If some levels have evolved and more will evolve,
then instead of thinking about them as levels of knowing and being, which is
how they are viewed by the Great Chain, you have to look at them more as
acquired natural habits of consciousness!!!! Wilber calls them “Kosmic
habits” or “Kosmic memories.” So, after describing this historical process,
Wilber defines enlightenment, in light of evolution: “Enlightenment is the
realization of oneness with all states and all structures that are in
existence at any given time.” “…the same structure that 6000 years ago
could be said to be fully Enlightened, is no longer so today. Somebody at
mythic-membership today is no longer one with the Totality of all Form,
because there are, “over the head’ of amber, the orange and green and teal
and turquoise structures. Those are real, ‘ontological,’ actually existing
structures in the Kosmos, as real as if they were Platonic eternal givens
(except they aren’t), and if a person has not transcended and included those
levels in their own development, then there are major levels of reality that
they (the amber individuals) are not one with.” So, with this conception,
“the ontologically pre-existing levels of being and knowing…which both
modernity and postmodernity absolutely savaged, are simply no longer needed,
because we can generate the essentials of every one of those levels but in a
completely post-metaphysical way.”

He concludes by stating that levels of reality do not pre-exist but are
created by the evolution of consciousness. This means that enlightenment,
while always equally free and empty, becomes more “full” as habits of
consciousness create higher stages. Wilber believes his answer satisfies the
criticisms of modernity and post-modernity without postulating a
metaphysical foundation for spirituality.

“Nobody ever has any truth, just various degrees of falsehood.”

– “Things” do not exist objectively in a pregiven world. “All real things
are first and foremost perspectives.” You locate something in the universe
by determining the level on which it exists and by determining the quadrant
in which it exists. You also must take into account the level and
perspective of the perceiver!

– A “quadrant” is a perceiving subject’s perspective; a “quadrivium” is the
object’s location as it is perceived. This is because only individual holons
have all four perspectives (artifacts like chairs lack a “dominant I,” but
all objects can be looked at from any of the four quadrants.

– Wilber goes on to get very sophisticated about this, basically laying out
his epistemology, or what can be known and how you can know it. He explains
why and how any statement can be (and should be) located in terms of
perspective and stage. He goes on to suggest letter and number designations
as shorthand for identifying any statement according to where it exists and
who can see it.

– Wilber now makes a very critical and important point. After you have gone
to all the trouble to specify the “Kosmic address” of God, Santa Claus, or
imaginary numbers, you “must be able to specify the injunctions
(instructions) necessary for the subject to be able to enact the Kosmic
address of the object.” In other words, for you to just give an address but
not provide the injunctions by which that address can be verified, you are
just doing metaphysics. What Wilber is doing here is creating a very rigid
epistemology not only for spirituality but for every truth claim of every
kind. This could have been (and probably should be) a book all by itself.
It’s huge.

– He sums the last point up in a succinct and revolutionary way: “Any
language other than injunctive is metaphysics.” Wow! This is the most
important part of the book, and it’s in the second appendix!!! “No
injunction, no meaning, no reality. Just metaphysical gibberish in an age
that is no longer capable of being impressed by such.”

…………

In his FINAL appendix, number III, The Myth of the Given Lives On, Wilber
gives a series of examples of areas of thought that are stuck in a
metaphysical, pre-integral world view.

– Both the sciences and the humanities rejected introspection, interiority,
spirituality, and subjectivity in the 20th century.

– Wilber gives a terrific summary of the rise of post-modernism and its
attack on modernism in its phenomenological forms (existentialism, humanism,
phenomenology).

– Wilber thinks that contemporary writers on spirituality like Capra and
Chopra have done little to rehabilitate spirituality for intellectuals. They
write for a popular audience that has not come to grips with the serious
questions, much less the disheartening answers, that modernism and
post-modernity pose for spirituality. Their mistake is that they have
attempted to demonstrate that mysticism has modern scientific support in an
attempt to give it the credibility necessary to have it be accepted by the
humanities. “This was EXACTLY THE WRONG MOVE in every way. The enemy was
never science, which won’t listen anyway. The enemy was the
intersubjectivists. And by showing, or trying to show, that spirituality
could be grounded in quantum physics, or dynamical systems theory, or chaos
theory, or autopoiesis, they played right into the hands of the
intersubjectivists.” (p. 282)

– Wilber’s point is that the post-modernists reject all forms of reality
that do not take into account the relativism created by the consideration of
unavoidable contexts created by language and interpretation. Science is as
guilty of this as the humanities in their critique, which Wilber accepts.

Finally, Wilber critiques a number of contemporary and classic works on
consciousness, mostly to point out where respected thinkers are missing the
point. His critique of William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience
is amazing and his critique of meditation in his piece on Daniel Goleman’s,
The Varieties of Meditative Experience, is fairly astonishing, coming from a
very practiced and advanced long-term meditator like Wilber: “Meditation is
still hobbled by the myth of the given because it is still monological; it
still assumes that what I see in meditation or contemplative prayer is
actually real, instead of partially constructed via cultural backgrounds
(syntactic and semantic).” “Meditation is the extension of the myth of the
given into higher realities, thus ensuring that you never escape its deep
illusions, even in Enlightenment.” “Again, meditation is not wrong but
partial, and unless its partialness is addressed, it simply houses these
implicit lies, assuring that liberation is never really full, and even
satori conceals and perpetuates the myth of the given .” (pp. 289-90)

– On pages 291-2 Wilber writes a devastating critique of the “new physics,”
including What the Bleep Do We Know?(on pp. 294-5).

– An equal opportunity paradigm basher, Wilber next takes to task a
post-modernism that refuses to recognize stages of development beyond
language and the personal. Pp. 295-6.

………….

Here are my thoughts about this text:

– Ken Wilber has once again proven himself to be the most brilliant,
revolutionary, important thinker of our time. Anyone who, from this point
forward, does not take his model into consideration while attempting to
advance knowledge on any subject is just not on the “A” team. They are
announcing their contributions to be “pre-integral” in the big picture of
human evolutionary thought.

– If a person reads and re-reads this text until they understand it, they
will get the equivalent of a Ph.D. in a branch of philosophy called
epistemology, or “how we know what we know,” “what is true,” and “what is
real.”

– I have already mentioned my problems with Wilber’s present color layout.

– Wilber would have strengthened the text and tied in the difficult first
chapters with the important last chapters if he had shown how each of the
eight perspectives could be used to move people from mythic to worldcentric
rational in the context of an integral life practice.

– It would also have been helpful if he had talked about how an integral
life practice shows up at each stage. What’s different?

– Again and again Wilber tells his readers that they must take the arguments
of post-modernism seriously. He is convinced that spiritual studies cannot
and will not be rehabilitated in the West until this is done.

– Wilber’s claim that proper meditation can provide stabilized development
of as much as two stages in as little as four years is unsubstantiated,
although I would like to believe it.

– Wilber would probably say that whatever thoughts and feelings are aroused
in you as you read this text reflect the level of development that you
mostly hang out on. What ideas don’t you like? Explore your reasons why. Are
parts of yourself threatened by them? If so, what parts?

– Wilber has created a classic. I would not say that it is easy, but it is
clear. It’s just that it includes an ENORMOUS amount of information, most of
which will be new to most readers. About a fourth of it was new to me, and
I’ve read everything Wilber’s written that has come to my attention, at
least once, many twice. So if it seems somewhat overwhelming, that’s a good
sign. It means you’re in the right chair, in the right class, in the right
school. Keep learning.

————

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http://www.kenwilber.com/

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http://www.integralinstitute.org/

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http://www.integralnaked.org/

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