always amazes me with his ability to cut right to the heart of so much of modern thinking on particular issues.
I know so little about modern psychology that I feel at a loss to rate the job he does in explaining the cardinal works and major interpretations of those works in this book, but most of the information I had prior knowledge of coming into this book he was spot on with.
I really like the approach that Wilber takes to philosophy/spirituality/psychology/etc, but am skeptical of the holarchy approach, There is something very powerful in the way that Wilber writes, but also a frustrating element in his writing that scares me.
I really like what he is saying, but his tone in referring to other's work and in defending himself from criticism tends to turn pretty nasty and petty at times.
I can't put my finger on exactly why his writing puts me off, because I really want to like what he is saying and I know his writing comes from a place of sincere interest in truth of experience and expression of that experience.
There is simply some part of his work that holds me at arms length, I always enjoy his work and will continue to read more of what he has done, because I feel his books are powerful and mean something.
This book gives a unique, integral perspective on psychology, and continued movement in this direction is something that literature needs more of.
Really beautiful book that organizes and clarifies so much knowledge from across the breadth of the Great Tradition,
I feel I understand the overall historical situation of humankind much better for having read this book, Hope I get past the introduction before my head explodes! Bless my heart, I keep trying to understand Wilbur, . . A true attempt to integrate all of human psychology, Wilber investigated many models of the evolution of human psychology and tries to create an integrated model and integrates them all, He looks at inner subjective/objective and outer subjective/objective traits and creates a quadrant that showcases how consciousness can create body, mind, spirit, soul, and Self.
His research is informed by eastern and western sources, Also, he looks at premodern, modern, and postmodern ways of thinking,
Much of his research has already been elaborated in his magnum opus, but this is good introductory material for those who have not read it yet.
Some Quotes:
Thus, the first seven years of life involve adaptation to the physical realm especially food, survival, safety.
The second seven years involve adaptation to the emotionalsexualfeeling dimension which culminates in sexual maturation or puberty, The third seven years of life typically adolescence involves the emergence of the logical mind and adaptation to its new perspectives, This brings us to around age twentyone, where many individuals overall development tends to become arrested,
Each time the self the proximate self encounters a new level in the Great Nest, it first identifies with it and consolidates it then disidentifies with it transcends it, deembeds from it and then includes and integrates it from the next higher level
It was this scientific materialism that very soon pronounced the other value spheres to be worthless, “not scientific,” illusory, or worse.
And for precisely that reason, it was scientific materialism that pronounced the Great Nest of Being to be nonexistent,
The self, at every level, will attempt to defend itself against pain, disruption, and ultimately death, and it will do so using whatever tools are present at that level.
If the self has concepts, it will use concepts if it has rules, it will use rules if it has visionlogic, it will use visionlogic.
We might say, only as consciousness gained some distance from nature could it paint nature more realistically,
We are all the sons and daughters of a Godhead that is the Goal and Ground of every gesture in the Kosmos, and we will not rest until our own Original Face greets us with each dawn.
Constructivism means consciousness doesnt merely reflect the world, it helps construct it, Contextualism means that holons are nested, indefinitely, Integralaperspectivism means that as many perspectives as humanly possible must be included in an integral embrace, That the Kosmos is endlessly holonicthere is the message of postmodernism
Most of Ken's book are similar, each expanding a bit to one side of the theory or the other.
If you don't know his theory and are interested in developmental psychology you should definitely check him out, The last couple months, I've been talking to my coworkers about this weird author I can't figure out, I tell them, my coworkers, that I can't decide if he's a honesttoGod systems philosopher or a crazy person, Don't get me wrong: I have a special fondness for crackpots because I worry about how I myself have crackpot tendencies: trying to read graduate level stuff without a graddegree, drawing diagrams in my little hovel, not on the cognitive level to build up a bibliography like Joseph Tainter or Jonathan H.
Turner, but willing to buy the books and work on them in my own humble way it wouldn't be a Scott if it didn't have the selfflagellation I routinely employ.
This is my second Ken Wilber book I've read in toto, among others I've skimmed or halfread, My conclusion is that Ken Wilber is definitely brilliant, and his heart's in a good place, but there is like a solidNewAge SnakeOil vibe that permeates his writing as opposed to someone like Talcott Parsons, in whom there is aNew Age Anything vibe.
There's probably a reason he's published by Shambala and not by Wiley or SUNY, like some of the other transpersonalist/integralist writers.
If you haven't investigated this super weird semiacademic niche, I'm going to give you a brief playbyplay of my own experience, because I don't know how else to situate this phenomenon that I've accidentally stumbled into: Academically Geared New Age.
I went through some personal stuff recently, and my general sense of wellbeing sort of collapsed these are the periods when we open ourselves up to all sorts of odd things, isn't it We can only pray that we're surrounded by genuinely good people and institutions when we have our little disintegrations, otherwise, who knows what might happen.
So, in my search for meaning and healthy practices, I started looking into psychology and positive psychology, I'd heard of some of the humanistic psychologists, who were like Heidegger and Sartelite: Rollo May and Carl Rodgers and Abraham Maslow.
But all these dudes are dead, What happened to that sort of Human Potential wave after that generation It got picked up by a cousin in humandevelopment: the New Age Movement.
I haven't read enough about the social Origins of the New Age movement, but I know that my mom was really into that stuff.
And I was in to it too when I was little, But then my friend lent me an Academic text on Lao Tzu, and I realized that New Age was the softest nonfiction that was out there, and even though it said nice things, it wasn't rigorous and it seemed to just glide over all the hardstuff that we encounter in living: suffering, responsibility, obligation, and institutions.
That, and so much of it was based on woowoo magicalthinking that, as far as I could tell, had no basis in reality.
There of course are limits to this sort of critique: at what point do we as rational compatriots in dialectic draw the line between soundfaith and hogwash Obviously, we end up having faith in something.
The general contemporary trend I identify in my peers is a sort of lowdefinition scientism, if I had to give it a name.
But even that ideology has the basic structure of a faithrelationship as does political allegiance, or even the Cult of Literature, A person may never sit down and write out their manifesto, but they have general ideas about how there may be a God, but it's maybe sort of like a pantheistic thing, but mostly science accounts for our experience of reality, but why are we talking about this, it's pretty deep, huh I slipped into freeindirectdiscourse: I'm not saying that's my opinion, that's just the general vibe I get.
So, anyway, while digging through positive psychology stuff stuff grounded in clinical research, I did not want to start wading through selfhelp New Age woowoo, I eventually stumbled into this super weird discourse on mystical experiences and personal growth.
That's stuff I'm totally into! The more I dug around into the Transpersonal literature, the more I kept on seeing the name "Ken Wilber.
" And I was like, "who the hell is this guy" He has a humble little Wikipedia page, Salon did an interview with him, He has an online presence, He's written a ton of stuff, From what I could gather, latterday positive psychology developed into Transpersonal Psychology, and Ken Wilber is one of its major luminaries, I asked my friends who got psychology degrees if they had ever heard of him, One told me no and I should read the Psalms, The other told me he hadn't either, and we still haven't made definite coffee plans yet, So I just decided to begin reading him,
I should probably talk about the book, The above is an awful lot of preamble for a book review, But we never just read a book, We read a book in a certain period of our lives, under definite historicalsocial circumstances, and unless we're hardcore completitionists, we only take a book seriously if it answers some question we can't sort out on our own.
Wilber kind of does this, I mean, enough to
convince me he has important insights to share, But I don't think he and his messianic Integralism is the panacea that his circle apparently is convinced that it is, Next to his genuinely astute psychological observations, he's selling vacuum cleaners, man,
Wilber is at his best when he's discussing developmentalpsychological schemes he loves charts I can't fault him, though: I love diagrams.
He's basically doing systems science, but his argument is that systems science doesn't extend far enough into the transpersonal domains, And there's a good reason for that, But first, let me explain what these guys are talking about when they talk about "The Transpersonal, " This is the idea that EasternStyle Enlightenment/Satori/Moksha is a higher level of human evolution, And via serious religious practices, a person can tap into these higher domains, I have a long, complicated history with the idea of EasternStyleEnlightenment, but let me say generally that, well, obviously, some people have their cognitive shit together a lot better than others.
And there's no doubt that this sort of highlytuned mental discipline can produce some incredibly important interior experiences, But, what I believe, is that these sort of mystical experiences are deeply, profoundly personal, And though a person may communicate some of the insights the experience reveals, the verbal communications don't count for much when held up next to the genuine personal article.
Wilber, which is the weirdest thing about his writing, Wilber just glibly goes along like these EasternStyleEnlightenment experiences are a sure thing and to be intellectually taken for granted.
That's where his discourse really jars with me, At least Alan Watts, for all his faults, had the decency to explain that talking about EasternStyleEnlightenment was not at all the same thing as the experience itself.
Wilber may mention this sort of caveat in passing, but it really is a significant aspect of religious practice to just wipe your hands with and lump into your system.
It reminds me of a hilarious zen explication about religious instruction, As you may or may not know, zen is into paradox, because the point of zen practice is to point the way beyond conventionallogical understanding or, as Wilber would say, "Centaur VisionLogic" Wilber's nomenclature is consistently goofy.
So, upon being asked by a pupil "what is the body of Shakyamuni" which is a typical student way of asking "how do I get that good Enlightenment juice," the zen master replied, "dried shit cube.
" Because that's as good as linguistic communication is in passing on The First Principle in zen, Wilber's slick discussions about "subtle, causal, and nondual" states of consciousness really just remind me of dried shit cubes,
But I don't mean for this review to be totally negative and rude, I can't convince myself that Wilber is not on to some fundamental truths about human nature, For instance, his discussion about lines of development is a powerful explanatory tool not everyone is developed equally in every aspect of human nature, so that's why you can have gurus who end up committing felonies, or scientists who lack social grace as the ole stockcharacter trope goes.
His theorizing about personal development and pathology is also very useful, And he's definitely done the heavy lifting in reading through the literature on pathology, Here's a good quote about psychological disorders with respect to the effort to achieve personal growth:
As we saw, if something goes wrong during this general developmental period, the result is a
'script pathology,' a series of distorted, demeaning, unfair ideas and scripts about oneself and
others.
Cognitive therapy has excelled in rooting out these maladaptive scripts and replacing
them with more accurate, benign, and therefore healthy ideas and selfconcept.
The other cool thing he does is match up certain types of developmental disorders with certain types of therapy cognitive therapy with cognitive distortions, existential therapy with existential issues, and so on, and places these within an overarching developmental scheme.
The one frustrating thing about this book, I mean, this one in particular, is that in many places, it references his earlier books for fuller discussions.
Wilber seems to have a tendency to not go into fuller discussions, He said the original version of this book was supposed to be two volumes and overcharts heck yeah!, But what we get, instead, is a really breezy run through of individual development, where development can go wrong, and then some stuff about cultural development and Wilber's special sauce: The Four Quadrants it's as smart as it is hokey: I mean, yes, clearly, any effort towards consilience must take on a form like Wilber's, but Wilber's has the sense of a person who's got the general parts all sorted out, but doesn't have a solid metaphysics to glue it all together, and human psychological development and the expectation of "nondual consciousness" can only defer the necessary details so far until it starts to come off as insincere.
.
He even admits towards the end that he hasn't given enough details: "Obviously, as I said in the Introduction, this type of approach can only begin with the most general of generalizationsoutrageous generalizations, some would say.
. . ".
It's getting late, I'm about to need to eat my salad and watch Law amp Order, Long story short: I wouldn't recommend this book, "The Atman Project" was pretty neat, And I'm sure one of his earlier books I've got on order will probably go into detail about some of the topics that Wilber appears to have a grip on.
But this book won't help you out of a jam, It's not a therapeutic book, It's a showcase for Wilber's Integralism, which at moments begins to sound like multilevel marketing, I'll let you know if any of his other material has some insights about inner growth and pathology therapeutics because that's what I'm really interested in.
But I'm going to stick with Voegelin as my theoretical North Star,
.