Ken Wilber's Integral Spirituality is turning out to be quite an interesting read. There is a big gap between this book and his previous ones (about five years or so) and that gap really shows. This new stuff has definitely stepped up a notch. It's a bit of a slow read, but is turning out to be quite an exciting and thought provoking one.
He's also made a fairly radical change to his spectrum model. Previously, his upper left evolved much along the lines of his original spectrum of consciousness model, and basically grafted meditative involution onto the top of the procession of waves from developmental psychology and the like. Thus one evolved up to the integrated 'centaur' and then started evolving into the transpersonal 'psychic', 'subtle', 'nondual', etc.
Now he's literally tipped this over on its side. Instead of grafting involution onto the top of developmental evolution, he's made them effectively orthogonal. Instead of a one-dimensional spectrum, we now have a two-dimensional lattice with evolutionary developmental structures as one dimension, and meditative state development as the other. Now he can explain how you can have highly developed 'spiritual' practice which is still stuck in a low level evolutionary state. No wonder I find spiritual text difficult to get into. Much of it is written from a lower evolutionary state. The Bible may be a glorious source of rich involutionary inspiration, but it is grounded in a 2000 year old worldspace and morality which seems barbaric, cruel, and totally incompatible with a modern global society.
It also helps to clarify to myself where I am in this AQAL setting, and why I was seemingly on the doorstep of the transpersonal but didn't seem to be aware of it at all. No wonder I've been looking for Buddhism for Gearheads. Perhaps this I-I "Integral Life Practice" kit that Sunshine is getting for Christmas will be something of that ilk. (Assuming that it isn't now too out of date with respect to this multi-dimensionality). Still, I guess the advantage of being at 'tier 2' is that I can reach down and pick out some of the wisdom from below. I can try and reinterpret Zen into a teal/turquoise worldspace, even if it's more work.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I think I'm at a beginning turquoise (yellow in the Clare Graves, Spiral Dynamic model) but I am freshly out of green so I still find myself fighting some of those values at times.
As you posted in your other Integral Spirituality entry, I have also been wrestling a bit with the Post Integral Metaphysics stuff. I get it (though feel like I might be missing something). What is disappointing is that he has just that he has nuked one of my VERY favorite subjects, metaphysics. I need to read the Appendix on Post Integral Metaphysics to get a better feel.
Yeah, the stuff he covers in the appendix is really pretty crucial. It's also trickier, so I guess that's why it's in the appendix. (Thankfully he finally ditched the endnotes! Now I can read with only a single bookmark.) I think that the IPM sorta boils down to a really hardnosed version of the idea he was proposing with Sense & Soul, i.e a sort of generalized scientific method, but with a much stronger emphasis on acknowleding the postmodern lack of absolutes. Its actually interesting to see Wilber embracing the postmodern more obviously now, after the polemic of SES and some of his early 'phase 4' stuff. Not that he wasn't being integral then, but his newest stuff *seems* more obviously integral. With his post-metaphysics stuff I think I see much more clearly how the centaur actually integrates postmodernism into the mix, I still get the feeling there's more there though. I should probably go read those "excepts" on the Shambala site sometime.
I also think I'm somewhere up around turquoise, but it's a little hard to tell, especially if you start admitting the possiblity that you could be down translating 'partial truths' from higher structures. Like you I also still struggle with my largely orange/green background.
I'm not sure that he's really destroyed the subject of metaphysics so much as he's criticising its methodology, particularly the "Myth of the Given" and the idea that anything that *seems* true to you, is true in the "real world", whatever that is.
Anyway, I agree that Wilber's stuff is very good, particularly his latest stuff. Starting up I-I seems to have kicked him into another gear.
Post a Comment