60 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Atman Project, July 24, 2000
This review is from: The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development (Paperback)
I'll admit it straight out: I'm a Wilber fan. After thirty years of philosophical study and spiritual practice, I have only begun to read his work in the past year, but I find that it helps me synthesize many of the disparate thought currents I have studied with each other and with my own experience over thirty years of meditative practice. True, you have to be skeptical of anyone's ability to even read, much less thoroughly understand, all of the farflung disciplines that Wilber cites and purports to synthesize in his work. And in the (many) areas he cites of which I have little or no personal knowledge, it's pretty hard to know whether he's doing a complete or accurate job of analyzing them.
But in those areas I do know something about, I have found his work to be as accurate, as luminous and as brilliant as anything I have read. For example, I think he does a better job of summarizing the importance and weaknesses of the work of Immanuel Kant than Arthur Schopenhauer did, and he didn't do such a bad job. His descriptions of meditative states are congruent with my own experiences and with the described experiences of the many writers on that subject with which I am familiar. So he has earned so far a high degree of credibility with me.
The Atman Project attempts to integrate the work of developmental psychology with pre-egoic, pre-rational structures of consciousness with the experience of the mystical traditions with post-egoic, post-rational structures, to form a picture of how the individual evolves from structure to structure "up" the hierarchy, or "holarchy" in Wilber language, of these stages. There is a discussion of how "Spirit" "involves" itself downward through these structures and creates the imperative to evolve back up through them to Self-realization.
This book was an early work of Wilber's, and though seminal to his thinking, in many ways does not accurately (or at least completely) reflect his current thought system. He states as much himself in later works. I therefore do not recommend it as an introduction to Wilber, but would instead recommend a later work, such as "A Brief History of Everything" or perhaps "The Essential Ken Wilber" for that purpose. And that is why I only give it three stars instead of the five stars I would give to the other six Wilber works I have read so far. However, the more committed Wilber student will find this book helpful in understanding Wilber's notion of how the individual negotiates its way along the "spectrum of consciousness" (though I think a better and more complete explanation can be found in "The Eye of Spirit") and, armed with some understanding of Wilber's more recent writings, perhaps will be less likely to mistake this for being a comprehensive treatment of even this part of his thought. I recommend it for that purpose.
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
a workable synthesis...., June 2, 2000
This review is from: The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development (Paperback)
....and an interesting summing up of many schools of thought. However, a key problem with the book and with most transpersonal models is what I think of as their verticality worship: higher, better, brighter. But so much of life--and in this I include spiritual life--occurs in the valleys, in the shadows and the messiness and the confusion of life, not in the middle of straight paths that hike up metaphysical mountainsides. I regard the notion that one can achieve blessedness through reading and hard inner work inflated, and I think the Zen masters so often quoted by integral folks would too. --Anyway, Wilber is quite readable and interesting.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This is a book about human evolution and spirit involution., April 27, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development (Paperback)
This is a book about human evolution and spirit involution. Wilber painstakenly reviews the stages of growth from the Pleromatic stages up through the Subtle, Causal then finally Non-dual. The Atman Project is regarded as one of the core which upon which Wilber's later and more complex books are based. This is an outstanding work and now my second favorite Wilber book after Eye to Eye.
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