Customer Reviews

The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

....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.

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.

Far one of the greatest book ever written in the transpersonal area!!I'm still reading, but the syntesis that Wilber did is amazing!!Many authors, one subject: Evolution!!

Kenneth Earl Wilber II (born 1949) is an American philosopher who designates his framework as "Integral Theory." In 1998, he founded the Integral Institute, for teaching and applications of Integral theory. He has written many influential books, such as Integral Life Practice: A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening, A Brief History of Everything, Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution, The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, the Universe, and Everything, Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World, etc.

He wrote in the Preface to this 1980 book, "The theme of this book is basically simple: development is evolution; evolution is transcendence... and transcendence has as its final goal Atman, or ultimate Unity Consciousness in only God. All drives are a subset of that Drive, all wants a subset of that Want, all pushes a subset of that Pull---and that whole movement is what we call the Atman-project: the drive of God towards God, Buddha towards Buddha, Brahman toward Brahman, but with results that range from ecstatic to catastrophic."

Here are some additional quotations from the book:

"To put it all very plainly, evolution can continue. It has already brought forth humans from amoebas--why on earth should we think that after that prodigious feat lasting billions of years, evolution just petered out and wound down?" (Pg. 65)
"What we have seen---at every major stage of growth---is that the process of psychological development proceeds in a most articulate fashion. At each stage, a higher-order structure---more complex and therefore more unified---emerges through a differentiation of the preceding, lower-order level." (Pg. 79)
"We have seen that psychological development in humans has the same goal as natural evolution: gthe production of ever-higher unities. And since the ultimate Unity is Buddha, God, or Atman ... it follows that psychological growth aims at Atman. And that is part of what we call the Atman-project." (Pg. 100)
"And this why human desire is insatiable, why all joys yearn for infinity---all a person wants is Atman; and all he finds are symbolic substitutes for it. This attempt to regain Atman consciousness in ways or under conditions that prevent it and force symbolic substitutes---this is the Atman-project." (Pg. 102-103)
"For myself, the Atman-project is not a lie about Atman, but a substitute for Atman." (Pg. 121)

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.

I have read the other reviews below mine and I understand that Wilber has shortcomings. On the other hand, I also think he has much strength and that this particular book is incredible for a variety of reasons.

First, I think his presentation of transpersonal development is a great attempt at a synthesis of many schools of thought and his overall model for such a cycle is realistic. While some of the correspondences between disparate models might be inaccurate in the particulars, there are enough correlations that it is reasonable to take this work as a good starting point for a more complete synthesis.

Second, I loved the way Wilber explained what it must be like to be an infant or small child. He described the experience of different stages of development so well; I couldn't put the book down and read these sections over and over again.

Third, I liked the way Wilber positioned human development as part of a larger evolution. I believe that he is correct in his general ideas and he presents a hopeful picture of the future of humanity.

Overall, I think this is a very interesting read and complimentary to most of the good standard material that is already out there on development. It doesn't read like a text, it is much more engaging and thought provoking. I really appreciated this approach. The book is also dense; he packs a lot of useful information in a short space without repeating himself as much as he does in some other books.

I did not love the preface, but once I got into the core of the book I was very pleasantly surprised. You can get this volume for as little as $5.00 used. I have bought copies for my friends because I think it is especially good for parents, teachers and others who need to understand the different lines and stages of development from the INSIDE. It is good stuff don't be discouraged away from this book because it isn't perfect in every respect.

... of the path towards full awareness with a description of the dynamics of evolution and involution. Really brilliant !

"The Atman Project" is the central Wilber's book, the fount ( with the possible exception of "The Spectrum of Consciousness" ) of all his later speculations which try to dovetail all & everything, from biological evolution ( only sketched ) to socio-cultural models & spiritual Weltanschauungen into a single, all- encompassing pattern. Since my opinion is that such an endeavor ( in effect, the whole book is an effort to resolve the ultimate question,:" What is the meaning and purpose of ( human ) life ?" ) is doomed from the outset ( "The Tao that can be told of is not the eternal Tao" ), I'll just adumbrate a few points of this book, without going into nuances & detail which would take us too far.

1. In essence, Wilber's "The Atman Project" is a book whose central message is that the meaning & purpose of life is "evolution" of consciousness ( rather fuzzily defined, probably under the influence of Neotheosophical writers/sages like Sri Aurobindo ), culminating in non-dual recognition of oneness of one's being with the eternal Ground of all ( Boehme's Ungrund/Abyss, Advaita's Brahman, Vajrayana's Dharmakaya, Eckhart's Godhead/Gottheit etc. ) In short, you got a clear message: the pinnacle of humanity are Zen patriarchs, Jiddu Krishnamurti or Ramana Maharshi. Shakespeare, Bach or Einstein are still schoolboys. Evidently, such a worldview unabashedly puts the author's pro-mystical bias as *the* key to the "riddle of existence". More, even "spiritually" or religiously minded people could hardly accept that the ground of the theophanies & the source of prophetic revelations, i.e. "God", is, at best, just a passive object of quietist meditative practice of rather passive contemplatives. The Biblical or Koranic God is reduced to an anemic yantra or mumbo-jumboid mantra.

2. Wilber's psychology is a curious blend. Essentially, he assimilated Freudian "insights" ( now heavily questioned ), put them within partially Jungian framework ( his chief reference is Neumann's "The Origin and History of Consciousness", whose singular terminology he amply (mis)uses ( pleromatic self, uroboric self,..))& subsumed under Vajrayana/Tibetan idealist monism. Admittedly- although both pillars of Atman project share the same trait: the absence of genuine levels of selfhood, as exemplified in the indestructible "I" ( Assagioli's Psychosynthesis ), spiritual seed ( Valentinian Gnosticism ), jiva ( Hindu Tantra ), "the naked isolated self" ( Gerda Walther , Psychic Being ( Aurobindo )- that very consistency makes the entire "Atman Project" inconsistent. For, if nothing transpersonal, but still individual, evolves, we are again back on Hegel's evolving Spirit from "Phenomenology of Spirit", "enriched" ( better, fused into perfect confusion ) by Vajrayana Buddhist doctrine. Well, yoy can't get both evolution and illusory nature of reality.

3. At the end, just a few remarks: a) Wilber consistently misreads various "perennial philosophies". For instance, his tables of correspondences at the end of the book are sad examples of ignorance ( Kabbalah's Binah and Hokmah as "spiritial" equivalents of Nirvikalpa Samadhi, plus other numerous bizarre attributions ). b) his obsessive sqabble re pre-trans fallacy is completely redundant- an echo of Freud/Jung disagreements & a few humanistic psychologists' fixations. c) conceptually, there is virtually nothing new cognitive-wise in this book. Whilst other researchers, from Stapp to Stuart Hameroff, try, stumblingly, to come to a new definition of consciousness, Wilber self-congratulatorily rehashes old dogmas & antiaquated concepts. d) considering that Freud's edifice is rapidly falling apart, Wilber's "pre" phase would probably follow the same way.