Customer Reviews

Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

In one of his previous books "Sex Ecology and Spirit", Ken Wilber introduced a wildly ambitious schema that (as one previous reviewer accurately calls it) attempts to butt-weld western psychology onto eastern spirituality. His All-Quadrant-All-Levels (AQAL) model is a dizzyingly complex schemata that tries to appease, well, pretty much every major thinker in the eastern and western canon.

Despite the ponderous weight of "Sex, Ecology and Spirit", there were major holes in his exposition, and "Integral Spirituality" was written, I suspect, to plug some of those holes. I believe that there are 2 major problems that Wilber addresses in "Integral Psychology". The first problem is that, although Wilber spent the bulk of "Sex, Ecology and Spirit" savagely critiquing the limits of a menagerie of postmodernist thinking, he did not incorporate the insights of postmodernism into his AQAL model. The second problem is that, in "Sex, Ecology and Spirit", even though he divides the world into four irreducible quadrants in his AQAL model (the individual interior, the individual exterior, the social interior, and the social exterior), he reads the history of the Enlightenment as the differentiation of only three spheres of values (aesthetics, morals and science). Clearly, one sphere of value missing.

Scholars of Wilber might find then, that the first 5 chapters of "Integral Spirituality" are a tedious re-tread of the AQAL model found in previous books. But this particular presentation of the AQAL model offers something fundamentally different. It embraces postmodern insights into its core, by providing a much more nuanced discussion of inter-subjectivity. That's why Wilber makes such a big deal, as another reviewer pointed out, of critiquing the "Myth of the Given" and the "Philosophy of Consciousness" in these chapters. These critiques encapsulate the basic insight of twentieth century postmodernism, and it is something that Wilber did not do in previous books.

One result is that Wilber argues that eastern traditions are blind to their cultural biases - biases that are fundamentally invisible to meditative introspection. These cultural biases can only be detected using hermeneutics/sociological techniques, the bread-and-butter of postmodernist thinkers. Wilber accuses every major meditative tradition of being naive (or monological) in their belief in the absolute reality of the cultural manifestations of their traditions. That is why many genuine teachers of Eastern traditions, might also be misogynists, sexual deviants and abusive figures of authority. This is a major clarification and culminates in a very satisfying chapter about the Shadow and the Self, or how western psychology might supplement meditative practices.

The other major problem tackled in "Integral Spirituality" resolves an anomaly in previous discussions of the european Enlightenment. In previous books, Wilber described the Enlightenment as the moment in western history when values first differentiated into the autonomous spheres of Art, Morality and Science. He calls this the differentiation of the Big Three. Wilber argues that the failure of the Enlightenment was a failure to integrate the Big Three. This has always been puzzling to me as Wilber makes such a big deal about the Four Quadrants in his AQAL model, whereas Wilber described the Enlightenment as the differentiation of only 3 spheres of values.

In "Integral Spirituality", Wilber resolves this anomaly between the Big Three and the Four Quadrants. He now finds that the Enlightenment failed because it failed to differentiate a Fourth sphere of values. He has tentatively identified this as the spiritual line of development, as described by James Fowler. This is admittedly vague, but represents a genuine change in Wilber's thinking. The failure of the Enlightenment is not the failure to integrate the Big Three, but the failure to differentiate into the Big Four, and that is what is preventing the next step in human evolution, the Integration that is yet to come. Based on this insight, Wilber offers some startling insights on the future role of institutionalized religions in the chapter "The Conveyor Belt". He argues that the world's religions must transform themselves to develop this fourth sphere of value, an enlightened differentiated form of spirituality.

Although Wilber doesn't pursue this, I'd like to offer a schema to map the Big Four onto his Four Quadrants. Art or Aesthetics is the values we use to describe our Individual Interior. Ethics are the rules and values, with which we relate to each other, forming the Social Interior. Science is the study of discrete physical things, essentially the Individual Exterior. And Spirituality or the Godhead, or the Ultimate, is how we relate to everything out there, and *that* is the Social Exterior.

Integral Spirituality lays out a worldview that tries to encompass and take whatever is of value from as many worldviews as possible. It assumes that no particular position is completely wrong and looks for patterns of meaning across the world's wisdom traditions. Anyone familiar with Wilber will already know this, but for those new to him this point may be useful to mention.

There are many reviews that criticize this book for repeating material that is repeated in other books. I agree with these criticisms and I think there is a bit too much of a commercial focus on the website as well. I was expecting less repetition and more editorial discipline, but I still think the book justifies a 4 star rating based on its other merits. Hopefully, Ken will get away from doing this in future publications.

What I enjoyed specifically about this book was the material on Integral Methodological Pluralism (although this appears in other places) and the somewhat different focus on an Integral Post-Metaphysics. The material on the shadow and disowned self was also interesting and I'm also glad he included a chapter on an Integral Life Practice. Integral Life practices involve engaging every level of being such as body, emotion, mind, soul and spirit to bring about transformation of consciousness.

While this book does indeed contain a lot of recycled material, it is worth purchasing for the new material and some of the new ways that old ideas are presented. Going forward, however, I hope Ken Wilber works more closely with his editors, gets clear on the audience for a particular book and avoids unnecessary repetition and rambling.

Ken is certainly a very important philosopher with a useful point of view. As other reviewers have pointed out, I believe he has blindspots, but he is one voice among many. At times, his attitude can be irritating and arrogant, but I try not to let this get in the way of the underlying value in his message. I think he is worthy of considerable respect for what he has done in this area. I also appreciate how entertaining he can be much of the time, while simultaneously making important points.

In many of Wilber's works the repitition didn't bother me because it was a good review. I suspect this will be the case for new readers of Ken Wilber, but a problem for others more familiar with his work. Another good introductory book on Ken's writings is A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYTHING which is organized like an interview. This is a fairly easy read and lays out his most important ideas in a highly digestible and engaging format.

I also think it would be useful for Ken to run his ideas by more people that disagree with him. This book was a long time in coming out and other reviewers have legitimately pointed out that certain points of view such as Christianity were treated in what seems like an arbitrarily narrow manner. I believe this criticism applies to some other areas of thought as well and would have benefited from more scholarly review from third parties.

I had the pleasure of teaching this book to a small undergraduate seminar on the Sociology of Religion last quarter. The reaction was decidedly mixed, with some students finding the material to be exciting and mind-expanding, while others, though sympathetic to the ideas, were totally turned off by Wilber's egotism and bad writing. My #1 recommendation to Ken and the Integral Institute is to fully, integrally utilize the talents that are being gathered and produce works that are edited for maximum impact -- there is a world of sentient beings to save, and time is short!

Overall, Wilber's analysis is incredibly valuable, and if this is the first of his books you read, you will learn much. However, it is less clear that INTEGRAL SPIRITUALITY adds much to what he has already said. I still recommend THE MARRIAGE OF SENSE AND SOUL as the best introduction to his work.

I will limit my substantive comments to a few points of critique: 1) The topic promised by the subtitle is only covered in Chapter Nine, "The Conveyor Belt," and is not examined with the depth or with the respect that it deserves. 2) One of the most fascinating aspects of the book, for anyone who has been following Wilber's project over time, is that he has stopped bashing the "Mean Green Meme" (bad writing exemplified!) and incorporated postmodernism into his AQAL system. Now he's taken to bashing all spiritual authors and teachers who have NOT incorporated postmodernism! 3) As a sociologist and long-time political activist, it is by turns amusing and annoying to me how superficially Wilber treats his lower-left and lower-right collective quadrants (cultural and social). He appears to have only a rudimentary familiarity with the research in sociology and anthropology, and tends to subsume it all under the heading of postmodern philosophy, which is puzzling and incongruous. I continue to maintain that Wilber's Project is too inwardly focused, too psychological, and not fully integral because it fails to address the need for social change, as opposed to personal growth. 4) Conceptually, some of the best points made here have to do with the need to integrate the subjective with the objective (including intersubjective, objective and interobjective), but when Wilber doubles his four quadrants to eight zones, and speaks of a subjective and objective zone for each quadrant (page 39), and then puts down everyone who fails to do so, along with the accompanying 8 distinctive methodologies (page 37), he makes a serious error. There can be no "subjective interior" to any quadrant other than the upper left. 5) Wilber may think his assertion that "the problem of the proof of God's existence simply evaporates" (page 266) is proven with a wave of the postmodern wand, but he provides nothing to back up his sweeping claim, no way that a seeker can verify that a teacher actually represents a higher level of consciousness, or just talks a good line. Is s/he just the Wizard of Oz? He claims to have staked out post-metaphysical terrain, but he'll have to do better before an accepted ladder of higher post-conventional levels moves from the realm of metaphysics and becomes intersubjectively and objectively real.

One thing that is clear in reading INTEGRAL SPIRITUALITY is that Wilber is working through serious emotional problems. Just as he correctly points out that meditation alone will not resolve such problems, it is clear that writing alone will not resolve them either. Clearly there are some raging shadows/demons/disowned voices roaming through this text and this project. I encourage spiritual seekers to look to dharma teachers such as Thich Nhat Hanh who have clearly manifested the compassion of the boddhisattva. Brother Ken has much to offer in the conceptual realm, but he does not seem to be fully realized emotionally, and therefore is not a good role model. (In his own terms, he may experience higher states of consciousness, but will interpret them from a limited emotional vantage point.)

I send my loving regards to Ken and all the members of the global sangha -- may we move together to liberate all sentient beings, every day, with all our hearts and minds.

Namasthe.

Ken Wilber started out 30 years ago in "Spectrum of Consciousness" trying to butt-weld Buddhism onto western developmental psychology. Now in "Integral Spirituality" he is trying to imagine what religion would look like if it accepted that the modernist critique of pre-modern religion and the postmodernist critique of modernism (including science) are true.

In other words he asks: How can we live a spiritual life when science has declared that God is Dead, and the postmodernists have declared that knowledge is culturally determined and anyway is hopelessly entangled with political power?

His answer starts with a new world-view of reality, the AQAL Matrix, that differentiates the Cartesian mind/body dualism into a quadrant. The old mind/brain opposition is now further divided into the singular/plural. There are not just minds but collections of minds in a shared culture, and not just bodies but collections of material bodies in systems.

Wilber had already developed this model in his earlier work. In this book, he tries to accommodate the critique of postmodernism by adding a new layer upon his matrix.

So much for the "is." Religion, or spirituality, is about the meaning of the "is." But for the integral believer, meaning is not just given from the mountaintop as in "organized religion," it must be discovered. For this journey of discovery Wilber recommends an Integral Life Practice, a daily workout not just for body, but mind and spirit too.

Some have criticized Wilber for repetition. They object to shelling out $20, again, for a book that mostly rehashes old material. They will not like this book. It covers a lot of old ground before it extends Wilber's ideas with new chapters on shadow work and Integral Life Practice.

But the critics miss the point. Wilber is directing in an ongoing project to develop a new religion or spiritual practice that can satisfy the "post-bourgeois," the educated metrosexuals for whom the old pre-modern religion is superstition and for whom the naive materialism of the militant secularists does not satisfy. Each new book is a status report on the project now institutionalized into Integral Institute. If you are interested in project status you should buy the book. If you want to wait till it's all finished--well then, wait.

It is true, however, that this book like most of Wilber's recent books lacks the sweep and style, the unity that you expect in a full-service non-fiction book. That is a pity. But it attests to the truth that Wilber's thought is a work-in-progress.

This book should have been titled "Intro to Ken Wilbers Phase 5" It just simply falls short. Ken does not come off as a "Kosmic Storyteller" but rather rushes through the further teachings of his AQAL model. Spirituality is the main path that people come from and happen to come across Ken's work, so the people who are interested will pick up this book due to the title and probably never buy a Ken Wilber book again.

I know that he now writes for people who are already educated on his teachings (thank God!) but I guess I just feel it is a bad title for the book. I would expect him to have written a more poetic and inspiring tale of our historical journey we are on towards Spirit in a spiritual context, by that i mean having fun with the questions such as "do we have free will or is it destiny?" "is there any truth to supernormal abilities such as healing or reading minds?" "seeing how complex evolution is can there even be an Omega Point?" and of course the question of reincarnation. Mabye it should have been called Integral Spiritual Philosophy. I hope he understands that there is a lot of "buzz" going around about him and that MOST PEOPLE who will pick up this book for revolutionary spiritual teachings ARE NOT PHILOSOPHERS!

Yet, being such a fan I still enjoyed learning so much more about how unbelievable his model is and the Appendix B helped me see things through a Turquoise lens like I have never been able to before. The essay on Integral Post-Metaphysics is inspiring, humbling, and revolutionary! But BEGGINERS BEWARE!

This isn't the best book Ken Wilber has ever written. IMHO, it's SES (Sex, Ecology, Spirituality read concurrently with the notes). Wilber didn't write every book to be an SES and I don't see how it's even possible. It appears that he is now writing for serious students of his work.

There is a considerable amount of necessary review of Wilber I - IV material in Integral Spirituality to understand the rest of the book. However, it's probably (probably because 1. I can't run a controlled experiment on myself 2. My 1st person perspective is not enough to generalize for everyone else) not enough of a review for anyone coming to this for the first time.

The new material presented in this book is 1. Indeed new 2. Integrates the new with Wilber I - IV 3. Has an emergent quality; trancends and includes 4. Offers first person perspective, state and stage transformation exclusive of Ken's previous material.

The previous reviewer has done a great job summarizing the content in this book, so I'll just make a few simple comments. This book will probably be most enjoyed by people who have some familiarity with Ken Wilber's work (thought this is not necessary). Not a lot of time is spent defining and suiting his theory (thank goodness, since he's already done that in a hand-full of previous books). It was refreshing to see Wilber present some significant new ideas, some revisions of previous ideas, and he also began to relate different parts of his model to each other in a more dynamic fashion (thought there is still a long way to go).
Like a lot of his work this reads like a summary of a much larger work (he has admitted as much about some previous books). It leaves me wishing to see the ideas in the book fleshed out in even more detail. I guess I'll just have to wait a little longer for that. No rush.
If you are interested in situating the different ways of perceiving/approaching spirituality and how they might relate to each other and/or if you are interested in an intelligent attempt to engage a very broad array of human experience and understanding you will probably find the book interesting.
The best comment I can make about this book and Wilber's work in general: if you engage it deeply it offers a very useful and at times beautiful vision of "reality."
Oh yeah, I found the book fun to read and at times even funny, but that might just be me.

I have followed this author since he began publishing, and this book represents a profound deterioration of focus. Readers familiar with this author will know that he has difficulty staying focused in the exposition in his best books. I cannot understand why the organization he writes for allowed this book to go to press for two reasons: (1) It is poorly edited with a tone that is so informal in places it reads as though the author were an adolescent; (2) it is an extended advertisement for the spiritual products sold on an "org" Web site. These are the characteristics that lead to my emotional reaction to this book, which is strong.

In terms of content, readers can expect a brief summary of the author's earlier works written in the first five of ten chapters. Chapters 6 and 7 present two profound, valuable insights most readers expect from this author. They are worth the price of the book, but they are difficult to read because they also suffer from an undisciplined schizophrenic focus split between psychological and philosophical concerns.

I have read just about all of Wilber's material and find him extremely insightful, needless to say. But I continue to have certain major reservations. First, is "enlightenment" the goal of all religous/spiritual paths? Wilber talks only or almost exclusively of the "contemplative/medative traditions".The implication being that "spirituality" only occurs primarily between the alone and the Alone or is primarily an "intellective"(cognitive)spirituality. When he discusses the Judeo/Christian tradition he points to the contemplative traditions within them (Father Keating, e.g.) but never addresses the essence of the tradition itself. Surely Kabbalah and the mystical/monastic tradition in Christianity are not the heart and soul of these traditions although they might fall within the broad scope of their historical manifestations. I would like to imagine a conversation, e.g. of Ken Wilber with Marin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas,along with a liberation theologian like Sebastian Kappen S.J. and a poltical theologican as Johann Baptist Metz. I don't believe these religious teachers would primarily approach the Judeo/Christian tradition as a contemplative tradition. Rather was not Jesus a prophet in very much the style of the Hebrew prophets? And was the practice of Jesus and the Prophets not primarily monastic meditation but an immersion in the sufferings of the people of their day? Was not service the primary praxis? This does not deny the need for prayer or contemplation but it does not isolate this practice either as the quintessential praxis of the Hebrew or Jesus's way of life. When Wilber discusses the "Spirit in 2nd Person" he points to only the "alone with the Alone" version. This is not the Judeo/Christian approach. Rather it is through service to our brothers and sisters in the world that we encounter the great Mystery, the great Thou. The ego purification comes about not primarily in one's solitude but rather in one's ego being rubbed raw in the existential immersion in the pain of the world.The dark night of the soul comes about in the midst of the world as it did for Jesus and the prophets. As Abraham Heschel once wrote: "The more deeply immersed I become in thinking of the prophets, the more powerfully it became clear to me what the lives of the prophets sought to convery: that morally speaking there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings." It would seem to me that if we look at Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan as pointing to the very essence of his way, could we not say that we could have all the highest states, all the highest stage persectives, and the deepest of awareness and yet walk right by the man in the ditch fully AQAL-ed (so to speak). In Wilber's scheme maybe we could say that the Judeo/Christian tradition prioritizes the moral/ethical line as well as emphasing the exterior doing of a way along with the interior growth of the inner person? Wilber once made the comment that a spiritual path could arise in any one of the four quadrants. And yet he exclusively focuses on quadrant one. Could we not say that the Judeo/Christian spirituality arises in quadrants 3 and 4 (compassion -3; and justice-4?)I would be very interested in a Wilberian's response to these queries.

Two years ago I opened up Ken Wilber's "Sex, Ecology and Spirituality" (SES) and was floored by its profundity. It gave me a powerful new framework through which to understand the world, and I proceeded to read another half dozen of his books, hungry for more of his ontological and psycho-spiritual insight. It's been a downhill journey, and I think with "Integral Spirituality" it's hit bottom. I've never bothered to review a book but feel compelled to now because this book was such a waste of time. I was so disappointed that I won't bother reading anything he publishes in the future, with the possible exception of volumes 2 and 3 of his Kosmos trilogy, if they ever make it to print.

Ken Wilber has been publishing several books a year and at this point they're all more or less regurgitations and summaries of one another, and "Integral Spirituality" is a case in point. It seems that his greatest contributions were presented a decade ago in his magnum opus SES. I get the feeling he's now publishing books not based on their own merit but rather solely on his past reputation. He doesn't seem to have many new ideas to contribute, so I can't help but suspect he's publishing this garbage just to make money. The book reads like one big plug for his "Integral Life Practice" modules and integral this and that .[...]. It's borderline offensive. I want my money back.

This book is a real shame and disappointment because it's a further watering down of his earlier work that is truly brilliant.

If you're interested in Ken Wilber's philosophy, read SES. In my very humble opinion it's one of the most important books of the 20th century. Forget about most of the rest.