EDIT 2/6/2012:
--------------
In an effort to "longitudinally review", I have followed up and I like this book less now. I have docked a star. I've seen many things wrong with this model since myself, but what really blew the model open for me was the article Brian Hines wrote, "What Wilber gets wrong about Plotinus", which can be found by searching online. That confirmed a lot of my suspicions -- this is one more great author mangled by Wilber to fit a theory, and without this one there really *is* no theory in any cross-cultural sense. The nature of cross-cultural spirituality is way more complex and multivalent than anything in this book, and the real patterns are in my opinion completely missed in the triumphalist mapmaking. But even more, what lost this review that star was the total failure of Wilber to address the points raised by Hines -- or indeed by Meyerhoff. Wilber is completely uninterested in discussion. I don't like his model, and won't be looking further into it.
This is the second edit I've made to this review -- the first is to be found at the end.
--------------------------------------------
My first Wilber and a most interesting experience. Much that was good but much also that I found problematic. This is really a 3½ star review but on careful reflection I rounded unmathematically down.
This book is mostly a very widely-addressed, energetic and scholarly push to bring a practice-based spirituality back to mainstream philosophy and psychology, which is something many of us want to see, myself included. I just wish that it were more actually rather than intellectually inclusive, because the traditions I work in are very different to Wilber's. Still, if that were the only difficulty I'd have rounded up. The whole shebang is sold as the Answer to Absolutely Everything; that's what made me round down. I know Wilber was writing in reply to many others who also claimed to have `solved' all our crises, but for me, he fell into the same trap.
Wilber welds the spiritual to the scientific principally by means of evolution, following Gebser and Aurobindo, in an 'integral' viewpoint. Developmental psychology, not to mention history, shows an evolution towards higher levels of rationality in successive stages, and then, he surmises, into post-rational and transpersonal realms. We are evolving towards the yogic non-physical planes, both individually and societally, and the old 'chain of being' idea, with the entire universe linked in a divine hierarchy, is back. This isn't just declared but illustrated with careful argument and research in a dozen disciplines, not necessarily 'spiritual', from German Idealism to molecular chemistry. Wilber makes me want to look at a few people I'd never otherwise consider reading, like Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and Habermas; never a bad thing.
For me though, difficulties often come from awkward leaps that have to be made to get that model to sit right. There's a lot of lopping. I won't pretend I've read half the people Wilber has, but when a familiar name did crop up, I kept sucking my teeth at just how little of the source's actual meaning was making it in. Occasionally it was a feeling similar to the one you get driving past a car wreck. (I found a nice paper by Gus diZerega -- easily found online -- which came up with many of the same objections, discussed them intelligently, and showed how Wilber murdered Emerson into the bargain. ^_^)
His synthesis is based primarily on the ladder of stages of Plotinus. He certainly does 'get' Plato and Plotinus, with whom he's completely on home turf, and is excellent on their spiritual qualities, relating them to Christian theorists like Dionysius, Origen and Eckhart. These latter appear as if abstract and with no Christian symbolism, though, because Wilber thinks the age of myth is over. The idea is to get at the underlying ladders, from here to 'God'; Wilber gets the job done and shows an equivalence between all these western figures and Nagarjuna, so we have a 'universal ladder' of spirituality which the entirety of humanity, and indeed creation, is hurtling up/along -- 'through time towards the timeless', he likes to say. It's very much a progress paradigm. And to a certain extent, it does fit and work on paper.
For me, though, there are problems with the linearity of the model; everything has to be going forwards. Take the 'pre/trans fallacy' idea, which is Wilber's way of dealing with the fact that the spiritual can be mixed up with what appears primitive or irrational. It's really designed to make spirituality of his kind academically acceptable as 'progress' (trans), whilst excluding things like magic, sorcery and paganism as 'regress' (pre). Of course you certainly cannot regress and call it progress -- but I think a certain blindness to the cyclical is letting him down. Dismissing the over-romanticism about childhood and early tribal humanity is laudable, and I love the fact he makes that point so strongly (people who see the womb as actual 'nondual' enlightenment are really pushing it, after all, as are those who think all 7 billion of us should go back to hunter-gathering when the earth won't support that many). But he overdoes it, peremptorily blackballing any attempt to see anything in the past as developmentally useful when it happens not to be to his taste.
Wilhelm Reich, dismissed with a one-liner, knew and showed that our earlier selves are naturally less encrusted with what he called 'body armour'. That's a very real phenomenon, and when Jesus of Nazareth recommended that we 'become as little children', I don't think he was asking us to regress to an infantile narcissism, any more than Lao-tzu was when he mentioned that "To possess Power that runs deep is to be like a newborn child." False selves need to be unmasked if true new ones are to be built, and decisions, events, images and energies need to be cleared to flow. Wilber seems to understand all this. At the time when the false was less present, the timeless was more so. (Grof's work alone shows that very clearly.) And lost potential is recovered by such an unblocking process. It doesn't matter what metaphors you use -- you can call it 'defragging the hard drive of the soul' if you prefer that to childhood -- but there is a valuable past simplicity and energy to be recovered. We haven't exactly 'gone the wrong way', but on some levels we've certainly cut ourselves off to get where we are.
Sullen dismissal of magic, alchemy, and suchlike endeavours, as also 'pre' and regressive, compounds this issue. This just gets plain silly. For someone of Wilber's intellectual capabilities one would expect more research. How about the three books of Franz Bardon:
Initiation into HermeticsThe Practice of Magical EvocationKey to the True Kabbalah... a western hermetic magical training that's about as 'integral' as you can get, of mind, body and spirit equally, that results in a 'non-dual' realization (see Rawn Clark, online, for some information on the experience) -- at the end of only the first book? It teaches communion with and summoning of spirits and gods, and multiple energetic strategies, many based on Platonism, in a tradition going back to Ancient Egypt. Where does that fit, exactly, with the idea that the magic and mythic are necessarily regressive? Bardon's fifth book would actually have been about alchemy if the communists hadn't intervened, but that's a tradition at which Wilber can only sneer... this aspect of his thought badly needs work. (Search Bill Mistele, too, for the observations of someone who bravely posts his interactions with some of these spirits and energies.)
Puzzlingly, Wilber seems to know perfectly well that such trainings exist -- "Other traditions value these psychic and subtle phenomena," he says, in the voluminous back notes, "and cultivate them mightily, even to the point of mastery and explicit articulation (which is a wonderful contribution)", p. 637. So what's wrong with the word 'magic' as a description of them, and with a revival and integration of those traditions, which rationality has indeed attempted to revise out of existence? I've seen at least one person wanting to make an 'integral magick' by Wilberian standards -- search 'Kaidevis' -- but personally I worry about the conformism that implies.
Likewise with mythology. Wilber wants gods only as evolvable-towards in the future, and Jungian archetypes, along with all mythic deity, as shadow play from the past. He genuinely seems to think animism is equivalent to kindergarten-age oversimplifications of identity and environment. Actually, the gods don't stand within time, and archetypes have universality because of their age-old links to the astral ('psychic') and succeeding levels, which are temporally non-linear and thus not exactly in the developmental past. But Wilber twists himself into real knots over this. Ancient and modern magicians do see a divinized cosmos rather than a foolishly egocentric one, but he hasn't grasped the livingness of that yet. (Have a look at p.135 of
A Century of Spells and ask yourself what Wilber would make of that procedure.) So he can't see ancient gods that way either; even the idea of them as living 'omega points' for natural and cultural processes hasn't occurred to him apparently. Animism, to him, is a mistake and nothing more.
Read more ›
