Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy (Paperback)

Standing in the middle of a room called reality, Wilber sees four corners--the subjective ("I"), objective ("It"), intersubjective ("We"), and interobjective ("Its")--and realizes the obvious: the world is not constructed as strictly "objective" and material, nor purely "subjective" and mental, nor the plurals of those, but somehow _all of them at once_. Reality has four corners to it (or, for simplicity's sake, three dimensions: subjective, cultural, and objective; or I, We, and It; or first-person, second-person, and third-person aspects), and none of these corners can be simply "reduced" to, or derived from, any other. All four corners of reality arise together, along with a single universal room, and while they are indeed irreducible to each other, they are all mutually determining, inseparable, and incessantly interacting. Thus, standing in the middle of this Kosmic room, Wilber gives consciousness its due, permitting it to roam freely about the room and saving it, so to speak, from the immemorial punishment of standing in a particular corner while its parents decided what to do with their problematic child.

The mysteries that Wilber's model solves are numerous. When the four-quadrant model is coupled with the traditional spiritual insight called the "Great Chain of Being"--which sees reality as a multidimensional spectrum of being and knowing, ranging from matter to life to mind to soul to spirit--the human "self" finally regains the complexity that everyone naturally intuits, but few psychological and spiritual systems acknowledge. Wilber gives the "self-system" continuum, stretching from most fundamental ("proximate") to least fundamental ("distal"), as: (1) "I-I" (Spirit, God, pure Consciousness, true Self); (2) "I" (ego, individual self); (3) "me" (aspects of oneself seen objectively, such as, for the average adult, her physical body); and (4) "mine" (external possessions and associations that define oneself). In the evolution of the "overall self," the "I" at one stage becomes the "me" at the next, transcending and including lower levels of reality, and this process opens consciousness to increasingly integral vistas. As Wilber explains: "[W]hat you are identified with (or embedded in) at one stage of development (and what you therefore experience very intimately as an `I') tends to become transcended, or disidentified with, or de-embedded at the next, so you can see it more objectively, with some distance and detachment. In other words, the _subject_ of one stage becomes an _object_ of the next" (p. 34). And when one reaches a level of _absolute_ transcendence, wherein _all_ things, including the sense of "I," become objects in awareness, then one opens to the mystical realization of enlightenment, which Wilber devotes considerable attention to (making this book worthwhile reading for even those spiritually-inclined people who wouldn't normally read psychology or transpersonal psychology texts). The fluid progression of the overall self through these increasing levels of consciousness, and also through the different _lines_ of these levels (such as the spiritual-development line, as well as the cognitive, moral, affective, interpersonal, worldview, empathic lines, et al.) forms the backbone of the treatise, with everything else ultimately related to this evolutionary process.

Just as significant is a remarkable chapter (and its footnotes) in which Wilber explains how the mind and brain can finally unite--first meeting each other with the conceptual understanding that inside and outside, subject and object, are two mutually-arising corners of the Kosmic room, as irreducible to each other as two sides of a coin, and then embracing each other in the "All is Spirit" vision revealed when consciousness develops to the level of perfect nondual enlightenment.

A full summary of this book and its merits would likely be wordier than the very concise text itself, but just to give a hint of what's explored within, here is a list of some more of the topics covered: the history of psychology, the perennial philosophy, the nature of holons and holarchies, the types of mysticism (psychic, subtle, causal, nondual), the types of spirituality (translative and transformative), the types of spiritual experience (peak, plateau, and permanent adaptation), the meme scheme of _Spiral Dynamics_ and ample discussions of other research, the pathologies that can be encountered on each level of development, a brief history of sociocultural evolution, the relation of transitory states of consciousness and stable structures of consciousness, the distinction between cultural-specific surface structures and universal deep structures, the fallacies of scientific materialism, the relations of the ego, the soul, and the Witness (or Spirit), and plenty of charts and figures to help make sense of it all.

Surprisingly, this book holds together extremely well, and it isn't nearly as complicated as the above summary might lead one to suspect. _Integral Psychology_ is just a model, a framework, around which Wilber hopes future investigations might follow. It isn't meant to be fully fleshed out and comprehensive, but for what it does explain--for what it tentatively integrates--it's more than well worth the consideration of anyone interested in the nature of mind and spiritual development. Truly, the utterly liberating sanity and clarity of this work cannot be overstated. From Aurobindo in the East to Piaget in the West, nearly every tenable analysis of the nature of consciousness adds a brick to this, the foundation of an edifice that, in coming years, can only help to restore meaning and sanity to the life of any self fortunate enough to walk its halls.

To give a taste of his work, I'll quote a passage from Integral Psychology that speaks to the positivistic predilection for eschewing all things non-quantifiable:

"The bleakness of modern scientific proclamation is chilling. In that extraordinary journey from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, scientific materialism halted the journey at the very first stage, and proclaimed all subsequent developments to be nothing but arrangements of frisky dirt. Why this dirt would get up and eventually start writing poetry was not explained. Or rather, it was explained by dumb chance and dumb selection, as if two dumbs would make a Shakespeare. The sensorimotor realm was proclaimed the only real realm, and it soon came to pass that mental health would be defined as adaptation to that 'reality.' Any consciousness that saw anything other than matter was obviously hallucinating."

Being a condensed 300 page version of a yet to be published two volume textbook on psychology, this immanently respectful contribution to the storehouse of knowledge on what we call "psychology" (there is polemic, but it only answers unfair or misconstrued erroneous criticisms of his work) not only elucidates its history & strengths, weaknesses & schools, but, anchored to the etymology of the word 'psychology,' plumbs the depths of what all quarters (east and west, ancient and modern) have brought to the question: what is consciousness? Collecting "sturdy conclusions" - as Wilber calls them - of the valid insights that various thinkers have had throughout history and within the conceptual constellations of their various schools of thought, Wilber tackles the idea of what therefore are Integral approaches to healing, to therapy; & true to his form, informs us of not only what the various schools positively contribute to this effort (& what we can do without) but what an Integral approach to psychology might entail and how to implement this approach.

Reading this volume - heavily end-noted for those who want to pursue the spectrum of scholarship that Wilber has examined for this book - will definitely bolster anyone's novice, veteran or professional interest in the ideas of what knowing is, how knowing works and how we can cull the resources of the history of the effort to know knowing so as to further what we know (& expand our active repertoire of how we know), and how we can use this study of the psyche, of consciousness, to heal ourselves (& others); so that we can become better, if not more conceptually ordered, people - at least as regards the idea of what psychology is.

Agree or disagree with Wilber - his method or his conclusions - he is not someone that you can ignore without peril to your own knowing. I can think of no one else who is as perceptively and unrelentingly, book by book, disclosing the nature of, again borrowing from what was his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness. No matter what your particular area of concern, or if your concern is the entire realm of the various areas & forms of knowing, Wilber has insights to impart that you will find merit your careful and considered attention. I suspect Integral Psychology is a volume you will read several times, and with much enthusiasm.