APPENDIX C
I noted in chapter 7 that with the triumph of scientific materialism, modernity found it convenient to trivialize or ignore the metaphysical teachings of the wisdom traditions. In his writings, Ken Wilber calls this great repudiation of the past “the disaster of modernity.” To his credit, Wilber attempts to navigate from there to a new framework that transcends both the modern and postmodern critiques of metaphysics but still enshrines their essential achievements. In addition, he reframes the traditional teachings of the world’s cultures—selecting from them the ideas that he considers to have universal import—and incorporates them into his Integral Map along with the leading ideas of modernity and postmodernity that he finds worth preserving.
In Wilber’s first take on this ambitious reconstruction project, he turned to what Aldous Huxley called perennialism, the notion of a grand hierarchy of universal levels of existence also known as the Great Chain of Being—perennial because it can be detected in almost all traditions worldwide. According to this vision, reality is composed of various nested levels or stages of existence, ranging upward from body to mind to soul to spirit. The Great Chain also referred to living beings, ranging from inanimate matter to plant and animal life, to humans, then to an angelic hierarchy, then extending up to God at the apex. But perhaps the better metaphor, says Wilber, is that of a “Great Nest.” Each level in the Great Nest is qualitatively different from the previous one, yet each senior dimension transcends but always includes (or nests) its juniors. For example, at the smallest scale, atoms are part of molecules, which in turn comprise cells, which comprise tissues, all of which is transcended and included in organs of the body, then on to the entire person, and so on, progressing on up to nested levels of group consciousness and finally to global culture. One simplified version of nesting at a larger scale ranges from physiosphere to biosphere to noosphere, each sphere transcending and including the previous one.
Later in his work, Wilber built upon the traditional divinization teachings of the East and West in a similar way. For example, in Transformations of Consciousness (Shambhala, 1986), Wilber and his coauthors compare the theosis teachings of Eastern Orthodox Christianity with similar teachings about levels of consciousness in Islam and Eastern religions. In increasingly refined versions of this work ever since then, Wilber has extended the integral project into sophisticated new descriptions of human development and spirituality that I cover in chapters 7 and 9.
We noted in chapters 5 and 6 that with regard to human nature, many traditions present only two levels (the “body and soul” of substance dualism, which are not necessarily nested). We also saw that some monistic and nondual traditions made no hard distinctions at all between levels and substances. But we’ve also seen that more advanced esoteric systems in the past have distinguished soul from spirit.
Wilber’s own early system followed Sri Aurobindo’s and other sophisticated maps that designate up to a dozen levels or more in the spectrum of consciousness and self. In an effort to simplify, Wilber borrowed terminology from Vedanta and Buddhism, describing the progression of stages of consciousness as extending from gross to psychic to subtle to causal to nondual. These “sheaths” stand for increasingly rarefied levels in the spectrum of ontologically real energetic substances—or a gradation of frequencies, as some might say.
He depicts the ultimate disappearance of the self into a blissful nondual state as the highest achievement of the practitioner. I see this state as comparable to attaining the first level of circle-making (the highest level) as described in chapter 4. Along this line, in Integral Psychology (2001), he describes what might be thought of as Thought Adjuster communication: “Looking deep within the mind, in the very most interior part of the self, when the mind becomes very, very quiet, and one listens very carefully, in that infinite Silence, the soul begins to whisper, and its feather-soft voice takes one far beyond what the mind could ever imagine. . . . In its gentle whisperings, there are the faintest hints of infinite love.”143
In a related passage, he adopts the traditional Platonic stance that the soul is a static substance: “There is a timeless nature about the soul that becomes perfectly obvious and unmistakable: one actually begins to ‘taste’ the immortality of the soul, to intuit that the soul is to some extent above time, above history, above life and death.”144
Wilber’s ideas in this “classic” period of his thought diverge from the Urantian understanding of the evolving soul. In the latter, progression depends on human choices and actions in the world. Wilber’s view of reincarnation is especially revealing in this connection. At first, he sharply distinguishes the soul as understood by the wisdom traditions from the popular belief in reincarnation. In the classical view, the soul, cannot (according to Wilber) be a container of memories experienced in one’s current or past lives. In the world’s great traditions, he said, the soul had only two defining characteristics. First, it was regarded as “the repository of one’s ‘virtue’ (or lack of it)—that is, of one’s karma, good and bad.” Second, the soul was a measure “of one’s ‘strength’ of awareness, one’s capacity to witness the phenomenal world without attachment or aversion.”145
One can see the possible Buddhist bias in these characterizations. In particular, Wilber considered the memories of one’s life to be strictly a phenomenon of mind, not soul. The upshot, in his view, is that any past life memory refers to some other phenomenon, not memories in the personal soul. Wilber has never been able to align himself with the idea that the worthy events of human experience are memorialized in and as the soul.
In his more recent thought, beginning with Integral Spirituality (2006), he dispenses with the idea of pre-given ontological soul or spirit, an approach adopted from postmodern theory that he calls the post-metaphysical stance.146 Drawing insights from what postmodern philosophers call the myth of the given, Wilber now steers around the question of ontology as being almost meaningless in a multiperspectival universe. There are no absolutely real and preexisting entities such as souls or spirits or levels of consciousness such as psychic, subtle, and causal, he declares. When we enact a given “world-space,” we generate perceptions of different phenomena that may arise in that zone and which appear to exist, but such perceptions are only possible or plausible because we inhabit and act from that particular “perspectival zone.” Writes Wilber: “[There is] no pre-given world, but simply a series of worlds that come into being (or co-emerge, or are tetra-enacted) with different orders of consciousness.”147
Wilber concludes his intricate argument in Integral Spirituality by calling for the “integralizing” of the world’s religions, whereby they become transformational and inspirational “conveyor belts” of evolutionary progress. The intent of this great educational project would be to foster the growth of the world’s peoples through the various quadrants, lines, states, and levels of consciousness development in ways that are compatible with the best concepts, models, and scriptures of their traditions. He further argues that a genuine “evolutionary enlightenment” of humankind becomes possible if planetary civilization finds a way to honor all perspectives, all religious traditions, and all levels of consciousness, through the method of transcending and including the best facts, knowledge, and insights from each. And Wilber has pursued this worthy endeavor of catalyzing the integralization of the world religions ever since, through his more recent books and through the Integral Institute and its associated website, www.IntegralLife.com.
143 Collected Works of Ken Wilber, vol. 4 (Shambhala, 1999) p. 421.
144 Ibid., p. 538.
145 Ibid.
146 See Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World by Ken Wilber (Integral Books/Shambhala, 2006).
147 Ibid., p. 260.