Beyond Ken Wilber's bounded reality

I've got mixed feelings about Ken Wilber.

Sometimes he strikes me as a self-absorbed guy who's fervently marketing his Integral Philosophy as the answer to every question, even though it strikes me as a conceptual exercise without much reality meat behind it.

Then I read something Wilber has written and resonate with it. (A sampling of my divided opinions toward Wilber is here, here, and here.)

I wasn't planning to renew my subscription to "What Is Enlightenment?" when the magazine changed it's question mark spots and became EnlightenNext, an even more brazen vanity massager for Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen -- who call themselves the "guru" (Cohen) and the "pandit" (Wilber).

But the sample issue that came in the mail had an interesting guru-pandit dialogue on "The Interdynamics of Culture + Consciousness." This is an area where Wilber makes pretty good sense.

When it comes to consciousness, we can talk about absolute consciousness and we can talk about relative consciousness... so absolute consciousness is indeed pure consciousness. It's not a thing; it's not an object; it's not a mist. If you have to think about it at all, it's a vast open emptiness in which all objects arise.

...But that's just the absolute component. What have become so important, as we have started to create an East-West integration, are the relative aspects of consciousness. And these relative aspects have to do with how you interpret that absolute experience of consciousness.

...So you can have a full-blown satori, or consciousness experience, but depending on where you are in this developmental scale, you'll interpret it according to different values.

You can interpret it in a magical, or egocentric, fashion: "I and I alone have this pure consciousness." You can interpret it in a mythic, or traditional, value structure, which is the next major stage, and believe that this experience is given just to one group, one people, or one chosen tribe.

And so on, with other stages providing the foundation for other interpretations.

Which leaves us with the crazy multiplicity of religions, each taking what likely is the same experience of love and connectedness with the cosmos, and framing it in a unique conceptual fashion.

Christians ascribe their uplifted feelings to Jesus. Followers of a mystical meditation system consider that the guru's grace is responsible. New Age types sense the presence of an angel or spirit guide working behind the scenes.

Wilber says:

The interpretation of a spiritual experience is as important, or more important, than the spiritual experience itself. That sounds kind of shocking at first, but the more you think it through, the more you realize it is exactly right on the money.

I believe Wilber is correct up to this point. But then he goes further: arguing that there is a highest and best way of interpreting spiritual experiences, and -- no big surprise -- it happens to be his very own Integral Philosophy.

The integral structure is the value structure that is basically the truest to the real nature of absolute consciousness.

Well, I doubt it.

How likely is it that the universe, which Wilber likes to call Kosmos, is arranged or structured in exactly the fashion that a 21st century Homo sapiens named Ken Wilber has intellectualized it to be? Not very.

Of course, any description of How Things Really Are is going to fall short of how things really are. Words aren't reality. Nobody, including Wilber, seriously disagrees about that.

But some conceptual models come closer than others to reflecting the universe as it is (in contrast to how a human mind would like it to be, or imagines it to be). This is the goal of science: to describe as accurately as possible how the natural world works.

It's also the goal of Rolf Sattler, who emailed me recently. He said:

I would like to let you know that on my website www.beyondWilber.ca I published a book entitled Wilber’s AQAL Map and Beyond. In the first part of this book I discuss some of the most fundamental limitations of Wilber’s map, and in the second part I present a dynamic mandala that overcomes them.

Sattler is an interesting guy. For some (obvious) reason I like his silver-haired bearded appearance. He's a retired botany and biology professor who is very much into Taoism, Yoga, and such-ness.

His overview of why it's necessary to go beyond Wilber's model of the cosmos makes good sense to me.

Wilber loves organized hierarchies where things are neatly nestled in tidy relationships with other things. This may capture the mechanical aspect of the universe, but life, consciousness, and ultimate reality (whatever the heck it might be, or not be) seem much less amenable to Wilber's conceptualizing.

So Sattler's summary of his downloadable book strikes me as a better reflection of the cosmos, in all of its mysterious glory, than Wilber's often dry-as-dust model of quadrants, levels, holons, and whatnot.

I haven't done more than skim through the book. What I've read about Sattler's "mandala" approach to modeling reality sounds good, though.

Contemplating the mandala does not only provide insight into reality, the Kosmos, but also communion with it. As we become aware of the source in the empty center of the mandala, we can realize that this center is the center of the Kosmos and ourselves. Thus, the centers of the mandala, the Kosmos, and ourselves coincide—they are one center, not in a spatial or temporal sense, but in the sense of the unnamable mystery that pervades all existence. 

Contemplating the mandala can also be liberating in several ways: instead of being caught in only one meaning of each concept, we can move freely to other complementary meanings; instead of being caught in only one way of relating the circles of concepts, we can entertain other complementary relations; and instead of being caught only in the manifest world cut off from its source, the empty center, we can see everything in relations to the source which bestows sacredness on the Kosmos including ourselves. 

Comments

[radiohead]

Bravo Brian..."We're" off the personal bantering with your lost 30 years and almost angerly trying to convince and/or question a cult member about their rational and beliefs in a guru or any other B.S. You were, will and never be any more successfully than you would have been convinced me over my 30 years worshiping a bottle that I believed held the answers. Jack Daniels was a pretty good satiguru for me and look...we occupy a connected reality...two corks down a stream, let loose on this planet about the same time, miles apart at one time. I read that analogy somewhere.

This topic is a fabulous transition/addition from your recent "stuff". (Including Sex which always "sells" and is the epitome of relative consciousness). Never-the-less, relative consciousness is the ONLY consciousness available when a brain is in the way. Which also likely means Absolute Consciousness may not exist because we may not beyond this brain attached physical manifestation.

Can't wait to find out.

Happy Thanksgiving to all. There is a lot to be thankful for in a relative sense.

[Stuart]

Wilber wrote...
"When it comes to consciousness, we can talk about absolute consciousness and we can talk about relative consciousness..."

Yeah, with talking and thinking, we can create whatever type of ideas and distinctions that we like. It's like saying, "When it comes to people, we can talk about Good People who are headed to Heaven, and Bad People who are headed to Hell." Sure, we can think and talk that way. We MAKE these distinctions.

But our experience is before all these ideas. Just now, if you take a drink of coffee, is the taste Relative or Absolute? The experience is what it is, before thinking; "Relative" and "Absolute" etc etc are ideas superimposed on the original experience. ("Open your mouth, already a mistake.")

Wilber wrote...
"The integral structure is the value structure that is basically the truest to the real nature of absolute consciousness."

More ideas. The real nature can't be captured with any idea. We don't know what we are. "Consciousness" is a name for what we're experiencing right now; no thought-structure touches it.

> But some conceptual models come closer
> than others to reflecting the universe as
> it is (in contrast to how a human mind
> would like it to be, or imagines it to
> be). This is the goal of science: to
> describe as accurately as possible how the
> natural world works.

The goal of science depends on what the scientist wants. The success of science is in predicting what will happen... with a much much greater accuracy than any "spiritual" system acheives.

But it never tells us what true nature is. It's like gravity: science may predict very well what it will DO, but no one knows what it IS.

Just now experience is precisely what we've got. All these different interpretations come and go like clouds in the sky. "Simplicity" is putting down the ideas, and returning to the situation of this moment.

Stuart
http://stuart-randomthoughts.blogspot.com/
http://home.comcast.net/~sresnick2/booboo.htm

[Brian]

Stuart, good point about absolute and relative consciousness. I had the same thought, but forgot to mention it in the post. I understand what Wilber is getting at, or at least I believe I do, but your point is well taken.

When have we ever seen something called "absolute consciousness"? It does indeed seem to be a concept that's found in Buddhism and other faiths. I've been struck by the fact that Wilber has practiced Buddhism for a long time, and it just so happens that the cosmos is structured remarkably similarly to Buddhist notions.

Hmmmm? Makes me wonder how much of Wilber's cosmology is founded in reality, and how much in his own mind.

[Sebastian]

Hey there. I wonder alittle why no one takes in account that the sense of the integral theory lies also beyond spiritaul informing, it extends into every direction, revisioning all fields of knowledge, winding them up through bettering interdisciplinary methods of research, co-labo/ope-ration, and so on.

And

If you ..think that thinking is bad, you are identified with wanting to not think. You should not identify with anything concerning anything AT ALL, but stop to make that move(avoiding/contracting). That means, that you must not stop to make meaning, but you must stop to identify with the meaning YOU MAKE ANYWAY whithin relativity, duality, NOT stop being able to see it(avoinding/contracting)
. there is never nothing, and everything is, as relative and fading, as much being within the eternity happening right now.

All theories are holy, then, just like everything.

[Stuart]

Wilber wrote...
> The interpretation of a spiritual
> experience is as important, or more
> important, than the spiritual experience
> itself.

Does Wilber even realize that when he talks about "a spiritual experience," he's ALREADY making an interpretation? He's taking the memory of some experience, and attaching the idea of "spiritual" to it. It's incoherent to talk of "spiritual experience" without clarifying why you're making ideas of "this is spiritual, that's unspiritual."

Further... how can you talk about what's "important" without clarifying who it's important to, and why?

Stuart
http://stuart-randomthoughts.blogspot.com/

[Sebastian]

Hey Stuart, tricky boy.

(btw, to make things clear, that wich i am chooses to be, me as relative person, is taking part in the integral MOVING-Ment)

WIlber is aware. if you would read sth. you knew that to Wilber, there is no Un-Interpreted Data at all, the disussion of pure vs. uninterpreted in his perspective is flawed as whole, cause it believes in the myth of the (possibity of a) given.

So to discuss this like that makes no sense at all. Did you read anything by WIlber? The questions you pose are sense less because all you have to do is open a book(no, not integral vision) and read. then we can discuss that(furthering the spiraling), but to tell you things you can read by your self seems sense less to me.

[Mickey]

I agree with Sebastian, Stuart. Give Ken Wilber a little credit. He knows that our experience is before our ideas and that thought-structures don't touch Consciousness. He's a writer; he's going to try to write coherently about these things *anyway*. Whether he succeeds or not is of course up for debate.