A Brief History of Everything
Sex, Ecology and Spirituality
Ken Wilber wrote Sex, Ecology
and Spirituality in 1995 and followed the next year with a condensed and
more accessible version of the same ideas in A Brief History of Everything.
Weighing in at seven pounds and more than 800 pages, SES is his
scholarly magnum opus, replete with extensive quotations, attributions and
about 200 pages of endnotes.[1]
BHE, on the other hand, is 340 pages, written in an almost breezy,
conversational style, employing the dialogic of the author’s questions and
answers with himself, a device as old as Plato.
There is much—tremendously
much—food for thought in these books, and I am greatly impressed with Wilber’s
accomplishment. He has consumed a vast amount of information and synthesized it
into a developmental map of the grand process of cosmic, biological, human and
spiritual evolution. Based on my own moderately wide reading in psychology,
philosophy, spirituality and the natural sciences, I am prone to regard Wilber as
the best mapmaker who has ever walked the planet.[2]
But beyond his scholarly work of divine cartography, Wilber (according to his
own accounts and to his biographer, Frank Visser) appears to be a genuine
mystic who has experienced the highest stages of the vast spectrum of
consciousness which he so thoroughly describes and illustrates.
Where shall we begin to cover the
main points of a system that took Wilber himself a few hundred pages to
summarize? Let us start with a key term in Wilber’s model, holons—a concept
he borrowed from Arthur Koestler (Visser, 182). Wilber defines holons as
“wholes that are parts of other wholes, indefinitely. Whole atoms are parts of
molecules; whole molecules are parts of cells; whole cells are parts of
organisms, and so on. Each whole is simultaneously a part, a
whole/part, a holon
First off, I have trouble with
this definition of holons (“reality is composed, not of things nor processes”).
It appears to me that holons are, in fact, processes. As I see it, movement
(change) is built into every holon holon
Anyway, back to Wilber. The
backbone of his model is that reality is layered in a Great Chain of Being, and
that existence can be envisioned as a nested holarchy of “spheres” or “levels”
ranging from matter to life to mind to soul to God.[5]
Human development ascends through the spheres of the holarchy, both
individually (psychologically) and collectively (socio-culturally). In fact, Wilber
applies the same model of evolutionary stages to four quadrants of development:
the growth of 1) individuals 2) cultures 3) societies and 4) the physical realm
of nature. He goes into considerable detail showing how each of the stages in
these quadrants corresponds to analogous stages in the other three quadrants.
(This is Gregory Bateson’s theme of “the pattern that connects” forged into a
supreme vision.) If Wilber’s system had succeeded only in bringing together
into a sensible ordering the aloof cousins of psychology and spirituality, this
would have been a remarkable and important achievement. But he manages to chart
into one comprehensive model of corresponding levels nothing less than the
whole Kosmos, starting with atoms! That is, his system takes an in-depth
accounting of the specialized fields of anthropology, history, physics,
biology, psychology, philosophy and spirituality—and makes unified sense out of
the whole shebang.
The spectrum of consciousness is
made up of four major links, to which Wilber gives the same terminology as
Huston Smith: body, mind, soul and spirit. These divisions apply not only to
levels of experience, but to ontologically real dimensions (levels of reality).
Additionally, these levels, although present as structural potential in all
human beings, represent a series of increasing improbability of actual living
experience (Visser, 243). In light of this multi-dimensional view of reality
and human consciousness, Wilber strongly criticizes the prevailing Western
mindset of scientific materialism which dismisses anything that cannot be
measured empirically and thus remains blind to spiritual worlds beyond “simple
location.” Related to this, Wilber regards it is a mistake to try to collapse
spiritual experience and knowledge into physics, by using quantum physics and
systems theory to explain the psychic and higher realms.[6]
Yet unlike most New Age enthusiasts, Wilber does not toss out the baby with the
bathwater: He is a biochemist by training and an excellent interpreter of scientific
facts. Indeed, he dismisses New Age superstition and gullibility with the same passion
that he criticizes the “flatland” view of scientific materialism.
All holons have an inside and an
outside and also an individual and a collective aspect. Therefore, holons can
be analyzed in terms of Four Quadrants: interior-individual,
exterior-individual, interior-collective and exterior-collective. For example,
psychology and spirituality fall within the interior-individual quadrant.
Culture occupies the interior-collective quadrant, and society lies within the
exterior-collective quadrant. Material science runs through both the exterior-individual
and exterior-collective quadrants. Each of these quadrants has dozens of levels
of holons. For example, the exterior-individual quadrant charts this
progression of stages: atoms to molecules, prokaryotes, neuronal organisms,
neural cord, reptilian brain stem, limbic system, neocortex (triune brain),
complex neocortex, etc. These evolutionary stages correspond with the interior-individual
levels of prehension (atoms and molecules), irritability (prokayotes and
eukaryotes), sensation (neuronal organisms), perception (neural cord), impulse
(reptilian brain stem) and so on, through emotion, symbol use, concepts,
concrete operations, formal operations, vision-logic, and into the
transpersonal realms of psychic (nature mysticism), subtle (deity mysticism),
causal (formless mysticism) and non-dual (non-dual mysticism).[7]
My next paper on Wilber will focus exclusively on his twenty tenets that
describe the emergent, evolutionary path of holons.
It is to Wilber’s credit that he
invites criticism of his work in journals and online forums, and he publishes
monographs responding to his critics. More significantly, he critiques and
revises his own work. A good example is his change of view after the
publication of his first two books, The Spectrum of Consciousness and No
Boundaries. In these early work, Wilber subscribed to the vision of depth
psychology as originated by Carl Jung. The Swiss psychologist’s model of human
development can be summarized thus: The newborn is fused with the Self, the
Great Mother, and by a heroic process of individuation, slowly extricates
itself from the overarching presence of the all-absorbing oceanic Self. Once
the ego has been firmly established (usually in the second half of life), the
ego can then confront and reunify with the Self, only this time, the union will
be “mature” and conscious. The worldview of this path goes along with the
archetypal motif of “the Great Return.” This was Wilber’s own view when he
began writing in his early twenties, a phase he now labels Wilber 1 (he’s now
up to Wilber 4).
However, Wilber’s current vision is
diametrically opposed to Jung’s. In Wilber’s model, the newborn is fused with
the physical body and material world, not with the Self, for at this stage the
Self exists only as pure potential. The ego then develops through various
stages of growth and via this evolutionary progression, the Self awakens at
last. Wilber emphatically makes the point that one does not awaken to the Self
by retracing one’s journey back to the pre-personal (pre-rational,
pre-ego), but by continuing advance beyond the personal to the trans-personal
(trans-rational, trans-ego).
These two models can be contrasted
in this way: the Great Return model (of depth psychology) says that we move from
the Self to the ego, and eventually return to the Self. The path
describes a loop, and the rise of ego is seen as a step away from
the true Self. Wilber’s model (which he has called “height psychology”) says
that we move from the pre-personal through the ego and onward to
the Self. The Self is not behind us, waiting for our return; it is ahead of us,
waiting for our evolutionary advance.
Is this just a semantic play of no
real importance? Actually, it makes a big deal of difference, Wilber insists.
In the context of depth psychology (Jung, deep ecology, eco-feminism, etc.),
the fact that the ego (its archetype is the masculine Hero) has separated
itself from nature (the Great Mother, the Feminine) is seen as the cause of
environmental destruction and every other modern evil. Since in this view nature
contains (or is) the Self, we must go back to nature and the feminine. Accordingly,
this vision (which Wilber calls the “pre/trans fallacy”) feeds strongly into
the popular rejection of anything having to do with intellect and science. It is
the source of much sentimental, romantic and regressive anti-rationalism[8]
(Visser, 265-7). Wilber specifically criticizes both neo-Jungians and New Age
enthusiasts (Wiccans, etc.) as trying to “get back to” the Self—of confusing
experiences prior to the development of the rational ego with consciousness of
the Self.[9]
Wilber welcomes the fact that the
ego has differentiated itself from nature. Hooray for the rational mind! With
the advent of ego (in spite of its inherently grave dangers), Wilber says we are
one evolutionary step closer to the Self. In Wilber’s view, the feminine
is no more spiritual than the masculine (although he concedes that the
spiritual paths of men and women may emphasize different parts of the total
picture). “Men and women both have to undergo the difficult process of
development from pre-personal, body-bound consciousness via personal
ego-consciousness to the transpersonal, spiritual consciousness of the Self”
(Visser, 274). [10]
In conclusion, it should be clear
that Wilber (like Plotinus, Aurobindo and others before him)[11]
is a mystic, an intellectual, a scholar, a scientist and a grand synthesizer, who
has deep faith in the capacity of the human mind and soul. [12]
He opposes movements that denounce the rational mind and ego under the guise of
spirituality and seek salvation in the romanticism of returning to the magic
and myth of the pre-rational, pre-scientific past. It is not the rational mind
and science that need to be renounced, Wilber argues, but materialism, “which
reduces the multi-dimensional Kosmos made up of matter, life, soul and Spirit,
to the uni-dimensional cosmos of visible matter” (Visser 284). Wilber deftly
argues that materialism is itself a metaphysical point of view that in the
modern West has taken on the qualities of a fundamentalist religion. Wilber’s
view of reality is fundamentally optimistic, like the Dzogchen view of the
Great Natural Perfection. It provides a wonderful antidote not only to New Age
nonsense, but to the post-modern nihilism, narcissism and scientific
materialism that poses as truth at virtually every hall of academia in the
Western world.
Works Cited
Visser, Frank. Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion. Albany , NY
Wilber, Ken. Sex, Ecology and Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Boston
Publications, 1995.
--- A Brief History of Everything. Boston
[1] It is
the first book in a planned “Kosmos Trilogy.” I read online that he has just
finished the third book. He has not yet begun the second book in the series.
[2] Of
course, a map is only a map; it’s not the territory itself. I recently met with
a small group of Wilber aficionados. One of them had read every Wilber
book and taken an extensive online course offered by his Integral Institute. It
was clear to me that she had memorized his map in detail—and that this abstract
knowledge was somehow satisfying to her. (Who needs the tofu? Just eat the
menu!) The difference between her and Wilber is that he says when he was
seeking spiritual reality his quest felt for him like a matter of life and
death. Such longing can never be fulfilled by a map, no matter how
comprehensive and accurate.
[3] Wilber
employs the Greek spelling to indicate the multidimensional Kosmos, in contrast
to materialist notions of a one-dimensional (nature-only) cosmos.
[4]
According to kinetic molecular theory, “heat” can be described in terms of
molecular motion. The more energetic the motion of molecules in any substance,
the higher is its temperature. At a theoretical chill called “Absolute Zero”
(zero on the Kelvin scale), all molecular motion would cease. The frozen
universe would become a perfectly still sea, devoid of temperature and all
energy—what scientists call “heat death.” Today’s most popular cosmological
theory is that the universe will come to its end in exactly this way! All
energy will run down via entropy (Second Law of Thermodynamics) and the world
will end, “not with a bang, but with a whimper.” The Goddess has reassured me
personally that this will never happen, because She doesn’t intend to sit still
for an instant, let alone cool down and die. However, this intuition is a bit
difficult to translate into scientific jargon.
[5]
Obviously, this is not a new idea (cf. Trika Shaivism, Jacob’s Ladder, Sri
Aurobindo, etc.). However, the analytical detail, depth and order brought to
far-reaching fields of specialized knowledge has not been seen before Wilber.
[6] Wilber
is no fan of books such as The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu-Li
Masters. A friend of mine labels such attempts to make the spiritual realms
more acceptable to hard science, “physics envy.”
[7] Alas,
the reader suffers here for lack of a visual chart.
[8] Peruse
the Rainbow Connection store for a grand tour of New Age pseudo-science and the
romanticizing of ancient or indigenous cultures.
[9]
Interestingly, one of the few points that Jung and Wilber agree on is the
importance of a strongly developed ego.
[10] This
resonates with the evolutionary models of Plotinus, Sri Aurobindo, Da Avabhasa,
Andrew Cohen, Theosophy, etc.
[11] This
list includes Wilber’s brilliant contemporary, Lex Hixon, who died of cancer at
age 53.
[12] Wilber
has written 25 books in the past 20 years, even though he spent four years
without writing while he cared for his dying wife, Treya. He made up for it by
publishing four books the year after she died! He manages to carry out his
prolific research and writing while suffering from a chronic viral illness
called RNase Syndrone that robs him of energy (it is similar to “chronic
fatigue” syndrome). The disease lays him out in bed for six months out of the
year and occasionally sends him to the hospital.
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