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Ken Wilber

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Kenneth Earl Wilber Jr. (born January 31, 1949, Oklahoma City, USA) is an American philosopher. His work focuses mainly on uniting science and religion with the experiences of meditators and mystics. Although he is considered a founder of the transpersonal school of psychology, he has since disassociated himself from it.

In 2000 Wilber founded the Integral Institute, a think-tank for studying issues of science and society in an integral way. He has been a pioneer in the development of Integral psychology and Integral politics.

Ideas

The Neo-perennial Philosophy

Wilber's major theoretical accomplishment has been to create what he calls the Neo-perennial Philosophy by integrating Aldous Huxley's Perennial Philosophy with a theory of spiritual evolution. Wilber's writings are an ultimately attempts to describe how spirit, or ineffable nondual awareness, changes through time.

Some (namely, the Croatian esoteric philosopher Arvan Harvat) have noted that attempting to integrate a thoroughly non-dual approach like Zen with an evolutionary view is ultimately impossible: if your model includes all possibility, how can it change? Wilber's response is that his theory is actually a 'rational reconstruction of a trans-rational state of consciousness'. In effect, Wilber concedes the ultimate futility—from a rational perspective—of his quest. His writings point beyond the rational to the mystical.

The Twenty Tenets

According to Wilber, all reality does not consist of matter, or energy, or processes. Instead, it consists of holons. A holon is something that is a whole and that is at the same time a part of a larger whole (it is a whole/part). Thus you are made of parts, like your heart, your brain, etc. Yet you are also a part of your society. Everything is a holon.

In his book Sex Ecology Spirituality: The Spirit of Evoution, Wilber outlines approximately twenty tenets [1] that characterize all holons. These tenets form the basis of Wilber's nondual model of consciousness.

AQAL

AQAL (pronounced aqual) is the core of Wilber's work. AQAL stands for All Quadrants, All Levels, but equally connotes All Lines, All States and All Types. Wilber's thesis is that, in order to give an inclusive, balanced and fair account--that is, an integral account--of anything, the account must be AQAL. Thus we must explain what Wilber means by Quadrants, Levels, Lines, States and Types.

Quadrants

Each holon has an interior perspective (an inside) and an exterior perspective (an outside). It also has a individual perspective and a collective (or plural) perspective. If you map these into quadrants, you have four quadrants, or dimensions: the interior individual, the exterior individual, the interior plural, and the exterior plural. Wilber sometimes calls these quadrants, referring to the chart, respectively, as upper-left (or UL), upper-right (UR), lower left (LL), and lower right (LR).

To give an example of how this works, we will look at four schools of thought that happen to fit into this model nicely. Freudian psychoanalysis, which interprets people's interior experinces, is an account of the interior individual dimension or quadrant. Skinner's behaviorism, which observes the apparent behavior of organisms, is an exterior individual account. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics is a school of thought that interprets the collective experiences of a society, and is thus an interior plural perspective. Economic theory examines the external behavior of a society.

Thus all four pursuits--psychoanalysis, behaviorism, philosophical hermeneutics and economics--offer complimentary, rather than contradictory, perspectives. It is possible for all to be correct, and necessary for a complete account of a holon. Wilber has integrated these four areas of knowledge through an acknowledgment of the four fundament dimensions of existence.

Lines, streams, or intelligences

Are you more highly developed in certain areas than in others? According to Wilber, all holons have multiple lines of development, or intelligences. According to Wilber, over two dozen have been observed. They include cognitive, ethical, kinesthetic, emotional, musical, spatial, logical-mathematical, etc. One can be highly cognitively developed (cerebrally smart) without being highly morally developed, and so forth.

Levels or stages

The concept of levels follows closely on the concept of lines of development. The more highly developed you are in a particular line, the higher level you are at in that line. Generally speaking, these levels are numbered one through ten. However, within each line of development, the levels have more specific terms. For instance, the levels in the cognitive line are as follows: instinctual, tribal, egoistic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, integral, holistic, psychic, subtle, causal, nondual.

States

States of consciousness include: waking, dreaming, and deep dreamless sleep and nondual. In the mystical traditions of which Wilber is a part, these four states correspond to: gross, subtle, causal, and nondual. Thus it is (logically) possible for someone at a low cognitive level—a newborn, for instance--to have an advanced mystical state. Whether this in fact does happen, however, is a matter for cognitive psychologists to take up.

Types

These are valid disctions that are not covered under Wilber’s other dimensions. masculine/feminine, introvert/extrovert, the eight Enneagram categories, and Jung’s archetypes, among innumerable others, are all types in Wilber's schema. Wilber makes types part of his model in order to point out that these distinctions are different from, and in addition to the already mentioned distictions: quadrants, lines, levels and states.

Influences

Wilber's conception of the Perennial Philosophy is influenced by the post-metaphysical, non-dual mysticism of Advaita Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, Nagarjuna, Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, and Ramana Maharshi.

Wilber's conception of spiritual evolution or psychological development is typified by Aurobindo, the Great chain of being, German idealism and by developmental psychologies like those of Jean Piaget, Abraham Maslow, Erik Erikson, Lawrence Kohlberg, Howard Gardner, Clare W. Graves, Robert Kegan and Spiral Dynamics.

Wilber's other major influences include: Tibetan Buddhism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jean Gebser, and Erich Jantsch. He is conversant with the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Jürgen Habermas.

Wilber has in turn influenced scores of new age and religious writers. His works have also been read by several musicians, including Stuart Davis, Ed Kowalczyk, and Billy Corgan.

Despite the popularity of Wilber's books among the public and the rigor of his writing, he has little or no recognition in mainstream academic philosophical circles and few, if any, academics would call him a "major contemporary thinker". This is undoubtedly due to the mystical aspects of his work, and his association with the New Age movement.

Wilber's Five Phases

Wilber himself identifies five phases [2] in the evolution of his ideas. According to Wilber, subsequent phases do not negate earlier phases, but transcend-and-include earlier phases, incorporating them into a deeper and more integrated whole.

Quotations

"In other words, all of my books are lies. They are simply maps of a territory, shadows of a reality, gray symbols dragging their bellies across the dead page, suffocated signs full of muffled sound and faded glory, signifying absolutely nothing. And it is the nothing, the Mystery, the Emptiness alone that needs to be realized: not known but felt, not thought but breathed, not an object but an atmosphere, not a lesson but a life." ―"Foreword", in Frank Visser's Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion, 2000
"I have one major rule: everybody is right. More specifically, everybody—including me—has some important pieces of the truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace." ―"Introduction", Collected Works of Ken Wilber, vol. VIII, p. 49

Bibliography

  • The Spectrum of Consciousness, 1977
  • No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth, 1979
  • The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development, 1980
  • Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution, 1981
  • The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science, 1982
  • A Sociable God: A Brief Introduction to a Transcendental Sociology, 1983
  • Eye to Eye: The Quest for the New Paradigm, 1984
  • Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists
  • Transformations of Consciousness: Conventional and Contemplative Perspectives on Development (co-authors: Jack Engler, Daniel Brown), 1886
  • Spiritual Choices: The Problem of Recognizing Authentic Paths to inner Transformation (co-authors: Dick Anthony, Bruce Ecker), 1987
  • Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life of Treya Killam Wilber, 1991
  • Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, 1995
  • A Brief History of Everything, 1996
  • The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad, 1997
  • The Essential Ken Wilber: An Introductory Reader, 1998
  • The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion, 1998
  • One Taste: The Journals of Ken Wilber, 1999
  • Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy, 2000
  • A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality, 2000
  • Speaking of Everything (2 hour audio interview recording), 2001
  • Boomeritis: A Novel That Will Set You Free, 2002
  • Kosmic Consciousness (12 hour audio interview recording), 2003

External links

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