Barbelith Underground > Switchboard > Consensus Reality

Oh right nobody ever seems to have heard of this guy which I keep finding surprising so I thought I'd drop the name in to see if anybody had [and I did it twice which kind of makes it somewhat less snappy but there you go] Anyway Ken Wilber this very interesting, absolutely non-flaky transpersonal psychologist bod from the states who's kind of dreamt up a reaonably cedible unifying field theory for modern philosophy/spirituality which I am not even going to attempt to explain on this message board 'cos I'll be here all night and I probably won't make a very good job of it. The pertinant part of KW here is his concept of post rational spirituality [nb spirituality is very clearly differentiated from the power systems and mediation of experience by a priesthood that is religion] which has obliquely popped up on this thread a couple of times. Ken's take on it is the idea that there are level of human developement that have been documented reaonably well by freud and in a sense marx but that this is a partial understanding of the potential growth process which can be seen in both the individual and the species. Essentially he sort of welds freud onto buddhism [suggesting that freudian interepretations of meditative experience as schizophrenic interludes of no value, is wide of the mark.] His central thesis is that we are evolving. Essentially human developement such as the stages a baby goes through in understanding itself in relaton to the world or a child when s/he reaches an early understanding of death can be mapped onto developement of the species [major changes like developing a sense of time that goes beyond day and night or the seasons. developing the notion of the ego and the individual, which happened comparatively recently] Everybody still following me? Good. The post rational bit is the bit that comes after post modernisim where nothing can really be said to be ultimately true and existentialism where you sort of know there is nothing except you in the world. It's the point where everything is explicable. It's where you follow the newtonian/cartesian paradigm to it's logical conclusion and realise the map is a reflection of the map maker that rationality can never explain the workings of the spirit and that a world that leaves that out of the equation ain't worth living in and that we cannot really understand anything about the psyche with the approach we have and we are aware of all the implications of the quantuum paradigm without having thoroughly rewritten human experience. At a personal level post rational spirituality is a non collective individual experience, as opposed to prerational spirituality that is about collapsing back into a pre egoic collective state eg nazism. The experience occurs after an understanding of selfhood and its' inherent despair from which one may progress to transcndance of the ego rather than the collapse that it may superficially appear to resemble. Reading this back I realise the impossibility of in any way summarising what this guy has to say. He's a bit like Fritjof Kapra but somewhat bigger and brighter [FK gets a bit of a dissing I'm afraid] and I'm sort of pleased no one's really heard of him although he's quite big on the continent where they are more into humanistic philosophers, [apparently] 'cos there really isn't anyone else with ideas like these and he's is going to make a big impact when he finally arrives. Key him into google and you get a bit up about him, oh and he's name checked in the Invisibles third volume. In terms of books Grace and Grit, about the death of his wife from cancer or A Brief History of Everything are good places to start I haven't read his new one Boomeritis but I have no doubt it's up to snuff and touts itself as another easy entry point to his ideas.

Consensus Reality - Religions