Considerable mileage from one series of lectures… Ken Wilber’s Kosmic Consciousness
Having read a few items by Ken Wilber over the last few years, I feel that it is now sensible to write a little on this unusual man. Ken Wilber might consider himself to be a philosopher or simply a writer. He is both of these, he might also be described as an espouser of a spiritual creed based upon comparative religion and textual analysis. He has produced many books which present an unusual “integral” approach to matters such as life, law and consciousness.
Ken Wilber is controversial and provocative; this is evident throughout his writing. In ‘the Spectrum of Consciousness’, for example, he elaborates a system of ever more exalted states of being. Wilber bares a startling resemblance to William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, owing to the similarity of their methods. Both authors use textual analysis to lay out a system of increasing levels of happiness. Wilber’s levels are marked by ever increasing sizes of self interest. Low levels, for example, see themselves as single individuals in a place in space and time. These individuals only need to look after themselves and no one else. Wilber then goes on to say that if you look at important literary thinkers and indeed one’s own experience, you will see that you can define yourself interest as what is good for you, your family and friends. The next stage, is to see your self interest as the good of your country and even your world. In its final stages, the good of the individual loops back to a union with what the individual sees as divine. Wilber argues that many religions, most particularly the Abramic ones, see God and the individual as separate. Break this pattern, Wilber argues, and one has access to states so exquisite that the effort that goes into acquiring them is more than repaid. Wilber then uses various texts to suggest that if God is infinite the idea of you not being God is ridiculous; it is not possible to separate the creator and the creation: they are necessarily the same thing.
In a recent series of Interviews, Ken Wilber outlines his ideas further by bringing “the Spectrum of Consciousness” into a wider context based upon the assumption that ‘nobody is completely wrong in what they say and write’. From this point, Wilber attempts to slot various groups into a coherent framework suggesting a model that resembles Gartner’s developmental lines. He advocates perhaps 7 separate, but occasionally overlapping, strands to an individual’s state of being. Included in these categories are such topics as: bodily intelligence, morality and cultural perspective. Moral development may be considered advanced at the same time as one’s bodily intelligence (how to perform gymnastics) may be relatively low. Wilber then goes on to argue that the most virtuous system of personal development is first, to accept yourself as you are, then to choose a specific subset of areas to work on; whilst at the same time maintaining a reasonably high perspective on all of the other levels. He believes that whilst it is nice to have the highest level on all facets, at a practical level it is not realistic to achieve this in real life at society’s level of being.
Wilber identifies several stages in the history of societies. Resembling the spectrum, he suggests that societies have their own evolution which can be marked by distinct stages including: mythic, traditional, modern and post-modern. Mythic, for example, encompasses societies which define themselves in terms of their myths which includes the Ancient Greeks. The idea here is that human agents, by themselves are relatively powerless to change the nature of the world, but outside agents such as Gods can change the world. Whilst this may be true, a serious limitation of this statement is that, of course, we have no way of knowing if this is true: since we cannot truly enter into the mind of Ancient Greeks. He then identifies other societies, or groups of people within society as traditional, meaning that they value above all else their membership of a particular nation or kinship group. Modern and post-modern come about when societies industrialise as at this time, women and men have greater levels of equality. In post-modern a sense of moral relativism creeps in, so that people from one nation find it abhorrent to impose their ideas of right and wrong on another people. Wilber’s final stage is the Integral Level, at which time society accepts certain values as worthwhile regardless of the culture or nation saying them. His system presents a coherent framework which certainly has merit.
Taken as a whole, Wilber presents an all encompassing model. It certainly has provided me with food for thought. I will observe, however, that he might have talked at greater length about how we know what we know. Although he uses textual analysis, some sense of how it is possible to know through this method would have increased the veracity of his exegesis. A few more words on why scientific studies may be limited would have strengthened his argument perhaps talking about the difficulty of replicating certain internal experiences. Finally, he could have talked about epistemology rather than implying, but never stating directly, that is by feeling that we select the arguments we find most convincing.
Still, Wilber presents an ambitious framework that is well worth reading. Though individual details may not be right, his overall suggestions appear sound enough. In particular the argument that individual’s are never totally wrong squares well with our contemporary mores. In addition a framework that encompasses all philosophies around levels of increasing perspective seems intuitively right.
