I’m afraid all the other books that I’m reading at present are being put on hold for Ken Wilber’s latest offering. It arrived a few days back and I’m starting with the appendix. Quite normal for one of Wilber’s. Appendix II is picking apart, bit by bit, everything I ever thought I knew about Metaphysics. And most of it makes perfect sense to me.
Central to the book is the fact that Wilber has managed to gather together teachers from most of the world’s religious belief systems and has got them comparing notes. Not in any attempt to destroy them but so that one can learn from the other, deepening their own sense of their particular path, but more importantly dispelling the myth of the one true church. In addition they are trying to make this common understanding of what it means to be spiritual, enlightened, or whatever, available to all interested. It is the logical add-on to Integral Psychology, which was also a great read.
There is, of course, a massive website associated with this effort and as is increasingly becoming the norm, a cost for access – $10 per month. I understand that these things are expensive to maintain but the new member free access is only a month. I’ll pass on that until I finish the book. There is still something about having the book in the hands, highlighting stuff and writing notes in the margins.
Wilber is a fan of Spiral Dynamics and the levels of SD form the Altitude aspect of is world map with the addition of two more levels and a slight change in the colour coding. His theory on the Integral Approach – AQAL All Quadrants, All Levels seems to make a lot of sense to me but I will certainly not attempt to explain it here. Check out the web for people more qualified than míse. But if you want to know where we really do go from here, then the Integral Approach will be part of it.
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All the appendices are now read and I’m still impressed with this book. I have had to go back to Integral Psychology to refresh my understanding of many of the terms and concepts but the effort is well rewarded. A particular challenge has been my own particular spiritual practice (a kind of modified Theosophy taught by Alice Bailey through the Arcane School) and trying to see where it fits in, if at all, with this integral model. It is good that my spiritual practice is been challenged in this way otherwise it just ends up as a religion or worse a cult.
One, really off the cuff, comment in a page note has struck a cord with me in a big way in that I suppose it expressed an idea that had been with me for some while. I have been reading lots of books over the years but found that many of them had really made their point in the first few chapters. The rest was just a redoing of the idea to make it book-size. It would have gotten the point across much easier and cheaper in a booklet. Never mind all the follow ups and add ons. Wilber makes the point when discussing Don Beck and Spiral Dynamics that it is impossible to have an academic conversation with someone whose livelihood depends on their particular model of reality. So you need to be careful when an author or “trainer” starts touring with their particular roadshow. I’m thinking here of Stephen Covey (7 and 8th Habits), Neal Donald Walsch (Conversations With God series which I love), and others. I suspect they get caught up in the demand for their stuff and if you are trying to reach out to people and you got to make a living, you end up choosing what you believe will help people.
For a really strong critque of these types of touring shows I recommend SHAM (Self-Help & Actualization Movement) by Steve Salerno. It’s subtitle says it all: How the gurus of the self-help movement make us helpless. Salerno is on a bit of a tirade himself but he makes some very valid points. He did manage to press some of my own buttons, as does Wilber, but any true understanding of this thing called Life must be consistant and open to challenge. And this is what is so important about what Wilber and his institute are trying to do. They are pointing out that there is no single or simple way. Life is complex, very complex. There is no simple solution. Bush and the Republican part in the US maybe (maybe?) realise that now in relation to Iraq. Our own government here in Ireland has yet to realise that but thank God they have no real power in the world.
