This volume continues to satisfy. Wilber continues to answer many of the questions my tiny mind had been keeping locked away simply because I was incapable of finding my own answers. I really love his writing style (even if he loses me at times) but his excitement at the story he is telling and his joy at having an opportunity to tell it leaps from the page. I recognise that excitement.
Some quotable bits:
- sometimes the pain that comes from peak experiencing a higher state that is already free of the particular addiction, and then being plunged back into the lower state, generating a profound sense of loss and suffering. [pg99]
- The result is that they become closed off to more and more parts of the world, which can actually lead to a regression to amber or fundamentalism or absolutism. They become both deep mystics and narrow fundamentalists at the same time. [pg118]
- Consequently, even advanced meditators and spiritual teachers are often haunted by psychopathology, as their shadows chase them all the way to Enlightenment and back, leaving roadkill all along the way. [pg119]
- the dominant mode of discourse is following the dominant monads of the leading edge of certain groups of individuals in that society, and those dominant monads definitely unfold in stages; and true also that individuals are molded by whatever stages/cycles the collective itself might be going through (e.g. Marx, Lenski). But once a society has developed to a particular level,then groups in that society do not have to repeat those stages, but individuals do.[pg152, author's italics]
- In the great developmental unfolding from egocentric to ethnocentric to world centric and higher, 70% of the world’s population have not yet stably made it to worldcentric, postconventional levels of development. “Nazis” is simply is simply an extreme way to state this fact. But whether those are fundamentalist Southern Baptists in Georgia, Shin Buddhists in Kyoto, Al-Qaeda Muslims in Iran, or fundamentalist Marxists in China, they represent the vast majority of the world’s population in terms of vertical development. And please, no politically correct tsk-tsking here. I’m talking about some of my best friends and most of my family (certainly all of my cousins. [pg179]
- This vertical-level clash is the single greatest source of friction, in the interior quadrants, that is now present in the world’s psychograph. These great tectonic plates (red, amber, orange) are slamming into each other with a ferocious impact, the the earthquakes that are resulting, and will continue to result, are killing thousands of human beings around the planet. [pg180]
