Letters to the Editor
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Exactly
"Please feel free to explain the pre/trans fallacy because I don't see it."
Chad, that's exactly right... "You" don't "see" it.
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will warner
You say, "...we reductionists understand that everyone, especially ourselves, will be healthier and more content in a moral, loving society, not an amoral, hateful war zone."
Materially speaking, where does this understanding lie? Show me on the brain scan where this moral understanding exists. This is exactly Wilber's point: at some point we have to acknowledge that a material explanation of everything breaks down.
Physicists understand this now. String Theory (or M theory) is the most viable quantum model at this point. No one has every seen a string; no one (that I've heard of) is even suggesting that it would be possible to observe one. We have investigated matter beyond it's existence, and the current, best model is strictly abstract mathematics.
Likely, no instrument will ever "see" 11 dimensions and just as likely, no instrument will ever "see" your moral understanding. Its very existence points to a metaphysical (that is simply "beyond matter") reality.
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Michael B.
You seem to be say that the essence of life or the nature of god is an altered mental state attainable through meditation. Is a feeling of "oneness" or "big-self" really what most people are looking for in religion? Why assume that such an altered mental state tells a person anything about anything? Why posit the existence of god based on such an altered mental state?
Michael: I'm saying that God cannot be understood. God can only be experienced.
For myself, I adhere to the Eastern religious view espoused by Ken Wilber, i.e., we are all already God; it's just that most of us don't know it (yet).
And yes, I think that the experience of oneness is what most people are looking for in religion, whether they're aware of it or not. And when you have that experience of oneness (most people have it for short periods, or fleeting moments, at first), it's not an ecstatic thing (as Ken Wilber describes it very well). Rather, it's a clarity, a calmness and a quiet joy.
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If this charlatan is a fan . . .
. . . then Wilber can be none too deep or an important thinker. At best, it's a desperate attempt at log-rolling.
Deepak Chopra calls him "one of the most important pioneers in the field of consciousness."
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ELYDOG
You analyze things way too much, and read things in that are not there, i.e.,
The Spiritual Elite
The pro-Wilber posters here hint at something that has always stuck me about people who thump the tub for mysticism. We have a post here that says, 'you are either 'on or off' the bus.' Now this was obviously stolen from Ken Kesey. Ken was a writer on acid. Kesey's bus held a limited number of people. Just like the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Peoples Temple, or the Christian fundamentalists who are going to be Raptured.
We have another poster, just a little below this one, that commends Mr. Wilber with the 'erudite' obscure word play of a lunatic passing codewords through the Confessional transom. I.E., you and I mere mortals won't be able to get on either of these 'buses' because we don't know WTF they are talking about.("WTF" is code too!) And that is the essence of this, or the Scientology folks, or even the Mormons. Join the cult, get on the bus, drink the cool-aid, leave the rational world behind -and joint the spiritual 'elite' which 'knows' so much more than you crude, ignorant, reality-based fools. And, of course, there are only room for some ...
Are we that desparate to be part of a group? And maybe, yes, a 'leader' of one of these groups?
Reason and science are one of the only thing that all humans have in common, and what we share, and how we are able to bind ourselves as a world community in the modern period. Mysticism actually divides humans, as there are as many mysticisms as there are countries, or people.
No one is talking about joining a cult, and there's room "on the bus" for everyone who wants to climb on board.
Reason and science have brought us many wonderful technological advances, but they can't teach us how to be decent human beings, or how to satisfy the deepest longings of the human soul.
And since you brought up the subject of cults, and false gurus, I will mention that Ken Wilber was instrumental in debunking a current false guru named Adi Da. Go Google Adi Da, if you're interested.
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I like the "idea" of Ken Wilber, but ...
... every time I've read anything of his I ended up bored stiff. His writing is so dry and jargon-laden that it sucks the life out an any interesting topic rendering it (ironically)soul-less.
If asked how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, Wilber could write volumes on the subject, but aside from curing insomnia I doubt it would provide much value to most spiritual seekers.
And yet, despite the fact that his writing does nothing for me, strangely, I still like the idea of Ken Wilber.
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A 'God' philosopher?
Some years ago someone invented the term 'psychobabble' to describe the then popular interest in Freudian analysis and the vocabulary adopted by lay enthusiasts. It seems to me that Ken Wilber has taken this process to a new extreme. A mental state unrelated to known reality could be described as an hallucination. J. Krishnamurti has tried to communicate a concept of 'true awareness' that occurs when one's mind is still, as when meditating. But,he emphatically states,it has nothing to do with God or religion.
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@jazztao
Materially speaking, where does this understanding lie? Show me on the brain scan where this moral understanding exists. This is exactly Wilber's point: at some point we have to acknowledge that a material explanation of everything breaks down.
It certainly does not break down there. There is every reason to expect that moral understanding has a physical imprint on the brain. You are just continuing a long tradition of identifying what is not currently understood or observable and grouping it in with the spiritual.
The activity of your brain is your personal model of the world around you. But even a perfect understanding of that model would not explain anything significant about awareness itself. That is where the mystery is.
The difficulty of explaining the very small has nothing to do with this either. It is just a problem of constructing a model that is very different from the very practical one we are programmed with to handle ordinary things.