Letters to the Editor
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I have read lots of crap on Salon but this was utter torture
One of my college professors during a chaos theory class once digressed into an arresting soliloquy about the difference between reification and hypostasis. It was one of those moments at grad school that stick with you forever although they never have any direct relevance to your studies, yet you know your life would be less fulfilling, had you missed them.
So deep from the bottom of moldy memory stores emerges "hypostasis", or assuming real meaning to words just because they exist, while yours truly reads this dialog with someone who had, if we can believe him, the opportunity to get acquainted with the Ultimate Reality.
It was with the word "interiority" where my memory for that word started to emerge. Is there some sort of interiority? he asks. Ah, mais bien sur, mon ami, he says, it is the inside of the Universe, outside the material stuff. It is a "non-determined interiority. It's simply there."
Gee, another memory pops up, this time from Dad, who used to bedazzle me with this little whatchamacallit: every inside that has an inside is just as much of an outside, as an outside that has an outside is an inside.
Poor dad, he did not even know he was a philosopher.
Back to World-unfamous Mr Wilber.
The section that shows perhaps the best what sort of a fool he is, is his simpleton distinction between altered states of consciousness being "real" versus "just a brain state". A brain state, any brain state, is just as real as a house, it is just that one experiences a brain state directly while a house indirectly, via a brain state, i.e. the image of the house.
There is one benefit that came from reading this article, although I'm not sure if it will be able to offset the despair generated by the fact that so many have found and will continue to find this gibberish something to ooh and aah about: I begin to understand how Al Gore has become the world-class charlatan that he is.
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Grace
Why is there an assumption that people who have experienced the empty spaciousness of big mind, or whatever silly name one wants to give it, feel in the least bit superior? I agree with Wilbur that it's incomprehensible without having been there, but this is through no fault of those who have not. Having experienced that, it is something I will never forget. However, there is no way I could have intellectually described it prior to the experiences, and just like Wilbur and others I am at a loss to describe it now. And having been "there and back again" does not make me the least bit more "enlightened" than anyone else, nor does it change anything about my obligation to do what I can to make the "normal" day-to-day reality better for as many as possible. I cannot dwell in that realm; there would be no "I" to write this or function at all. Being here in the realms of duality can easily allow me to imagine myself as somehow superior, but without that duality there is only grace.
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Meditation as Science
I think accomplished meditators are maintaining that under the right circumstances, a human being can serve as a scientific instrument and directly observe interior phenomena, which observations can be reliably verified by others. While I might instinctively place more trust in an electron microscope than a meditating monk to reveal reality, I also acknowledge the legitimacy of observations made by psychologists without the aid of conventional scientific instruments.
B. Alan Wallace has written “Contemplative Science”, an excellent book on this topic. In it he states, “…the conclusion that consciousness emerges solely from the material processes under study [in the brain]…is not a logical or empirical discovery, merely an inevitable conclusion based on a methodology of examining subjective, qualitative, mental processes by way of objective, quantitative, physical processes.” In other words, we need a different set of tools to study interior phenomena.
Further, “A simple fact that is hardly acknowledged by either cognitive scientists or philosophers of mind is that mental events can be observed directly. But, as [William] James acknowledges, ‘Introspection is difficult and fallible; and…the difficulty is simply that of all observation of whatever kind.’ Crucial to making rigorous observations of mental [interior] phenomena is the cultivation of sustained, vivid, high-resolution attention, which Buddhists call samadhi. Such focused attention is to the scientific investigation of mental phenomena what the telescope is to the scientific investigation of celestial phenomena.”
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Chad Bagley Read This
Chad,
Interior Science = Trying to prove ghosts (phenomenological) exist through the scientific method. Therefore, ghost hunters and that show on the Sci-Fi channel is an interior science.
If it's any consolation, I think Ken Wilber is full of crap too. My eyes started to glaze over when I read the word, "interiority", and my bullshit meter pegged out. I'm always suspicious of yahoos like this who try to couch their rhetoric in words that sound vaguely like real words but have some extra suffixes appended that render the word somehow more meaningful, but which in reality are just new-age caca. I'll read it again when I'm more motivated to do a thorough critique, but as of now I'm not impressed. Give me science over mysticism anyday, and I say that as a device (solid state) physicist and theoretical physicist educated at Berkeley.
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Wilber on Salon (finally!) and Acid Trips
First, after weeks of Ms. Walsh's race baiting I was ready to give up Salon (I still may be), but for now it is still my homepage, and what a pleasure to have Ken Wilber front and center. Thank you Mr. Paulson!
As for all the talk of acid trips, if I'm not mistaken I believe I've heard Wilber say that he hasn't ever done hallucinogens. That said, he has had discussions with many who have (IntegralNaked.org for hours of audio and video), and Integral Theory does not in anyway doubt the "reality" of an hallucinogenic state. The experience of being on acid is real for the subject in that altered state just as it is for the meditator.
Now, it has been widely shown that there are strong parallels between the descriptions of these drug-induced, altered states and the descriptions of altered states arrived at through contemplative practice/meditation without the use of drugs. The experience is very similar. (I've had both--for me they were nearly identical in many ways).
The distinction that needs to be made is that generally speaking, a drug-induced state is a diversion that lasts for a few hours and tends not to alter an individual's approach to life after the effect wears off, while the same state arrived at through spiritual practice may reinforce and further the practitioner along the developmental spiral.
For some the drug-induced variety may prompt them to pursue this awareness through some sort of contemplative practice, but I don't know that that is prevalent.
I recall someone describing it this way: an acid trip can give you a brief opportunity to get your head out above the pile of shit to see what's beyond, but when the teeth stop grinding it's all shit all over again. A disciplined meditation practice can lift your head out of the shit for far greater periods of time and eventually even allow you to keep it there.