An overview of some upgrades Wilber makes in this book

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	• Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World Ken Wilber Shambhala, 2007 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
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Ken Wilber Integral Spirituality

I am half-way through this book and would highly recommend it for anyone who is a progressive thinker. Ken has brought God back into the holistic picture of one's life!

An overview of some upgrades Wilber makes in this book

Ken Wilber's book, Integral Spirituality, has some new insights to offer, including an upgrade of his four-quadrant model. Taking into account that a holon in any of the four quadrants can be seen from the outside, or experienced as--or as if--from within, this gives a total of eight perspectives or zones.

The Four Quadrants with eight primordial perspectives, or hori-zones of arising, and their respective methodologies:

Upper Left
["I" inside: zone #1]
[phenomenology]
outside: zone #2
structuralism
subjective

Upper Right
["it" inside: zone # 5]
[autopoiesis]
outside: zone #6
empiricism
objective

Lower Left
["we" inside: zone #3]
[hermeneutics]
outside: zone #4
ethnomethodology
intersubjective

Lower Right
["its" inside: zone #7]
[social autopoiesis]
outside: zone #8
systems theory
interobjective

Although there is some overlap in these zones, a point to notice is what all this reveals. Eight zones, each with its own methodology, yield eight supplementary perspectives which, when integrated, give a more comprehensive revelation about the complexity of human nature and the nature. A parallel could be drawn with quantum physics as it delves within the atom to discover the beauty and the complexities of the particulate subatomic realm.

Another novelty that Ken offers is his idea that, to talk meaningfully about any actuality in the universe, you must first specify what he calls its Kosmic Address, and this you do by identifying the actuality's "altitude" and "perspective." Indeed, the definition is given by this formula:

Kosmic Address = altitude + perspective

where altitude means level of development and perspective where it is situated in the four quadrants. The address can be made even more specific by also identifying lines, states, and types. Thus: quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types are the basic five elements of any comprehensive or integral map. Using the notation of Integral Math, Wilber (on p. 265) gives an example of how to formulate a Kosmic Address:

"For a particular knowing subject (i.e., a holon with quadrants), this might be: researcher John Doe is coming from a 3rd-person perspective (i.e., using Q/3-perspective or it-perspective), altitude Level 5 or orange (L5 or L/o), line/cognitive (l/c), State/gross (S/g), type/masculine (t/m), all of which is (Q/3, L/5, l/c, S/g, t/m). John Doe might be researching (via quadrivia) an object in the LR that possesses a solid state (S/s), clade line homo erectus (symbol: he; thus: l/he), female type (t/f), as it is a member of the global ecosystem, colloquially known as Gaia (whose full contours don't emerge until altitude 8). This might be indicated with the sentence: John Doe (Q/3, L/5, l/c, S/g, t/m) is focusing his attention on female homo erectus in its interaction with Gaia (Q/4, L/8, 1/he, S/s, t/f) Generically, the Kosmic address of this interaction is:

Subject(Q/3, L/5, l/c, S/g, t/m) × Object(Q/4, L/8, 1/he, S/s, t/f) . . ."

Some other areas discussed in the book:

Intersubjectivity

A central point for Wilber is the postmodern revolution which brought to light the pivotal role that intersubjectivity plays in the workings of consciousness. Phenomena do not just pop into consciousness fully formed, but are the products of vast intersubjective networks such as linguistic systems, cultural backgrounds, and structures of consciousness. This is the realm of the Lower Left quadrant, zones #3 and #4. These intersubjective factors simply cannot be seen by direct introspection or meditation. What is needed is an outside approach to interior phenomena that allows one to step back far enough for them to begin to come into focus. One such approach is structuralism (or genealogy) and with this zone-#4 perspective new developmental structures come into view. This is why Buddhism, through centuries and even millennia of meditation, completely missed this aspect of consciousness. Although the Buddhists have a highly sophisticated understanding of the phenomenology of zone #1, they are--like anyone else who has missed the postmodern revolution--essentially blind to the many constitutive factors arising from the Lower Left quadrant.

A problem here is that pathologies can infect this process so that, rather than truth, lies and distortions are delivered to consciousness. Another consequence, as Wilber put it:

"Once you learn any developmental scheme, such as SD, a peculiar fact starts to become apparent. You can be listening to somebody who is coming from, say, the multiplistic level (orange altitude), and it is obvious that this person is not thinking of these ideas himself; almost everything he says is completely predictable. He never studied Clare Graves or any other developmentalist, and yet there it is, predictable value after predictable value. He has no idea that he is the mouthpiece of this structure, a structure he doesn't even know is there. It almost seems as if it is not he who is speaking, but the orange structure itself that is speaking through him--this vast intersubjective network is speaking through him.

"Worse, he can introspect all he wants, and yet he still won't realize this. He is simply a mouthpiece for a structure that is speaking through him. He thinks he is original; he thinks he controls the contents of his thoughts; he thinks he can introspect and understand himself; he thinks he has free will--and yet he's just a mouthpiece. He is not speaking, he is being spoken." (p. 277)

Ken Gets Personal with God

This came as a surprise, but a welcome one. In Wilber's words: "Spirit in 2nd-person is the great You, the great Thou, the radiant, living, all-giving God before whom I must surrender in love and devotion and sacrifice and release. In the face of Spirit in 2nd-person, in the face of the God who is All Love, I can have only one response: to find God in this moment, I must love until it hurts, love to infinity, love until there is no me left anywhere, only this radiant living Thou who bestows all glory, all goods, all knowledge, all grace . . ."

Philosopher Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000), who has been hailed as the Einstein of religious thought, consistently presented a case for God not as impersonal or as the unmoved mover but as the Personality most rich in relations. He liked to quote Rabbi Heschel that "God is the most moved mover." Even as early as his Harvard dissertation, he was saying, "Person as a legal concept is a highly abstract term, but personality in the end is the richest and most concrete of all ideas." And then in his autobiography, The Darkness and the Light, 67 years later: "I held that the idea of a personal God was not simply an illusion, that personality is our best sample of reality and value and could not be simply set aside in trying to conceive the cosmic, universal, and supreme form of existence."

The Wilber-Combs Lattice

See Figure 4.1 on page 90.

The lattice correlates emerging but then enduring vertical stages of development with momentary horizontal states. The point to notice here, as Wilber says, "is that a person at any stage can have a peak experience of a gross, subtle, causal, or nondual state. But a person will interpret that state according to the stage they are at."

The Sliding Scale of Enlightenment

Wilber poses a question that I've wondered about: what does Enlightenment--total Enlightenment with a capital "E"--what does this mean in an evolving universe where
creative advances accumulate in an ever-increasing totality? Wilber's answer:

"Enlightenment is the realization of oneness with all states and all structures [or stages] that are in existence at any given time." (p. 241)

If you will refer back to the Wilber-Combs Lattice, you will see that this entails both vertical and horizontal Enlightenment. This means that the Buddha's Enlightenment, over two millennia ago, was a complete Enlightenment at that time, but that it is only partial in comparison with what is possible now, for there are structures of consciousness now that were just not available then. The world moves on, continuously.

Enlightenment also has a twofold aspect in terms of the Buddhist distinction of Form and Emptiness, "where Emptiness is timeless, unborn, unmanifest, and not evolving, and Form is manifest, temporal, and evolving." The gift of Emptiness is freedom while that of Form is fullness.

Wilber takes evolution seriously. The structures of consciousness that unfold are not "pre-existing ontological structures in some eternally fixed Great Chain; they evolved and were laid down by factors in all four quadrants as they developed (or tetra-evolved) over time and became Kosmic habits of humanity, habits available to all future humans . . . That's why evolution shows so many fits and starts; it's a creative artwork, not an intelligent engineering product (because if so, that Engineer is an idiot)."

One thing you can always count on in a Ken Wilber book is that it will provide plenty of synaptic sizzle.

Review by Hyatt Carter, author of the book, Thinking Is the Best Way to Travel. Chapter three of this book explores Wilber's Four Quadrants and is entitled "Ken Wilber's Mandalic Model of Reality."

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Integral Spirituality is being widely called the most important book on spirituality in our time.

Applying his highly acclaimed integral approach, Ken Wilber formulates a theory of spirituality that honors the truths of modernity and postmodernity?including the revolutions in science and culture?while incorporating the essential insights of the great religions. He shows how spirituality today combines the enlightenment of the East, which excels at cultivating higher states of consciousness, with the enlightenment of the West, which offers developmental and psychodynamic psychology. Each contributes key components to a more integral spirituality.

On the basis of this integral framework, a radically new role for the world?s religions is proposed. Because these religions have such a tremendous influence on the worldview of the majority of the earth?s population, they are in a privileged position to address some of the biggest conflicts we face. By adopting a more integral view, the great religions can act as facilitators of human development: from magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral?and to a global society that honors and includes all the stations of life along the way.

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