Cont.

• Kenneth Earl Wilber (born January 31, 1949) is an American author who has written about adult development, developmental psychology, philosophy, world centrism, ecology, and stages of faith.

• His work formulates what he calls Integral Theory. In 1998, he founded the Integral Institute, for teaching and applications of Integral theory.

• Ken Wilber enrolled as a pre-med student at Duke University, and was almost immediately disillusioned with what science had to offer.

• He became inspired, like many of his generation, by Eastern literature, particularly the Tao Te Ching.

• He left Duke, enrolled in the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and completed a bachelor's degree in chemistry and biology.

• Ken Wilber's first book, A Spectrum of Consciousness, appeared in 1977, the year of Chiron's discovery, and is credited with officially ushering in the transpersonal psychology revolution.

• Aptly synchronistic! According to Rowan, Wilber's early work "threw a flood of light" on the entire field of consciousness studies.

• Evolution of consciousness, and the nature of the "self."

• Has conceptualized this spectrum in a variety of ways, presenting numerous models, maps, and diagrams, including anything from several to 17 levels, for within each level also lies numerous sub-levels.

The Spectrum of Consciousness -- From the Psychological Perspective

Level of Conscious

ness

Dualisms Splits Cognition Therapies Aim

Transpersonal Bands

Jung's Analytical Psychology,

Psychosynthesis, Maslow, Progoff

Mind (Unity Consciousness)Mind and Body

and the rest of the

Universe

No No Non-dual awareness

Mysticism

Unity with the One?

Vedanta Hinduism, Mahayana and

Vajrayana Buddhism, Taoism,

Esoteric Islam, Esoteric

Christianity, Esoteric Judaism

To heal the primary split between the

whole organism and

the environment,

to give the entire

universe.

• Wilber emphasizes that each therapy has its place in the spectrum of consciousness, each addressing a different level of the spectrum.

• Each level is also generated by a particular "dualism-repression-projection" or the "threefold process of maya".

• According to Wilber, we begin with Unity, "no boundary" awareness or the "non-dual void".

• With rational thought, enters duality, and hence unity becomes repressed and is projected as a multiplicity of separate things.

• This results in a "progressive narrowing of identity from the universe (Mind) to the organism (Existential) to the psyche (Ego) to parts of the psyche (Persona)."

• Here we find a parallel with the Chironic notion that a wound, or split, lies at the core of the human condition.

EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS• The first stage of consciousness evolution

can be traced far back to the dawn of the human race.

• Using Erick Neumann's terminology, Wilber refers to this period as pleromatic-uroboric.

• It is characterized by lack of real differentiation between inner experience and external reality.

• At this stage of primal embeddedness in the unconscious, the Atman project is limited to the uroboric drive for unity that focuses on simple instinctual functions, such as food.

• Wilber postulates that this state of consciousness prevailed among the early hominids.

• He relates it to mythological stories of Eden, to wide-spread occurrence of snake symbolism, and to the first chakra phenomenology in the Tantric tradition.

• The following typhonic period is characterized by separation of the individual self from the world of nature.

• However, the self and the body are not yet clearly differentiated and mental functioning is limited to the primary process and magical thinking.

• With the first sense of self comes the fear of death and the tendency to deny it; this is directly related to the discovery of time.

• Wilber postulates that this form of consciousness was characteristic of the average Neanderthal or Cromagnon man and woman.

• The artistic illustration of this stage is the image of the Sorcerer of Trois Frères and the corresponding mythological representations of the Titans in Greek mythology.

• Historically, this structure of consciousness operated in the human race approximately 200,000 years ago and onward.

• The stage of mythic membership coincides with the development of farming, rise of large settlements and cities, the institution of the great God-Kings, new forms of social control, and the cults of the Great Mother.

• Consciousness of this type is characterized by control of animal and emotional-sexual impulses, shift to temporal and mental goals, and extensive use of language.

• A specific new level of exchange is developed that involves mutual recognition and esteem.

• The Atman project takes here the form of pursuit of agricultural products, money, gold and other possessions; in this context, the God-King can be seen as a concretized expression of the extreme form of the Atman intuition.

• During this time, murder and sacrifice flourish as a new way of magically avoiding death by offering another being as a substitute.

• At the same time, war becomes an easily accessible symbol of immortality by providing an opportunity for killing and looting.

• Consciousness of mythic membership was most fully expressed between 4500 and 1500 B.C.

• The last stage of consciousness development systematically discussed in the book is the egoic structure of consciousness. Its lower forms started developing in the second millenium B.C. and in its high form, this consciousness structure is characteristic of much of contemporary humanity.

• It involves final transcendence of nature and body, sanctity of personhood, higher mentality with rational comprehension and operational thinking, self-reflection and a grasp of historical time.

• The Atman project consists of a variety of substitute goals and hedonistic self-indulgence.

• The increased emphasis on ego leads to new terrors-great vulnerability, awareness of one's mortality, and fear of death.

• This results in oppression, slavery, totalitarianism and homicide on a grand scale in the form of mass sacrifice and genocide.

• Typically, exchanges on all previous levels are distorted and exploited--the material, emotional-sexual, verbal membership, as well as egoic self-esteem maneuvers, are involved.

• In spite of what might seem to be a rather gloomy picture of our present condition, Up From Eden does not end on a pessimistic note; on the contrary, Wilber predicts further evolution to undreamt of levels of consciousness.

• He shows that in each stage of consciousness evolution, while most individuals manifest the dominant form of consciousness, a select few attain much higher levels that anticipate future evolution of all of humanity.

• Thus, during the pleromatic and uroboric stage, a few truly advanced shamans achieve the level of ecstatic trance and psychic abilities of the Nirmanakaya (level 5).

• During the mythic membership stage while the majority of the population practices various exoteric distortions of the Atman project and indulges in ritual sacrifices, a few saints succeed in connecting with the level of transcendent bliss and subtle oneness with the Great Goddess characterizing the Sambhogakaya (level 6).

• Similarly, during the egoic-mental period, a few sages representing the avant-gard of consciousness evolution, reach the Dharmakaya (level 7/8).

• Ken Wilber believes with Plotinus that humanity is poised midway between the beasts and the gods.

• We have come a long way from the unconscious slumber to our present state and have the potential to move on further to subtle and causal realms and to the Absolute.

• Deep structures of all the higher levels exist in the ground unconscious ready to unfold.

• Further evolution represents a real experiential possibility for all of us.

• Ken Wilber's Up From Eden, an extraordinary book with great conceptual clarity and wealth of information, will undoubtedly serve in the future not only as a most valuable guide, but as a powerful catalyst of this development.

Evolution• Comic Evolution

• Biological Evolution

• Sociological Evolution

• Random Evolution

• Emergent Evolution

• Directional Evolution

• In cosmic evolution, ontogeny is regulated by the interplay of physical forces and the results, both in the macro- and the microbranch of co-evolution, are passed on in the form of matter.

• Whereas macroevolution, in this phase, is at first characterized primarily by the condensation of matter, and therefore by conservative self-organization, different processes play a role in the synthesis of matter in microevolution; they also result in equilibrium structures (stable nuclei and atoms) - or it seems so at least from a macroscopic or intermediate angle of view.

• The increasingly active co-evolution of both branches seems to bring dissipative self-organization of macrostructures - cores of galaxies and stars - into play. Ontogeny dominates in cosmic evolution.

• However, there is a kind of unordered "phylogeny" in which matter is transferred criss-cross to new evolutionary sequences.

• As in the laterbiological phylogeny, complexity is thereby furthered; here in the form of planetary systems.

• Also, a controlled long-time burning of smaller stars, such as our sun, is ensured by the carbon cycle which depends on the "phylogeny" of some carbon.

• This controlled burning, in turn, makes the development of biological complexity on our planet possible.

• The units of this early phylogeny are highly normalized.

• The particularities of the history of matter transferred in such a way may be reconstructed only in vague contours, primarily by isotopic ratios which, for example, permit the exact dating of a nearby supernova explosion.

• In this way, we have only recently discovered something about the supernova which acted as a midwife for our solar system.

• In Biological Evolution, with the origin of life on earth, other types of processes are called into play.

• The connection between macro- and microworld is primarily ensured by the evolutionary ultracycles which have been discussed in the preceding chapter.

• At first, they become effective in coarse-grain, one-sided action, such as the transformation of the earth's surface and its atmosphere by the prokaryotes.

• This, however, facilitates the more finely tuned, continuously acting epigenetic processes in the eukaryotic organization of life's microevolution.

• Metabolic communication plays the major role in this second major phase of evolution.

• The results of this co-evolution, however, are no longer transferred directly in the form of matter, but enter in the form of information a process of true phylogeny.

• What evolves in phylogenetic development to higher complexity, is organization - an organization which, in principle, may be realized independently of time and space, as long as the environment is favourable.

• This information transfer along the time axis does not happen in the same way on the macro- and microbranches of evolution.

• The development of the macrosystems is based on the development of macrostructures of metabolic processes which corresponds to a long-drawn ontogeny of dissipative structures.

• Ecosystems do not conserve the structure of their circular processes as Margalef (1968) has pointed out.

• Extinct species are replaced by new ones which establish different relations.

• The traces which the extinct species leaves on earth become quickly erased and hardly influence the evolution of the dynamics of the system.

• Viewed as a whole, however, an ecosystem which is still alive represents a web of dynamic relations, a space-time structure in which history is expressed in the same ways in which it is expressed in a dissipative structure.

• In the phylogeny of biological microevolution, in contrast, information is stored in conservative structures and transferred through them.

• However, it is not rigidly transferred but becomes effective in the interplay of genetic and metabolic communication in the epigenetic process.

• From this interplay emerges an intimate, creative relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny, a non-equilibrium between evolutionary processes which underlies the development of higher complexity.

• In Sociocultural Evolution, Sociocultural microevolution, the evolution of the individual in the last of the three major phases, is based on the continuation of an outer differentiation in the differentiation of a symbolic inner world.

• The ontogeny of structures of the neural mind includes the organization of information which may be conservatively stored both in the outer world and the inner world (memory).

• However, it may also be generated in direct contact with other individuals and their mental structures.

• The phylogeny of mental concepts may take place in one or more individuals, in short or very long time-spans.

• The gain in flexibility, as compared with biological information, is evident.

• Teleology, or Directional Evolution, assumes that evolution is purposeful and moves towards a final goal, whether directed by an external cause or some inner striving.

• This is the total opposite to Random evolution, and because of its metaphysical, mystical, esoteric, and/or religious implications Directional Evolution is looked down at by mainstream Darwinists with the same horror reserved for Lamarkism and other heresies.