Oeaohoo
Member-
Content count
562 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by Oeaohoo
-
-
1 hour ago, Topspin715 said:Wilber is totally a genius but his content is so esoteric that it will be deeply appreciated by a narrow group of ppl which is why he has a cult following and misunderstood or ignored by masses. Leo is like that too in my opinion. There are very few truth seeking philosophers in this world but many of them are very private and very unlikely to be professional or academic philosophers.
This is another thing that I find quite odd about Wilber: he inhabits a strange middle-ground between espousing the esotericism that you are describing and selling out to whatever is trending in postmodern academia. I think he probably thought - as Mircea Eliade, Henry Corbin, Louis Massignon and a few other academics had done before him - that by combining the Perennial Philosophy with contemporary academic developments, he might be able to reintegrate genuine metaphysics into secular academia. This seems like a rather futile effort to me; I suppose we will have to see…
-
15 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:I talked about this many months ago, but I think it goes back to his fixation on science, specifically the stage models from developmental psychology, which all contain linear or "progressive" assumptions (Piaget, Kohlberg, Loevinger, Erikson, Fowler, etc.). There are so many of them that you'll undoubtedly be very tempted to make it center stage of an integrative framework.
Yeah, that is definitely the reason. There is the additional component that - since Hegel and the adaptation of his ideas by Marx, along with the “enlightenment” Philosophes - modern philosophy in general has tended towards progressism. Even here, though, we could wonder why Schillber fails to integrate all of the criticisms of these developments, for example those of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in the first case and Burke and Carlyle in the second. It would seem that all of this is just dismissed as belonging to a “lower stage of development”: this is a false argument, however, because the people who created the theories of progress to which these people were reacting belonged to the same “stage of development”! To me at least, it all comes off as an arbitrary personal preference for liberal progressism masquerading as “integral” thought.
I must admit that I am not so familiar with developmental psychology. I do know, however, that it was a field based on the most extreme form of positivistic rationalism and scientific materialism. It is not surprising that, if genuine progress was to be found anywhere, it would be found in a field with these premises: nobody could deny that, within certain limits and in merely material terms, progress can be demonstrated. The trouble is that, even when this material progress does not serve to actively deny spirituality, it generally only serves as a comparatively empty compensation for a lost spiritual potency. It also seems very strange to me to combine the discoveries of this field with the revelations of what Schillber himself calls the Perennial Philosophy, whose epistemology is completely antithetical, as though there is no real discrepancy here?
@A_v_E I don’t understand everything that you have said. I suspect that we have slightly different reasons for objecting to Schillber; nonetheless, some of what I do understand is very funny and on-point! Particularly:
17 hours ago, A_v_E said:at high level of cognition speaking become so non sense, and you understand communication is almost absolutely futile that you turn what the midwit call " a troll " just because fuck it, they are boring anyway to not get fucking shit about the relative of their sequences.
17 hours ago, A_v_E said:you right, wilber "made sense" ( or curiosity maybe ) for me, up til I reached 24 years old or something, I then met more "real life".
they were a good way to perceive life for ken, but they are irrelevant in the face of reality.
if your role model is ken wilber, you really lost in mind salad forever, he is a good boat for a little ride, to just to study how hard can go a complex deluded mind, that's a bit sad, but there is worst to waste your life away.
This is my impression too. Schillber seems more concerned with creating a cosy private fantasy world - in which lines, streams and waves of developmental growth and evolutionary progressivism must infinitely ascend into the clouds of relativistic integration, forever and ever - than engaging with reality as it actually presents itself…
21 hours ago, UnbornTao said:@Oeaohoo Thanks for your input.
I suggest checking out the creation vs destruction video.
Thanks for the suggestion. I watched a little bit of this video when it came out, though I didn’t get very far… I will consider watching it again!
-
1 hour ago, Breakingthewall said:all your speech is very beautiful and looks very cultivated, but its essence is: reactionary
Of course. To paraphrase one of Leo’s favourite phrases: “That’s not a bug, it’s a small creature!” At the same time, whilst there is an obvious affinity between reactionary thought and Perennial Traditionalism, they aren’t the same thing. Wilber himself opens his book Spectrum of Consciousness with a quotation from Frithjof Schuon and the first footnote in his book Integral Psychology is a reference to the main exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, who I have mentioned above. Why doesn’t he include their negative vision of history, not as Spiral Progress but as cyclical decay, in one of his handy little “developmental charts”?
Schillber’s writing can be very beautiful but it’s essence is: progressive. When it isn’t an appeal to a purely hypothetical future in which the degradations of postmodern nihilism and deconstruction have magically given rise to a spectacular New Age inhabited only by Tier 2 Systems Thinkers, “honouring” and “embracing” every “stage of development” (for lack of any humans left still worth honouring and embracing!), his defence of modernity is literally just the same old tired appeals to “liberal democracy” and “feminism”… Why does he fail to “integrate” any of the completely valid objections that have been raised against these demonstrably terrible ideas?
I call him Schillber because, as I have demonstrated, his so-called “Integral Theory” is conveniently selective as to what it “integrates”…
-
I agree with you. It is worth saying, though, that we live in a time where everything is dangerous. If you think you have found something “safe”, you are deluding yourself.
In our times, the best that you can do is to pick your poison. Or, as the Tantric texts written for the Kali Yuga in which we find ourselves say, find a way to hendoku iyaku, “turn the poison into medicine”…
-
If it were up to me, we would bring back the ancient practice of anonymity: then there could be no question of obsessing over “the work of Ken Wilber”, with all of the vanity and irrelevancy that this entails; it would simply be a question of upholding truth and denouncing falsehood.
On 30/12/2022 at 1:15 AM, Leo Gura said:You are full of crap.
Just stick to what you are good at, Leo: taking drugs and bragging about how “Awake” you are, and how “not Awake” everyone else is; leave the complex thought to us Stage Yellow Systems Thinkers! Stick to regurgitating the same old inane drivel, pretending to explain all of existence by reducing it to “survival” and some colour-coded stages of Spiral Progress. Stick to denigrating everything other than your so-called “teachings” as “petty human bullshit”, whilst telling people to “think for themselves” and chastising them whenever they dare to think differently from you. Stick to boasting about having transcended all systems of human authority whilst sucking the tit of TYT and CNN like the good little bug-man that you are. Your followers are so stupid, as they must to be to follow someone as stupid as you, that they will probably never tire of it…
On 30/12/2022 at 9:07 AM, Nilsi said:I would, but you're not willing to speak in a language I understand, so what can I do?
You're gaslighting me with fancy language, as far as I'm concerned.
Hahaha…
When all else fails, you idiots will always have the accusation of “toxic gaslighting” to fall back on! I sincerely apologise for my “toxic gaslighting”, blaspheming your precious idols: Ken Schillber, Lex Fraudman, Daniel Schmachtenbullshit… Funny how none of you have any objection to trouncing on Christ and the Buddha, but whenever someone criticises the likes of Schillber, Fraudman and Schmachtenbullshit you frantically rush to their defence… One more aspect of the contemporary pseudo-religion.
23 hours ago, StarStruck said:He will be remembered as the Jung of our time.
He won’t be remembered at all. The Global American Empire is doomed to collapse, from insanity within and hostility without, and Schillber’s vain and inconsequential work will perish with it. Everything that he has taught will be reduced to a pile of dust before you know it. This is all extremely obvious to anyone who doesn’t have a vested interest in not seeing it… For all their talk of having transcended the biases that “survival” imposes, it would seem that most people here are entirely blinded by their own preferences.
If Schillber is remembered, he will indeed be remembered as the Junk of our time.
-
1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:@Oeaohoo Notice your obnoxious manner.
As if I haven’t noticed it!
As if it isn’t carefully cultivated…
Notice how the modern pseudo-intellectual class is more concerned with nice manners than the pursuit of truth.
@Nilsi Never mind… It’s clear you aren’t really willing to engage with ideas outside of this progressive evolutionist wannabe-deep-thinker thought bubble. No point pretending otherwise.
This will always be the perfect parody of all of these idiots:
-
There is also a glaring contradiction throughout Wilber’s writing: whilst claiming on the one-hand that history is a progressive evolution from matter to spirit, he simultaneously acknowledges that modernity has systematically reduced all of reality to a “flat-land” in which all that exists is matter?! This makes absolutely no sense.
-
22 minutes ago, Nilsi said:emergence of a higher way of being
There he is again!
If you want to spend your time in the Dynamic Wave of Emergent Synergy Fields, suit yourself. To me, it’s just obvious drivel.
The main thing that has struck me reading Wilber is that his model is completely backwards. At the centre of the “Holarchy” is not matter and physics but spirit. Every other level of manifestation is a lesser emanation from this centre, the divine Heart. The soul is a lesser emanation of spirit, the mind is a lesser emanation of the soul, and the body is a lesser emanation of the mind… Pure matter is the most peripheral manifestation of consciousness. As such, it should be equivalent to the outward circumference of the “Holarchy”. To place pure matter at the centre of the “Holarchy” is simply ridiculous, as can be demonstrated by the simple question: what is the centre of your being?
This is obvious to anyone who really understands that this universe is a Creation. The essential problem here is that, so as to integrate Tradition with modern depravity, Wilber is forced to look at life from the merely human point of view, as opposed to looking at it sub specie interioritatis (from the inner point of view). From this point of view, there can be no question of emergence: instead, as I have already said, everything that exists is an emanation of the One.
-
As to the supposed innovations of Wilber, it must be acknowledged immediately that every Tradition was integral. Christendom contained contemplative practises and Theology alongside the sciences of the Trivium and Quadrivium. These were all unified by their animating principle, the Christian Tradition. If you are hostile to Christianity as many are today, this is equally true for the other Traditions; consider for example the six astika or branches of study within Hinduism. As another example, Aristotle wrote on Biology, Physics, Metaphysics, The Soul, Politics, Ethics, Poetics, Rhetoric, and so on, recognising the inter-connectedness of all these domains; and he didn’t just compile other people’s thoughts together into pointless “meta-systems” like Wilber… He actually thought things through from first principles!
So-called “Integral” is just a desperate attempt to reintegrate the different domains of knowledge, after they had been fatally fragmented by the decrepitude of late-stage Kali Yuga (or what Wilber, in his willed ignorance of traditional cosmology, calls “modernity and postmodernity”), which is indeed characterised by what Guénon described as a “dispersion in multiplicity”.
In short, there is nothing new here. Just another moronic American self-help “guru” who wants to delude himself into believing that he is a deep, important and innovative thinker.
-
5 minutes ago, The Mystical Man said:
-
You want to lure her in with sweet talk without being too direct. Try something like this:
“Hey baby! I don’t mean to be rude but that dress makes you look a little fat. Have you been eating too much recently?”
She’ll pretend to be angry with you, saying things like “What the hell, jerk! What kind of creep would say something like that?!” (If she starts crying, then you know she’s really into you!)
Keep on smooth-talking: “Also, your face looks a bit like a pig. Do you snore? I can’t stand snoring. Well, you probably want to know a little more about me… All you need to know is that my previous girlfriends have never been disappointed, if you know what I mean!”
At this point, she will physically escalate on you with a violent slap or maybe a kick between the legs. This is what he call her coming onto you.
Now that you’ve hooked her, pull out the big guns:
“Feminism has been a complete disaster for the human race. Birth rates are below replacement, the family has been devastated, women are a tyrannical force in the workplace and the cost of living has been raised drastically by two-salary households, making life more difficult for everyone.
Not only that, but giving woman the vote has rapidly escalated social decadence, leading to the dominance of feminine values like compassion over wisdom, love over truth, freedom over responsibility, and a general emasculation of culture. That is why I want to bring back the Islamic harem, in which my women would never talk to me unless spoken to.”
By this point, her underwear is fully saturated. Time to get each other naked. I’ll leave the rest to you…
-
No. You are just comparing Wilber with the wrong people. Wilber’s real predecessors are not Carl Junk and Sigmund Fraud, but people like Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon. Frankly, he is a pale mediocrity in comparison.
Wilber just took the Perennial Philosophy and mixed it with the the inconsequential “discoveries” of the profane and degenerate world. I have been reading him recently and I never realised how blatant this was.
The reason he is little known is because his theory is pointless, an irrelevant attempt to “integrate” the essential and the inconsequential.
-
1 hour ago, Nilsi said:Of course all of this is downstream from truth, which is neither of the quadrants.
Well, I would say that even if truth doesn’t correlate to any one of these quadrants, it also doesn’t lie at the centre of them. My point is that some truths are more significant than others. I remember reading a funny description of modern knowledge as “knowledge of that which is not worth the trouble of knowing”…
1 hour ago, Nilsi said:Good for you.
It really wasn’t. In a book that is worth reading the pages subtly emanate a mysterious transcendent light, glimmers of intellectual intuition… This book just radiates a spiritualised form of evolutionary progressivism. So many better books to read, so little time!
-
33 minutes ago, SeaMonster said:The problem with Orange is obvious from the beginning: everyone is NOT equal in a functional, down-to-earth sense which manifests in serious inequality...and that brings Green, which attempts to enforce the idea that everyone is equal via a romantic irrationalism that tells you that all inequality is systemic corruption.
So modernity (and post-modernity) is two layers of stupid.
Indeed. It seems to me that the emergence of “Stage Green” is not at all a positive development, either. It is something closer to putting out fire with gasoline…
34 minutes ago, SeaMonster said:But we get a lot of technological advancements and feel-good safe spaces as a compensation.
Woop-Dee-Doo!
-
5 minutes ago, Nilsi said:You forgot the other 3 quadrants
This actually came to mind because I decided to re-read one of Wilber’s mediocre books, “Integral Psychology”. Aside from rolling around laughing whenever Wilber was naive enough to claim that modernity is justified by the innovations of “liberal democracy” and “feminism”, I was struck by a particular chapter: “To Integrate Premodern and Modern”. In this chapter, he provides a graph of the four quadrants which, like you said, are literally just four versions of a line going up…
However, I thought that his criticism of the “premodern” (which should really be called Tradition) reveals one of the main flaws in the whole Integral project. He claims that “pre-modernity” was “all-level but not all-quadrant”, whereas modernity was “all-quadrant but not all level”. What he means by this is that Tradition emphasised the Upper-Left Quadrant (intentional-subjective) over the other three, whereas, whilst modernity has mapped the other quadrants more thoroughly, it has only done so at the lower “levels” which scientific materialism accepts as real.
Whilst it is undoubtedly true that modernity has conducted a more rigorous examination of external phenomena, there is a perfectly valid reason why Tradition prioritised the “quadrant” of internal subjectivity, for this is the domain of the spiritual realisation: everything else in life is downstream of and therefore subordinate to the divine Essence and the metaphysical Principles which are its emanations. Any normal society is ordered around a transcendent Principle, embodied by an elite class; it is only modernity which prefers a disorganised chaos, which is completely anathema to spiritual realisation except in isolated cases, in the name of “liberal democracy” and “feminism”.
Traditional civilisations did concern themselves with the other quadrants of knowledge; always recognising, however, the superiority of metaphysics above all other sciences. For brevity, let us take the single example of psychology: it is obvious that a psychology whose sole purpose is to create a “healthy ego”, which is the highest aim of modern psychology, is drastically inferior to one which maps the psychological states right up to the ultimate annihilation of the psyche in God. The latter is precisely what the psychological sciences of ”premodern” civilisations provide; even if they may lack the exacting rigour of modern science, this rigour is comparatively unimportant.
-
This graph explains EVERYTHING: Change, Progress, Evolution, Growth, Development, Actualisation, Becoming, the Future, the Path…
Copyright: This graph is borrowed from Ken Wilber’s little known work Integral Progress. It shows all of the Stages of Development in their dignity and simplicity.
-
What am I doing here?!
-
13 minutes ago, axiom said:Right, exactly - convenient fictions. That’s all we ever have, but we like to grandstand.
What makes one fiction more convenient than another?
-
58 minutes ago, axiom said:it depends what you mean by truth.
In my opinion, Truth (capital T) has infinite resolution and thus cannot be circumscribed nor even approximated by any human model.
That is not to disregard the apparent usefulness of some human models which attempt to expediently approach truth (lower case t) for survival purposes, entropy reduction etc.
What is the relationship between truth and Truth? If there isn’t one, why do you use the same word?
-
On 19/12/2022 at 4:10 AM, AtheisticNonduality said:Planet Earth, about to be recycled!
-
36 minutes ago, axiom said:The point here is to be cognizant of resolution before over-excitedly shoehorning one’s favourite political gripes and most-disliked public figures into convenient boxes, even if it temporarily makes the world seem like less than chaos.
I completely agree with this as the major flaw in the way that models like Spiral Progress are applied around here.
-
28 minutes ago, axiom said:It’s a model of the world. One model of countless models. A model is just a model, and should never be confused with the thing in itself.
Sure, it makes things bite-sized and more easily digestible. This is naturally very comforting. It provides an easily- understood and convenient recontextualisation of one’s own life. And by this I mean : the model is unlikely to be perpetuated by those self-identifying as beige.
But the apparent correctness of a model or lack thereof is always a function of resolution. Since there are always higher and lower resolutions to explore, no model can be said to be veridical or final.
This applies to even generally unchallenged ideas such as entropy (oil and water separate into their constituent elements and thus can be seen as negentropic)
@Nilsi This is what a postmodernist sounds like! Proof that I am not one!
@axiom Do you believe there is such a thing as truth? Do you believe that human concepts and truth are completely orthogonal to one another, or can we at least approach truth conceptually? To me it seems that - even if, yes, truth can never be reduced to a conceptual system - truth can nevertheless be approximated by conceptuality.
You could think of it like the “lock-on” system in films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, slowly aligning the computer’s model of things with reality. I also think that, because of the analogy between microcosm and macrocosm, even attaining to a perfect understanding of the truth of a relatively “low-resolution” situation can naturally scale to the big picture.
-
35 minutes ago, Devin said:What years and where do you consider "pure capitalist"? I don't believe that has happened. Or when and where are you saying was the closest to "pure capitalism"?
Me neither, nor has there even been a completely Stage Orange society. These are hypothetical ideals which never map perfectly onto reality. I would say that the post-Renaissance European mercantile empires were the nearest embodiment of “pure capitalism”. In the 20th century, we moved away from this towards managerial capitalism, in which the element of pure profit has slowly been substituted for various managerial agendas. This “managerial capitalism” is a precursor to the “communist capitalism” that I am describing!
32 minutes ago, Devin said:Anglo America was more communitarian than America is now actually, and the church played the socialist role to a 'T', and dictated social rules to a 'T'.
You’re being very pedantic! I was taking for granted that, given that the subject of this thread is the relationship between capitalism and communism (the latter being an ideology of the 20th century), you would recognise that I was talking about the values of these territories within the 20th century. Whilst there were certainly appeals to community on both sides, it is undeniable that the Anglo-American ideal was the “sovereign individual” and the “self-made man” whilst the Russo-Chinese Communist ideal was the “upholder of the community” and the “worker”. Just look at the art and propaganda of the two regimes.
-
10 minutes ago, Devin said:Well I wouldn't say that type of "Progress" has been made. I think there have been changes but consider the church in the past, everyone was mandated to tithe and the church gave the poor everything they need, the Church started many of the historical Universities, and it started hospitals as well, which were free care.
Very true… In this context, however, I am talking about the “progress” which has taken place within the modern capitalist system. In Spiral Progress terms, we could say that you are describing “Stage Blue” religious communities whereas here we are discussing “Stage Green” communitarianism, in between these being the pure capitalist system of “Stage Orange”.
I will admit that there is a slight issue with the wording of this whole thing. By capitalism and communism, it may be better to read the ideologies of Anglo-America and Russo-China, though I don’t think this is ideal either.
in Personal Development -- [Main]
Posted
This is one of the central delusions of this place: anything other than invoking a constant state of existential crisis through psychedelics or nihilistic deconstructionist philosophy is a “mind game at the avoidance of truth”. The implicit heresy here is the idea that the mind and Truth are diametrically opposed to one another; the reality is that the rational mind is a lesser emanation of Truth, subordinated in the hierarchy to intellectual intuition, the divine Logos and the Absolute. There is no real antithesis here, only degrees of realisation.