Oeaohoo

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.

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.

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…

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: 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… 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!

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. 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… 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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”… 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!

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… Woop-Dee-Doo!

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.

A capitalist system is one in which everybody does what they want. The trouble with this is that most people don’t know what they want. As a result of this, they end up defaulting and falling back on what other people are doing. This creates an increasingly collectivistic form of capitalism. A communist system is one in which everybody does what the state wants. The trouble with this is that most people don’t want to do what the state wants. As a result of this, they end up desiring individual liberty and the right to do what they want. This creates an increasingly individualistic form of communism. The ideology of the global system is one in which these two ideologies converge: this could be called, for lack of a better term, communist capitalism. Fukuyama was wrong that “liberal democracy” is the ideology of “the end of history”: the end-state ideology is really a hellish fusion of subservience to a state with no real sovereignty and the illusion of individual liberty. The sense of alienation and de-individualisation that come from surviving within a communist system can be compensated by the distractions and entertainments of capitalism. The sense of moral vacuity and atomisation that come from surviving within a neoliberal capitalist system can be compensated by progressive communitarianism. The collapse of the Soviet Union and post-Communist China really represent the “capitalisation” of communism, whereas the “Woke” progressive values which have come to predominate in the West are really just the “communisation” of capitalism, hence the endless appeals to “community” made by this movement. This is my view of the ideology which animates the system that we live under. It explains many of the complaints which the so-called Left and the so-called Right make against each other. For example, the “Woke” issue: from the point of view of the Right, this issue obviously represents a questionable divergence of the West from the individualistic values of “Classic Liberalism” and the “free-market”; from the point of view of the Left, it is nonetheless valid to point out that “Woke” is little more than a defence mechanism of “neoliberalism” or “late capitalism”. It also allows us to transcend the mediocre dialectic between capitalism and communism, a favourite topic for debate amongst the global community of political mid-wits. It is clear from my analysis that both systems converge upon the same ends. This shouldn’t be surprising given that both systems start from the same materialistic premises and the reduction of all life to the “socioeconomic factor”. What do you think of this? My impression from reading some of the threads on this forum is that some of you are in denial as to the extent to which the present-day “capitalist” system has morphed into something quite different, in exactly the same way that it would be silly to claim that modern-day China is still communist. If so, what I have said will probably annoy you!

What am I doing here?!

What makes one fiction more convenient than another?

What is the relationship between truth and Truth? If there isn’t one, why do you use the same word?

Planet Earth, about to be recycled!

I completely agree with this as the major flaw in the way that models like Spiral Progress are applied around here.

@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.

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! 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.