Wilber (and me)

Hello again,

I’m back! After an absence of many months I’m glad to see the health of this blog is intact. It’s not everyday you learn the name and existence of a new form of punctuation is it!? (I still haven’t worked out how to write one though). I had to respond to Chris’ review, but I’ll try and keep this post brief.

Firstly, I’ll admit upfront that I’m a fan of Wilber’s work. My own history as a lot to do with the reasons for this. As most of you know, I began study at Melbourne University spread across disciplines – economics, history, philosophy, environmental science, French – it always appealed to me to look at knowledge and the world from as many angles as possible. The experience I had with music also opened me up to the effect that the interior dimensions of experience (awareness, emotions, attitude, ego, etc) have on the expression of music. What is art but the creation of something that reflects some form of interior state of an individual? For some reason this notion escaped me when I was younger, but in my early 20s it flooded my interests. This led to me checking out meditation, martial arts and sampling a large part of the new age menu.

What makes ‘new age’ a dirty term? My guess is the largely uncritical acceptance and belief of a whole bunch of wacky ideas that are not well supported by empirical research or observable evidence. From the experiences I’ve had this is largely deserved but occasionally unfortunate. In my opinion, Wilber presents the most sophisticated theoretical framework that provides a space for many new age ideas to exist (satori, altered states and higher stages of consciousness etc).

When I went back to university and did International Studies at RMIT, the course was attempting to provide a holistic range of compulsory subjects that would provide the student with multiple access points to better understand globalisation as the most significant social/cultural transformation of our era. We were required to study economics and the history of techno-economic modes of production, the history of migration, ethnicity, construction of racial categories, languages and cultures other than English, the development of the nation-state system and development of the media. What was lacking in depth was compensated through span. It was fantastic, but something was missing -it didn’t quite all hold together.

There was the Marxist techno-economic history and the importance of the means of production in determining cultural outcomes.

There were the post-colonial critiques of scientific constructs as tools that facilitated domination and disempowerment.

There were the arguments over individual agency versus the effects of social structure in determining how messages in the media are interpreted.

We studied the great visionary leaders and great villains of history, but had no real sense of why and how these individuals emerged.

In other words, my previous studies seemed to prepare the soil for a certain uneasy contradiction between (seemingly) disparate knowledge systems to arise in my understanding.

When I came across Wilber’s work, it appeared that here was finally a framework that not only acknowledged the validity of each of the areas of study that I’d spent time with, but a way of understanding the relationships between them. This is why he calls what they do integral studies.

Now there are some issues that seem quite particular to Wilber when compared to other theorists. He is an extraordinarily charismatic individual and releases regular taped conversations from his websites. This combined with the weightlifting, yoga, 4am meditation, pop-culture references, taste for Armani suits, descriptions of non-dual spiritual experiences, and the constantly explicit description of developmental hierarchies in conversations has created a kind of personality cult that leaves many uneasy. The persona of an integral superman leaves many people suspicious, but I also think it stirs people’s own feelings of inadequacy. I don’t think these facts alone deny the validity of his work.

I'm going to leave this little narrative here, and post a rough overview of the key ideas of his model. If this bores the hell out of you I’m sorry, but at least it will give some substantive points to critique.