As long as one holds on to the separate-self sense, one must repress death and its terror. In order to transcend the death terror, one must transcend the self. That is, there is nothing that the self can do to actually get rid of death terror, since the separate self is that death terror�they come into existence together and they only disappear together. The only thing the separate self can do with death is, deny it, repress it, dilute it, or otherwise hide it.

�when man denies death , he refuses to live without a future, and therefore he refuses to live timelessly. In denying death he denies the condition of no future, and thus he denies eternity. In short, to deny death is to demand a future�in order to avoid death, man pictures his separate self going forward in time. He wants to meet himself tomorrow.

Of the three thresholds of evolution�prepersonal, personal and transpersonal�the prepersonal and transpersonal are often erroneously "confused and equated" since "both are, in their own ways, nonpersonal"�either the transpersonal is "reduced" to the prepersonal or the prepersonal is "elevated" to the transpersonal. For example, Science, Darwinism and Freud envisage development as rising from prepersonal nature to the "high point" of the rational ego but with nothing beyond and reduce transpersonal experiences to infantile occasions. Religion, Romanticism and Jung envisage humanity as declining from a spiritual paradise to the "low point" of the ego and elevate the prepersonal "subconscious immersion" of phylogenetic and ontogenetic infancy to superconscious glory. "The Pre/Trans Fallacy" is a major protocol in Wilber's thought.

Drawing on Plotinus, Wilber conceptualizes evolution as "the Great Nest of Being." Evolution is a "nested holarchy" of matter, body, mind, soul and spirit in "increasing inclusiveness" or "increasing embrace" whereby every higher level is a "nest" that "transcends and includes its predecessor." One of Wilber's key concepts is Hegel's "aufhebung": "To supercede is at once to negate and to preserve." Each level in evolution preserves its predecessor but negates its "partiality"�body includes matter and is more than matter. But at a "fulcrum" or "switch" from one level of evolution/consciousness to the next, transcendence or "differentiation" can go "out of control" and degenerate into "dissociation" whereby the higher level fails to "include" and instead begins to "repress" the lower level as in the case of the repression of the body (or nature or instinct) by the mind (or reason). Wilber endorses Kant's glorious stress on the necessity for the mind "to rise above nature" into "a rational morality and ethical will not found in nature" and function out of a freedom from lower "biocentric impulses," "egocentric wishes," and ethnocentric affiliations. But Wilber also indicates that mind/reason/ ego has not evolved into differentiated embrace (of nature/body) but lapsed into dissociated repression. Often the misguided "cure" for repression is "regression." Several healers and therapies proceed "from saying that body unrepressed by mind is higher than body repressed by mind to saying that body is higher than mind, period." Wilber designates this recipe to "lose your mind and come to your senses" the "retro-Romantic fallacy." For Wilber, the "cure" for "the problem of the oak" is not to "go back to being an acorn." Echoing Schelling, Wilber forcefully affirms that the wisdom of evolution is to achieve a higher integration beyond mind/reason and not to incur a regression below mind/reason.

Rooted in a sense of the past (phylogenetic and ontogenetic/ collective and individual) as "pre" and "sub" and the future as "post" and "trans," Wilber is a philosopher of "tomorrow's greater embrace" with a call "to us to go beyond what went before," to evolve and "go forward" in the "direction" of the "greater depth" and "unprecedented" higher integration of the future in tune with the unfolding/enfolding "emergence" of Spirit and not to regress through "retro-fallacies" into lower "immersion." Wilber's theory of evolution carries a strong "developmental" prescription of "growth to goodness" and not the nostalgic counsel of "recaptured goodness." This is not to be misconstrued as an outright rejection of the past. Wilber disapproves of the repression of the past by the present as much as the regression of the present to the past: "�one can fully transcend any level only if one fully honours it first: let us come to bury Caesar; let us praise him first." However, though undeniably "we are all the sons and daughters of tribes," the lower levels of our "prerational past" though undeniably "our roots, our foundations" are "yesterday's normality" and not at all an "omega pull" that can take us to tomorrow's "wider depth." It is this transcending evolutionary dynamics that makes Wilber reject the contemporary trend to revive and celebrate magical/tribal/horticultural kinship with nature as a panacea for the contemporary ecological crisis because the tribal state of being "close to nature" was only a "pre" condition of "ignorance"(when even the body was not fully differentiated from nature not to speak of the mind) that was truly a "lack of capacity to devastate the environment on a large scale [that] does not automatically mean presence of wisdom, let alone reverence for the environment." The past should always be successfully integrated with the present (without which individual or cultural or evolutionary neurosis occurs) and not resurrected in retro-romantic revivalism/regression as a solution to the pathologies of dissociation and repression of the present. The present should always look forward to a "trans"-formative future and not look back at the transcended past.

Wilber finds in evolution a "balance" of Eros/Ascent/Prajna ("the lower reaching up to the higher") and Agape/Descent/Karuna ("the higher reaching down and embracing the lower"). Wilber interprets contemporary Eco-romanticism which espouses nature as the "source" of our Being and the "foundation" of our "salvation" as a sign of "Thanatos" or the "drag" of the lower (or the "hijacking" of the higher by the lower) which is a counter-evolutionary act and a setback to the evolutionary Eros of Ascent to higher and wider integration/embrace. Undeniably, the Ego in mad dissociation has degenerated into repressive "Phobos" and dominated nature and precipitated an ecological peril. As a corective, eco philosophies propagate a "return to nature" which is unacceptable to Wilber as it contravenes his vision of evolution in which, as Schelling proclaimed with pioneering insight, mind "transcends" nature but can and must "include" nature in an "unprecedented" "higher union" and not forsake its status of evolutionary subsequence as a "deeper and wider" stage "beyond" nature and regress to a "prior" dedifferentiated immersion in "shallower and narrower" nature. In Wilber's poetics of evolution: "Each stage is true, each succeeding stage is 'more true.' This is not elitist, and it offers no reason for any epoch (even ours) to picture itself as privileged, because it, too, is destined to pass, to be transcended and included in tomorrow's greater embrace."

Wilber calls the Great Nest of Being "the essence of premodernity," and taking cue from Habermas, endorses Max Weber's definition of modernity as "the differentiation of the cultural value spheres" of art, morals and science (or of what Wilber calls "the Big Three�"I, We, It" or "the Beautiful, the Good, and the True" or "Self, Culture, and Nature"). For Wilber, this differentiation constitutes the "dignity of modernity" as art, morals and science could now each "pursue its own truth without violence and domination from the others" in a new unheard of freedom made possible exclusively by the emergence of reason. The differentiation of I and We gave birth to human rights and freedom from subservience to State and Church; the differentiation of I and It inspired an imagination freed from representation to create non-realist art; and the differentiation of We and It promoted discoveries in science unhampered by Church and State. Wilber also speaks of "the Big Three" of modernity as "the four quadrants" that are the four "faces"of Spirit which exist in complex interdependence: the Upper Left quadrant("intentional" or "the inside of the individual" or "I"), the Upper Right quadrant ("behavioural" or "the outside of the individual" or It"), the Lower Left quadrant("cultural" or "the inside of the collective" or "We") and the Lower Right quadrant("social" or "the outside of the collective" or "Its"). Wilber contends that the four quadrants of individual consciousness, cultural backgrounds, objective states and social structures "tetra-evolve," that "each quadrant is intimately correlated with, dependent upon, but not reducible, to the others," that consciousness is "distributed across all four quadrants" and not "located solely" in any one quadrant, and that " Spirit manifests always and simultaneously as the four quadrants" and therefore the "unpacking of God" should occur non-exclusively or non-reductively as an "integral" performance out of "intuitions touching the I and the We and the It domains." However, it is not uncommon for epistemologies to interpret reality in terms of only one of the four quadrants or of the Left-Hand or Right-Hand alone and thereby reductively exaggerate "one-fourth of the story" or "only one half of the story" as "the whole story" and "deny not only the importance but the very existence of the other quadrants." Right-Hand realities (UR and LR) are all exteriors or surfaces and have "simple location"(in "physical spacetime") and can be "'pointed' to with your finger" and be an object of empirical observation. Atoms, molecules, prokaryotes, eukaryotes, neuronal organisms, neural cord, reptilian brain stem, limbic system, neocortex (triune brain), complex neocortex, SF1, SF2,and SF3 are Upper Right (exterior of the individual) levels while galaxies, planets, Gaia system, heterotrophic ecosystems, foraging survival clans, horticultural ethnic tribes, agrarian feudal empires and early nations, industrial corporate states and informational planetary order and value communities are Lower Right (exterior of the collective) levels. Left-Hand realities (UL and LL) defy "simple location" since they are non-empirical interior depths and invite interpretation. Prehension, irritability, sensation, perception, impulse, emotion, symbols, concepts, conop, formop, vision-logic, psychic, subtle and causal are Upper Left (interior of the individual) levels, while physical-pleromatic, protoplasmic, vegetative, locomotive, uroboric, magic, mythic, rational and vision-logic are Lower Left (interior of the collective) levels. Wilber affirms that "surfaces can be seen but depth must be interpreted" and Empiricism and Hermeneutics have been the "the Right and Left Hand Paths" of "every major knowledge quest, East and West alike" and are "the Two Hands of God." All Left-Hand interior realities have Right-Hand exterior "correlates." This does not mean that Left-Hand interiors are not anything other or more than Right-Hand exteriors. But modernity has reduced Left-Hand depths to Right-Hand surfaces and generated a "flatland." In a classic explanation of the example of "the thought of going to the grocery store," Wilber shows the "integral" interrelations of intentional, behavioural, cultural and social manifestations of this "thought." The "interior intentionality" of consciousness (UL) has correlates as "brain states" (UR): "� there was a release of norepinephrine between the neural synapses in the frontal cortex, accompanied by high amplitude beta waves�and so on. All of which is true enough and all of which is important. But that is not how I experienced the thought and I will never actually experience my thought in those terms." Further, individual consciousness is neither exclusively "of the Upper Left or the Upper Right or both together" because it cannot arise in the first place without a "cultural world space" or an "intersubjective circle of mutual recognition"(Lower Left). Individual "intentions" and "thoughts" do not emerge in a "vacuum" nor can they be generated by the "physical brain alone": "My thoughts do not pop into my head out of nowhere, they pop into my head out of a cultural background" and cases of a "wolf boy" show that "the human brain, left without culture, does not produce linguistic thoughts on its own." It is culture that "allows" consciousness, and the whole gamut of capacities of subjective identity is "situated" in "a vast intersubjective world space." For example, language is not exclusively an "intentional"/subjective expression but a "cultural" competence of intersubjective origin: "� I can take a simple word like 'dog' and point to a real dog and say 'I mean that!' What is so remarkable is that you know what I mean by that. Forget the simple empirical pointing. Instead look at the mutual understanding." But this LL meaning of a language (semantics) that is culturally shared by a community (or collective signifieds) has Lower Right collective material/social correlates in the form of the rules of the language (grammar and syntax) and spoken and written words (or collective signifiers). All LL collective/cultural practices are not disembodied interiors but have exterior/observable correlates in the form of LR collective/social structures, institutions and systems.

Wilber advances the view that each of the "levels" of the Great Nest (matter, body, mind, soul and spirit) has four quadrants of manifestations�for example, the intentional self/ I of "mind," the behavioural nature/ It of "mind," the cultural background/ We of "mind" and the social environment/ Its of "mind". Further, not only is any given quadrant one of the four manifestations of a level of the Great Nest, each quadrant as a genre (as UL or UR or LL or LR) has (as indicated above) its own evolutionary history of several stages. Wilber uses the Pythagorean term "Kosmos" to designate the "Totality" of all the levels of the Great Nest each with its four quadrants of manifestation. Wilber also uses the simple shorthand "everything" as a synonym for "Kosmos." As a philosopher of "everything" with "Kosmology" as theme and an "integral" turn, Wilber in his writings from 1995 has focussed on recent evolutionary mishaps in integration of "levels" and of quadrants within a level and has configured an "integral" recipe for evolutionary reconstruction.. In a bold critique, Wilber claims that though the premodern Great Nest is "the collective wisdom of several millennia of the greatest men and women this planet has ever seen," it is quite a "static system" as it conceptualizes its "levels" as "simply and everlastingly pregiven, static, unyielding to the advances of time or the unfolding of development" and as it does not, unlike modernity, possess the "differentiation" of the four quadrants to be able to envision, for example, the intentional self of soul, the cultural background of soul, the objective nature(neurophysiology) of soul and the social environment of soul and to see how these four faces of soul also "evolve through time." Wilber seeks to "modernize" the Great Nest. But modernity itself has most ignorantly "trashed" the Great Nest. Wilber notes that with the rise of modernity in the sixteenth century, the Great Nest "took a colossal hit from which it never recovered." Wilber contends that the "dignity of modernity" turned into a "disaster" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Wilber interprets the "disaster of modernity" as the "dissociation" or "imperialism" of "monological science" that "dismissed" "the entire interior dimensions" of "consciousness, psyche, soul, spirit, value, morals, ethics and art" as "hangovers from the premodern, prescientific ignorance of humankind" because none of the "subjective and interior domains" of art and morals fell within the "eye of flesh or empirical instruments" of scientific materialism and that "flattened" the "interior realities of the I and WE" to "objective exteriors" and "exterior surfaces." This "collapse of the Kosmos," as Wilber also calls the "disaster of modernity," is tantamount to a "rejection" of "the core" of the interior truths of "all of the world's wisdom traditions" which have served as "the backbone of every human culture prior to modernity. " Wilber views "the modern West" as "the first major civilization in the history of humanity to deny almost entirely the existence of the Great Nest of Being."

Wilber proposes the "integral task" of a synthesis (as in a Hegelian triadic dialectic) beyond premodernity and modernity that would include premodernity and modernity but overcome their respective limitations�the premodern lack of the four quadrants and the modern denial of the Great Nest. This postmodern synthesis/integration of "the enduring truths" of premodernity (or "all-level") and "the good news" of modernity (or "all-quadrant") would generate " all of the levels in the four quadrants�[and] all of the quadrants at each of those levels" or as Wilber succinctly defines it " body, mind, soul, and spirit in self, culture, nature" or as he condenses it even further into an integral mantra: "all-quadrant, all-level,"/ "AQAL." Instead of emerging as such a synthesis, contemporary postmodernity as yet in its "deconstructive" phase has merely compounded the Upper Right "flatland madness" of modernity with another Right-Hand reductionism: Lower Right "aperspectival madness."

Postmodernity is early vision-logic of "integral- aperspectival" consciousness that seeks to deconstruct and transcend the exclusionary, marginalizing, silencing, indifferent and oppressive practices of modernity/rationality. But the "bright promise" of the "inclusiveness" and "diversity" of vision-logic/postmodernity failed and degenerated into "aperspectival madness." Wilber speaks of the "horizontal integration" at any level of consciousness which would entail "an integration of the four quadrants at [that] level" and the converse possibility of the "pathological imbalance" at a level of consciousness when there is "overemphasis on the I, We, It domains." Wilber claims that instead of unfolding in an "all-quadrant" embrace, postmodern integral-aperspectival consciousness "collapsed" to "surfaces, to exteriors, to Right-Hand occasions" and became "crippled" into a Lower Right pluralism or "exterior holism" of aperspectival madness. Instead of an all-quadrant "integralism," postmodernity merely extended the Right-Hand reductionism of modernity in another "twist" on the collapse of the Kosmos as a LR pluralism with a denial of UL depth (the premodern Great Nest) and an exclusive embrace of only LR surfaces/ "interobjective its"(institutions/structures/ sites of ideology and power). Up to a point, Wilber sees the "pluralistic relativism" sponsored by deconstructive postmodernity as an advance over the "universal formalism" of modernity as it has "opened up the world to a richness of multiple voices." Typical of his holarchical view that "each wave of existence [level of consciousness] is a fundamental ingredient of all subsequent waves [levels]" and of his integrative magnanimity to "cherish and embrace" every level of consciousness, Wilber acknowledges (using Don Beck's colour terminology of "memetic" taxonomy of consciousness, cultures and nations that dominates his recent writings) "the many gifts of green." But Wilber indicates in dissent from deconstructive postmodernity that it is "stuck"/ "arrested" in the chaotic incommensurability of "contextual pluralities." It is not enough for postmodernity to merely provide pluralizing liberation from the hegemonic absolutes of modernity; it should " transcend and include its wonderful accomplishments in an even more generous embrace" and "integrate" the Babel of "unrelated" local voices it has freed--as otherwise, each local voice only "expresses and relishes its uniqueness," "revolves around itself, becoming its own universe" and is severely self-absorbed. Unless the many excluded narratives, marginalized identities and silenced voices so "nobly" recovered by the pluralistic relativism of deconstructive postmodernity are integrated into a new higher unity of "universal integralism" or "dynamic dialecticism" or "constructive postmodernity," they will remain merely a "heap" of different contexts and multiple perspectives. Constructive postmodernity can "convert heaps into wholes, fragments into integration, alienation into cooperation."

Wilber's quest for the "unity-in-diversity" of constructive postmodernity is in accord with his Kosmic sense of our "need to keep trying to find the One-in-the-Many that is the form of the Kosmos itself" and it becomes the next evolutionary step in the self-realizing movement of the Kosmos one step closer to the ultimate return of the Kosmos to itself. As "aperspectival madness" is a debasement of the original promise of "all-quadrant, all-level" integralism, Wilber's critique of deconstructive postmodernity carries a strong accent on the unfinished project of postmodernity. Wilber emphasizes the evolutionary urgency of achieving the missed synthesis of the Great Nest of premodernity and the four quadrants of modernity and linking it with a "jump"/ "momentous leap" from the early vision-logic of deconstructive postmodernity of "aperspectival madness" or "dynamic pluralism" which is the "green" final wave of "first-tier thinking" to the middle and late vision-logic of constructive postmodernity of "universal integralism" or "dynamic dialecticism" which is the "yellow" and "turquoise" of "second-tier thinking" beyond which are transmental "third-tier"/"Kosmocentric"stages of coral/psychic and subtle, causal and nondual in as yet unchristened colours of the ultimate destiny of consciousness.

With a prodigious mission of evolutionary rehabilitation that can rescue us from the "disaster of modernity" which has worsened into the contemporary "aperspectival madness" of deconstructive postmodernity and make us fit to go forward in higher emergence, Wilber is a visionary custodian of our teleological tryst with an integral and transpersonal tomorrow. With majestic wisdom and marvellous eloquence, Wilber has been reminding us in book after book that we have laboriously come "up from Eden" and should not, individually or collectively, jeopardize the teleological promise of "tomorrow's greater embrace." A visionary orchestration of multidisciplinary doctrines of diverse thinkers of different times and cultures into a pathbreaking philosophy of the Kosmos, a lofty discourse on the evolutionary meaning of human fate, an erudite narrative of the journey of consciousness through "all our yesterdays" to its "fresh woods and pastures new" of tomorrow, a magisterial presentation of the Kosmos as a teleological play of Brahman, a creative refiguration of the premodern "perennial philosophy" into a paradigm of wisdom for the postmodern wired world, and a sublime meditation in surpassing spiritual prose on eternity and time, the Big Bang and Eden, heaven and earth, the One and the Many, gods and goddesses, pre and trans, higher and lower, inner and outer, left and right, surface and depth, immersion and transcendence, mind and brain, science and spirituality, sex and soul, the child and the sage, I and We, epochs and worldviews, yesterday and tomorrow, atoms and Atman, ego and enlightenment, and Everything and Emptiness, Wilber's achievement is a miracle of prajna and karuna.