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 Newsletter Nr. 662   
 Amsterdam, June 7th, 2017


CLIMBING THE STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN - Ken Wilber's Mystical Religion of the Future - FRANK VISSER

My recent six-part series of rather critical topical review essays[1] of Ken Wilber's latest book The Religion of Tomorrow (2017) will be concluded by this final one, which strikes a decidedly more positive note. Readers of the previous essays could easily have gotten the impression that this book isn't worth reading, but nothing could be further from the truth. The core of this book—and the core-business of Ken Wilber's oeuvre—consists of a stage model of development and consciousness that can fruitfully be applied to all aspects of religion, both in their healthy and their less healthy expressions. 

Ten years ago I published essays on Integral World, by budding integral religious scholar Dustin DiPerna, on Christianity and Islam which demonstrated exactly that fact.[2] I saw, and see, great merit in using the integral model to clarify the religious landscape, which is so full of tensions and misunderstandings between large groups of society, but without overburdening it with cosmological, evolutionary or esoteric considerations. Plainly stated: religion can be magical, mythical, rational, pluralistic, integral and super-integral (mystical), and these distinctions hold true both between and within religious traditions—because they reflect universal human capabilities. Fundamentalism, liberalism and mysticism can be found in all religious traditions.

Read more:
http://www.integralworld.net/visser105.html