INTEGRAL WORLD MAILING LIST http://www.integralworld.net Newsletter Nr. 685 Amsterdam, October 29th, 2017 NOVELISTIC TRUTH - Comparing Ken Wilber's Eros Theory with Dan Brown's Latest Fictional Narrative, Origin - ANDREA DIEM-LANE Dan Brown is an extraordinarily successful novelist, even if literary scholars have bashed his fictional works, such as The Da Vinci Code and Inferno. I am also not a great fan of Brown's historical fiction, though I readily admit that I perversely enjoyed Angels and Demons. Brown's latest offering is entitled Origin and describes how Robert Langdon, the renowned Harvard Professor of Symbology and Religious Iconology, tries to unravel the murder of his one-time student and friend, Edmond Kirsch, who as a brilliant computer scientist (think of someone like Elon Musk) has made a shattering discovery that he claims will completely revolutionize our understanding of how life originated and the future destiny of humankind as a species. The problem, and the driving force behind the entire plot of the book, is that Kirsch is killed before he can present his radical findings to the world at large. As I was reading the book, which I must confess is a bit pedantic and clichéd, it struck me as quite ironic that the fictional Edmond Kirsch's speculative theories on life's origin and future trajectory was much more evidential and persuasive than Ken Wilber's Eros theory about the cosmos. To put this into sharper relief, the novelistic truth embedded in Origin sheds a clearer light than the supposedly “non-fictional” metaphysics espoused in Integral Theory. The science in Dan Brown's fiction, in other words, is more properly grounded and carries more weight than most of what one finds in Wilber's later tomes. This may come as no surprise to his many critics, but it is disconcerting when one finds greater insight in Dan Brown's latest novel than in Ken Wilber's attempts at Integral science. Of course, it may be argued that novels work precisely when they do reflect deeper truths, even if housed in fanciful tales. Read more: http://integralworld.net/diem-lane33.html