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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Search for a
‘Big Wholeness’

Review of Ken Wilber's Finding Radical Wholeness

Frank Visser

Seven years after his big tome on The Religion of Tomorrow Ken Wilber has published a new book: Finding Radical Wholeness: The Integral Path to Unity, Growth, and Delight. In this review we will explore what this volume adds to his already voluminous oeuvre (see the Bibliography page for a complete overview). This new book might be more accessible than its big brother, and most of all more practical. For Wilber offers an integral brand of spirituality—“spiritual but not religious”, as it is called these days—which offers a methodology to directly experience the Divine, or the Ground of Being, his favorite phrase.

Its approach is spiritual, in the sense that it helps you to directly discover a real Wholeness—a genuine spirituality—right here and right now in your own life, but it does not demand any sort of belief in magical or mythical stories, miracle events, or anything like an institutional religion. In redefining a genuine spirituality as the discovery of a real Wholeness, it bypasses most of the magical and mythic belief systems that permeate so many of the world's religions, and exactly in that sense, it is "spiritual but not religious." (p. 1-2)

In general, religious texts can be interpreted literally or literary, as I would phrase it. For example, fundamentalist Christians take the Genesis story in a literal way, especially those of the Young Earth variety. More educated Christians accept the scientific view of the origin of life and see religion as a set of stories that have to be told and retold to future generation, without bothering much about their literal content. For Wilber, religion, or rather spirituality, has more to offer: a direct experience of the transcendent dimensions of existence. That is, indeed, a totally different story. In psychological terms, these approaches can be seen as three different stages: mythic-literal, rational-symbolic and mystical-experiential.

He breaks down this methodology into five different disciplines, if you will, summarized as: Waking Up, Growing Up, Opening Up, Cleaning Up and Showing Up. All of these aim for some kind of Wholeness, and together they form "Big Wholeness". I can't resist associations with Big Macs or Big Whoppers, but then again, Ken is an American. In any case, Wilber's is a very Up form of spirituality.

Waking Up

The first methodology, of Waking Up, is by far the most ancient, and has been perfected in the East. The other four are of more recent date, and have been explored in the West. In Wilber's understanding, meditation leads to Enlightenment, in various stages, which has been known under various names: Awakening, Unity consciousness, Nondual awareness, Kosmic consciousness, One Taste, the Supreme Identity, oneness with the Ground of All Being, Absolute or Ultimate Truth. To clarify these expressions, Wilber points out that Waking Up relates to the Ultimate Truth, whereas all other forms of knowledge belong to the realm of relative truth.[1]

Ultimate Truth does not deal with a particular being or a group of beings; it deals with Being itself, with a capital B—the Ground of All Being, spaceless and therefore infinite, timeless and therefore eternal, and a groundless Ground that underlies every relative truth in existence but is not itself a relative truth and thus is not detectable by ordinary, external science but only by an interior, meditative science. (p. 20)

This is a lot to take in, and Wilber puts much effort in convincing his readers that he means what he says. To complicate things further, he stresses that we all have access to these higher states of consciousness, if only we would know where to look for them. He also emphasizes we need to distinguish between the experience and the explanations that have been offered for it.

The simplest explanation for this direct experience is not that your brain has had a physiological meltdown and that you are deeply confused and delusional. It's that in the timeless Now-moment of Waking Up, you have directly and immediately experienced the fundamental, all-pervading, groundless Ground of All Being—which is timeless, which means ever-present, which means eternal." (p. 34)

Yet, modern science would prefer a more sober approach to spiritual experience. Is the concept of a Ground of All Being really "the simplest explanation"? Perhaps we can activate brain modules in which the usual sense of time and space are inaccessible, so they give us the sensation of being beyond time and space. Who knows. One need not be delusional for this, except if one imagines oneself to be one with the Absolute (whatever that could possibly mean).

For example, skeptic Michael Shermer, in his review of the book Why God Won't Go Away (2002) by Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili, writes:

When Buddhist monks meditate and Franciscan nuns pray, for example, their single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) scans indicate strikingly low activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, a bundle of neurons the authors have dubbed the OAA, or Orientation Association Area, whose job it is to orient the body in physical space (people with damage to this area have a hard time negotiating their way around a house). When the OAA is booted up and running smoothly there is a sharp distinction between self and non-self. When OAA is in sleep mode—as in deep meditation and prayer—that division breaks down, leading to a blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy. Is this what happens to monks who feel a oneness with the universe, or with nuns who feel the presence of God?[1a]

Wilber tends to favor absolutist language when describing mystical experiences, even in his post-metaphysical phase of writing. But however much he claims to separate experiences from interpretations, what else is the "Ground of All Being" but a very metaphysical explanation? Why not stay with something like a Ground of Self, a flow state in which the mind is centered and serene, without any metaphysical overload? A typical integralist would argue that brain states are at most correlates of states of consciousness, not their full explanation, but in the case of mystical experience it surely is more parsimonious to look for brain-based explanations first.

For your reference, these are the various spiritual stages in Wilber's model, and how they correspond with more natural states of consciousness[2]:

Briefly, the gross state is identical to the normal waking state, which according to spiritual traditions is a restricted, sinful or illusory state. The subtle meditative state resembles the dream state, as the causal state resembles the deep sleep state. The difference being that in the meditative states one remains fully conscious. The fourth meditative state is called in Indian philosophy turiya or "the fourth", in which one is a pure witness of one's own mind. The fifth meditative state results in a unity with all of existence, or the Ground of All Being. For these last two states Wilber provides guided meditation instruction as only he can do. In these instructions he presents himself as a veritable spiritual guide.[3]

As an aside, the metaphor of awakening pops up in different segments of society as well. In right-wing conspiracy circles, think QAnon, much is expected from the Great Awakening, in which the global elite that supposedly tries to enslave us is exposed and captured. And also on the left hand side of the spectrum, the Woke philosophy tries to raise consciousness of the many ways the West has oppressed and exploited other cultures and minorities. Awake or Woke, what's the differerence? To this Wilber adds a third meaning: spiritual awakening.

GROWING UP

With the second module, Growing Up, we enter the field of modern Western developmental psychology, which is barely a century old. In Wilber's understanding, how we interpret and explain our experiences depends largely on the stages of development we are in.

But these developmental stages determine a lot of how we see the world, morality, relationships, religion and so forth. A new-born child cares only about itself and can't take the perspective of others, is ego-centric. In the next, ethnocentric stage one becomes a member of a certain group, starting with the family unit and widening itself to the village or the country. In the next, worldcentric stage, one respects all human, regardless of country, race, religion or sex. And in the final, integral stages, the previous stages are integrated. Here's an overview.

The relevance of this model is, according to Wilber, that all humans start from the beginning, in the egocentric stage, and develop to further stages during their lifetime. But not many go beyond the ethnocentric stage, and this explains in large part the constant competition and war between nationalist and religious groups, not to mention the "clash of civilizations". In this sense, human development amounts to an increasing widening of one's mental horizon of empathy. Essentially, group-think rules the day, as we can see in the current Russo-Ukrainian war, for example.[4]

The bulk of the book is spent on describing how the various stages—archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic and integral—determine our lives. He makes good use of James Fowler's study Stages of Faith, who measured the seven stages of religious development.[5] This line of spiritual intelligence, as apart from cognitive, emotional or moral intelligence, tracks our ultimate concern. The research question than becomes: does religion belong to the mythic-literal past, or does it grow with us, as we mature in life and move to higher stages of development? In academia researchers struggle to define any post-rational forms of religiosity, which some call an existential or "second primitivity", a term fraught with ambiguities. Wilber redefines these stages as decidedly mystical and experiential.

Since there are many developmental models around, Wilber has chosen to use colors to designate them in more neutral terms (derived but modified from the Spiral Dynamics system of colors.)[6]

So in terms of Christianity, there are as many variants of this religion as there are colors in this scheme, and in each color-stage the Jesus figure is interpreted differently. For example, for Red Christianity Jesus was a Magician who could work miracles; for Amber Christianity he was a Savior only for those who believed in him; for Green Christianity he came for all good people in the world; and for Turquoise Christianity he was a wisdom teacher—the whole need for sin and salvation has dropped out of the picture.

Wilber uses the stage concept for both individual and cultural evolution, and the latter has been very controversial in academia. Aren't we all human beings with the same biological past? He refers to a book by Nicholas Wade, former general science editor of the New York Times, who argued cultures differ because of genetic differences due to natural selection. The book was opposed vehemently, but Wilber uses him as source to argue that human evolution still continues, to this very day.[7]

Returning to individual development: the switch from mythic religion to mystic spirituality is performed by reason, and this can take different forms: a symbolic-rational re-interpretation of the myths of one's religion, in liberal theology, or a total rejection of all mythic-literal religion, as atheists favor. Both use reason to get liberated from the confines of the mythic mind. Wilber is no fan of mythological lore, he doesn't think myths actually contain a deeper meaning. Instead, he advises us to put them aside and talk about mystical spirituality in more direct, even technical terms. When religion as such is confined to the mythic stage, and reason fights against this mythic religion, both are caught in what he has called a level-line fallacy. Rather, in his integral view, religion can have many phases or stages, following the developmental line of spiritual intelligence. And Wilber adds: one can make progress in this developmental line even without having had any spiritual experiences of the Waking Up variety.

An Intermezzo on Evolution

At this point in his narrative—the orange-rational stage of development—Wilber introduces the topic of evolution in the paragraph "Evolution—the 'What' and the 'Why'" (p. 166-171). Allow me to digress, because we have discussed Wilber's views on evolutionary science extensively. Where does he stand in 2024?

At this orange rational stage, the notion of evolution itself often becomes reinterpreted by spiritual intelligence as something like "Spirit-in-action." The entirety of conventional Darwinian evolution is not necessarily embraced at this stage, but, at the very least, it is no longer thought that evolution itself is incompatible with a legitimate spirituality. But this is almost always done with a very specific understanding of evolution. To wit: there are at least two quite different aspects of modern evolutionary theory—there is the chronological what of evolution, and there is the theoretical why of evolution. The "what" is almost always accepted by a smart orange rationality, the "why" almost never. (p. 166)

This is truly an odd statement. No rational professional evolutionary scientist believes he needs Spirit to make sense of his data. That is precisely Wilber's own private belief system. By using words such as "often" and "almost always" Wilber seems misinterpret the rational-reflexive faith stage, which will mostly, but not always, opt for a secular view of religion, either liberal-symbolic or atheistic. The "what" of evolution includes "the empirical record of that actually occurred", and the "why" of evolution Wilber briefly and suggestively discusses by dropping some names (Whitehead, Erich Jantsch, Ilya Prigogine, Francisco Varela, Stuart Kauffman and "some philosophers", who go unnamed, who use terms such as "Eros" or "self-organization"). He then asserts confidently:

The inherent drive of the universe to self-organize has set evolution in motion and then pushed it from from within to ever-greater and ever more unified wholes (or holons), with the result of 14 billion years of this self-organization through self-transcendence being nothing less than this unbelievably beautiful world we find ourselves in. This is an inherent drive—an actual force—present in the universe itself. It's as real a force as gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. (p. 167)

All this is vintage Wilber, and it is pseudo-science. Notice the over-generalization of the concept of evolution to cosmic dimensions, the use of emotive language about the beauty of the world, and the strong, but unsupported, claim that there is a fundamental force of nature at work here. To make things worse, deploying this force also to the process of individual development, he continues:

This Eros or self-organization also pushes our own growth and development and opens us to higher and higher stages of evolutionary unfolding. The force that produced galaxies from the Big Bang, gorillas from dirt, and global worldcentric concern from egocentric narcissism is the same force that will drive us to higher and higher stages of our own growth, development and evolution. And if you see evolution as being driven by "Spirit-in-action"—which is one possible view that emerges at this orange stage—then the very drive of this Eros or self-organizing activity can be seen as the creative drive of Spirit itself, creating something from nothing in every moment of existence, as the creative Ground of Being of everything that is. (p. 167)

Ernst Mayr (1904-2005)

It is hard to know where to begin, with these poetic and quasi-scientific pronouncements. One cosmic force that is responsible for everything under the sun and identifying this as Spirit, is a sure sign of pseudo-scientific reasoning. Wilber selectively quotes from scientists he likes, but fails to convey the details that are studied by real scientists. For example, evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr once carefully described the What, the How and the Why of evolution in his handbook This is Biology (1997)[8] By leaving out the How dimension Wilber skips all the work done by real scientists to clarify how evolution and self-organization actually work, so he can introduce his own vaguely defined spiritual "explanation." This is Ernst Mayr's view:

• WHAT? - The study of Biodiversity (chapter 7): how many species are there? how do they relate to each other? how are the various taxonomic classifications founded and validated?
• HOW? - The Making of a New Individual (chapter 8): how do cells develop into organisms? is there such a thing as recapitulation? what role do genes play during development?
• WHY? - The Evolution of Organisms (chapter 9): Darwin's many theories (gradualism, common descent, natural selection, sexual selection, micro- and macroevolution explained)

Wilber cursorily refers to a number of thinkers, in support of his opinion that neo-Darwinism is "not a complete theory". He mentions "leading edge" biologist David Sloan Wilson, who "speak[s] of things like psychological and cultural evolution." So? These are separate fields of research, asking for their own explanatory principles. He also mentions "highly respected pioneer in abiogenesis" [origin of life studies] Bruce Damer, with whom Wilber "spent a fair amount of time". Then, Charles Peirce is summoned as witness, whose article "Evolutionary Love" (1893!) postulated exactly such a divine element in evolution. And the late Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution, in which he gave a rational-evolutionary re-interpretation of Christianity. A rather motley crew indeed.

Finally, Wilber throws around a random creationist trope about the implausibility of a 150 amino acid long protein chain being built by chance alone (giving 1/1077 as probability, which is probably a typo for 1/10⁷⁷? Either way, it is a silly number). One wonders, if random chance and natural selection are unable to pull this off, how would a cosmic and transcendent/immanent Spirit know how to assemble such a protein, let alone actually build it? There is not the slightest hint of a credible explanation to be found in these circles, especially when Wilber clarifies, after rejecting the mythic God of Intelligent Design: "Eros, or self-organization, is a general push, a broad tendency, a rough directive, a generalized morphogenetic field not a precise and detailed blueprint." (p. 171) So, how would that actually work, protein-wise?

But if we want, we can bypass the Spirit narrative at this rational stage, he concedes:

Spiritual intelligence, grappling with these issues, can see this inherent drive that creates order out of chaos as being an intrinsic feature of the universe itself or as a primary form of Spirit's own creativity. One of these two versions—secular or spiritual (both of which embrace self-organization)—is the most common explanation of the why of evolution, starting at orange. But gone is the insanity of there being nothing but chance mutation and natural selection driving evolution—a notion so utterly idiotic that it reminds one of Arthur Lovejoy's comment that "there is no human stupidity that has not found its champion." (p. 170)

But then, Wilber backtracks a bit about this all-powerful spiritual "push" or "drive" behind evolution:

There are simply too many aspects of evolution that although surely driven by an inherent drive to create higher order, nonetheless are often fairly happenstance; not every itty-bitty item of evolution is clearly and carefully intelligently designed (some things still happen by chance, for one thing). Eros, or self-organization, is a general push, a broad tendency, a rough directive, a generalized morphogenetic field not a precise and detailed blueprint. (p. 171)

The scientific challenge of course is to specify precisely where chance is involved, and where "something else" is at play—and what the nature is of that "something else". As usual, Wilber chooses mystification over clarification. If not every detail is designed, then what actually is designed according to Wilbers visionary science? I guess there's much more to rationality and science than Wilber likes us to think with his broad-brush approach. He seldom if ever gets down to the level of empirical details or examples. Briefly, self-organization is not an inherent cosmic drive, but something that happens under the right conditions, primarily energy flows, in multiple different fields. But that's a rather unending story.[9]

Growing Up, Continued

Moving on, because we are not even half-way through the book. Covering the postmodern-pluralistic (or Green) stage, Wilber sees the currrent and almost tribal culture wars as a clash between three developmental stages of Growing Up: premodern Amber-mythic, modern Orange-rational and postmodern Green-pluralistic, each of which has different values and truths, each of which has also its own shadow-sides. A developmental perspective is very helpful here: "Until that fact is taken into account, there seems to be no end in sight for the ever-increasing polarization of society. The only antipolarizing force on the cultural horizon seems to be the slow but steady increase in the emergence of the Integral stages." (p. 179) The integral view would find elements of truth in all three of these but would actively look for a balance.

What does religion look like from this pluralistic perspective? It is very much social justice oriented, aiming at equality for all. Multiculturalism belongs here. Jesus is seen as a social activist, who exposes the rich and powerful of this world. A radical egalitarianism is preached, even with the inclusion of nature as a whole. It is the religion of Gaia or the Great Web of Life, where the manifest world is equated with Spirit.

What does the Integral stage bring to the table to make good on its strong claim that it can resolve the culture wars and introduce new forms of spirituality? This Turquoise-integral stage represents a "monumental leap of meaning" (p. 199), to paraphrase the title of a magazine article about the work of Clare Graves, the founder of what later came to be called Spiral Dynamics.[10] For one thing, I would say, it could de-escalate the tensions between the three warring segments of society, by explicitly accepting their qualities while rejecting their dysfunctional cultural expressions. Family values, indidivual freedom and social justice each are values to be upheld. But as long as each group sees only its own truths, consensus becomes impossible.

What would the integral stage of religious development look like? Wilber's story is rather thin in this area, and extols the corresponding mystical states that are available during Waking Up when this stage is reached. Of course, very little empirical research has been done given the small number of people in the population that has reached this stage, but James Fowler's descriptions of what he calls Universalizing Faith (which is equivalent to Teal/Turquoise according to the table Wilber provides on page 96) could be helpful here. "The individual would treat any person with compassion as he or she views people as from a universal community, and should be treated with universal principles of love and justice." (Wikipedia) As one online overview has it: "People at this stage can become important religious teachers because they have the ability to relate to anyone at any stage and from any faith. They are able to relate without condescension but at the same time are able to challenge the assumptions that those of other stages might have."

That seems to be a fair description of someone living from an integral point of view, when it comes to religion.

Additional Pathways

To these main methodologies of Waking Up and Growing Up, Wilber adds a few additional tools to his integral toolkit: Cleaning Up, Showing Up and Opening Up. We will take them one by one.

Cleaning Up is generally known as shadow-work and has been pioneered by the various schools of depth psychology. The idea is that humans can repress parts of their nature they don't like and cause symptoms of mental illness. The cure is to bring these repressed elements into the light of consciousness, which will make these symptoms disappear. Examples are: anger, jealousy, greed and so on. In Wilber's understanding, shadows too come in various colors, so there is red shadow, orange shadow, green shadow, etc. Shadow material is typically projected onto others, and the therapy aims at taking back these projections. Wilber has devised a simple process called "3-2-1", which means that you first study the person you hate (as a 3rd person), then talk to him or her (as a 2nd person), and then look inside (as a 1st person) to see if you recognize these very same qualities in yourself.

Showing Up, in turn, relates to checking if you include all the four integral quadrants in your understanding of anything or your behavior in general. The four quadrants are known as:

This has turned out to be a very fruitful diagram, that has found applications in multiple fields, such as management, health care, criminal law, architecture, art interpretation, and many more. Sometimes Wilber shortens this into three segments: I, We and It(s). On Integral World you can find many discussions about both of these schemes. Not only is it important to discover what is included in them but even more what gets left out.

Wilber has even used the four quadrants to solve the infamous mind-body problem, which has been a philosophical nightmare for centuries. The Upper-Left quadrant represent the mind, the Upper-Right quadrant represents the body/brain. Critics have argued that juxtaposing mind and body does not solve the mind-body problem, which is about how these two principles interact and how this can be rationally clarified. Wilber has claimed that such a rational solution is just not possible and that a real solution (or should we say dissolution?) can only be reached in deep contemplation.[11]

What is more, Wilber claims his view is an improvement on the perennial philosophy that saw matter as the lowest rung on the ladder (of the Great Chain of Being), for instead "matter is not the lowest level of existence but the exterior dimension of all levels of existence." (p. 266). In this context he calls the Great Chain concept "silly". (p. 265) What was once seen as supernatural or metaphysical should be seen as "intraphysical" (p. 266). All of the states of consciousness, from the lowest to the highest, have brain correlates. But in and endnote (p. 454-455) he still refers to subtle bodies related to the afterlife, in fact several of these bodies, so that is still quite metaphysical. Besides, no physicist can make sense of the notion of an "intraphysical" reality, expecially not if the cosmic drive towards complexity, discussed earlier, is situated there. This is as metaphysical as you can get. The real question is: what is actually the ontological status of the Left-Hand quadrants, the interior dimensions as such? A question I raised about two decades ago.[12]

When the four quadrant scheme is applied to this new book—or in fact to all of Wilber's books—it turns out they address the Upper-Left quadrant of consciousness, and to a lesser degree the Lower-Left quadrant of culture. He hasn't written about neurology (Upper-Right), because "the neurophysiological study of the brain is indeed objective, natural, Right-hand science, and thus it will move forward and make progress, come what may." (p. 280) True enough, but what about the Lower-Right quadrant of justice, politics and power relationships between groups in the real world? This seems to be a blind spot to Wilber, as some authors on Integral World have argued. So the four quadrant model might be balanced and complete, even if its applications might be skewed to the interior quadrants.

And finally, Opening Up refers to the theory of multiple intelligences, each of which are available to us to a certain degree. There is cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence, musical intelligence, aeshetic intelligence, mathematical intelligence, and many other forms. According to Wilber, there are so many different types of intelligence because life raises different questions to us, and we evolved an intelligence for answering them. For example: what do I find attractive? Who am I? What is the right thing to do? What does music have to say to me? What is ultimately the most important thing for me? And so on.

Dark Shadows Looming

The next 50 or so pages are spent on real-world problems, in the chapters "Very Dark Shadows Today" and "The Nightmare of Modernity": the various catastrophes that may be awaiting us, from global warming to nuclear war, terrorist attacks, AI superintelligence and the extreme worldwide income inequality. Let's see if Wilber can assuage our concerns about having neglected this particular Lower-Right quadrant. Wilber's take is the opposite: we have spent too much time studying external realities, and have sorely neglected the interior dimensions.

Wilber starts with a retrospective on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963, which had put us on the brink of a global destruction, when Russia placed nuclear warheads in Cuba. (What he doesn't mention is that this was in direct response to the US placing nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey, and of course the horribly failed US invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs). For Wilber this marked the transition of an optimistic modernity to a pervasively pessimistic postmodernism (even though both were global stages of development). A rather anachronistic start, given the fact that the current Russo-Ukrainian war is seen by no less than Noam Chomsky as putting us in the same dangerous situation. And again, the US is directly involved in this (at least in Russia's perception) through NATO expansion and half-hearted promises to Ukraine of a future NATO membership. He gives the following analysis:

The central problem that human beings face today is not due primarily to the fact that we exist in a global village, with its economics, finances, trade, technology, education and politics all being interwoven, of 7 billion people. The central problem is that the capacity to inhabit a level that fully embraces this global reality is the result of several major stages of interior human development, and at this time less than 30 percent of the population have developed to the worldcentric stages where this can be done. (p. 303)

It is a double problem, in Wilber's analysis: we are not developed enough, and we don't even know it. Hence, most of the world population is ethnocentric, and in its extreme versions produces ISIS, Hamas and Hezbollah (p. 304). Globalism is largely an exterior affair—technological, economic, organizational—but not yet an interior accomplishment.

A real part of the problem here is that government, as well as many other national and international organizations (including businesses), often operates at an ethnocentric level. Although the science and technology that they use are indeed global and worldcentric, their own interior motives are often red power-tribal or amber jihadist-traditional (and this applies also to military organizations, financial systems, international politics, and transnational businesses; while their technology has reached global worldcentric levels, their leaders often have not). Humanity, in other words, is not living up to its own profound interior potentials. And this is compounded by the fact that we are not even tracking this interior dimension at all! (p. 305)

Military spending, 2023 (Wikipedia)

To his credit, Wilber does mention military organizations and financial systems as major culprits, but does not go so far as mentioning the Military-Industrial Complex as a major factor. Nor does he point to the fact that the US spends an insane amount of money on "defense", more than the next 10 countries, including Russia and China (though they are catching up), which is odd for a large country surrounded by huge oceans. But yes, there are strong ethnocentric elements in the United States, both in its internal divisions and as a whole towards the outside world, as much as there are in the other superpowers, each with their own mythologies. He does not mention the American desire to remain a hegemonic superpower, nor the cry for a multi-polar world order heard in the global South. What planet is he living on?[15]

Of course, the western countries have a different perspective on this potentially global conflict, but that's the whole point. When perspectives clash, integral theory should be able to make sense of it. Here, Wilber seems to back off from really digging into current world affairs. In Finding Radical Wholeness we find interesting statements about the culture wars or internal US politics—likewise a clash of values and perspectives—but never more than a few pages. That seems to be a recurring pattern with Wilber, who has always claimed that integral politics tops his agenda.

And again:

Our planet is being assaulted and crippled by people who have access to orange Right-hand worldcentric technology and artifacts, but who themselves are at pre-worldcentric and pre-orange Left-hand levels of development and either can't see or don't care about global realities. This is killing all of us. (p. 308)

The same fundamental problem, Wilber says, hinders a rational solution to the "very real and extremely threatening" (p. 309) global warming crisis. There was a time Wilber was a climate skeptic, but apparently not anymore.[13] A fully objective and rational analysis of the problem should be enough to make steps towards its solution, but large segments of society just don't think there is a problem, or if there is, it's not caused by us. The same analysis he applies to modern capitalism and cybercrime: those in charge lack sufficient development. In general, we have devised technologies and organizations with a global potential, but have yet failed to live up to their global nature, by pursuing our nationalist or religious agendas. I think that's a fair assessment of the current world situation.

GUIDED MEDITATIONS

Turning now back again to the world of interiority—where Wilber is most at home and where he excels in his clarifications—the last 100 pages are spent with guided meditations or "pointing out instructions" that will help you in your Waking Up process. The focus is on the two meditative states mentioned above, "the fourth" or Witness-consciousness and "beyond the fourth" or Nondual-consciousness, otherwise known as One Taste.

Witness-consciousness is reached when you lean to dis-identify from the contents of your mind. Just by watching these, you become separate of them. If this process is pursued to the very end, a state of stillness and peace is reached, which is said to be beyond suffering, anxiety and angst. You just watch whatever comes before the mind's eye. The logic here is that whatever is Subject can never be seen as an object, so you end up with Absolute Subjectivity. As you notice, things are here often written with capitals, like Supreme Identify, Higher Self, Absolute Consciousness. These are, of course, interpretations of the mystical experiences.

Nondual-consciousness is one step further, and paradoxically one no longer distances oneself from everythting that can be witnessed, but one becomes one with these realities. As Wilber would say: "You no longer witness the mountain, you become the mountain." Of course, again this is a description of a feeling, an interpretation of what goes on, and to my mind these interpretations are mystifications. What goes on in the brain we may never know exactly, but I assume more mundane and economical explanations are in order. But that's just me. When it comes to choosing between hubris or humility I would definitely choose the latter.

Wilber closes with two chapters on Tantra, which is a nondual tradition present in most of the world religions, but most notably in Buddhism. The early schools practiced along the lines of Witness-consciousness, but the later schools turned their gaze to becoming one with reality. All kinds of dualism, between the sacred and the profane, are transcended and accepted as part of life. So for example, instead of denying and repressing negative emotions such as anger, they are accepted and as a result transcended into clarity of mind. This included the use of alcohol and sex, which were taboo in the early schools. (Of course, things could easily run out of hand here, and many a tantric guru ended up as alcoholic or abuser. Wilber refers to Chögyam Trungpa favorably a lot, but this well-known guru died suffering from symptoms of terminal alcoholism and liver cirrhosis.)

Wilber gives a re-interpretation of the historical tantric schools by integrating them in his integral framework, thus offering a kind of "super Tantra" (p. 406), which excludes the more dubious and dangerous aspects of this tradition (p. 409). Again, much is written in capitals like Bliss and Love and Light and Freedom, but you know by now what policy I follow here. In Wilber's presentation, feelings of bliss and love from sex are transferred to the cosmos as a whole.

Pragmatically, this means that whenever you feel Bliss, don't just rest imperviously in its own self-contained delight, but expand that Bliss to a loving embrace of the entire world—hence, Loving Bliss. And likewise, whenever you feel Love, make sure you inject it with a real Happiness, so that you are feeling a truly Happy Wholeness, a Joyous Fullness, a Blissful Love.
This is important, because Bliss and Love are the most common feelings elicited by the two highest or ultimate states of consciousness—turiya [the fourth] and turiyatita [beyond the fourth]—and thus evoking both feeling tones together is an important part of our lives. Or perhaps I ought to say, it should be an important part of our lives. (p. 431)

CONCLUSION

Looking over the ground we have covered in this review, I must say this is a typical Wilber book, with all the positive and negative aspects. It is very rich in content, dealing with integral concepts that are by now well-known, but also adding some new accents, such as Opening Up and the chapters on Tantra. It is highly repetitive throughout the book, and that's probably a conscious strategy, but I don't have to read six times in a few pages that I no longer have to believe in the myths of yesteryear, or that Enlightenment is just around the corner if I only know where to look. That said, the text is much more polished and restrained than previous books. Ethnocentric stages are no longer put aside as "neo-Nazi", as he did in Integral Spirituality, but just characterized as what they are: group-mind oriented stages of human development.

Except, of course, when it comes to science proper. Wilber keeps peddling the same tropes about complexity science supporting his spiritual worldview, even if only from a third-person perspective, or evolutionary science failing to live up to its promise, and he can't help calling neo-Darwinism "idiotic", which supposedly is an improvement over the phrase "moronic" which he used in The Religion of Tomorrow. Why does Wilber lose his enlightenment when evolutionary science comes along? Why does he trade his careful and detailed writing when discussing psychology or spirituality with careless slogans and names dropping when science is discussed? Why is he impervious to the criticism that has been levelled over the years? Is it Wilber's own blind spot or does he want to defend an integral ideology?

Still, I wonder if Wilber is ever able to touch on the subjects of the WE and the IT(s) domains as ably as he does with the I-domain. Whenever I read his ideas about the culture wars or US politics, I am always eager to learn more, but he doesn't seem to get beyond the same schematic suggestions he has offered over the years. Not to mention that the world is bigger than the United States, and we desperately need an integral expert to look at the current geopolitical world in turmoil.[14] But then again, that might not be within his expertise, and that's fine. As to science, I think he is beyond redemption, and we have to live with that fact.

With all these warm and cosy Feelings towards the cosmos, all I know is that it is pretty cold out there. And that's an understatement.[16]

NOTES

[1] Incidentally, his assurance that these spiritual experiences have no bearing on all fields of relative knowledge conflicts with his claim that his spiritual philosopy offers a better explanation of evolution than science is able to provide. This has been a major theme in my many essays on Integral World, see for example: Frank Visser, Why Ken Wilber is wrong about evolution and ignores the evidence for it, October 2020

[1a] Michael Shermer, "Is God All in the Mind?", michaelshermer.com, July 6, 2001. This review was originally published in Science, 6 Jul 2001 Vol 293, Issue 5527, p. 54.

[2] In his earlier works Wilber wrote much about the stages of consciousness humans go through. Later on he added a complex theory about states of consciousness. For a strong critique of the latter see: Mark Edwards, An Alternative View on States, Part I: Part One: My Presumptuous Proposition - Ken runs Aground on the Pre-Trans Fallacy #2, October 2003 and Part 2: Traditional and Modern Models of the Sleep States, November 2003. Not that Wilber has ever bothered to engage with this criticism.

[3] See my 1998 essay "The Seven Faces of Ken Wilber", which was included in Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (2003).

[4] See an extensive discussion of this group-think phenomenon on "Thoughts about the Ukraine Crisis", www.integralworld.net

[5] But not "just recently", as Wilber writes on p. 72, for the book appeared in 1981 and Fowler died in 2015. I studied it extensively during my psychology of religion study at the Catholic University Nijmegen in the '80.

[6] For an in-depth analysis for the implications of this change, see: Frank Visser, A more adequate spectrum of colors?, A Comparison of color terminology in chakra-psychology, Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics, May 2017, which is Part III of a 7-Part review of The Religion of Tomorrow.

[7] See "A Troublesome Inheritance" for this controversy. Wilber adds, with his usual over-confidence: "[T]he massive amount of recent research done during just the last few decades—especially in genomics and nucleic acid reproduction—makes it absolutely certain [sic] that not only did evolution continue beyond fifty thousand years ago, but it is still active and operating today." (p. 104). In my opinion, Wade was chastized, not because he argued for cultural evolution, but because he suggested a genetic basis for it (even though he admitted this was still very speculative). Obviously a kindred spirit to Wilber. Cultural evolution uses memes, not genes.

[8] See Frank Visser, 'From Dirt to Divinity', Ken Wilber's pre-Darwinian Understanding of Evolution, November 2010.

[9] Check out my essays on this topic in the Reading Room, too numerous to mention here. For those interested, I have debated a lot with Brad Reynolds about the "evolution as Spirit-in-action" concept, for example see: Brad Reynolds' 2019 three-part series "Real vs. Fake Integral". What is at stake here is how successfully integral theory has been able to integrate science, especially evolutionary theory. From Part Two:

To be clear: there is NO "pervasive cosmic force supposedly responsible for evolution or consciousness" (as Visser says). God is not an object or a "force" such as "Eros" or whatnot, but is the inherent Source and Condition of all existence. It is the inner Source, the True Self, that manifests all of creation—"Spirit-in-action," as Wilber would have it.

Yet, in this latest book, Wilber emphatically states: "This [Eros] is an inherent drive—an actual force—present in the universe itself. It's as real a force as gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces [emphasis added]." So Wilber is either confused about Spirit's role in nature, or there are two aspects to this, and we both, in our reading of Wilber, take up one of these: nature as a manifestation of Spirit, and Spirit playing a certain role within nature.

[10] For some reason Wilber seems to skip the Teal-Integral or Holistic stage that precedes the Turquoise-Integral stage, though he mentions it briefly (p. 201). It is good to remember that in his earlier works, Wilber would combine Green, Teal and Turquoise as the Existential-Humanistic stage of development, as it stands in-between the personal and the transpersonal stages, where body and mind are integrated. See for example Ken Wilber, The Atman Project (1980). The Spiral Dynamics color scheme was introduced only around 2000, and updated a few years later. See note 6 for an extensive discussion of this history and controversy.

[11] See Frank Visser, What's It Like to Be a Super-Nova?, Ken Wilber's Cosmic Approach to the Mind-Body Problem, May 2017, which is Part IV of a 7-Part review of The Religion of Tomorrow.

[12] See Frank Visser, Reflections on "Subtle Energy", December 2003. Read more here about the feelings of worms, and why the perennial philosophy is "goofy" according to Wilber.

[13] Clive Hamilton, Ken Wilber a climate denier? Say it ain't so, August 2015

[14] I am guessing the manuscript of Finding Radical Wholenss was submitted to Shambhala mid-2023. The Russian invasion happened February 2022. You do the math.

[15] For a much better and complete analysis of how the Cold War saga unfolded, see the Netflix 9-part series: "The Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War", which nicely covers both America's paranoia about the communist threat, its overspending on defence, the failures of many CIA operations and Russia's inferiority complex about trying to keep up with the US militarily and economically. Russia having far less missiles than the United States could compensate for this by placing just a few of these near the American doorstep of Florida.

[16] See: "Outer Space", Wikipedia: The baseline temperature of outer space, as set by the background radiation from the Big Bang, is 2.7 kelvins (-270 °C; -455 °F).