Ken Wilber

Pretentious pseudoscientific blather.

A bewildering mash-up of Greek philosophy, metaphysics, Marx/Freud/Jung, Buddhist enlightenment, 1920's creationism, 1940's cybernetics, 1960's sociology, 1970's Gaia universalism, 1980's New Age "Spirituality", and 1990's Theory of Mind. All of it misrepresented and misinterpreted to varying degrees and shrouded in mysticism to create an impressively ornate framework of outdated abject bullshit.

Audiobook: There are two narrators, a curious ignorant show more woman who asks questions, and an intelligent intellectual man who condescendingly mansplains how the world works in order to demonstrate how smart he is. show less

I have a lot of patience but this one really challenged my principles of sticking with the book. Gibberish masquerading as deep wisdom.

The author keeps commenting on scientific topics despite a complete lack of grasp of them. At one point he says that the view that evolution somehow progresses through a random mutation in a male finding a female with the same mutation is moronic. Indeed. But the only moron with this view is the author. That's not how heritability works as even a 12 year old show more would be able to explain.

I'll save you the time wading through this twaddle: the only intelligible thing in the whole book is that the author thinks religions should update their teaching to adapt to liberal social opinions and anyone who doesn't believe in equality of all people is simply not meditating enough. The rest is an incomprehensible stream of consciousness style Nonsense with every other Word capitalised about Wholeness, Universe, Teal and Purple Awareness levels and backward Buddhists who really need to get on with the times and accept gays. show less

This book gave me so many feelings. I was so upset when I was done, I almost threw it in the fire. Then I remembered it was a library book, checked out on someone else's card. This book could give you unrealistically high expectations of a "good death." Just remember, it's perfectly natural to be afraid or in pain or not ready; not everyone is going to have an experience like this amazing person did.

I picked this up at a remaindered bookstore because Ken Wilbur was mentioned positively at a workshop I went to, and my impression is that this is what happens when someone with a erotic attachment to charts takes a lot of LSD.

Wilbur is one of the founders of integral thought, a philosophical meta-system he's been pushing since the 1970s. The basic concepts of Wilbur's thought is that everything exists in a hierarchy of emergent phenomenon, that they're usefully described by the AQAL (All show more Quadrants All Lines) chart on the axis of interior/exterior and individual/collective, which map roughly to personal experience (interior-individual), culture (interior-collective), external reality (individual-exterior) and social systems (collective-exterior). Oh, and finally and most importantly, there's a hierarchy of mental states heading towards a transcendent experience of universal integration, and progress along this path can be sped up by mediation, yoga, and similar deliberative practices.

I'm not going to harsh anyone's vibe, if integral thought is your jam. All I can say is that it feels very retro, and not in a cool way. The state goal, unifying all forms of knowledge under a single spiritual umbrella, is so ambitious as to be laughable, especially compared to the actual state of the theory. show less