There is no science in this book, so stop reading here if you are

looking for any science. Nor is it a history of anything. It is just a

collection of very speculative opinions of the spiritual kind. This
is the second volume of the Kosmos Trilogy that began with Sex
Ecology Spirituality (1995) and ended with A Theory of
Everything (2000). This trilogy summarizes ideas that Wilber has
been experimenting since the terribly outdated The Spectrum of
Consciousness (1977) and No Boundary - Eastern and Western
Approaches to Personal Growth(1979). The book mainly
defends a four-quadrant grid that is supposed to summarize
Wilber's view of the universe. It is worth as much as thousands of
similar nonscientific speculations based on a superficial
knowledge of contemporary science. The premise is always the
same: quote a few findings of contemporary science but then point
out that science draws the wrong (or incomplete) conclusions from
them. Then science comes up with some other findings, and
someone else will come along aping those new scientific theories
and arguing that science should draw this or that conclusion about
the ultimate nature of the universe. Wilber's merit is to have wed
two ideologies that are very popular among the spiritual, new-age
crowd: Buddhism and Freud. The book is written in an awful
format of question-answering, perhaps trying to match Plato's
dialogues with Socrates. But i think that it is mostly a trick to
spend a lot of time discussing trivial matters.
Wilber sees a common evolutionary trait among inanimate matter,
living matter and thinking matter and mind (cosmos, biosphere
and noosphere). He calls "kosmos" the set of all three. He views
Koestler's holons as the building blocks of each: a holon is both a
whole and a part. Holons are capable of maintaining themselves,
of resisting the pressure to disintegrate, and at the same time
function as parts of another whole. The universe is a holarchy, a
hierarchy of holons. Evolution is a process of transcending
(creating new forms) and including (the previous forms). Spirit is
the highest holon and it also includes everything else.
Wilber is convinced that "absolutely nobody believes... the neo-
Darwinian explanation of natural selection" and that Darwin's
theory cannot possibly explain the emergence of complicated
organs such as the eye (yes, this is Michael Behe "Darwin's "Black
Box", no more and no less). Wilber explains the (in his opinion)
unexplained success of evolution with the idea of evolution is
"self-realization through self-transcendence" (Erich Jantsch's
expression). Apparently, Wilber feels better when he replaces a
scientific theory with gibberish.
Wilber is dismayed that "there are still reductionists around" and is
confident that "you hardly have to explain anymore why
reductionism is bad". What does Wilber offer instead of
reductionism? Just one sentence: "The kosmos is creative". Done.
No need to explain anything else because if you try to explain how
the kosmos can be creative you commit the sin of reductionism
again. Just believe that Wilber is right. The kosmos is creative
because it is the emanation of Spirit/ Emptiness. Wlber thinks that
"science agrees that self-transcendence is built into the very fabric
of the universe". Which scientists think so is not shared with us.
Apparently, all of the thousands of physicists, chemists, biologists,
mathematicians, computer scientists etc of the world agree with
that sentence.
The problem, as usual with this nonscientific books, is the
Dunning-Kruger effect: incompetence makes you believe that you
are very competent. Wilber disputes the notion that chance alone
(in quantum mechanics and Darwinian evolution) is enough to
explain the history of the universe. But science never said
anything so silly. It is "chance" plus (plus) the laws of nature. And
chance may not be chance at all: probability is not really chance.
Maybe his "kosmos" and his "spirit" are simply different names
for the laws of nature because he writes "Chance is exactly what
the self-transcending drive of the kosmos overcomes" and he
refers to kosmos as a creative force. The big difference between
Wilber's religion and current cosmology is that Wilber believes
that kosmos has a direction. This can be a trivial statement (any
formula has a direction in the short term) or a very strong
statement (that, for example, the universe will never implode but
will continue forever to create higher and higher forms of order).
Wilber confidently states that evolution has a direction: creating
order out of chaos, a "drive towards greater depth".
Wilber the historian is as poorly competent as Wilber the physicist
and Wilber the biologist. His discussion of the evolution of human
civilization could have been written by any ten-years old, except
that a ten-years old would probably use a search engine to
doublecheck "facts" that Wilber takes for granted. For example,
Wilber claims that the Mayan civilization was destroyed by a self-
inflicted ecological disaster, a claim repeated with more popular
success by Jared Diamond in "Collapse" (2005); and that is
certainly a possibility. But the Mayans never disappeared and
millions of Mayan people still inhabit the traditional Mayan
regions. The last independent Mayan kingdom was conquered by
the Spaniards only in 1697. The Mayan Empire declined (not
collapsed) just like the Roman Empire had declined one thousand
years earlier. There were several stages of decline, not an abrupt
collapse. Barbarians attacked the center of the empire just like
barbarians had attacked (and weakened) the Roman empire one
thousand years earlier. Infectious diseases may have wiped out
large populations. People are quickly led to believe in the
ecological-disaster theory because they think that the Mayans
disappeared overnight and because they are not familiar with the
climate in the Yucatan. It is only the southern cities (that are
blessed, or cursed, with heavy rainfall) that were abandoned,
whereas the northern cities (Chichen Itza and Uxmal) prospered
for much longer despite having a much drier climate. More
sophisticated theories are rarely mentioned in books like this one
because these theories are neither popular (don't involve popular
buzzwords like "climate change") nor easy to understand. Joseph
Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies" (1988) has no
chance of being quoted in books like this one.
The amazing conclusion that Wilber draws from his quick and
superficial history of human civilization is that each stages of
development corresponds with a different view of the world. Yes, i
know: duh! But you can write this as "The kosmos looks at itself
with different eyes" and it suddenly sounds terrific. Coming to our
age, Wilber predicts that the "rational-industrial worldview" is
coming to an end. Then comes the four-quadrant grid: each of the
quadrants speaks a different aspect of the truth. It is either
incredibly trivial or it contains some magnificent truth that i failed
to grasp. But statements such as "you can know all about my brain
and that will tell you nothing about the specific contents of my
mind" don't encouraged me to understand more. Wilber is lucky
that we know so little (almost nothing) about the brain. I bet that,
the day we will know a lot more about Wilber's brain, we will
know exactly what is in Wilber's mind. Alas, neither me nor
Wilber will still be around because neuroscience is still in the
embryonic stage. Wilber is like a prehistoric skeptic claiming that
"you can know all about matter and that will tell you nothing
about the lightning". It just took a few thousand years but
eventually we figured out the electrical properties of matter and
the nature of clouds and that lightning is nothing but an electrical
phenomenon. Alas, reductionists tend to spoil all the fun of
nonreductionists, given enough time.
The rest is really for the spiritually inclined, for example that
interpretation is important in spiritual transformation. The four
quadrants get reduced to three elements: i, we and it. The ultimate
I is Buddha, the ultimate we is Sangha and the ultimate it is
Dharma. All are facets of Spirit/ Emptiness. The evolution of
consciousness goes through different stages, from subconscious to
self-conscious to super-conscious, which is actually Spirit's own
unfolding. Wilber basically follows three parallel paths in
describing the evolution of consciousness: one is a retelling of
Buddhist/Hinduist ideas; one is a retelling of classic
developmental psychology (Jean Piaget via Lawrence Kohlberg);
and the third one is an attemp to wed Freud and Buddha (quote:
"If you don't befriend Freud, it will be harder to get to Buddha").
He identifies nine stages of evolution, each corresponding to a
paradigm shift. From atoms to humans, he sees a tendency in
evolution to overcome egocentrism. The egocentric self of
children evolves into the sociocentric and worldcentric selves, and
eventually to world soul. The fact that holons are both subjects
and objects, i.e. that the building block of the universe is non-dual,
leads him to praise William James via Bertrand Russell who was
the first one in Western psychology and philosophy to reject the
dualism of subject and object (the idea that there is a subject
observing the object). Surprisingly, Wilber does not go on to
mention quantum mechanics (where the act of observing affects
the observer) and Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time" (1927),
two popular topics in discussions of nondualism. This is the peak
of the four transpersonal stages of evolution: the psychic, the
subtle, the causal and the nondual. These are the highest stages
that are rarely achieved, and that were the specialties of shamans,
yogi and the likes. Instead the human race evolved towards the
Enlightenment, that decided to map the entire kosmos into
empirical procedures. The West denied the transpersonal
dimensions (we can confidently add that the East, namely China
and India, has denied the same dimensions and is perhaps
becoming even more materialistic than the West but perhaps
Wilber has never spent time with the young generations of the
East).
Wilber divides religious practices in two camps, ascending and
descending spirituality: the ascending one renounces the flesh and
practices purity towards communion with the supreme deity,
whereas the descending one is a worldly embrace of nature and
the body. Today, the descenders (the materialists) are winning, to
Wilber's despair. Wilber's dream for a better future is a balance of
ascending and descending spirituality. Wilber summarizes the
intellectual tragedy of the West as one thousand years of
ascending ideal followed by centuries of descending ideal. We
now live in a purely descending world. Even the eco-romantics are
descenders because they have a purely materialistic view of
nature. Today the West divides into Ego and Eco, with the Ego
repressing and the Eco regressing, a cosmic battle between the two
souls of the rational West.
The sections that i found interesting (once you remove all the
pseudo-Zen and pseudo-Psychology mumbo-jumbo) are about
moral development (which requires cognitive development but not
only) and Jung's archetypes (which Wilber criticizes as too narrow
a concept). Wilber the anti-feminist is also intriguing. He argues
that men and women co-created the nature of their interaction:
there was no oppressor and no oppressed. Women were not simply
duped into submission: they seeked that "submission" as a social
contract that benefited them as much as men. Wilber also
embraces Schelling's philosophy because it is nondual: Spirit
knows itself objectively as nature, subjectively as mind and
absolutely as Spirit. Schelling's philosophy integrates Eco and
Ego.
Like all books of this kind, the last chapter mourns the collapse of
human civilization that is supposedly losing its connection with
reality while it adopts a more scientific and technological (and
therefore god-less) approach to it. Then he probably drives off in
his SUV (and, soon, self-driving car) using his GPS navigator
after checking his email and ready to meet someone based on his
Google calendar. And let the readers believe that all this
technology that makes our lives so convenient is actually killing
the most important thing.
P.S.: 95% of Internet users are male (chapter 17)? Can we
doublecheck the sources before we gullibly quote whatever we
read in whatever media? The truth is just the opposite: a Pew
studyshows that (quote) "gender parity has been the norm in
internet usage" at least since the year 2000.
TM, , Copyright 2016 Piero Scaruffi