Spiritual science in Ken Wilber

Ken Wilber is one of, if nor the, most thoughtful, articulate philosopher/visionary I have read. There is so very much I like and admire in him that it seems churlish to write down some of my objections. Still, I must, because I believe the issue is a pivotal one.

I am responding (belatedly, because I have been thinking about this for quite some time) to Wilber's preface to the third edition of his Eye to Eye in which (as in his book The Marriage of Sense and Soul) he repeats his usual spirited defense of transpersonal consciousness, arguing that the most important questions about Reality, mind/body, one/many can not be solved by reason, the middle of the three modes of consciousness, mind, matter, and spirit. They can only be grasped, if that is the word, via meditative intuition. The answers are intuited but cannot be articulated. When they are, they lead to paradoxes, like Reality is not one, not many, neither not one not many, and so on.

How does he know? Where is this written? He, of course, is philosophically driven to this position, having elevated mystical, mandalic consciousness to the pinnacle of awareness, and so has the perennial philosophic tradition which he so often cites. But that doesn't make it so.

There are several questions. Why are the most important truths only available to mystical contemplation? Why is it so that after they are made available through meditative techniques they cannot (must not?) be articulated to reason? And why is it automatic that the Kosmos, Reality, the Absolute must result in a paradox. After all, wouldn't it be just as likely that once the results are apprehended, they could be articulated? And that the results would not be paradoxical.

I suspect that he and the tradition he is espousing have vested interest in elevating mystical, spiritual, meditative mode of knowledge, whose edge can only be demonstrated if Reality (always capitalized; never defined) is indeed non-rational. It is not enough that it should not be revealed rationally, it must not be grasped rationally either. But Reality (which by the way cannot be grasped even by enlightened ones like Wilber) doesn’t have to be the way Wilber wishes it to be: it could be for instance such that there is only one substance, or Spirit is only transcendental, for instance. I suspect that Wilber and his fellow transpersonalists (and certainly Hegel and Plotinus who were not meditators) derived their position first philosophically, and then tried to perpetrate it via teaching and practices. The Absolute, the Spirit, Void, was too big for them to grasp via intellect, so had to come up with paradoxical terms to validate their gut-worldview. This has to have been the case with Hegel who was a philosopher. And probably with Plotinus.

The next point has to do with Wilber's elevation of the mystical practice to science. Of all transcendentalists he knows science. I do take his meaning and does an honorable job. A creative job even. Injunction, yes. But verification by the Sangha? No, absolutely no! On one hand he points out that practitioners verify the findings, but he also says that answers which don't accord with the views of the Sangha are culled out. Well, consensus is pretty easy this way. Einstein could never have come up or out with his theory is such a system, because his views would have contradicted by the prevailing view. A poor Zen adept who arrives at a different Reality gets punched; of course, he is going to agree to the consensus. Furthermore, the meditators are heavily bombarded by sacred texts whose validity they are supposed to experience. Of course, they will do so. I suggest the following truly independent test: take 100 intelligent ego-staged persons and have them meditate for 3 years. OK, they can be given injunction on how to concentrate on breath, candle, and mantra, whatever. Check them 3 years later and collect their thoughts. If they reproduce Hegel, Aurobindo, Nagarjuna, if they even say that the Absolute is neti neti, or “one taste”, Wilber's point is proven. Without such a confirmation, it is questionable. His statement that different traditions have come up with similar deep structure is only partly proof. (Different traditions have also thought the earth was flat). But most Eastern traditions have direct lineage to a single common philosophy even if independent Western traditions, admittedly don't. But even he has to shoehorn Plotinus, Eckhart, and Hegel to totally conform to the perennial philosophy. Besides, as I have pointed out, these thinkers have not arrived at their view via the meditative technique advocated by Wilber as the way to grasping Reality. As an aside, his selective quotes form the New Testament and Paul are really poor and totally taken out of context.

But let us now grant all that Wilber is saying. A novice takes the injunction, goes through the practice, and experiences Reality, can understand that Brahman is all, and all is Brahman, Nirvana is Samsara and vice versa, and that he is one with God and he is God, and there is no seer and seen, they are the same. What would this mean? To give an odious but apt analogy, assume we give the following injunction to a group of participants: drink 2 quarts of alcohol. Later collect the experience. The participants all see pink elephants. Does this mean that there are pink elephants? Of course not, this merely means that when human beings drink alcohol, they experience pink elephants. Their experience is reproducible, verifiable, and is real. But pink elephants are not. Similarly, most hash users have similar experience; the world has opened up, they can see and understand everything, they are omnipotent. But these are merely experiences.

In other words, experience and a level of consciousness is not the same as truth about Reality. The experience that one is God, and consciousness that all is one does not make it so. The same way as one can not arrive at ontological facts by rational means, one cannot arrive at ontological facts by spiritual means, however attractive that would be to Wilber and his followers. One cannot become one with God by thinking or meditating his way into it, one can only have the experience of being so. Maybe that is all there is, like beauty and truth, and all we need to know. It is noble, beautiful, elevating, but ain't necessarily so. To belabor this point, assume there is a Satanic cult. Through its rituals all the members think they are the Devil. (A bit like the Gaunillo's response to Anselm). I don't think they are the Devil. I do not even think there is one, though an objective review of Human History so far would go much farther in supporting that hypothesis than its opposite, that is a God, let alone a Spirit who somehow got unconscious and is working its way out of it through us.