Concept Index
Concept Index
Explore Wilber's ideas through short explanations and passages from his books. Start with the core terms for his main vocabulary, or browse his views on subjects such as spirituality, science, politics, and culture.
The current selection draws on Sex, Ecology, Spirituality and Integral Psychology. For a guided route, follow the roadmap; for comparisons between developmental models, visit the Chart Index.
★ marks core terms in Wilber's vocabulary. The second section gathers his views on broader questions and topics.
Core terms
| Concept | Notes |
|---|---|
| ★ Holons | the basic units — wholes that are also parts |
| ★ Holarchy | how holons nest into nested wholes |
| ★ The Great Chain of Being | the traditional matter/life/mind/spirit picture |
| ★ The Four Quadrants | interior/exterior × individual/collective |
| ★ The Big Three | I / We / It — art, morals, science |
| ★ Right-Hand and Left-Hand Paths | it-language vs. interior meaning |
| ★ Kosmos vs. Cosmos | matter+life+mind+spirit vs. the merely physical |
| ★ Flatland | the reduction of the Kosmos to the cosmos |
| ★ Vision-Logic | the postformal cognition beyond linear rationality |
| ★ The Pre/Trans Fallacy | confusing prerational and transrational states |
| ★ Ascent and Descent | wisdom's return to the One, compassion's embrace of the Many |
| ★ Eros and Agape | the motive forces behind Ascent and Descent, and their pathologies |
| ★ Involution and Evolution | Spirit's enfolding into, and unfolding out of, the lower |
| ★ Waves and Streams | levels of consciousness vs. the developmental lines that move through them |
| ★ The Proximate Self and the Distal Self | the "I" that navigates vs. the "me" it leaves behind at each stage |
| ★ Horizontal Types | Enneagram/Myers-Briggs-style types vs. the vertical stages they cut across |
| ★ The Integral Psychograph | plotting one person's uneven development, line by line |
| ★ The Psychic, Subtle, Causal, and Nondual | the four stages of transpersonal development beyond mind |
| ★ Interiority (the "Within" of holons) | why every holon has an inside as well as an outside |
| ★ Repression | the noosphere's "no" carried to extremes, individual and civilizational |
| ★ The Ego Camp and the Eco Camp (Ascenders vs. Descenders) | Book Two's central polemic, from Plotinus to modernity |
| ★ Spirit-in-Action | Wilber's panentheism: Spirit as both Alpha and Omega of evolution |
| ★ The Transpersonal Domains | the case for contemplative knowledge as a genuine reconstructive science |
| ★ Micro/Macro Coevolution | individual and collective holons evolve together, never separately |
| ★ The Reconstruction of the Contemplative Path | contemplation as a repeatable, falsifiable injunction, not a private feeling |
| ★ Validity Claims of Mysticism | how a contemplative claim can actually be checked |
| Paradigm as Injunction | why a new paradigm needs a new technique, not just a new theory |
Wilber on broader topics
| Concept | Notes |
|---|---|
| Is Spirituality Developmental? The Five Definitions | five different meanings of "spirituality," only some of them stage-like |
| Systems Theory and the Sciences of Complexity | Wilber's case for, and (elsewhere) against, complexity science as holism |
| Dominator vs. Growth Hierarchy | separating hierarchy from domination |
| Wilber's Non-Dual Reading of Plato | Plato as mystic, not just rationalist |
| Wilber on Postmodernism | its real achievement (vision-logic, pluralism) and its derailment (nihilism, narcissism) |
| Sex and Gender: Male and Female Advantage/Liberation | Wilber's own account of sex differences in development |
| The Dignity and Disaster of Modernity | differentiation of the value spheres vs. their dissociation |
| Environmental Ethics / Holonic Ecology | Wilber's constructive alternative to "bioequality" |
| The Myth of Primal Ecological Wisdom | why "tribal societies had ecological wisdom" confuses indissociation with integration |
| Two Arrows of Time | entropy's decay vs. evolution's rise — physics and biology tell opposite stories |
| The Limits of the Exterior Approach | why empirical science alone can't see a holon's interior |
| The Two Gods: Ascending vs. Descending Theology | the transcendent Vedanta God vs. the immanent "schizoid God" |
| The Agony of Modernity: Fichte versus Spinoza | Ascending idealism vs. Descending pantheism as a named 19th-century split |
| The Death of God | secularization as the Descended camp's historical triumph |
| The Great Plenitude | Lovejoy's principle as a research program for the Great Chain |
| The Legacy of the Idealists | why German Idealism collapsed as a movement |
| Sexuality and Modernity | Wilber's argument about sex under modernity's dissociation |
| Multiculturalism and Transnationalism | Wilber's read on these as developmental-stage phenomena |
| The Dialectic of Progress | every developmental stage solves old problems and creates new ones |
