From SES to Integral Spirituality: How Wilber's Map Changed

From SES to Integral Spirituality: How Wilber's Map Changed

Wilber's View

Between Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995) and Integral Spirituality (2006), Wilber keeps his main vocabulary of holons, quadrants, levels and lines, but changes what he claims for it. Three shifts stand out across the three books.

1. The Great Chain stops being a map of the Kosmos and becomes a map of one quadrant. In SES Wilber rehabilitates the Great Chain of Being as a "Great Holarchy" nested in Spirit. His main complaint about the traditional version is that it never separated the four quadrants: it put the brain on the bottom rung with all other matter, instead of treating it as the exterior side of interior consciousness. The levels themselves, from matter up to spirit, he largely keeps. By Integral Spirituality the claim is much narrower. The Great Chain is "almost entirely" an account of the Upper-Left quadrant, the individual interior. The traditions mapped that territory brilliantly, but they cannot be held to account for the other three quadrants, which only modern science and postmodern cultural theory opened up. Wilber presents this as a way of saving the traditions' insights from modern and postmodern critique, not as a demotion.

2. The levels go from given to evolved, in two steps. Integral Psychology (2000) is the halfway point. It still sets out a perennial-philosophy "Great Nest" of about a dozen basic levels. It also says those levels need not be pictured as fixed Platonic essences, and that they can instead be understood as "habits of evolution" or "Kosmic memory", with the higher levels still potentials that are open to being formed. Even so, it notes that "for convenience" it will often speak of them as given. Integral Spirituality makes this the main principle, under the name post-metaphysics (see Appendix II). The levels are "not pre-existing structures lying around out there". They are structures of human consciousness that were laid down over time, and any claim that they exist has to meet modernity's demand for evidence and postmodernity's demand for intersubjective grounding.

3. Higher states stop being rungs above the mind. In Integral Psychology, psychic, subtle and causal still appear among the basic structures, the rungs of the developmental ladder (compare psychic-subtle-causal-nondual). The same book also notes that the states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep are available at virtually any stage, and that how a person interprets a state depends on their stage. Wilber traces that grid back to A Sociable God (1983). Integral Spirituality builds the model around this point. The Wilber-Combs Lattice puts structure-stages on one axis and states on the other, so gross, subtle, causal and nondual are "no longer stages stacked on top" of Western developmental stages. They are states that can occur alongside any stage. This answers a problem Wilber says had stalled him for about two decades: how someone 2,000 years ago could be "enlightened" if some of today's stages did not yet exist.

Two further additions in Integral Spirituality sit on top of these shifts. Integral methodological pluralism splits each quadrant into an inside and an outside view, giving eight "primordial perspectives" or zones, each with its own family of methods. Post-metaphysics then treats perspectives, rather than things or perceptions, as the starting point. The book also gives a separate chapter to the shadow, as one of the "3 S's" alongside states and stages.

What's contestable. These are largely Wilber's own retrospective accounts, and the excerpts show more continuity than a clean "phase IV to phase V" break would suggest. The "Kosmic habits" idea and the state/stage grid are both already in Integral Psychology, and the grid goes back to 1983. What changes is mainly emphasis and framing: what had been a qualification becomes the founding principle. It is also fair to ask how "post-metaphysical" the result is. The levels still structure the whole model, and Wilber concedes that no philosophy can do entirely without a priori forms, only that "the fewer, the better". For the broader five-phase story, see The evolution of Wilber's thought.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995)

The SES text here is the revised second edition, so it may reflect revisions made after 1995.

…the Great Chain of Being was in fact a Great Holarchy of Being—with each link being an intrinsic whole that was simultaneously a part of a larger whole—and the entire series nested in Spirit.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 1

But what the traditional Great Nest failed to do, on any sort of significant scale, was to clearly differentiate the four quadrants. … The discovery that states of consciousness have correlates in brain states—that all Left-Hand events have Right-Hand correlates—was a devastating blow to the Great Chain and all metaphysics as traditionally conceived, and rightly so, even though it went too far and contributed to the collapse of the Kosmos into nothing but scientific materialism.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12

In Integral Psychology (2000)

It is not necessary to picture the basic structures or basic holons as being permanently fixed and unchanging essences (Platonic, Kantian, Hegelian, or Husserlian). They can, in part, be understood as habits of evolution, more like a Kosmic memory than a pregiven mold.

— Integral Psychology, ch. 1

At the same time—and this cannot be emphasized too strongly—the higher levels in the Great Nest are potentials, not absolute givens. … Although for convenience I will often speak of the higher levels as if they were simply given, they are in many ways still plastic, still open to being formed as more and more people coevolve into them…

— Integral Psychology, ch. 1

Nonetheless, although the major states of gross, subtle, causal, and nondual are available to human beings at virtually any stage of growth, the way in which those states or realms are experienced and interpreted depends to some degree on the stage of development of the person having the peak experience. This means, as I suggested in A Sociable God, that we can create a grid of the types of spiritual experiences that are generally available to individuals at different stages of growth.

— Integral Psychology, ch. 1

In Integral Spirituality (2006)

If you imagine any of the phenomena (or holons) in the various quadrants, you can look at them from their own inside or outside. This gives you 8 primordial perspectives—the inside and the outside view of a holon in any of the 4 quadrants.

— Integral Spirituality, ch. 1

The claim of Integral Post-Metaphysics is that the invaluable and profound truths of the premodern traditions can be salvaged by realizing that what they are saying and showing applies basically to the Upper-Left quadrant, so they needn’t be held responsible for not knowing about the other 3 quadrants…

— Integral Spirituality, ch. 1

…a person at any stage can have a peak experience of a gross, subtle, causal, or nondual state. But a person will interpret that state according to the stage they are at. … Thus, gross/psychic, subtle, causal, and nondual were no longer stages stacked on top of the Western conventional stages, but were states (including altered states and peak experiences) that can and did occur alongside any of those stages.

— Integral Spirituality, ch. 4

…the 10 or so levels of reality are not pre-existing structures lying around out there waiting for all and sundry to stumble on them, like apples and rocks and paper clips. Even IF we allow that there is something like 10 levels of reality, those levels must be understood, not as independently existing structures, but in part as con-structures of the knowing subject—that is, as structures of human consciousness…

— Integral Spirituality, Appendix II

See Also

Links to this page:

  1. changelog
  2. The Great Chain of Being
  3. Concept Index
  4. The Psychic, Subtle, Causal, and Nondual
Built with LogoFlowershow