Wilber's ideas in one picture each. Diagrams and posters for reading, teaching and sharing.
Diagrams that each try to make one of Wilber's ideas click. Every figure is redrawn from Wilber's own descriptions, not copied from a published figure. Text set as a quotation is verbatim from the book. Anything marked ◇ is this wiki's own device or note, not Wilber's. Press play to watch each idea unfold; the final frame is the shareable image. You're welcome to share them; they're signed so they stay attributed.
Development runs through three bands: prerational, rational, transrational.To an eye that hasn't sorted the sequence there are only two kinds of thing, rational and nonrational, so the first and third bands fall into one bin.Reductionism reads the transrational down as prerational. Wilber's example is Freud.Elevationism reads the prerational up as transrational. Wilber's example is Jung.The settled frame, with Wilber's own sentences. This is the shareable image.
Development runs from the prerational (infantile, magical, mythic) through the rational to the transrational (mystical, contemplative). The first and last are both nonrational, so they are easy to confuse. In Wilber's words:
"The essence of the pre/trans fallacy is itself fairly simple: since both prerational states and transrational states are, in their own ways, nonrational, they appear similar or even identical to the untutored eye."
Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995), ch. 6
The confusion runs both ways. Reductionism reads genuine mystical experience down as regression to infancy. Elevationism reads infantile or mythic states up as mystical union. "Freud was a reductionist, Jung an elevationist—the two sides of the pre/trans fallacy. And the point is that they are both half right and half wrong" (SES, ch. 6).
The two-bin "untutored eye" picture is this wiki's device for Wilber's sentence. More: The Pre/Trans Fallacy.
States off the ladder
2000: one spine of basic structures. Psychic, subtle, causal and nondual are drawn as its top rungs.2006: the four become states, running across the top of a grid.The six structure-stages run up the side of the grid.Every cell is a state experience interpreted through a stage: a person at any stage can have any of the states.The settled diptych, with Wilber's sentence and the honest note that IP already said this. This is the shareable image.
In Integral Psychology (2000) the mystical states (psychic, subtle, causal, nondual) are drawn as the top four rungs of a single developmental ladder. In Integral Spirituality (2006) the same words name a second axis. They are states that can be experienced at any stage, and each experience is interpreted through the stage of the person having it:
"…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."
Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality (2006), ch. 4
What changed is mostly the picture and the weight put on it. Integral Psychology already says these states are "available to human beings at virtually any stage of growth" (ch. 1), and traces the grid idea back to A Sociable God (1983). More: From SES to Integral Spirituality.
