Throughout his writings, Wilber often refers to meditative states as "higher." Initially, he had stacked them on top of (and after) the stages of cognitive and moral growth. This doesn't account for the the "enlightened asshole" problem -- you can realize deep states of meditative awareness, and still have unresolved psychological, cognitive, and moral issues. So, in later incarnations of his theory, Wilber differentiates meditation from psychology somewhat, and begins to think about meditation and cognition as different types of subjective experience. He places cognitive growth and meditative states on perpendicular axes, resulting in the Wilber-Combs lattice. Yet, in Wilber-5 (as represented by the Kosmos excerpts), he is still referring to meditative states as "the upper reaches of the Upper-Left quadrant" -- implying that he still views meditative states as "higher" than cognitive states.
So, in Wilber's writings, there are two basic views on the relationship between meditative states and cognitive states: (1) that they are different types of Upper-Left quadrant subjective experience, and (2) that they are the same type of subjective experience, with one comprising progress over the other. It is this second view that intrigues me, because it comes in two flavors, and Wilber only seems to consider one of them.
What if we associate meditation with immanence instead of transcendence? In other words, what if we conceptualize meditative states as lower than cognitive states? What if it is not cognition that is fundamental and meditation that is significant, but meditation that is fundamental and cognition that is significant?
How would a meta-theory of meditative and cognitive states be different if meditation was conceived of as a vehicle for drilling down, instead of reaching up?
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Sunday, March 8, 2009
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Now this is the first time you're going to make me saw, "Wow."
ReplyDeleteNot that the idea itself is new (awareness as fundamental), but rather the way you're suggesting integrating it into the integral map.
Eager to hear your thoughts on the implications.
I see this as potentially leading to a more complete integration of the right hand quadrants and their sciences into integral theory, by correcting an undue privileging of the upper left quadrant.
ReplyDeleteBasically, I see Wilber as having reified a certain sort of UL quadrant subjective meditative experience into capital-S Spirit, and then claimed that this is the most fundamental aspect of the Universe. This is what Wilber calls subtle reductionism in reverse: rather than reducing the interior, subjective left hand quadrants to the exterior, objective right hand quadrants, he's reduced the right hand quadrants to the left hand quadrants instead. This is what Matthew Dallman means when he says Wilber's integral theory turns "everything" into "the psychology of everything."
By conceptualizing meditative awareness differently -- as something that is ever present because it is fundamental, and which we fail to see through the complexity layered on top -- we can escape this "reverse subtle reductionism" trap. We can also escape the trap of turning awareness into a new kind of metaphysics, as the "Spirit" conceptualization seems to have done.
Therein, I see the promise of an integral theory that is truly methodological rather than ontological and metaphysical.