"With this in mind, we can now direct our attention to the unique event of mankind that underlies, it would seem, all human endeavor: the unfolding of consciousness … We must recognize that the attempt to set forth the temporal course commonly referred to as the ‘evolution of mankind’ is merely an attempt to structure events for convenient accessibility. Consequently, we must exclude from our discussion as far as possible such misleading notions as ‘development’ and ‘progress’. "
Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin (English translation, 1985, p. 36)
This is completely false. The consensus among reputable sources is that the oldest portions of Rig Veda samhita were orally composed around 1500 BC, give or take 1 to 5 centuries. This is cringeworthy because you shouldn’t be using terms like “accepted” when you are relying on fringe historiography. I kind of feel like I’m debating Graham Hancock here.
Notably, we’re only talking about the samhita. This consists mostly of devotional hymns. The Brahmanas, Aranyakas, and Upanishads were composed later, probably after 1000 BC. That is where the first exploration of enlightenment and waking up can be found.
And there are some references to what can be interpreted as historical events, but likely the composers were in northern India and perhaps what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. This was centuries before the Brahmanic culture made its way to southern India and Sri Lanka.
I definitely agree that the development of consciousness is not linear. In fact, that is one of my central points. I suppose you can say you have to get through amber to get to orange and orange to get to green, etc. I figure that each of these represents a capacity in its own right that can be developed somewhat independently of the others. I imagine you need at least a pre-conventional amber neurological development in order to lay down and wire up a pre-conventional orange neurological capacity. Probably in order to reach 2nd tier consciousness, you’ll need at least conventional level capability in each of the 1st tier capacities. I believe the ancient gurus and sages must have had at least conventional orange and green capacities, but these lines of development and their related psychotechnologies and institutions of learning and post-conventional development didn’t exist at the time. I’m basically saying that with the Western rational enlightenment, this is where post-conventional orange first came onto the scene, even though with the Eastern spiritual enlightenment, there were many adepts individuals and insular communities in sanghas and ashrams that had reached 2nd tier consciousness and they had a tradition of reliably developing people to that level in their communities. So to address the greatest challenges of our time, we need a convergence of these traditions and the psychotechnologies and developmental processes that are practiced within each of these cultures.
You may be debating Narendra Modi and the BJP (effectively). In a previous post I referred to Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis. There has been much criticism and analysis of that. All of Huntington’s “civilizations” need some unpacking - they are not strictly analogous to one another or even especially well defined. One approach to the critique is to peer into each “civilization” one at a time and look more closely.
Susane Hoeder Rudolf finds four phases in the evolution of the idea of an Indian civilization.
Orientalist. East India Company officials became enamored of Sanskrit and ancient cultures. This content fed European Romantic images of the spiritual East.
Anglistic. India is a backward place that needs to be Westernized in the name of “progress”. The late 19th-century British Imperial view.
Indian Nationalist. Gandhi and Nehru. The different cultures, religions, and communities on the subcontinent are tolerant of one another and must unite for self-determination.
Hindu Nationalist. What’s happening now. The formation of a specifically Hindu nationalism and a harder edge vis-a-vis other world civilizations, especially Islam (but not just Islam).
So heroic tales of Rama and Krishna can be viewed as a decolonization project. BTW, if anyone is wondering why the first two phases of Indian “civilization” were concocted by westerners, it’s because the idea of “civilization” was invented in France in the 1700s. Of course, great cultures, empires, and religions were on the sub-continent all along. Conceptualizing any or all of these as a specific “civilization” is a relatively recent development.
If we take a wider angled view of decolonization projects around the world, similar coming-into-identity story-telling is not uncommon. The heart of the Huntington thesis - which is still plausible on many levels - is an “amber” turn in various regions of the world as a self-appropriating move against globalization (which looks quite a bit like Westernization) The Integral implications of all this is that not everyone in the world is in a big hurry to get to a Western version of orange, green, or second-tier.
The thing I like about fringe theorists is that they ask questions that the “reputable” cannot answer.
The “reputable” makes zero sense and has tons of holes in it.
I’ll observe that you dipping into calling me “cringe” is a descent into what archeologists do and try to smear any alternative non-eurocentric historical view.
I’m teaching a workshop this weekend and don’t have time to devote to a debate about all the dozens of ways the historical timeliness of “reputable” are just plain wrong or have been adjusted after attacking anyone who questioned the previous draft
One thing I’m not sure about is how or even if consciousness development maps onto red orange green blue. I can see a difference at the tier level but when I think of orange I just think of lack of consciousness at that level. Like the mindless unfeeling bureaucracies for example
Just briefly though I will point out how bias fits into reputable history.
Homer’s illiad describes a civilization unknown to historians when I was a kid. But historians gave the work the benefit of the doubt and judged such a civ must exist and I believe it was later found. Similar with the Viking saga Erik the red - we use it to suggest the Icelandic people did travel to North America and I believe later some physical evidence was found.
Then with the ancient Hindu texts they just kind of appeared out of nowhere and even though they describe events and civilizations we presume they are fantasy, as opposed to Troy, which was always presumed to be real
Good point. Gebser is my muse on this one. Gebser’s treatment of the “perspectival”, which roughly equates to European orange, is that the Renaissance issued in the DEFICIENT mental structure. The real-deal mental was found in Axial Athens (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and co.) So from that POV, European orange was flawed at its inception. Vervaeke tells a similar story in his Awakening from the Crisis of Meaning series, as do many others. This strongly suggests why much of the world is less than enthused about abolishing local traditions in favor of economic development, western science projects, and high tech everything.
Now … the interesting challenge for Integral Theory is … can orange ego development (roughly, Robert Kegan’s fourth-level consciousness) and green ego problematization (roughly Kegan’s fifth-level consciousness) be abstracted from western historical experience? I’m very curious - is there a Vedantic ego psychology? Likewise, are there Buddhist, Chinese, Islamic and other ego psychologies? Can an executive (orange) ego be something other than a Cartesian calculating machine?
Others can weigh in on how authoritative this source is. Seems good to me. Anyway, yes, there is a Vendatic ego psychology per this source. How does it differ from normal Western ego development? “The ego has to identify with something.” The sorts of things the Western ego identifies with lead to what is called here the “unripe” ego. I would go further and suggest that Western postmodernism (green meme) represents a loosening up process for the materially obsessed ego, creating an opening for spiritual concerns. The Vedantic pathway seems like a straighter course, which - speculating here - may lead to less dramatic orange and green manifestations on the way to second tier, because the seeds of second tier are built into the culture in the first place.
I do find Stoicism meets Buddhism (as examples) far more easily and seem to offer far more effective solutions to today’s crisis of overconsumption and other self-inflicted crises than later Western philosophies and Religions that tend to get lost inside themselves.
It seems Vervaeke uses the Axial Enlightenment of Gautama Siddhartha as the paradigmatic Enlightenment. He then uses that as a measuring rod, so to speak, so size up different Western philosophers. The Stoics come off rather well in this assessment. Like Buddhism, Stoicism is fundamentally a practice (not just a belief system), so it points to participative knowledge which can transforms perspective.
So I guess the question then arises, why add more to Buddhism? My reading of Vervaeke is that he wants a big serving of modern scientific worldview to go with ancient Enlightenment practices. So he is reengineering Enlightenment with 4e Cognitive Science and reading more current Western philosophy and theology that points to a participatory ground. Paul Tillich, to cite one example.
Currently reading Gebser to get a different take on all this … Gebser’s pejorative “deficient” seems to apply whenever a structure loses contact with the participatory ground. For Gebser, that participatory consciousness is the “magical”. Compare this to Vervaeke’s use of Shamanism. So Axial Western philosophy - the early “mental” - was efficient, not deficient, owning to closer contact with the magical. For Gebser, the “rational” is deficient mental, because “ratio” implies division, separation, opposition, fragmentation, etc. The great bulk of Western philosophy is rational in this way. The current integral project (Gebser’s … and it seems to me others) is to return efficiency to the mental by reengaging with both the mythical and the magical. Using Gebser, then, as a perspective on Vervaeke, Vervaeke wants to keep the mental (not regress to irrationalism), but to ground it in the participatory (magical) and to engage in meaning-making (mythical) for contemporary relevance framing.
All of this puts additional meat on the bones of Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory too. But that’s another discussion for another day …
I probably (actually more than probably) don’t know that much about either Stoicism or Buddhism, but what I have seen so far is that I’m much less likely to find people who claim to be stoics, but who are not practicing stoicism. There could be a dozen different reasons why that I don’t know - it does seem to be my experience though.
Buddhism, on the other hand is a beautiful concept and also a beautiful practice, but it does seem to attract a greater variety of people. In addition to the people who might be attracted to it because it is a trend, you also have people who get so deep into the dogma of it and the faster and deeper they go down that road of Buddhist Philosophy, the less they seem to me to actually practice Buddhism.
By “practice” above I mean “walking the walk”.
Part of it, in my opinion, is laying claim to being more enlightened than one actually is ready for. It’s so simple but at the same time so difficult for mere mortals to attain. Do Stoics understand better than Buddhists that they are trying to achieve something they never achieve 100%?
Let’s take Veganism as an example. Veganism isn’t a “requirement” to be Buddhist, but on the other hand is often perceived to be (sometimes dogmatically) . This could be an East vs West way of looking at veganism as a subset of Buddhism.
At one point I wanted to come out with the concept of “Intermittent Veganism” but I knew it would create such an uproar and appear to be trying to troll vegans when my actual point would have been "look, take it easy on judging yourself and try 3 days vegan, 1 day nonvegan. Then gradually expand that. I think this makes perfect sense to an Eastern perspective on spirituality as well as scientifically, but from my Western mind I there is a collective judgement of “sin” or “impurity” to such an approach and it would upset a lot of people. As a gross generalization, I tend to find Asian Buddhists much easier to talk to about Buddhism than Western Buddhists. Western Buddhists often go directly into pontificating the Philosophy of Buddhism to a degree that is inversely proportional to their practice of Buddhism.
It’s also a kind of thing with Yoga in the West when we talk about “Yogis”. A Yogi literally just a guy or a gal who is “trying”. It isn’t an achievement, but in the Western mind we turn it around to some kind of claim to title, achievement or level of progress. Even moreso is the confusion with what a “Guru” is. The Western mind wants to put Gurus onto a kind of supernatural pedestal along with “enlightenment”, then become hurt, angry and accusatory or disillusioned when Gurus act out their lives to be only what they are - mortal men and women who have achieved a kind of insight and presence.
A persuasive argument could be formed that Western Buddhism (or a lot of West Coast Buddhism, anyway), is just the latest in a long series of frontier revivalist “awakening” sects. The process goes like this: 1) find a stump; 2) grap preferred Holy Book; 3) let’er rip … loud and long … with feeling. This sort of thing totally influses my work world to the point that I fled here to avoid complete “colonization”. I joked to my boss that it’s “management by exhortation”. If only we all believed the right things in the right ways, used the right vocabulary, and showed proper respect for (fill it in here) the planet would be saved, justice would be ours, and history would be redeemed.
Me … very West Coast. Also, on the fringes of actual Buddhism. Namely, I read Thich Nhat Hahn, who only asks me to do things I can actually do, and I very gladly do them. Stop. Breathe. Notice your body. Notice the trees, the rocks, the grass, the birds. Remember they all flow through you and you through them. Look deeply.
Beautifully stated. I didn’t make a connection to 4E cognitive science in my talk, but that is an important element of the new enlightenment that we are working toward.
Yes, and I see the need to develop these structures of consciousness in their own right, including the rational, but not to the detriment of any others. The fact that the Western enlightenment did tend to suppress the magic and mythic and other structures of consciousness doesn’t discredit the worthy aims and values of this cultural and intellectual movement.
Hi @Sidra. I follow Fr. Richard Rohr. He sorts it out rather nicely, actually. Of course, Christian theology has many contending perspectives, so although Fr. Rohr is very integral-friendly, I think his approach is not really mainstream for the church as a whole. The history of Christianity is big, sloppy, and complicated, so it can all look very good or very evil, depending on what one chooses to highlight.
Some of my favorite spiritual books involve Christian-Buddhist dialog with authors like Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hahn. Honestly, these perspectives feel very “both and”.
A year ago, it never would have occurred to me to post anything in an online forum related to spirituality, meaning, humanity, or anything really. My whole focus was on IT (“information technology”, not “integral theory”). Then one thing lead to another and I felt the need to start communicating with actual people about things actual people actually care about. One milestone in that process was this introductory passage in an essay I drafted a few months ago. (I’ll use this to circle back to your post in a minute).
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The Human Network
One of the very first slides in the Cisco CCNA curriculum includes the content below.
Networking Today: No Boundaries
World without boundaries
Global communities
Human network
That probably felt true and authentic to curriculum writers in the 1990s. They might have held out hope for this vision all the way through 2016. In the current environment, it all just sounds absurd. And yet, in a profound way, I do both believe and embrace this. It appears some explanation is in order. …
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The point in relation to your post? We’re all just nodes on the human network. You connect with an assortment of authors, ideas, beliefs, and practices. I connect with a different assortment of authors, ideas, beliefs, and practices. We mutually connect to a few of these in common, but we likely diverge in far more. That’s how networks work. If all of us connected to each other in exactly the same ways about exactly the same content, that would be very rigid and unadaptable. More diverse networks hold more promise for evolution. So in a highly textured, but also absolutely literal way, exchanges like this are all about networking.
I think what people miss is that in every community - even within the self and it’s various parts - there is going to be conflicting interests and the need to confront these conflicts. Failure to accept conflict as necessary in the global community is no more healthy than refusing to confront one’s own inner conflicts in one’s “inner community”.
The problem being - returning back to a key difference between one specific branch of Christianity that seems to have taken root in the American psyche (and is often presented as “Western” when “American” would often be more appropriate) - is the concept of Good vs Evil and the belief that one has to cast out the Evil and defeat it. The problem with that is we tend to project that Evil onto any container that is nearby and now we have culture wars as the latest iteration of that.
This goes to the root of dysfunction in Western (I mean, American) culture. And because the American psyche is massively disproportionally represented on the internet, there may be a tendency to believe this is a global phenomenon and the Global community is broken, when it would probably be more accurate to say the West (I mean, America) just needs to get it’s “stuff” in order and fix it’s own disfunction and blockages to becoming “Integral” first, before trying to present the world (or the East) as superiors or even equals when it concerns “Enlightenment”.
Last night I was listening to some “Eastern” Philosophy. I find it to be a sophisticated philosophy and practice today, to say nothing of the fact that it started far, far before even Greek philosophy and shows a depth of understanding of humanity I don’t find in western philosophy. Even rejecting their own account of history and only accepting the “superior” Western account of History as acceptable [sic] - this philosophy goes back 1,000 years before the Christian Messiah allegedly lived. I say allegedly because of course we give Western history the benefit of the doubt despite lack of actual evidence when it concerns what is legitimate History.
Last summer I felt the need to explore a lot of “meaning of life” questions. So I started adding that type of thing to my YouTube favorites. Eventually, I gravitated to “non-duality”, which was an unfamiliar term to me at the time.
After quite a few hours of listening to an assortment of swamis I’d have to admit that Advaita Vedanta is a clear, sensible philosophy that allows for Western science but also goes beyond Western science. For logistics reasons, a full Advaita Vedanta practice does not seem viable for me right now, but the general framework allows for all kinds of practices and it allows for different types of people to practice in different ways.
In your other post you mentioned some problematic elements of US Christianity. This thread could get very long about all that! I just want to say here, that I appreciate the work of Fr. Richard Rohr who brings a non-dual perspective to Christianity and a Christian perspective to non-duality.
I try not to be Stephen Hawkings, but Christianity is the foundation on which Western civilization was built so it would be highly suspicious if a dialogue about Western Civilization did not include Christianity.
I heard someone say today that “Enlightenment is expanding one’s ability to have joy about more and more things.”
Which makes perfect sense. It makes enlightenment a process rather than an achievement and someone who is able to have joy about everything would be truly enlightened. All the angst in so many philosophers and many religions seems to be a long and unnecessary detour around a very direct and simple path.
Agreed, The history of Christianity is inseparable from – history. For example, there were all sorts of atrocities committed in the Middle Ages by people who were ostensibly Christian. Is it fair to lay those atrocities on the person of Jesus or on the core teachings of Christianity?
It’s not quite so easy to let Christianity off the hook, though. As Vervaeke does a good job pointing out in one of his videos, the essential spiritual realization of the ancient Hebrew prophets was that theirs was the God of history and that faith was always a journey to get right with where God wanted them to go next. That same sensibility flowed into Christianity, and through the work of Augustine of Hippo, in particular, into the civilization that informed those medieval warriors with all their very rough edges.
Really, any kind of evolutionary system that is teleological in nature (Integral Theory, perhaps?) can likely be traced back to the original realizations of Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, and co. So at the end of the day, anyone who espouses an evolutionary theory guided by some loving presence has a major theodicy problem. Because history itself has been one bloody smackdown after another.