This post is to follow-up on my comments about Ken’s “editorial” comments about “soul culture” in TROT book, and to speak further to some of the things @Michelle and I were discussing. I’m going to quote Wilber because his words validate my own intuitions and sense of things, and because I think his comments are both relevant to and instructive for this discussion, and I don’t know that everyone has read or has access to the TROT book. The book was published in 2017, so he might have different things to say today, or might say them in a different way, but what he has said is useful, I think. And will help clarify some of the terms and concepts we’ve been using.
“Much of the criticism of Western culture rests entirely on critiques involving the gross, sensorimotor, waking state of manifestation…Some suggest that Western culture needs more feminine values, that its “patriarchal” orientation has committed it to much too aggressive, analytic, hierarchical, egocentric instead of ecocentric, autonomy-focused instead of relationship-focused, modes of being and awareness. There is some truth to this, as long as it is set in an Integral context. Western culture, for example, categorically does not need more feminine values per se. The first two stages of female moral development, recall, are (a la Carol Gilligan) the egocentric selfish and the ethnocentric care–and Western culture absolutely does not need more selfish and more prejudiced sexist/racist values. It’s not enough to be female to contribute what Western society needs, because the very first two (and most common) stages of female values are exactly what the West needs less of, not more of…What the West needs more of are the highest stages of female moral and value development–worldcentric universal care and integrated.”
“Others suggest that capitalism needs, if not to be jettisoned entirely, a drastically new face…a much more compassionate and caring capitalism, ethical to its roots.”
“And then there are the ever-present technophiles, waiting for the Singularity, at which point machines will take over not only providing the answers but also posing the questions facing Western culture, and provide such brilliant responses as to be beyond even human comprehension.”
“But I would like to add just one more point, at the least. We get few critiques focused on the West’s state center of gravity…lacking in these mainstream suggestions are that any permanent transformations of the state center of gravity of the culture at large are needed…it should at least be said that Western culture is long past the time that its predominately ego-structured culture could and should become a soul culture. And by “soul,” I don’t mean in the sense of a fundamentalist mythic self-sense, locked into its ethnocentric, biased, in-group mentality, but in the sense of the actual subtle realm, which accepts interiors, is radiant with luminous creativity, and draws on the wisdom and virtue of, if not an actual string of past lives, then an extraordinary, unmatched learning process, or as a higher dimension of consciousness and culture beyond the ego’s materialistic, exteriors-focused, self-centric, flatland orientation.”
“The West has done everything that is necessary to make possible the emergence of this deeper, wider, higher dimension of reality. Particularly with the turn–and the jumpstart–that the process got in the sixties, the net result should have been that as individuals began to transform from around amber or orange to green (in structures), they would also have begun…moving from being gross-ego oriented to subtle-soul oriented. Although the leading edge of culture in the Western world is today (on average) at orange/green altitude (in structures) with gross/egoic states (on average), it should be, at the least, at orange/green with a subtle-state center.”
(I am going to stop here for now, take a break.)
). I guess I would like to understand your intention with the post, but if not, I will just let it drift.
when I learned years ago that something like 80% of all published material in history had been written by males. It was instrumental in my starting to enact the feminine perspective more directly in the world–in giving educational talks to men’s clubs–Kiwanis, Elks, FOP, etc.–about sexual assault when I was working in that area, I always managed to spend a little time on the fact that once God was a woman, at least in parts of the world, and that the Ultimate as God and Goddess still is primary in parts of the world. The room was always spell-bound, totally silent, and at the end (I’m laughing now), there was rarely a question; I was kindly thanked and asked “can I get you a cup of coffee before you leave?”