Word: wilber
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...introductory book for the field of trans-personal psychology. Up From Eden deals with generalities that attempt to explain, well, everything. The whole world, It is Wilber's codification of what he calls the perennial philosophy, the bare-bones religious belief that the universe is the backdrop for the unfolding of consciousness culminating in humanity's reunion with some sort of Godhead--the Buddha or Hegel's Absolute Spirit or what have you Wilber does not attempt to reconcile science and religion but instead shows how they are part of the same endeavor, the Atman Project--humanity's constant striving...
...onto one sentence, as if to say "See, it isn't only me who feels this way." Among his 444 sources are a lot of counter-culture authorities like Wilhelm Reich and other fringe types who rely on each other for corroboration and consequently get discarded en masse, but Wilber also anchors his theory with some powerful ideas from the safe thinkers, such as Freud, Levi-Straus, Durkheim, Chomsky and that old mystic. Hegel Wilber's grasp on the bannister of western social science is too tight to dislodge, so if the existing regime kicks him down the stairs...
...beginning, according to Wilber, was the archaic stage of consciousness, the first stage that could be called human. Wilber uses the image of the uroboros--the serpent devouring its own tail--to illustrate this stage's total self-absorption. The dichotomies of Subject and Object, and Self and World had not yet been made. This stage is similar to Piager's description of the early stages of an infant's cognitive development...
Around 200,000 B.C. man evolved into the magical stage. Here we have an ego developing, but it is more of a body-ego than a mental ego. Most of the conclusions Wilber makes about this era are based on the speculations of others, such as Joseph Campbell and Ernst Cassifer. Historical Explanation is always a risky business and many of the educated guesses Wilber makes about events 200 millennia ago should be treated as such...
...WHAT MAKES THIS an interesting theory is that Wilber believes that in any given moment, there are several modes of consciousness occurring. As he points out, there is still a substantial portion of the population in the mythical stage. However, there are also three stages reachable today that are higher than the mental-egoic level. The individuals who operate at these levels are usually gurus, saints, philosophers and book reviewers. Closest to mental egoic is the Psychic level, marked by the beginnings of behavior based on transcendence of the rational Intuition becomes dominant. The stock-broker who bases his transactions...