[Dialogue] You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber | Salon Life

[George Holcombe]

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You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber

The integral philosopher explains the difference between religion, New  
Age fads and the ultimate reality that traditional science can't touch.

By Steve Paulson

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April 28, 2008 | Ken Wilber may be the most important living  
philosopher you've never heard of. He's written dozens of books but  
you'd be hard-pressed to find his name in a mainstream magazine.  
Still, Wilber has a passionate -- almost cultlike -- following in  
certain circles, as well as some famous fans. Bill Clinton and Al Gore  
have praised Wilber's books. Deepak Chopra calls him "one of the most  
important pioneers in the field of consciousness." And the Wachowski  
Brothers asked Wilber, along with Cornel West, to record the  
commentary for the DVDs of their "Matrix" movies.

A remarkable autodidact, Wilber's books range across entire fields of  
knowledge, from quantum physics to developmental psychology to the  
history of religion. He's steeped in the world's esoteric traditions,  
such as Mahayana Buddhism, Vedantic Hinduism, Sufism and Christian  
mysticism. Wilber also practices what he preaches, sometimes  
meditating for hours at a stretch. His "integral philosophy," along  
with the Integral Institute he's founded, hold out the promise that we  
can understand mystical experience without lapsing into New Age mush.

Though he's often described as a New Age thinker, Wilber ridicules the  
notion that our minds can shape physical reality, and he's dismissive  
of New Age books and films like "The Tao of Physics" and "What the  
Bleep Do We Know." But he's also out to show that "trans-rational"  
states of consciousness are real, and he's dubbed the scientific  
materialists who doubt it "flatlanders."

Wilber's hierarchy of spiritual development -- and the not-so-subtle  
suggestion that he himself has reached advanced stages of  
enlightenment -- has also sparked a backlash. Some critics consider  
him an arrogant know-it-all, too smart for his own good. His dense  
style of writing, which is often laced with charts and diagrams, can  
come across as bloodless and hyper-rational.

When I reached Wilber by phone at his home in Denver, I found him to  
be chatty and amiable, even laughing when he described his own recent  
brush with death. He's a fast talker who leaps from one big idea to  
the next. And they are big ideas -- God and "Big Self" and why science  
can only tell us so much about what's real.

You've written that there's a philosophical cold war between science  
and religion. Do you see them as fundamentally in conflict?

Personally, I don't. But it depends on what you mean by science and  
what you mean by religion. There are at least two main types of  
religion. One is dependent upon a belief in a mythic or magic dogma.  
That is certainly what most people mean by religion. Science has  
pretty thoroughly dismantled the mythic religions. But virtually all  
the great religions themselves recognize the difference between  
"exoteric" or outer religion, and "esoteric" or inner religion. Inner  
religion tends to be more contemplative and mystical and experiential,  
and less cognitive and conceptual. Science is actually sympathetic  
with the contemplative traditions in terms of its methodology.

  		 	
When you refer to mythic religions, are you talking about the kinds of  
stories we read in the Bible?

Or any of the world's great religions. Lao Tsu was 900 years old when  
he was born. According to the Hindus, the earth is resting on a  
serpent, which is resting on an elephant, which is resting on a  
turtle. Those kinds of mythic approaches aren't wrong. They're just a  
stage of development. Look at [Swiss philosopher] Jean Gebser's  
structural stages of development. They go from archaic to magic to  
mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral and higher. Magic and  
mythic are actual stages. They're not wrong any more than saying "5  
years old" is wrong. It's just 5 years old. We expect there to be  
higher stages. There was a time when the magic and mythic approaches  
years ago were evolution's leading edge of development. So we can't  
belittle them.

Where do you think the scientific worldview falls short when dealing  
with religion?

Conventional science has correctly dismantled the pre-rational myths  
but it goes too far in dismantling the trans-rational. The mythic and  
magic approaches tend to be pre-rational and pre-verbal, but the  
meditative or contemplative practices tend to be trans-rational. They  
completely accept rationality and science. But they point out that  
there are deeper modes of awareness, which are scientific in their own  
way.

What do you mean by trans-rational?

People at these higher stages of spiritual development report a "non- 
dual awareness," a type of awareness that transcends the dichotomy  
between subject and object. The mystical state is often beyond words.  
It is trans-rational because you have access to rationality but it's  
temporarily suspended. A 6-month-old infant, for instance, is in a pre- 
rational state, whereas the mystic is in a trans-rational state.  
Unfortunately, "pre" and "trans" get confused. So some theorists say  
the infant is in a mystical state.

Are you saying people with a rationalist orientation can't make these  
distinctions?

I'm saying that when people look at mystical states, they often  
confuse them with pre-rational states. People like Sigmund Freud take  
trans-rational, oceanic states of oneness and reduce them to infantile  
states of unity.


Why has the scientific worldview dismissed this trans-personal  
dimension? For most intellectuals around the world, the secular  
scientific paradigm has triumphed.

It's understandable. Historically, if you look at these broad stages,  
the magical era tended to be 50,000 years ago, the mythic era emerged  
around 5,000 B.C., and the rational era -- secular humanism -- emerged  
in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an attempt  
to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma.  
But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with  
the bath water.

You can't prove a higher stage to someone who's not at it. If you go  
to somebody at the mythic stage and try to prove to them something  
from the rational, scientific stage, it won't work. You go to a  
fundamentalist who doesn't believe in evolution, who believes the  
earth was created in six days, and you say, "What about the fossil  
record"? "Oh yes, the fossil record; God created that on the fifth  
day." You can't use any of the evidence from a higher stage and prove  
it to a lower stage. So someone who's at the rational stage has a very  
hard time seeing these trans-rational, trans-personal stages. The  
rational scientist looks at all the pre-rational stuff as nonsense --  
fairies and ghosts and goblins -- and lumps it together with the trans- 
rational stuff and says, "That's non-rational. I don't want anything  
to do with it."

So where does God fit into this picture? Do you believe in God?

God is a perfect example of how these two types of religion treat  
ultimate reality. You asked, "Do you believe in God?" In exoteric  
religion, it's a matter of belief. Do you believe in the kind of God  
who rewards and punishes and will sit with you in some eternal heaven?  
But in the esoteric form of religion, God is a direct experience. Most  
contemplatives would call it "godhead." It's so different from the  
mythic conceptions of God -- the old man in the sky with a gray beard.  
The word "God" is much more misleading than it is accurate. So there's  
a whole series of terms that are used instead by the esoteric  
traditions -- super consciousness, Big Mind, Big Self. This ultimate  
reality is a direct union that is felt or recognized in a state of  
enlightenment or liberation. It's what the Sufis call the "supreme  
identity," the identity of the interior soul with the ultimate ground  
of being in a direct experiential state.

It does raise the question of whether God -- or ultimate reality --  
has some independent existence, or whether this is just a mental state  
that our minds can conjure up.

That's right. One way we try to find out is by doing cross-cultural  
studies of individuals who've had the experience of the supreme  
identity and see if it shows similar characteristics. The most similar  
characteristic is it doesn't have characteristics. It's radically  
undefinable, radically free, radically empty. This formless ground of  
being is found in virtually all esoteric religions around the world.  
For the final test, take scientists with a Ph.D. who are studying  
brain patterns and put them in a contemplative state of the supreme  
identity and ask them whether they think that state is real or just a  
brain state. Nine out of 10 will say they think it's real. They think  
this experience discloses a reality that's independent of the human  
organism.

Next page: What neuroscience will never measure

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George Holcombe
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