Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy

by Ken Wilber

Book Overview

A leader in transpersonal psychology presents the first truly integrative model of spiritual consciousness and Western developmental psychology The goal of an "integral psychology" is to honor and embrace every legitimate aspect of human consciousness under one roof. Drawing on hundreds of sources--Eastern and Western, ancient and modern--Wilber creates a psychological model that includes waves of development, streams of development, states of consciousness,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1570625549
• ISBN13: 9781570625541
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: Shambhala
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent integration!

Ken Wilber, the master of integration, attempts to integrate many theories in the diverse field of psychology, philosophy, and spirituality in this book. It is full of very interesting ideas and insights. Even if you do not agree with some of his ideas, it is very interesting and worth contemplating. In this book, Wilber convincingly writes that the four quadrants (his theory of the "1,2,3 of consciousness") are highly related to each other, and that they need to be integrated in order to advance our understanding of things. However, he really does not go into much detail about how we can go about doing this. I found that the book called the "The Ever-Transcending Spirit" by Toru Sato goes one step further and actually attempts an integration of these four quadrants. This fantastic book by Sato is a little more readable and takes this idea to an even more advanced level. Both books should be on your must read list if you are interested in the intersection between psychology, philosophy, and spirituality.

A Few More Words on Mr. Wilber

An Added Note, Jan 2002:Reading the reviews on this page, some of them remind me of a philosophy class I once took with an excellent professor. The subject matter was Sextus Empiricus, and his "fathering" of Skepticism as a formal philosophical method. What the professor mentioned to us, just before handing back our first essays, in a friendly but admonishing manner, was that it is far too easy to simply cast aspersions or find thinkers wrong; whereas it is far more productive to find what is right about what they say; and that only after you've got what they say down pat & can recount it, can you start to do an intelligent criticism of their work. Mr. Wilber himself parses his work into four periods, sometimes revising his earlier views (such as on Romanticism). And though there is a general concern that informs what he has written - the totality of human knowledge and how we come to that knowledge and what characterizes that knowledge & perhaps most importantly what we can do with that knowledge (which therefore makes is difficult to write something that is not somewhat related to something else that is already written in Wilber’s ongoing opus) – UP FROM EDEN is not the same book as, say, INTEGRAL PSYCHOLOGY. And the repetition in the books simply, yes, rehashes the basic outlines of his foundational Quadrant model, which any good writer will offer, as there will always be readers who are new to him. Thus each book can be self-contained and does not require what can be a frustrating practice of buying a book that refers back to another book the reader is therefore forced to get in order to be able to make sense of the tome in her hands at the moment – a tome which could have set her back 50 dollars.Who else out there can summarize so much, so clearly, and be good enough at writing to actually sell books, thus making his work available (can anyone really argue otherwise, agree or no with his starting-point conclusions) to all of us easily, and not have us searching for his work in obscure, disparate, academic journals? And what other philosopher is so perspicaciously tooting the horn of so many other writers, introducing them to us and contextualizing them for us?For my buck, it is difficult to find a better analytical guide to knowledge, and his hand-holding - as he guides us through the annals of consciousness - is simply too valuable and too rare, to my eye, to cast aside as simply repetitious.Is it a wonder at the relatively young age of Mr. Wilber that his works are, though unfinished, already collected?

A psychological thriller for thinkers.

This is the second book I've read toward my goal of reading all of Ken Wilber's books this year. In 1835, philosopher Gustav Fechner wrote "Man lives on earth not once, but three times: the first stage of life is continual sleep; the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, waking forever" (pp. vii-ix). This observation inspired Wilber to write this book. His aim, he writes, is to start a discussion, not to finish it, to act as a beginning, not an end (pp. xii; 193). Wilber's book is not so much a "history of psychology," as he calls it (p. ix), but an attempt to reconcile the spiritual dimensions of the human consciousness with the discipline of psychology. "Consciousness is real, the inward observing self is real, the soul is real, however much we debate the details" (p. xi). From Wilber's perspective, we are living in a modern "flatland." "The nightmare of scientific materialism is upon us (Whitehead), the nightmare of the one-dimensional man (Marcuse), the disqualified universe (Mumford), the colonization of art and morals by science (Habermas), the disenchantment of the world (Weber)" (p. 70). "Flatland," Wilber explains, is "the belief that only the Right-Hand world is real--the world of matter/energy, empirically investigated by the human senses and their extensions (telescopes, microscopes, photographic plates, etc.). All of the interior worlds are reduced to, or experienced by objective/external terms" (p. 70). Modernity "marked the death of God, the death of the Goddess, the commodification of life, the leveling of qualitative distinctions, the brutalities of capitalism, the replacement of quality by quantity, the loss of value and meaning, the fragmentation of the lifeworld, existential dread, polluting industrialization, a rampant and vulgar materialism" (p. 59). With the "thundering authority of science" (p. 55), modernity denies the premodern belief that higher potentials are available to any individual "who wishes to pursue a path of awakening, liberation, or enlightenment" (p. 55), and reduces the entire spectrum of consciousness and certainly its higher levels (soul and spirit) . . . to permutations and combinations of matter and bodies" (p. 64). However, Wilber is not without optimism. "This is the dawning of the age of vision-logic," he writes, "the rise of the network society, the postmodern, aperspectival, internetted global village. Evolution in all forms has started to become conscious of itself. Evolution, as Spirit-in-action, is starting to awaken on a more collective scale" (pp. 193-4). A truly integral psychology, Wilber says, would involve the best of religious premodernity, scientific modernity, and postmodernity, "all level, all quadrant" (p. 87). "The soul is not running around out there in the physical world; it cannot be seen with a microscope or telescope or photographic plates. If you want to see the soul, you must turn within. You must develop your consciousness. You must grow and evolve

What is Psychology?

Mr. Ken Wilber is simply a national treasure. Wilber's approach is to cast a compassionate yet perspicaciously critical eye on the entire history and practice of human's efforts to know, examine everything we know, and further, to understand and explain how we share this knowing. The kinds of knowing the mind & brain (all of them here explained) are carefully explicated in this clearly written powerhouse of a concentrated book. Though the title accurately cues us to its subject matter, those not familiar with Wilber's scholarship will be pleasantly surprised - thoroughly and gently challenged - by the breadth of the concern this book so carefully and compactly elucidates. Elucidates is what this books so clearly does. Many books attempt to bring light to the subject of psychology, however few so clearly and so broadly cast, as one reviewer says, "...conceptual order to psychology of the east and west." And all this in a friendly and clear prose which though simple, imparts heady ideas in an inviting, open style that makes the book a pleasure to read. Wilber teaches, but a didactic diction is as foreign as is superficial analysis in this and all of his work. If you are new to him you wonder why so many others are so positively bumbling in their grasp of ideas and in the delivery of their insights. I find it difficult to put down his books; they're surprisingly fun to read, given the subject matter of his prolific output - nothing less than, to borrow from the title of another work, A Theory of Everything.To give a taste of his work, I'll quote a passage from Integral Psychology that speaks to the positivistic predilection for eschewing all things non-quantifiable:"The bleakness of modern scientific proclamation is chilling. In that extraordinary journey from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, scientific materialism halted the journey at the very first stage, and proclaimed all subsequent developments to be nothing but arrangements of frisky dirt. Why this dirt would get up and eventually start writing poetry was not explained. Or rather, it was explained by dumb chance and dumb selection, as if two dumbs would make a Shakespeare. The sensorimotor realm was proclaimed the only real realm, and it soon came to pass that mental health would be defined as adaptation to that 'reality.' Any consciousness that saw anything other than matter was obviously hallucinating."Being a condensed 300 page version of a yet to be published two volume textbook on psychology, this immanently respectful contribution to the storehouse of knowledge on what we call "psychology" (there is polemic, but it only answers unfair or misconstrued erroneous criticisms of his work) not only elucidates its history & strengths, weaknesses & schools, but, anchored to the etymology of the word 'psychology,' plumbs the depths of what all quarters (east and west, ancient and modern) have brought to the question: what is consciousness? Collecting "sturdy conclusions" - as Wilb

Consciousness Restored!

With this book Ken Wilber accomplishes something extraordinary. In lucid, lively, and often humorous writing, he presents a model of psychology and spirituality that, unlike anything before it, fully integrates--in a _completely_ reasonable manner--every facet of serious mental and spiritual investigation ever devised. Standing in the middle of a room called reality, Wilber sees four corners--the subjective ("I"), objective ("It"), intersubjective ("We"), and interobjective ("Its")--and realizes the obvious: the world is not constructed as strictly "objective" and material, nor purely "subjective" and mental, nor the plurals of those, but somehow _all of them at once_. Reality has four corners to it (or, for simplicity's sake, three dimensions: subjective, cultural, and objective; or I, We, and It; or first-person, second-person, and third-person aspects), and none of these corners can be simply "reduced" to, or derived from, any other. All four corners of reality arise together, along with a single universal room, and while they are indeed irreducible to each other, they are all mutually determining, inseparable, and incessantly interacting. Thus, standing in the middle of this Kosmic room, Wilber gives consciousness its due, permitting it to roam freely about the room and saving it, so to speak, from the immemorial punishment of standing in a particular corner while its parents decided what to do with their problematic child.The mysteries that Wilber's model solves are numerous. When the four-quadrant model is coupled with the traditional spiritual insight called the "Great Chain of Being"--which sees reality as a multidimensional spectrum of being and knowing, ranging from matter to life to mind to soul to spirit--the human "self" finally regains the complexity that everyone naturally intuits, but few psychological and spiritual systems acknowledge. Wilber gives the "self-system" continuum, stretching from most fundamental ("proximate") to least fundamental ("distal"), as: (1) "I-I" (Spirit, God, pure Consciousness, true Self); (2) "I" (ego, individual self); (3) "me" (aspects of oneself seen objectively, such as, for the average adult, her physical body); and (4) "mine" (external possessions and associations that define oneself). In the evolution of the "overall self," the "I" at one stage becomes the "me" at the next, transcending and including lower levels of reality, and this process opens consciousness to increasingly integral vistas. As Wilber explains: "[W]hat you are identified with (or embedded in) at one stage of development (and what you therefore experience very intimately as an `I') tends to become transcended, or disidentified with, or de-embedded at the next, so you can see it more objectively, with some distance and detachment. In other words, the _subject_ of one stage becomes an _object_ of the next" (p. 34). And when one reaches a level of _absolute_ transcendence, wherein