A Brief History of Everything

Year: 1996 · Format: Book

Description

Accessible, interview-format restatement of SES for a general audience — the usual recommended entry point into Wilber's mature system.

In-Depth Overview

Written in an interview/Q&A format — a device Wilber returns to often when addressing a general audience — A Brief History of Everything restates SES's core claims without the endnotes and academic apparatus. It walks through holons and holarchy, the four quadrants, and the "spectrum of consciousness" running from matter to life to mind to soul to spirit, framed as a single "Great Nest of Being" — concentric spheres of increasing depth, each transcending but including the one before. It covers the same developmental territory as Integral Psychology (Piaget, Kohlberg, Loevinger, and similar lines of development) but in plainer, conversational language, and repeats the critique of scientific-materialist "flatland" from SES. It also introduces material that would later become Boomeritis: a discussion of postmodern pluralism as a genuine developmental achievement that curdles, when absolutized into "there is no hierarchy of any kind," into a self-undermining relativism Wilber associates with a narcissistic strain of Baby Boomer culture.

Because it compresses the whole system into a shorter, more readable form without skipping the difficult parts, this is the book most commonly recommended — including by Wilber's own publisher — as the best entry point into his mature work for a reader who wants the real theory rather than a simplified paraphrase, before tackling SES itself.

Notes

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