Integral Spirituality

A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World

Year: 2006 · Format: Book

Description

Marks Wilber's turn to "integral post-metaphysics" — reinterpreting contemplative states and stages without pre-modern metaphysical assumptions — and introduces the Wilber–Combs Lattice mapping states of consciousness against structures/stages of development.

In-Depth Overview

Integral Spirituality is Wilber's most technical, meta-theoretical book and the one where his framework visibly turns a corner. Its central move is integral post-metaphysics: earlier Wilber (and most of the contemplative traditions he draws on) speak as if there are pre-existing "levels" of reality or structures of the psyche simply waiting to be discovered through practice — a broadly Platonic, "Great Chain of Being" picture. Here Wilber argues that's no longer philosophically defensible after Kant and postmodernism: there is no view from nowhere, no pre-given reality separate from the perspective enacting it. Developmental structures and stages, on this account, are enacted through evolution rather than discovered as already-existing furniture of the universe — a significant reframing of claims that looked more metaphysically realist in SES.

The book's most widely used practical contribution is the Wilber–Combs Lattice (developed with Allan Combs), which cleanly separates states of consciousness from stages of development: states (gross, subtle, causal, witnessing, nondual) are, in principle, available to a person at any developmental stage — anyone can have a profound nondual peak experience — but how that experience gets interpreted and integrated afterward depends entirely on the stage the person occupies when they have it. This directly explains, in Wilber's account, why genuinely gifted meditators can still hold what look like developmentally immature ethical or political views: state attainment and stage development are separate axes, not one continuum. The book also introduces Integral Methodological Pluralism — a further subdivision of each of the four quadrants into inside and outside views (eight "zones" total, e.g. phenomenology vs. structuralism as the inside/outside methodologies proper to the interior-individual quadrant), an attempt to give each of the many competing schools of psychology, sociology, and science a legitimate, non-overlapping methodological home within AQAL rather than treating them as rivals.

This is denser and more meta-theoretical than SES or A Brief History of Everything, and a number of longtime readers have found it a harder read than the more narrative earlier work — it's really a book about how to build a theory of everything responsibly as much as it is a restatement of the theory itself.

Notes

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