A Brief History of Everything (20th Anniversary Edition)

Ken Wilber is great!

Livro com muito interesse, para uma prospecção futura.

Este es un excelente libro para comenzar a leer a Ken Wilber.

In Wilber’s ontology, the building blocks of reality are holons: wholes that themselves form part of greater wholes, all the way up and down. So for instance, atoms form molecules, which in turn make up cells, which constitute organisms, and so on – thus creating holarchies (hierarchies of holons). The emergence of consciousness, for Wilber, is not a particular problem, as he deems it already present in elementary particles, though much less so than in holons with greater “depth”: humans, for example. Moreover, holons have an inside and an outside, as well as an individual and collective aspect: thus one arrives at four quadrants, each with its own type of holarchy, or growth hierarchy – “I”, “We”, “It”, “Its”; with their respective lines of personal, cultural and scientific development. Spirit, which manifests as all four quadrants, is both the highest, all-encompassing stage as well as the very ground and being of everything. To grow beyond a given stage is to first differentiate from it, then to transcend and include it; if not, things are either stuck or take on a pathological form. It is central to Wilber’s “Integral Theory” that development needs to proceed in all quadrants and along all lines apace if real and healthy progress is to be made.Wilber is a great categoriser and systematiser, and the explanatory power of his conceptual map does indeed prove itself in the illuminating way he analyses various pathologies that have arisen along the way, be it scientific materialism (the denial of the interior dimension), eco-romanticism (the reduction of the spiritual to mere exterior nature), or postmodern relativism and multiculturalism (the denial of growth hierarchies). Outlining the history of both cultural and individual growth, he throws in (among other things) superb summaries of the philosophies of Plotinus and Schelling, all along the way to the Nondual realisation.To offer anything resembling an adequate critique of Wilber’s system would go entirely beyond this brief review, and I will not do so here. Just a few points: The distinction between interior and exterior, for example, does not in itself answer the deep philosophical question as to why reality is such as to motivate the distinction - it states it but does not explain it. As for the relationship between interior and exterior – between, for example, having a certain emotion and a certain brain state – Wilber says that they are “correlated”, but does not sufficiently explain how this is to be understood. His “integral vision” is meant to integrate at a higher level (“transcend and include”) what modernity differentiated but could not pull together: aesthetics, morals and science. But what that level would look like remains somewhat nebulous: “The general idea is simply that we need to exercise body, mind, soul, and spirit – and do so in self, culture and nature.” (p. 311) To be sure, he has written more on how this is to be done in later works; nevertheless, his vision seems to me to be more a promise so far than a reality.Despite his relative fame, Ken Wilber has perhaps not been given the credit he deserves: Spiritual seekers tend to regard him as too obsessively focussed on theorising, while hard-headed theoreticians are suspicious of his spiritual outlook. And yet his achievement is precisely that he has pulled spiritual theory and practice together. He has dedicated a lifetime to sifting through, organising and synthesising vast amounts of material, from both East and West, and the result is a conceptual map which in its combination of clarity and comprehensiveness is probably unmatched by any other. Certainly I have benefited a great deal in clarifying my own thinking by reference especially to his various states and stages, to their characterisations and to the principles and pitfalls that govern the transitions between them – things that had been quite muddled in my mind.Above all, whether he is quite right or not, he has surely made a significant contribution to pointing out the way towards the realisation of much higher potentials than we typically live up to, a challenge for us to get serious and grow up if we are not to destroy our planet and ourselves. I therefore think that anyone who strives for higher things would do well to be familiar, at least in outline, with Wilber’s thought, both as a fruitful theoretical framework and for its very practical implications. This book, a distillation of most of his system, is as good a starting place as any to becoming acquainted with it.

Arrived in time in perfect condition and was exactly what I wanted at a good price.

I have no yet finished it yet but so far I am Impressed withKen Wilbur's ability to express clearly in reasonably simple prose some difficult scientific concepts. I think that his Q and A format is a part of his secret.