Ken Wilber Online: Introduction to Volume 1 of The Collected Works

The introduction to Volume 1 of The Collected Works of Ken Wilber

I wrote the Spectrum of Consciousness in the winter of 1972. I was twenty-three years old and about half way through graduate school in biochemistry. I wrote it "in my head," as I often do; I began to write it down on paper the next winter. It took me three months to write it out long-hand, whereupon began a hilarious nine months as I tried to get it typed. By 1974 the manuscript was ready to go, and largely through the efforts of Jim Fadiman and especially John White, it finally found a publisher (after being rejected by almost three dozen).

In The Eye of Spirit, written twenty-five years later, I divided my work into four main periods: period-1 was Romantic; period-2 was evolutionary and developmental; period-3 subdivided development into levels and lines; and period-4 set development in the context of the four quadrants (intentional, behavioral, social, and cultural). Periods 2, 3, and 4 form a fairly coherent sequence, each building on and incorporating its predecessor(s). But period-1, which was steeped in the general Romantic philosophy (which is still by far the most prevalent model of spiritual unfolding), forms a great ground of what I think are both some very good, and some very confused, ideas.

All of the works in this volume are from period-1, and they represent, in my opinion, about the best you can do with the fundamentally flawed notions of Romanticism. These works were extremely important for me, because in trying to make the Romantic ideas work, I found out precisely why they would not. The general Romantic notion is that men and women start out--both phylogenetically and ontogenetically (in infancy, in the noble savage, in Eden)--immersed in an unconscious union with Spirit, a type of wholeness and oneness with the entire world. But as development or evolution proceeds, we lose that wholeness and are thrust into the world of separation, alienation, suffering, and pain. But once having split from that wholeness, we can regain or recapture it, but now in a conscious, mature form.

The Romantic view has much to recommend it, and I would incorporate many of its essential features in later models. But the crucial problem concerns the nature of the infantile state of "unconscious wholeness with the world." Since infants do not clearly differentiate subject and object, inside and outside, Romantic theorists have taken this as a type of mystica unio, a type of nondual union with the entire world. But are infants really one with the whole world? They certainly are not one with the world of language, logic, poetry, art, commerce, economics, or even the Oedipal complex--for none of those have yet emerged. The infant exists in a type of fusion state, no doubt, but it is a fusion merely with the sensorimotor world. None of the higher worlds have yet emerged, and thus the early "paradisiacal" state is definitely not one with any of those. And this early fusion state certainly does not transcend the self, because there is not yet any self to transcend.

The Romantics, it appeared, were caught in what I would later call "the pre/trans fallacy." The early infantile fusion is not trans-personal, it is pre-personal; not trans-rational, but pre-rational; not supramental, but inframental. Because both pre-personal and trans -personal are, in their own way, non-personal, it is easy to confuse the two. The typical mistake is to try to reduce all transpersonal mystical states to prepersonal infantile narcissism, thus dismissing spirituality altogether (e.g., Freud). But the Romantics committed the opposite mistake: they elevated prepersonal infantilisms to transpersonal glory (while simultaneously turning Spirit into an infantile display). Reductionism and elevationism are the two sides of the pre/trans fallacy, and the Romantics were the original elevationists.

This was not yet obvious to me as I began writing on these topics. Indeed, the vast majority of the theorists in the field firmly believed, as they still do, that the Romantic model is the correct model of spiritual unfolding. Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Norman O. Brown, the entire Jungian tradition--all had lined up in favor of the Romantic view. My job, as I saw it, was to correlate and synthesize all of these various theorists, East and West, and thus produce a type of master template of human growth and development. And so I began. The works in this volume present the major statements from that period--namely, period-1--where I was grappling with, and trying to free myself from, the great Romantic tradition.

One of the major difficulties with Romanticism is that, because the early "paradisiacal" fusion state is supposed to contain the "whole world" (albeit unconsciously), then each succeeding stage of development must be pictured as a "loss" of something essential that was previously present. Romanticism must view the infantile state as possessing everything that is important and significant (after all, if enlightenment is a recapturing of the infantile state, that state must possess all good things!), and therefore Romanticism must view subsequent development as a series of painful, tragic loses. Actually trying to make this scheme work verges on the preposterous (and hilarious), as I was soon to discover.

Language, for example. The infant is immersed basically in the sensorimotor world. As language begins to develop, the Romantics must see language as doing nothing but filtering the "richness" of the infant's world. Language is seen as a screen, as something that dilutes, distorts, reduces, or hides the richness of the sensory world. While that sometimes happens, the great role of language is not to filter the physical world, but to create higher, deeper, and wider worlds--not just filter the sensorimotor world, but create the magic, mythic, and mental worlds, themselves verging on the transverbal and transmental. Language is the great gateway to the transverbal, not merely a filter of the preverbal. But you will see me, in Spectrum, attempt to support this old Romantic silliness--I even called one chapter "The Great Filter."

Romanticism likewise confuses the merely sensory body, which is present in infancy, with the mind-and-body integration (the "centaur"), which doesn't emerge until early adulthood. And Romanticism must confuse sensory and centaur because the centaur is a type of profound wholeness and union, and all good unions must be present in the infantile "paradisiacal" state! In the following pages you will see me likewise attempt to place the centaur in infancy, and derive the mental-ego from a splitting or fragmentation of the prior centaur--which is really quite hard to do, since the centaur doesn't emerge until early adulthood!

All of these Romantic confusions stem from variations on the pre/trans fallacy. The more I tried to make the Romantic model work, the more I saw its inadequacies. By the time I had finished No Boundary (and the essay called "Where It Was, There I Shall Become"), I was beginning to see exactly what the problem was. I abandoned the traditional Romantic model, and hence began period-2, whose first major statement was The Atman Project.

The works in this volume, then, represent my coming of age, so to speak. The first paper I ever published was called "The Spectrum of Consciousness," which appeared in the November, 1974 issue of Main Currents in Modern Thought. I was then twenty-five; had been married one year; had left graduate school; was intensively practicing Zen Buddhism; and was about to start my long career as a dishwasher at the Red Roster Restaurant in Lincoln, Nebraska (in order to pay my half of the rent). That paper was followed by "Psychologia Perennis: The Spectrum of Consciousness," Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1975, which is included in this volume. Finally, in 1977--five years after I had written it--The Spectrum of Consciousness was published by Quest. As any author will attest, seeing your first book is a thrill never quite equaled.

"Are the Chakras Real?" is a good example of how, following Romanticism, I attempted to derive all higher structures from a restriction or repression of lower structures. The standard line: the infant starts out "one with the whole world" but then loses that oneness and must regain or recapture it in order to find freedom and enlightenment. This period-1 model has been elaborated by theorists such as Michael Washburn, but it is a view that simply will not fit with developmental data, as I soon discovered.

No Boundary was written shortly after Spectrum, and like Spectrum, took several years to find a publisher. At the time I was studying Zen with several masters, in person and by correspondence. Maezumi Roshi, of the Zen Center of Los Angeles, was one of them, and I gave the book (and half of its royalties) to his Center Publications; it appeared in 1979. Shambhala brought out its first edition of the book in 1981.