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Introduction to the Second Volume of The Collected Works of Ken Wilber
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his volume contains the major publications of that period of my work I have called
phase-2. Phase-1 was Romantic, marked by an overall belief that the dawn state
of humans--both ontogenetically in the child and phylogenetically in
primal humans--was a type of slumber in Paradise, in Eden, in a unified
state or ground of being, from which we were alienated in the process of
growing up, and to which we therefore should return: the original "paradise" must be
recaptured in some form for our salvation. The insuperable difficulties with that
view--difficulties fully discussed in the following pages--led me to abandon a pure
Romanticism for a more evolutionary or developmental view (phase-2), which replaced
a "recaptured goodness" model with a "growth to goodness" view. In phase-3 I would
further refine the developmental view to include levels and lines (or waves and streams)
of development, and in phase-4 I would see development itself set in the context of four
major domains (the four quadrants of intentional, behavioral, social, and cultural unfolding).
But the major turning point in my intellectual development came in moving from phase-1
to phase-2--Romantic to evolutionary--and this volume chronicles that growth.
This is not to say that, being phase-2, these publications are now outdated. In
fact, much (or even most) of what follows is material I still consider to be
basically sound in its overall conclusions, and it still forms several crucial
building blocks of my subsequent work. The Atman Project
was the first major psychological system to suggest a coherent and detailed map
of human consciousness that included most of the major schools of Western
psychology and Eastern mysticism. It outlined seventeen levels (or waves) of
consciousness development leading from matter to body to mind to soul to
spirit. Those seventeen stages are ones that I still consider to be the basic
units (or holons) of consciousness evolution, although I have continued to
refine their actual definitions and correlations with other researchers (see,
for example, Integral Psychology). And Up from Eden remains, in my
opinion, a quite valid outline of the major waves of cultural or worldview evolution,
although, as with The Atman Project, I have continued to refine its points.
The transition from phase-1 to phase-2 (Romantic to developmental) was an
inordinately difficult intellectual passage, and is worth studying, not for any
personal angst through which I passed, but for the extremely important and
delicate theoretical issues involved. I do not believe the child begins life
immersed in a perfect Paradise, but I do believe most people begin thinking
about Spirit in very Romantic terms: not something we possess now
in timeless eternity yet refuse to see, but something we possessed yesterday in
time and must regress to regain. This volume opens with the essay
"Odyssey," an exploration of this retro-Romantic theme and its surprisingly large
number of variants, and it points out the simple fact that, once you get on the
Regress Express, it's extremely hard to get off.
This does not mean that infancy and childhood have no access to any sort of
spiritual awareness at all. That has never been my position, although many
critics still assume it is. In The Atman Project
I outline the various bardo realms (or the realms between death and rebirth),
which--according to most forms of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, early
Christianity, and many forms of Jewish and Islamic mysticism--each soul
traverses in his or her journey to Self-realization. The point is that the
infant might indeed come "trailing clouds of glory," as Wordsworth
put it, and these spiritual trails are often present, some evidence suggests,
in prenatal, perinatal, neonatal, early infancy and childhood, although they
are almost always suppressed when egoic (or frontal) development gets under
way. Yet even then, the infant--and all human beings as such, from the
primal human to the modern adult--has access to the three major realms of
gross body (waking), subtle soul (dreaming), and causal spirit (sleeping), for
the simple reason that all of them wake, dream, and sleep. I pointed this out
in The Atman Project and Up from Eden, and thus I have never
denied spiritual awareness of one sort or another to any stage of human development.
Nonetheless, I spent considerable time in phase-2 attacking the merely Romantic notion that
infancy is basically an immersion in the primal paradise, and the archaic dawn
state nothing but Eden. I pointed out that much of the eulogizing of infancy
and dawn consciousness was based on "the pre/trans fallacy," or the
confusing of pre-rational states and trans-rational states simply
because both are non-rational. Much (but not all) of the Romantic agenda was
a colossal confusion of pre and trans, with the result that some of the most
outrageously prepersonal, preverbal, and prerational states of being were elevated
to transpersonal, transverbal, transrational glory--so that instead of going forward to a
transpersonal tomorrow, the Romantics recommended a recapture of a prepersonal past.
Because I dwelled on the many items in the archaic state and in infancy that are in
fact prepersonal, I got the reputation (unfairly but perhaps understandably)
for denying the possibility of any sort of archaic or childhood spirituality,
which, as I said, is quite untrue.[1]
Still, in this age of rampant narcissism, the dangers of elevating prerational
impulses to transrational liberation far outweigh any skepticism about the
glory of the two-year-old child, and although what we ideally want is a
judicious assessment of each, erring on the side of skepticism is often the
wiser move.
Since both Atman and Eden use the terms "structure of consciousness"
and "structuralism," some critics wondered what relation my ideas had
to the structuralists, who at the time were ascendant in many cultural studies
(although poststructuralism had, since May of 1968, been increasingly rearing
its ravenous head). The answer is, the movement known as "structuralism"--associated
with names such as Levi-Strauss, Barthes, early Foucault, Lacan, aspects of Chomsky--was
an important influence, but not overwhelmingly. It was merely one of several strands of
cultural studies I was attempting to integrate, and it remains important to
that degree. But most of the structuralists--linguistic, cultural,
mathematical, and psychological--were working with structures that they
believed were ahistorical (or synchronic), whereas I also wanted to include
those aspects that were developmental or historical (diachronic). Likewise,
most structuralists believed that structures were a priori givens of some sort
(Kantian, Platonic, Hegelian, or Husserlian), but I believed that a priori
structures were in fact the result of previous evolutionary history, but once
they were laid down as a developmental habit, they were then basically a priori
to subsequent development. And finally, most structuralists felt that
structures were autonomous units, whereas I believed that they also depended up
processes of relational exchange. For all those reasons, I could never be
called a structuralist in any strict sense, although I attempted to integrate
its enduring contributions.
Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson might be called
"proto-structuralists," and I found them both absolutely brilliant
(I continue to embrace many of their pioneering insights). From the early
Foucault I took the importance of culturally constructed worldviews (although
after Gebser, Foucault is rather thin soup). From Lacan, the fact that at
least some of the unconscious has linguistic structure, and from Barthes,
certain techniques of playing with that fact. Chomsky reminded us that aspects
of language are universal and apparently innate, and that language itself is a
phenomenon that behaviorism cannot even begin to explain.
But of all the structuralists, I found Piaget the most important. His system, as a
system, is now eclipsed by more integral views (see The Eye of Spirit
for a discussion of this), but many of his points are as valid today as when he
first advanced them. In particular, his use of the word "structure," although
utilizing many important currents of thought at the time, was quite original and
highly influential. Most critics I know who dislike "structuralism" say that it is
too rigid, too fixed, too, well, structured for their tastes. They prefer more
holistic, patterned, self-organizing, dynamical processes.... apparently ignorant of
the fact that such is exactly how Piaget defined the term "structure." In an age where
everybody soon wanted to deconstruct something, the very word "structuralism"
cried out for attack, as one rioting student scrawled on a wall in the streets
of a burning Paris: "Down with Structuralism!"
In his book Structuralism, Piaget points out that "structure" simply means a
self-organizing holistic pattern. All schools of structuralism, he notes, take their
cue from wholeness: "For the mathematicians, structuralism is opposed to
compartmentalization, which it counteracts by recovering unity through
isomorphisms. For several generations of linguists, structuralism is chiefly a
departure from the diachronic study of isolated linguistic phenomena...and a
turn to the investigation of synchronously functioning unified language
systems. In psychology, structuralism has long combated the atomistic tendency
to reduce wholes to their prior elements."
More precisely, according to Piaget, "The notion of structure is comprised of
three key ideas: the idea of wholeness, the idea of transformation, and the
idea of self-regulation." He continues:
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That wholeness is a defining mark of structures almost goes without saying, since
all structuralists--mathematicians, linguists, psychologists, or what have
you--are at one in recognizing as fundamental the contrast between
structures and aggregates, the former being wholes, the latter composites
formed of elements.... Moreover, the law's governing a structure's
composition are not reducible to cumulative one-by-one association of its
elements: they confer on the whole as such overall properties distinct from the
properties of its elements.... The third basic property of structures is that
they are self-regulating, self-regulation entailing self-maintenance and closure.
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In short, structures--whether linguistic, psychological, mathematical,
biological, sociological--are simply self-regulating holistic patterns.
To use my terms, "structure" is generally synonymous with "holon"; but, more
specifically, it means the holon's agency or autopoiesis, the deep pattern
or self-organizing code that governs its transcription and translation (see Sex,
Ecology, Spirituality). Francisco Varela's concept of autopoiesis owes much to
Piaget's structures. Piaget even recognized the whole/part (or holonic) nature of
structures within structures: "It is in this sense that a structure is
'closed,' a notion perfectly compatible with the structure's
being considered a substructure of a larger one [a whole that is part of a
larger whole]; but in being treated as a substructure, a structure does not
lose its own boundaries; the larger structure does not 'annex' the
substructure; if anything, we have a confederation, so that the laws of the
substructure are not altered but conserved and the intervening change is an
enrichment rather than an impoverishment." As I would put it,
development is envelopment, with each senior holon transcending but embracing
its juniors, so that each successive unfolding is indeed an enrichment, not an
impoverishment.
Unlike most structuralists, Piaget believed that structures underwent
development--that structures were con-structed.[2]
He thus attempted to integrate synchronic (given) with diachronic (developed),
an integrative intent that I shared. I would eventually come to believe that
most of the deep features (or self-regulating codes) of holons (in all domains)
were not given ahistorically, but rather were laid down in the process of
evolution and development itself. However, once laid down as evolutionary
memory, they tend to become fixed habits (or a priori structures) in their
developmental domains, acting as teleonomic omega points for all future members
of the class, which is why, in very general terms, ontogeny does recapitulate
phylogeny. But even when a holon's deep features appear as a priori forms, nonetheless
the surface features continue to be socially molded, historically fashioned, and
often culturally relative. No part of a holon then--whether deep or surface--stands
completely outside the molding hands of time and history and evolution (except, of
course, for the Timeless itself).
So I would (and still do) refer to a holon's "structural organization
and relational exchange." Structural organization means the defining agency,
the deep features, the specific patterns of autopoiesis, of any self-organizing holon.
Relational exchange refers to the fact that all holons possess not just
autonomous agency or isolated self-regulating patterns, but also exist in networks of
communion, relationship, and embeddedness. The deep features may be relatively autonomous
(and hence self-regulating), but the surface features consist of patterns of
relational exchange with the surrounding environs, an exchange upon which every
holon depends for its very existence. Thus, all holons are self-regulating,
but not self-sufficient, because all holons are always agency-in-communion (or
coherence-in-correspondence, or being-in-the-world). Neither agency nor
communion, neither autonomy nor relationship, neither coherence nor correspondence,
neither a prior nor a posteriori, are alone enough to define a holon.
In this volume, I usually speak of "deep structures" and "surface structures" for those
two features of holons, but that was perhaps an unfortunate choice of terms because
they were also being used at the time by Chomsky, with meanings that were not the same.
Chomsky himself dropped those terms, as did I. I now refer to them as "deep features"
and "surface features"--or the relatively autonomous, universal, enduring features of any
holon and the contingent, conditioned, culturally relative features of any holon,
respectively. But by whatever names, both features are profoundly significant.
A few specific points on each book. The terminology of the basic structures or
levels of consciousness given in The Atman Project reflects my own early
attempts to integrate a vast array of conflicting psychological and spiritual
systems. In subsequent books I would continue to refine the levels. In some
cases the dates of emergence have been adjusted to match more recent evidence
(this is the case with Eden, also). This is especially true of the earlier
stages (birth to concrete operational, or archaic to mythic--both ontogenetically and
phylogenetically). Ontogenetically, for example, the "membership self," although it
starts around ages 2 to 4, as indicated in The Atman Project, doesn't really
solidify until the rule/role mind (of ages 7-12), so in subsequent works (starting as
early as Eden) I pushed the term "membership" and "mythic-membership"
to that later period. The seventeen stages are still basically the same, I
have simply used some slightly different terms and have adjusted the typical
dates of emergence. (Nor is there anything sacred about the number
seventeen--those levels can be subdivided, or alternatively, combined, in
any number of valid ways.) For these refinements, of course, the reader is
referred to such books as Integral Psychology, but the general outline of
the basic structures is still as given in The Atman Project.
For the many contorted, conflicting meanings of Eros, Thanatos, Agape, and
phobos--and my own changing use of those terms--I refer to the reader
to a footnote.[3]
Which brings me to the other major change in subsequent theorizing: the shift from
phase-2 to phase-3. In The Atman Project, I gave the seventeen levels
(which are basically a subdivision of matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit),
but I failed to fully articulate the fact that different developmental lines
(such as cognitive, moral, artistic, interpersonal, affective, etc.) each
develop in a relatively independent fashion through those seventeen levels.
Thus, a person could be at a relatively high level of cognitive development,
medium level of interpersonal development, and low level of moral development.
In other words, development is not a clunky ladder-like affair, but rather
consists of numerous independent lines (or streams) progressing through the
seventeen basic levels (or waves) of consciousness. In most subsequent works,
I would simply use nine or ten basic structures or waves of consciousness,
through which almost two dozen different developmental lines or streams would
move relatively independently. That insight--levels and lines, or waves
and streams--would mark the transition from phase-2 to phase-3, represented in such
books as Transformations of Consciousness and The Eye of Spirit. But, once
again, the basic levels are given in The Atman Project, which is why it remains
a fruitful foundation.
In Up from Eden, I focused on the evolution of cultural consciousness or
worldviews (what I would later call the Lower Left quadrant, or intersubjective
consciousness, just as The Atman Project focused on the Upper Left quadrant,
or subjective consciousness). In Eden, I divided consciousness evolution into
two main streams, the average mode and the most advanced (or growing tip) mode. I
should emphasize that the average mode is just that: an average, with any individual
capable of being quite above or below the group mean. Thus, in the magical-typhonic
era, some individuals developed mythic, mental, and even psychic capacities (the latter
were the shamans, I argue), but the higher the level of consciousness, the rarer it was,
with the shaman being the most evolved--and therefore the rarest. Some
critics imagined that in a magical-typhonic culture, none of the mythic or
mental structures existed in anybody, so a shaman, accessing the psychic, would
in fact be skipping stages. All of those difficulties can be avoided by
remembering that the average mode was simply an average.
Also, it should be noted that the higher transpersonal realms (such as the subtle and
the causal) can exist as both temporary states and permanent traits
(or structures), and temporary states of transpersonal consciousness--such
as altered states or a peak experience--can happen to virtually anybody at
virtually any stage of development.[4]
Thus, certain individuals in typhonic (foraging) times--such as a
shaman--could access temporary transpersonal states regardless of the
stage of their own development or that of their culture. Either or both of
these explanations (the average mode allows for some individuals to possess
advanced traits or structures, and temporary states can be accessed regardless)
are enough to account for shamans, saints, and sages experiencing successively
higher realms of the superconscious, even while their brethen were largely
confined to average-mode awareness.
In Up from Eden I therefore also focused on differentiating between average-mode
or exoteric religious symbols (stemming from the magic, mythic, or mental levels)
and advanced-mode or esoteric religious symbols (stemming from the psychic, subtle,
or causal levels). In particular, I focused on the difference between the Great Mother
(originating largely in prepersonal structures) and the Great Goddess (originating largely
in transpersonal ones). Likewise with God the Father as a mythic parental
figure (prepersonal) and as Purusha or Consciousness (transpersonal).
Those insights are still quite valid, in my opinion, but I would simply add, as I did
in a footnote to the original text, that there are other equally important
meanings of the Feminine and Masculine Faces of Spirit. As explained in
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality and A Brief History of Everything,
the most comprehensive meaning of "God" and "Goddess" is simply as Ascent and Descent,
Eros and Agape, wisdom and compassion, consciousness (purusha) and manifestation (prakriti),
transcendence and immanence. Neither God nor Goddess is more important, higher, deeper,
or better. Rather, each covers half of the eternal cycle of reflux and efflux,
reaching higher in wisdom and reaching deeper in compassion, the Eros and Agape
of Spirit's play in the world.
Both The Atman Project and Up from Eden discuss evolution at length, with
a brief but important overview of involution. According to the perennial philosophy--or
the common core of the world's great wisdom traditions--Spirit manifests a universe by
"throwing itself out" or "emptying itself" to create soul, which condenses into mind,
which condenses into body, which condenses into matter, the densest form of all. Each of
those levels is still a level of Spirit, but each is a reduced or "stepped down" version
of Spirit. At the end of that process of involution, all of the higher dimensions
are enfolded, as potential, in the lowest material realm. And once the material world blows
into existence (with, say, the Big Bang), then the reverse process--or evolution--can
occur, moving from matter to living bodies to symbolic minds to luminous souls
to pure Spirit itself. In this developmental or evolutionary unfolding, each
successive level does not jettison or deny the previous level, but rather
includes and embraces it, just as atoms are included in molecules, which are
included in cells, which are included in organisms. Each level is a whole that
is also part of a larger whole (each level or structure is a whole/part or
holon). In other words, each evolutionary unfolding transcends but includes
its predecessor(s), with Spirit transcending and including absolutely everything.
This arrangement--Spirit transcends but includes soul, which transcends but
includes mind, which transcends but includes body, which transcends but
includes matter--is often referred to as the Great Chain of Being, but
that is clearly a very unfortunate misnomer. Each successive level is not a
link but a nest, which includes, embraces, and envelopes its predecessor(s).
The Great Chain of Being is really the Great Nest of Being--not a ladder,
chain, or one-way hierarchy, but a series of concentric spheres of increasing
holistic embrace. The Great Nest of Being is a holarchy, composed of holons, a
development that is envelopment. And the deep features of this development
were, at least in some significant ways, said to be deposited in involution.
This naturally raises the thorny question, Since the major dimensions of existence
are laid down in involution, is evolution a completely determined course of
action? Are the higher levels (or structures or holons or stages) given as
Platonic Forms, ready to fall from the sky on their appointed cue?
Most of the traditionalists--such as Huston Smith, Fritjof Schuon, and Ananda
Coomaraswamy--would reply with a strong "Yes." But that part
of the "perennial philosophy" is something with which I could never
really agree (which is one of the reasons I wrote "The Neo-Perennial
Philosophy," replacing its central tenet of static Platonic Forms with an
evolutionary panentheism). Like most of the structuralists, the
traditionalists believed in ahistorical, completely pregiven Forms, untouched
by time, history, or evolution. I, on the other hand, believed that there was
indeed an involutionary arc, but all that it "predetermined" were some very general
potentials for evolutionary unfolding.
To say that matter, body, mind, soul, and Spirit are evolutionary potentials is to
say both quite a lot and not very much. With the traditionalists, I agree that
these higher realms of being (or higher states of consciousness) are potentials
that are available to us in any moment we can open our eyes wide enough. And
the reason they are to some degree available is involution:
all of these potentials were made available during efflux or involution, when
Spirit threw itself outward to create the realms of soul, mind, body, and
matter, realms that await rediscovery by any and all who can transcend the
shallower to find the deeper.
Those individuals, for example, who have a strong religious experience, satori, or
enlightenment, almost always report that they are simply rediscovering
something that they once knew (in eternity) but forgot (in time). Profound
mystical experience always carries the sense of "coming home," and
never the sense of stumbling onto something completely unknown. Plato, in that
regard, was quite right: this type of spiritual knowledge is a remembering, not
an inventing. And we remember our higher states because they are already
there, as potentials, awaiting rediscovery (a rediscovery of something we
possessed, not in childhood, but in the depth of the timeless moment). In this
specific sense, then, we absolutely need a concept of involution in order to be
true to the phenomenological evidence of spiritual experience.
But that does not mean that everything about evolution is therefore laid down
in involution, so that evolution is nothing but a rewinding of the videotape, so to
speak. At most, certain deep features of the major realms are given by involution as
potentials, but all the surface features are created, molded, shaped, and
formed by historical currents and evolutionary forces. In that sense, certain
deep features are remembered, but surface features are learned. (And, as I
explained above, I think even the deep features of holons are partially molded
by time's formative powers. I say "partially," because if
they were totally formed by evolutionary pressures, we would still have to
account for the formation of the evolutionary pressures themselves, which would
require at least some forces that did not come from evolution.) Spirit, in
other words, is not by any means a deterministic machine, but rather an
organically playful Spirit, whose own sport and play (lila) includes the
wonderful game of "surprise" at every possible turn, undermining
determinism as all creativity does.
I think of involution, then, along the analogy of a rubber band: stretch it, and
you have involution, which supplies a force (namely Eros) that will then pull
the two ends of the rubber band (matter and spirit) back together again--in other
words, an involutionary force that will pull evolution along.[5]
But the actual route taken in that return, and all its wonderful variety, is a
co-creation of every holon and the currents of Eros in which it fluidly floats.
Now, of course, you are perfectly free to believe in evolution and reject the notion
of involution. I find that an incoherent position; nonetheless, you can still
embrace everything in the following pages about the evolution of culture and
consciousness, and reject or remain agnostic on involution. But the notion of
a prior involutionary force does much to help with the otherwise impenetrable
puzzles of Darwinian evolution, which has tried, ever-so-unsuccessfully, to
explain why dirt would get right up and eventually start writing poetry. But
the notion of evolution as Eros, or Spirit-in-action, performing, as Whitehead
put it, throughout the world by gentle persuasion toward love, goes a long way
to explaining the inexorable unfolding from matter to bodies to minds to souls
to Spirit's own Self-recognition. Eros, or Spirit-in-action, is a rubber
band around your neck and mine, pulling us all back home.
[1] For further discussions of this theme, see
Integral Psychology and One Taste.
[2] Piaget's main cognitive stages (sensorimotor,
preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational), are ones that I
still use, in a very general way, but only for the cognitive line of development,
and then only for the lower half or so of the spectrum of consciousness (beyond formal
operational is centauric vision-logic, psychic vision, subtle archetype, causal gnosis,
and nondual sahaja). Piaget's major misjudgment, most critics now agree, was
attempting to subsume all developmental lines within the cognitive line alone,
which simply does not allow for the empirical fact that different lines show
sometimes pronounced differences in rate of development and dynamic of unfolding (see
The Eye of Spirit). But Piaget's brilliance in clinically investigating--and
theoretically formulating, within a Hegelian/Kantian scheme--the development of cognitive
worldviews, moral sense, space and time construction, levels of self sense, and so on--all
within a largely nonreductionistic, holistic, constructivist, developmental/evolutionary,
self-organizing paradigm--was a monumental contribution.
[3] Here is a semantic nightmare: in Eye to Eye
and Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, I outline the many ways in which the words "Eros,"
"Thanatos," "Life," and "Death" have been used in theorists from Plato to Freud. I conclude
that both "Life" and "Death" have two very different meanings: what we might call "vertical"
(transformative) and "horizontal" (translative). Vertical life is a search for higher and
wider unity, a reaching up of the lower for the higher; while horizontal life is a clinging to
one's present state of life and unity, a self-preservation drive at any given level. Vertical
death is a regressive dissolution, a moving down the holarchy of being, ultimately ending in
lifeless matter and decay; while horizontal death is a type of "letting go" of fixations at
one's present level, ultimately to transform to a different level altogether (either upward,
in growth, or downward, in regression). There are, in other words, four major "drives"
or "forces" here: vertical life (upward to higher levels), horizontal life (holding on to
one's present level), horizontal death (letting go of one's present level), and vertical death
(moving down to lower levels, finally to lifeless matter). Those four drives are very real
(in fact, they are simply the four capacities of each and every holon), but "Eros" and
"Thanatos" have historically been used in completely different ways when referring to those
drives, and this has constituted, as I said, a bit of a semantic mess.
In both The Atman Project and Up from Eden, I used the term "Eros" to mean
horizontal life (or attempting to preserve one's present state), and Thanatos to mean
horizontal death (or letting go of one's present state). Vertical life (or transformation
upward) I called Atman telos, and vertical death (or regression) I called contraction or Atman
restraint. One of the central conclusions was that when Thanatos exceeds Eros--when the
death of one level exceeds the life of that level--then translation fails and transformation
ensues. Thus transformation upward (or evolution) requires that Thanatos (or the death of
the present level) be accepted, so that consciousness can rise to higher and more embracing
levels. Higher life, in other words, requires an acceptance of death at each and every stage
of development, and the denial of death means the denial of growth and transcendence.
I believe those concepts are still quite valid, but I now use different terms to
describe the identical ideas. I have since found that it is more appropriate
to use Eros and Thanatos to refer to the vertical dimension of Life and Death
(upward evolution versus downward dissolution), and not to the horizontal dimension,
as I did in Atman and Eden. Horizontal life is then agency and self-preservation,
and horizontal death is self-negation, adaptation, and communion. (And, as explained in
Sex,Ecology, Spirituality, Agape now refers to downward embrace, which, when
disconnected from Eros, yields Thanatos; and phobos refers to the equivalent but opposite
disconnect of Eros from Agape). All the conclusions remain the same, I have simply switched
the terms. This is fully spelled out in Eye to Eye and Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
; for the following pages, it is enough to realize that Eros and Thanatos are being used in
the horizontal sense, and that, if nothing else, I was truthful when I said this was a semantic
nightmare.
[4] For discussion on the difference between states and
structures, see A Sociable God ; "Paths beyond Ego in the Coming Decade" (in Walsh
and Vaughan, Beyond Ego); Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, chapter 14, note 17;
and Integral Psychology.
[5] More technically, an involutionary force (Agape) that
will pull evolution from above while its own self-transcending force (Eros) pushes it
from below. In this account I am simplifying to just Eros as the depository of Spirit-in-action.
See Sex, Ecology, Spirituality for a detailed account of the importance of both Agape
(reaching down) and Eros (reaching up) in evolution and development.
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