Ken Wilber

PART I | PART II | APPENDIX I | FOLLOWUP | APPENDIX II | NOTES

Appendix 2: The Nature of Involution

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. [In the mountain analogy I just gave, "soul" is not a pregiven substance or structure but the potential to descend to 8000 meters; mind is the potential to descend to 5000 meters; body, to 2000 meters; and matter is the top of the mountain, with 0 meters of descent, the starting point for the return to spirit at 10,000 meters "down." The point is these "levels" are simply levels of the potential gradient exerted by gravity or spiritual Eros, and not any given structures or completely independent realities.]

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 [e.g., the pull of spiritual gravity].

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. 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 on earth 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.

PART I | PART II | APPENDIX I | FOLLOWUP | APPENDIX II | NOTES