Integral Spirituality

After “No Boundary”, Ken Wilber once again amazed me with his holistic, big-picture and integral understanding and approaches of spirituality and psychology. In this book, he talks about an Integral framework that he calls the AQAL (All Quadrants All Levels) framework, which, basically describes all of life if one thinks about it.

Understanding all quadrants and all levels is required if we want to have a map of human development. This framework integrates individual and collective parts of life, with it's inner and outer zones. There are very important illustrations here, which help us zoom out a little and look at one of the most comprehensive maps clearly, where we can see that intentional, behavioral, social and cultural phenomena are just parts of a whole. They are just a perspective or one aspect of our being in each moment of our lives.

But again, this is just a map, not the territory, and because of that, Ken suggests us the Integral Life Practice (ILP), which unites the practices to train 8 major zones from 4 quadrants. Those are the life-changing stuff if put in practice.

He also talks about structuralism and various models of human psychological and cultural development, including Graves' Spiral Dynamics, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, etc. and asks a very important question, how can we define Enlightenment? and is the Enlightenment from 2000 or 10,000 years ago the same as it is today? He suggests that it isn't, because we not only have to take into account the various mystical states that people can experience in each ages of history, but also the stages, that are being developed as history and evolution unfolds reality. So, some of the stages that are available today, was not available hundreds or thousands of years ago.

We are talking about the stages that Graves defined as different colors: red, blue, orange, green, yellow, turquoise, etc. According to Wilber, Enlightenment means becoming one with all the states and stages that are currently available in the memory of Kosmos today.

Also, he mentions very important issues, like “pre/post fallacy” and “the myth of the given”. Those are crucial to consider if we want to understand issues such as religion vs science, science vs spirituality, why science will never answer the question of the ultimate concern, and why failing to do so creates much more evil in the world. Also, it's important to think about a whole new paradigm that comes with post-metaphysics, as Wilber call it, according to which, there is no given reality waiting for us to be discovered, and there are no pre-created structures of the human psyche that the mankind hasn't tapped into yet. No, those are all co-created and have been co-created since the beginning of the universe.

That is supposed to be the reason why only meditation won't solve your problems because there are things that just can't be seen while sitting on your cushion. Also, shadow work is worth mentioning, which Ken talks about too, and considers crucial for becoming a whole human being.

In short, this was a very interesting read. Anyone interested in holistic understanding of spirituality must read this book (and other works of Ken Wilber)