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Balance and Emphasis More Key than Mere Comprehensiveness
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Watts, not Wilber, focused on core
transformation
It is easy
to mistake high myth and ultimate rationality for low myth and
irrationality. Ken Wilber's idea of the
pre/trans fallacy explains this mistake, but even he doesn't have a consistent,
firm, clear, specific grasp on what is most important in mythic symbolism and
transrationality.
Should
scientific rationalists who fail to rationally comprehend the meaning of myth
be pointed to Wilber as the key to understanding myth? No, the essence and the core of
comprehension is lost in Wilber's understandably complex system, with lopsided
and unclear results. He doesn't discuss
transrationality in the way that would be most useful for the greatest number
of people. His system is, for all
practical purposes, wrong, or unseeing.
He has no
real grasp of the problem of self-control and how it is reflected in myth and
how it is amplified and made to blossom or brought to a climax through
entheogens. He has many of the required
pieces, but many of the central key pieces are buried and strewn apart in his
system. It's not enough for a model of
religious experiencing to have the right pieces in a heap, or in just any
configuration.
Wilber has
almost all the required puzzle pieces, but he hasn't put them together in a
practical way; he has a bunch of airplane pieces but not a plane that can
actually fly. His framework is
misfocused; the pieces need to be flipped into a different configuration that
emphasizes the problem of rational self-control and the experience of loss of
the sense of control, combined with the experience of timelessness, during the
intense mystic altered state, and recognize how myth-religion expresses this
very dynamic.
Wilber has
some meditation-state experience and some metaphysical theory and some
understanding of myth, but he can't identify the most powerful, most central,
and most relevant dynamics and insights, that would make the most intense and
distinct transformation happen straightforwardly in the majority of minds. He thinks that psychospiritual progress is
something that slowly proceed on many fronts.
He doesn't
realize how simple, straightforward, rational, comprehensible, and easy the
main, classic religious transformation is.
There really isn't much to it -- this transformation was routine for the
Hellenists, but Wilber thinks that the Hellenists were primitive and had
different psyches than we do now, except for Mr. Historical Jesus, who was,
inexplicably, psycho-spiritually more advanced than we are.
The
Hellenists were closer to the simple, concise core of understanding than
Wilber. Ingest the entheogenic
sacrament, experience no-free-will and ego death, discover the limits of
ordinary perfect rationality, discover the ability to validly and rationally
postulate an even more perfected, transcendent rationality that can account for
illusion and convention, and express this through various myths.
Very
effective, attainable, simple, to-the-point, and no-nonsense -- unlike Wilber's
massive, complicated, unfocused system that has no clear central transformation
insight/experience but instead requires decades of meditation with gradual
incremental mini-transformations or transformation through relatively
continuous development.
Finally,
in the end, Wilber's system is unwieldy and impractical, like the period when
the guitar stores were carrying both the dirt simple and eminently practical
Line 6 Flextone guitar amp and the Johnson Millennium amp based on the unwieldy
DigiTech technology with lots of little programming buttons and deep
menus.
Ken
Wilber's system is like the Johnson Millennium amp -- unfocused, complicated,
difficult to use, confused about its audience, not sure what its central goal
is, not focused on the central goal of most people in actual, real
circumstances. My ideal is more like
the spirit that so suddenly thrust Line 6 from out of nowhere into the lead:
pick a realistic and popular target scenario to address, and focus on the main
goals, with ease of use, practicality, and relevance.
As a
sprawling theory of integral everything, Ken's is a balanced and effective
theory. But he really, by a practical
measure, is not -- surprising to say -- very clear about the core pivot-point
of the main transformation that lies as a potential in every mind. Alan Watts was much more focused on that
main, pivotal transformation. The ideal
theory then should combine the sprawling overall integral framework of Wilber,
with the focused core transformation model of Watts.
Watts had
a firmer grasp on the most central concerns that are relevant for the main
transformation we all can experience: sudden satori, Christian myth in detail,
and entheogens, and self-control, with an occasional treatment of the illusory
nature of individual free will. Wilber
has these aspects but has them less than Watts, and has a huge integral theory
that overshadows, obscures, and scatters apart these most important, key
points.
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