some of my thoughts and notes

Ken Wilber and Human Design

I was wondering today how Ken Wilber's Integral Philosophy might fit together with the idea of Human Design. What I found was Ken Wilber's Human Design Chart and an interesting text about The Rise and Fall of Ken Wilber.

Before I continue reading Siddhartha I want to briefly summarize this text. Here's the most important lessons from Wilber (according to Mark Manson):

  1. Nothing is 100% right or wrong, they merely vary in their degree of incompleteness and dysfunction. No one or nothing is 100% good or evil, they just vary in their degree of ignorance and disconnection. All knowledge is a work in progress.

  2. Leaps in evolution usually occur in a manner of “transcending and including,” not by wiping out what came before. [...] Rational thought did not eliminate emotion but included it into a greater developmental level of consciousness. Industrial societies did not wipe out agriculture but transcended agriculture into greater levels of efficiency and prosperity. [...]

  3. The goal of spirituality is to transcend the ego, not to demolish it or repress it. Many spiritual leaders who claimed to have rid themselves of ego, it turns out, merely repress it. The results are horrible and sometimes tragic.

  4. People often mistake what’s pre-conventional (earlier phase of development) for being post-conventional (later stage of development) because neither is conventional. One example he uses is the New Age spiritual movements which glorify a return to an infantile state of acting purely on emotion and desire. [...]

  5. Perception contains interior and exterior modalities. [...] The problem arises when one assumes that our thoughts and behaviour are controlled by the physical assortment of neurons firing. It implies that our minds are not autonomous and that we lack free will. [...] Indeed, research into neuro-plasticity (the ability to change the physical configuration of your brain through changing thought patterns and behaviour) is beginning to back up this conclusion.

  6. Hierarchies exist, but they don’t necessarily equal moral superiority. There are higher levels of development and complexity, people of greater skills and talents, but that does not mean they are morally superior or more complete expressions of reality or that lower levels on the hierarchy should not be honoured. [...]

The one thing that stalled Ken Wilber's Integral movement was that he overlooked the fact that

no depth of spiritual experience can negate our physical and primal drives for power, lust, and validation. As primates, we’re wired to seek someone to look up to as well as to be looked up to by others. And that’s true whether we’re experiencing Godhead or bodhisattva or not. It’s inescapable.

[And that] a brilliant mind does not necessarily make a brilliant leader.

There is no ideology. There is no guru. There is only us, and this, and the silence.