Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution is philosopher Ken Wilber's magnum opus. Wilber intends it to be the first volume of a series called The Kosmos Trilogy, but subsequent volumes are still in preparation. The scholarly work comprises 850 pages, including 270 pages of notes. The German edition of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality was entitled Eros, Kosmos, Logos: Eine Jahrtausend-Vision ("A Millennium-vision"). A philosopher is a person devoted to studying and producing results in philosophy. ... Kenneth Earl Wilber Jr. ... Magnum opus, from the Latin meaning great work, refers to the best or most renowned achievement of an author, artist, or composer. ... EROS (The Extremely Reliable Operating System) is an operating system developed by the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University. ... For other uses of the word, see cosmos (disambiguation) The cosmos is the universe, especially when thought of as an orderly or harmonious system. ... The Greek λόγος or logos means word. Logos was used by Heraclitus, one of the more eminent Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, to describe human knowledge and the inherent order in the universe, a background to the essential change which characterizes day-to-day life. ...

Published in 1995, SES (as it is sometimes called) is the work in which Wilber grapples with modern philosophical naturalism, attempting to show its insufficiency as an explanation of being, evolution, and the meaning of life. He also describes an approach, called vision-logic, which he finds qualified to succeed modernism. Naturalism is any of several philosophical stances, typically those descended from materialism and pragmatism, that reject the validity of explanations or theories making use of entities inaccessible to natural science. ... In modern English usage, being means conscious entity. ... Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory In the life sciences, evolution is a change in the traits of living organisms over generations, including the emergence of new species. ... What is the meaning of life? is probably the most-asked philosophical question by humanity at large. ... In Ken Wilbers integral theory of developmental psychology, vision-logic is a post-formal but personal level of cognitive development. ... Le Corbusiers Villa Savoye, 1929-30: The modern style is noted for its rigorous geometrical forms, and became adopted internationally, though not without continuing controversy Modernism in the cultural historical sense is generally defined as the new artistic and literary styles that emerged in the decades before 1914 as...

The term "kosmos"

Wilber emphasizes that the account of existence presented by the Enlightenment is incomplete—it ignores and represses the spiritual and noetic components of existence. He accordingly avoids the term cosmos, which is associated with merely physical existence. He prefers the term kosmos to refer to the sum of manifest existence, which harks back to the usage of the term by the Pythagoreans and other ancient mystics. Wilber conceives of the Kosmos as consisting of several concentric spheres: matter (the physical universe) plus life (the vital universe) plus mind (the mental universe) plus soul (the psychic universe) plus Spirit (the spiritual universe). For the period in European history, The Age of Enlightenment For the corresponding movement in the European Jewish community, see Haskalah. ... Most dictionaries define the term noetic as a synonym of mental or intellectual. ... The Pythagoreans were an Hellenic organization of astronomers, musicians, mathematicians, and philosophers; who believed that all things are, essentially, numeric. ... Matter is anything that has mass and occupies space. ... Life is a multi-faceted concept. ... The mind is the term most commonly used to describe the higher functions of the human brain, particularly those of which humans are subjectively conscious, such as personality, thought, reason, memory, intelligence and emotion. ... The soul according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is the ethereal substance — spirit (Hebrew:rooah or nefesh) — particular to a unique living being. ... (Singular-lower case) The transmitting organ of man for contacting God. ...

The structure and theses of SES

Introduction

• Wilber describes the spiritual inadequacies of philosophical naturalism as the source of the contemporary world's menacing ecological crisis.
• He describes his methodology as outlining "orienting generalizations"—points on which agreement can be found that will reveal a shared world-space.

Book One

1. The Web of Life

• Arthur Lovejoy's account of the Great Chain of Being is used to show how the mechanistic, materialistic modern worldview triumphed over the West's traditional, holistic, hierarchical view.
• Pathological, dominating hierarchies have given hierarchy a bad name. But hierarchy is ultimately inescapable. Thus, we should concentrate on discovering which hierarchies actually do exist and on healing them.

2. The Pattern That Connects

The Twenty Tenets

• Arthur Koestler's account of holism and holarchy and Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory are used to describe (approximately) twenty tenets (http://207.44.196.94/~wilber/20tenets.html) of all holons.
• The holistic version of the Great Chain of Being Wilber calls the "Great Nest of Spirit", because this account emphasizes that higher levels include as well as transcend lower ones.

3. Individual And Social

• Erich Jantsch's account of co-evolution and self-organizing systems is described.

4. A View From Within

• Two fundamental aspects of existence are described: the "Right-hand path" (interiority) and the "Left-hand path" (exteriority).
• Gross Reductionism—atomism, for example—consists in reducing a whole to its parts. Subtle Reductionism—systems theory, for example—consists in reducing the interior to the exterior. Charles Taylor's work is used to show that the Enlightenment paradigm suffers from both Gross and Subtle Reductionism.
• When Individual and Social spheres are added to the Interior and Exterior aspects of existence, four quadrants emerge.

5. The Emergence Of Human Nature

• Jean Gebser's account of the development of human consciousness is used to show how the West progressed from the magic to the mythic to the rational mentalities.
• This acknowledgment that all of existence is in development adds a third fundamental dimension—depth, or verticality—to Wilber's model of consciousness.

6. Magic, Mythic And Beyond

• Jean Piaget's theory of developmental psychology is used to describe the individual development of the contemporary human being.
• The "Pre/Trans Fallacy" is described. This is Wilber's term for "romantic" approaches, like deep ecology and ecofeminism, that mistake earlier and more exclusivist modes of being for more mature, more inclusive modes.

7. The Farther Reaches Of Human Nature

• Jürgen Habermas' account of socio-cultural development is used to describe collective human development.
• Vision-logic is described, a non-dominating, global awareness of holistic hierarchy, in which the pathological dissociations of Nature from Self, interiority from exteriority, and creativity from compassion are transformed into healthy differentiations.
• The validity claims of mystics are compared to Thomas Kuhn's account of scientific paradigms.

8. The Depths Of The Divine

• The accounts of four mystics are used to describe the possibilities for further individual spiritual development.

• The Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson on nature mysticism
• The Christian saint Teresa of Avila on deity mysticism
• Meister Eckhart on formless mysticism
• The Hindu guru Ramana Maharshi on nondual mysticism

Arthur Onken Lovejoy (Berlin, October 10, 1873 - Baltimore, December 30, 1962) was an influential intellectual historian, and the founder of the history of ideas. ... 1579 drawing of the great chain of being from Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana The Great Chain of Being is a classical and western medieval conception of the order of the universe, whose chief characteristic is a strict hierarchal system. ... In philosophy, mechanism is a theory that all natural phenomena can be explained by physical causes. ... This article primarily focuses on the general concepts of matter and existence. ... Le Corbusiers Villa Savoye, 1929-30: The modern style is noted for its rigorous geometrical forms, and became adopted internationally, though not without continuing controversy Modernism in the cultural historical sense is generally defined as the new artistic and literary styles that emerged in the decades before 1914 as... A world view, also spelled as worldview is a term calqued from the German word Weltanschauung (look onto the world). The German word is also in wide use in English, as well as the translated form world outlook. ... A compass rose with West highlighted West is most commonly a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating direction or geography. ... Holism (from holon, a Greek word meaning entity) is the idea that the properties of a system cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its components alone. ... A hierarchy (in Greek hieros, sacred, and arkho, rule) is a system of ranking and organizing things. ... Pathology (in ancient Greek pathos = feeling, pain, suffering and logos = discourse or treatise, i. ... Arthur Koestler Arthur Koestler ( September 5, 1905 - March 3, 1983) was a novelist, political activist, and social philosopher. ... Holism (from holon, a Greek word meaning entity) or wholism is the idea that the properties of a system cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its components alone. ... A holarchy is a hierarchy of holons. ... Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy (September 19, 1901, Vienna, Austria - June 12, 1972, New York, USA) was a biologist who was a founder of general systems theory. ... Systems theory or general systems theory or systemics is an interdisciplinary field which studies systems as a whole. ... A holon (from the Greek holos = whole and on = entity) is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. ... Erich Jantsch was an Austrian astronomer who wrote the book The Self-organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution, which was published in 1980. ... Bumblebees and the flowers they pollinate co-evolve so that the flower is dependent on the bee and the bee is dependent on the flower for survival In Biology, Co-evolution is the mutual evolutionary influence between two species that become dependent on each other. ... Self-organization refers to a process in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases automatically without being guided or managed by an outside source. ... Reductionism in philosophy describes a number of related, contentious theories that hold, very roughly, that the nature of complex things can always be reduced to (explained by) simpler or more fundamental things. ... Atomism is the theory that all the objects in the universe are composed of very small, eternal particles. ... Charles Taylor (born November 5, 1931) is a Canadian philosopher known for his viewpoints on morality and modern western identity of individuals and groups. ... For the period in European history, The Age of Enlightenment For the corresponding movement in the European Jewish community, see Haskalah. ... Also known as the integral-aperspectival stage of consciousness, the term integral has been used in a philosophical sense by several twentieth century philosophers and psychologists that is different from the mathematical sense. ... Jean Gebser (1905 – 1973) was a prodigy, a student of the evolution of human conciousness, a linguist, and a poet. ... Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and ones environment. ... Look up Magic in Wiktionary, the free dictionary The term magic is a Persian loanword into English and may refer to: Magic (paranormal) deals with the manipulation of what the practitioner believes to be genuine paranormal phenomena. ... For the computer game, see Myth (computer game). ... Rational may be: the adjective for the state of rationality acting according to the philosophical principles of rationalism a mathematical term for certain numbers; the rational numbers the software company Rational Software; now owned by IBM, and formerly Rational Software Corporation This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which... Jean Piaget (August 9, 1896 - September 16, 1980), a professor of psychology at the University of Geneva from 1929 to 1975, was a francophone Swiss developmental psychologist who is most well known for organizing cognitive development into a series of stages - that is levels of development corresponding to infancy, childhood... Developmental psychology is the scientific study of age related changes in behavior across the life span. ... Kenneth Earl Wilber Jr. ... Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement in the history of ideas; it originated in late 18th century Western Europe. ... The phrase deep ecology was introduced by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss in 1973. ... Ecofeminism is a biocentric environmental movement with cultural and social concerns. ... Habermas speaking with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, 2004 Jürgen Habermas (born June 18, 1929 in Düsseldorf, Germany) is a philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory. ... In Ken Wilbers integral theory of developmental psychology, vision-logic is a post-formal but personal level of cognitive development. ... Mysticism (ancient Greek mysticon = secret) is meditation, prayer, or theology focused on the direct experience of union with divinity, God, or Ultimate Reality; or the belief that such experience is a genuine and important source of knowledge. ... Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American intellectual who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions in the philosophy of science. ... Since the late 1800s, the word paradigm has referred to a thought pattern in any scientific discipline or other epistemological context. ... Transcendentalism was the name of a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture and philosophy which emerged in New England in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. ... Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was a famous American essayist and one of Americas most influential thinkers and writers. ... For Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who has not yet been canonized, see Mother Teresa. ... Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) was a German theologian, philosopher and mystic and one of the most influential Christian Neoplatonists. ... This article is about the Hindu religion; for other meanings of the word, see Hindu (disambiguation). ... A guru (गुरू Sanskrit) is a teacher in Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. ... Ramana Mahrishi as portrayed in a loving oil painting by Jayalakshmi Satyendra Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi is regarded by some as one of the greatest saints of Hinduism in the 20th century. ...

Book Two

9. The Way Up Is The Way Down

• According to the Neo-Platonist Plotinus%u2019 nondual metaphysics, "Ascending" philosophies are those that embrace the One, or the Absolute. "Descending" philosophies are those that embrace the Many, or Plenitude. Both ascent (driven by Eros, or creativity) and descent (driven by Agape, or compassion) are indespensible for a healthy, whole view.
• Plato's metaphysics, which also included both ascending and descending drives, is described.
• Plotinus' attack on Gnosticism is described in order to trace differences between healthy and pathological approaches to ascent.

10. This-Wordly, Otherwordly

• Attempts to repair modernism's fractured and flattened worldview are described, especially Schelling's existential idealism.

11. Brave New World

• The liberating advantages as well as the spiritually crippling disadvantages of the modern, scientific mentality are described.

12. The Collapse Of The Kosmos

• Charles Taylor's account of the effects of the Enlightenment paradigm is used to show how vertical depth was collapsed into horizontal span and how the ascending drive was dissociated into the "Ego camp" (Kant's and Fichte's Transcendent Ego) and the "Eco camp" (Spinoza's deified Nature).
• Utilitarianism is described as mistaking sensory pleasure for Spirit, which ultimately resulted in a fixation on hedonism and sex in modern society.

13. The Dominance Of The Descenders

• Describes how the West tried to embrace the Many through science, but failed to embrace the One through mysticism.
• The result was the rise of Thanatos (Freud's death drive), and Phobos (existential fear), which are the respective pathological versions of Agape and Eros.

14. The Unpacking Of God

• Aspects of particular historical nondual views that could possibly heal the noetic fissures in the West are described, especially spiritual practice as understood by Zen & Dzogchen Buddhism.

At The Edge Of History

• Includes a meditation on Emptiness as the ground of Being in which all entities are ontologically healed.

Neoplatonism (also Neo-Platonism) is an ancient school of philosophy beginning in the 3rd century A.D. It was based on the teachings of Plato and Platonists; but it interpreted Plato in many new ways, such that Neoplatonism was quite different from what Plato taught, though not many Neoplatonists would... Plotinus Plotinus, (died about A.D. 270) is widely considered the father of Neoplatonism. ... A nondual philosophical or religious perspective or theory maintains that there is no fundamental distinction between mind and matter. ... Metaphysics (Greek words meta = after/beyond and physics = nature) is a branch of philosophy concerned with the study of first principles and being (ontology). ... EROS (The Extremely Reliable Operating System) is an operating system developed by the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University. ... Agapē. ... Statue of a philosopher, presumely Plato, in Delphi. ... Gnosticism is a blanket term for various mostly dualistic mystical religions and sects most prominent in the first few centuries A.D. General characteristics The word gnosticism comes from the Greek word for knowledge, gnosis (γνῶσις), referring to the idea that there is special esoteric knowledge that only a few... Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (January 27, 1775 - August 20, 1854) was a German philosopher. ... Existentialism is a philosophical movement emphasizing individualism, individual freedom, and subjectivity. ... In philosophy, idealism is any theory positing the primacy of spirit, mind, or language over matter. ... Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (April 22, 1724 – February 12, 1804) was a Prussian philosopher, generally regarded as one of Europes most influential thinkers and the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment. ... Johann Gottlieb Fichte Johann Gottlieb Fichte (May 19, 1762 - January 27, 1814) has significance in the history of Western philosophy as one of the progenitors of German idealism and as a follower of Kant. ... Baruch Spinoza Benedictus de Spinoza (November 24, 1632 - February 21, 1677), named Baruch Spinoza by his synagogue elders and known as Bento de Spinoza or Bento dEspiñoza in the community in which he grew up. ... Utilitarianism is a theory of ethics based on quantitative maximisation of happiness for society or humanity. ... Hedonism ([[Greek: hēdonē pleasure + –ism)describes any way of thinking that gives pleasure a central role. ... Wiktionary has a definition of: Sex The members of many species of living things are divided into two or more categories called sexes (or loosely speaking, genders). ... Sigmund Freud His famous couch Sigmund Freud (May 6, 1856 - September 23, 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology, a movement that popularized the theory that unconscious motives control much behavior. ... Most dictionaries define the term noetic as a synonym of mental or intellectual. ... Bodhidharma, woodblock print by Yoshitoshi, 1887. ... Dzogchen (meaning Great Perfection). ... Statues of Buddha such as this, the Tian Tan Buddha statue in Hong Kong, remind followers to practice right living. ... In modern English usage, being means conscious entity. ...

Quotation

"Put differently, I sought a world philosophy. I sought an integral philosophy, one that would believably weave together the many pluralistic contexts of science, morals, aesthetics, Eastern as well as Western philosophy, and the world's great wisdom traditions. Not on the level of details—that is finitely impossible; but on the level of orienting generalizations: a way to suggest that the world is one, undivided whole, and related to itself in every way: a holistic philosophy for a holistic Kosmos: a world philosophy, an integral philosophy." —Ken Wilber, "Introduction to Volume Six of the Collected Works" Also known as the integral-aperspectival stage of consciousness, the term integral has been used in a philosophical sense by several twentieth century philosophers and psychologists that is different from the mathematical sense. ...

External links

• Wilber's Shambhala site (http://wilber.shambhala.com), which includes lengthy excerpts from the forthcoming Volume II of the Kosmos Trilogy, tentatively titled Kosmic Karma and Creativity.

• Review of SES by Roger Walsh (http://cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/Walsh_on_Wilber_95.html), author of Essential Spirituality

• Review of SES by Kaisa Puhakka (http://members.ams.chello.nl/f.visser3/wilber/rev/rev_ses_puhakka.html), Transpersonal Psychologist