Transpersonal psychology guru Ken Wilbur completed a 3-month retreat

In the second half of February, I read "Spectrum of Consciousness" ❤️ five times and got an e-book on it

The spectrum of consciousness is the first book of Ken Wilbur's 3-month retreat.

Completed in 1974, after three years of tempering, this book shocked the world and became the fourth greatest philosophical work of the 20th century after Aropideo's "TheOry of Divine Humanity", Heidegger's "Existence and Time", and Huaiheide's "Process and Reality", and is an important reference for contemporary times.

With his astonishing ability to inductively study, Ken Wilbur integrates psychology, psychotherapy, mysticism, and the spiritual practices of the major religions of the East and the West, as well as philosophy, sociology, transpersonal psychology, anthropology, mythology, economics, biology, physics, and many other fields.

At the same time, a revolution in transpersonal psychology began.

This book attempts to provide a framework for explaining everything in the universe. This framework synthesizes the various pathways of understanding consciousness and is often generally grouped as "East" and "West."

Ken Wilbur used physics' electromagnetic spectroscopic methods to summarize these all-encompassing, extremely complex ways of understanding consciousness, just as physicists describe a white light creating a rainbow through a prism.

1. Level of consciousness

Drawing on psychoanalysis, the yogic school, the Jungian school, the Vedanta school, Gestalt therapy, tantra, psychological synthesis, and similar learning, Ken Wilbur selected three main bands, as well as four auxiliary bands, as shown in the following figure:

thereinto

The self class is a belt of our role, self-portrait, and self-image, which exists in our consciousness and subconscious, and is the analyzable and discernible essence of our wisdom and "mind".

The hierarchy of existence, on the other hand, encompasses our entire organism organization, our body and mind, and is therefore also composed of our basic sense of existence and the cultural preconditions that shape it.

In addition, the hierarchy of beings forms sensory indicators of our self-image: when you evoke in your mind the symbols of self-imagery, these are your feelings. In short, it constructs a never-ending, never-fading source for the separate I-owareness.

The great mind realm, also widely known as mystical consciousness, gives you the feeling that you are essentially one with the universe.

So the ego class contains the mind, the existence layer contains both the mind and the body, and the great mind realm contains the mind, the body, and everything in the universe. This sense of unity between heaven and earth is more common than you think at first, because it is the basis of all feelings.

Simply put,

Self-class is how you feel when you think you are a father, a mother, a lawyer, a businessman, an American, or any other specific person or image.

The hierarchy of existence is what you feel "underneath" your self-image; that is the feeling of the existence of the whole organic organization, the inner belief of you as an independent subject that you have experienced.

The realm of the big mind is the most primitive feeling you have before you feel anything in this instant—the sense of unity between heaven and man.

The ego class and the existential class together make up our universal feelings as self-existent and independent individuals, and most Western theories are rooted in these classes.

Eastern theories are more concerned with the realm of the big mind and therefore tend to bypass the egocentric class altogether.

So, Western psychotherapy focuses on "repairing" the individual's self, while Eastern meditation aims to transcend the self.

Hinduism sees life as the cycle of "absolute self-nature" under and above and over and over and over again, and 'upper and lower and all things' are the two major chapters of the Spectrum of Consciousness.

Hinduism acknowledges that many of us have spent our entire lives alone, as an isolated (i.e., hallucinatory) self in the face of an unfamiliar universe. In these cases, Western psychotherapy can deal with the suffering caused by fate in order to provide a certain degree of relief, which can be said to be beneficial and harmless.

If this 'destiny' seeks liberation (i.e., the realization of the state of the great mind), then Western theory can only serve as a preliminary preparation or an accompanying aid.

2. East and West

The Western approach offers a way to alleviate the "common neurosis" that is part of the ego.'

In the Eastern pathway, most of the central goal is not to strengthen the self, but to transcend the self completely and completely in order to attain liberation, absolute virtue, and enlightenment.

This can inspire a certain class of consciousness, bring about complete freedom and utter liberation, detachment from the root causes of all suffering, and can calm down the questions of the nature of "reality" that are most perplexing to us.

So, let's go back to the theory of the East:

The Eastern theories of Vedanta or Zen Buddhism are not theories, philosophies, psychology, or religions.

opposite

They are essentially a series of experiments with rigorous scientific awareness in the field.

They consist of a series of rules or ordinances. If practiced properly, it will lead people to discover the state of mind. This 'means of obtaining data' is disliked by Western scientists, who refuse to understand 'knowing the results of these scientific experiments'.

Due to the existence of the great mind realm, or the occult consciousness may not be demonstrated in the classroom, the class can only explore quantitative and tangible things.

For those who are willing to follow this guidance, there will always be a way that is ready for them (such as an experiment)... Therefore, the realm of the great mind, the "absolute," or the mystical consciousness is not formulated purely from a speculative point of view.

The scientists who have not conducted such experiments themselves, but who scoff at the results, are just a group of scientists with the narrowest vision and the poorest feelings.

3. Two modes of cognition and dualism

The famous interpreter of vedanta, Shangkaracharya, coined the concept of "subration," a concept of considerable value.

"Witnessing" is a psychological process in which people use the feelings of the new class of consciousness to re-evaluate some of the classes of consciousness that have been evaluated in the past.

Anyone who reaches the realm of the great heart has witnessed the self-class and the existential class.

There is also a cognitive model, which is "symbolic cognition".

After awakening symbolic knowledge, there seems to be a dividing line between the knower and knowledge, the thinker and the thought, and the objective and the subjective in all things in the universe, which is what we usually call "dualistic opposition".

In the words of Daisuke Suzuki:

The will awakens consciousness in order to understand itself. As consciousness is awakened, the will is divided in two. The will, which was once a complete unity, is now divided into two roles: actor and audience. Conflict is inevitable: because the audience has set the role for the actor according to his own conscious desire, but the actor now wants to be freed from the limitations he set when he is the audience.

Physicist Eddington put it in a nutshell:

"Therefore, when you get half the knowledge in this world, you will naturally ignore the other half."

We cannot escape the fact that the world we know is built in order to be able to see ourselves in such a way.

In this incomplete state of being divided in two, whatever it sees, it can only be a part.

therefore

Just as a flashlight cannot illuminate itself, a knife cannot cut itself, everything in the universe cannot fully regard itself as an object. If we try to understand everything in the universe as the object of knowledge, there is a contradiction that is bottomless and cannot be eradicated.

The concept of dividing everything in the universe into subjectivity and objectivity (or reality and fallacy, good and evil, etc.) is the fundamental cornerstone of Western philosophy, theology, and science.

In general, Western philosophy is ancient Greek philosophy, and ancient Greek philosophy is dualistic philosophy. Whitehead called Western philosophy an exhaustive footnote to Plato's doctrine.

Most of the major philosophical treatises that are still debated today were created and shaped by ancient Greek philosophers, including the dualism of reality and fallacy, known as "logic"; the dualism of good and evil, called "ethics"; and the dualism of appearance and essence, called epistemology. The ancient Greeks also pioneered the large-scale study of "substanceism," the examination of fundamental properties or the existence of everything in the universe.

Throughout Western history, all thought has been deeply ingrained in these dualisms and continues to generate independently a variety of other dualisms: waves and particles, positivism and idealism, matter and energy, unity and opposition, spirit and body, space and time, and so on.

4. The spectrum of consciousness is a metaphor, a model

As mentioned earlier,

The realm of the big heart, in which everything is indispensable.

This presents a new task for Ken Wilbur's integration or integration.

That is, to try to describe the creation or evolution of the appearance of reality (i.e., illusion) in our traditional class of consciousness "according to" the state of mind.

This evolution is actually not the evolution of the Great Mind Realm through (through) time, but the evolution of the illusion of the Great Mind Realm in time (into).

Because the state of the great mind itself is non-temporal, timeless, eternal.

We understand consciousness from the point of view of the absolute Now-moment, so this synthesis/integration becomes the psychological interpretation of evergreen philosophy, which inevitably falls into the torment of paradoxes, logical contradictions, and other troubling claims.

The reason is extremely simple, that is, the state of mind is ultimately not a thought, but a very personal feeling.

It is so close to us that it cannot be described in words;

So, Ken Wilbur emphasizes,

Thinking of consciousness as a spectrum is purely metaphorical or analogous—it explains what consciousness "looks like," but it cannot be said to be exactly what it is.

Because its essence is hidden behind words and symbols, it is "the essence of one's spiritual feelings, which cannot be analyzed intellectually without causing logical contradictions."

But today there are so many techniques, methods, schools, philosophies, and theories of psychotherapy that our problem is to find a well-ordered appearance, an internal logic, a continuous line of thought in this vast heterology of different and frequently contradictory psychological systems.

Ken Wilbur said,

If the spectrum of consciousness is used as a model, then these hidden order appearances may emerge.

Relying on this model, it is possible to integrate not only the main schools of Western psychotherapy, but also the "Eastern" and "Western" theories of consciousness

end

Transpersonal psychology guru Ken Wilbur completed a 3-month retreat

1. Level of consciousness

2. East and West

3. Two modes of cognition and dualism

4. The spectrum of consciousness is a metaphor, a model

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