More Contra Wilber

Stages of Consciousness are Involutionary

Ken Wilbur's six stages of consciousness are not best described as “evolutionary,” they are more involutionary when experiencing them as stages. And they are not really a hierarchy, they are simply human consciousness. We do not “transcend” these stages as we develop, just as we don't really transcend the body in higher consciousness, they remain essentially undifferentiated. We “transcend” only when we evolve to new species.

The first womb-state of consciousness is only a very small difference from the later ego state. A human is a human and not a God, though we have traces of God within us. Even the highest human consciousness is not “transhuman,” and is barely a baby consciousness when compared to God's consciousness.

Knowledge Doesn't Free us From the Material

With language and knowledge we do not “control” the world and we are not “free” from being molded by the environment. We merely manipulate the same concrete world. Evolution works upon matter but does not free matter, not until we evolve to Godhood, and even then we are not so much “free” as transmuted into the highest matter possible.

The Concrete is Not Bondage

Contrary to Wilbur, the development of language did not bring “release” from the “bondage” of the concrete world—why is the concrete world “bondage”? Release from the concrete world can only come through biological evolution to Godhood. Language separated us from the reality of the world when we began to use symbols rather than applying the thing itself. Contrary to Wilbur, language does not enable the human mind to span both space and time, it is not a “liberation” from the body, language is only a concrete copy within the concrete mind.

This Gnostic hating of the material World is a mistaken notion in religion which is continued by Wilbur. God is both concrete, or material, and spiritual, as we are, although the Trinity is the Zenith of evolved life.

The Materialistic Unconscious

Contrary to Wilbur, there is not a real difference between the pre-logical state of consciousness and the so-called “transmental.” It seems that Wilbur wishes to describe these states as only profoundly analogous to save his version of religion from being more than Jung's view of a materialistic unconscious.

Of the six levels of Wilbur's consciousness, the first, the Uroboric, is described as the bliss of At-One-Ness with Nature, reflecting the child floating in the amniotic fluid. But there is virtually no difference between the bliss of At-One-Ness experienced by mystics and the Uroboric. The Soul and Spirit lie still deeper within the activating heart of life itself, long before this unconscious-conscious experience of the child in the womb. This is not a transmental state, this is a material state.

To attain true Godhood, which is only glimpsed Wilbur's way in deep meditation, we must evolve biologically, all the way to Godhood. Here the true “transhuman” exists, along with transhuman consciousness, and not before.