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Jim
Joined: 08 25 04
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 Post subject: the meditation card Posted: 12/20/05, 8:38 am |
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Quotes from two posts by Charles in
this thread: | Quote: | Who are other folks who took up the injunction for many years and came away with a different realization or experience than Wilber claims is the ultimate?
I'm just thinking how there are so many individuals out there who have logged some serious years on the meditation cushion who may not agree with Wilber. Here is experience meeting experience head on. Now how do we decide who is right?
The ongoing assumption seems to be that if you put a certain number of time into meditation that you will come to these levels of spiritual attainment. However, I think a serious confirmation bias is occurring when there isn't a serious dialogue about meditatively experienced people who would not support Wilber's interpretation. Individuals that would differ with Wilber's model according to their own experience.
Where are the people who have taken up the injunction and have said, "Sorry Wilber, I didn't find that as my experience"? |
Why "meditatively experienced" people who have "logged some serious years on the meditation cushion"? Why not anyone? Because according to Wilber's standards, one must be meditatively experienced and proficient in order to be "adequate to" his referents (e.g., see his article "An Integral Theory of Consciousness" in The Journal of Consciousness Studies).
Wilber says that in order to be "adequate to" his referents, one must "take up the injunction to exercise the eye of contemplation." He adds that not everyone who takes up the injunction to exercise the eye of contemplation "ends up fully mastering the discipline, just as not everybody who takes up quantum physics ends up fully comprehending it. But those who do succeed -- in both contemplation and physics, and indeed, in any legitimate knowledge quest -- constitute the circle of competence against which validity claims are struck..."
Wilber says it is a “fact” that “spiritual transformation takes years of meditative or contemplative practice.” He says, “a glimpse is one thing, a stable realization, quite another. And the latter usually takes the better part of a decade, at least, of meditative injunctions, apprehensions, and confirmations.” He says (in his EEG video) that it takes about twenty years of meditative injunctions before one has stable "constant witnessing consciousness" twenty four hours a day.
The questions Charles poses are related to what Gadfly called the playing of the "meditation card." Here's how it works: Joe says x is true. Fred says x is not true. Joe says, how the hell do you know that x is not true, you've never taken up the injunction to meditate.
The implication is that only those who have taken up the injunction are qualified to expound upon x. But it's a bit more complicated than that, for Wilber also says that any person at any stage can apprehend higher states of consciousness, “but a person will interpret that state according to the stage they are at.” And he says that the "existence of waves of consciousness is why many philosophical arguments are not really a matter of the better objective evidence, but of the subjective level of development of those arguing."
So Joe says x is true, Fred says x is not true, and Joe says how the hell do you know, you've never meditated, and even if you have, my subjective impression of your subjective level of development tells me that you're not at my level, so either way, you're not qualified to talk about x.
Let's say that Integral Institute does a research project that involves assessing thousands of people to determine how developed and enlightened they are, using Ken Wilber as the gold standard. And let's say that II manages to find two people who test out as being as developed and enlightened as Wilber. They are given SDi tests, they are tested by Dzogchen and Zen masters hand picked by Wilber, their brains are tested using EEG, SPECT, PET, fMRI, TMS, and other equipment used to locate the "neural correlates of consciousness," and all the tests indicate that these two people are at the same "subjective level of development" in "all quadrants and all levels," they are both awake, liberated, realized, enlightened, and they are operating at the highest level of post-postformal vision logic.
Is it possible that they could disagree on things like reincarnation, evolution, the nature of consciousness, paranormal phenomena, epistemology, psychology, politics, ethics, and aesthetics, etc.?
Or would two people who met Wilber's standards of development and enlightenment necessarily see eye to eye on all of that and more?
This goes to the heart of the questions Charles poses. I get the impression that Wilber and some Wilberians might actually believe that alignment with Wilber's opinions and values is a barometer of how developed and enlightened one is, meaning that the more aligned with Wilber's opinions and values one is, the more developed and enlightened one is, and vice versa.
I peeked in an Integral Naked forum around two months back and saw that a few IN members were discussing what some characterized as a lack of debate and disagreement between Wilber and his weekly guests. One IN member wrote: | Quote: | How come we never see any debate in the clips? Or at least disagreement?
It's not just that at an integral level debate stops because we can recognize all truths, as this forum is a good example. Is there another reason?
The dangers of surrounding oneself with people who hold the same opinions and values are well known. |
Another member said: | Quote: | | I've never been happy with all the back-patting and hobnobbing that constitutes most of the interviews. Never mind debate, how about some true dialogue? Engage a critic once in awhile or someone who doesn't think in terms of AQAL and memes. |
By way of example we might ask how Wilber might discuss reincarnation with a "meditatively experienced" individual "who doesn’t think in terms of AQAL and memes” and who unlike Wilber, doesn't interpret their meditative experience to mean that reincarnation is a fact.
Wilber says that reincarnation is “a spiritual hypothesis, which is to be tested with the eye of contemplation.” “Once we take up contemplation and become fairly proficient at it, we will start to notice certain obvious facts” which will make the “immortality of the soul” - and thus reincarnation - “perfectly obvious and unmistakable." What Wilber means by "soul" in this context is the “'eternal indestructible drop', which transmigrates from life to life until radical Enlightenment.” This is what Alan Wallace, discussing Tibetan Buddhist dogma, characterizes as “an individual continuum of consciousness that carries on from one lifetime to the next, storing memories and other personal character traits over time.” Wallace says that this continuum of consciousness - or what Wilber calls “the soul” - enters “into the union of the sperm and egg” and “enables the zygote to grow into a fetus.”
Once we take up contemplation and become fairly proficient at it, it will become perfectly obvious to us that reincarnation or the transmigration of souls is a fact. Is that not a question-begging definition of contemplative or meditative experience? It seems that Wilber believes that any contemplative or meditative experience that doesn't reveal the spiritual "knowledge" that he says spiritual experience reveals is inauthentic by definition.
Wilber says “there is sensory experience, mental experience, and spiritual experience, and any specific claim in each of those domains can potentially be falsified by further data in those domains." If Wilber defines the “spiritual experience” not in terms of practices that can be observed impartially but as one that reveals spiritual knowledge as he pre-defines it, his definition of spiritual experience is a question-begging definition.
If Wilber defines the aforementioned “circle of competence” as consisting only of those members whose opinions and values are aligned with his, confirmation bias is a given, and his "hermeneutic circle" is at risk of becoming hermetically sealed. |
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| Subject |
 the meditation card ~ Jim
12/20/05, 8:38 am |
| Re: the meditation card ~ Heru
12/21/05, 3:47 am |
| Re: the meditation card ~ Jim
12/27/05, 6:14 pm |
| Re: the meditation card ~ Heru
12/29/05, 4:03 am |
| Re: the meditation card ~ Jim
12/29/05, 12:40 pm |
| Re: the meditation card ~ Heru
12/30/05, 2:48 am |
| Re: the meditation card ~ Jim
12/30/05, 12:40 pm |
| Isn't there a middle ground? ~ Heru
12/30/05, 6:08 pm |
| Re: Isn't there a middle ground? ~ Jim
12/30/05, 9:58 pm |
| Re: Isn't there a middle ground? ~ Heru
12/31/05, 1:24 am |
| Re: Isn't there a middle ground? ~ Jim
12/31/05, 8:52 am |
| Re: Isn't there a middle ground? ~ Heru
12/31/05, 12:48 pm |
| Where does Wilber do the middle ground ? ~ Gadfly
12/31/05, 1:33 pm |
| Addendum ~ Heru
12/29/05, 4:17 am |
| Re: the meditation card ~ templeman
12/20/05, 10:06 pm |
| Who transmigrates? ~ Coyote
12/20/05, 8:56 pm |
| Re: Who transmigrates? ~ bob
12/20/05, 9:14 pm |
| Then again ~ Coyote
12/21/05, 7:03 pm |
| Re: the meditation card ~ MarkDavid
12/20/05, 3:59 pm |
| Re: the meditation card ~ Jim
12/21/05, 9:18 am |
| Re: the meditation card ~ MarkDavid
12/23/05, 3:22 am |
| Agree with Gad, awesome post ~ Coyote
12/21/05, 8:56 pm |
| Yikes ! Pretty good stuff Jim. ~ Gadfly
12/21/05, 10:28 am |
| How do you like his weightlifting analogy ? ~ Gadfly
12/20/05, 4:46 pm |
| Hi Jim - good to hear from you ! ;-) ~ Gadfly
12/20/05, 10:59 am |
| ethical behaviour ~ Susan
12/20/05, 11:31 am |
| The money-makers are about the same ilk as religios ~ Coyote
12/21/05, 10:01 pm |
| what is your own opinion about reincarnation jim? ~ neo
12/20/05, 9:07 am |
| stream of vulgarity ~ Coyote
12/20/05, 9:02 pm |
| Re: what is your own opinion about reincarnation jim? ~ Jim
12/20/05, 5:06 pm |
| Only if I come back as myself ! ~ Gadfly
12/20/05, 11:02 am |
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